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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

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

Editor of Scientific American Resigns After Expressing Outrage About Trump Win

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2024 //
11

NPR reported on the resignation of Laura Helmuth, the editor of Scientific American, in the wake of her comments about Trump on social media after the election. Who knew that Trump supporters were such snowflakes? Trump constantly sneers at and insults people and he got elected President. She expressed her reaction to his election and was forced out.

Before coming to Scientific American, Helmuth was previously the health and science editor for The Washington Post. She was also the President of the National Association of Science Writers.

NPR wrote:

Laura Helmuth, the chief editor of Scientific American magazine, announced her resignation on Friday after comments she made disparaging supporters of President-elect Donald Trump gained attention in conservative circles.

In a post on the social media platform Bluesky, Helmuth wrote, “I’ve decided to leave Scientific American after an exciting 4.5 years as editor in chief. She added, “I’m going to take some time to think about what comes next (and go birdwatching).”

In subsequent messages on Bluesky, which were later deleted, Helmuth referred to some of Trump’s supporters as “the meanest, dumbest, most bigoted” individuals celebrating his election night victory over Vice President Harris.

She also expressed regret to younger voters, stating that her generation is “so full of f****** fascists.”

Helmuth later apologized for her remarks, writing: “These posts, which I have deleted, do not reflect my beliefs; they were a mistaken expression of shock and confusion about the election results.”

Helmuth’s comments and resignation come in the wake of a highly contentious election season, during which media organizations and their reporters struggled with how to address Trump and his allies concerning conspiracy theories, their plans to consolidate power to the White House, and threats to their perceived enemies.

For only the second time in its nearly 180 years, Scientific American endorsed a presidential candidate, backing Kamala Harris while describing Trump as a threat to public safety who “rejects evidence, preferring instead nonsensical conspiracy fantasies.”

In an emailed statement to NPR, Kimberly Lau, president of Scientific American, confirmed Helmuth’s resignation, stating, “Laura Helmuth has decided to move on from her position as editor in chief. We thank Laura for her four years leading Scientific American, during which time the magazine won major science communication awards and established a reimagined digital newsroom. We wish her well in the future.”

Helmuth is a courageous editor. Her departure is a loss to freedom of thought and expression, as well as to science.

If you are on BlueSky, check out her posts. Especially her list of the outstanding articles published on her watch.

Categories Ethics, Extremism, Science, Trump

“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

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

The Bulwark: Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian Asset

By dianeravitch
November 15, 2024 //
60

Trump nominated former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to be Director of National Intelligence, the person at the pinnacle of the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and more than a dozen other intelligence agencies. Her nomination is startling, not only because she has no relevant experience, but far more important, because she has a history of defending Putin, no matter what he does. These may be her sincere beliefs yet they hardly suggest that she should control America’s intelligence agencies. It’s doubtful that she could get a security clearance to work at the CIA or any of the other intelligence agencies. Yet Trump wants to put her in charge.

Writing at The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last asks: Is Tulsi Gabbard a Russian asset or a dupe? Open the link to finish reading the article.

1. Aloha, Comrade!

When you woke up yesterday the idea that Pete Hegseth—a philandering morning TV host who has never run anything bigger than a frozen banana stand—could serve as the secretary of defense was the most preposterous idea in the history of the federal government.

By dinner time Trump had issued two nominations that made Hegseth look like Bobby Gates.

The Matt Gaetz appointment is getting most of the attention because of the irony. The DoJ being controlled by a man who was recently investigated by the same department for having an alleged sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl, whom he (allegedly) paid to travel with him? It’s too good.

Also, in the near term, the attorney general can a lot of damage to America. The AG has the power both to turn the state against its citizens and to shield wrongdoers from accountability.

But it’s the appointment of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence that worries me more. Because for a decade Gabbard has looked and behaved like a Russian asset. 

In four terms as a congresswoman her most notable actions were ongoing defenses of two war criminals: Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin.

Let me tell you her story.

It began in 2013, when Assad’s military used chemical weapons against Syrian civilians. The Obama administration was mulling over responses and Gabbard argued that America should not intervene. She said she would vote against authorizing Obama to use force. 

Why Syria?

Syria and Russia had long enjoyed a cooperative relationship. In 2015, that partnership blossomed into direct Russian military intervention on Assad’s behalf. In March of 2016, 392 members of the House voted for a non-binding resolution of on holding Assad accountable for his crimes against humanity. The only Democrat to vote against it was Gabbard.

In December 2016, Gabbard sought an audience with the newly-elected Trump to promote a bill she called the “Stop Arming Terrorists Act.” The goal of this bill was to withdraw U.S. military support for the Syrian rebels fighting against the combined forces of Assad and Putin.1

And in 2017, Gabbard made an unannounced trip to Syria. She did not give her congressional colleagues advance notice that she was traveling to the region and she refused to disclose who had funded the trip. While there, she met with Assad. Twice.

In fact, Gabbard’s only notable break with Trump came in 2017, after Trump authorized a cruise missile strike on Syria in retaliation for Assad deploying nerve agents against civilians. Gabbard called this—Trump’s action, not Assad’s—“dangerous,” “rash,” and “reckless.”2

And she kept going. In 2019, she proclaimed that Assad “is not the enemy of the United States.”

For an on-the-make politician, that’s an awful lot of political capital spent defending a mid-level war criminal. Curious, no?

But of course, it wasn’t really about Syria. It was about Russia.

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When Gabbard made her failed presidential run in 2020, she was surreptitiously backed by Russian cyber assets. Russia’s interest in promoting Gabbard was obvious enough that Hillary Clinton publicly observed that it was clear the Kremlin was grooming her.

The extent of Gabbard’s affinity not just for Assad, but for Putin, spilled into the open when Russia invaded Ukraine. Gabbard defendedPutin’s invasion even before it began, blaming the Biden administration for forcing Russia’s hand.3

Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show, she said that it was the Biden administration who wanted war in Ukraine:

President Biden could end this crisis and prevent a war with Russia by doing something very simple. . .

Guaranteeing that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO because if Ukraine became a member of NATO, that would put U.S. and NATO troops right on the doorstep of Russia, which, as Putin has laid out, would undermine their national security interests. . . .

The reality is that it is highly, highly unlikely that Ukraine will ever become a member of NATO anyway. So the question is, why don’t president Biden and NATO leaders actually just say that and guarantee it?

Which begs the question of why are we in this position then? If the answer to this and preventing this war from happening is very clear as day. And really, it just points to one conclusion that I can see, which is, they actually want Russia to invade Ukraine.

Why did Gabbard think Biden wanted Russia to invade Ukraine? So that it could impose sanctions on Putin. And to be clear here: Gabbard thought that imposing sanctions on Vladimir Putin would be terrible. She explained:

It gives the Biden administration a clear excuse to go and levy draconian sanctions, which are a modern-day siege against Russia and the Russian people.

Sanctions, by the way, are a long-standing bugaboo of Gabbard’s. In 2020, she introduced a bill designed to prove that U.S. sanctions kill children in foreign countries so as to make it harder for the U.S. to deploy sanctions against adversaries.

So in case you’re keeping score: Gabbard is opposed both to U.S. military intervention and to U.S.-imposed sanctions.

But she is not opposed to the Syrian dictator gassing civilians or Russia pursuing its “security interests” by invading neighboring countries.

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As the war progressed, Gabbard would go on to parrot Russian claims about the United States funding “biolabs” across Ukraine as part of her ongoing attempt to justify Putin’s aggression.

After Putin arrested a Russian journalist who protested the invasion of Ukraine, Gabbard rushed onto TV to defend Putin. She claimed that the media environment in Russia was “not so different” from America.

Last April, Gabbard accused President Biden of trying to “destroy” Russia:

All the statements and comments that the Biden-Harris administration has made from the beginning of this [Russo-Ukrainian] war essentially point to their objective being basically to destroy Russia.

In case you cannot tell: Gabbard viewed the “destruction” of the Putin regime in Russia as a bad thing.4

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2. Asset or Dupe?

Is Gabbard a Russian asset? I don’t know if that’s how she sees herself. But the Russians certainly view her that way.

Here’s the thing about intelligence assets: Sometimes an asset is a person you must own and direct. But sometimes an asset will do what you want her to, either with gentle, indirect inputs or completely under her own steam.

Walter Duranty did not officially report to the Kremlin, but Stalin viewed him as a valuable asset and made sure to stroke him and position him in ways that were useful to the USSR. The result was that Duranty’s dispatches to the New York Timeswere indistinguishable from something a KGB-controlled spy would have written.

Whether or not Duranty saw himself as a Russian agent, Stalin and the Soviet secret services classified him as an asset and were diligent in Duranty’s care and feeding.

So when it comes to Gabbard, ask yourself: What would she have done differently over the last decade if she had been formally controlled by Putin?

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Gabbard says, over and over, that the only thing she cares about is “peace.” But in this quest for peace she has, over and over, attacked and attempted to discredit the U.S. intelligence community while embracing propaganda emanating from the Kremlin.

She has attempted to stop U.S. military intervention against Russian allies while also opposing sanctions against them.

She has met secretly with Russian clients.

She has blamed the United States for an invasion conducted by Russian forces, attempted to draw false equivalence between America and Russia, and accused the American president of being unfairly belligerent toward Putin—whose regime has killed tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians and abducted 20,000 Ukrainian children.

Even if Gabbard is only an unwitting dupe, from the Russian perspective her elevation to DNI would represent the greatest achievement in the history of espionage. Russia will have fully penetrated the American intelligence apparatus at the very top level.

Having Gabbard serve as DNI would probably set back America’s intelligence services by a generation.

First, asset recruitment would become impossible. Any potential recruit in the field would be a fool to cooperate with U.S. intelligence knowing that the American DNI was at least functionally on Putin’s side.

Second, no secrets would be safe. There is no way Gabbard could pass a security clearance check in 2024. The only way for her to gain access to this level of information is to be appointed to the top of the organization. She could never be considered for a job inside, say, the CIA.5

Third, she’s not even on America’s side. Just objectively speaking Gabbard views the American government as a problem to be resolved and the interests of the Russian government as valid and worth accommodating.

Making Gabbard director of national intelligence simply makes no sense. It’s the equivalent of the American government gouging its own eyes out and purposefully making itself blind to the covert actions of its adversaries.

Or rather, it makes no sense for America.

For Russia, DNI Gabbard makes all the sense in the world.

Categories Accountability, Character, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, International, Trump

The Atlantic: Tulsi Gabbard Should Not Be Confirmed as Director of National Intelligence

By dianeravitch
November 15, 2024 //
12

Tom Nichols writes about national security for The Atlantic. In this article, he writes that Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee for the highest ranking position in the intelligence community, is not only manifestly unqualified but is a threat to national security. She has spent the past few years as an apologist for the dictator of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, and the dictator of Russia, Vladimir Putin.

Nichols writes:

President-elect Donald Trump has nominated former Representative Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created after 9/11 to remedy what American policy makers believed was a lack of coordination among the various national-intelligence agencies, and the DNI sits atop all of America’s intelligence services, including the CIA.

Gabbard is stunningly unqualified for almost any Cabinet post (as are some of Trump’s other picks), but especially for ODNI. She has no qualifications as an intelligence professional—literally none. (She is a reserve lieutenant colonel who previously served in the Hawaii Army National Guard, with assignments in medical, police, and civil-affairs-support positions. She has won some local elections and also represented Hawaii in Congress.) She has no significant experience directing or managing much of anything.

But leave aside for the moment that she is manifestly unprepared to run any kind of agency. Americans usually accept that presidents reward loyalists with jobs, and Trump has the right to stash Gabbard at some make-work office in the bureaucracy if he feels he owes her. It’s not a pretty tradition, but it’s not unprecedented, either.

To make Tulsi Gabbard the DNI, however, is not merely handing a bouquet to a political gadfly. Her appointment would be a threat to the security of the United States.

Gabbard ran for president as a Democrat in 2020, attempting to position herself as something like a peace candidate. But she’s no peacemaker: She’s been an apologist for both the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Her politics, which are otherwise incoherent, tend to be sympathetic to these two strongmen, painting America as the problem and the dictators as misunderstood. Hawaii voters have long been perplexed by the way she’s positioned herself politically. But Gabbard is a classic case of “horseshoe” politics: Her views can seem both extremely left and extremely right, which is probably why people such as Tucker Carlson—a conservative who has turned into … whatever pro-Russia right-wingers are called now—have taken a liking to the former Democrat (who was previously a Republican and is now again a member of the GOP).

To finish the article, please open the link.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Trump

Matt Gaetz Should Not Be Confirmed as Attorney General

By dianeravitch
November 15, 2024 //
33

When Trump announced that he intended to nominate Representative Matt Gaetz to be his Attorney General, a gasp went up in both political parties.

Gaetz has been a fierce Trump loyalist, which is why Trump chose him. He certainly didn’t choose him because he is an eminent member of the bar, because he has the respect of his peers, or because he is a pillar of integrity. Trump wants someone who is certain not to investigate him and certain to prosecute Trump’s “enemies.” Perhaps Trump thinks he has found his latter-day Roy Cohn, a man who can be counted on to twist the law to justify whatever Trump wants.

Gaetz was just reelected on November 5, yet resigned as soon as Trump announced that he had chosen him to be Attorney General, the very epitome of our justice system.

Candidates for the Cabinet usually wait to see if they are confirmed before resigning. Why did he rush to resign a seat he just won?

The House Ethics Committee was investigating serious charges against him and was about to issue its report. His resignation ends the investigation.

But, Politico writes, that’s not the end of the Gaetz story:

The lawyer representing a woman former Rep. Matt Gaetz allegedly had sex with when she was a minor called on the House Ethics Committee to “immediately” release its report into his alleged conduct.

“Mr. Gaetz’s likely nomination as Attorney General is a perverse development in a truly dark series of events,” attorney John Clune wrote Thursday on X. “We would support the House Ethics Committee immediately releasing their report. She was a high school student and there were witnesses.”

Gaetz, a conservative firebrand whom President-elect Donald Trump tapped Wednesday to serve as attorney general — and who pushed the effort to oust former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy —  resigned abruptlyfrom the House Wednesday, days before the chamber’s ethics panel was reportedly set to release a report of its investigation.

Gaetz has repeatedly denied the allegations. A spokesperson for Gaetz did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The former congressman was also the subject of a separate federal sex trafficking investigation by the Department of Justice — which he could soon lead — but was ultimately not prosecuted. That probe, started in 2020 during the Trump administration, was focused on whether Gaetz paid women for sex and traveled overseas to attend parties with teenagers under the age of 18.

In May, he was subpoenaed to sit for a deposition in a civil lawsuit brought against the woman with whom he allegedly had sex — who is represented by Clune — by a friend of Gaetz, ABC News reported.

House Ethics Chair Michael Guest (R-Miss.) told reporters Wednesday before Gaetz’s resignation that the probe would end if Gaetz was no longer a member of the House — and reiterated that position on Thursday.

But lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have said they hope to review the report ahead of Gaetz’s Senate confirmation. Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) demanded in a statement that the House Ethics Committee share its findings with the Senate Judiciary Community, saying “We cannot allow this valuable information from a bipartisan investigation to be hidden from the American people.”

Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post described the Gaetz nomination as “a middle finger to the Senate.” She hopes it never reaches a vote. Maybe Trump is testing the Senate to see how low they will go to please him.

The New York Times summed up Trump’s reasons to admire Gaetz:

Gaetz, a Florida Republican, says Trump’s ties to Russia should never have been investigated. He wants “the Biden crime family” to face justice. And he called nonpartisan D.O.J. officials whom he may soon oversee the “deep state.” He has introduced legislation that would limit sentences for people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 and suggested “abolishing every one of the three-letter agencies,” including the F.B.I.

The New Republic referred to stories about Gaetz’s drug-fueled sexual adventures:

Then-Representative Markwayne Mullin, now a senator, candidly told CNN last year that Gaetz bragged about having sex with young women to other members on the floor of the House of Representatives. 

“We had all seen videos … of the girls that he had slept with,” Mullin said. “He’d crush [erectile dysfunction] medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night.” Mullin, now a Senator, has done a total 180 on this, saying on Wednesday that he “completely” trusts Trump’s decision to nominate Gaetz.

Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville said that any Republican senator who voted against Gaetz should be ousted. Only four defections, and Gaetz is defeated.

Categories Character, Civil Rights, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Injustice, Justice, Trump
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