dismantle agency
I FORGOT, SEE 2025 AND DOGE
prolly belated but this is beyondregulatory capture
infamous start w/ Perry sr moment?
see deregulation
see gubmint
really just outgrowth of now st'd rw BS that govt fail/corrupt corps good/effic
SEE TRUMP ADMIN CORRUPT /inept
MCMAHON SHUCK JIVE CONFIRM 2 25
==
no lnx many
Trump’s Pro-Abstinence HHS Appointee Fits an Unnerving ‘Pattern’
Jennifer Gerson Uffalussy·Contributing Writer
June 7, 2017
On Tuesday, the Trump administration quietly appointed Valerie J. Huber as chief of staff for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Huber most recently served as president and CEO of Ascend, an organization focused on promoting abstinence-only education in schools. She was previously the abstinence-education coordinator for the state of Ohio, where she oversaw abstinence programs for more than 100,000 students per year.
Valerie J. Huber
In a memo to HHS staffers by Acting Health Secretary Doug Wright, he called Ascend “a Washington DC-based professional association that champions youth to make healthy life and relationship decisions.”
But abstinence-only education — or what many on the far right call “sexual risk avoidance” — is seen by many health advocates as ineffective, and frequently leave out certain demographics of young people that are especially vulnerable, including LGBTQ teens and pregnant and parenting teens.
Why Experts Are Concerned
Diana Thu-Thao Rhodes, the director of public policy for Advocates for Youth, says there is a pattern not only of Trump appointees being named to offices whose very mission they seem to oppose, but also one emerging among HHS appointees specifically who are united in their opposition to contraception.
“There is definitely in HHS and the Trump administration a focus on rolling back birth control coverage and access to contraception in general,” Thu-Thao Rhodes says. “And yet another pattern of this administration is that they don’t see contraception as a preventative service and integral to women’s health. There’s a pattern here of people being appointed to key positions by the administration who think this way.”
Echoes Leslie Kantor, PhD, MPH, and the Vice President of Education at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, “At Planned Parenthood, we are very concerned about an increasing number of anti-women’s health, anti-sex education, anti-science appointments in the Trump administration.”
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Last month, Teresa Manning was tapped as deputy assistant secretary for population affairs at HHS, the role that oversees the administration of Title X, the national family planning program. In a 2003 interview, Manning stated on the record that she believes that contraception doesn’t work. Manning has also criticized the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists for recommending that prescribers offer advance prescriptions of the morning-after pill and has called emergency contraception “medically irresponsible” and “anti-family.”
Charmaine Yoest, Trump’s appointee to serve as assistant secretary of public affairs for HHS, is opposed to intrauterine devices (IUDs) as a form of birth control and has falsely said that they have “life-ending properties.” As noted in a memo circulated to Senate Democrats from the staff of the minority members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee earlier this week, “IUDs do not work after implantation and therefore cannot end pregnancies. Additionally, recent data from the Guttmacher Institute found that unplanned pregnancies are at a 30-year low, largely a result of an increase in the use of long-acting reversible contraceptives like IUDs. The [Affordable Care Act] has been critical in increasing access to IUDs by removing cost barriers for women seeking contraceptive services.”
HHS Secretary Tom Price has also spoken on the record about his opposition to the contraception mandate of the ACA, telling a reporter in 2012 that “there’s not one woman” who does not have access to birth control — and thus does not need it guaranteed as part of her insurance coverage at no cost. Price is also vehemently outspoken on his opposition to federal funding for Planned Parenthood and his support of seeing the organization dropped as not just a Medicaid provider, but also a Title X provider. Planned Parenthood serves more than 40 percent of Title X patients, including teens, despite making up just 13 percent of all Title X health centers.
And Dr. Scott Gottlieb, Trump’s appointee to head the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), has repeatedly insisted in his own words that the contraception mandate of the ACA harms women’s health.
“These appointments have an enormous impact on the lives and future success of young people in our nation,” Ginny Ehrlich, CEO of The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, tells Yahoo Beauty in a statement. “We hope these officials will exercise their responsibilities in a way that builds on past successes in reducing teen and unplanned pregnancy, rather than going backwards.”
Bipartisan Support for Comprehensive Sex Ed
According to the Guttmacher Institute, research “suggests that strategies that promote abstinence-only outside of marriage while withholding information about contraceptives do not stop or even delay sex. Moreover, abstinence-only programs can actually place young people at increased risk of pregnancy and STIs.”
“The point of sex education is that you want to get to young people before they become sexually active. You don’t want them to get critical information after the fact,” Kantor says. “Good sex ed lays the groundwork throughout childhood and the teen years so that when you’re in the situation when you’re in a relationship and navigating and negotiating having sex for the first time, you are well prepared and have all the information you need to protect yourself.”
Adds Kantor, “There was a very, very important change in the country in2010 when for the first time, rather than pouring money into abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, money started to be appropriated for evidence-based approaches — approaches found to help young people change their behavior either by delaying sex or by using condoms and contraception when having sex. We don’t want to see things roll backwards to the bad old days of abstinence-only-until-marriage education.”
January 2017 polling by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy found that 85 percent of American adults — including 89 percent of Democrats and 75 percent of Republicans — favor maintaining federal funding for the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program and the Personal Responsibility Education Program, both of which utilize evidence-based, comprehensive sex education curricula.
Furthermore, the National Campaign’s polling found that 79 percent of Americans — including 81 percent of Democrats and 73 percent of Republicans — believe that teens should receive more information about abstinence and birth control and sexually transmitted infection protection.
Read more in Yahoo Beauty + Style:
Trump’s ‘Religious Liberty’ Order Threatens Women’s Health, Experts Say
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6 Threats to Women’s Health Baked Into Trump’s New Budget
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Better Birth Control Access Could Drop Abortion Rate by 67%, Save $12 Billion
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note mccarthy has joined the trolls gubmint
aha recall conservatives hard-wired to be sensitive to threat/fear, amplified by soc media bubble, boost by troll caucus [all built on libtard/ koch fdn]
conserv all want to get rid of income tax/also trumpistas? b/c they think they will be rich someday?
recall the gubmint is evil, so starve the beast
self-ish me vs we; if gubmint corrupt if not evil or even just inept no pt in wasting $ on it
8 22
https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/gop-rumors-irs/
An official from the U.S. Treasury Department confirmed Friday that, contrary to the unrelenting barrage of lies repeated by GOP operatives for over a week, the Internal Revenue Service is not going to hire 87,000 new agents to harass working people at their homes.
Not a single Republican in the House or Senate voted for the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that was passed through the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process last week and signed into law by President Joe Biden on Tuesday, choosing instead to condemn the package's relatively modest but popular tax reforms.
Despite analysts' predictions that the 98.2% of U.S. households with annual incomes of $400,000 or less will receive the same tax bill or a slight cut as a result of the IRA, [plus study for free file] far-right lawmakers have sown disinformation about how the law's provision of roughly $80 billion in new IRS funding over 10 years—money intended to help the agency crack down on rich tax cheats—poses a threat to every American.
Last week, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) went so far as to claim that Democrats are "using the power of the federal government for armed robbery!" Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has made :{similar allegation:(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}:s.
It's not just fringe members of the GOP who are spreading such falsehoods. One day before Boebert's tirade, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), the highest-ranking Republican in the lower chamber, tweeted, "Democrats in Washington plan to hire an army of 87,000 IRS agents so they can audit more Americans like you."
On Wednesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—currently a top contender, along with former President Donald Trump, to be the Republican Party's 2024 nominee for the White House—called hiring 87,000 IRS agents "a middle finger to the American public," making clear that he would prefer more "might at the border."
Where does this oft-repeated number of IRS agents come from?
"The 87,000 figure does exist, buried within a May 2021 Treasury Department report when the Biden administration was pushing a bigger spending bill with the same $80 billion IRS funding," Reuters noted Friday. "The report estimated the money could fund 86,852 full-time hires through 2031."
But the actual net increase in staff would be much lower, as the IRS expects more than 50,000 aging Baby Boomer employees to retire over the next half-decade.
In addition to an unspecified number of new revenue agents—there were 8,321 in fiscal year 2021—the agency is looking to hire tens of thousands of new information technology specialists and customer service personnel who can create a user experience more akin to online banking, Natasha Sarin, Treasury counselor for tax policy and administration, told Reuters.
There are 2,100 special agents in the IRS Criminal Investigation branch who are authorized to carry firearms, but right-wing assertions that all 87,000 new hires would be auditors, criminal enforcement agents, or armed are "deeply dangerous nonsense—and false," said Sarin.
"The speed and voracity with which [Republicans] are coming at this is really a testament to how important these resources are going to be—because there are many wealthy tax evaders that stand to lose a lot," Sarin continued.
The GOP's intentionally misleading attacks come after a decade of budget cuts approved by congressional Republicans left the IRS with 16,000 fewer employees in 2021 than it had in 2010.
As ProPublica has documented, the IRS now audits low-income taxpayers at the same rate as the top 1%, but that is a direct result of years of austerity, which have undermined the agency's ability to audit the rich.
The IRA's boost in IRS funding aims to rectify this injustice and to begin closing an estimated $600 billion annual "tax gap"—the difference between taxes paid and owed—by strengthening enforcement against the complex avoidance strategies used by the wealthy, especially those with murky sources of income.
New information technology hires will develop "tools to identify more high-end audit targets," Reuters reported. "To target wealthy taxpayers and handle sophisticated audits, Sarin said the IRS needs mid-career individuals with accounting and often tax law experience."
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the increase in IRS funding will raise $204 billion in additional revenue over 10 years, while the Treasury projects that the real revenue impact will likely be $400 billion over a decade—a substantial portion of the IRA's climate and healthcare spending.
Earlier this week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen instructed IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig—a scandal-plagued Trump appointee who spent decades battling the agency—to submit an $80 billion spending and hiring plan within six months. Yellen previously directed the agency not to use any new resources to increase audits of people making less than $400,000 per year.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-fed/
alexh
no twt
In the financial world, there has been much discussion over the nomination of Judy Shelton — a former campaign adviser for President Donald Trump — for the board of the U.S. Federal Reserve. Shelton is likely to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, where Republican senators are still terrified of offending Trump even though he lost the 2020 presidential election to Democratic nominee Joe Biden. And according to Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell, Shelton's likely confirmation is a travesty.
"The Senate is expected to vote as soon as this week on Trump's nomination of Judy Shelton to the Fed," Rampell explains. "Simply put, Shelton is a demonstrably unqualified partisan quack who has no business working at the world's most powerful central bank. Her nomination has been condemned by hundreds of economists and Fed alumni, including prominent Republicans and at least seven Nobel laureates. The senators poised to confirm her appear to know she is unfit; ahead of February hearings, a former Republican Senate Banking Committee aide said that 'the idea of even calling her as a witness for something was beyond the pale' not long ago."
rampell cites someexamples of why many economists consider Shelton a "quack," including "her multi-decade effort to bring back the gold standard" — which, Rampell notes, "might be popular among the right-wing fringe, but it was abandoned worldwide long ago and remains almost unanimously rejected by economists. For good reasons, including that gold prices are volatile. Linking the dollar to gold can also restrict liquidity when the economy needs it most — as happened during the Great Depression."
On top of that, Rampell adds, Shelton has "questioned whether the Fed should even exist."[rogue agency"]
shelton's nomination, Rampell argues, is based on political considerations — not real economic policy.
"Another pending Fed nominee, Christopher Waller, is qualified for the job and still hasn't gotten a vote," Rampell observes. "Yet somehow, Shelton is getting jammed through ahead of him. One possible explanation: a desire to salt the earth for incoming President-elect Joe Biden."
Rampell concludes her column by arguing that perhaps Republicans want Shelton on the Federal Reserve board in order to hurt the incoming Biden Administration on economic policy.
The Post columnist warns, "Shelton's confirmation could represent a point of no return for corrupting the mission and functionality of the Fed, and destroying whatever bipartisan resolve remained to not tank the economy for political gain…. I hope I'm wrong — both that Shelton is about to be approved and that her confirmation would escalate efforts to sabotage the job market or price stability while the other party is in power. But if I'm right, a dark new economic era looms."