vought omb CRAm

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SEE TWO

pow mofo pending

SEE PJT 2025

PRIMARY 7 22 ON VOUGHT WANTS TO WEAPONIZE OMB TO DO BANNON DISMANTLE ADMIN STATE

SEE COOCH, RUFO

HIRED BOSSERT CLARK

SEE KLUKOWSKI

paoletta

wife mary ron johnson comms staffer

money launder to weaponization "whistleblowers" Cash Patel

big push on CRTm pension plan

pension ctr renew see ntbcw

2fer: former Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday announced the launch of a new political advocacy group, "Advancing American Freedom,

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rww 11 23

right Wing Watch reported in June 2022 that on the same day the Trump-enhanced right-wing Supreme Court majority overturned Roe v. Wade, a coalition of Christian nationalist, voter suppression, anti-LGBTQ-equality, Big Lie-promoting, and Trump-cheerleading groups had publicly launched a project that would “position the movement to take the reins of government” after a Republican victory in the 2024 presidential election.

Since then, the right-wing coalition has expanded, and reporting by national media outlets has fleshed out some frightening specifics of the “Project 2025” plan to conduct an ideological purge of the civil service and turn the entire executive branch into an enforcement arm of the MAGA movement—and if former President Donald Trump is elected, a weapon for personal retribution against his enemies.

The Washington Post reported Nov. 5 that Trump and some former administration officials are scheming with Project 2025 to abandon a rule-of-law principle embraced for decades that the Justice Department’s law enforcement decisions should be free of political pressure from the president.

Russ Vought, a former Trump official who launched a MAGA movement think tank after Trump’s defeat, told the Post, “You need an attorney general and a White House Counsel’s Office that don’t view themselves as trying to protect the department from the president.”

Even worse, Jeffrey Clark, who tried in the final days of the Trump administration to throw the weight of the Justice Department behind Trump’s false claims about the stolen election, is leading efforts to set the stage for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the U.S. military against American citizens—a step that some far-right leaders had urged Trump to take in 2020 to stay in power.

Politico also reported this month on a complementary project called American Moment launched after Trump’s defeat to recruit and vet young ideological warriors who would be prepared to fill lower level administration jobs created by mass firings of civil service employees. American Moment would provide an army of foot soldiers to carry out the battle plans against the “deep state” ordered by the higher-ranking officials that Project 2025 is preparing to put in place. American Moment is officially part of the Project 2025 coalition. Vought is among the MAGA movement leaders helping train American Moment’s operatives, who have served internships with Sens. J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio.

American Moment was launched with more than $300,000 from the Conservative Partnership Institute, which as Politico noted “has become a sort of administration-in-exile for former Trump staffers.” CPI has been an institutional home to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former Trump attorney Cleta Mitchell, who participated in the notorious call on which Trump badgered Georgia’s secretary of states to “find” him the votes he needed to win the state, and was later picked to head up CPI’s “election integrity” project, which has lobbied against federal voting rights legislation.

Recognizing the threat that Trump and his MAGA Republican allies across the country pose to our rights and freedoms, People For the American Way is encouraging supporters to take a pledge to vote against authoritarian MAGA candidates and for progressive candidates in local, state, and federal elections.

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no lnx $

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/17/us/politics/trump-plans-2025.html

Donald J. Trump intends to bring independent regulatory agencies under direct presidential control.

Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025

The former president and his backers aim to strengthen the power of the White House and limit the independence of federal agencies.

Jonathan SwanCharlie Savage Maggie Haberman

By Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and Maggie Haberman

Published July 17, 2023

Updated July 18, 2023

Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.

Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.

Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.

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Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.

He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.

He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”

“The president’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal,” said John McEntee, a former White House personnel chief who began Mr. Trump’s systematic attempt to sweep out officials deemed to be disloyal in 2020 and who is now involved in mapping out the new approach.

“Our current executive branch,” Mr. McEntee added, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”

Mr. Trump and his advisers are making no secret of their intentions — proclaiming them in rallies and on his campaign website, describing them in white papers and openly discussing them.

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said Russell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump White House and now runs a policy organization, the Center for Renewing America.

The strategy in talking openly about such “paradigm-shifting ideas” before the election, Mr. Vought said, is to “plant a flag” — both to shift the debate and to later be able to claim a mandate. He said he was delighted to see few of Mr. Trump’s Republican primary rivals defend the norm of Justice Department independence after the former president openly attacked it.

A Divided Congress

[Under Scrutiny: A licensing agreement between Ford Motor and a major Chinese battery maker is facing questions by Republican lawmakers, who say the deal could make Ford reliant on a company with links to forced labor.

Air Travel: The House overwhelmingly passed bipartisan legislation to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration for the next half-decade, moving at a time of growing dysfunction and disruption in the system to make a number of changes that affect passengers.

Supreme Court Ethics Bill: The Senate Judiciary Committee approved legislation that would impose strict new ethics rules on the Supreme Court, moving over Republican objections to address revelations about justices receiving financial benefits from wealthy benefactors.

U.C. Berkeley: A House select committee is requesting more information about a partnership between the university and several Chinese entities that it said could help China gain access to cutting-edge research.]

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said in a statement that the former president has “laid out a bold and transparent agenda for his second term, something no other candidate has done.” He added, “Voters will know exactly how President Trump will supercharge the economy, bring down inflation, secure the border, protect communities and eradicate the deep state that works against Americans once and for all.”

The two driving forces of this effort to reshape the executive branch are Mr. Trump’s own campaign policy shop and a well-funded network of conservative groups, many of which are populated by former senior Trump administration officials who would most likely play key roles in any second term.

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Mr. Vought and Mr. McEntee are involved in Project 2025, a $22 million presidential transition operation that is preparing policies, personnel lists and transition plans to recommend to any Republican who may win the 2024 election. The transition project, the scale of which is unprecedented in conservative politics, is led by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has shaped the personnel and policies of Republican administrations since the Reagan presidency.

That work at Heritage dovetails with plans on the Trump campaign website to expand presidential power that were drafted primarily by two of Mr. Trump’s advisers, Vincent Haley and Ross Worthington, with input from other advisers, including Stephen Miller, the architect of the former president’s hard-line immigration agenda.

Some elements of the plans had been floated when Mr. Trump was in office but were impeded by internal concerns that they would be unworkable and could lead to setbacks. And for some veterans of Mr. Trump’s turbulent White House who came to question his fitness for leadership, the prospect of removing guardrails and centralizing even greater power over government directly in his hands sounded like a recipe for mayhem.

“It would be chaotic,” said John F. Kelly, Mr. Trump’s second White House chief of staff. “It just simply would be chaotic, because he’d continually be trying to exceed his authority but the sycophants would go along with it. It would be a nonstop gunfight with the Congress and the courts.”

The agenda being pursued has deep roots in the decades-long effort by conservative legal thinkers to undercut what has become known as the administrative state — agencies that enact regulations aimed at keeping the air and water clean and food, drugs and consumer products safe, but that cut into business profits.

Its legal underpinning is a maximalist version of the so-called unitary executive theory.

The legal theory rejects the idea that the government is composed of three separate branches with overlapping powers to check and balance each other. Instead, the theory’s adherents argue that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president complete control of the executive branch, so Congress cannot empower agency heads to make decisions or restrict the president’s ability to fire them. Reagan administration lawyers developed the theory as they sought to advance a deregulatory agenda.

“The notion of independent federal agencies or federal employees who don’t answer to the president violates the very foundation of our democratic republic,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, adding that the contributors to Project 2025 are committed to “dismantling this rogue administrative state.”

Personal power has always been a driving force for Mr. Trump. He often gestures toward it in a more simplistic manner, such as in 2019, when he declared to a cheering crowd, “I have an Article 2, where I have the right todo whatever I wantas president.”

Mr. Trump made the remark in reference to his claimed ability to directly fire Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in the Russia inquiry, which primed his hostility toward law enforcement and intelligence agencies. He also tried to get a subordinate to have Mr. Mueller ousted, but was defied.

Early in Mr. Trump’s presidency, his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, promised a “deconstruction of the administrative state.”But Mr. Trump installed people in other key roles who ended up telling him that more radical ideas were unworkable or illegal. In the final year of his presidency, he told aides he was fed up with being constrained by subordinates.

Now, Mr. Trump is laying out a far more expansive vision of power in any second term. And, in contrast with his disorganized transition after his surprise 2016 victory, he now benefits from a well-funded policymaking infrastructure, led by former officials who did not break with him after his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

One idea the people around Mr. Trump have developed centers on bringing independent agencies under his thumb.

Congress created these specialized technocratic agencies inside the executive branch and delegated to them some of its power to make rules for society. But it did so on the condition that it was not simply handing off that power to presidents to wield like kings — putting commissioners atop them whom presidents appoint but generally cannot fire before their terms end, while using its control of their budgets to keep them partly accountable to lawmakers as well. (Agency actions are also subject to court review.)

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Presidents of both parties have chafed at the agencies’ independence. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal created many of them, endorsed a proposal in 1937 to fold them all into cabinet departments under his control, but Congress did not enact it.

Later presidents sought to impose greater control over nonindependent agencies Congress created, like the Environmental Protection Agency, which is run by an administrator whom a president can remove at will. For example, President Ronald Reagan issued executive orders requiring nonindependent agencies to submit proposed regulations to the White House for review. But overall, presidents have largely left the independent agencies alone.

Mr. Trump’s allies are preparing to change that, drafting an executive order requiring independent agencies to submit actions to the White House for review.Mr. Trump endorsed the idea on his campaign website, vowing to bring them “under presidential authority.”

Such an order was drafted in Mr. Trump’s first term — and blessed by the Justice Department — but never issued amid internal concerns. Some of the concerns were over how to carry out reviews for agencies that are headed by multiple commissioners and subject to administrative procedures and open-meetings laws, as well as over how the market would react if the order chipped away at the Federal Reserve’s independence, people familiar with the matter said.

The former president views the civil service as a den of “deep staters” who were trying to thwart him at every turn in the White House.Credit...John Tully for The New York Times

The Federal Reserve was ultimately exempted in the draft executive order, but Mr. Trump did not sign it before his presidency ended. If Mr. Trump and his allies get another shot at power, the independence of the Federal Reserve — an institution Mr. Trump publicly railed at as president — could be up for debate. Notably, the Trump campaign website’s discussion of bringing independent agencies under presidential control is silent on whether that includes the Fed.

Asked whether presidents should be able to order interest rates lowered before elections, even if experts think that would hurt the long-term health of the economy, Mr. Vought said that would have to be worked out with Congress. But “at the bare minimum,” he said, the Federal Reserve’s regulatory functions should be subject to White House review.

“It’s very hard to square the Fed’s independence with the Constitution,” Mr. Vought said.

Other former Trump administration officials involved in the planning said there would also probably be a legal challenge to the limits on a president’s power to fire heads of independent agencies. Mr. Trump could remove an agency head, teeing up the question for the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court in 1935 and 1988 upheld the power of Congress to shield some executive branch officials from being fired without cause. But after justices appointed by Republicans since Reagan took control, it has started to erode those precedents.

Peter L. Strauss, professor emeritus of law at Columbia University and a critic of the strong version of the unitary executive theory, argued that it is constitutional and desirable for Congress, in creating and empowering an agency to perform some task, to also include some checks on the president’s control over officials “because we don’t want autocracy” and to prevent abuses.

“The regrettable fact is that the judiciary at the moment seems inclined to recognize that the president does have this kind of authority,” he said. “They are clawing away agency independence in ways that I find quite unfortunate and disrespectful of congressional choice.”

Mr. Trump has also vowed to impound funds, or refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress. After Nixon used the practice to aggressively block agency spending he was opposed to, on water pollution control, housing construction and other issues, Congress banned the tactic.

On his campaign website, Mr. Trump declared that presidents have a constitutional right to impound funds and said he would restore the practice — though he acknowledged it could result in a legal battle.

Mr. Trump and his allies also want to transform the civil service — government employees who are supposed to be nonpartisan professionals and experts with protections against being fired for political reasons.

The former president views the civil service as a den of “deep staters” who were trying to thwart him at every turn, including by raising legal or pragmatic objections to his immigration policies, among many other examples. Toward the end of his term, his aides drafted an executive order, “CreatingSchedule F in the Excepted Service,” that removed employment protections from career officials whose jobs were deemed linked to policymaking.

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Mr. Trump signed the order, which became known as Schedule F, near the end of his presidency, but President Biden rescinded it. Mr. Trump has vowed to immediately reinstitute it in a second term.

Critics say he could use it for a partisan purge. But James Sherk, a former Trump administration official who came up with the idea and now works at the America First Policy Institute — a think tank stocked heavily with former Trump officials — argued it would only be used against poor performers and people who actively impeded the elected president’s agenda.

“Schedule F expressly forbids hiring or firing based on political loyalty,” Mr. Sherk said. “Schedule F employees would keep their jobs if they served effectively and impartially.”

Mr. Trump himself has characterized his intentions rather differently — promising on his campaign website to “find and remove the radicals who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education” and listing a litany of targets at a rally last month.

“We will demolish the deep state,” Mr. Trump said at the rally in Michigan. “We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive outthe globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. And we will throw off thesick political class that hates our country.”

[Jonathan Swan is a political reporter who focuses on campaigns and Congress. As a reporter for Axios, he won an Emmy Award for his 2020 interview of then-President Donald J. Trump, and the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Aldo Beckman Award for “overall excellence in White House coverage” in 2022. More about Jonathan Swan

Charlie Savage is a Washington-based national security and legal policy correspondent. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, he previously worked at The Boston Globe and The Miami Herald. His most recent book is “Power Wars: The Relentless Rise of Presidential Authority and Secrecy.” More about Charlie Savage

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent and the author of “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.” She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. More about Maggie Haberman

A version of this article appears in print on July 17, 2023, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump and Allies Seeking Vast Increase of His Power. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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puts the cash in patel?

https://www.alternet.org/send/jim-jordan-trump/

marh 3

a trio of witnesses being called as "whistleblowers" by the GOP committee investigating the "weaponization" of government were paid off by a Trump ally and spread conspiracy theories, reportedThe New York Times on Thursday.

"The first three witnesses to testify privately before the new Republican-led House committee investigating the 'weaponization' of the federal government have offered little firsthand knowledge of any wrongdoing or violation of the law, according to Democrats on the panel who have listened to their accounts," reported Luke Broadwater and Adam Goldman. "Instead, the trio appears to be a group of aggrieved former F.B.I. officials who have trafficked in right-wing conspiracy theories, including about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, and received financial support from a top ally of former President Donald J. Trump."

"The roster of witnesses, whose interviews and statements are detailed in a 316-page report compiled by Democrats that was obtained by The New York Times, suggests that Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the chairman of the panel, has so far relied on people who do not meet the definition of a whistle-blower and who have engaged in partisan conduct that calls into question their credibility," said the report. "And it raises questions about whether Republicans, who have said that investigating the Biden administration is a top goal, will be able to deliver on their ambitious plans to uncover misdeeds at the highest levels."

The three witnesses in question, per the report, are "George Hill, a retired F.B.I. supervisory intelligence analyst from the bureau’s Boston field office; Stephen Friend, a former special agent who worked in the Daytona Beach office; and Garret O’Boyle, a special agent from the field office in Wichita, Kan., who has been suspended."

They have promoted conspiracy theories; Hill wrote on Twitter that the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was a "set up." Meanwhile, O'Boyle and Friend have admitted to receiving financial aid from Kash Patel, a former aide to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) and Trump associate who has testified in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.

"The Democratic report includes excerpts from depositions and evidence of conspiratorial social media posts," noted the report. "It also details the ties between Mr. Trump’s inner circle and the witnesses. For instance,Mr. Patel found Mr. Friend his next job, working as a fellow on domestic intelligence and security services with the Center for Renewing America,which is run byRuss Vought. The center is largely funded by the Conservative Partnership Institute, which is run by Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, and former Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina."

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https://www.mediamatters.org/social-security/right-wing-media-provides-safe-space-house-republicans-call-cuts-social-security

right-wing media figures and activists continue to call for cuts to Social Security and Medicare, even as leaders of the Republican Party deny that slashing benefits for seniors is a goal. Conservative pundits are making these demands against the backdrop of ongoing debt ceiling negotiations between the White House and the Republican-controlled House, perpetuating the myth that federal spending is out of control as an excuse to push austerity policies.

Conservative orthodoxy has long held that Social Security and Medicare need to be “reformed,” a euphemism for cutting benefits or the raising eligibility age for future enrollees of either program. Nearly 90% of people over 65 were receiving Social Security checks as of  the end of last year, representing about 30% of their income, according to official figures. As of last September, more than 65 million people were on Medicare. Slashing federal spending for either of those programs is politically unpopular, and some conservatives have changed their messaging — if not their underlying ideology — as a result.

Former President Donald Trump, for example, recently released an ad attacking Florida Governor Ron DeSantis – who is expected to announce his candidacy shortly – for backing cuts to the programs. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has also promised not to include the programs in the massive spending reductions his party is seeking.

But old habits die hard, and there is no shortage of recent examples of conservative media figures, activists, and politicians who have made it clear that their goal is to weaken and undermine these programs, often under the pretext of protecting them in the long term.

Townhall editor Katie Pavlich illustrated this dynamic last week on Fox News, when she referenced the national debt as a justification for cutting benefits to seniors.“The bottom line is that for either party in Washington, if they want to actually address this $32 trillion problem, someone is going to have to propose spending -- legislation that takes on reforming social security and Medicare,” Pavlich said. “Those are the things that are driving the debt." vid]

fox News anchor John Roberts showed how the Republican talking point infiltrates the network’s so-called straight news coverage.

“There’s all this talk about how to get spending under control, and I think people on both sides rationally know there is no way to get spending under control unless you start to implement reforms to things like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, but neither side wants to come forward unilaterally and say, ‘Here’s our plan to do it,’” Roberts said. “There needs to be cooperation, they need to reach out across the aisle and until they do that, that debt ceiling is just going to keep bumping up and bumping up and bumping up — look at where it is now, more than $31 trillion, it's stunning.”

Roberts’ argument rests on the unstated and incorrect assumption that the US budget is analogous to a household budget, a fallacy that has been repeatedly debunked.

Earlier this month, Fox News host Mark Levin called for cuts on his radio show, even as he denied he was doing so. “Now, this isn't about cutting them,” Levin said. “This is about changing certain variables in these programs for future generations.”

“One of the proposals that was made several years ago, and I think what DeSantis voted for, and I would have voted for it too, was to raise the retirement age to 70,to grandfather in all current beneficiaries and those who will bebeneficiaries within the next 10 years, so anybody 55 and older, because it's not gonna exist,” he continued.

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk similarly advocated for reducing benefits to seniors in the future, also positioning himself as telling a harsh but necessary truth. “​​Current beneficiaries, I don't think anything should be touched, but yes, there need to be some adjustments for future retirees,” Kirk said. “And if you even say that, it's like the third rail.”

The right-wing outlet The Epoch Times positively covered presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s calls to gut Social Security and Medicare as well, with the headline: “Haley Promises Supporters She Will Address the Nation’s Huge Deficit.”

Speaking in a barn in the legislative district where she got her political start, Nikki Haley, former UN ambassador and South Carolina governor, said the nation needs to get its fiscal house in order.

…

And that work, she said, will include reforming entitlements.

“Social Security will be bankrupt in 10 years. Medicare will be bankrupt in five,” she said.

Fellow Republican presidential primary candidate Mike Pence also advocated for reductions to Social Security and Medicare, saying “we’ve got to put them on the table in the long term.”

On former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) broke from the official leadership line to consider reducing seniors’ benefits. “I believe that we have to have a discussion about raising the age of Social Security,” Gaetz said.

Right-wing site The Daily Caller was more honest than most in a story from earlier this month headlined: “Despite The Establishment’s Best Efforts, Some Republicans Want To Reform Entitlements.”

National Review, which has long positioned itself as the intellectual vanguard of the conservative movement, has also been open about their desire to weaken Social Security and Medicare.

In a blog post pegged to Trump’s attack ad, senior writer Noah Rothman defended DeSantis on the grounds that “the longtime Republican lawmaker once evinced support for longtime Republican positions: specifically, the urgent and undeniable national imperative for reforming America’s unfunded entitlement programs before they collapse.”

In another, contributor Jack Salmon called for “raising the retirement age to at least 68, indexing retirement age to life expectancy, and adopting chained Consumer Price Index [CPI] as the preferred metric for measuring annual cost-of-living adjustments.” Research shows that moving to chained CPI would reduce benefits for seniors.

Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist sympathizer and the founder of the right-wing think tank the Center for Renewing America, has been at the center of the debt ceiling debate, including pushing for massive cuts to social welfare programs. Like McCarthy, Vought’s official line is that his organization isn’t targeting Social Security or Medicare, but diverges from the House leader in acknowledging that those programs are only off the table for the short term.

“The House Republicans are not making Social Security and Medicare a fight on this debt limit,” Vought said on Fox News last month. He added that his organization’s budget targeted Medicaid, while also admitting that when it came to Social Security and Medicare, “We have to reform those programs over time.”

While Social Security and Medicare are universal programs that benefit seniors, and are incredibly politically durable as a result, Medicaid is a targeted anti-poverty program whose recipients conservatives are happy to demonize.There is no small irony that the faux-populist wing of the Republican Party — which includes Bannon and Vought — are doing their best to deny health care to the working class.

Vought frequently expresses his eagerness to slash Medicaid coverage by implementing work requirements. Public health experts call that a “terrible idea,” but it is nonetheless one that conservatives keep proposing. “You’ve been talking about the work requirements,” Bannon said to Vought on an April 24 edition of War Room.

Vought responded, arguing to get significant fiscal reductions in spending “you have to really begin to reform Medicaid, as I’ve proposed, andget people who are adults without children off of the Medicaid program.”

Bannon has repeatedly advocated for reducing the federal budget by cutting Medicaid. On April 18, he reiterated that “Medicare and Social Security are off the table,” but “you can get there” by “getting into Medicaid.” He similarly called for “massive cuts” to Medicaid earlier this year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, citing Vought’s work.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the House GOP plan to add work requirements to Medicaid would result in 10 million people losing their coverage.

The through-line from all of these statements are clear. Conservatives in government and right-wing media are laying the foundation to eviscerate the limited but important social programs for seniors and the working class. Their denials are paper-thin, when they’re even offered at all.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/critical-race-theory/anti-civil-rights-activist-chris-rufo-has-extensive-ties-christian-nationalist

no vid twt

anti-civil rights activist Christopher Rufo has extensive ties to a leading MAGA-aligned think tank led by a Christian nationalist that’s at the heart of several high-profile political battles in Washington, D.C. The think tank, the Center for Renewing America, was founded by Russ Vought, who has called for an “army” of believers with a “biblical worldview” to transform the federal bureaucracy into an ideological weapon to further his hard-right agenda. Vought and Rufo are both conservative media mainstays, and each appears frequently on Fox News and right-wing streaming shows.

Rufo’s ties to CRA are not hidden, but nor are they particularly well-known outside of the cloistered bubble of conservative activism. Although Rufo is primarily known for his rhetorical attacks on critical race theory (which he has admitted he knows nothing about) and LGBTQ people, he shares CRA’s goal of taking over existing institutions and remaking them as supposed paragons of conservatism.

That desire has been most clearly realized in Rufo’s hostile takeover of New College of Florida, facilitated by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ decision to appoint him and several other hard-liners to the school’s board of trustees. Rufo and DeSantis’ scheme bears significant resemblance to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s remaking of Central European University in Budapest, one of many points of overlap between U.S. conservatives and their European counterparts. Rufo is currently spending a month in Hungary, according to his Substack newsletter. 

Vought and CRA have been at the forefront of advocating for a policy known as Schedule F,a Trump-era scheme that allowed the administration to sidestep job protections for non-political career staffers. In an appearance on The Charlie Kirk Show, Vought and Kirk promoted the idea of implementing “ideological purity tests” for federal civil servants, and Vought estimated that he would need to fire around 10 percent of the workforce at federal agencies and departments. Vought has also argued the House of Representatives should adopt new rules to allow the chamber to target and possibly remove individual civil servants.

CRA occupies a divided position in the conservative political landscape at the moment, seemingly straddling the line between the Trump and DeSantis camps. Vought, the organization’s leader, is a frequent guest on Steve Bannon’s War Room, which has taken a pro-Trump, anti-DeSantis editorial position. The think tank more broadly is often described as being aligned with Trump as well. But Rufo is closely associated with DeSantis, for now at least, due to his appointment to the board at New College. And CRA senior fellow Ken Cuccinelli recently launched a pro-DeSantis PAC, urging the governor to run for president.

Probably the most important link between Rufo and Vought came during the Trump administration. When Rufo was able to transform critical race theory from a relatively obscure legal discipline into a right-wing bogeyman — thanks in large part to an appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight— it was Vought, then the head of the Office of Management and Budget, who was tasked with carrying out Trump’s order to remove any mention of CRT from federal trainings. Since then, their affinity appears to have grown.

Rufo reportedly recently held a private summit at the Santa Monica, California, outpost of The Manhattan Institute, where he is a senior fellow.The gathering’s focus was “planning for the next White House,” a priority Rufo shares with CRA. In a short video summarizing his thoughts on the event, Rufo praised Vought’s behind-the-scenes efforts in Congress’ ongoing battle over the federal budgetas an opportunity to inject far-right values into final legislation.

in the video, Rufo argued that earlier generations of conservatives tried to win budgeting arguments using dry facts and figures, but that that’s changing now.

“Some people, most notably Russ Vought,who is President Trump’s former OMB director, have pioneered a new approach to talking about the budget that I think has enormous potential,” Rufo said. “Russ talks about the ‘woke and weaponized bureaucracy.’ He talks about defunding $150 billion that is currently being spent to advance left-wing priorities that are antithetical to the values of the majority of citizens.”

“He’s saying, ‘You know what? We want to defund thewoke bureaucrats and DEI commissars who are putting critical race theory in all of the agencies of the government,’” Rufo added. The official CRA Twitter account posted Rufo’s video, and Vought replied, thanking Rufo for the shout-out.   

In the YouTube description of the video, Rufo praisesWade Miller, CRA’s executive director, who apparently attended the private summit. Miller, a former aide to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), describes himself as anti-antiracism in his Twitter bio. He recently posted a racist tweet claiming, without evidence, that Stanford medical school awarded postings to new surgery applicants based on their race and ethnicity, and that those selected probably weren’t the most qualified. [twt]

rufo also has ties to CRA visiting fellow Michael Young, who is prominent on right-wing Twitter under the handle @wokal_distance, primarily for invoking 1990s nostalgia toward reactionaryends. Rufo worked with Young and CRA on his anti-LGBTQ pamphlet “A Parent’s Guide to Radical Gender Theory.” The two interact regularly on Twitter, praising each other’s acumen and execution.

Whether CRA can keep one foot in on either side of the Trump dividing line without drawing the former president’s ire is an open question, as is the impact that DeSantis’falling poll numbers could have on Rufo’s brand and influence. For now, Rufo and Vought are trying to find ways to find a broader audience for their cruel, anti-civil rights proposals, and they’re willing to burn down anything that stands in their way.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/social-security/house-gop-reportedly-relying-christian-nationalist-and-right-wing-media-darling

mma 3 23

house budget overdue b/c benghazi fuckery?

right-wing media mainstay and former Trump official Russ Vought is advising a House Republican charge to drastically reduce federal aid for the working class and those in poverty, with an eye toward expanding the cuts to include universal programs — like Medicare and Social Security — in the future.

From a New York Times report:

After decades of futile efforts to cut the enormous costs of Social Security and Medicare, Republicans have pledged not to touch the biggest entitlement programs, whose spending grows automatically and are on an unsustainable trajectory as more Americans reach retirement age. Coupled with their promise not to raise taxes, that leaves the G.O.P. to consider a slash-and-burn approach to a slew of federal programs and agencies whose budgets are controlled by Congress.

As they meet privately to develop their plan, Republicans say they are relying heavily on a budget outline developed by Russell T. Vought, the former Trump administration budget director who now leads the far-right Center for Renewing America.

Vought, a Christian nationalist, heads the right-wing Center for Renewing America, a think tank closely aligned with former President Donald Trump and staffed with several officials from his administration. In addition to Vought, who served as head of the Office of Management and Budget, CRA’s staff also includes coup plotter Jeffrey Clark, former Pentagon official Kash Patel, and former Department of Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli.

Speaking with the Times, Vought argued conservatives should attempt to dismantle targeted programs before setting their sights on larger entitlement spending. “[A] work requirement food stamp program is a lot easier to sellthan premium support,” Vought told the Times, referencing a proposed change that would turn Medicare into a voucher system.

In an interview on Fox News a day before the Times piece came out, Vought made it clear that the larger goal was to go after Social Security and Medicare down the line. “The House Republicans are not making Social Security and Medicare a fight on this debt limit,” Vought said.

“The budget that I put forward, that they’re looking at, uses Medicaid and other easier-to-go entitlements, mandatory programs, and discretionary spending to get to balance in 10,” Vought said, referring to his goal of balancing the budget in 10 years.

He then returned to Social Security and Medicare. “We have to reform those programs over time, but I think if you care about those programs and you're a budget cutter the most important thing is to make progress on what you can cut in the appropriations process,” Vought continued. “The bureaucracy that's aimed against your people and then to go after the social safety net that has become a benefit hammock." [fox vid]

in contrast to the conservative approach, the Biden administration has proposed to increase taxes on income over $400,000 to address Medicare’s budget.

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon referenced Vought when he demanded “massive cuts” to federal programs, including Medicaid, last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Bannon regularly hosts Vought on his War Room podcast, and Vought is a common presence on Fox Business and occasionally on Fox News.. When Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), and others on the far-right flank of the GOP House caucus opposed Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) speakership bid earlier this year, they turned to Vought for guidance. His think tank’s budget has become something of a north star for the House MAGA caucus, and he has made clear that he wants to rid the federal government of civil servants he and his supporters deem insufficiently committed to their far-right agenda.

Now, as Congress and the White House prepare for what is likely to be a long and painstaking budgetary process, Vought and the House Republicans who have aligned themselves with him are looking to eviscerate what little social safety net spending still exists in the United States. From the Times:

The outline includes a 45 percent cut to foreign aid; adding work requirements for food stamp and Medicaid beneficiaries; a 43 percent cut to housing programs, including phasing out the Section 8 program that pays a portion of monthly rent costs for low-income people; cutting the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence budget by nearly half; and eliminating Obamacare expansions to Medicaid to save tens of billions of dollars.

Nearly 40 states have accepted federal funding for expansion under the Affordable Care Act, providing health care coverage for an estimated 12 million individuals living near or below the poverty line.

Despite Vought’s vicious attacks on the working class, he is often presented in mainstream and conservative media as a populist figure. Conservative Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen wrote that Vought was pushing ideas that “animate the new populist conservatism.” Bloomberg described Vought’s think tank as one of the “organizations designed to push [Trump’s] populist agenda.” The conservative Daily Caller described CRA as “a right-populist group Vought helms.”

In a blog post introducing his think tank, Vought decried, in typically pompous prose, the “decades-long plundering of the American economy by multinational corporationseager to claim the benefits of American law while disclaiming all responsibility to provide remunerative employment to American workers.”

He added that the Center for Renewing America would focus on “challenging the policy architecture that has hollowed out productive work for America’s working class and transferred the gains of the American economy to the service-sector elites.”

The reality is that Vought is selling the same basic framework of anti-poor, anti-working class policies championed by Republicans for decades. Whatever conservative orthodoxies Trumpism may have broken with, right-wing populism is an empty set of ideas. Vought has nothing to offer to address the material needs of the working class; to the contrary, he is their class enemy and antagonist.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/rep-matt-gaetz-r-fl-and-former-trump-official-russ-vought-discuss-using-new-house

REP. MATT GAETZ (GUEST HOST): Let's start with the Holman Rule. Talk about what it means for any member of Congress to be able to get up and defund a particular bureaucrat.

RUSS VOUGHT (PRESIDENT, CENTER FOR RENEWING AMERICA; FORMER OMB DIRECTOR): It's huge. And so you know I come from the executive agency before this role, and we would have all of these career bureaucrats that we would be having to work with and the American people would largely not know their names, until Covid happened and now everyone knows who Tony Fauci is. But think about the ability to go to the House floor and have a debate about a particular bureaucrat. That is enormous. It changes the entire game right now.

I would have situations where our staff would do anything they possibly could not to necessarily give me what I needed, because they were worried about their own ability to stay anonymous. The Holman Rule makes sure that those career bureaucrats are no longer anonymous, and that they are put in the crosshairs to the same extent – in the arena – that you are. That I am.

So that is a game changer in having the appropriations debate. Also, not just what the message it sends, but the extent to which it itself focuses the appropriations process on the deep state, on theadministrative state that exists, that is now woke, and it's weaponized.And that has to be the biggest fiscal priority that we have, to go after the woke and weaponized bureaucracy.

GAETZ: Russ, if we'd have had this tool, we would have obviously directed it at Anthony Fauci, right? So, if you're comparing and contrasting, we would have had the ability – if we had the rules that we now have in place – if we'd have had those in place in the last Congress, you could actually force a vote on funding Fauci or not funding Fauci. As we look at a weaponized system across the apparatus of government, give us some examples or advice for who are some of the bureaucrats that enjoy their anonymity now? What are some of the agencies we should look at to target and take this tool out of the toolkit and actually put it to use?

VOUGHT: Well, there's all sorts of the types of people that you'd want to get in with Labor, HHS, and the COVID fascism that we've saw as a result of kind of lockdown-era policies. But we're going to want to use this in the Department of Justice. We're going to want to find those people that participated in the Russia hoax, that participated in going to FISA and lying to get warrants that are cooked up against the American people. So as you bring that aspect of what you negotiate, along with the Church-style committee that will sit within Judiciary, those are the kinds of things that you can say in real time that makes this enforcing.

The battle is certainly not over. We've got to show up at every stage, but it is self-enforcing.You enforce it, the 20 enforce it.And that was what makes this different than anything else that we've seen in recent memory, because not only is your voting no confidence in real speak – your motion to vacate present, but you also have the Rules Committee that is enforcing this on a bill-by-bill basis. So it's enormously successful and you've got a lot of potential to use it against thatbureaucrat that you'd identify that's standing in your way at NASA or the EPA – who's the EPA bureaucrat that put Joe Robertson, a 77-year-old Navy veteran in jail for building four ponds on his ranch to be able to fight wildfires. That's the person we want to use the Holman rule on.

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an 1 23

while former President Donald Trump reiterated his support for would-be Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy on Wednesday, former Trump official Russ Vought rallied right-wing activists to “keep fighting” against McCarthy, and a group of religious-right leaders who supported Trump’s efforts to stay in office released a statement slamming McCarthy and praising the “courageous” far-right representatives who prevented him from getting a majority in six votes on Tuesday and Wednesday.

“McCarthy must go,” Vought wrote in a Wednesday evening email to supporters of Citizens for Renewing America, a group he started after Trump was dumped by voters. The group has actively promoted MAGA movement culture wars over “cultural Marxism” and “critical race theory.”

Vought wrote that his team was in “close contact” with many of the roughly 20 House Republicans who denied McCarthy victory in six votes on Tuesday and Wednesday—a group Vought described as “a band of America First patriots.” Vought also went on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” this week to portray the fight against McCarthy as a chance to “dismantle the establishment.”

Dozens of right-wing movement leaders, including Vought and Ginni Thomas, signed the anti-McCarthy statement released by the Conservative Action Project, which is affiliated with the secretive and influential Council for National Policy. The first signer, Conservative Action Project chair Kenneth Blackwell, was revealed by the Jan. 6 committee to have been involved in the effort to pressure Mike Pence to act unconstitutionally and illegally to prevent congressional affirmation of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. In December 2020, members of the Conservative Action Project falsely claimed that Trump had won, urged state legislators in swing states won by Biden to name pro-Trump electors anyway, and called on congressional Republicans to contest electoral votes from those states.

Also on Wednesday, Trump’s fellow Floridian Rep. Matt Gaetz sent his own fundraising email disparaging the GOP’s House leader as “Cavin’ McCarthy” and “Kiev Kevin” and calling him a “California liberal” and “spineless RINO.”

Tags: Donald Trump Ginni Thomas Ken Blackwell Kevin McCarthy Russ Vought House Speaker ElectionCenter for Renewing AmericaConservative Action Project Council for National Policy Republican Party

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Christian nationalist Russ Vought recently appeared on Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk’s radio show to discuss plans to purge at least 10% of federal career staffers under a new Trump administration. Vought described that portion of the federal workforce as “the roots of the problem” that prevented former President Donald Trump from fully implementing his agenda. During the interview, Kirk suggested that the next Republican administration subject civil servants to “ideological purity tests.”

Vought ran the powerful Office of Management and Budget under Trump and now heads up a right-wing think tank called the Center for Renewing America, whose mission is to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.” While at OMB, Vought helped develop a policy called “Schedule F” as a tool that would allow a new conservative administration to circumvent job protections typically enjoyed by federal workers who aren’t politically appointed.

Speaking on the September 23 edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, Vought claimed to have reclassified 90% of the workers in his own office under that job category

CitationFrom the September 23, 2022 edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

“Schedule F is an authority that we discovered and developed at the end of the Trump administration to give the president the ability to reclassify career civil servants, who normally have permanency within the bureaucracy, to turn them into essentially at-will employees,” Vought told Kirk.

When asked by Kirk how many career employees he’d like to potentially sack using this authority, Vought set the floor at 10% of current workers, but suggested that he considers as much as 80% of the federal workforce to be ideological opponents.

“I would say that within my agency, we had, you know, 80% of it was left-leaning,” Vought said. “Their paradigms were all rooted in this permanent class, ruling class that defines the milieu of Washington, D.C.”

“And you can reason and work with that crowd, but there is about a 10% of activists that are animated by the wokeism, the anti-racist movement, to be able to come into these agencies and they're just activists,” Vought added.

Vought then told Kirk that someone in the human resources department at OMB described themselves and their colleagues as “committed anti-racists.”

Kirk responded by calling that person the leader of “a sleeper cell of a woke communist ideology who's just right there within our federal government.”

“You're going to have to figure out how to solve that, I don’t know,” Kirk continued. “But ideological purity tests are an interesting approach, but let's break up the federal government first and then we'll go from there.”

In July, Axios reported on discussions Trump allies were having about staffing their next administration, with the Schedule F being central to the framework. Vought reportedly has been a leader in these efforts: As Media Matters reported a week prior to Axios’ story, Vought stated publicly that he wants to build an “army” of hard-right activists with “Biblical worldview” to run the federal agencies that he can’t outright destroy. He’s been very clear that the goal is to get “ideologically committed individuals up and down the agencies,” and he’s been similarly clear that Schedule F is the way to do it.

Right-wing propagandist Christopher Rufo – known for launching bad-faith attacks on critical race theory and targeting children’s hospitals that provide care to trans youth – has pushed for a similar course of action.

“The idea is to centralize ideological control over the federal agencies in the White House and create a team at theOffice of Management and Budget to enforce it,” Rufo said in an interview with conservative website IM-1776 in July.

In furtherance of those shared goals, Vought has attempted to turn the Center for Renewing America into a shadow government-in-waiting for Trump or another conservative president. In June, Vought brought on Jeffrey Clark, a former Department of Justice environmental lawyer and Trump’s top coup architect, as senior fellow at CRA. Kash Patel, another key figure in Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election, is a CRA senior fellow as well.

In the recent interview with Kirk, Vought expressed a common regret among former Trump officials that the administration wasted precious time in its first years adjusting to the steep learning curve of running the government.

“My hope is that we don’t have to do that again because we're laying the groundwork now,” Vought said, later adding, “We want to make sure that can never happen again and make sure that from day one, we can ensure that the agenda is being done.”

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haas foia

23. John Eastman (including but not limited to, from the email address

jeastman@claremont.org or jeastman@chapman.edu), or anyone

communicating on behalf of Constitutional Counsel Group (@ccg1776.com)

24. Anyone communicating on behalf of theAmerica First Policy Institute,

including Brooke Rollins, Chad Wolf,or anyone communicating from an

email address ending in @americafirstpolicy.com

25. Anyone communicating on behalf of America First Legal, including Stephen

Miller, Gene Hamilton, Russ Vought, or anyone communicating from an

email address ending in @aflegal.org

---

Public records obtained by American Oversight show the degree of access Thomas and her coalition had in the Trump administration.

A calendar entry from March 5, 2020, shows Russ Vought, then the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget,

was scheduled to have “Breakfast with Ginni Thomas.”

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One of the most striking figures in former President Donald Trump’s increasingly desperate effort stay in power after losing the 2020 election was Jeffrey Clark, an environmental lawyer at the Justice Department who urged Trump to make him attorney general days before the insurrection so that he could drag the Justice Department into Trump’s schemes.

Clark’s superiors had resoundingly rejected his planto have the Justice Department send letters to leaders in battleground states Trump lost, letters that would have falsely claimed that the DOJ had “identified significant concerns” about the elections and suggested that legislators send pro-Trump electoral votes to Congress.

But after being rebuffed by DOJ leaders, Clark went around them to meet directly with Trump—multiple times. Three days before the insurrection, Clark urged Trump to name him attorney general. Other DOJ officials who had gotten wind of the meeting told Trump that such a move would lead to mass resignations. In the end, Trump blinked.[SAT NIGHT MASSACRE]

The Washington Post reported this week that Clark also requested an intelligence briefing about “an allegation that the Chinese were controlling US.-based voting machines via internet-connected smart thermostats,” a wild theory even for Trump’s stolen-election conspiracists and, not surprisingly, one that the DOJ did not consider credible.

Clark’s attempted end-run around the Justice Department has been documented by media and the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Clark is expecting more negative attention from the committee,* after the committee’s first public hearing last week.

On Bannon’s June 13 show, Clark falsely claimed that the committee had no right to investigate his actions because, he said, he had nothing to do with the physical attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6. In fact, the committee has made it very clear from its inception that its focus is not only on the events of Jan. 6 but also on the related conspiracy to overturn the election that led up to the attack. Clark has reportedly cited the Fifth Amendment in refusing to answer committee questions. Bannon told Clark he would have him back on the show to address information about him that comes out in other Jan. 6 committee hearings.

Bannon isn’t the only Trumpworld figure rewarding Clark’s loyalty and apparent willingness to do anything to keep Trump in power. This morning, Center for Renewing America President Russ Vought,a former Trump administration official, announced that his group had hired Clark as a senior fellow to work on “election integrity” and other issues.

Vought was the guy who issued a ban on anti-racism training by federal agencies and contractors in the closing months of the Trump administration, part of a right-wing political strategy to mobilize angry voters via fearmongering about critical race theory. The Center has helped drive the manufactured anti-CRT panic; its toolkit has been promoted by the pro-Trump prayer-warriors at Intercessors for America. Vought has said the election of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin was proof of its power as a culture war weapon.

Here’s how Vought characterized Clark’s attempted subversion of the presidential election:

He brought up legitimate concerns to President Trump about potential voter fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election. This isn’t just a defensible action, but one that true patriots should be proud of.

Now he’s under intense scrutiny from the January 6th committee. It’s clear they want to make him a centerpiece of their witch hunt despite the fact that he fought to expose potential voter fraud.

We should learn even more about Clark’s role in Trump’s bid to retain power in the days ahead. The House select committee is expected to focus one of its upcoming public hearings on actions taken by Trump and his team to pressure the Justice Department into supporting his voter fraud claims and intimidation efforts directed against state election officials.

Tags: Capitol Insurrection Election 2020 Center for Renewing America Trump Administration

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jessica anderson heritage action

990

Total Revenue

$11,987,038

Total Functional Expenses $12,154,755

Net income -$167,717

Notable sources of revenue Percent of total revenue

Contributions $11,418,703 95.3%

Program services $517,500 4.3%

Investment income $21,555 0.2%

Bond proceeds $0

Royalties $0

Rental property income $0

Net fundraising $0

Sales of assets $12,321 0.1%

Net inventory sales $0

Other revenue $16,959 0.1%

Notable expenses Percent of total expenses

Executive compensation $761,036 6.3%

Professional fundraising fees $174,814 1.4%

Other salaries and wages $2,003,912 16.5%

Other

Total Assets $7,154,426

Total Liabilities $1,566,973

Net Assets $5,587,453

Key Employees and Officers Compensation

MICHAEL A NEEDHAM (CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER) $361,004

TIMOTHY J CHAPMAN (CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER) $300,117

RUSSELL VOUGHT (VP, GRASSROOTS OUTREACH) $209,661

• Show more

FISCAL YEAR ENDING DEC.

2015

PDF

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off bs

Mary G. Vought is the President and Founder of Vought Strategies and the Executive Director of the Senate Conservatives Fund in Washington, D.C.

Prior to that, she worked in the U.S. Senate for Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) as his Communications Director and then senior advisor. She also worked in the U.S. House for several Members of Congress serving in many communications roles including working on the House leadership staff for then-Representative Mike Pence (R-IN). 

Her work has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today, the New York Post and other leading publications.  Vought has a bachelor's degree in communications and one in political science. She graduated with high honors fromVanguard Universityin Southern California. 

Her husband, Russ Vought, served as Director of the Office of Management and Budget for the Trump Administration. They have two children and reside in Arlington, Virginia. 

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sched f neutralized public sector unions?  note the bill does the opposite of what roy says it does; also thugswarm of action BS orgs c4??

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an 7 22

Rep. Chip Roy's introduction Friday of a bill to make federal bureaucratic personnel at-will employees further stoked fears that marginalized workers will suffer discriminatory firings under a future Republican administration or even GOP-controlled Congress.

The Public Service Reform Act "will empower federal agencies to swiftly address misconduct and remove underperforming or ill-willed employees, creating a federal workforce focused on service to the American people," Roy (R-Texas) said in a statement.

The bill "would make all federal bureaucrats at-will employees—just like private sector workers—and claw back the inordinate protections some federal employees grossly abuse," he added.

The proposed legislation comes a week after reports that aides to former President Donald Trump are working to revive a plan to reclassify federal civil service personnel who worked under both Democratic and Republican administrations as at-will workers subject to easier termination.

Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, told Government Executive that "this is obviously a huge and major change, an effort to gear up a major assault on the federal employment system" that "is being helped and aided unquestionably by a set of groups likeAmerica First Works, Heritage Action for America, FreedomWorks, and Citizens for Renewing America, who have endorsed the bill."

"Much of the debate has largely been about if Trump is reelected," he added, "but what this makes clear is the efforts to try to change the civil service aren't just Trump necessarily, and if Republicans take control of Congress following the midterms, this may very well go from idea to specific action."

According to Government Executive:

Although the bill stands nearly zero chance of passing in the current Congress, experts say that it, combined with recent news that conservative political operatives with Trump's endorsement have devised plans to revive Schedule F, a proposal to strip the civil service protections from tens of thousands of federal employees in "policy-related" positions, indicates the civil service system as we have known it for the last 150 years will be under attack under the next Republican administration.

Although Roy says his bill "will provide justice to federal employees who are victims of discrimination or whistleblower retaliation," Kettl warned that the measure "dramatically limits the amount of whistleblowing activity that's possible," noting that "it creates a disincentive to blow the whistle because your retirement benefits could be reduced."

"When you put it together," he added, "it's a very big deal" and "would dramatically change the incentives for individuals who are being dismissed because of whistleblowing."

Author and transgender activist Brynn Tannehill worries that, should at-will employment become reality, "a purge of trans people from federal service" would follow a return of Trump or another Republican president to the White House.

Commenting on the mass firingof progressive staffers by San Francisco's new tougher-on-crime district attorney following Chesa Boudin's recall, socialist organizer Julian LaRosa recently argued for a codified employment termination standard similar to the one realized in the limited laws that labor activists led by Local 32BJ of theService Employees International Unionhelped enactin Philadelphia and New York.

"Can we just get universal just cause in the workplace already?" he asked.

Testifying before New York City Council members in support of that city's 2021 just-cause law, former Chipotle worker Melanie Walker said she was suddenly fired by her manager one day for not smiling, even though there were no customers in the store.

"Everyone who's working needs to have some type of stability in your life," she said. "You should be able to go to work without thinking you have to be on eggshells all day, thinking that you can be fired at any moment for any cause."

"I'm loyal to you as a worker and you should be loyal to me," Walker added. "People still have to feed their families."

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WEAPONIZE OMB, UNITARY?

mma 7 22

https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/center-renewing-america-preparing-next-republican-administration-govern

over the last several years, the United States has seen a dramatic rise in Christian nationalism, a loosely defined ideology that fuses patriarchy, xenophobia, and pretextual economic populism with an overtly biblical foundation and a deep distrust of democracy. This phenomenon has manifested in many ways, but one of the organizations driving the trend is a far-right think tank called the Center for Renewing America. 

Several former Trump administration officials are associated with the group, including its president,Russ Vought, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump. Vought led the administration’s efforts to demonize critical race theory, including removing anti-racism training from federal agencies. He is a regular guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room: Pandemic and on Fox News. His organization is one of several far-right groups under the umbrella of the Conservative Partnership Institute, whose top officials include former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and right-wing legal activist Cleta Mitchell.Both Meadows and Mitchell were intimately involved in Trump’s attempted insurrection, as were at least 18 other people associated with CPI, including CRA senior fellow Kash Patel,  former Trump Pentagon official.  

Perhaps the most significant of Trump’s top coup allies is CRA senior fellow Jeffrey Clark,a former environmental lawyer at the Department of Justice who was hired by the think tank in June. About three weeks later, Clark was targeted in a raid by federal law enforcement. Little is publicly known about the investigation into Clark, but it may revolve around his proposal “to send a letter to state officials in Georgia falsely stating that the department had evidence that could lead Georgia to rescind its certification of Mr. Biden’s victory in that key swing state,” according to The New York Times.

CRA works on an array of disparate, seemingly unrelated issues. In addition to CRA-linked individuals’ considerable efforts to justify the January 6 insurrection, the organization has sown doubt about future “election integrity.” Vought has remained at the heart of the anti-critical race theory push even after he left OMB. He is virulently anti-trans, calling trans identity a “contagion” in a 2021 podcast, and CRA has supported anti-trans legislation and opposed laws that would ban discrimination based on sexual and gender identity. Senior fellow and immigration restrictionistKen Cuccinelli and Vought successfully lobbied counties in Texas to declare that they were under “invasion” by migrants. CRA is also an active participant in the conservative legal community, as exemplified by its senior fellowMark Paoletta,who prepared Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas for their confirmation hearings. Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Vought celebrated Paoletta’s central role in the court’s rightward shift. 

What unites these issues is what Vought refers to as a “biblical worldview,” a concept that has long been prevalent on the religious right and refers to an all-encompassing ideology derived from a conservative interpretation of the Bible. Although Vought eschews the aesthetics of some of the street-fighting Christian fascists who terrorized Pride events in June, he overtly believes the United States should be a Christian nation. CRA’s mission is to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.” Vought is signatory to a national conservative statement affirming that “the Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities.” Most revealingly, in 2021 Vought wrote an opinion piece for Newsweek with the headline: “Is There Anything Actually Wrong With 'Christian Nationalism?'

Vought argues that, no, there’s nothing wrong with Christian nationalism, so long as it’s defined in a circumscribed, non-threatening way.

“Once stripped of its superimposed liberal scar tissue, ‘Christian nationalism’ is actually a rather benign and useful description for those who believe in both preserving our country's Judeo-Christian heritage and making public policy decisions that are best for this country,” Vought writes.

This is a fig leaf. Christian nationalism as it actually operates — sometimes taking the modifier “white” at the beginning — endorses the racist “great replacement theory,” which posits that global elites are fueling non-white immigration to the United States to “replace” white people. The conspiracy theory holds that this upending of power relations will be done through demographic changes, and at the ballot box — which helps to explain CRA’s obsession with “secure borders” and “election integrity.”

For Vought, CRA’s issues of focus are not discrete policy battles. As he made clear recently on a right-wing podcast, he believes the country is in a Manichean war between the forces of good and evil. The battleground is so-called cultural issues, which, properly understood, are liberation movements to end racist and patriarchal oppression, but for Vought they must be opposed at every step of the way.

“These are the issues that if we don’t fight on we lose our civilization,” Vought said. “Critical race theory has to be front and center. Transgender contagion in our schools, impacting our daughters across the country, needs to be a front and center issue."

moment of truth pod]

vought wants to create an “army” of activists ready and waiting to serve in government who can be trusted to carry out a Christian nationalist agenda. And as former director of OMB, Vought has a unique insight into how to implement a whole-of-government approach to enacting a presidential directive, which is what he did with Trump’s initiative against so-called “critical race theory.”

“When the president says, ‘I want to not fund critical race theory through the federal government,’ that’s involving all of the agencies, and we have to then make sure that the president’s agenda is executed,” Vought said in the same interview [aud]

more broadly, Vought lamented that not enough religious right activists “operate on the basis of worldview.” As a result, less dogmatic “elite Christians” have adopted ideologies that “lack clarity at best” and are “damaging at worst.” Vought wants hardliners in the church and in the public sphere. In the context of running the government, that means replacing career staff with “ideologically committed individuals up and down the agencies.”

That idea aligns with the upcoming plans from the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who, along with Vought and CRA, spearheaded the broader backlash against critical race theory. As Rufo said in a recent interview:

As we approach 2024, I will be publishing a policy paper on “eliminating left-wing ideologies in the federal government,” using the power of the presidency to fundamentally reshape the bureaucracy with a six-part program targeting budget, content, personnel, grantmaking, and oversight. The idea is to centralize ideological control over the federal agencies in the White House andcreate a team at the Office of Management and Budget to enforce it. We could easily wipe out a significant portion of the infrastructure for the left-wing ideologies within the federal bureaucracy and within the network of federal grantees and contractors, which would shift American politics in the right direction.

These plans are not theoretical. CRA is one of many hard-right organizations involved in the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, a coalition of zealots determined to avoid some of the shortcomings and incompetencies of the Trump administration. (Vought is a former vice president of the organization’s grassroot and advocacy arm, Heritage Action for America.)

Vought has made no secret of what he would do if given the opportunity to serve as a Cabinet-level appointee in a Republican administration. He would attempt to eliminate or drastically curtail the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and others.

“We got to get after these agencies we talked about before, the administrative state, bigmoney, EPA, CDC, [and] NIH that's weaponized against the American people and we need to put them on the chopping block before we get to some other things down the road,” Vought said on Steve Bannon’s War Room.

A subsequent Supreme Court decision that drastically limited the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions would likely serve as a template for Vought to dismantle broad swaths of the executive branch’s regulatory authority.

Vought’s antagonism toward the regulatory state extends to aspects of federal law enforcement, but only when those agencies are investigating conservatives for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk asked Vought about the Department of Justice’s supposed persecution of conservatives, including his colleague Jeffrey Clark, and how he thought it should be addressed.  The long-term plan is to structurally change it,” Vought said. “We've got to deconstruct the state that is weaponized against the American people.”

Like other organizations that have sprung up to harness Trumpism in the last several years, CRA’s broad influence remains limited. But its success in promoting the backlash against critical race theory shows it shouldn’t be underestimated, even though that topic may not have had the electoral influence Vought and others have claimed. What’s undeniable is that Vought and his fellow travelers have sweeping ambitions and the zeal of a true believer. They are telling us exactly what they are going to do if they return to power at the federal level, and it is a chilling vision of theocracy and repression.

vid Citation From the June 27, 2022, edition of Real America's Voice's The Charlie Kirk Show

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no lnx few

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/national-conservative-manifesto-a-plan-for-fascism-but-it-s-not-hypothetical/

'National Conservative' manifesto: A plan for fascism — but it's not hypothetical

[Trump endorses strongman Viktor Orbán in Hungarian election: ‘He has my complete support’]

Kathryn Joyce andSalon June 24, 2022

Last November in Orlando, dozens of the right's leading intellectuals, writers and think tank staffers gathered for the first meeting of the National Conservatism conference since the COVID pandemic hit, drawing journalists from across the political spectrum seeking to untangle what this high-brow gathering of avowed nationalists was all about. The emergence of the "NatCon" movement several years earlier had alarmed many liberal, centrist and even mainline conservative observers with its efforts to rehabilitate the concept of nationalism.But it energized many on the right who were starting to describe themselves as "post-liberal," meaning they were no longer satisfied with the conservative marriage of convenience that had existed since at least the Reagan era and had drawn together the religious right, anti-communists and free-marketeers in a potent but sometimes uneasy coalition. That consensus, they declared loudly, was dead, and a new conservative fusion must arise to take its place.

After the disruption of the pandemic, the loss of the presidency and the rage of Jan. 6, last fall's NatCon II conference was focused on the goal of building that new coalition along nationalist and post-liberal lines: blending extreme social conservatism with a skeptical approach to some forms of laissez-faire capitalism and a sharp hostility to both global or international authority and what they see as corporate-driven liberal cultural hegemony.

Now, the movement has formalized its ideas in a new manifesto, "National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles," released last week by the Edmund Burke Foundation. This ambitious document calls for the creation of a "world of independent nations" as the sole bulwark against "universalist ideologies" that would impose a "homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe." The credited authors include some leading lights of the NatCon world: Israeli political theorist and Burke Foundation chair Yoram Hazony, former American Enterprise Institute president Christopher DeMuth, First Things editor R.R. Reno and American Conservative columnist Rod Dreher.

But the list of signatories is much longer, and also far broader, ranging from right-wing mega-donor Peter Thiel to former Trump administration staffers Mark Meadows and Ken Cuccinelli, Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, anti-critical race theory activist Christopher Rufo, multiple officials from Hillsdale College — a nerve center of contemporary right-wing politics — and numerous other think tank staffers and writers from across the spectrum of conservative media.

The manifesto hasn't gotten much attention so far — which isn't surprising, considering how much else is happening in the political realm. A column by David von Drehle in the Washington Post declared its contents akin to fascism, and a more substantial fisking in The Bulwark by Cathy Young found it "a document steeped in thinly veiled and sometimes distressingly overt authoritarian ideology." That's not wrong. But it's also worth observing that, in the battle to build a new conservative coalition, much of the NatCon platform has already won.

As Young notes, many of the NatCon's 10 priorities read, at first, like banal restatements of conservative ideology in general: national independence, the rule of law, God and public religion, free enterprise, family and children. But in ways both subtle and unsubtle, those familiar terms don't all mean what you'd think.

The NatCons hope to divorce nationalism from its association with the Nazis, who they claim were not "nationalist" at all.

The first two items, national independence and rejecting globalism and imperialism, follow one of the core, if questionable, goals of the NatCon movement, which is to divorce the concept of nationalism from its most powerful associations, such as the fascist regimes of Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, which National Conservatives see as imperialist. Instead, NatCons want to attach the term to smaller, scrappier scrappy countries that resisted the Nazis or Soviet Communism.

While the manifesto holds that "Each nation capable of self-government should chart its own course," in alignment with its own legal, cultural and religious traditions, it warns against their "transferring" authority to any "transnational or supranational bodies" and advocates opposing "imperialism in its various forms." Those forms include modern-day China and Russia, of course, but also "the liberal imperialism of the last generation, which sought to gain power, influence and wealth by dominating other nations and trying to remake them in its own image."

The "liberalism" described here, as in most NatCon contexts, isn't the center-left politics of the Democratic Party, but rather "classical" liberalism, focused on individual rights, free trade and pluralistic cultures, which until recently was embraced by most mainstream conservatives as well. But within the post-liberal and NatCon world, that small-l liberalism contained the seeds of conservatism's undoing, leading inevitably to the big-L liberalism of progressive ideology by creating a culture in which it's too hard to raise children along traditionalist lines. In this view, societies that uphold pluralistic tolerance and diversity are inherently unfair by denying the majority the right to live in a culture that supports their values — in essence, allowing the minority to oppress the majority.

While both Young and von Drehle read the jabs at boomer "imperialism" as allusions to the Iraq War — which is at least partly true — "empire" for NatCons also has a larger meaning. First, they believe that international compacts, accords and governing bodies like the European Union or the UN infringe on national sovereignty, particularly when it comes to social issues. In the movement's conference this March in Brussels, Hazony sought to align the NatCon vision with Ukraine's fight against Russian aggression. Vladimir Putin's disdain for borders and national independence, he suggested, mirrored the attitudes of bureaucrats in Brussels and Washington. The obvious subtext was that Hungary and Poland — two post-liberal, overtly nationalist countries greatly admired within the movement — were facing EU sanctions over a variety of human rights issues, which Hungarian and Polish leaders rejected as an attempt to squash the rights of the nation-state, and sympathetic fellow speakers cast as the workings of a new "evil empire."

"Empire," in the NatCon world, refers to the right's long, losing battle in the cultural sphere, these days largely waged against what American conservatives call "woke corporations."

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rww tag

• JUNE 17, 2022 1:53 PM

Jeffrey Clark Tried to Help Trump Overturn the Election. Now Team Trump Has His Back.

• NOVEMBER 5, 2021 1:43 PM

Russ Vought—Trump’s Critical Race Theory Guy—Says Virginia Win Proves Political Power of Culture-War Fights

• OCTOBER 20, 2021 1:08 PM

The Dishonest and Harmful Right-Wing Attack on American School Boards

• AUGUST 6, 2021 2:00 PM

The Right-Wing Political Machine Is Out to Take Over School Boards by Fanning Fears of Critical Race Theory

• JULY 23, 2021 12:17 PM

Religious Right Pushes Effort To Whitewash History and Restrict Teaching About Systemic Racism

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nh register

Opinion: Dark money behind school board conflicts

Christine Palm and Frank Hanley Santoro

Oct. 4, 2021

A woman carrying a sign protesting the teaching of critical race theory arrives at a Board of Education meeting at Central Middle School in Greenwich, Conn., on Thursday June 17, 2021. Members of the group Greenwich Patriots came out to the meeting to urge people to attend and speak at public comment toprotest masking, vaccinations for students and critical race theory..

Schools are the latest battleground in the culture wars. Protests over issues such as critical race theory, masks and vaccines have cropped up all over the state, including in the towns of Guilford, New Canaan, Glastonbury, Haddam, Cheshire, Bristol and Fairfield. The protesters often characterize themselves as concerned parents. This may be partially true, but it is not the whole story. If you dig deep enough, you will find a web of dark money fueling political operatives in so-called “astroturf” groups — those that purport to be grassroots but are in fact formed and funded by hidden corporate and political sponsors. Their agenda has little to do with improving public education.

Protesters have a right to state their opinions (even suicidal ones in the case of vaccine opposition). But as the right-wing agenda increasingly infiltrates small towns, members of local school boards might find themselves portrayed as purveyors of an “increasingly hostile” threat to the community “rooted in Marxism” who will “stop at nothing” as they are “trying to socially replace you.” Those are words from the websites of the Center For Renewing America and its Citizens Renewing America Toolkit.

In fact, hostility against board of education members has gotten so ugly that the National School Boards Association this past week asked President Biden for help from federal law enforcement agencies.In reality, most of these folks are hardworking volunteers who are far more concerned with balancing a budget than they are with a radical agenda — be it on the left or the right. And yet, recently in Haddam, police had to escort board members to their cars following a contentious meeting in which anti-maskers shouted through a bullhorn and drowned out much of the proceedings.

Clearly, something is afoot. Why is this happening suddenly and simultaneously in so many different places around the state (and indeed the country)? Why is the pattern so similar? Why does it seem peculiar to affluent Connecticut towns? Why do some protests turn disruptive? Why pick on CRT, which schools don’t even teach (it’s a post-secondary pedagogical tool)? This doesn’t sound like something that just happened to occur to parents at a local bake sale.

The explanation may lie with Steve Bannon. According to Bannon, “This is the Tea Party to the 10th power,” and “The path to save the nation is very simple. It’s going to go through the school boards.” Before he was pardoned by Trump, Bannon was the guy arrested at sea off Westbrook on a Chinese billionaire’s yacht for allegedly siphoning over a million dollars from a “We Build the Wall” scheme. According to news reports, he was also accused by an ex-wife of objecting to the Archer School in Los Angeles for his daughters because, she said, he “didn’t want the girls going to school with Jews.”

The phenomenon may also be explained byNicole Neily — the president of Parents Defending Education, whose targets include several Connecticut towns. PDE describes itself as a “grassroots” organization, and Neily once was quoted as saying, “We’re all working moms.” But according to several sources including Sourcewatch, Neily is a veteran operative of the Koch network. She’s not alone. Other astroturf operatives include Russ Vought, a former Trump official whose group publishes the “Toolkit” for taking over school boards; Christopher Rufo, whose anti-CRT activism earned him an invitation to the Trump White House; and Keri Rodriques, who was reportedly paid $388,000 in 2017 and 2018 for her advocacy work. Anti-CRT activity seems a profitable cottage industry for the apparatchiks of MAGA world.

Dark money is hard to ferret out because astroturf groups do not disclose their funders. But some information can be found. Among the sources are MassPoliticsProfs.org, the blog of Diane Ravitch, UnKochMyCampus.org, and a book called “Outside Money in School Board Elections.” Google searches also help. Our information is based largely on these sources.

A picture emerges of a shadowy and labyrinthine network of astroturf groups funded by big money. Funders include the Koch network, Turning Points USA, the DeVos Family Foundation, the Ed Uihlein Foundation, Donors’ Trust, and the Heritage Foundation. Some astroturf groups are local (Connecticut Parents Union). Most are national. Many have happy names like Citizens for Renewing America, the Center for Renewing America, Free to Learn, National Parents Union, Massachusetts Parents United, No Left Turn in Education, Moms for Liberty, and Fight for Schools. Some encourage their readers to report incidents (i.e., spy on teachers).One group calling itself School Board Watchlist models disruptive behavior on its website.

Our point is not necessarily to question the sincerity of the self-appointed disrupters, misguided though they are. But we believe they are pawns in a darker power grab of which they are probably unaware. The next time you hear that public schools are a threat to freedom, it’s good idea to follow the money.

Christine Palm is the state representative for the 36th Connecticut General Assembly District. Frank Hanley Santoro is a former assistant U.S. attorney.

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wheeler chem regs routed thru/stalled by OMB?

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https://www.eenews.net/articles/how-bidens-team-rushed-to-dump-a-trump-era-pfas-assessment/

no lnx

How Biden’s team rushed to dump a Trump-era PFAS assessment

By E.A. Crunden | 09/01/2021

Trump administration appointees interfered with development of a toxicity assessment for a "forever chemical" and made changes that were "not scientifically sound," documents obtained by E&E News through the Freedom of Information Act show.

Trump-era EPA appointees engaged in "considerable political level interference" on an assessment for a controversial "forever chemical," documents obtained by E&E News indicate.

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But the Biden administration wasted no time in yanking that document, moving to scrub the assessment of alterations made by political appointees and restore language advocated by EPA career scientists shortly after the president’s inauguration.

At issue is a toxicity assessment forPFBS, part of the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances family. PFBS is a replacement chemical for PFOS — one of the two most well-studied and controversial PFAS, due to health risks like cancer. The replacement compound, a surfactant, is used in manufacturing processes and to make stain-resistant coatings for various consumer items like clothes, among other purposes.

Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act shed light on the agency back-and-forth over the toxicity assessment for PFBS, released in the last days of the Trump administration, only to be clawed back as soon as Biden took office. Staff conversations show the process of withdrawing and replacing the document came after a contentious publication process that saw significant input from political appointees, in a breach with agency processes.

In an email sent Jan. 21, shortly after Biden’s inauguration, then-head of EPA’s Office of Research and Development Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta conveyed wishes that the PFBS assessment be removed.

"During the rush of the last administration to complete various tasks, there was a PFAS assessment on PFBS along with an internal deliberative memo from [the EPA chemicals office] that apparently were posted Tuesday," she wrote to Jane Nishida, then-acting EPA administrator, in an email marked with a "high" importance level.

In January, anonymous EPA staffers raised concerns that the assessment had been politically compromised (Greenwire, Jan. 14).

As Biden took office, leadership in the research office and the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention immediately requested that the assessment and related documents be taken down at once, Orme-Zavaleta said. "The materials posted are not supported by ORD or OCSPP career scientists and violate the Agency’s scientific integrity policy. We will work to correct the document, brief new leadership then follow up with [the Office of Public Affairs] on the correct release."

At the heart of the controversy was a significant shift from a draft assessment, which offered a reference dose — or an indicator of how much individuals can be exposed to a chemical before experiencing adverse health impacts.

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A key component of deriving that reference dose are uncertainty factors, which are applied to reflect data limitations. For the PFBS assessment, uncertainty factors were crucial, given a lack of information around areas like immunotoxicity and mammary gland development. But the new document refuted any database deficiency and shifted the reference dose to a range.

While the assessment was a science, rather than regulatory, document, critics worried the change would allow for industry and government to cherry pick numbers when setting threshold levels. An EPA spokesperson confirmed to E&E News that the Biden administration "immediately began working with EPA’s career scientists and staff" to withdraw and replace the document.

Orme-Zavaleta, who recently retired, meanwhile said the document published under Trump reflected "considerable political level interference" and became "a poster child for why it’s critical to have scientific integrity policies in federal government."

Pushback on a Trump EPA priority

The PFBS assessment was a priority for the Trump administration, and former Deputy Assistant Administrator for Science Policy David Dunlap [kochsucker] highlighted the issue as a major focus.

EPA originally planned to publish the assessment in late October 2020. But the schedule was delayed amid last-minute comments and concerns about the uncertainty factors from the Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics.

A December document reviewed by E&E News showed that Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention Deputy Assistant Administrator David Fischer — a former official with the American Chemistry Council, which represents PFAS manufacturers and has lobbied extensively against a crackdownon the chemicals — asked senior toxicologists to review the Office of Research and Development’s PFBS work. Fischer’s office countered ORD’s findings regarding uncertainty factors for chronic and subchronic reference doses.

Fischer did not respond to a request for comment. But EPA confirmed to E&E News that the process became bogged down by his office’s previous political leadership, in a deviation from regular practices.

In early January, leading up to posting the assessment, Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics Deputy Director Tala Henry shared a draft with officials, noting it included proposed in-line edits supporting a range of uncertainty factors.She commented that former EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler had requested the inclusion of those edits. Conversations indicate officials sought to publish the assessment in advance of a Wheeler PFAS-centric interview.

Orme-Zavaleta confirmed to E&E News that political leadership decided to modify ORD’s peer-reviewed assessment in keeping with Wheeler’s preferences and that she did not learn of the changes until January. She called the back-and-forth "one of the more infuriating experiences I have ever encountered."

Her emails show that she pushed back, arguing Wheeler "did not have complete information" in making his request. The PFBS assessment had previously been considered final.

"The type of changes OCSPP proposes would require us to go through the whole process of intra/inter-agency review [and workgroup efforts] … which will take anywhere from 6-8 months," she said.

But a day later, Wheeler’s senior adviser, Taylor Hoverman, announced the process would move forward. The agency’s political leadership negotiated a fast-tracked review through the Office of Management and Budget that is not typically part of EPA’s processes for toxicity assessments. Soon afterward, EPA published the document.

‘Very unusual’ levels of input

Multiple political appointees kept a close eye on the PFBS assessment process. In one instance, the Department of Defense gave EPA feedback disputing the agency’s approach to uncertainty factors. Former career staff said those comments came as part of an interagency review process and in response to language inserted by Fischer. Emails show Dunlap wound up editing EPA’s response to the Department of Defense, taking an active role in shaping the final product. He continued asking for updates on the status of the assessment as it proceeded.

Orme-Zavaleta said the level of involvement was irregular. "David Dunlap was engaging in the decision making process for PFBS without consulting with or including anyone else from ORD," she said. "I am also not aware of any other [EPA administrator] weighing in on a science decision in an assessment before."

Betsy Southerland, a former longtime EPA top scientist, said Dunlap’s level of involvement was "very unusual." She said an official at Dunlap’s level would not typically have edited a technical document as he did.

"[Deputy assistant administrators] certainly keep track of the progress on high-priority projects and ensure work is done on schedule and following all peer-reviewed guidance and standard processes, but rarely if ever rewrite documents since they are generally not subject matter experts," Southerland said.

Kyla Bennett, who directs science policy for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, meanwhile expressed alarm. The conversations, she said, "prove what we always suspected — Trump Administration political appointees improperly manipulated science at EPA," adding the revelations were "disturbing."

Dunlap did not respond to a request for comment.

Career staff, meanwhile, were unhappy with the changes imposed by political officials. EPA senior science adviser Louis D’Amico voiced harsh criticism in an email sent on Jan. 6.

"This is precedent setting, and flies completely in the face of legitimate and necessary separation between risk assessment and risk management," he told Orme-Zavaleta and Samantha Jones, the acting associate director for health at EPA’s National Center for Environmental Assessment.

"A decision to release a ‘range of values’ in EPA assessments should be discussed across the agency, including program offices and regions."

Jones agreed in a response email, also taking issue with changes stating that the individual value generated for PFBS would be dependent on "the needs of the program office and in the type of risk assessment being performed," including for the general population.

That note, Jones said, "should NOT be in a scientific foundational document. It would go into the risk assessment by the program."

A speedy reversal

Only a day after Biden took office, EPA staff began the process of taking down the PFBS assessment.

In a Feb. 9 email, EPA science communications specialist Kacey Fitzpatrick linked the issue more clearly to former Administrator Wheeler, saying the changes made to the PFBS assessment were at "political direction" and "not scientifically sound."

"Administrator Wheeler determined that uncertainty factors were policy, not scientific judgements. … This is contrary to long-standing risk assessment practices based on National Academy of Sciences (NAS) guidance," Fitzpatrick wrote to Carolyn Hubbard, ORD’s science communications director, in an email laying out the agency’s response. "This constitutes a violation of the agency’s Scientific Integrity Policy and the documents have been removed from the EPA website while the agency completes its review."

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The old document was pulled that same day (E&E News PM, Feb. 9).

Two months later, EPA released its replacement — one Orme-Zavaleta said in a statement "fixes errors in the version issued earlier this year, was developed by EPA career scientists, and upholds the values of scientific integrity"(Greenwire, April 8).

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The new assessment set a chronic reference dose of 300 parts per trillion per day, along with a subchronic dose of 1,000 ppt per day. That reference dose is much stricter than the 2018 Trump EPA’s original chronic dose recommendation of 10,000 ppt per day with a subchronic range from 40,000 ppt to 100,000 ppt.

That replacement didn’t mark the end of the saga. EPA’s Office of Inspector General said in June that it would probe the agency’s decisionmaking regarding the assessment (Greenwire, June 16). At the time, EPA said it was "committed to upholding scientific integrity" and would support and assist the review.

For her part, Orme-Zavaleta said the PFBS assessment published under Biden "could have been a good news story" if released under Trump, offering the administration a significant action at a time of mounting focus on PFAS. Instead, the release of the compromised assessment eroded faith in an agency that prides itself on science-based decisions.

"Scientific integrity, coupled with sound external peer review and quality assurance procedures are critical for ensuring public trust," she said. "When these measures break down or are manipulated, it erodes public trust and jeopardizes our ability to protect public health and the environment, which first and foremost is EPA’s mission."

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https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/center-for-renewing-america/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/ex-trump-officials-reveal-how-ivanka-trump-and-kellyanne-conway-meddled-with-cdc-guidelines/

ivanka Trump and Kellyanne Conway sent "dictates" to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordering the public health agency to downplay the severity of its coronavirus messaging, two former members Trump appointees tell The New York Times.

"Every time that the science clashed with the messaging, messaging won," former chief of staff at CDC Kyle McGowan says. McGowan had worked with Tom Price, first in the Georgia Republican Congressman's office, and then at Health and Human Services after Trump appointed him Secretary of the agency. Price left HHS in disgrace.

Conway and Trump, both top advisors to the president, were focused on churches and schools. During the course of the pandemic the CDC first held back guidance it had prepared to help churches re-open safely. The Trump administration rewrote that guidance to allow houses of worship greater freedom, but at a huge cost in American lives. President Trump spent months demanding schools reopen, ignoring CDC guidance, and providing state and local governments few if any tools or financial support to protect students and staff.

McGowan and his deputy, Amanda Campbell, say the White House slowly but surely crushed the CDC, interfering with public announcements or pronouncements, all in the interest of protecting the health of the economy instead of the health of the American people.

In one instance McGowan says he and CDC Director Robert Redfield were forced to alter language on social distancing guidance, after White House budget director Russell Vought told them specifics on spacing requirements would be too onerous for businesses. In the end, no specifics on social distancing requirements were provided.

McGowan and Campbell say they "mediated between Dr. Redfield and agency scientists when the White House's requests and dictates would arrive: edits from Mr. Vought and Kellyanne Conway, the former White House adviser, on choirs and communion in faith communities, or suggestions from Ivanka Trump, the president's daughter and aide, on schools."

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/is-the-republican-party-over/

...[rats from ship egs]

And yet another story from the day: a third career prosecutor from the Department of Justice resigned after publicly attacking Attorney General William Barr for abusing his power to get Trump reelected."After 36 years, I'm fleeing what was the U.S. Department of Justice," Phillip Halpern wrote. "[T]he department's past leaders were dedicated to the rule of law and the guiding principle that justice is blind. That is a bygone era, but it should not be forgotten." Noting that "Barr has never actually investigated, charged or tried a case," Halpern expressed deep concern over Barr's "slavish obedience to Donald Trump's will." "This career bureaucrat seems determined to turn our democracy into an autocracy," he warned.

Georgetown Law Professor Paul Butler, who worked as a federal prosecutor under Barr when he was George H. W. Bush's Attorney General, told Katie Benner of the New York Times that such criticism is "unprecedented," and reflects Trump's pressure on the AG. "I have never seen sitting prosecutors go on the record with concerns about the attorney general," he said.

And yet, Barr's willingness to bend the Justice Department to Trump's personal will may, in the end, not be enough to keep Trump's favor. Angry that Barr did not produce a report attacking the Russia investigation before the election, Trump just yesterday said he wasn't happy with Barr's performance, and might not keep him on as AG if he wins a second term.

There are signs people in the administration are preparing for Trump to lose the election. His cabinet is rushing to change regulations to lock in Trump's goal of giving more scope to businessmen to act as they see fit. Normally, changes in regulations require setting aside time for public comment on the changes, but the administration is shortening or eliminating those periods over changes in, for example, rules allowing railroads to move highly flammable liquefied natural gas on freight trains, what constitutes "contract" work, how much pollution factories can emit, and who can immigrate to America.

Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said in a statement: "President Trump has worked quickly from the beginning of his term to grow the economy by removing the mountain of Obama-Biden job-killing regulations," and that the current push simply continues that effort. But no one is missing the quiet distancing going on in Washington as Republican lawmakers are shifting away from public support for the president.

Meanwhile, at his rally tonight in Georgia, Trump told the crowd "You should… lock up the Bidens, lock up Hillary." The crowd then began to chant "Lock them up." But one thing about a bully: when people finally start to turn on him, there is a stampede for the exits.

Tonight, at his Georgia rally, Trump outlined all the ways in which he was being unfairly treated, then mused: "Could you imagine if I lose?… I'm not going to feel so good. Maybe I'll have to leave the country, I don't know."

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/deregulatory-rush-shows-even-if-defeated-the-trump-white-house-willing-to-scorch-the-earth-before-they-go/

no twt lnx

Deregulatory rush shows Trump White House willing to 'scorch the Earth before they go'

Brett Wilkins and Common Dreams October 18, 2020

With President Donald Trump's re-election very much in doubt, his administration is rushing to ram through regulatory rollbacks that could adversely affect millions of Americans, the environment, and the ability of Joe Biden—should he win—to pursue his agenda or even undo the damage done over the past four years.

Reporting by the New York Times details how the administration is cutting corners as it scrambles to enact as much of its agenda as possible before ceding power on January 20 if Trump loses the election. Required public comment periods and detailed analyses, according to the Times, are being eschewed in favor of streamlined approval processes that have left even staunch deregulation defenders sounding the alarm.

[EricLiptonNYT

JUST POSTED: Facing the prospect that President Trump could lose his re-election bid, his cabinet is scrambling to enact regulatory changes affecting millions of Americans in a blitz so rushed it may leave some changes vulnerable to court challenges]

"Two main hallmarks of a good regulation is sound analysis to support the alternatives chosen and extensive public comment to get broader opinion," Susan E. Dudley, director of the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center and formerly head of regulation in the George W. Bush White House, told the Times. "It is a concern if you are bypassing both of those."

Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, told the Times that the president has always "worked quickly... to grow the economy by removing the mountain of Obama-Biden job-killing regulations."

However, critics are warning that some of the proposed changes are being rushed through with insufficient regard to the harm they might cause. Some of the issues that are raising red flags include:

Refusing to lower limits on dangerous particulate and ozone pollution, which cause thousands of annual premature deaths.

Allowing so-called "bomb trains" that transport highly combustible liquefied natural gas on freight trains.

Determining when workers can be classified as employees orindependent contractors.

Exempting certain commercial drivers from mandatory hour limits and rest periods.

Placing limits on how science is used in the air pollution rule-making process.

Expanding regulation of immigrants by requiring citizenship applicants to submit biometric data, by forcing sponsors of immigrants to stay off welfare and prove their financial independence.

In response to the reporting, critics of the administration like writer Matthew Kressel said that it helps make clear that if the Republicans in the White House cannot win reelection, they'll "scorch the earth before they go."

And Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, tweeted: "I think people underestimate the amount of time and energy that is going to be needed just to climb out from under the mountain of shit this administration leaves behind."

MattGertz

I think people underestimate the amount of time and energy that is going to be needed just to climb out from under the mountain of shit this administration leaves behind.

Many of the changes reflect the agendas of the powerful corporate and other business interests whose key players have donated generously to Trump, belying the president's oft-repeated claim that he is "draining the swamp." Other regulator rollbacks come despite warnings from career officials within federal agencies about the harm they could cause.

carlzimmer

EPA’s scientific advisers warn its regulatory rollbacks clash with established science

Alarmed by the administration's rushed rate of regulatory rollbacks, a group of over 15 Democratic senators earlier this month sent a letter (pdf) to Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia warning of "profound economic implications" for some 143 million U.S. workers that would result from curtailing public comment periods for the proposed rule change regarding independent contractors.

"Workers across the country deserve a chance to fully examine and properly respond to these potentially radical changes, and a 30-day comment period is not nearly enough," the letter states.

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meese prez medal of freedom

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...an 920

On top of the Trump administration’s disinformation campaign, the notion that the federal government is going to withhold federal funds from three of its top contributing cities is ludicrous.

All three cities rank in the top 10 per capita income for the 25 most populated cities in the U.S.: Seattle was second, Portland eighth, and New York 10th. Because states and cities with a larger share of higher income residents contribute more to the federal government, these three cities alone likely contribute more tax dollars to federal coffers than most red states, which have been feeding at the federal trough for decadeswhile contributing far less money to its bottom line. New York and the northeastern states, in particular, are “giver” states, while most red states, especially in the southeast, are “getter” states, according to a Rockefeller Institute of Government study.

But now that Barr has homed in on the cities he wants to target and delivered supposed criteria for determining which cities fall into that category, the next step, according to Trump’s presidential memo, is for the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, to issue guidance to the heads of certain agencies on “restricting eligibility of or otherwise disfavoring, to the maximum extent permitted by law, anarchist jurisdictions in the receipt of federal grants.”

Again, such a direction will undoubtedly be challenged in court and tied up until long after the election. So at this point, it’s nothing more than another lawless effort by Trump to target cities run by Democrats in order to gin up and delight his “getter” constituency in the red states.

If Joe Biden wins, this ridiculous presidential directive will obviously fall onto a scrap heap of other lawless Trump directives targeting Democrats, liberals, and certain demographic groups purely for Trump’s political benefit and pandering to his supporters.

But if Trump manages to somehow steal this election, the directive is simply one more reason why we could see a serious effort by Democratic states to leave the union. There’s absolutely no reason for those states and their densely populated liberal cities to stick around for Trump’s presidential harassment while the federal government bleeds them dry.

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wa exmr BS

demint endorse; l: Derek Kan, the executive associate director of the Office of Management and Budget, has been nominated as the agency’s deputy director. He will be under Russ Vought, who moved up from deputy to director. For the past few months, Kan, a recent undersecretary for policy at the Transportation Department, has been overseeing the distribution of coronavirus funds and other key budget items. He has a reputation for bipartisanship, has worked for several GOP leaders, and has a high-tech background. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, praised Kan as “smart, competent, politically savvy, a serious economic thinker who should have been running things over at the White House several years ago.” …

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voodoo

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/trumps-plan-to-unveil-next-round-of-tax-scam-just-before-2020-election-slammed-as-another-political-ploy/

no lnx

Trump’s plan to unveil next round of ‘tax scam’ just before 2020 election slammed as ‘another political ploy’

President Donald J. Trump hosts a tax reform industry and business leaders meeting | October 31, 2017 (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

Written by Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams February 14, 2020

The Tax March movement responded critically on Friday after National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow revealed that President Donald Trump has instructed him to unveil the second round of what opponents call the GOP “tax scam” ahead of the presidential election in November.

“Announcing an ambiguous set of so-called middle-class tax cuts just ahead of the November election is yet another political ploy,” Tax March executive director Maura Quint declared in a statement.

“We know the truth: the first punch of the Trump tax scam brought higher taxes on working people to pay for the massive giveaways to billionaires and corporations,” she said. “And now, to top it all off, Trump is trying to land a second punch to our pocketbooks. The only promise Trump is fulfilling with this second round of tax cuts is his commitment to enrich the rich at the expense of working people.”

When Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) into law in December 2017, he told reporters at the White House that “corporations are literally going wild over this, I think even beyond my expectations,” shortly after touting the legislation as “a bill for the middle class.”

The TCJA slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and included various other permanent benefits for companies and wealthy Americans. Although the legislation also included tax cuts for families and individuals, those benefits are set to expire after 2025.“And once the individual tax rates revert to their former levels, a stingier inflation gauge would raise taxes for most households,” CBS News noted in 2017.

Fox Business reported Friday that the next round of the administration’s tax agenda is “a middle-class tax cut plan,” and that Kudlow said the president recently told him to “get it out by September,” just two months before Trump will face off with the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.

According to Fox Business:

“It’ll come out sometime in September,” Kudlow told Fox Business‘ Maria Bartiromo.

The administration, he said, will likely use the Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought’s $1.4 trillion budget request to craft the package and make tax cuts permanent.

Kudlow said the administration plans to give the middle class a 10% tax cut in addition to strengthening and making permanent “some of the other tax cuts.”

Chye-Ching Huang, senior director of economic policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, tweeted Friday that reporting on Kudlow’s comments was “yet another occasion for a reminder that the 2017 tax law was costly, tilted to the top, and invites tax gaming by the wealthy.”

Chye-Ching Huang

@dashching

Yet another rumor of the Trump Administration working on "tax cuts 2.0" https://thehill.com/policy/finance/domestic-taxes/483087-kudlow-new-tax-cuts-will-probably-come-out-sometime-in …

Yet another occasion for a reminder that the 2017 tax law was costly, tilted to the top, & invites tax gaming by the wealthy -- & all attempts at "2.0" since then shares those flaws: https://twitter.com/dashching/status/1194368530088693760 …

Kudlow: New tax cuts will 'probably come out sometime in September'

National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow on Friday said that the White House hopes to introduce new middle-class tax cuts by the fall.

thehill.com

Chye-Ching Huang

@dashching

All of these things are pretty much just like the others, tax policy edition.

2017 tax law: tilted to the well-off.https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/2017-tax-law-tilted-toward-wealthy-and-corporations …

Tax March’s Quint said Friday that “if Trump had wanted to help the middle-class, he would have done so already. Instead, he continues to push tax giveaways to the wealthy and major corporations while also proposing massive cuts to services that everyday Americans pay into and depend upon.”

As Common Dreams reported Monday, just two days after promising that the White House “will not be touching your Social Security or Medicare,” Trump unveiled a budget blueprint for 2021 that calls for doing exactly that. Critics condemned the president’s proposal to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from those and other programs as “savage” and “shameful.”

In a floor speech this week, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) tied Trump’s proposed safety net cuts to the administration’s “tax scam” for corporations and the wealthy.

Sherrod Brown

@SenSherrodBrown

President Trump’s budget is his blueprint for how he wants to pay for his #GOPTaxScam - cutting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Embedded video

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25042019/trump-omb-secret-science-policy-memo-pollution-health-studies-heritage-foundation-vought

Donald Trump's administration has launched yet another attempt to control the use of science in federal policymaking—this time with a memorandum to government agencies from the White House budget office.

Thememo, quietly released on Wednesday, appears aimed at putting into effect some long-sought goals of industry foes of environmental regulations.

Described as "guidance" for executive branch agencies, it offers numerous new avenues for regulated industries to challenge the science used in policymaking. The memo was signed by Russell Vought, a former top official at the political arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation who is now acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Observers say the OMB is seeking to implement by fiat restrictions on environmental and health science that have failed to garner support in Congress and have foundered in a formal rulemaking process begun last year by the Environmental Protection Agency.

"There's been no consultation with the scientific community, no opportunity to comment, no analysis on the costs or impacts," said Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Vought's memo, titled "Improving Implementation of the Information Quality Act," sets out new guidance for all federal agencies on identifying and using "influential scientific, financial, or statistical information."

It says that such data should be held to higher standards than other information, with a more in-depth peer review required. That review should evaluate "the objectivity of the underlying data and the sensitivity of the agency's conclusions to analytic assumptions," with additional peer review required in some circumstances.

Data of this kind, such as health surveys, are often used to support controls on pollutants, including those like smog and soot that come from burning fossil fuels. The guidance could also affect how limits on greenhouse gas emissions are devised.

Vought writes that influential analysis must be disseminated to the public "with sufficient descriptions of data and methods to allow them to be reproduced by qualified third parties who may want to test the sensitivity of agency analyses."

Echoes of EPA's 'Secret Science' Effort

The OMB memo appears aimed at achieving the same goals as EPA's proposal last year, the so-called "Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science" rule, which sought to prevent the EPA from relying on public health studies where the raw data had not been made public due to confidentiality concerns. It mirrored legislation sponsored by former Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), then chairman of the House Science Committee, that was passed by the House of Representatives three times but never been taken up by the Senate.

Under the guise of transparency, the EPA rule would have excluded from environmental policymaking some of the seminal studies linking air pollution to increased mortality.

The EPA received more than 500,000 public comments on the transparency proposal, including an extraordinary outpouring of opposition from the scientific community—including the presidents of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine; the leaders of physicians' groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics; health organizations like the American Lung Association; and the editors of major scientific journals.

No further public action has occurred on the rule since the comment period closed last August. An EPA spokesperson said in an email that the agency "is considering the new OMB memorandum as we move forward with the 'Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science' rulemaking."

'It's About Delay'

It is not clear exactly what impact the OMB guidance will have—in part because this kind of guidance doesn't have the force and effect of law. (In other words, the requirements and deadlines of environmental statutes would weigh more heavily before a judge.) Also, Vought does not specify what the EPA or other agencies are to do about influential scientific studies that do not meet the new requirements. But Rosenberg said it appears to offer the regulated industry new avenues to challenge actions that rely on science.

"It's about delay," said Rosenberg. "Every piece of this allows industry to make a claim that will delay the process of regulations.

"It essentially says that anyone—mostly industry—can challenge the data or technical information, and the agency then has to develop a response to every challenge, and then the person who challenged the data can appeal, and you have to go through this cycle again, apparently endlessly."

Vought, known as a conservative firebrand who served as an aide to Vice President Mike Pence when Pence was a member of Congress, played a key role in the budget controversies that engulfed the White House early this year.He reportedly designed Trump's initial proposal for border wall funding and led the decision to continue processing tax refunds during the government shutdown.

Vought's memo on information quality portrays the new guidance as a good government measure. "Prudent decision making depends on reliable, high-quality information," Vought wrote. "Congress has long recognized that federal agencies should make decisions using the best data reasonably available, and Congress has entrusted OMB with the statutory role of ensuring that federal agencies collect, use, and disseminate information that is fit for its intended purpose."

Published Under:

Regulation

Climate Science

Donald Trump

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