The following article by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Somini Segupta was posted on the New York Times website September 18, 2017:
A Syrian family in Fresno, Calif. The draft report by Health and Human Services officials, which was completed in July but not released, found that refugees “contributed an estimated $269.1 billion in revenues to all levels of government” between 2005 and 2014 through the payment of federal, state and local taxes. Credit Jason Henry for The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Trump administration officials, under pressure from the White House to provide a rationale for reducing the number of refugees allowed into the United States next year, rejected a study by the Department of Health and Human Services that found that refugees brought in $63 billion more in government revenues over the past decade than they cost.
The draft report, which was obtained by The New York Times, contradicts a central argument made by advocates of deep cuts in refugee totals as President Trump faces an Oct. 1 deadline to decide on an allowable number. The issue has sparked intense debate within his administration as opponents of the program, led by Mr. Trump’s chief policy adviser, Stephen Miller, assert that continuing to welcome refugees is too costly and raises concerns about terrorism.
Advocates of the program inside and outside the administration say refugees are a major benefit to the United States, paying more in taxes than they consume in public benefits, and filling jobs in service industries that others will not. But research documenting their fiscal upside — prepared for a report mandated by Mr. Trump in a March presidential memorandum implementing his travel ban — never made its way to the White House. Some of those proponents believe the report was suppressed. Continue reading “Trump Administration Rejects Study Showing Positive Impact of Refugees”
The following article by Amy B. Wang was psoted on the Washington Post website September 17, 2017:
Donald Trump won the presidential election. Yet, since Nov. 8, Trump has tweeted about Democratic rival Hillary Clinton many times. (Victoria Walker/The Washington Post)
President Trump retweeted a meme on Sunday morning that showed him hitting Hillary Clinton in the back with a golf ball, prompting another round of outrage from critics who felt the president’s tweets had once again crossed the line.
The following article by Callum Borchers was posted on the Washington Post website September 16, 2017:
An amazing thing happened this week.
News outlets that President Trump has branded “fake news” reported Trump agreed in principle to grant long-term legal status to DACA recipients — a big item on Democrats’ wish list — without securing funding for a Southern border wall in return. Trump said the media and the Democrats who say they negotiated with him were mischaracterizing the situation. Continue reading “Trump’s ‘fake news’ attack lost its power this week”
The following article by Alex Rowell and David Madland was posted on the Center for American Progress website September 14, 2017:
New data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that in 2016, the median U.S. household earned $59,039, a 3.2 percent increase from the previous year. Seven years after the end of the Great Recession, the median household’s income has approximately recovered to its pre-recession level, when adjusted for inflation, but has effectively remained stagnant since the late 1990s.
Middle-class households are not seeing the high levels of income growth that are being enjoyed by America’s highest-income earners. Furthermore, the share of income that is earned by the middle 60 percent of households, by income, has fallen to record lows. A revitalized union movement could help reverse the decades-long trend of growing inequality and a shrinking middle class. But anti-union attacks at the state and national levels threaten to further tilt our nation’s economy against workers. Continue reading “Without Strong Unions, Middle-Class Families Bring Home a Smaller Share”
The following article by Juliet Eilperin was posted on the Washington Post website September 15, 2017:
The coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, with the Brooks Range as a backdrop. (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service)
The Trump administration is quietly moving to allow energy exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for the first time in more than 30 years, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post, with a draft rule that would lay the groundwork for drilling.
Congress has sole authority to determine whether oil and gas drilling can take place within the refuge’s 19.6 million acres. But seismic studies represent a necessary first step, and Interior Department officials are modifying a 1980s regulation to permit them.
The effort represents a twist in a political fight that has raged for decades. The remote and vast habitat, which serves as the main calving ground for one of North America’s last large caribou herds and a stop for migrating birds from six continents, has served as a rallying cry for environmentalists and some of Alaska’s native tribes. But state politicians and many Republicans in Washington have pressed to extract the billions of barrels of oil lying beneath the refuge’s coastal plain.
Democrats have managed to block them through votes in the Senate and, in one instance in 1995, by a presidential veto.
In an Aug. 11 memo, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service acting director James W. Kurth instructed the agency’s Alaska regional director to update a rule that allowed exploratory drilling between Oct. 1, 1984, and May 31, 1986, by striking those calendar constraints.
Doing so would eliminate an obstacle that was the subject of a court battle as recently as two years ago.
“When finalized, the new regulation will allow for applicants to [submit] requests for approval of new exploration plans,” Kurth wrote in the memo.
If the rule is finalized after a public comment period, companies would have to bid on conducting the seismic studies. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated in a June 27 memo, obtained by Trustees for Alaska through a federal records request, that this work would cost about $3.6 million.
With oil prices averaging around $50 per barrel, potentially too low to justify a significant investment in drilling in the refuge, it is unclear how much interest companies would have. Some might consider proceeding with those studies to get a better sense of the area’s potential.
The behind-the-scenes push to open up the refuge — often referred to by its acronym, ANWR — comes as longtime drilling proponents occupy key positions at the Interior Department.
Its No. 2 official, David Bernhardt, represented Alaska in its unsuccessful 2014 suit to force then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell to allow exploratory drilling there. Joseph Balash, President Trump’s nominee to serve as Interior assistant secretary for land and minerals management, asked federal officials to turn a portion of the refuge over to the state when he served as Alaska’s natural resources commissioner. The state’s plan was to offer the land for leasing.
During a stop in Anchorage on May 31, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said he hoped to jump-start energy exploration on Alaska’s North Slope in part by updating resource assessments of the refuge.
“I’m a geologist. Science is a wonderful thing. It helps us understand what is going on deep below the surface of the Earth,” Zinke said at the time. “We need to use science to update our understanding of the [coastal plain] of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as Congress considers important legislation to responsibly develop there one day.”
The Fish and Wildlife memo notes that the Interior Department asked it “to update the regulations concerning the geological and geophysical exploration” of that coastal area but does not identify who issued the directive.
An Interior official said in an email Friday that the department is “required by law — the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act — to allow for seismic surveys in wildlife refuges across Alaska.”
“Hundreds of seismic surveys have been conducted on Alaska’s north slope — many of them on ANWR’s borders,” the official added.
Both the Clinton and Obama administrations concluded that the department was legally barred from permitting seismic studies in the refuge. And environmentalists have consistently opposed such activity, which sends shock waves underground. They say it would disturb denning polar bears, which are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, as well as musk oxen and other Arctic animals.
An increasing number of polar bears are now denning onshore during the winter — when seismic studies would take place — due to diminishing sea ice, and a significant portion of the coastal plain is designated as critical habitat for the bears. The Aug. 11 memo directs the Fish and Wildlife Service’s regional director to conduct an environmental assessment as part of the proposed rule change because the Endangered Species Act requires federal agencies to show that their actions will not jeopardize or adversely modify critical habitat of a listed species.
“The administration is very stealthily trying to move forward with drilling on the Arctic’s coastal plain,” said Defenders of Wildlife President Jamie Rappaport Clark, who led the Fish and Wildlife Service under President Bill Clinton. “This is a complete about-face from decades of practice.”
Environmental groups would be likely to challenge any decision to conduct seismic work in the refuge in federal court.
Alaska officials have been working for several years to restart seismic studies on the coastal plain. They say the initial ones, conducted in the winters of 1984 and 1985, were done with outdated technology and do not reflect the area’s true potential. The Geological Survey, which reanalyzed that data nearly 15 years later, estimated that 7.7 billion barrels of “technically recoverable oil” lie under the coastal plain.
The June 27 memo, sent to Zinke’s energy policy counselor Vincent DeVito, said the department could either assume the existing seismic data is acceptable, reexamine that data with “state-of-the-art” technology or conduct new studies with modern, 3-D technology.
In an interview Thursday, Alaska Natural Resources Commissioner Andy Mack said that recent oil discoveries near the refuge’s western edge suggest there may be more oil there than federal officials identified three decades ago.
“Alaska’s always had an abiding interest in resource development, particularly in oil,” Mack said. “We’re not discounting the existing data, but it’s old, and it’s relatively limited.”
The question of whether Interior can restart the seismic work is a subject of legal dispute. The 1980s studies, which took place along 1,400 miles of survey lines and were financed by private oil firms, were aimed at gathering information for a report the interior secretary submitted to Congress in 1987.
In 2001, Interior solicitor John Leshy issued a formal opinion concluding that the 1983 rule was “a time-limited authorization for exploratory activities in the coastal plain.”
Twelve years later, Alaska sought permission from the Fish and Wildlife Service to launch a new exploration program; Obama administration officials rejected the request, and the state sued.
On July 21, 2015, U.S. District Judge Sharon L. Gleason ruled against the state. “Whether the statute authorizes or requires the Secretary to approve additional exploration after the submission of the 1987 report is ambiguous,” she wrote, but Jewell’s interpretation that she no longer had authority to allow it “is based on a permissible and reasonable construction of the statute.”
Mack said he was not sure whether companies would want to drill in the refuge, but they now are more interested in the potential on land than offshore.
ConocoPhillips, for one, is “actively exploring and focused on new development opportunities” within the neighboring National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, according to spokesman Daren Beaudo. “If ANWR was opened, we’d consider it within our portfolio of opportunities . . . and it would have to compete with other regions for our exploration dollars,” he said.
Yet Pavel Molchanov, an energy analyst at Raymond James & Associates, predicted “very little interest” in drilling in the refuge for the foreseeable future.
“The number of companies that would be open to a meaningful bet on ANWR we could realistically count on one hand, and that would be generous,” Molchanov said.
The following article by Eric Lipton was posted on the New York Times website September 15, 2017:
President Trump visited his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida for 25 days between his inauguration and the middle of May. Credit: Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Friday escalated a battle with government ethics groups by declining to release the identities of individuals visiting with President Trump at his family’s Mar-a-Lago resort during the days he has spent at the private club in Palm Beach, Fla., this year.
The surprising move by the Department of Justice, which had been ordered in July by a federal court to complete its review of Mar-a-Lago visitor records, came after weeks of promotion by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the liberal nonprofit group known as CREW, that it would soon be getting the Mar-a-Lago visitors logs.
Instead, on Friday the Justice Department released a State Department list of just 22 names — all of them members of the delegation of the Japanese prime minister — who visited the club in February for a meeting with President Trump. Continue reading “Trump Declines to Release List of His Mar-a-Lago Visitors”
The following article by Emily C. Singer was posted on the Mic website September 13, 2017:
Former President Barack Obama worked with members of the GOP, including John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, on many occasions. Credit: Saul Loeb/Getty Images
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders lauded President Donald Trump from the White House briefing room Wednesday, saying Trump had done “more for bipartisanship in eight days than [former President Barack] Obama did in eight years.”
“I can’t think of any time when [Obama] made a deal with anyone from the opposing party,” Sanders said, seeking to defend Trump’s decision to negotiate with Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi on a three-month extension of the debt ceiling.
Maybe Sanders just has a bad memory, however, because Obama made a number of bipartisan deals throughout his presidency.
Those deals were necessary for the Democratic commander-in-chief, who faced a Republican-controlled House for six years of his tenure and a GOP-controlled Senate for the final two.
In 2010, Obama worked with then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on an extension of Bush-era tax cuts and unemployment benefits, along with other tax changes.
Three years later, Obama again worked with McConnell to avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff,” which would have triggered a tax increase on Americans earning less than $250,000 a year as well as strict budget reductions.
Obama also reached out to congressional Republicans on other occasions, including during the health care debate back in 2010.
Obama even went so far as to travel to a House Republican retreat in Baltimore that same year, where he spent an hour answering questions about his health care bill.
Trump’s negotiations with Democrats, as well as his dealmaking with Schumer and Pelosi, is nothing new — and Sanders’ assertion that Obama never made any gestures to Republicans is false.
The following article was posted on the Daily Beast website September 14, 2017:
Credit: Gary Cameron/Reuters
The U.S. Office of Government Ethics has reportedly altered a longstanding internal policy prohibiting White House staff members with legal defense funds from accepting anonymous donations. Walter Shaub, the former director of the OGE who stepped down last July, told Politico in an article published late Wednesday that President Trump’s administration appeared to have quietly reverted to a 1993 OGE guidance document that approved of anonymous donations. That policy has long remained intact on paper, though the ethics office always advised staffers’ attorneys to steer clear of anonymous donations, according to the report. Upon leaving the office in July, Shaub said he added a note to the original document stressing that internal practice diverged from the 1993 guidance—a note that he says has since been removed. Instead, he said, that note was replaced by a statement that the original 1993 guidance “has not changed.” “It’s very depressing,” Shaub told Politico. “It’s unseemly for the ethics office to be doing something sneaky like that.” The White House denied Shaub’s claims after Politico published its story late Wednesday, saying the former OGE director is just trying to “feel relevant.”
The following article by Tom Hamburger and Devlin Barrett was posted on the Washington Post website September 13, 2017:
Then-national security adviser Michael Flynn at the White House in February. Credit: Carolyn Kaster, AP
The lobbying activities of Michael G. Flynn, the son of President Trump’s former national security adviser, are being examined by the special counsel investigating possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the probe.
The inquiry into the younger Flynn, first reported by NBC News, follows other indications this week that investigators are increasing pressure on his father, retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who advised Trump during the campaign and briefly served in the White House before being ousted for misleading statements about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.
Mueller is looking at the younger Flynn because of his role as chief of staff to his father at the Flynn Intel Group, a lobbying and consulting firm that worked for international and domestic clients, according to the people familiar with the inquiry, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an open case. Continue reading “Lobbying activities of Michael Flynn’s son being examined by special counsel on Russia”
The following article by Nicole Lewis was posted on the Washington Post website September 13, 2017:
“In the last ten years our economy has grown at an average of only around 2 percent and some would say less than that. When I talk to the leaders of other countries – I speak to them all the time – they’re unhappy about 7 or 8 points of growth – GDP [gross domestic product]. I spoke to a leader of a major, major country recently. Big, big country. They say our country is very big, it’s hard to grow. Well believe me this country is very big. How are you doing, I said. ‘Cause I have very good relationships believe it or not with the leaders of these countries. I said, how are you doing? He said ‘not good, not good at all. Our GDP is 7 percent.’ I say 7 percent? Then I speak to another one. ‘Not good. Not good. Our GDP is only 9 percent.’”
