NEUTER AGY capt 2
estb 6 25 see main REGULATORY CAPTURE
MERRI OK
THIS INCLUDES NEWER BUT MORE EXTREME INCLUDE KILL SHUTTER DOGE EG USAID
SEE ALSO NORMS INSTITITIONS
SEE GUBMINT DEEP STATE ADMINSTRATIVE STATE
DOJ FBI BONDI? KASH BONGINO?
FEMA NOEM
EPA ZELDIN INTERIOR DOUG BURGUM
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AN 3 26
Although Missouri is a red state — Donald Trump carried Missouri by 18 percent in 2024 compared to roughly 14 percent in Texas — its largest city, St. Louis, is a Democratic stronghold. Tensions have long existed between St. Louis' Democrat-dominated city government and Missouri's GOP-controlled state government in Jefferson City, and those tensions escalated when Donald Trump became the Republican Party's most influential figure.
St. Louis-based journalist Devin Thomas O'Shea describes the growing tensions between that city and Missouri Republicans in an article published on March 20.
Those tensions, according to O'Shea, are underscored by Republican responses to a May 2025 tornado that killed five people in the St. Louis and inflicted considerable damage.
"In St. Louis, as The Wall Street Journal pointed out, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been antagonistic to recovery efforts," O'Shea explains. "Neither the president nor this last year's Homeland Security director, Kristi Noem, believe that FEMA should exist. Some Senate Democrats believe Noem's pausing and delaying FEMA payments violated federal law, but the effect is that Missouri has been added to a growing list — alongside North Carolina after Hurricane Helene — of states cut loose, left to rebuild on their own."
O'Shea continues, "Noem cut FEMA's workforce by thousands to achieve this result, and if St. Louis is a test case for contemporary climate disasters, the verdict is in: You're on your own."
St. Louis City Mayor Cara Spencer, according to O'Shea, "admits that things have moved too slowly" with tornado recovery efforts "and that money has not reached storm victims."
"While some Missouri Republicans claim they are upset about FEMA's dysfunction, they are also using the tornado recovery to lash St. Louis," O'Shea notes. "This year, the GOP plans to bankrupt the city. This is not an exaggeration — in January, the Missouri Legislature turned $100 million in relief into a weapon to compel St. Louis to enact the budget policy of eliminating the earnings tax, a prime source of city revenue. It's also not an exaggeration to say that the Missouri State Legislature spent last year moving forward with the re-invasion of the City of St. Louis."
O'Shea adds, "The Republican-controlled state spends much of its legislative time trying to overturn voter referendums. State-wide, Missourians approve abortion, vote in favor of increasing the minimum wage, and reject right-to-work legislation. Meanwhile, Missouri lawmakers go to work to criminalize abortion, lower the minimum wage, and get right-to-work back on the ballot. In March 2025, three months before the tornado, Gov. Mike Kehoe rejected a 2012 voter referendum that granted local control of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department (STLPD) to the City of St. Louis."
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DUCK 2 26 PARK PUBLIC Land burgum drill baby
The Wilderness Society
New map illustrates public lands reach of Trump's "energy dominance ...
Feb 24, 2025A new map and data from The Wilderness Society illustrate the potential reach of executive and secretarial orders issued to fulfill President Trump's fossil fuel-centric "energy dominance" vision.
Los Angeles Times
How the Trump administration sold out public lands in 2025
Dec 25, 2025Almost a year into the Trump presidency, it's clear his administration has sided with the corporations seeking to mine and drill our nation's public lands.
westernpriorities.org
New map illustrates Trump's destructive "energy dominance" plan for ...
Feb 25, 2025The Wilderness Society produced a new map to illustrate the potential reach of executive and secretarial orders signed by President Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in pursuit of their shared fossil fuel-centric "energy dominance" vision for America's public lands. "As we speak, the Trump administration's Department of the Interior is deciding which of our treasured ...
Center for American Progress
A Historically Bad Year for Public Lands Under President Trump
Dec 11, 2025The Trump administration's attacks on parks and public lands broke records in 2025, but they also met intense public opposition.
New York Times
Why Is Trump Dumping East Wing Rubble in a Public Park?
2 days agoThe East Potomac Golf Links is a municipal course that has been a fixture in Washington for decades. President Trump is turning it into something else.
UPI
https://www.upi.com › Top_News › US › 2025 › 10 › 15 › public-land-alaska-texas-oil-drilling-mining › 8411760534258
Most public land already open to energy production; Trump wants ... - UPI
Oct 15, 2025The Trump administration has vowed to open up public land to usher in an age of American energy dominance but in the West there is little frontier left.
Western Environmental Law Center
https://westernlaw.org › trump-escalates-war-on-nature-with-attack-on-public-lands-rule
Trump escalates war on nature with attack on Public Lands Rule
Sep 10, 2025The rescinding of this common-sense rule shows that the Trump Administration is dead set on prioritizing energy development and extractive industries over all other uses on our public lands, rather than seeking to uphold balanced land-management practices." - Alec Underwood, conservation director of the Wyoming Outdoor Council Contact:
CNN
https://www.cnn.com › 2025 › 09 › 30 › climate › coal-power-trump-public-lands
Trump is handing out public land and millions of dollars to ... - CNN
Sep 30, 2025While the Trump administration wages war against clean energy, it is now vowing to lease millions of acres of public lands at a discount and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to prop up the ...
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AN 9 25
"Cuts, fear and understaffing" is causing employee morale to plummet at the United States Department of Labor, according to a report by The Guardian.
About 20 percent ofstaffat the department have resigned or retired ahead of threatened, devastating cuts at the agency.
"Staff charged with protecting US workers feel their core mission is being undermined," and despite the fawning by labor secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who called President Donald Trump "the transformational president of the American worker," the irony has not gone unnoticed by agency workers.
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"Everyone thinks it’s a joke because it is a joke. There are parts of the building that have not been fixed. We have closed bathrooms all over the place. The front door doesn’t work, it’s been broken for two months, but we have money for a stupid banner,” one anonymous worker told The Guardian.
That banner is the giant one draped over the labor department featuring a massive picture of Trump with the words, "American Workers FIRST!"
"Fawning over the president, regardless of who the president is, acting that way means [Chavez-DeRemer] can’t give him hard or bad news and you should be able to do that if you’re a leader," said the anonymous staffer.
But it's the undermining of the agency's mission— to "foster and promote the welfare of job seekers, wage earners and retirees through drastic cuts, deregulations that include pay cuts for workers, and mistreatment of those employed at the agency," says The Guardian, that has the biggest impact.
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“They are gutting us. They are taking away everything that makes us helpful to the citizens of the states we work in,” another anonymous employee told The Guardian. “They say they’re changing things for the American worker. I was born in the US and am a veteran. I’m an American worker and they don’t care about us.”
Workers at the department are also being muzzled. Despite the National Labor Relations Act, which provides employees with a protected right to speak to the media about their working conditions and labor concerns, the labor secretary threatened workers with "serious legal consequences" if they did so.
“A federal worker shouldn’t be scared to speak the truth. For me to even be concerned about speaking is ridiculous, it’s how we stand up to protect ourselves and those around us,” said the second anonymous employee.
In response to workers' complaints about maintenance issues in the department's offices and bathrooms, a labor department spokesperson toldThe Guardian, "this fake news hit piece is exactly why public trust in the mainstream media is at historic lows."
READ MORE:'Something is wrong': MAGA pundits say Trump is 'lying to us' about Charlie Kirk shooting
The workers beg to differ.
“It’s kind of like working in a prison,” said the second anonymous employee. “It’s very clear how they treat us is a bellwether for how they want other workers to be treated.”
Julie Su, who was labor secretary under President Joe Biden, agreed, saying this is far from a golden age for American workers as the administration promised.
“The Department of Labor is being deployed fully as one arm of this president’s war on workers, which is even more painful given that the mission of the Department of Labor is to protect workers. The way you treat your own workers is a sign of how you believe workers in general deserve to be treated. And this administration has taken a very destructive approach to its own workers," she said.
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AN SALON 7 25
Following the deadly flooding that areas of Central Texas suffered over the 4th of July Weekend, President Donald Trump seems to be backing down from his proposal to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) — at least for the time being.
But Salon's Amanda Marcotte, in an article published on July 14, emphasizes that hatred of FEMA runs deep on the far right. And she cites Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as a prime example.
"Noem isn't giving up the dream of ending the federal agency," Marcotte warns. "Sending innocent people to wither away in foreign gulags has been Noem's top priority at DHS, but she seems to be nearly as excited about cutting off aid to Americans who are suffering from natural disasters. In February, she declared her intent to 'get rid of FEMA the way it exists today.' In March, Politico reported that Noem plans to subject FEMA to the 'chopping block.'"
READ MORE: 'You dress as a cowgirl?' Kristi Noem bashed at homestate fundraiser
The Salon journalist continues, "Those plans haven't changed. This week, she reiterated that FEMA 'fundamentally needs to go away as it exists' and called for it to be 'eliminated as it exists today.' The 'as it exists today' caveat is put there to give Noem and Trump wiggle room, but make no mistake: Their goal is to destroy the system of disaster relief that Americans depend on, especially as climate change worsens."
Marcotte observes that "white supremacist conspiracy theories" over FEMA existed long before today's "paranoid MAGA conspiracist bubble."
"The history of conspiracy theories about FEMA goes back to the agency's founding under President Jimmy Carter in 1979," Marcotte explains. "Far-right groups immediately started circulating rumors that FEMA's disaster relief mission was a cover story for the true goal: Rounding up white Christians into concentration camps, so the 'globalists' — read: Jews, people of color, feminists, queer people — could impose the 'New World Order.' As usual with racist conspiracists, the psychological motivation is a combination of sublimated shame and defensiveness, manifesting in a victim complex. In the imagination of right-wingers, the 'real' victims are white Christians, and it's the people who were once subjected to slavery, concentration camps and genocide who are the oppressors."
Marcotte continues, "At the center of the conspiracy theory is this concept of 'FEMA camps.' The claim is that FEMA will pretend to be setting up emergency relief stations, but really, they're laying groundwork for prison camps for white Christians."
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Marcotte cautions against believing that Trump is really giving up on abolishing FEMA.
"First things first: Mainstream media reports that Donald Trump has 'backed away' or 'scrapped' plans to destroy the Federal Emergency Management Agency are greatly exaggerated," Marcotte laments. "Trump is just doing what he always does when faced with intense public scrutiny of his unpopular positions: Lying. As usual, he will go right back to doing the bad thing as soon as the news cycle moves on to something else."
READ MORE:'The really big bomb': Outrage grows from all sides over Trump admin backtracking
*Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.
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raw 6 25
a legal expert sounded the alarm over President Donald Trump's nomination of a MAGA influencer to lead an obscure but important federal agency.
The president nominated far-right podcaster Paul Ingrassia to head up the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which was set up by Congress after Watergate to protect whistleblowers and other federal workers from unlawful employment practices, as well as enforcing the Hatch Act that forbids political activity in the federal workplace, wrote former prosecutor Barbara McQuade for MSNBC.
"Picking Paul Ingrassia to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel is not like putting the fox in charge of the hen house," McQuade wrote. "It’s more like setting fire to the whole farm."
"The nature of the work demands an experienced investigator who is scrupulously apolitical," she added. "Ingrassia is anything but."
The 30-year-old Ingrassia has been an attorney for only three years and previously worked at the far-right Claremont Institute, where Trump's infamous legal adviser John Eastman came from before hatching the 2020 fake elector scheme. McQuade said the president's nominee was woefully unqualified for this new role.
"Ingrassia doesn’t have the legal experience for the role," she wrote. "But he has something more important, at least for this administration. Early in Trump’s second term, Ingrassia served as the president’s liaison to the Justice Department, where he referred to himself as Trump’s 'eyes and ears,' according to NBC News. He was reassigned to the Department of Homeland Security after he reportedly clashed with DOJ officials by pushing to hire candidates with 'exceptional loyalty' to Trump, reports ABC News."
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He urged Trump to pardon all of the Jan. 6 rioters and called for $1 million in reparations to each of their families, and he advocated for the president to identify all the judges and prosecutors in those cases and call for their resignations, she wrote.
"His views on the Jan. 6 riot are extreme, even by MAGA standards," McQuade wrote. "Ingrassia also urged Congress to make Jan. 6 a national holiday to place 'the day’s events in their proper historical context: as a peaceful protest against a great injustice affecting our electoral system' [and] referred to former Vice President Mike Pence as a traitor who belongs in 'the ninth circle of hell.'"
"All private citizens are entitled to express their opinions, but someone who is either as delusional or sycophantic as Ingrassia is, in my opinion, simply unfit to lead an agency that is tasked with enforcing nonpartisanship," McQuade added.
Trump fired Hampton Dellinger, Joe Biden's appointee as OSC head, in February, and while a court found his dismissal was unlawful, he dropped his legal challenge when an appeals court declined to reinstate him, and the president moved to neuter the agency after its oversight found 13 senior administration officials in his first term had violated the Hatch Act.
"Like the U.S. attorney position, the head of the Office of Special Counsel must be confirmed by the Senate. For the sake of our federal workforce and the important work they do for our country, let’s hope this nomination meets the same fate as [U.S. attorney nominee Ed] Martin’s
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