statistic metric measure

619 belated beware a lot of this is about fuckery? // “reform”

SEE EXPERT FACT DATA ~FASCISM TRUMP

SEE CENSUS 9 26 FUCKERY

see no record stats for sci suppression eg guns, abortionIMR

you can change reality by jiggering numbers, you can alter world based on what is (NCLB) and IGNORE what is NOT not measured

note: you can use algo to strip out data to get chart you want eg below emily miller fda

// dirty trick? see expertise data empirical ~ fascism accountability transparency

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AN 10 26

I've got to hand it to Washington's Republican policymakers. They've come up with a truly remarkable way that, they promise, will vastly expand the number of small businesses in America. Great!

This is personal for me, for I grew up in a family that had a Main Street business in small-town Texas, so I know how hard it is for little guys to battle the raw monopoly power of corporate chains. Thus, I cheered the GOP ... until I learned that their small business proposal is just another big business scam.

Far from actually increasing the number of small enterprises, Trump bureaucrats are merely redefining "small" to include BIG. For example, the Small Business Administration has long categorized a business as small if it had less than $25 million in yearly sales. But they've now jacked that definition up by 1,000%! Indeed, even some billion-dollar giants can now -- HOCUS POCUS -- qualify as small.

This is much worse than a statistical ruse, for it means that very large outfits with Wall Street backing, Washington lobbyists and slick corporate lawyers will suddenly take the grants, contracts and other government benefits intended to advance genuine Main Street innovators and competitors. In short, the GOP's cynical scheme is using the small business label to overpower those very enterprises. It's a deliberate rigging of the rules by today's right-wing government officials to help big business grab public money -- increasing the power of corporate elites to eliminate competitors... and further monopolize our economy.

Remember this deceit when Republican congress critters run corporate-financed election ads this fall claiming to "looove" small business. Yeah ... love it to death.

TWO-LEGGED HOGS TRYING TO RULE AG POLICY

Warning: This is a sob story that might bring you to tears. Or make you upchuck in disgust.

It's about hogs -- both the four-legged species and the more piggish, two-legged breed of agribusiness executives. The latter have long profited from cruel abuse of millions of hogs caged in their monopolistic system and now the agbiz giants have launched a lobbying campaign called SOB -- "Save Our Bacon." It's not a plea to save the abused animals, but to save the abusers' profits!

It turns out that most consumers don't like animal abuse, so states are passing laws to prevent such corporate practices. This has led to a vibrant new market for humanely raised pork, already gaining more than a fourth of national pork sales.

"Ouch," squealed the factory farm giants, feeling the pinch of real competition. Rather than clean up their methods, though, the monopolists have raced to Washington, demanding that Congress "save their bacon" by artificially and autocratically rigging the market. Their Save Our Bacon act would usurp states' rights to set their own standards for animal welfare.

This is not an "academic free market issue." In recent state ballot initiatives, voters have overwhelmingly endorsed ethical standards for animal agriculture. Moreover, responsible family-farm producers have quickly responded to this growing new market, upgrading their facilities to meet the new state standards of humane production.

Yet, rather than embracing this success for animals, farmers and consumers -- here come tiny cliques of corporate profiteers like the National Pork Producers Council. They're wielding their Big Money lobbying muscle, trying to overrule the public interest ... and the political will of America's majority.

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AN 10 26

On Wednesday, it was revealed that under the leadership of President Donald Trump, the FBI has embraced a novel solution to making it appear as if its violent crime arrests are up: “juice the stats.” This is according to a new report by MS NOW, which found that the crime numbers touted by FBI Director Kash Patel are padded with arrests made by state and local law enforcement rather than the bureau.

“With fewer agents and a strained budget, the FBI under its director, Kash Patel, has brought thousands fewer criminal cases than previous administrations,” reports MS NOW, citing a review of Justice Department data. “The findings rebut Patel’s repeated claims that he has led a crackdown on violent crime. Patel has boasted that the FBI has arrested 54,000 violent criminals, which he describes as a 90 percent increase in arrests from the same period in the Biden administration. What he doesn’t mention is that his count is inflated by including arrests that state and local police forces and other federal agencies have made when an FBI employee is present.” And as the FBI itself acknowledged, many were not FBI cases.

In fact, data shows that the FBI has referred 15 percent fewer criminal cases for federal prosecution during Trump’s second term than during the same period in the Biden administration. And, while the FBI does not break down its criminal referrals into types of cases, the data also shows that the DOJ prosecuted 15 percent fewer cases of violent crimes during the first 16 months of the Trump administration than during the same period of the Biden administration.

According to MS NOW, “There were nearly 3,800 fewer people charged federally with violent crimes during the first part of the second Trump administration than during the comparable Biden period — the opposite of what Patel says. That figure includes cases referred from all federal agencies, not just the FBI.” The report is based on public DOJ data obtained and shared by Justice Connection, a group of former DOJ and FBI employees who have accused the administration of weaponizing the department to pursue Trump’s political ends.

The drop in criminal cases has corresponded with a “huge” increase in focus on immigration crimes per Patel’s demand. According to MS NOW, “Since the 9/11 attacks, the FBI’s priority mission has been stopping terrorism. The bureau is also devoted to hunting foreign spies, ferreting out political corruption and white collar fraud, and disrupting complex criminal schemes and organized crime.” The shift to emphasizing immigration enforcement along with the juiced stats represents a major change in the FBI’s function and transparency.

“Kash Patel is actively dismantling decades of statistical integrity just to feed a political narrative,” said Christopher O’Leary, a former senior FBI official and MS NOW contributor. “We are seeing a historic institution reduced to a metrics game, where the FBI is poaching credit for arrests made by other law enforcement agencies and departments. This artificial inflation of the stats is a deliberate smoke screen designed to mask internal chaos and the mass exodus of experienced talent by manufacturing an illusion of productivity that simply does not exist on the ground.”

In a statement to MS NOW, the FBI did not dispute the data showing a reduction in criminal referrals, but it pointed to the declining rate of violent crime. But as MS NOW explains, “That decline has been a nationwide trend for several years after crime briefly spiked during the Covid-19 pandemic from 2020 to 2022. It’s been steadily declining ever since.” And while Patel has claimed a 90 percent increase in “violent crime arrests” by the FBI, this ignores crucial context: “that Patel is taking credit for the work of other agencies.”

“By Patel newly including state and local arrests, as well as arrests by other federal agencies, his FBI progress report radically changes the way the FBI counts its cases to include work the FBI did not do,” MS NOW elaborates. “The FBI has not previously counted other agency arrests as part of its caseload, according to internal DOJ data and the accounts of current and former officials. There is no way to say how many of the local police arrests — which Patel now claims credit for — would have been made regardless of the FBI’s presence.” The FBI asserts that the numbers have always been tallied that way, but that is false, multiple former FBI officials told MS NOW. Former FBI agent Daniel Brunner said the FBI previously always resisted counting state and local arrests as FBI achievements. “It’s never been done,” he said. “And when agents attempted to do it, it was always pushed back on at the local division. Headquarters did not want false numbers, they wanted the truth from the field.”

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RWW 9 26

Vittoria Elliott and David Gilbert @ Wired: A US Census Report on Noncitizen Voting Used Bad Data to Reach Faulty Conclusions

Trump has touted a recent Census report. WIRED found grave flaws in its analysis and the process behind it, and confirmed the identity of several of its authors—among them a one-time DOGE affiliate.

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AN 3 26

A Social Security advocacy organization on Thursday blasted the Trump administration for covering up damaging information contained in an inspector general report released in December.

According to The Washington Post, a report from the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) inspector general (IG) about call wait times for beneficiaries was altered to make it seem as though wait times to speak to representatives had been reduced to under 10 minutes per call.

“An unpublished draft of the report... showed that the inspector general had planned to report another metric—called the ‘total wait time’—to measure the overall time it takes for callers to be connected with an SSA employee,” the Post explained. “According to that draft report, in 2025 total wait time averaged 46 minutes to over two hours.”

The Post added that this “information was deleted from the draft after the agency reviewed it before publication.”

Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, responded to the report by saying that “now we know why [President Donald] Trump fired the inspector general at Social Security,” noting that the SSA IG was one of several fired across multiple agencies at the start of Trump’s second term.

Altman then argued that the attack on inspectors general was part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to dismantle government transparency all together.

“Inspectors general are the American peoples’ eyes and ears in these agencies,” said Altman. “The Trump administration is undermining that oversight at every turn. Under this administration, the IG has no ability to conduct independent oversight. There is no meaningful check on the Trump administration’s Social Security sabotage.”

Democratic communications consultant Jesse Lee linked the damage to the SSA documented in the draft IG report to efforts by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which went on a firing spree of federal workers last year.

“So DOGE did a smash and grab at the Social Security Administration, breaking into the most sensitive data, firing phone and in-person case workers,” Lee wrote. “Trump appointee waved around an IG report claiming wait times were fine—after burying the real report saying they were up to two hours.”

OMFG}:

MOJO

This story was originally published by theGuardian and is reproduced here as part of the*Climate Desk*collaboration.}:

The Trump administration is breaking up a research center praised as a “crown jewel” of climate research after accusing it of spreading “alarmism” about climate change.

Russell Vought, the director of the White House’s office and management budget, said the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, would be dismantled under the supervision of the National Science Foundation.

“This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country,” he wrote in a social media post. “A comprehensive review is underway & any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.”

The announcement was the latest in a series of climate-skeptic moves by the administration, which has vowed to eliminate what it calls “green new scam research activities.”

It drew fierce condemnation from climate experts, who said the Colorado center was renowned for advances in the study of weather patterns, including tropical cyclones.

Roger Pielke Jr, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute thinktank, told *USA Today*, which first reported the story, that the facility was “a crown jewel of the US scientific enterprise and deserves to be improved not shuttered.”

He added: “If the US is going to be a global leader in the atmospheric sciences, then it cannot afford to make petty and vindictive decisions based on the hot politics of climate change.”

The move was also criticized by Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis, who said it put “public safety at risk.”

“Climate change is real, but the work of NCAR goes far beyond climate science,” he said. “NCAR delivers data around severe weather events like fires and floods that help our country save lives and property, and prevent devastation for families.”

The center employs approximately 830 staff and includes the Mesa Laboratory in Boulder, which Vought said would be shut. It also operates two aircraft for atmospheric research and manages a government-owned supercomputing facility in Wyoming.

The decision to dismantle it is consistent with Donald Trump’s frequent characterisations of climate change as a “con job” or a “hoax.”

The White House has accused the centre of following a “woke direction” and identified several projects that administration officials say are wasteful and frivolous, USA Today reported.

These include a Rising Voices Center for Indigenous and Earth Sciences that seeks to “make the sciences more welcoming, inclusive, and justice-centered,” as well as research into wind turbines, an innovation that Trump has repeatedly denounced.

The administration has already proposed a 30 percent cut to the funding of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, slashing spending on its climate, weather and ocean laboratories, which work to improve forecasting and better understand weather patterns.

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7 25 note no f word but he got there

neoconservative writer Bill Kristol says President Donald Trump’s firing of the Commissioner of Labor Statistics over her department’s accurately reported numbers was moving the U.S. into “third world” territory.

“My alarm scale is pretty high,” Kristol told podcaster Tim Miller. “It’s been pretty high for quite a while, but it’s ticking higher.”

The furious president fired Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after a dismal June jobs report showing only 73,000 new jobs added and downward revisions of more than 250,000 for April and May.

“She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “… The Economy is BOOMING under “TRUMP.”

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Kristol said past presidents often spun bad numbers with claims that ‘it’s complicated” or "these adjustments are a little bigger than usual."

“That would’ve been a normal political reaction,” Kristol said. “But spin is not OK anymore. I guess we just have to have pure propaganda. You can’t report the facts if they run counter to the narrative of America First, that everything is fantastic, everything that Trump does has instantaneously great results and there will never be another disappointment or a down month in the economy as long as Trump is president.”

“The numbers weren’t even outright recessionary,” added Kristol, but now Trump has amplified them to shake confidence in everything now coming out of the administration.

Miller called the firing a "don’t believe your lying eyes-authoritarian creep" and agreed that McEntarfer lost her job “because she reported the facts.” This will signal that nobody will now be able to take as truth any “facts” coming from the administration, whether it’s economic numbers or the details of a hurricane.

“The economy is based on trust and the belief that institutions will pay their bills, that the numbers they report will be accurate and there will not be a corrupt scheme that hyperinflates or deflates the value of the dollar,” said Miller. “This is the reason the U.S. has the world’s reserve currency, why the U.S. is still la trusted world harbor for investment for people around the world It is because our institutions are strong and legitimate. If you delegitimize our institutions that puts you on a path of having an economy that looks like Argentina.

Miller asked why anybody would invest in the U.S. if they suspect the government is going to put out “fake numbers to please the despot.”

And it is to please the despot, said Kristol. The abrupt nature of the firing proved that.

“They want the intimidation. They want the sense that the whole government works for Donald Trump,” Kristol said, adding that the all caps “Trump” in Trump’s Truth Social post was “revealing.”

Hear the Bulwark podcast at this link.

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MMA

After Steve Bannon called for “a MAGA Republican” to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Trump fired its commissioner

Trump took this action following a weak jobs report with major downward revisions. Economists say this move will create mistrust about economic data.

Written by Zachary Pleat

Published 08/01/25

On the August 1 edition of former Trump strategist Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, he and Heritage Foundation’s E.J. Antoni called for getting rid of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner following a weak July jobs report.

Hours later, President Donald Trump said and NBC News confirmed that he had fired BLS Commissioner Dr. Erika McEntarfer. Economists quickly spoke up about how this action, which would decrease confidence in economic data and seriously risk politicizing it outright, poses a grave threat to the entire American economy.

The BLS reported this morning that in July, only 73,000 jobs were created, and job creation in May and June were revised downward by a combined 258,000 jobs.

In response, Bannon claimed to be concerned about “whether we get accurate numbers” from the BLS, adding: “What in the hell is going on there? And have we put in our own person into BLS? Is a MAGA Republican, that President Trump knows and trusts, are they running the Bureau of Labor Statistics yet?” Antoni replied, “No, unfortunately, Steve, we still haven’t gotten there. And I think that’s part of the reason why we continue to have all of these different data problems.” Antoni also talked up a previous BLS commissioner, and added: “He’s been replaced by someone who, frankly, I think is incompetent. And that shows with the fact that the problems in the statistics — that first became evident all the way back in the spring of 2022 — those problems are still there.”

Video

Citation

From the August 1, 2025, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

Hours later, citing the July jobs report and a conspiracy theory about the BLS from the 2024 election cycle, Trump posted on Truth Social: “I was just informed that our Country’s ‘Jobs Numbers’ are being produced by a Biden Appointee, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory. … I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified.”

Economists reacted to Trump’s firing of the BLS commissioner by explaining that the revisions weren’t political, and that Trump could damage trust in the accuracy of economic statistics moving forward.

Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics for Yale’s Budget Lab, wrote: “Every economist who knows the 1st thing about labor data knows this has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the challenges of real-time jobs estimation in the world's biggest economy.”

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Navy Federal chief economist and Washington Post columnist Heather Long wrote: “This is basically unprecedented and will raise concerns about US data integrity going forward.”

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Employ America executive director Skanda Amarnath wrote: “Even if nothing in BLS processes actually changes, public trust is permanently harmed when the BLS commissioner is fired after one bad jobs report. The optics are terrible and collective perception matters. So does reality.”

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MEF Associates senior research associate Matt Darling simply replied: “Banana Republic hours.”

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Some conservative economists also expressed alarm over Trump’s action.

Manhattan Institute senior fellow Jessica Riedl wrote: “Trump firing the BLS director for a bad jobs report - days after demanding the Smithsonian remove him from the list of impeached presidents - is banana republic stuff.” She added in a follow-up post: “Trump just ensured that we should not trust any government data coming out of his administration. Why should we trust data from agencies in which the director's job depends on altering any bad economic news? Any Republicans with a spine need to speak out.”

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American Enterprise Institute director of economic policy studies Michael R. Strain wrote: “Erika McEntarfer has devoted her career to public service. She has conducted herself as BLS Commissioner with great integrity. There is no evidence whatsoever that BLS data are politically biased. By incorrectly asserting that the data are biased, President Trump is undermining the integrity of the information that policymakers, businesses, households, and investors use to make important decisions that affect the welfare of the nation. It is imperative that decisionmakers understand that government statistics are unbiased and of the highest quality. By casting doubt on that, the President is damaging the United States.”

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WHEN WILL HE KILL THE STATS?

BASICALLY GO AROUND TABLE BROWN NOSING; BONDI WENT FROM 20M KIA TO 258! actually 70k last year

AN 525

NO LNX

Trump’s clown car cabinet is driving off a cliff

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reacts as she walks towards the White House, in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 10, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Sabrina Haake, Raw Story May 03, 2025

UPS, the United Parcel Service, just announced that it is laying off 20,000 employees and closing 73 of its buildings by the end of June. It attributes the downturn to reduced shipping volume from its largest customer, Amazon, due to Trump’s tariffs.

When a division of Amazon considered telling consumers the truth, by posting the costs tariffs added to the price of each imported product, the mere possibility set the White House on attack mode. Trump immediately called Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, who reassured him Amazon would never do such a thing, while Karoline Leavitt accused Bezos of a “political and hostile” act just for thinking about it.

When a presidential team of incompetent egoists calls truth-telling a “hostile act,” we’re in trouble.

Ruinous economic indicators prompt ruinous deflection

Trump’s first quarter report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis reflects a sharp contraction in the economy, showing an annual decrease in the GDP of 0.3 percent. Compared to Biden’s last quarter, when “real GDP increased 2.4 percent,” the data suggest that perhaps Trump isn’t the economic genius he claims to be.

These are not partisan data; that the Bureau falls under the US Department of Commerce suggests Trump may soon hobble its reporting capacity. For now, the data show economic contraction, reflecting a colossal reversal from Biden’s expansion. Wall Street sums up Trump’s first 100 days in office as the “worst for the stock market in half a century.”

On brand, when faced with these data, Trump lied, deflected, and blamed his predecessor, posting,“This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s. I didn’t take over until January 20th. This… has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that (Biden) left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other. BE PATIENT!!!”

Trump continues to manufacture Biden’s “bad numbers”

Trump can’t stop parroting his own campaign lies about Biden’s economy. During the 2024 presidential campaign, when he wasn’t manufacturing a border invasion to enrage people, Trump repeatedly attacked Biden’s economy. It worked. While remaining mum on how his own COVID-19 mismanagement worsened the economy, he convinced 49% of voters that they were impoverished, despite economic indicators to the contrary.

After commerce reports came out this week, Trump doubled down. During an embarrassing televised cabinet meeting orchestrated to praise himself, Trump confirmed that he sought to undo everything Biden did to improve the economy, stating, “We came in and I was very against everything that Biden was doing in terms of the economy. … We took over his mess in so many different ways.”

Trump and his cabinet may drink their own economic Kool-Aid, but Wall Street is abstaining. Multiple indicators confirmed that Biden delivered the strongest post-COVID economic recovery in the world, including: growth and job creation that exceeded G7 and other advanced economies' growth in 2024; inflation control despite global inflationary pressures; avoidance of the post-COVID recession predicted by many; wage gains; strong market performance with record S&P 500 highs; and stellarinfrastructure investment that Trump, in a toddler-esque pique of jealousy, is scrambling to unravel.

During Biden’s term, the U.S. added 16 million jobs, low earners were experiencing wage growth, inflation levels approached the Federal Reserve’s target, and unemployment hit a 54-year low. By these metrics, Biden performed economic jujitsu, delivering an economy that The Economist called “the envy of the world.”

Teaching Trump media how to lie better

After Trump officially blamed Biden this week for economic contractions caused by his own ill-conceived tariffs, he went further, instructing right-wing media how to spin bad economic news of the future. During his televised “Praise Dear Leader” cabinet meeting, Trump told his preferred outlets (Fox, Newsmax, OAN) that they should also blame any economic downturns in the second quarter on Biden.

Trump showed similar intransigence during an interview with Terry Moran of ABC News about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man Trump is keeping in an El Salvador prison despite a Supreme Court order to facilitate his return. Trump insisted during the interview that an obviously photoshopped picture showed Garcia with “MS13” tattooed on his knuckles. When Moran told Trump that the image was clearly photoshopped, Trump acted like a tyrant. He first suggested Moran owed him something – it was thanks to Trump that Moran got the interview at all. Frustrated by Moran’s continuing refusal to lie, Trump told him, “you’re not being very nice,” before pivoting to attacking media as a whole, saying this “is why people no longer believe the news … It’s such a disservice…”

Discussing the Supreme Court order to facilitate Garcia’s return, Moran stated the obvious — that Trump could simply pick up the phone, call El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, and get him back. Trump confirmed that he is, indeed, flouting the Supreme Court’s authority, stating, “I could…. And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that.”

In one interview, Trump vacillated between being the all powerful Oz, and the cheap salesman behind the curtain. When Moran reminded him that the high court ordered him to return Garcia, Trump deflected, incredibly: “I'm not the one making this decision. We have lawyers who don't want to do this.”

Trump’s clown car cabinet is driving off a cliff

After the Supreme Court slapped the administration and ordered Garcia’s return with a 9-0 decision, White House adviser Stephen Miller simply lied about it. Miller claimed on Fox News that the administration had “won” the case, “clearly,” prompting a conservative columnist to retort, “Nope, you lost. Unanimously.” Fox viewers, of course, won’t hear that rejoinder as Fox anchors continue to throw falsehoods at the wall to see what sticks.

As Team Trump continues governing the country like a made-for-Fox-TV reality show, real-life consequences are piling up. China just canceled orders for American pork, soybeans, and lumber, putting US farmers in “full-blown crisis” mode.

Maybe, like dolls for Christmas, farmers can make do with selling one or two hogs instead of 30. As Trump put it during a town hall Wednesday night, he plans to defeat public skepticism over his tariffs through deception. “I just think that I’ll be able to convince people how good this is.”

NOW READ: Trump's rampage is out of control — but there's one way to stop it

Sabrina Haake is a 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her columns are or have been published in Alternet, Chicago Tribune, MSN, Out South Florida, Raw Story, Salon, Smart News, State Affairs, and Windy City Times. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

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an 4 25

President Donald Trump’s firings at the Department of Health and Human Services included the entire office that sets federal poverty guidelines, which determine whether tens of millions of Americans are eligible for health programs such as Medicaid, food assistance, child care, and other services, former staff said.

The small team, with technical data expertise, worked out of HHS’ Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, or ASPE. Their dismissal mirrored others across HHS, which came without warning and left officials puzzled as to why they were “RIF’ed” — as in “reduction in force,” the bureaucratic language used to describe the firings.

“I suspect they RIF’ed offices that had the word ‘data’ or ‘statistics’ in them,” said one of the laid-off employees, a social scientist whom KFF Health News agreed not to name because the person feared further recrimination. “It was random, as far as we can tell.”

Among those fired was Kendall Swenson, who had led development of the poverty guidelines for many years and was considered the repository of knowledge on the issue, according to the social scientist and two academics who have worked with the HHS team.

The sacking of the office could lead to cuts in assistance to low-income families next year unless the Trump administration restores the positions or moves its duties elsewhere, said Robin Ghertner, the fired director of the Division of Data and Technical Analysis, which had overseen the guidelines.

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The poverty guidelines are “needed by many people and programs,” said Timothy Smeeding, a professor emeritus of economics at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin. “If you’re thinking of someone you fired who should be rehired, Swenson would be a no-brainer,” he added.

Under a 1981 appropriations bill, HHS is required annually to take Census Bureau poverty-line figures, adjust them for inflation, and create guidelines that agencies and states use to determine who is eligible for various types of help.

There’s a special sauce for creating the guidelines that includes adjustments and calculations, Ghertner said. Swenson and three other staff members would independently prepare the numbers and quality-check them together before they were issued each January.

Everyone in Ghertner’s office was told last week, without warning, that they were being put on administrative leave until June 1, when their employment would officially end, he said.

“There’s literally no one in the government who knows how to calculate the guidelines,” he said. “And because we’re all locked out of our computers, we can’t teach anyone how to calculate them.”

ASPE had about 140 staff members and now has about 40, according to a former staffer. The HHS shake-up merged the office with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, or AHRQ, whose staff has shrunk from 275 to about 80, according to a former AHRQ official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

HHS has said it laid off about 10,000 employees and that, combined with other moves, including a program to encourage early retirements, its workforce has been reduced by about 20,000. But the agency has not detailed where it made the cuts or identified specific employees it fired.

“These workers were told they couldn’t come into their offices so there’s no transfer of knowledge,” said Wendell Primus, who worked at ASPE during the Bill Clinton administration. “They had no time to train anyone, transfer data, etc.”

HHS defended the firings. The department merged AHRQ and ASPE “as part of Secretary Kennedy’s vision to streamline HHS to better serve Americans,” spokesperson Emily Hilliard said. “Critical programs within ASPE will continue in this new office” and “HHS will continue to comply with statutory requirements,” she said in a written response to KFF Health News.

After this article published, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon called KFF Health News to say others at HHS could do the work of the RIF’ed data analysis team, which had nine members. “The idea that this will come to a halt is totally incorrect,” he said. “Eighty million people will not be affected.”

Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has so far declined to testify about the staff reductions before congressional committees that oversee much of his agency. On April 9, a delegation of 10 Democratic members of Congress waited fruitlessly for a meeting in the agency’s lobby.

The group was led by House Energy and Commerce health subcommittee ranking member Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), who told reporters afterward that Kennedy must appear before the committee “and tell us what his plan is for keeping America healthy and for stopping these devastating cuts.”

Matt VanHyfte, a spokesperson for the Republican committee leadership, said HHS officials would meet with bipartisan committee staff on April 11 to discuss the firings and other policy issues.

ASPE serves as a think tank for the HHS secretary, said Primus, who later was Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s senior health policy adviser for 18 years. In addition to the poverty guidelines, the office maps out how much Medicaid money goes to each state and reviews all regulations developed by HHS agencies.

“These HHS staffing cuts — 20,000 — obviously they are completely nuts,” Primus said. “These were not decisions made by Kennedy or staff at HHS. They are being made at the White House. There’s no rhyme or reasons to what they’re doing.”

HHS leaders may be unaware of their legal duty to issue the poverty guidelines, Ghertner said. If each state and federal government agency instead sets guidelines on its own, it could create inequities and lead to lawsuits, he said.

And sticking with the 2025 standard next year could put benefits for hundreds of thousands of Americans at risk, Ghertner said. The current poverty level is $15,650 for a single person and $32,150 for a family of four.

“If you make $30,000 and have three kids, say, and next year you make $31,000 but prices have gone up 7%, suddenly your $31,000 doesn’t buy you the same,” he said, “but if the guidelines haven’t increased, you might be no longer eligible for Medicaid.”

The 2025 poverty level for a family of five is $37,650.

As of October, about 79 million people were enrolled in Medicaid or the related Children’s Health Insurance Program, both of which are means-tested and thus depend on the poverty guidelines to determine eligibility.

Eligibility for premium subsidies for insurance plans sold in Affordable Care Act marketplaces is also tied to the official poverty level.

One in eight Americans rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, and 40% of newborns and their mothers receive food through the Women, Infants, and Children program, both of which also use the federal poverty level to determine eligibility.

Former employees in the office said they were not disloyal to the president. They knew their jobs required them to follow the administration’s objectives. “We were trying to support the MAHA agenda,” the social scientist said, referring to Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” rubric. “Even if it didn’t align with our personal worldviews, we wanted to be useful.”

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aha evil pending b/c we need empirical data literally to save lives, so to manipulate it to hide death is evil; plus a graph is visual and intuitive (by pass logical language side of brain tho SEEMS to do opposite? up = good down = bad ($ not covid case]; recall some months ago graph dates were rejiggered to get down slope.[southern state?]

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3 25

1st? target of Dept of Ed was stats?

'Obfuscation tactics': Trump moves to hide key data as economy careens 'toward a downturn'

an 3 25

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https://www.alternet.org/**2022/05**/trump-administration-meat-industry-covid/

*former President Donald Trump's administration colluded with top-level meatpacking industry executives to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic in order to drive up prices and downplay the severity of the emergency, according to an exhaustive investigation released on Thursday by the United States House Select Oversight Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.

Representative Jim Clyburn (D-South Carolina), the House Majority Whip and chairman of the Subcommittee, said in a statement that "the shameful conduct of corporate executives pursuing profit at any cost during a crisis and government officials eager to do their bidding regardless of resulting harm to the public must never be repeated."

The probe began last year and uncovered a spider web of corruption and flagrant disregard for human life involving American corporate titans and individuals in the highest ranks of the federal government.

Officials at the Department of Agriculture – including Secretary Sonny Purdue and Under Secretary for Food Safety Mindy Brashears – "collaborated" with corporate bigwigs to prioritize profits and production over the safety of employees and the public despite being fully aware of the hazards.

"Infections and deaths among workers for five of the largest meatpacking companies—Tyson Foods, Inc. (Tyson), JBS USA Holdings, Inc. (JBS), Smithfield Foods (Smithfield), Cargill, Inc. (Cargill), and National Beef Packing Company LLC (National Beef)—were significantly higher than previously estimated, with over 59,000 workers for these companies being infected with the coronavirus andat least 269 dying," the report states.

The powerful cadre also "engaged in a concerted effort with Trump Administration political officials to insulate themselves from coronavirus-related oversight," it explains.

In one instance, the chief executive officers of the conglomerates told Purdue on a phone call that their workers “should not be entitled to unemployment benefitsif they are otherwise able to work through the pandemic” and cautioned against “creat[ing] an incentive, much less a path, for food industry workers to choose unemployment overproducing food.”

In that same conversation, they "implicitly acknowledged how dangerous plants were, asking for liability protection against lawsuits if workers were infected on the job."

There was also an aggressive campaign to skirt "pesky" local, state, and federal regulations that would have kept workers and their products safe and healthy.

"Companies lobbied the White House to make clear that—despite concerns by state and local health departments—meatpacking companies should not have to address coronavirus risks if it would impact productivity," the investigation revealed.

Alarmingly, the CEOs managed to successfully lobby Trump to draft and sign an executive order in April of 2020 that "would insulate meatpacking companies from oversight by state and local health departments and provide legal protection against lawsuits for worker illnesses and deaths."

The edict led to Trump "invoking the Defense Production Act to ensure meatpacking plants 'continue operations.'"

Shortly thereafter, records handed over to the Subcommittee show that "meatpacking industry representatives and companies—Smithfield and Tyson in particular—engaged in constant communications with Trump appointees at USDA, the National Economic Council, and the White House, including calls between Smithfield CEO Ken Sullivan and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows; a joint call with Sullivan, Meadows, and Tyson CEO Noel White;a call between White and Vice President Pence’s Chief of Staff Marc Short; and a call from Meadows to White asking if White would be willing to meet with President Trump."

Trump subsequently "held a call with officers of the meatpacking companies who had lobbied for it on the morning the order was issued."

After Trump granted their wish, an effort was undertaken between the administration and the industry to "coordinate closely on messaging concerning the order and its effects, apparently hoping to generate positive press coverage" for the ex-commander in chief.

Worker fatalities, meanwhile, were swept under the rug.

In a particularly egregious example, an outbreak at Foster Farms in Livingston,California that infected "at least" 392 workers and killed eight in August of 2020 prompted the company to "intimidate" the Merced County Department of Public Health from shutting down the plant.

"Foster Farms attempts to obfuscate the death count by labeling fatalities as 'resolutions,'" investigators learned. "MCPH officials told the Select Subcommittee that an unidentified person on the call from either Foster Farms or USDA said these cases could be considered 'toe tag resolutions,' referring to the toe tag that is often put on a corpse at the morgue. MCPH said that Brashears asked this individual to 'stop' and said they would 'talk about this separately.'"

Operations at Foster Farms in Livingston were eventually temporarily suspended on August 31st.

Read the full report here.

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hmmn/ but fusion ctrs got $ and rewarded for tracking EF! dapl, green occupy?

aha: invis hand free mkt is impoverished systemic "thinking" bottom line (a little knowledge is dangerous) b/c it is too radical an exclusion of factors, often the ones that can't be quantified,eg of fail

raw story

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/capitol-riot-2650416088/

On Tuesday, writing for The Daily Beast, former CIA officer Jeff Stein highlighted some of the root causes of the "massive" intelligence failure that prevented a meaningful effort to stop the Capitol riot from happening.

Reports suggested that the FBI had alerts of "war" at the Capitol just a day before it all unfolded — and yet many federal and local officials who should have been prepared were caught off guard.

"Nobody here needs to be reminded that far-right fringe groups and untold tens of thousands of delusional pro-Trump fans had been lighting up their social-media redoubts and chat-room hideouts for weeks with excited talk of marching on Washington to reverse the election results," wrote Stein. "The red lights were screaming, as the all too common saying goes.Just days before the Jan. 6 insurrection calamity, I talked to a regional D.C. intelligence official who claimed with quiet confidence to be on top of it all. In retrospect, it reminds me of the walk I took with a CIA friend in August 2001, when he told me the agency was expecting Osama bin Laden to hit us big time any day."

One of the big causes of the problem, wrote Stein, is that the culture at the intelligence and law enforcement agencies prioritizes "statistical accomplishments" that can be quantified — and preventing an insurrection is not easily quantifiable, so there aren't enough resources put into it.

"As former FBI agent Harry Gossett told me a few weeks ago,investigative resources are 'doled out based on statistical accomplishments,' such as the number of 'subjects identified, indictments, arrests, convictions, fines, savings, recoveries, etc,'" wrote Stein. "If the squad investigating bank embezzlements, for example, can show hard numbers on money saved, it's going to get a bigger budget. In contrast, Gossett said, 'counterintelligence squads were measured by defections, recruitments, and intelligence take. Their cases rarely went to court.' Can't show money saved there."

You can read more here.

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no lnx

https://www.nytimes.com/:{2020/04/:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:16/climate/epa-mercury-coal.html

E.P.A. Weakens Controls on Mercury

The agency is changing the way it calculates the benefits of mercury controls, a move that would effectively loosen the rules on other toxic pollutants.

By Lisa Friedman and Coral Davenport

April 16, 2020

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Thursday weakened regulations on the release of mercury and other toxic metals from oil and coal-fired power plants, another step toward rolling back health protections in the middle of a pandemic.

The new Environmental Protection Agencyrule does not eliminate restrictions on the release of mercury, a heavy metal linked to brain damage. Instead, it creates a new method of calculating the costs and benefits of curbing mercury pollution that environmental lawyers said would fundamentally undermine the legal underpinnings of controls on mercury and many other pollutants.

By reducing the positive health effects of regulations on paper and raising their economic costs, the new method could be used to justify loosening restrictions on any pollutant that the fossil fuel industry has deemed too costly to control.

“That is the big unstated goal,” said David Konisky, a professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University. “This is less about mercury than about potentially constraining or handcuffing future efforts by the E.P.A. to regulate air pollution.”

The proposed change is the latest in the Trump administration’s long-running effort to roll back environmental regulations and reduce regulatory burdens, particularly on the coal, oil and gas industries. Over the past three years the administration has weakened rules to cut planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, restrict coal companies from dumping debris in streams and claimed falsely that that President Trump has revived the dying coal industry.

Over the past few weeks as the nation struggled with the coronavirus, the administration has also rushed to loosen curbs on automobile tailpipe emissions, opted not to strengthen a regulation on industrial soot emissions and moved to drop the threat of punishment to companies that kill birds “incidentally.”

The deregulatory push appears designed to secure less restrictive rules quickly, in case Republicans lose control of Congress and the White House in November. A new government could move quickly under the Congressional Review Act to overturn any regulation or federal rule within 60 days of it being finalized — making any rule completed after late May or early June vulnerable.

The mercury rollback is a particular victory for Robert E. Murray,the former chief executive of Murray Energy Corporation and a top fund-raiser for Mr. Trump. Mr. Murray personally requested the rollback in a written “wish list” to top officials shortly after the president took office. The company has since declared bankruptcy and is undergoing a reorganization.

“Under this action, no more mercury will be emitted into the air than before,” Andrew R. Wheeler, the E.P.A. administrator said in announcing the rule.

Climate and Environment ›

[Keep Up on the Latest Climate News

Once nonexistent, campaign cash earmarked as "climate donations" is flowing to Joe Biden as a small but growing counterweight to the monied muscle of fossil fuels.

Environmental lawyers and public health leaders called the timing of the final mercury rule, as well as its substance, an attack on air quality.]

“What is most disconcerting to me is this administration’s lack of interest in science and, frankly, their lack of concern for our nation’s children,” said Aaron Bernstein, interim director of the Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Mercury pollution in the United States damages our children’s brains before they even come into the world, and estimates are that that cost is in the billions of dollars.”

Patrick Parenteau, a professor at the Vermont Law School, noted that in virtually every environmental rollback, Mr. Trump’s E.P.A. has acknowledged in the fine print that enormous increases in health problems and deaths will occur because of increased pollution.

A plan to weaken carbon dioxide emissions at power plants, for example, predicted as many as 1,400 additional premature deaths a year. A draft analysis of the soot policy put forward this week showed that tightening the existing standard by 25 percent could save as many as 12,150 lives a year.

Two people close to the administration said the White House was concerned enough about the public perception of loosening environmental rules during the outbreak that it held the mercury plan for several weeks after it passed a review from the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. E.P.A. officials assured the White House that the agency was merely responding as required to a 2015 Supreme Court ruling that found it must justify the economic impact of the mercury standards.

The weakening of the mercury rule would be one of the most significant regulatory rollbacks engineered by the Trump administration. The existing federal regulation on mercury pollution, completed in 2012, is the most expensive clean air regulation ever written by the E.P.A.

When it published its draft cost-benefit changes last year, the Trump administration’s E.P.A. said the cost of cutting mercury from power plant emissions “dwarfs” the economic benefits and argued that the Obama rule could not be justified as “appropriate and necessary.”

The E.P.A.’s 2012 regulation was the first federal standard to require power plants to install pricey pollution controls to limit mercury emissions — at a cost to industry of $9.6 billion a year. The Obama administration justified that cost with some mathematical legerdemain of its own. The Obama E.P.A. tallied not just the benefits of reducing mercury but also “co-benefits” like reducing sulfur dioxide, fine particulate matter and other pollutants that were also curbed by the equipment.

In his announcement on Thursday, Mr. Wheeler called the Obama administration’s accounting of health benefits “dishonest.”

Driving down mercury emissions alone, the studies at the time found, would yield a $6 million annual benefit, a fraction of the cost of the controls. But by adding in co-benefits like projected gains in avoided heart disease, asthma attacks and other health problems, the total benefits reached $80 billion over five years. Overall, the Obama administration estimated that the rule would prevent 4,700 heart attacks, 130,000 asthma attacks and 11,000 premature deaths each year.

Under the Trump administration’s new rule, such co-benefits will no longer be calculated with cost, only direct benefits.

While coal producers urged Mr. Trump to roll back the rule, the vast majority of electric utility companies have agreed the cost-benefit changes may be of little help to them, because they have already spent the billions of dollars needed to come into compliance. Many of those companies urged the Trump administration to leave the mercury measure in place.

Coal plants subject to the rule “have already spent millions of dollars to install mercury equipment to reduce mercury emissions,” wrote Scott A. Weaver, the director of air quality services for American Electric Power, an Ohio-based electric utility company that operates power plants in 11 states, in a public comment on a draft of the rule.

“Rescinding the standards at this point will create new problems” Mr. Weaver wrote, noting that companies that have sought to recoup the cost of installing mercury control equipment through bills to customers may no longer legally be able to do so. That means the new rule could actually cost companies more money.

Yet in comments to the E.P.A, major coal companies and the United States Chamber of Commerce also supported changing the underlying cost-benefit analysis to prevent future rules that they might consider onerous.

Matthew Davis, a former E.P.A. scientist who worked with the agency’s office of children’s health protection to develop the original rule, said weakening the rule still represented a threat to children’s health.

“The reason we did this rule is because children and developing fetuses are harmed by mercury,” said Mr. Davis, who now works at the League of Conservation Voters.

Jeffrey R. Holmstead, an attorney for the electric utility industry who served in the E.P.A. under the second President George Bush, rejected the idea that the decision was a cynical calculation to set the stage for other regulatory rollbacks.

“It’s not as if the administration has been shy about rolling back other things,” Mr. Holmstead said, dismissing environmental concerns. “I don’t think there’s any impact whatsoever from this.”

In Congress, the Obama-era mercury rule has bipartisan support. Senator Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works committee, and Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the chairman of an energy and water appropriations subcommittee, wrote an opinion piece in USA Today in November urging the Trump administration to leave the regulation unchanged.

“Changing the rule after billions of dollars have already been spent means that utilities will have less certainty about federal regulations,” they wrote. “The gains we have made over the past decade to protect children and families from dangerous mercury pollution should not be lost.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/heres-how-u-s-poverty-statistics-ignore-millions-of-struggling-americans/

no lnx

Here’s how US poverty statistics ignore millions of struggling Americans

written by The Conversation June 25, 2019

Sophie Mitra, Fordham University and Debra Brucker, University of New Hampshire

Who counts as poor in the U.S. today?

Measuring the share of the population that experiences poverty is important to understanding and monitoring how the country’s economy is doing. It also informs the administration of safety net programs, such as Medicaid and food stamps.

Poverty is measured in the U.S. in two ways – but both focus on a lack of income. Currently, those who may have some income but lack other key necessities, like health insurance and access to quality education, are invisible in official poverty data.

Other countries, like Colombia and Mexico, as well as international organizations like the United Nations Development Program, are ahead of the U.S. when it comes to considering the many dimensions of poverty.

Measuring by income alone

The first way that the U.S. monitors poverty is through the official poverty measure. This compares a family’s pre-tax income to a threshold. For instance, in 2017, a family of four was considered poor if their pre-tax income fell below about US$26,000.

Using this measure, in 2017, 12.3% of the U.S. population, or 39.7 million people, were in poverty.

The second, newer measure is the Supplemental Poverty Measure. This is an income-based measure that reflects more comprehensively the resources and needs of families, adjusted to geographic differences in housing costs. It adjusts after-tax income by adding resources, such as food stamps, and taking away essential expenditures, such as medical out-of-pocket and childcare expenses.

According to this measure, in 2017, 13.9% of the population, or 44.9 million people, were poor.

However, people who are not deemed “poor” by these measures may still be struggling and disadvantaged in many ways. The experience of poverty is not exclusively about income.

Say a family of four has an income of US$50,000 and two employed adults but does not have health insurance. One child becomes chronically ill, and the family incurs high out-of-pocket medical expenses, defaults on their mortgage and gets evicted from their home.

This family’s sudden multiple deprivations are currently invisible to policymakers, analysts and journalists looking only at income poverty.

Measuring as multiple deprivations

...