What's going on with the Executive Departments

[GreyhoundFan]

Sigh: "Counseled by Industry, Not Staff, E.P.A. Chief Is Off to a Blazing Start"

Spoiler

WASHINGTON — In the four months since he took office as the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt has moved to undo, delay or otherwise block more than 30 environmental rules, a regulatory rollback larger in scope than any other over so short a time in the agency’s 47-year history, according to experts in environmental law.

Mr. Pruitt’s supporters, including President Trump, have hailed his moves as an uprooting of the administrative state and a clearing of onerous regulations that have stymied American business. Environmental advocates have watched in horror as Mr. Pruitt has worked to disable the authority of the agency charged with protecting the nation’s air, water and public health.

But both sides agree: While much of Mr. Trump’s policy agenda is mired in legal and legislative delays, hampered by poor execution and overshadowed by the Russia investigations, the E.P.A. is acting. Mr. Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general who built a career out of suing the agency he now leads, is moving effectively to dismantle the regulations and international agreements that stood as a cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s legacy.

“Just the number of environmental rollbacks in this time frame is astounding,” said Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard. “Pruitt has come in with a real mission. He is much more organized, much more focused than the other cabinet-level officials, who have not really taken charge of their agencies. It’s very striking how much they’ve done.”

Since February, Mr. Pruitt has filed a proposal of intent to undo or weaken Mr. Obama’s climate change regulations, known as the Clean Power Plan. In late June, he filed a legal plan to repeal an Obama-era rule curbing pollution in the nation’s waterways. He delayed a rule that would require fossil fuel companies to rein in leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas wells. He delayed the date by which companies must comply with a rule to prevent explosions and spills at chemical plants. And he reversed a ban on the use of a pesticide that the E.P.A.’s own scientists have said is linked to damage of children’s nervous systems.

In a sign of both Mr. Pruitt’s influence in the White House and the high regard in which Mr. Trump holds him, he will take a leading role in devising the legal path to withdraw from the 194-nation Paris agreement on climate change, a job that would typically fall to lawyers at the State Department.

And he is doing all this largely without the input of the 15,000 career employees at the agency he heads, according to interviews with over 20 current and former E.P.A. senior career staff members.

“I have been consistently informed by multiple career people at E.P.A. that Administrator Pruitt is not meeting with them ahead of making decisions like rolling back these major regulations,” said James J. Jones, who had worked at the agency since the Reagan administration before retiring in January. Mr. Jones, an expert in chemical and pesticide pollution, was appointed by Mr. Obama as the E.P.A.’s assistant administrator for chemical safety in his final years at the agency.

Instead, Mr. Pruitt has outsourced crucial work to a network of lawyers, lobbyists and other allies, especially Republican state attorneys general, a network he worked with closely as the head of the Republican Attorneys General Association. Since 2013, the group has collected $4.2 million from fossil fuel-related companies like Exxon Mobil, Koch Industries, Murray Energy and Southern Company, businesses that also worked closely with Mr. Pruitt in many of the 14 lawsuits he filed against the E.P.A.

Within the agency, Mr. Pruitt relies on the counsel of a small network of political appointees, including a number of former lobbyists and senior industry officials. For example, he tapped Nancy Beck, previously a policy director for the American Chemistry Council, which lobbies on behalf of companies such as Dow and DuPont, to oversee the E.P.A. office charged with enforcing regulations on hazardous chemicals.

“It amounts to a corporate takeover of the agency, in its decision- and policy-making functions,” said Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen, a government watchdog group.

Mr. Pruitt, 49, sees himself as a champion of states’ rights, pressing to diminish the intrusive authority of an overbearing federal agency. Hanging near the fireplace on the wood-paneled walls of his office is a portrait of President James Monroe, who opposed ratifying the Constitution because he said it gave too much power to the federal government.

Mr. Pruitt pushed that message in his first speech to the agency’s staff. “Congress has been very prescriptive in providing, in many instances, a very robust role, an important role of the states,” he said. He did not mention public health or climate change.

Since then, Mr. Pruitt has begun what he calls his “back to basics” agenda for the E.P.A. — one that he has described to multiple people as an effort to rein in the regulatory efforts of the Obama era, which focused on invisible greenhouse gases from tailpipes and smokestacks. Instead, Mr. Pruitt has said, he wants to focus on “tangible” pollution — for example, the Superfund program, which cleans up hazardous waste at old industrial sites.

“I am making it a priority to ensure contaminated sites get cleaned up,” he said. “We will be more hands-on.” (His proposed budget for 2018, however, would cut the Superfund program by about 25 percent.)

Mr. Pruitt made his message explicit in a visit to the Harvey coal mine in Sycamore, Pa., to kick off a “back to basics” promotional tour in April.

“It’s sad that a regulatory body of the government of the United States would declare a war on any part of our economy,” he told the miners. “The regulatory assault is over.”

Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas, who worked closely with Mr. Pruitt when he was Oklahoma’s attorney general to sue the E.P.A., said he was pleased that Mr. Pruitt’s new job hadn’t changed him. On March 1, Mr. Paxton met with Mr. Pruitt to request that the agency withdraw a rule requiring energy companies to collect data on emissions of methane from oil and gas wells. Mr. Paxton delivered the letter with the signatures of 11 attorneys general, laying out the case for walking back the rule.

“I personally handed him the letter, and the next day the rule was personally withdrawn,” Mr. Paxton said.

Meanwhile, the agency’s career scientists and legal experts say they have been largely cut out of the process. Senior staff members with decades of experience in environmental law and science said they had been consulted rarely on the agency’s major decisions to undo environmental protections.

It is not unusual for E.P.A. administrators to consult with lobbyists, state officials, and industry and advocacy groups as they develop major policy proposals. But veteran E.P.A. employees say Mr. Pruitt has gone much further in cutting out career staff members.

“Going back to the Reagan administration, I was never aware of a substantive decision made without input from career staff,” said Mr. Jones, the former head of the E.P.A.’s chemical regulation office. “It’s hard to imagine that you have all the relevant facts if you’re not meeting with the people who have a greater depth of knowledge on these issues than almost anyone in the country.”

Some career E.P.A. employees said they had been consulted, particularly in the writing of legal language to execute Mr. Pruitt’s agenda. After Mr. Pruitt drafted his plan to repeal Mr. Obama’s rule on pollution in the nation’s waterways, he turned to the E.P.A.’s legal office to help ensure the language was bulletproof, said Kevin Minoli, the agency’s acting general counsel.

“As lawyers, it’s not our job to choose the ultimate policy decision,” said Mr. Minoli, who has served as an E.P.A. lawyer since the end of the Clinton administration. “As lawyers, our job is to help articulate the policy in the most legally defensible way possible.”

But Mr. Pruitt’s main source of counsel on industry regulations appears to be the industries he regulates. An excerpt from his calendar for Feb. 21 to March 31, acquired through the Freedom of Information Act by the energy trade publication E & E News, details multiple meetings with chief executives and lobbyists from oil, gas, chemical, agribusiness and other industries regulated by the E.P.A., as well as with Mr. Pruitt’s personally appointed political staff — but few meetings with career employees or environmental groups.

Leaders of at least three major environmental and public health groups — the Audubon Society, the Nature Conservancy and the American Lung Association — have had meetings with Mr. Pruitt, they said. E.P.A. officials said he had also met with advocacy groups such as the American Public Health Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the March of Dimes, the National Medical Association, the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of American, and the National Environmental Health Association.

But the influence of those groups, which have pushed to retain environmental rules, appears to be outweighed by the counsel of industry groups.

Dow Chemical Company had pushed the E.P.A. to reconsider an Obama-era ban on the use of chlorpyrifos, a pesticide that the E.P.A.’s scientists have concluded causes developmental damage in children. On March 30, Mr. Pruitt reversed the ban.

On March 13, Mr. Pruitt met with agriculture lobbyists, including Dale Moore, executive director of the American Farm Bureau Federation, which has lobbied heavily for the repeal of an Obama-era regulation that could restrict the use of fertilizers near waterways. Last month, Mr. Pruitt filed a draft plan to repeal the Waters of the United States Rule.

On March 22, he had dinner at the Trump International Hotel in Washington with 45 members of the board of directors of the American Petroleum Institute, a body composed largely of chief executive officers of the oil and gas industry. At the time, oil and gas companies were pushing the E.P.A. to roll back a set of rules on methane leaks from drilling wells, which the industry estimates could cost it over $170 million.

On June 13, Mr. Pruitt filed a proposal to delay those regulations by two years, and the agency is expected to rewrite them. In the filing, he noted that the E.P.A. had concluded that a delay of the pollution rules “may have a disproportionate effect on children.” But he also said the rules would come at a significant cost to the oil and gas industry.

“The nice thing is,” Mr. Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, said, “now we feel like we’re being heard.”

...

This is just maddening.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Cabinet secretaries’ tough task: Lack of funding, support for agency missions"

Spoiler

As the Trump administration sets out to overhaul the federal government, a small group of Cabinet secretaries may have the most daunting task. They are running departments with missions they have sometimes disparaged, with employees who are secretly — and on occasion publicly — hostile.

Across the agencies, these Cabinet members have made very public efforts to court their staff, yet frequently are crafting key initiatives in private. They are forming alliances where they can and skirmishing where they cannot. For the most part they have erected small, secluded citadels within each department, where they can advance policies that reflect the priorities of the ­president.

At the Education Department, Secretary Betsy DeVos has been trying to build rapport with a leery staff, dining at times in the employee cafeteria and convening a group of LGBT employees to talk about hot-button issues relating to transgender students. But some employees complain they are being cut out of decision-making. The head of the financial aid division resigned in May, warning in a farewell email of severe constraints being placed on the ability of career officials to “make decisions and deliver on the organization’s mission.”

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has invited staffers to his grand office overlooking the Mall to imbibe IPA beer from his home state of Montana and has trumpeted a new policy of allowing employees’ dogs to roam the department’s hallways on selected days. But as soon as government rules allowed, he reassigned dozens of Senior Executive Service career staff members without consultation or notice, relocating some to other parts of the country.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson has braved rush-hour crowds at the L’Enfant Plaza Metro stop to greet employees and shake their hands. But when the agency decided to reconsider a controversial HUD policy granting transgender people access to sex-segregated shelters of their choice, Carson surprised the staffers who had crafted the policy by excluding them from the discussion.

White House spokeswoman Natalie Strom said in an email that President Trump’s Cabinet members are determined to overhaul the way their agencies ­operate.

The president “has recruited an incredibly talented group of individuals to serve in his Cabinet — one of most visible and active Cabinets in recent history,” Strom said. She added, “He has instructed them to work with both political appointees and career employees to streamline the federal government to make it smarter, more effective and more responsive to the American people.”

Among all the Cabinet members, DeVos and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt have faced the most vocal resistance from employees, despite efforts to win them over.

Unlike her predecessors, DeVos no longer uses the private, express elevator to reach her seventh-floor suite, taking the same ones that everyone else, and has given up the agency’s private chef, according to spokeswoman Liz Hill.

But some employees dismiss her lunches in the cafeteria as photo ops.

DeVos has made more of an impact with her decision to rescind a department policy requiring school districts to let transgender students use restrooms and other facilities of their choice. Her decision to reverse that policy — coupled with her refusal to say whether she would block federal funding for private schools that discriminate against LGBT students — has prompted some agency employees to begin talking about resigning.

One staffer who recently quit said he had been disappointed not only by DeVos’s refusal to stand up for LGBT students at a Senate hearing in May, but also by the way he said she refrained from committing to protect African American students and students with disabilities. He criticized “the few and general ways the secretary has claimed to be standing up for students and families.”

DeVos, who has called such accusations “hurtful,” says she is opposed to discrimination of any kind and that any school accepting federal funds must abide by federal law.

At the EPA, Pruitt’s relationship with the agency was destined to be difficult from the outset because as Oklahoma attorney general, he had sued the EPA more than a dozen times, challenging its regulations policing greenhouse gas emissions, toxic emissions from power plants and the dredging of waterways.

Pruitt has clashed with many staffers over the issue of climate change, in part by questioning the extent to which human activity is driving global warming. Some employees at the agency’s headquarters grouse about having to walk by a sign featuring Pruitt shaking hands with miners. When Pruitt’s appointees directed that the agency take down its climate Web pages containing scientific data and policy details, career officials initially balked. The pages have been removed from the EPA’s website.

Employees at the agency’s regional office in Chicago have participated in nearly a half-dozen public protests over the agency’s budget and administration policy decisions, including the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement.

Still, EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman said that Pruitt has found “the vast majority of the staff are committed to working with us,” and he is working to follow the agency’s statutory authority. She added that he “doesn’t experience the tension that is drummed up in the press.”

At the Energy Department, Secretary Rick Perry is running an agency that he had promised, as a presidential candidate in 2012, to eliminate. (He had famously forgotten the Energy Department’s name during a presidential debate.)

Since taking over, he has kept a lower profile than many other Cabinet secretaries. But Perry has also praised some aspects of the agency, such as its national ­laboratories.

“It’s good to be able to realize when you’ve made an error and admit it,” Perry said during a stop at Oak Ridge National Laboratory last month. “I’m very happy that I’ve had the opportunity to be associated with this agency now.”

The spending cuts included in the administration’s budget, drafted with limited input from the agencies themselves, have left many Cabinet members in a difficult position as they defend the White House’s plan while in some cases seeking to soften the blow.

DeVos has backed a budget proposal that would slash more than 13 percent of the Education Department’s budget while investing in her top priority, school choice.

Pruitt privately pressed for less draconian cuts than those proposed by the White House but was rebuffed, according to senior administration officials briefed on the process. Once the White House settled on a 31 percent cut in the EPA’s budget, Pruitt defended the reductions, although he identified a handful of programs he hopes Congress will restore.

After initial budget figures were released, both Carson and Zinke vowed to restore some of the money that was cut. Carson urged his staff in a memo to disregard the “preliminary numbers” — only to see the final reductions be even deeper. HUD’s budget is to be reduced by 16 percent and Interior’s by 12 percent. Zinke said last month that he plans to eliminate 4,000 jobs. Officials have declined to detail what, if anything, Carson and Zinke did to push for more ­money.

Carson and Zinke seem to have made some inroads, although modest, with their employees.

Carson has tried to get to know his staff, holding events at least once a week at agency offices across the country, including job fairs and town halls for career employees, according to HUD spokesman Raffi Williams. After Carson’s first speech to his staff, some employees grilled him about his priorities. But one staffer, who did not give her name, praised him for addressing the “uncertainties” that she had her colleagues had about the new administration.

Williams said that during his frequent events with staff, Carson “always thanks the staff for their hard work and takes questions from any employee who wants to ask,” adding that the letter calling for a change in the department's policy on transgender shelter applicants “ended up being received by the Secretary’s office because it was addressed to him.”

Many HUD employees, however, remain skeptical of Carson because of his lack of expertise in housing, his support for scaling back long-standing programs, and his comments in a radio interview last month that poverty is a “state of mind.”

Zinke has sought to boost morale through several initiatives, including a new zero-tolerance policy for sexual misconduct and efforts to secure more comfortable employee uniforms.

But he has upset some of his career employees by asking them to brief him on Interior policies, such as regulating oil and gas drilling in national parks and national wildlife refuges, without telling them that those policies were about to be reversed.

Zinke, perhaps more than any other Cabinet secretary, reflects the Trump administration’s ambivalence about the operations of federal agencies and the people who work in them.

He is quick to praise employees in public, at times tweeting out a “bravo zulu,” the Navy version of a shout-out. But he also has held them up for public ridicule.

Addressing a meeting in June of the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association, Zinke mocked elements of his department’s “bureaucracy” for standing in the way of change.

“When you start to drain the swamp, you know what happens?” Zinke asked. “You start to expose serpents.”

Every single day, I wake up, hoping that the last nine months have been a bad dream. Then, I realize they actually happened. Every.single.day. I am planning to go on a cruise early in 2018, I keep trying to focus on that, so I don't get even more depressed.

[Howl]

An in the White House, über punk von Führer Stephen Miller is trying to give marching orders to Rex Tillerson on immigration.  Apparently it didn't go well, but likely Miller prevailed.  

However, there was serious shouting (described as a verbal explosion) on another occasion.  Report: Tillerson Explodes At Top Trump Aide After Mounting Tensions

Quote

 

Tillerson allegedly shouted at DeStefano in front of White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, top aide Jared Kushner and Tillerson’s chief of staff Margaret Peterlin, and told him he didn’t want DeStefano to have “any role in staffing” the State Department, according to a Politico sources who were familiar with the meeting.

Tillerson was so infuriated that Kushner told Peterlin his behavior was unprofessional and needed to be addressed, Politico’s sources said.

The outburst comes after months of Tillerson reportedly expressing frustration with his new role. While President Donald Trump promised him autonomy in his department, Tillerson has complained about the White House trying to control his hiring process, Trump’s tweets and the working condition in the West Wing, according to Politico’s report.

 

How ironic, coming from Kushner, considering his close association with an uncouth FiL who is subject to periodic meltdowns.  Can it be long before Tillerson decides he needs to devote more time to his family and his quarter horses? 

The dysfunction in this White House is simply epic.  In fact, I can't think of any aspect of the Trump administration that is fully functional.

[candygirl200413]

*rolls on the ground while screaming after reading that article of how more of a hot mess this entire cabinet is*.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Cue the twitter tantrum: "Federal court blocks Trump EPA on air pollution"

Spoiler

An appeals court Monday struck down the Environmental Protection Agency’s two-year suspension of new emission standards on oil and gas wells, a decision that could set back the Trump administration’s broad legal strategy for rolling back Obama-era rules.

In a 2-to-1 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit concluded that the EPA had the right to reconsider a 2016 rule limiting methane and smog-forming pollutants emitted by oil and gas wells but could not delay the effective date for two years while it sought to rewrite the regulation.

“The court’s ruling is yet another reminder, now in the context of environmental protection, that the federal judiciary remains a significant obstacle to the president’s desire to order immediate change,” Richard Lazarus, an environmental-law professor at Harvard Law School, said in an email.

“The D.C. Circuit’s ruling today makes clear that neither the president nor his EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, can by fiat unilaterally and instantaneously repeal or otherwise stay the effectiveness of the environmental protection rules put into place during the Obama administration,” he added.

The EPA, along with the American Petroleum Institute, had argued that the stay Pruitt imposed last month was not subject to judicial review, because it did not constitute final action on the rule. In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Pruitt said, “Just because you provide a time for implementation or compliance that’s longer doesn’t mean that you’re going to necessarily reverse or redirect the rule.”

But the court rejected that interpretation, writing, “EPA’s stay, in other words, is essentially an order delaying the rule’s effective date, and this court has held that such orders are tantamount to amending or revoking a rule.”

The ruling could affect myriad agencies that have delayed the Obama administration’s regulations, some for long periods. And it underscores the extent to which activists are turning to the courts to block President Trump’s most ambitious policy shifts.

Last month, for example, the Interior Department announced that it would delay compliance with a rule finalized in November that would limit methane burned off from drilling operations on federal and tribal lands. And the Labor Department just proposed delaying until December a rule that was set to take effect July 1 that would require companies to electronically report injuries and illnesses.

“The court says you can consider changing the rules but you have to do it the normal way, with a comment period,” said David Doniger, director of the climate and clean-air program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “You can’t yank it out of existence on your say-so.”

Lazarus added, “Changing the rules midstream can occur only after a thorough administrative review, including public notice and opportunity to comment, that ensures that there are good reasons for the change, backed up by sound policy and science.”

EPA spokeswoman Amy Graham said in an email that the agency was “reviewing the opinion and examining our options” in light of the decision.

The rule the EPA had sought to suspend had imposed the first-ever federal limits on leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and natural-gas wells. It applied only to new or modified wells. The agency had previously projected that the rule would prevent 11 million metric tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions by 2025. Doniger said it would, so far, apply to about 11,000 wells drilled since September 2015.

Many of the industry’s largest companies have been working with the Environmental Defense Fund to measure leakage through the natural-gas system, including wells, pipelines, power plants and homes. The EDF said that reducing leaks would keep large quantities of smog-forming volatile organic compounds, cancer-causing benzene, and methane from being emitted into the air.

Pruitt has moved to suspend or revoke several other rules adopted during the Obama administration, including a two-year delay on a regulation aimed at minimizing chemical accidents like the 2013 ammonium nitrate explosion at a plant in West, Tex.

Monday’s court ruling was sharply worded at points, with the judges dismissing “the flimsiness” of the EPA’s “claim that regulated entities had no opportunity to comment” on one aspect of the methane rule.

“The administrative record thus makes clear that industry groups had ample opportunity to comment on all four issues on which EPA granted reconsideration, and indeed, that in several instances the agency incorporated those comments directly into the final rule,” the judges wrote.

Reid Porter, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, said in an email that the suspension of the rule would have allowed for “regulatory certainty” and that an EPA report in March concluded that methane emissions from petroleum production had already declined roughly 8 percent from 2014 levels.

“API supports revision of the 2016 New Source Performance Standards, and we are hopeful that the eventual outcome recognizes the science, allowing for revisions to the flawed rule,” Porter said.

Even as one aspect of the administration’s push to promote domestic energy production faced a legal setback Monday, it advanced on a separate front. The Interior Department launched a new offshore-leasing planning process for 2019 to 2024, a move that could open up new areas for drilling in the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific oceans, as well as the Gulf of Mexico.

In a Federal Register notice published Friday, the Interior Department invited public comment on a plan that would “replace the 2017-2022 Program” established during the Obama administration and represent “a key aspect of the implementation of President Donald J. Trump’s America-First Offshore Energy Strategy.”

 

[47of74]

On 7/2/2017 at 8:57 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

"Cabinet secretaries’ tough task: Lack of funding, support for agency missions"

  Reveal hidden contents

As the Trump administration sets out to overhaul the federal government, a small group of Cabinet secretaries may have the most daunting task. They are running departments with missions they have sometimes disparaged, with employees who are secretly — and on occasion publicly — hostile.

Across the agencies, these Cabinet members have made very public efforts to court their staff, yet frequently are crafting key initiatives in private. They are forming alliances where they can and skirmishing where they cannot. For the most part they have erected small, secluded citadels within each department, where they can advance policies that reflect the priorities of the ­president.

At the Education Department, Secretary Betsy DeVos has been trying to build rapport with a leery staff, dining at times in the employee cafeteria and convening a group of LGBT employees to talk about hot-button issues relating to transgender students. But some employees complain they are being cut out of decision-making. The head of the financial aid division resigned in May, warning in a farewell email of severe constraints being placed on the ability of career officials to “make decisions and deliver on the organization’s mission.”

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has invited staffers to his grand office overlooking the Mall to imbibe IPA beer from his home state of Montana and has trumpeted a new policy of allowing employees’ dogs to roam the department’s hallways on selected days. But as soon as government rules allowed, he reassigned dozens of Senior Executive Service career staff members without consultation or notice, relocating some to other parts of the country.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson has braved rush-hour crowds at the L’Enfant Plaza Metro stop to greet employees and shake their hands. But when the agency decided to reconsider a controversial HUD policy granting transgender people access to sex-segregated shelters of their choice, Carson surprised the staffers who had crafted the policy by excluding them from the discussion.

White House spokeswoman Natalie Strom said in an email that President Trump’s Cabinet members are determined to overhaul the way their agencies ­operate.

The president “has recruited an incredibly talented group of individuals to serve in his Cabinet — one of most visible and active Cabinets in recent history,” Strom said. She added, “He has instructed them to work with both political appointees and career employees to streamline the federal government to make it smarter, more effective and more responsive to the American people.”

Among all the Cabinet members, DeVos and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt have faced the most vocal resistance from employees, despite efforts to win them over.

Unlike her predecessors, DeVos no longer uses the private, express elevator to reach her seventh-floor suite, taking the same ones that everyone else, and has given up the agency’s private chef, according to spokeswoman Liz Hill.

But some employees dismiss her lunches in the cafeteria as photo ops.

DeVos has made more of an impact with her decision to rescind a department policy requiring school districts to let transgender students use restrooms and other facilities of their choice. Her decision to reverse that policy — coupled with her refusal to say whether she would block federal funding for private schools that discriminate against LGBT students — has prompted some agency employees to begin talking about resigning.

One staffer who recently quit said he had been disappointed not only by DeVos’s refusal to stand up for LGBT students at a Senate hearing in May, but also by the way he said she refrained from committing to protect African American students and students with disabilities. He criticized “the few and general ways the secretary has claimed to be standing up for students and families.”

DeVos, who has called such accusations “hurtful,” says she is opposed to discrimination of any kind and that any school accepting federal funds must abide by federal law.

At the EPA, Pruitt’s relationship with the agency was destined to be difficult from the outset because as Oklahoma attorney general, he had sued the EPA more than a dozen times, challenging its regulations policing greenhouse gas emissions, toxic emissions from power plants and the dredging of waterways.

Pruitt has clashed with many staffers over the issue of climate change, in part by questioning the extent to which human activity is driving global warming. Some employees at the agency’s headquarters grouse about having to walk by a sign featuring Pruitt shaking hands with miners. When Pruitt’s appointees directed that the agency take down its climate Web pages containing scientific data and policy details, career officials initially balked. The pages have been removed from the EPA’s website.

Employees at the agency’s regional office in Chicago have participated in nearly a half-dozen public protests over the agency’s budget and administration policy decisions, including the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement.

Still, EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman said that Pruitt has found “the vast majority of the staff are committed to working with us,” and he is working to follow the agency’s statutory authority. She added that he “doesn’t experience the tension that is drummed up in the press.”

At the Energy Department, Secretary Rick Perry is running an agency that he had promised, as a presidential candidate in 2012, to eliminate. (He had famously forgotten the Energy Department’s name during a presidential debate.)

Since taking over, he has kept a lower profile than many other Cabinet secretaries. But Perry has also praised some aspects of the agency, such as its national ­laboratories.

“It’s good to be able to realize when you’ve made an error and admit it,” Perry said during a stop at Oak Ridge National Laboratory last month. “I’m very happy that I’ve had the opportunity to be associated with this agency now.”

The spending cuts included in the administration’s budget, drafted with limited input from the agencies themselves, have left many Cabinet members in a difficult position as they defend the White House’s plan while in some cases seeking to soften the blow.

DeVos has backed a budget proposal that would slash more than 13 percent of the Education Department’s budget while investing in her top priority, school choice.

Pruitt privately pressed for less draconian cuts than those proposed by the White House but was rebuffed, according to senior administration officials briefed on the process. Once the White House settled on a 31 percent cut in the EPA’s budget, Pruitt defended the reductions, although he identified a handful of programs he hopes Congress will restore.

After initial budget figures were released, both Carson and Zinke vowed to restore some of the money that was cut. Carson urged his staff in a memo to disregard the “preliminary numbers” — only to see the final reductions be even deeper. HUD’s budget is to be reduced by 16 percent and Interior’s by 12 percent. Zinke said last month that he plans to eliminate 4,000 jobs. Officials have declined to detail what, if anything, Carson and Zinke did to push for more ­money.

Carson and Zinke seem to have made some inroads, although modest, with their employees.

Carson has tried to get to know his staff, holding events at least once a week at agency offices across the country, including job fairs and town halls for career employees, according to HUD spokesman Raffi Williams. After Carson’s first speech to his staff, some employees grilled him about his priorities. But one staffer, who did not give her name, praised him for addressing the “uncertainties” that she had her colleagues had about the new administration.

Williams said that during his frequent events with staff, Carson “always thanks the staff for their hard work and takes questions from any employee who wants to ask,” adding that the letter calling for a change in the department's policy on transgender shelter applicants “ended up being received by the Secretary’s office because it was addressed to him.”

Many HUD employees, however, remain skeptical of Carson because of his lack of expertise in housing, his support for scaling back long-standing programs, and his comments in a radio interview last month that poverty is a “state of mind.”

Zinke has sought to boost morale through several initiatives, including a new zero-tolerance policy for sexual misconduct and efforts to secure more comfortable employee uniforms.

But he has upset some of his career employees by asking them to brief him on Interior policies, such as regulating oil and gas drilling in national parks and national wildlife refuges, without telling them that those policies were about to be reversed.

Zinke, perhaps more than any other Cabinet secretary, reflects the Trump administration’s ambivalence about the operations of federal agencies and the people who work in them.

He is quick to praise employees in public, at times tweeting out a “bravo zulu,” the Navy version of a shout-out. But he also has held them up for public ridicule.

Addressing a meeting in June of the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association, Zinke mocked elements of his department’s “bureaucracy” for standing in the way of change.

“When you start to drain the swamp, you know what happens?” Zinke asked. “You start to expose serpents.”

Every single day, I wake up, hoping that the last nine months have been a bad dream. Then, I realize they actually happened. Every.single.day. I am planning to go on a cruise early in 2018, I keep trying to focus on that, so I don't get even more depressed.

I'm focusing on my upcoming surgery and school coming up in a couple months in order to keep from going nuts reading about all the shit fuck head and his groupies are doing.

[Childless]

On 7/3/2017 at 9:09 AM, Howl said:

An in the White House, über punk von Führer Stephen Miller is trying to give marching orders to Rex Tillerson on immigration.  Apparently it didn't go well, but likely Miller prevailed.  

However, there was serious shouting (described as a verbal explosion) on another occasion.  Report: Tillerson Explodes At Top Trump Aide After Mounting Tensions

How ironic, coming from Kushner, considering his close association with an uncouth FiL who is subject to periodic meltdowns.  Can it be long before Tillerson decides he needs to devote more time to his family and his quarter horses? 

The dysfunction in this White House is simply epic.  In fact, I can't think of any aspect of the Trump administration that is fully functional.

Not quite sure how Tillerson convinced himself he would have autonomy.  Trump has to have his nose shoved into everything even if it doesn't pertain to him.  This kind of shit is why Trump is having issues staffing his administration.  No one wants to work in such a toxic environment for a lunatic that changes his opinions more often than he changes his underwear.

[47of74]

Awww poor put upon Nikki

[GreyhoundFan]

"Justice Official Quits Due To White House Conduct"

Spoiler

A top Justice Department official has quit, saying that she could no longer hold companies to standards that Donald Trump is not meeting.

Hui Chen, a corporate crime expert in the fraud unit of the DOJ's criminal division, discussed her reasons for leaving in a June 25 post on LinkedIn.

"Trying to hold companies to standards that our current administration is not living up to was creating a cognitive dissonance that I could not overcome," she said in the post. "To sit across the table from companies and question how committed they were to ethics and compliance felt not only hypocritical, but very much like shuffling the deck chair on the Titanic."

She continued: "Even as I engaged in...questioning and evaluations, on my mind were the numerous lawsuits pending against the President of the United States for everything from violations of the Constitution to conflict of interest, the ongoing investigations of potentially treasonous conducts, and the investigators and prosecutors fired for their pursuits of principles and facts."

Chen added: "Those are conducts I would not tolerate seeing in a company, yet I worked under an administration that engaged in exactly those conduct. I wanted no more part in it."

Since quitting, Chen has been vocally critical of the Trump Administration, especially on Twitter:

...

She sounds like an honorable person. Obviously that's not what the tangerine toddler wants.

[GrumpyGran]

16 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Awww poor put upon Nikki
 

 

 

 

Your choice, Bitch. No one held your AK-47 to your head and made you take the job.

And in other news, Steve Bannon is apparently out of hibernation? So if you screw up in the White House, you don't go to the dog house, they literally put you to sleep for a while? Now I'm picturing a room in the basement with those glass tube-like things you see in sci-fi movies, with various people in them "hibernating."

[GreyhoundFan]

"18 states sue Betsy DeVos over delay of student loan protections"

Spoiler

Eighteen states and the District of Columbia filed suit against Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Thursday over her delay of regulations meant to protect federal student loan borrowers defrauded by their schools.

The lawsuit in Federal District Court in D.C., led by Massachusetts and joined by 18 other Democratic attorneys general, accuses DeVos of illegally delaying the regulations aimed at predatory colleges, which were finalized by the Obama administration and had been set to take effect on July 1.

The rules, known as “borrower defense to repayment,” are aimed at making it easier for defrauded student loan borrowers to seek debt forgiveness. They also prohibit colleges from requiring students to resolve complaints against their school through arbitration rather than in court.

The Trump administration last month delayed implementation of the rules, citing a legal challenge by a California association representing for-profit colleges. DeVos said at the time the rule created “a muddled process that's unfair to students and schools, and puts taxpayers on the hook for significant costs.” The Education Department has said it will begin a process to rewrite the rules later this year.

The state attorneys general argue in their lawsuit that DeVos’ delay of the rules violates the Administrative Procedures Act, and they are asking a federal court to order the Trump administration to implement the rules.

“Since day one, Secretary DeVos has sided with for-profit school executives against students and families drowning in unaffordable student loans,” Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey said in a statement. “Her decision to cancel vital protections for students and taxpayers is a betrayal of her office’s responsibility and a violation of federal law.”

A spokeswoman for DeVos said she is reviewing the lawsuit and would not immediately comment.

Yet another lawsuit has been filed against this sham administration.

[Childless]

18 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Awww poor put upon Nikki
 

 

 

 

Feel free to quit Nikki.  Otherwise, quit your whining and do the job you're being paid to do.

[GreyhoundFan]

"U.S. Government Ethics Chief Will Resign, Casting Uncertainty Over Agency"

Spoiler

WASHINGTON — Walter M. Shaub Jr., the government’s top ethics watchdog who has repeatedly gone head-to-head with the Trump administration over conflicts of interest, said on Thursday that he was calling it quits.

Mr. Shaub’s five-year term as the director of the Office of Government Ethics is not set to expire until January, but with little chance of renewal and an appealing offer in hand from a nonpartisan advocacy group, he said the time was right to leave.

“There isn’t much more I could accomplish at the Office of Government Ethics, given the current situation,” Mr. Shaub said. “O.G.E.’s recent experiences have made it clear that the ethics program needs to be strengthened.”

...

His new position, he said, will allow him to advocate freely for such reforms.

In a short letter informing President Trump of his decision, Mr. Shaub did not offer a specific reason for his departure but extolled “the principle that public service is a public trust, requiring employees to place loyalty to the Constitution, the laws and ethical principles above private gain.” He had not been pressured to resign, he said.

In departing ahead of schedule, Mr. Shaub has handed Mr. Trump an opportunity to begin putting his mark on the agency overseeing the federal government’s vast ethics program, including that of the White House. The office’s director traditionally has had wide latitude to set its priorities, its tone in working with the White House and other federal agencies and, perhaps most important, how to interpret the country’s ethics laws.

The impending vacancy is all but certain to raise fears among Democrats and those in the small world of government ethics who see the office under Mr. Shaub as an important political bulwark against conflicts of interest in the upper echelons of the government. To Mr. Trump’s defenders, who have seen Mr. Shaub, an Obama appointee, as politically motivated, it is more welcome news.

The intensity of feeling over what is usually an obscure job speaks to the central role ethics have come to play in Mr. Trump’s Washington, where the vast holdings of the president and his cabinet, as well as an influx of advisers from businesses and lobbying firms, have raised a rash of accusations of conflicts of interest.

It is the job of the ethics office, a creation of a post-Watergate Congress, to work with a web of ethics officials at each agency to help those entering the government sidestep potential conflicts. The office guides each administration’s political appointees though financial disclosure requirements and creates agreements to restrict participation in deliberations over topics they handled for paying clients.

Mr. Shaub, 46, has faced an uncertain future at the agency since Mr. Trump took office in January. In the weeks between the president’s unexpected election victory and his inauguration, Mr. Shaub had taken an extraordinary gamble: He advocated very publicly on Twitter, and in a rare public speech, that Mr. Trump liquidate his vast business and personal holdings. The arrangement, Mr. Shaub argued, was the only truly ethical option.

Mr. Trump did not heed his advice, and by the middle of January, Mr. Shaub thought he might be fired. To minimize his attachment to the position, he packed up the personal possessions that filled his office.

But he was not fired, even as he continued to spar with Mr. Trump’s aides over a range of ethical concerns, including the ethics office’s authority to exercise oversight of the White House.

In February, he recommended that the White House discipline Kellyanne Conway, a top adviser to the president, after she made an on-air endorsement of the clothing line of Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter. The White House Counsel’s Office disagreed and took no disciplinary action.

More recently, Mr. Shaub and the administration fought over a routine request by the ethics office for copies of waivers issued to White House appointees to work in the Trump administration. The Office of Management and Budget initially balked at the request, challenging Mr. Shaub’s legal authority even to ask for the information and asking him to withdraw it. After Mr. Shaub fired back with a stern 10-page letter shooting down the argument, the White House backed down.

The White House eventually released the waivers, showing it had granted at least a dozen exemptions for aides to work on policy matters they had handled as lobbyists or to engage with former colleagues in private-sector jobs. Mr. Shaub objected to the fact that many of the waivers were undated and unsigned, and that some gave approvals for acts retroactively.

Mr. Shaub, who served for about a decade as a career civil servant at the agency before being appointed director, said his role had always been politically neutral. Rather than fighting Mr. Trump, as some critics have suggested, Mr. Shaub has said his decisions to speak out have been motivated by a desire to defend an ethics program that traditionally has counted on support from Democrats and Republicans alike. He said he spoke publicly only after other more traditional channels were exhausted.

Mr. Shaub will leave the agency in this month to take up his new position as a senior director for ethics at the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, a nonpartisan group that advocates campaign finance reform and litigates voting rights cases. Mr. Shaub will have more freedom to comment on the government’s ethics program and propose changes to it.

A permanent replacement for Mr. Shaub would require confirmation in the Senate, where Democrats would probably use confirmation hearings to raise grievances about what they see as Mr. Trump’s own potential conflicts of interest.

The White House could also simply leave the position to an acting director indefinitely. Shelley K. Finlayson, the office’s chief of staff, is first in line for the acting director position, but the law governing such vacancies also allows the White House to choose from among the office’s upper ranks.

It's too bad that another qualified, honest person has felt the need to escape.

[fraurosena]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"U.S. Government Ethics Chief Will Resign, Casting Uncertainty Over Agency"

  Reveal hidden contents

WASHINGTON — Walter M. Shaub Jr., the government’s top ethics watchdog who has repeatedly gone head-to-head with the Trump administration over conflicts of interest, said on Thursday that he was calling it quits.

Mr. Shaub’s five-year term as the director of the Office of Government Ethics is not set to expire until January, but with little chance of renewal and an appealing offer in hand from a nonpartisan advocacy group, he said the time was right to leave.

“There isn’t much more I could accomplish at the Office of Government Ethics, given the current situation,” Mr. Shaub said. “O.G.E.’s recent experiences have made it clear that the ethics program needs to be strengthened.”

...

His new position, he said, will allow him to advocate freely for such reforms.

In a short letter informing President Trump of his decision, Mr. Shaub did not offer a specific reason for his departure but extolled “the principle that public service is a public trust, requiring employees to place loyalty to the Constitution, the laws and ethical principles above private gain.” He had not been pressured to resign, he said.

In departing ahead of schedule, Mr. Shaub has handed Mr. Trump an opportunity to begin putting his mark on the agency overseeing the federal government’s vast ethics program, including that of the White House. The office’s director traditionally has had wide latitude to set its priorities, its tone in working with the White House and other federal agencies and, perhaps most important, how to interpret the country’s ethics laws.

The impending vacancy is all but certain to raise fears among Democrats and those in the small world of government ethics who see the office under Mr. Shaub as an important political bulwark against conflicts of interest in the upper echelons of the government. To Mr. Trump’s defenders, who have seen Mr. Shaub, an Obama appointee, as politically motivated, it is more welcome news.

The intensity of feeling over what is usually an obscure job speaks to the central role ethics have come to play in Mr. Trump’s Washington, where the vast holdings of the president and his cabinet, as well as an influx of advisers from businesses and lobbying firms, have raised a rash of accusations of conflicts of interest.

It is the job of the ethics office, a creation of a post-Watergate Congress, to work with a web of ethics officials at each agency to help those entering the government sidestep potential conflicts. The office guides each administration’s political appointees though financial disclosure requirements and creates agreements to restrict participation in deliberations over topics they handled for paying clients.

Mr. Shaub, 46, has faced an uncertain future at the agency since Mr. Trump took office in January. In the weeks between the president’s unexpected election victory and his inauguration, Mr. Shaub had taken an extraordinary gamble: He advocated very publicly on Twitter, and in a rare public speech, that Mr. Trump liquidate his vast business and personal holdings. The arrangement, Mr. Shaub argued, was the only truly ethical option.

Mr. Trump did not heed his advice, and by the middle of January, Mr. Shaub thought he might be fired. To minimize his attachment to the position, he packed up the personal possessions that filled his office.

But he was not fired, even as he continued to spar with Mr. Trump’s aides over a range of ethical concerns, including the ethics office’s authority to exercise oversight of the White House.

In February, he recommended that the White House discipline Kellyanne Conway, a top adviser to the president, after she made an on-air endorsement of the clothing line of Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter. The White House Counsel’s Office disagreed and took no disciplinary action.

More recently, Mr. Shaub and the administration fought over a routine request by the ethics office for copies of waivers issued to White House appointees to work in the Trump administration. The Office of Management and Budget initially balked at the request, challenging Mr. Shaub’s legal authority even to ask for the information and asking him to withdraw it. After Mr. Shaub fired back with a stern 10-page letter shooting down the argument, the White House backed down.

The White House eventually released the waivers, showing it had granted at least a dozen exemptions for aides to work on policy matters they had handled as lobbyists or to engage with former colleagues in private-sector jobs. Mr. Shaub objected to the fact that many of the waivers were undated and unsigned, and that some gave approvals for acts retroactively.

Mr. Shaub, who served for about a decade as a career civil servant at the agency before being appointed director, said his role had always been politically neutral. Rather than fighting Mr. Trump, as some critics have suggested, Mr. Shaub has said his decisions to speak out have been motivated by a desire to defend an ethics program that traditionally has counted on support from Democrats and Republicans alike. He said he spoke publicly only after other more traditional channels were exhausted.

Mr. Shaub will leave the agency in this month to take up his new position as a senior director for ethics at the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, a nonpartisan group that advocates campaign finance reform and litigates voting rights cases. Mr. Shaub will have more freedom to comment on the government’s ethics program and propose changes to it.

A permanent replacement for Mr. Shaub would require confirmation in the Senate, where Democrats would probably use confirmation hearings to raise grievances about what they see as Mr. Trump’s own potential conflicts of interest.

The White House could also simply leave the position to an acting director indefinitely. Shelley K. Finlayson, the office’s chief of staff, is first in line for the acting director position, but the law governing such vacancies also allows the White House to choose from among the office’s upper ranks.

It's too bad that another qualified, honest person has felt the need to escape.

You know, I get it, I really do, that people are resigning and fleeing this administration.

However... Isn't it also precisely playing into their hands? Isn't the complete and utter destruction of government the sole purpose of the alt-right anti-gubmint cretins like Bannon? 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Rick Perry offered a ‘little economics lesson.’ It didn’t go so well."

Spoiler

Speaking at a coal-fired power plant in Maidsville, W.Va., on Thursday, Energy Secretary Rick Perry made a strange argument about supply and demand, seeming to confuse the relationship between two of the essential forces in the economy.

“Here's a little economics lesson: supply and demand,” Perry said, according to Taylor Kuykendall of Standard & Poor's. “You put the supply out there, and demand will follow.”

People often talk about supply and demand in economics, but not in the way Perry used the terms. In essence, supply refers to whether goods and services are readily available on the market, and demand refers to how badly consumers want those products. Just supplying a product does not create demand for it.

If Perry was suggesting that no matter how much coal the industry produces, there will be demand for it, he was clearly mistaken. Of course, demand for coal — or any other item — is not infinite. People will only buy so much of it at a given price, and producers will only be able to sell more if they bring down the price.

Another possible interpretation of Perry's odd remark is that he might have been repeating a theory that was once widely accepted among economists. On this theory, demand and supply will always be in balance across the economy as a whole. These days, however, many economists view this logic as deeply and dangerously mistaken.

This reasoning is usually associated with the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say, who argued in 1803 that oversupply in excess of demand across the economy as a whole was impossible (although he did not use those terms exactly).

Say claimed that the money consumers use to buy goods and services must come from, ultimately, those same consumers selling something else on the market. As a result, the supply from producers on the market would always be matched by demand, since — according to Say — producers would use what they earned making sales to make purchases for themselves.

Or, as Say's British contemporary David Ricardo wrote, “I think that demand depends only on supply.”

As later economists argued, however, people do not always use their money to buy things. Sometimes, they prefer to save money instead, or to pay down debts. That is especially the case during a panic, when firms and households are looking for security.

In that situation, then the supply of goods and services the economy produces can exceed the demand for them. When goods go unsold because no one is buying them, factories will sit idle and workers will be unemployed. Say himself recognized this problem after a financial crisis in England in 1825 and changed his tune.

The fact that Say seems to have been wrong initially is crucial to how modern governments manage panics. Today, economists and policymakers generally agree that during a crash, governments should put more money into the economy. When households and businesses have more to spend with, the demand for goods and services will increase, putting the economy back into balance.

John Maynard Keynes is usually credited with developing this remedy. According to the Keynesian view, if you put the demand out there, the supply will follow — not the other way around, as Perry said.

Keynesianism has held sway over public policy for most of the past century, but there are still some conservative economists who disagree with him. Perry might have been thinking of conservative objections to Keynes when he said that demand follows supply.

Yet in the context of a visit to a coal plant, it is not clear whether those objections are relevant. Say's arguments about supply and demand only applied to the economy as a whole, not to specific goods such as coal or electricity.

Say always recognized that there could be surpluses of particular commodities if it turned out that customers did not want them. Instead, he believed that firms would adjust to produce those goods that consumers did want to buy using their earnings from selling to the market, so that demand would always balance supply overall.

If producers in a given industry simply “put the supply out there,” as Perry said, they'll be left with warehouses full of surplus goods. In other words, demand does not follow supply any more than one blade of a pair of scissors follows another, to borrow an analogy from the economist Alfred Marshall.

“We might as reasonably dispute whether it is the upper or the under blade of a pair of scissors that cuts a piece of paper,” he wrote in 1890.

Perry is such an idiot.

[Cartmann99]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

“Here's a little economics lesson: supply and demand,” Perry said, according to Taylor Kuykendall of Standard & Poor's. “You put the supply out there, and demand will follow."

Yes Ricky, that's why every single product ever brought to market has always been successful.

I've heard there's a new reality show where you can dance with naked cannibals. You should try out for that one.

[Penny]

10 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

I've heard there's a new reality show where you can dance with naked cannibals. You should try out for that one.

Noooooo! 

[Cartmann99]

3 hours ago, Penny said:

Noooooo! 

*Looks around to make sure no one else is listening*

 We tell him there's a show, then we get him on a plane and drop him and his glasses off on that deserted island we always talk about. 

[GreyhoundFan]

Alexandra Petri writes great sarcastic pieces for the WaPo: "What the ethics chief really wanted to say in his resignation letter"

Spoiler

he Office of Government Ethics director, Walter Shaub, has submitted a letter of resignation. He will depart on July 19 to work for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.

“The great privilege and honor of my career has been to lead OGE’s staff and the community of ethics officials in the federal executive branch,” he wrote. “They are committed to protecting the principle that public service is a public trust, requiring employees to place loyalty to the Constitution, the laws, and ethical principles above private gain.”

Shaub told NPR that “the current situation has made it clear that the ethics program needs to be stronger than it is.”

This was much less strongly worded than the previous draft, which I assume ran as follows:

“Listen, I have to resign for my own mental health, because I am honestly starting to wonder if I am invisible.

Now that I am leaving, let me ask: Have you gotten any of the warnings about disclosures and conflicts of interest that I have sent for the past numerous months? It seems like you have, and it certainly looked like they had gone through, but — nothing. I go into rooms and clear my throat pointedly and no one even looks up from signing a directive to make sure that our desire to protect our drinking water does not interfere with making golf courses great again.

Most days I feel like I am dropping a copy of the emoluments clause into a dark deep black hole from which nothing, not even radiation, can escape.

Sometimes I send an email with very pointed italics saying ‘this doesn’t seem okay’ but — not even crickets. I think the crickets are dead. I go home and I am sometimes startled when people respond to my voice. Sometimes cats look right through me.

Ideally, we are supposed to suggest ways of resolving conflicts, but people have to WANT to resolve conflicts, and right now the only blind trust that Donald Trump has is the kind that the American people have placed in him that he would run his business appropriately.

Look, you have to want to enforce these things. I don’t even have investigative authority.

And what’s worse is that somehow everyone has gotten the idea that they ought to call me to tell me about ethics violations. I appreciate it. It makes me feel wanted, I guess. It is nice to have thousands upon thousands of calls. I think they think that I can stop it, somehow. But I can’t. All I can do is suggest until I am blue in the face. And I am. If my face is still visible, which I sincerely doubt.

I hope that, in future, people understand what the Office of Government Ethics can and cannot do. What it can do is SUGGEST, even going so far as to use ITALICS, but we don’t have investigative powers, and for a while I was worried we might not even be able to compel disclosures. That is up to Congress. I am not saying “please stop calling us,” but I feel like people keep telling me about cats in trees under the misapprehension that I can run off and change into a lifesaving spandex outfit and rescue them, and in fact I am just a mild-mannered fellow who can write a memo saying that the cat ought to be looked into.

This is wearing on me, as it wears on the other employees. It seems wasteful to have an entire office of 70 people whose entire job is to make suggestions that nobody listens to. It makes us feel like ghosts.

After a certain point you could just get a printed sign that says DON’T DO ANY OF THIS and it might do as good a job, and the sign won’t get depressed and think to itself, “Is my whole life a waste? Does my voice even make a sound?”

Honestly, do we need an Office of Government Ethics? If this is how you’re going to treat it, I think not. Sometimes I lie awake in the vast loneliness where I exist and no one takes notice of me, and I wonder if ethics might not be obsolete, anyway. They are cumbersome and take sacrifices and require you to comply (a total beta move) and eliminate conflict, whereas real men rush to conflicts and fan them. Never let it be said that Donald Trump backed down from a conflict. His business holdings reflect this, I think. I don’t know. Nobody knows, because his tax returns are still a riddle wrapped in an enigma surrounded by an impenetrable wall of darkness and lawyers.

Speaking of lawyers, I understand that we are draining the swamp by filling the swamp with apex predators and letting them fight it out, so perhaps all these outdated rules about hiring lobbyists and industry types need to be chucked into the swamp too, to see if they survive. They probably won’t, but that will mean less paperwork for everyone. Honestly, when the waivers started to be posted online I thought it was a joke. It couldn’t possibly have been in response to my request, because my requests vanish into the vastness of space never to be seen again.

And I have had enough.

I am going to put ethics on my shoulder and walk until I come to a place where no man knows what they are. Oops, I am already there. Well, never mind. I will continue to walk, because this is no way to live.”

 

[GrumpyGran]

15 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Alexandra Petri writes great sarcastic pieces for the WaPo: "What the ethics chief really wanted to say in his resignation letter"

  Hide contents

he Office of Government Ethics director, Walter Shaub, has submitted a letter of resignation. He will depart on July 19 to work for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.

“The great privilege and honor of my career has been to lead OGE’s staff and the community of ethics officials in the federal executive branch,” he wrote. “They are committed to protecting the principle that public service is a public trust, requiring employees to place loyalty to the Constitution, the laws, and ethical principles above private gain.”

Shaub told NPR that “the current situation has made it clear that the ethics program needs to be stronger than it is.”

This was much less strongly worded than the previous draft, which I assume ran as follows:

“Listen, I have to resign for my own mental health, because I am honestly starting to wonder if I am invisible.

Now that I am leaving, let me ask: Have you gotten any of the warnings about disclosures and conflicts of interest that I have sent for the past numerous months? It seems like you have, and it certainly looked like they had gone through, but — nothing. I go into rooms and clear my throat pointedly and no one even looks up from signing a directive to make sure that our desire to protect our drinking water does not interfere with making golf courses great again.

Most days I feel like I am dropping a copy of the emoluments clause into a dark deep black hole from which nothing, not even radiation, can escape.

Sometimes I send an email with very pointed italics saying ‘this doesn’t seem okay’ but — not even crickets. I think the crickets are dead. I go home and I am sometimes startled when people respond to my voice. Sometimes cats look right through me.

Ideally, we are supposed to suggest ways of resolving conflicts, but people have to WANT to resolve conflicts, and right now the only blind trust that Donald Trump has is the kind that the American people have placed in him that he would run his business appropriately.

Look, you have to want to enforce these things. I don’t even have investigative authority.

And what’s worse is that somehow everyone has gotten the idea that they ought to call me to tell me about ethics violations. I appreciate it. It makes me feel wanted, I guess. It is nice to have thousands upon thousands of calls. I think they think that I can stop it, somehow. But I can’t. All I can do is suggest until I am blue in the face. And I am. If my face is still visible, which I sincerely doubt.

I hope that, in future, people understand what the Office of Government Ethics can and cannot do. What it can do is SUGGEST, even going so far as to use ITALICS, but we don’t have investigative powers, and for a while I was worried we might not even be able to compel disclosures. That is up to Congress. I am not saying “please stop calling us,” but I feel like people keep telling me about cats in trees under the misapprehension that I can run off and change into a lifesaving spandex outfit and rescue them, and in fact I am just a mild-mannered fellow who can write a memo saying that the cat ought to be looked into.

This is wearing on me, as it wears on the other employees. It seems wasteful to have an entire office of 70 people whose entire job is to make suggestions that nobody listens to. It makes us feel like ghosts.

After a certain point you could just get a printed sign that says DON’T DO ANY OF THIS and it might do as good a job, and the sign won’t get depressed and think to itself, “Is my whole life a waste? Does my voice even make a sound?”

Honestly, do we need an Office of Government Ethics? If this is how you’re going to treat it, I think not. Sometimes I lie awake in the vast loneliness where I exist and no one takes notice of me, and I wonder if ethics might not be obsolete, anyway. They are cumbersome and take sacrifices and require you to comply (a total beta move) and eliminate conflict, whereas real men rush to conflicts and fan them. Never let it be said that Donald Trump backed down from a conflict. His business holdings reflect this, I think. I don’t know. Nobody knows, because his tax returns are still a riddle wrapped in an enigma surrounded by an impenetrable wall of darkness and lawyers.

Speaking of lawyers, I understand that we are draining the swamp by filling the swamp with apex predators and letting them fight it out, so perhaps all these outdated rules about hiring lobbyists and industry types need to be chucked into the swamp too, to see if they survive. They probably won’t, but that will mean less paperwork for everyone. Honestly, when the waivers started to be posted online I thought it was a joke. It couldn’t possibly have been in response to my request, because my requests vanish into the vastness of space never to be seen again.

And I have had enough.

I am going to put ethics on my shoulder and walk until I come to a place where no man knows what they are. Oops, I am already there. Well, never mind. I will continue to walk, because this is no way to live.”

 

Hilarious, but also so sad that this happened. This just screams, screams what is wrong with this administration, hell, with the majority of our government now. No ethics. None, nada, nil, zilch. 

[fraurosena]

On 7-7-2017 at 6:51 PM, Cartmann99 said:

*Looks around to make sure no one else is listening*

 We tell him there's a show, then we get him on a plane and drop him and his glasses off on that deserted island we always talk about. 

Can we still have cannibals? Pretty please?

[fraurosena]

Oh, the irony. Pruitt is getting a taste of his own medicine. He's being sued by a coalition of six states (Massachusetts, Maryland, Vermont, Washington and the District of Columbia) for not banning chlorpryrifos, a dangerously toxic pesticide.

Spoiler

As the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt has swiftly enacted the decidedly anti-environment agenda he perfected as Oklahoma’s attorney general. Rolling back several decades worth of regulations, Pruitt has chosen to prioritize corporate interests over the most basic of safety concerns.

Pruitt, who knows a thing or two about suing the EPA, will now get a taste of his own medicine. Ignoring the EPA’s own previous analysis, Pruitt rejected a petition spearheaded by environmental groups to ban a pesticide called chlorpyrifos. Now six states are suing the EPA in response to his decision.

Despite years of research concluding that exposure to chlorpyrifos is harmful to children, even at the lowest levels, Pruitt’s decision strongly favored Dow Chemical—the pesticide’s manufacturer. Prompted by Pruitt’s blatant disregard of health, a “coalition” of several states has sued the EPA, hoping to overturn his denial.

According to the Associated Press, the lawsuit is spearheaded by New York’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman; Massachusetts, Maryland, Vermont, Washington, and the District of Columbia have also joined the effort. In the filing, Schneiderman chastised the administration’s endangerment of children.

 “Job No. 1 for the EPA should be protecting Americans’ wellbeing, especially that of our children. Yet the administration is jeopardizing our kids’ health, allowing the use of a toxic pesticide for which it can’t even identify a safe level,” Schneiderman said.

Chlorpyrifos’s toxicity has already been recognized by the EPA. Following a Columbia University study that demonstrated a link between newborns who were exposed to the pesticide and significant setbacks to their cognitive development, the EPA released its own findings on the chemical. EPA researchers found that no level of chlorpyrifos was safe in groundwater and it recommended “revok[ing] all tolerances for chlorpyrifos.”

Why might Pruitt defy the repeated proposals of an agency he now runs? The answer seems quite apparent. The AP’s report noted that Dow Chemical spent $13.6 million on lobbying last year and the company’s CEO, Andrew Liveris, is a close adviser to President Trump; Liveris also donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.

Pruitt’s rejection of a chlorpyrifos ban goes against the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendation. Last month, the organization said it was “deeply alarmed” by Pruitt’s decision. AAP wrote a joint letter with the Environmental Working Group to Pruitt imploring him to reconsider. They wrote, “The risk to infant and children’s health and development is unambiguous.”

 

[Cartmann99]

On 7/8/2017 at 5:17 PM, fraurosena said:

Can we still have cannibals? Pretty please?

Only if he takes Ted Cruz with him. 

[GreyhoundFan]

7 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

Only if he takes Ted Cruz with him. 

Does he qualify as human?  Actually, I think he'd be a good addition to the island. He'd annoy the crap out of the others.

[fraurosena]

Meanwhile, in other news, the NYT has an extensive overview of The Business Links of Those Leading Trump’s Rollbacks

A short summary in quotes from the article:

Quote

Three members were appointed to agencies that they previously lobbied.

Two may personally profit from changing regulations.

Twenty-three are connected to private-sector groups that interacted with or were regulated by their current agencies.

Five worked for government agencies or congressional offices that tried to weaken regulatory limits at the agencies that currently employ them.

The remaining 38 known members are either nonpolitical agency staff or have professional backgrounds that don’t appear to intersect with their agencies.

So nearly half of the appointees have possible conflicts of interest. If you want to know more about how, I recommend reading the article for more information on each individual member. It has nice charts and everything.