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Trump Picks Linda McMahon, Wrestling Exec and Friend, as Secretary of Education

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2024 //
21

President-Elect Trump announced that he has chosen Linda McMahon as his Secretary of Education. McMahon, 76, was co-chair of Trump’s transition and served as head of the Small Business Administration in Trump’s previous term. She made a lot of money as a partner in World Wrestling Entertainment and helped turn it into a multi-billion company.

McMahon briefly served on the Connecticut State Board of Education before she quit to run for the Senate and lost. She is a graduate of East Carolina University with a degree in French.

She is board chair of the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned “think tank.”

Her selection continues Trump’s pattern of selecting totally unqualified people for his cabinet. McMahon’s job is to destroy the U.S. Department of Education.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., vaccine opponent: appointed to run the Department of Health and Human Services. FOX commentator, Pete Hegseth, who has zero managerial experience, to run the massive Department of Defense; Tulsi Gabbard, Putin sycophant, as Director of National Intelligence. Matt Gaetz, allegations of drug use and sex with underage girls, as U.S. Attorney General. On and on with people who seem to be not only unqualified but at odds with the organization they are supposed to lead.

Trump’s choices are intended to destabilize the government.

Steve Bannon says the Trump team wants to destroy “the administrative state.” That’s our government. Trump is choosing people to destroy our government.

Categories Disruption, Elections, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

What’s on the Musk-Ramaswamy Chopping Block?

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2024 //
13

Trump put Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of a “Department of Government Efficiency” and told them to have fun cutting the federal budget. A billionaire and a millionaire who know nothing about government programs will start hacking away.

The Washington Post helpfully assembled a list of programs that are prime targets.

Jacob Bogage wrote:

Trump government efficiency advisers Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have pledged not to bring a chisel to government spending, but rather “a chainsaw.” The particular approach Ramaswamy has in mind could threaten dozens of programs that tens of millions of Americans rely on each day.


Ramaswamy floated on social media a proposal to eliminate programs that Congress funds but where specific spending authorization has lapsed. That may sound like an easy source of savings, but it would ax veterans’ health-care programs, drug research and development, opioid addiction treatment — even the State Department.


“We can & should save hundreds of billions each year by defunding government programs that Congress no longer authorizes,” Ramaswamy wrote.


The approach from President-elect Donald Trump, Musk and Ramaswamy’s out-of-government “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of Congress and federal spending, experts say.


Though Ramaswamy suggested that programs Congress no longer authorizes are prime targets for cuts, in reality, many programs where Congress has let authorization lapse are covered by funding bills that policy wonks call “self-authorizing.”

In other words, instead of needing two laws — one to approve funding for an agency and another to actually allocate the money — Congress only passes one: the allocation, which intrinsically gives a department authority to spend its funding. It is Congress’s way of making legislative work more efficient, and its legality has been confirmed by numerous government studies.


There is plenty of room for policymakers to uncover and eliminate excess federal spending, experts say, an issue made even more serious by the country’s deteriorating financial health. The national debt is expected to eclipse $36 trillion in the coming days; Trump’s first-term policies accounted for $8.4 trillion of that amount, according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.


It just might be more difficult than DOGE’s backers suggest.


“It is obviously important for the government to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars. There’s real bipartisan areas where people agree there’s stuff to be done. But what Elon and Vivek and Trump are going for is not that,” said Bobby Kogan, an analyst at the center-left think tank Center for American Progress. “They don’t even get the basics right. They get the size of the budget wrong. They named it after a meme. In no way are they actually taking this seriously.”

Musk and Ramaswamy beg to differ, and have called the DOGE commission the United States’ next Manhattan Project.


“There’s a new sheriff in town. Donald Trump’s the president. He has mandated us for radical, drastic reform of this federal bureaucracy with the learnings of that first term,” Ramaswamy said on Fox News. “And look, Elon and I — Elon is solving major problems of physics. I came from the world of biology. What we’re solving here now is not a natural problem. This is a man-made problem, and when you have a man-made problem, you better darn well have a man-made solution. That’s what we’re bringing to the table.”
Trump transition officials did not immediately return a request for comment.


The programs without separate spending authorization that Ramaswamy would do away with represent more than $516 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The 10 largest make up $380 billion. Here’s a look at what some of those programs do.

Veterans’ health care


A 1996 law set eligibility requirements for military veterans to receive hospital, medical and nursing home care and authorized spending for those services and patient enrollment. That law has not been renewed, but Congress regularly allocates additional Department of Veterans Affairs funding and allows benefits to increase automatically based on inflation. VA provides medical care to more than 9.1 million enrolled veterans, according to the agency.
Drug development and opioid addiction treatment.


Most of this spending relates to the bipartisan 21st Century Cures Act of 2016. That law provided money to the National Institutes of Health and Food and Drug Administration to modernize pharmaceutical research and medical trials. It funded research for cancer cures and state-level grants for opioid addiction and other substance abuse treatment.


State Department


In 2003, Congress passed the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, which set policy priorities and created spending authority for the State Department. That law has not been renewed, but Congress every year since has passed annual funding bills for the department, which Trump has announced he’ll nominate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) to run.


Housing assistance


President Bill Clinton in 1998 signed the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act, which overhauled federal housing assistance policies, including voucher programs and other antipoverty assistance. The Department of Housing and Urban Development and other agencies continue using this law to implement federal housing programs.


Justice Department


In 1994, Congress passed the landmark Violence Against Women Act and has renewed it multiple times since. In 2006, lawmakers packaged a VAWA renewal with authorizing legislation for the Justice Department. As with the State Department, Congress has not approved new authorizing legislation for the Justice Department since, but it has funded the agency — and even authorized hundreds of millions of dollars more for a new FBI headquarters — every year.


Education spending


The 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act delegated power to state and local education officials to set primary and secondary education achievement standards. It gives billions of dollars in federal grant money to state and local education officials to fund schools and school districts. Those standards are still used by the Education Department, even though the legislation has not been reauthorized. Trump has suggested he’d like to eliminate the entire department.


NASA


Stripping funding for NASA, which was last reauthorized in 2017, could spell doom for Musk’s commercial spaceflight firm, SpaceX. The company has contracts worth more than $4 billion — including for return trips to the moon and retiring the International Space Station — linked to programs approved in the 2017 law.
Health-care and student loan programs
What’s known as the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was actually passed in two separate bills in 2010. The Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act represents the second bill, which included some tax revisions and technical changes to the ACA. The law has not been reauthorized since, but the Department of Health and Human Services reported in March that more than 45 million people have health insurance coverage backed by the Affordable Care Act.

The law that made those final tweaks to the ACA also overhauled the Education Department’s student loan program. Where some schools relied on private lenders to issue federally backed loans, with this law, the government itself became the lender. That change has since enabled President Joe Biden to offer student loan debt relief, though many of his most ambitious policies have been blocked by the courts. Student loans are generally funded through mandatory spending — similar to social safety net programs such as Medicare and Social Security — and not subject to annual spending laws.


International security programs


The 1985 International Security and Development Cooperation Act bundled together authorizations for a number of international security programs, including funding and regulations for arms sales to allies, economic aid for developing countries, airport security, anti-narcotics-trafficking policies, the Peace Corps and more. This Reagan-era law continues to be foundational to congressional funding and federal policy.


Head Start


Head Start provides preschool education for children from low-income families. In the 2023 fiscal year, more than 800,000 children enrolled in Head Start programs, according to the National Head Start Association. The program also helped place more than 530,000 parents in jobs, school or job-training programs. It was last authorized in 2007.

The article contains a graphic of programs that are on the chopping block, along with their appropriations. I can’t copy it. If you subscribe to the Washington Post, please open the link and post the graphic in your comment.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Health, Ignorance, Trump

Jared Polis, Democratic Governor of Colorado, Praises RFK Jr.

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2024 //
18

https://www.denverpost.com/2024/11/14/jared-polis-rfk-jr-trump-hhs-endorsement-tweet/

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis holds up a copy of Project 2025 as he speaks during the Democratic National Convention Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis holds up a copy of Project 2025 as he speaks during the Democratic National Convention Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis on Thursday cheered anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to lead the nation’s top public health agency, highlighting the controversial nominee’s stances on “big pharma” and “corporate ag.”

Polis, a Democrat, faced quick pushback on social media after he said he was “excited” by President-elect Donald Trump’s selection, and he posted againan hour later to clarify his thoughts. A spokesman for the governor then further walked back Polis’ support for Kennedy in a statement to The Denver Post.

Trump, a Republican, nominated Kennedy to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In the presidential race, Kennedy initially had sought the Democratic nomination, then ran as an independent. A member of the dynastic Kennedy family, he later abandoned his presidential campaign and backed Trump.

Kennedy has pushed a number of public health conspiracies, most prominently around vaccines, and has advocated for other positions that are generally out of the mainstream, such as more availability of unpasteurized milk. He has said he wants to remove fluoride from the American water supply, and when he ran for president, he said he wanted to pause research into pharmaceuticals and infectious diseases for at least eight years.

He has falsely suggested that COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted” to “attack” certain groups and that mass shootings have been caused by prescription drugs, among other debunked conspiracy theories.

Kennedy has adopted some mainstream health positions, such as limiting ultra-processed foods and the use of pesticides in growing crops. Polis, citing specific quotes by Kennedy, focused on those latter views in his first post Thursday afternoon on the social platform X.

“‘In some categories, there are entire departments, like the nutrition department at the (Food and Drug Administration) that are — that have to go, that are not doing their job, they’re not protecting our kids,” Polis quoted Kennedy as saying, then added himself: “YES! The entire nutrition regime is dominated by big corporate ag rather than human health and they do more harm than good.”

Polis — who’d previously criticized Kennedy’s anti-vaccine stances this summer — acknowledged those positions in his posts Thursday but urged his 136,000 X followers to hold off on mocking or disagreeing with Kennedy.

He said Kennedy had “helped us defeat vaccine mandates in Colorado in 2019.” He was referring to a defeated legislative measure that would have made it harder for parents to opt out of vaccine mandates for public schools.

Polis wrote that he hoped Kennedy would make vaccines a matter of choice, not about bans or requirements.

Polis’ comments drew swift backlash. Outgoing state Rep. David Ortiz, a Littleton Democrat, called the governor’s endorsement “pathetic pandering.” Rep. Javier Mabrey, a Denver Democrat, quipped on X: “Yikes.” Shad Murib, the chair of the Colorado Democratic Party, tweeted “Welp” shortly after Polis’ comments, and he subsequently criticized Kennedy’s conspiratorial history in a Thursday evening statement from the party.

Sen. Kyle Mullica, a Thornton Democrat and emergency room nurse, was blunter.

“This is just complete bullshit,” he said in an interview, and then repeated that point for emphasis. 

Mullica rejected Polis’ suggestion that state officials had sought vaccine mandates in the past. He said legislators worked to improve immunization rates through medical exemption reform and through education. Polis previously supported parents’ ability to opt out of vaccinations — drawing support from anti-vaccine advocates — despite the state’s poor rankings for pediatric immunization.

“The biggest thing is — look, science matters, man,” Mullica continued. “And with all the disinformation and misinformation that’s being put out by people like RFK Jr. and the internet, we need leaders who can stand up, follow the science, understand it and (make) sure we are making decisions based on evidence and science.”

Asked why Polis endorsed Kennedy in light of his often-conspiratorial stances, a spokesman for the governor responded by referring to a subsequent Polis social media post. The spokesman, Eric Maruyama, then issued a statement distancing the governor from the controversial figure he had just backed.

Maruyama wrote that Polis “does not endorse actions that would lead to measles outbreaks and opposes unscientific propaganda.”

“Governor Polis has not changed his view as a whole on RFK Jr. or on the Governor’s previously stated concerns regarding some of  RFK Jr’s positions,” Maruyama wrote. “While opposed to RFK’s positions on a host of issues, including vaccines and banning fluoridation, (Polis) would appreciate seeing action on pesticides and efforts to lower prescription drug costs and if Trump is going to nominate someone like him then let them also take on soda, processed food, pesticides and heavy metals contamination.”

Categories Colorado, Elections, Extremism, Health, Science

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Attacks the Foundations of Our Government

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2024 //
19

In this post, Heather Cox Richardson demonstrates why she has over one million paid subscribers. She brilliantly weaves together events of the day to show the pattern on the rug. The economy is humming along with new jobs created by Biden. Meanwhile Trump plans massive cuts to Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. Trump’s goal: to destroy the foundations of the American government. We were warned.

She writes:

On Friday, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo locked in a $6.6 billion deal with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company for it to invest $65 billion in three state-of-the-art fabrication plants in Arizona. This will bring thousands of jobs to the state. The money comes from the CHIPS and Science Act, about which Trump told podcaster Joe Rogan on October 25: “That CHIPS deal is so bad.” House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said he would work to repeal the law, although he backed off that statement when Republicans noted the jobs the law has brought to their states. 

Also on Friday, a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a Biden administration rule that would have made 4 million workers eligible for overtime pay. The rule raised the salary level below which an employer has to pay overtime from $35,568 to $43,888 this year and up to $58,656 in 2025. The decision by Texas judge Sean D. Jordan kills the measure nationally.

On Sunday, speaking from the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, President Joe Biden said that it would not be possible to reverse America’s “clean energy revolution,” which has now provided jobs across the country, primarily in Republican-dominated states. Biden noted that the U.S. would spend $11 billion on financing international responses to climate change in 2024, an increase of six times from when he began his term. 

But President-elect Trump has called climate change a hoax and has vowed to claw back money from the Inflation Reduction Act appropriated to mitigate it, and to turn the U.S. back to fossil fuels. What Trump will have a harder time disrupting, according to Nicolás Rivero of the Washington Post, is the new efficiency standards the Biden administration put in place for appliances. He can, though, refuse to advance those standards.

Meanwhile Trump and his team are announcing a complete reworking of the American government. They claim a mandate, although as final vote tallies are coming in, it turns out that Trump did not win 50% of the vote, and CNN statistician Harry Enten notes that his margin comes in at 44th out of the 51 elections that have been held since 1824. He also had very short coattails—four Democrats won in states Trump carried—and the Republicans have the smallest House majority since there have been 50 states, despite the help their numbers have had from the extreme gerrymandering in states like North Carolina. 

More Americans voted for someone other than Trump than voted for him.

Although Trump ran on lowering the cost of consumer goods, Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk, along with pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, have vowed to slash the U.S. government, apparently taking their cue from Argentina’s self-described anarcho-capitalist president Javier Milei, who was the first foreign leader to visit Trump after the election. Milei’s “shock therapy” to his country threw the nation into a deep recession, just as Musk says his plans will create “hardship” for Americans before enabling the country to rebuild with security. 

Ramaswamy today posted on social media, “A reasonable formula to fix the U.S. government: Milei-style cuts, on steroids.” He has suggested that cuts are easier than people think. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump noted that on a podcast in September, Ramaswamy said as an example: “If your Social Security number ends in an odd number, you’re out. If it ends in an even number, you’re in. There’s a 50 percent cut right there. Of those who remain, if your Social Security number starts in an even number, you’re in, and if it starts with an odd number, you’re out. Boom. That’s a 75 percent reduction done.”

But, as Bump notes, this reveals Ramaswamy’s lack of understanding of how the government actually works. Social Security numbers aren’t random; the first digit refers to where the number was obtained. So this seemingly random system would target certain areas of the country. 

Today, both Jacob Bogage, Jeff Stein, and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post and Robert Tait of The Guardian reported that Trump’s economic advisors are talking with Republicans in Congress about cuts to Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) formerly known as food stamps, and other welfare programs, in order to cover the enormous costs of extending tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Medicaid is the nation’s health insurance for low-income Americans and long-term care. It covers more than 90 million Americans, one in five of us. Rural populations, which tend to vote Republican, use supplemental nutrition programs more than urban dwellers do. 

The Washington Post reporters note that Republicans deny that they are trying to reduce benefits for the poor. They are, they say, trying to reduce wasteful and unnecessary spending. “We know there’s tremendous waste,” said House Budget Committee chairman Jodey Arrington (R-TX). “What we don’t seem to have in the hour of action, like when we have the trifecta and unified Republican leadership, is the political courage to do it for the love of country. [Trump] does.”

Those cuts will likely not sit well with the Republicans whose constituents think Trump promised there would be no cuts to the programs on which they depend.

Trump’s planned nominations of unqualified extremists have also run into trouble. Senate Republicans are so far refusing to abandon their constitutional powers in order to act as a rubber stamp to enable Trump’s worst instincts. Former representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a Trump bomb thrower, was unqualified to be the nation’s attorney general in any case, but as more information comes out about his alleged participation in drug fueled orgies, including the news that a woman allegedly told the House Ethics Committee that she saw him engage in sex with a minor, those problems have gotten worse. 

Legal analyst Marcy Wheeler notes that the lawyers representing the witnesses for the committee are pushing for the release of the ethics committee’s report at least in part out of concern that if he becomes attorney general, Gaetz will retaliate against them. 

According to Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman, fear of the MAGA Republican colleagues who are already trying to bully them into becoming Trump loyalists is infecting congress members, too. When asked if Gaetz was qualified for the attorney general post, Representative Mike Simpson (R-ID) answered: “Are you sh*tting me, that you just asked that question? No. But hell, you’ll print that and now I’m going to be investigated.”

The many fringe medical ideas of Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., earned him the right-wing New York Post editorial board’s denigration as “nuts on a lot of fronts.” The board called his views “a head-scratching spaghetti of what we can only call warped conspiracy theories, and not just on vaccines.” Kennedy is a well-known opponent of vaccines—he called Covid-19 vaccines a “crime against humanity”—and has called for the National Institutes of Health to “take a break” of about eight years from studying infectious diseases, insisting that they should focus on chronic diseases instead.

Writing in the New York Times yesterday, Peter Baker noted that Trump “has rolled a giant grenade into the middle of the nation’s capital and watched with mischievous glee to see who runs away and who throws themselves on it.” Mischievous glee is one way to put it; another is that he is trying to destroy the foundations of the American government.

Baker notes that none of Trump’s selections would have been anything but laughable in the pre-Trump era when, for example, Democratic cabinet nominations were sunk for a failure to pay employment taxes for a nanny, or for a donor-provided car. Nor would a president-elect in the past have presumed to tap three of his own defense lawyers for top positions in the Department of Justice, effectively guaranteeing that he will be protected from scrutiny. 

A former deputy White House press secretary during Trump’s first term, Sarah Matthews, said Trump is “drunk on power right now because he feels like he was given a mandate by winning the popular vote.”

Today Trump confirmed that he intends to bypass normal legal constraints on his actions by declaring a national emergency on his first day in office in order to launch his mass deportation of undocumented migrants. While the Congressional Budget Office estimates this mass deportation will cost at least $88 billion a year, another cost that is rarely mentioned is that according to Bloomberg, undocumented immigrants currently pay about $100 billion a year in taxes. Losing that income, too, will likely have to be made up with cuts from elsewhere. 

Finally, today, CNBC’s economic analyst Carl Quintanilla noted today that average gasoline prices are expected to fall below $3.00 a gallon before the Thanksgiving holiday. 

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Economy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, Republicans, Trump

John Horgan, Science Writer, Laments the Loss of a Bold Editor

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2024 //
38

John Horgan is a widely published science writer. In this article, he expresses his sorrow that Scientific American bowed to pressure to oust its outstanding Chief Editor Laura Helmuth. Right wingers love to attack Democrats for “censorship,” but it is Republicans who forced Helmuth’s ouster and Republicans who ban books.

He wrote:

Well before Scientific American’s editor vented her despair over the election, social injustice warriors were bashing the magazine for its political views. Critics include anti-woke bros Jordan Peterson, Charles “The Bell Curve” Murray, Pinker wannabe Michael Shermer, Dawkins wannabe Jerry Coyne and the right-leaning Wall Street Journal and City Journal.

On election night, Sci Am editor Laura Helmuth called Trump voters “racist and sexist” and “fucking fascists” on the social media platform BlueSky, a haven for Twitter/X refugees. Yeah, she lost her cool, but Helmuth’s labels apply to Trump if not to all who voted for him. 

Although Helmuth apologized for her remarks, Elon Musk (perhaps miffed that Scientific American recently knocked him) and others called for her head. Yesterday Helmuth announced she was stepping down.

Trump spews insults and wins the election. Helmuth loses her job. Critics of cancel culture cheered Helmuth’s cancellation. I’m guessing we’ll see more of this sickening double standard in coming months and years.

I’m writing this column, first, to express my admiration for Helmuth. She is not only a fearless, intrepid editor, who is passionate about science (she has a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience). She is also—and I’ve heard this from her colleagues and experienced it first-hand–a kind, considerate person. That’s a heroic feat in this mean-spirited age.

I’d also like to address the complaint that Helmuth’s approach to science was too political and partisan. Yes, under Helmuth, Scientific American has had a clear progressive outlook, ordinarily associated with the Democratic party. The magazine endorsed Joe Biden four years ago, shortly after Helmuth took over, and Kamala Harris this year.

Sci Am presented scientific analyses of and took stands on racism, reproductive rights, trans rights, climate change, gun violence and covid vaccines. Critics deplored the magazine’s “transformation into another progressive mouthpiece,” as The Wall Street Journal put it. Biologist Jerry Coyne says a science magazine should remain “neutral on issues of politics, morals, and ideology.”

What??!! As Coyne knows, science, historically, has never been “neutral.” Powerful groups on the right and left have employed science to promote their interests and propagate lethal ideologies, from eugenics to Marxism. Science journalists can either challenge abuses of science or look the other way.

I became a staff writer at Scientific American in 1986, when Jonathan Piel was editor. The magazine bashed the Reagan administration’s plan to build a space-based shield against nuclear weapons. I wrote articles linking behavioral genetics to eugenics and evolutionary psychology to social Darwinism. I got letters that began: “Dear Unscientific Unamerican.” My point: the magazine has never been “neutral,” it has always had a political edge.

Under Piel, as well as successors John Rennie, Mariette DiChristina and Helmuth, the magazine published plenty of articles with no political ramifications. But if you just stick to uncontroversial science, and you decline to take a position on topics like climate change or reproductive rights, you aren’t “neutral.” You are just looking the other way. 

Robert Kennedy, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health, has linked vaccines to autism, and he has conjectured that the covid virus was engineered to attack Caucasians and African Americans and spare “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” Trump says some Mexican immigrants have “bad genes” that make them killers, and as recently as 2022 he called climate change a “hoax.”

Meanwhile, Trump is vowing to cut federal aid to schools “pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content.” And The Guardian reports that Trump is filing lawsuits against The New York Times and other media “that have been critical of him.”

Using your power to silence your opposition sounds pretty fascist to me. Will the next editor of Scientific American have the guts to challenge Trump and his minions? Will anyone?

Categories Courage, Elections, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Science

“Democracy”: Why Trump Chose FOX News Host as Secretary of Defense

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2024 //
26

Our reader “Democracy” explains why Trump chose Peter Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense. Trump has said that he wants the military to participate in rounding up, detaining, and expelling millions of immigrants. Hegseth won’t object. Trump has said he wants the military to crack down on protests or gatherings he doesn’t like. Hegseth won’t object. Hegseth also would block any prosecution of military members who are alleged to have committed war crimes.

“Democracy” writes:

What Elon Musk and others want to do in “cutting” government is to eliminate certain federal agencies, like the department of education, and to gut others, like Interior and the EPA, and to deplete the federal civil service while stocking it with Trump loyalists, competent or not.

What he’s doing with Defense appears to be a first step in weaponizing the US military, turning it into a Trump “army” to be used as he sees fit. As any sensible person knows, he IS unfit for office. That’s a genuine recipe for bad things to come.

Here’s how the Associated Press reported Trump’s selection of Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense:

“Trump passed on a number of established national security heavy-hitters and chose an Army National Guard captain well known in conservative circles as a co-host of Fox News Channel’s ‘Fox & Friends Weekend.’…He has made it clear on his show and in interviews that, like Trump, he is opposed to ‘woke’ programs that promote equity and inclusion. He also has questioned the role of women in combat and advocated pardoning service members charged with war crimes.”

On a conservative podcast, Hegseth said this:

“‘First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Any general, any admiral, whatever,’ who was involved in diversity, equity and inclusion programs or ‘woke shit has “got to go.’”

“Woke” as in being committed to democratic values and principles. “Woke” as in equality, and “liberty and justice for all.” “Woke” as in abiding by US and international law as defined in 18 USC 2441: War crimes.

As the Associated Press also reported,

“…women have successfully passed the military’s grueling tests to become Green Berets and Army Rangers, and the Naval Special Warfare’s test to serve as a combatant-craft crewman — the boat operators who transport Navy SEALs and conduct their own classified missions at sea.”

The Washington Post said this, in part, about the Hegseth pick:

“The breakneck speed of the Hegseth nomination also underscores the value Trump places on TV personalities who have used their platform to promote his agenda.”

Elon Musk. Kristi Noem. Pete Hegseth. All cause for deep concern. Is the next appointment going to be the Brainworm Boy at HHS? The McDonald’s Hamburglar at USDA?

But seriously, given who Hegseth is and what Trump has said, there’s a reason to fear. From CNN:

“There is not much the Pentagon can do to pre-emptively shield the force from a potential abuse of power by a commander in chief. Defense Department lawyers can and do make recommendations to military leaders on the legality of orders, but there is no real legal safeguard that would prevent Trump from deploying American soldiers to police US streets…it is also possible that forces could be sent into American cities if asked to help with the mass deportation plan Trump mentioned repeatedly on the trail.”

And this:

“The president’s powers are especially broad if he chooses to invoke the Insurrection Act, which states that under certain limited circumstances involved in the defense of constitutional rights, a president can deploy troops domestically unilaterally.”

AND this:

“In a video posted last year, Trump said if elected he would ‘immediately re-issue my 2020 Executive Order restoring the President’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats…we will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our National Security and Intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them.’”

The plan is to make the defense and intelligence bureaucracies Trump subsidiaries, along with the Department of Justice. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand why, and what he’ll do with that kind of “deep state” power.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Gender, Immigration, Trump

Trump Tries to Bypass the Senate to Install His Cabinet of Horribles

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2024 //
71

Trump knows that there is a strong possibility that some of his nominees for his Cabinet are so unqualified that they may not be approved by the Republican majority of the Senate. The Senate typically advises and gives its consent to high-level appointments. But Trump is trying to exercise a relatively obscure provision of the Constitution to bypass the Senate.

Since we know that Trump never read the Constitution, it’s certain that one of his creative lawyers planted the idea.

Trump’s selection of Matt Gaetz, who faces allegations of sex-trafficking minors and drug abuse, as Attorney General, produced shock and disbelief among some Republicans. So has Tulsi Gabbard, whom Trump would elevate to the highest position in the American intelligence community. So has Robert Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine advocate, to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Medical and scientific experts are appalled. So has Trump’s choice of Pete Hegseth, FOX talk show host, to lead the department of Defense.

But Trump could give them “recess appointments” and have no scrutiny or review by Senators. And avoid the risk that some or all might be rejected.

We know that Trump doesn’t care about norms, traditions or laws that constrain his power. If the Senate abandoned its role to please Trump, he would be empowered to trample the rule of law at every turn. That is most definitely a threat to our democracy.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune says “all options are on the table,” and has neither accepted or refuted the scheme.

Edward Whelan, a prominent conservative lawyer, criticized Trump’s devious route in this op-ed in The Washington Post.

He wrote:

President-elect Donald Trump is threatening to turn the Constitution’s appointment process for Cabinet officers on its head. If what I’m hearing through the conservative legal grapevine is correct, he might resort to a cockamamie scheme that would require House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) to play a critical role. Johnson can and should immediately put an end to this scheme.

The Senate’s power to approve or reject a president’s nominees for Cabinet positions is a fundamental feature of the Constitution’s system of checks and balances. As Alexander Hamilton explained in the Federalist Papers, that power “would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters,” including those “who had no other merit than that … of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of [the president’s] pleasure.” Almost as if Hamilton were describing Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick for attorney general.

To be sure, the Constitution also provides a backup provision that allows the president to make recess appointments — “to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate.” But as Hamilton put it, this “auxiliary method of appointment” is “nothing more than a supplement” to the “general mode of appointing officers of the United States” and is to used “in cases to which the general method was inadequate.”

It appears that the Trump team is working on a scheme to allow Trump to recess-appoint his Cabinet officers. This scheme would exploit an obscure and never-before-used provision of the Constitution (part of Article II, Section 3) stating that “in Case of Disagreement” between the houses of Congress, “with Respect to the Time of Adjournment,” the president “may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.”

Under this scheme, it appears that the House would adopt a concurrent resolution that provided for the adjournment of both the House and the Senate. If the Senate didn’t adopt the resolution, Trump would purport to adjourn both houses for at least 10 days (and perhaps much longer). He would then use the resulting intrasession recess to appoint Gaetz and other Cabinet nominees.

Ten years ago, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia labeled the president’s recess-appointment power an “anachronism” because “modern forms of communication and transportation” make the Senate always available to consider nominations. Along with three of his colleagues, Scalia also argued that the president’s power to make recess appointments is limited to intersession recesses and does not apply to the intrasession recess that the Trump scheme would concoct. The justice, who died in 2016, would be aghast at the notion that a president could create an intrasession recess for the purpose of bypassing the Senate approval process for nominations.

Mike Johnson should not be complicit in eviscerating the Senate’s advice-and-consent role. He should promptly make clear that the House will abide by its usual schedule of recesses and will not attempt to engineer a recess of the Senate.

Edward Whelan is a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the Antonin Scalia chair in constitutional studies.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Health, Injustice, Republicans, Science

Miranda Yaver: Disaster Ahead at the National Institutes of Health

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2024 //
7

Miranda Yaver, a professor of public health policy at the university of Pittsburgh, writes about Trump’s disastrous choice to run the National Institutes of Health.

She writes:

I first got interested in health policy because of Ronald Reagan, but not in the way you might think. 

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area with a mom who worked at the United Way, I was well aware of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. I knew people who were HIV positive. So when HBO released the film adaptation of And the Band Played On, I was riveted. Enraged. Filled with righteous indignation. 

To be honest, it hasn’t really worn off. 

Randy Shilts wrote in his prologue to And the Band Played On (which I reread amid the COVID-19 pandemic) the following:

“The bitter truth was that AIDS did not just happen to America – it was allowed to happen by an array of institutions, all of which failed to perform their appropriate tasks to safeguard the public health. This failure of the system leaves a legacy of unnecessary suffering that will haunt the Western world for decades to come…. The story of these first five years of AIDS in America is a drama of national failure, played out against a backdrop of needless death. People died while Reagan administration officials ignored pleas from government scientists and did not allocate adequate funding for AIDS research until the epidemic had already spread throughout the country… People died while public health authorities and the political leaders who guided them refused to take the tough measures necessary to curb the epidemic’s spread, opting for political expediency over the public health.”

So was also the case for the COVID-19 pandemic, which was unleashed upon the world at a time in which the United States’ public health bureaucracy was hotly politicized, chronically underfunded, and constrained by anti-science forces at the head of the Trump Administration. 

And rather than learning from the mistakes of this pandemic, the most dangerous among them are being rewarded with high-level posts from which to spew anti-scientific drivel, which can come with real life-or-death consequences. 

I’m not talking about R.F.K. Jr… this time. Right now, I’m talking about Jay Bhattacharya, who according to Dan Diamond of The Washington Post is likely poised to be the new head of the National Institute of Health (NIH), having been listed by RFK Jr. as a top contender for the position, which falls under the broader umbrella of HHS. 

It has admittedly been an interesting experience to watch the nominations unfold, having written a doctoral dissertation on the problems that arise when agencies are headed by people who oppose the agencies’ core missions, and when Congress and others are ill-equipped or disinclined to hold those agencies accountable. You know, hypothetically. 

So, who is Jay Bhattacharya? Needless to say, he has been a critic of the NIH while being celebrated by noted public health opponent, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. His other cheerleaders include Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Joe Rogan – you know the voices of reason in public health. 

His opposition within the public health community is not about partisanship, but rather the anti-science stances that he embraced over the course of the deadly pandemic, and which have been widely perceived among experts as having prioritized the business community over health outcomes. While I joined with experts in public health and medicine through the organization Brief-19 to disseminate evidence-based analyses of the public health and policy implications of what we were learning from day to day about the pandemic, Bhattacharya downplayed the threat of the virus, instead emphasizing less government control and more reliance on individual choices to self-protect. 

Rugged individualism and self-reliance. Now where have we heard that before? 

To be sure, I have had many quibbles with Ayn Rand and her followers over the years. Some of it is political. Some of it isn’t. 

The reality is that rugged self-reliance just simply doesn’t work in the public health setting. Public health can and indeed must be rather paternalistic, because by definition it’s focused not on individual health, but collective health outcomes and system performance. Choosing not to get vaccinated is bad for you, but it’s really bad for your community. Choosing not to mask or socially distance during a pandemic undercuts not only your and your family’s safety, but it compromises scientifically-grounded public interventions aimed at flattening the curve. This requires that we care not just about “me me me,” but to think more broadly. That isn‘t always easy for Americans. But given that we know that the next pandemic isn’t a matter of “if” but rather “when,” it’s vital that our institutions of public health be staffed with grown-ups who believe in science and understand that effective public health interventions should be prioritized over individual convenience. And they absolutely need to be staffed with people who know better than to elevate pseudoscience and grifters – whether in hedge funds, on podcasts, or widely discredited academics relying on a degree to lend credence to anti-scientific and/or anti-democratic theories. 

Indeed, a prominent supporter of Bhattacharya was his Stanford colleague Scott Atlas, who went against the scientific community in encouraging lower-risk people to become infected with COVID-19 as a means to promote herd immunity, and who urged the reopening of schools even as we knew that there would be risks of increased transmission in those settings. And Bhattacharya contributed to The Great Barrington Declaration, which urged that younger Americans return to work and build immunity against the COVID virus. 

All of this was in the interest of creating a false dichotomy between helping the economy and promoting public health. But the reality is that while people of both parties want a robust business sector, containing a deadly virus is an important precursor. What is the value of having a business open if would-be patrons are sick or dying? What is the value of forcing a business open if staff immediately become exposed and sick? 

Investments in public health pay off. We see this in the insurance setting, which is where most of my own research and teaching are situated. Of course, covering people costs money. But what is the result? People are able to access needed care. They are able to manage chronic and acute medical conditions. They are able to not only survive but thrive. And in light of that, they can be productive in the American economy, while health care providers are relieved of the economic burdens of uncompensated care. 

These are not burdens. They are investments. 

America just emerged – far from unscathed – from a major, deadly pandemic the likes of which we had not seen since the 1918 Spanish flu. And we deserve public health leaders who learned the right lessons from it. Instead, Bhattacharya’s impulse amid the COVID pandemic was to see the core problem as the stifling of dissent (which is to say, prioritizing public health expertise over the legitimization of quackery).

These are not the only reasons why Bhattacharya would be a problematic selection to head NIH. While he boasts impressive academic credentials, he has never before overseen a large bureaucratic organization, while the National Institute of Health has nearly 20,000 staff. To be sure, RFK Jr. and others within Trump’s orbit see it as an advantage to lack government experience, largely because of a deeper distrust of the government apparatus and hostility to government interventions (even those which could honestly be termed “pro-life”). But governmental and managerial competence is vital, and when this is put on the back burner in the domain of public health, there are life-or-death consequences. 

Bhattacharya has ideas for how the NIH should operate, and it doesn’t look good, essentially coming down to its decentralization as well as deprioritizing the expertise of long-serving bureaucrats. This disregard for agency expertise fits well within the Trump Administration’s broader opinions on the administrative state (or what’s left of it after Loper Bright), seeking to clamp down on civil servants who are perceived as being politically disloyal. Prof. Don Moynihan has written extensively on these issues in Schedule F positions, and you should read it.

If we are lucky, as with the first Administration, the degree of incompetence will exceed the high degrees of malevolence, thus stymying the most dangerous policy proposals that have been floated. But we should not have to root for public health incompetence when our lives – not to mention our research funding on a broad array of public health and health policy subjects – depend on the strength of this agency. 

Jay Bhattacharya would deeply damage our efforts to study public health problems facing the country and the world and would signal even further entrenchment of conspiratorial perspectives and political expediency where we most need to follow the science. Tom Nichols wrote a book called The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. As with my own work on bureaucratic noncompliance amid misaligned agency objectives, I fear that this will be all too relevant in the coming months and years.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Health, Science, Trump

Muslim Leaders Who Endorsed Trump Are Dismayed by His Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2024 //
35

Reuters reports that Muslim leaders in Michigan who endorsed Trump are having buyers’ remorse. Thus far, his cabinet selections are pro-Israel; none is pro-Muslim or pro-Palestinian.

Trump got a campaign donation of $100 million from Dr. Miriam Adelson, Israeli-born wife of the billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson. She is passionate about Israel.

Secretary of State-designate Rubio is pro-Israel.

Trump’s choice for Ambassador to Israel is Christian evangelical Mike Huckabee, who is more Zionist than Netanyahu. Huckabee is a fervent believer in annexation and an opponent of a two-state solution. He has said that there are no Palestinians.

Why would American Muslims endorse a man who tried to ban Muslims in his first term?

Categories Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Lies, Trump

Trump’s Enemies List: Should They Worry?

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2024 //
21

Vanity Fair posted a partial list of people who have been threatened by Trump. It’s a partial list because Trump has threatened so many people that no one can name them all. He is truly at heart a Mafia Don.

Who, exactly, would be within their rights to be sweating buckets—or, more likely, shitting bricks—at the very real possibility of Trump and/or his government allies coming after them? The long list includes:

  • Special counsel Jack Smith (Trump has said he should be “thrown out the country”)
  • Joe Biden (Trump has vowed to appoint “a real special prosecutor to go after” the 46th president and his family)
  • Kamala Harris (Trump has said she should be “prosecuted for her actions” concerning the border)
  • Barack Obama (Trump wants the 44th president tried by “military tribunal”)
  • Former GOP representative Liz Cheney(Trump circulated a post on social media calling her “guilty of treason” and arguing she should also be tried by a “military tribunal,” and separately, said she should have guns “trained on her face”)
  • California senator-elect Adam Schiff(Trump has called the lawmaker the “enemy from within,” and suggested the military should be used against him)
  • Nancy Pelosi (Trump has similarly dubbed the former House Speaker the “enemy from within” and called her “evil, sick, crazy,” and mouthed a word that “starts with a b”)
  • General Mark Milley (Trump suggested last year that the retired Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman should be executed)
  • New York attorney general Letitia James(Trump has called for James to be prosecuted, and one of his allies recently declared in an interview, “Listen here, sweetheart, we’re not messing around this time, and we will put your fat ass in prison for conspiracy against rights”)
  • Justice Arthur Engoron (Trump has similarly called for Engoron, who presided over James’s case against the ex-president, to be prosecuted, and called him a “corrupt…political hack”)
  • Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg(yes, Trump also wants Bragg, who brought the hush money case against him, prosecuted)
  • “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials” involved in the 2020 election (Trump has called for them to receive “long term prison sentences”)
  • Mark Zuckerberg (Trump said during the 2024 race “we are watching him closely” and threatened the Meta founder, saying he could “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he broke any laws)
  • Comcast (Trump has said the company, which owns NBC News and MSNBC, should be investigated for “treason”)
  • ABC News (following his debate with Harris, Trump similarly declared the company should have its license taken away for fact-checking him)
  • CBS News (Trump said the company should lose its license because he didn’t like the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Harris)
  • Journalists (Trump has vowed to jail reporters who don’t reveal their sources on stories he believes concern national security, and “joked” that the threat of prison rape would get them to give up such information)
  • “A sinister group of deep-state bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media” (who Trump claimed comprise a “left-wing censorship regime” and that as president he would “order the Department of Justice to investigate” them and “to aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified”)
  • Representatives Jamie Raskin and Bennie Thompson, senators Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell,former representative Adam Kinzinger,and former vice president Mike Pence(Trump reshared a post calling for them to be jailed)

“He’s erratic and has the attention span of a seven-year-old,” Harry Litman, a former Clinton DOJ official, told the Times of Trump. “But his thirst for revenge against those he views as his current antagonists is very real, and there’s no reason to think he would be deterred by legal niceties.” (Trump’s office did not respond to the Times’ request for comment concerning whether he would make good on campaign revenge threats.)

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Elections, Trump
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