Tag: Trump Administration

Top intelligence nominee Ratcliffe faces lingering questions about qualifications, adherence to law

First Senate hearing since pandemic-related restrictions took effect

Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard M. Burr opened Tuesday morning’s confirmation hearing for Rep. John Ratcliffe to lead the intelligence community with a nod to the unusual circumstances.

“This hearing will be a little bit different. It is perhaps the first congressional hearing held during the extenuating circumstances of the pandemic,” the North Carolina Republican said. “We have a sparse crowd and an expanded dais, reflective of the committee’s adherence to the guidelines put forth by the Rules Committee and the attending physician.”

Indeed, the traditionally bipartisan Intelligence Committee had the dubious duty Tuesday of convening the first Senate hearing since coronavirus-related restrictions upended life on Capitol Hill. Continue reading.

The Trump administration projects about 3,000 daily deaths by early June.

New York Times logoAs President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of coronavirus cases and deaths over the next several weeks. The daily death toll will reach about 3,000 on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double the current number of about 1,750.

The projections, based on government modeling pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases a day currently.

The numbers underscore a sobering reality: While the United States has been hunkered down for the past seven weeks, significant risks remain. And reopening the economy will make matters worse. Continue reading.

‘A New Low’: Betsy DeVos sued for garnishing wages of nearly 300,000 student loan borrowers during pandemic

AlterNet logoA home health aide who earns just under $13 per hour is the lead plaintiff in aclass-action lawsuit filed Thursday against Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, whose department has continued garnishing the wages of hundreds of thousands of student loan borrowers in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

The CARES Act, which was signed into law in late March, prohibits the Education Department from seizing the wages and tax refunds of student loan borrowers who have defaulted on their loans.

But Elizabeth Barber of Rochester, New York, says the Trump administration has nonetheless continued to take 12% of her paychecks since the legislation passed—garnishing $70 from her check as recently as last week—adding to the financial strain which forced her to default on $10,000 in federal loans in December. Barber’s hours have also been reduced by 10 to 15 hours per week since the coronavirus pandemic began. Continue reading.

The pandemic and the waning of American prestige

Washington Post logo“Nations palpably on the way down tend to earn the contempt of other nations in spades.” So wrote Michael Anton, a veteran right-wing operative in Washington and a member of President Trump’s National Security Council, in a much-discussed essay published in the first months of Trump’s term. Anton is no longer at the White House, but through his thinking and writing, he tried to provide some intellectual scaffolding to Trump’s chest-thumping politics.

In the essay, Anton called into question the viability and value of the existing “liberal order,” and focused on the goal of restoring American “prestige” after years of apparent timidity and fecklessness on the world stage. “Pointless apologies, gratuitous insults to allies and friends, failure to honor commitments, transparent groveling to enemies — these rub salt in the open wound of contempt,” he wrote, citing, among other perceived humiliations, an incident in January 2016 when Iranian forces detained a number of U.S. sailors for a day. “Perhaps the largest contributor to contempt, however, is a general sense of decline.”

Anton’s words carry unintended irony three years later. The president he served has been pilloried precisely for his gratuitous insults to allies and friends, his failure to honor commitments, and, indeed, his sometimes transparent groveling before America’s putative adversaries. Continue reading.

Infectious Disease Expert: FDA Has ‘All But Given Up’ Oversight On Antibody Testing

“We have the wild, wild West for testing right now,” said Dr. Michael Osterholm.

The Food and Drug Administration has “all but given up” its oversight responsibility on coronavirus antibody tests, one the country’s top infectious disease experts said Sunday.

“We have the wild, wild West for testing right now,” Dr. Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told NBC’s “Meet The Press.”

“The FDA has all but given up its oversight responsibility for the tests we have on the market,” he added. “Many of them are nothing short of a disaster.” Continue reading.

Newly Appointed Trump Official Deleted Scores Of Conspiracy And Racist Tweets

Michael Caputo is a former adviser to Donald Trump’s 2015-2016 presidential campaign. He is now the brand new spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). A New York Republican operative, you may remember Caputo from his very worried and somber post-Mueller investigation interview in May of 2019. Since the Republican Party is unwilling to do anything to remedy the issue of our treasonously impeached and corrupt president, people like Caputo continue to rise.

CNN reports that Mr. Caputo has all kinds of conspiracy-laden, illogical, and bigoted ideas that we have come to expect from the Trump administration, the Tea Party, and their conservative base. In a series of tweets, which Caputo deleted—but exist forever because it’s the internet, stupid—Caputo has all kinds of truly terrifying ideas about the COVID-19 pandemic. According to CNN’s KFile, Caputo did away with his entire Twitter history of over 1,300 tweets and retweets. And none of these ideas are good or smart or remotely helpful to the public health in general.

Using an internet archive, some of Caputo’s statements have been saved here. So what sort of things does one of Trump’s “best people” think? On Feb. 28, 2020, Caputo had this to say about the novel coronavirus:

“Bottom line, a lot of Americans have to get sick and die for coronavirus to tank the Trump economy.
The Democrats’ only hope for 2020 victory is a sunk economy. They’re talking it down right now.
But their strategy only works if a lot of Americans get sick and die.”

Continue reading.

Trump administration considers leveraging emergency coronavirus loan to force Postal Service changes

Washington Post logoPresident Trump has railed for years against what he sees as mismanagement of the agency, which he argues has been exploited by sites such as Amazon

The Treasury Department is considering taking unprecedented control over key operations of the U.S. Postal Service by imposing tough terms on an emergency coronavirus loan from Congress, which would fulfill President Trump’s longtime goal of changing how the service does business, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Officials working under Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who must approve the $10 billion loan, have told senior officials at the USPS in recent weeks that he could use the loan as leverage to give the administration influence over how much the agency charges for delivering packages and how it manages its finances, according to the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks are preliminary.

Trump has railed for years against what he sees as mismanagement at the Postal Service, which he argues has been exploited by e-commerce sites such as Amazon, and has sought to change how much the agency charges for delivery packages. (Amazon’s founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Continue reading.

Confusion reigns as IRS starts issuing coronavirus payments

The Hill logoThe rollout of coronavirus relief payments has been clouded by confusion for the millions of Americans struggling to understand why they haven’t received their money.

The IRS last week sent out more than 80 million payments to people via direct deposit. But tens of millions more are still waiting for their funds, and they have questions.

Tax policy experts said it’s understandable for those people to be upset. Continue reading.

We Are Living in a Failed State

The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.

Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos. Continue reading.

How Bill Barr is gearing up to take the fall for Trump’s coronavirus policy: report

AlterNet logoAccording to a report from the Daily Beast, Attorney General Bill Barr appears poised to take the lead and attempt to force governors to re-open their states during the coronavirus pandemic — even at the risk of ramping up the spread of the virus when it appears to be slowing down.

In the process, he could become the face of Donald Trump’s failures to stem the COVID-19 health crisis.

“Donald Trump is calling for his followers to LIBERATE the states from the social distancing measures that are staving off an even greater coronavirus death toll. Trump’s enforcer, Attorney General Bill Barr, is now poised to support Trump’s call for insurrection by turning to the federal courts—seeded with a legion of newly installed right-wing jurists—to undermine critical public health protections on his boss’ behalf,” the Beast’s David Lurie wrote. “If Barr and Trump get their way, the states will soon be ‘opened up”’to the virus, and thus to a massive number of needless deaths.” Continue reading.