Executive Departments 3

[AmazonGrace]

 

[fraurosena]

6 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

This could potentially be a good thing. I'm not sure if it was only rumors or if there was some substance to the allegations, but I remember reading that the presidunce took part in the parties that Epstein had where minors were present.

I also seem to remember there a lawsuit by one such minor in 2016, alleging the then-candidate had sexually abused her; a lawsuit that went away after the elections.

If this deal with Epstein is looked into by DOJ, could Epstein be re-tried or re-sentenced, or would that be double jeopardy? If it is at all possible that Epstein were to be re-indicted or some such, what would the chances be that he gives up information on the presidunce? 

In any case, even if my wishful thinking about indicting the presidunce on sexual abuse of a minor comes to naught, it's still a good thing that Acosta is being held to account for that atrocious deal he made with Epstein. 

[mamallama]

BTW, I worked in midtown Manhattan through the 80's and 90's.  We shared an office area with our landlord who owned many midtown properties.  He'd recently lost his wife so he filled his days sitting around the common area regaling us with midtown real estate gossip.  Among his stories was the one about Trump raping a 12 year old.  To be fair Fred (the landlord) despised Trump but it's an interesting coincidence.  Several other stories that sounded far fetched turned out to be uncannily accurate.

[Howl]

There's a book about Epstein.  He's worse then evil and is clearly a sexual predator at a huge scale. Obviously the victims were threatened and paid off.  Again, a scenario where vulnerable teenaged girls were targeted and then used to recruit other vulnerable teenaged girls. 

I glad to see this is being looked into again, because it NEEDS to be looked into again. 

[fraurosena]

I've found a thread about that very rape allegation. These human filth need to be strung up on the highest tree. Preferably by the balls. With barbed wire.

Beware before you start reading, this thread might be triggering.

 

Edited January 30, 2019 by fraurosena

[Howl]

From Ian Madrigal's twitter thread: 

Quote

"Donald Trump specifically asked about me because I remind him of his daughter, and she said, 'Well, she's 13 as well.'"

I *know* we avoid seriously discussing this because it is disturbing beyond comprehension. But we all know what Trump has said about Ivanka. This. Adds. Up.

No words, except

1) I'm glad Tiffany was raised far away from Trump

2) I'm glad Trump's last child is a son. 

Ivanka may be rich and beautiful, but it doesn't make up for having a father as horrible as Trump. 

The thread unroll for the entire horrifying Ian Madrigal tweet thread is here. 

For those not on twitter, tweet authors can create long threads to convey important information.  An app called Thread Reader "unrolls" all the tweets into an easily readable form; you need not be on Twitter to view and read a thread that has been unrolled.

And J.F.C. ! There's this from another Ian Madrigal tweet: 

 

Edited January 30, 2019 by Howl

[AmazonGrace]

 

[smittykins]

Every time I read “Mnuchin” I see it as “Munchkin.”

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[fraurosena]

 

 

[Howl]

I quit mentally face palming about a year ago, but Ben has sent me over the edge into face palm territory. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump to nominate David Bernhardt, a former lobbyist, as the next Interior secretary"

Spoiler

President Trump tweeted Monday that he will nominate David Bernhardt, a veteran lobbyist who has helped orchestrate the push to expand oil and gas drilling at the Interior Department, to serve as its next secretary.

If confirmed, Bernhardt, a 49-year-old Colorado native known for his unrelenting work habits, would be well positioned to roll back even more of the Obama-era conservation policies he has worked to unravel since rejoining Interior a year and a half ago. He has helmed the department as acting secretary since Jan. 2, when Ryan Zinke resigned amid multiple ethics probes.

“David has done a fantastic job from the day he arrived, and we look forward to having his nomination officially confirmed!,” Trump tweeted.

While Zinke reveled in public displays of his affinity for the outdoors — riding horseback while on the job and touting his enthusiasm for hunting — Bernhardt is the ultimate insider. A former Capitol Hill staffer who served as Interior’s top lawyer under George W. Bush, Bernhardt has made it his mission to master legal and policy arcana to advance conservative policy goals.

“It’s a humbling privilege to be nominated to lead a Department whose mission I love, to accomplish the balanced, common sense vision of our president,” Bernhardt said in a statement Monday.

A former partner at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, he walked into the No. 2 job at Interior with so many potential conflicts of interest he has to carry a small card listing them all. He initially had to recuse himself from “particular matters” directly affecting 26 former clients to conform with the Trump administration’s ethics pledge.

While Bernhardt has deliberately adopted a low profile as he steers the 70,000-person department, he has used his expertise to promote the president’s agenda at every turn. He is working to streamline environmental reviews to expedite energy projects and has promoted overhauling the Endangered Species Act to provide more certainty to developers.

In an interview last year with The Washington Post, Bernhardt said he immerses himself in the details of every significant policy decision because he knows they can have enormous ramifications for Americans across the country.

“I don't shy away from reading a massive amount of material before decision,” he said. “And I don't, for a minute, not think about the impact that it's going to have for good or ill.”

During the 35-day shutdown, Bernhardt employed novel tactics to ensure oil and gas drillers could continue to obtain permits and national parks would stay open even as most of the department was shuttered. When trash piled up and human waste began posing a health risk at popular national parks, for example, Bernhardt instructed superintendents to tap fees these sites had collected to address their most visible problems.

Industry representatives praised the selection. Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Denver-based Western Energy Alliance, said in an email that, like Trump’s recent nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Andrew Wheeler, Bernhardt is better prepared to enact policy changes than his predecessor.

“He’s done an excellent job setting and implementing policy the last year and a half, so it will be a seamless transition,” she said. “As with EPA, the environmental groups forced the original Cabinet secretaries out only to have the even more capable policy people who know the agencies in depth take over.”

Dan Eberhart, a Trump donor and CEO of the drilling-services company Canary, offered his praise for Bernhardt with a succinct description: “There is no one who knows DOI better than David Bernhardt. He is effective and competent.”

Bernhardt’s industry-friendly policies, coupled with his extensive work as a lobbyist, have earned him the enmity of environmental groups and many Democrats.

“The ethical questions surrounding David Bernhardt and his commitment to pandering to oil, coal and gas executives make former interior secretary Ryan Zinke look like a tree-hugging environmentalist in comparison,” said Vicky Wyatt of Greenpeace USA. “And Ryan Zinke was a disaster."

Liberal advocacy groups such as the Western Values Project, which targeted Zinke while he was in office, have argued that Bernhardt’s lobbying past disqualifies him for serving in Interior’s top post. On the day Trump announced that Zinke would step down, the group launched a website to highlight Bernhardt’s work in the private sector.

“The bottom line is that Bernhardt is too conflicted to even be acting secretary,” Western Values Project executive director Chris Saeger said. “At the very least the American public deserved to know more about the man behind the curtain who is actually running the show at Interior and could soon be fully responsible for managing our country’s public lands, wildlife and natural resources.”

The head of one centrist conservation group, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, said in an email Monday that his organization would back Bernhardt despite their policy differences.

“He has been a steady hand during challenging times at the Department and he has worked to strengthen relationships with the states and the nation’s sportsmen and women,” said the group’s president, Whit Fosburgh. “Mr. Bernhardt’s nomination to be secretary of the Interior places him in an unenviable position to balance the priorities of the Trump Administration with the mission of the Department.”

Initially Bernhardt was reluctant to take the post when approached by the White House, according to administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters. And as recently as a week ago, Trump was considering tapping former congresswoman Cynthia M. Lummis (R-Wyo.), a conservative who retired from the House in 2017.

But the shutdown, coupled with Zinke’s departure, also gave Bernhardt an opportunity to spend more time with the president as Trump weighed the vacancy. During a Cabinet meeting last month, Bernhardt sat next to the president, and he also accompanied Trump and Vice President Pence on a recent trip to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial near the Mall.

A former senior administration official said Bernhardt rarely interacted with Trump in the first two years because Zinke was so determined to be in front of the president and taking credit for the department’s accomplishments. But Bernhardt “actually ran the agency,” the official said. “Zinke wasn’t running the agency.” The official requested anonymity to describe internal conversations between the White House and the agency.

Bernhardt made it clear he was prepared to leave the administration if the president tapped someone else for the top job, according to two individuals familiar with the matter.

Even Bernhardt’s opponents described him as a skilled policy and legal expert who has spearheaded the regulatory rollbacks and accelerated oil and gas leasing at a department that manages 500 million acres of U.S. land.

“As a former lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry, Bernhardt would be even more adept than his predecessor at advancing Trump’s drill-anywhere agenda that prioritizes pollution over people,” said Jamie Williams, president of the Wilderness Society.

In the last two years Interior has auctioned off more than 16.8 million acres of public land for oil and gas drilling, according to the advocacy group Center for Biological Diversity, 2.3 million of which was leased. In the first quarter of 2019, nearly 2.3 million more acres are on the chopping block.

Bernhardt has played a key role in shrinking two national monuments in southern Utah, as well as pushing to open up the land now outside their boundaries for coal and mineral mining.

Dan DuBray, who worked for Bernhardt on Indian trust issues during the Bush administration and retired last year as the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s director of public affairs, said his former boss was focused on maximizing efficiency even as they toured some of America’s most scenic sites.

“We’d have long days, in Portland, Anchorage and Arizona; I think David was still game to keep going; others might have wanted to see a local site or get outside,” DuBray said. “There’s a finite amount of time, and David has always been keenly aware of that — we have limited time to get our agenda accomplished.”

Bernhardt has made a point of consulting with Republican lawmakers since returning to Interior, but his support among congressional Democrats has slipped since he was confirmed. The Senate approved him as deputy secretary on a vote of 53 to 43, largely along party lines. While the Republican margin of control in the Senate all but ensures that he will win confirmation, he is unlikely to attract as much Democratic support as he did a year and a half ago.

House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) has already indicated that he intends to call Bernhardt before his panel to testify about some of the department’s policy decisions, and confirmation hearings in the Senate would allow Democrats to press for answers on an array of fronts.

Bernhardt, for his part, has made an effort to reach out to Interior staff through a series of occasional department-wide emails. On Sunday, he sent an email praising their dedication, even as he blasted Obama administration officials for not upholding the department’s ethical standards.

“I believe that serving the public is one of the highest callings a person can undertake,” he wrote in an email Sunday, which was obtained by The Washington Post. “This belief has been reaffirmed in the past few weeks as many of you carried on fulfilling the Department’s mission with the knowledge that the timing of your pay was highly uncertain. This perspective is why the notion that a public servant would breach the public trust to enrich themselves so deeply offends me. Such conduct undermines everything I believe in regarding public service.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump will nominate David Malpass, a Treasury official, to lead World Bank"

Spoiler

David Malpass, a senior Treasury Department official and World Bank critic, has accepted President Trump’s offer to lead the world’s largest development lender, according to two people familiar with the decision who were not authorized to speak publicly.

A formal announcement of the nomination is planned for Wednesday, the people said.

Malpass, 62, Treasury’s undersecretary for international affairs, would need to be approved by the World Bank’s 12-member board before becoming its president. The United States traditionally chooses the bank’s leadership.

Malpass, a Trump loyalist and veteran of the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, has had sharp words for several policies at the World Bank, including its loans to China. He has also long expressed skepticism of global institutions.

Malpass has been heavily involved in U.S.-China negotiations over trade in recent months.

On Monday night, a person close to Malpass said he would seek to be “constructive” as World Bank president, but declined to detail much of his possible agenda, beyond saying his priorities would be raising incomes in developing nations and defending U.S. interests.

The Trump administration’s decision to nominate Malpass was first reported by Politico.

A White House official declined to comment.

Jim Yong Kim is stepping down as World Bank president after more than six years in the post. Kim is leaving Feb. 1 to join a firm involved in infrastructure investment in developing countries.

The World Bank’s directors, who represent donor countries, have the right to nominate candidates for the president’s job and will vote on a winner.

By an unwritten tradition since the bank’s founding in 1944, the board has always chosen Washington’s nominee. The Europeans, in turn, have determined the head of the International Monetary Fund.

The Trump administration has questioned the value of multilateral institutions including the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. But it supported a funding increase for the World Bank last year, which raised $13 billion from member countries.

 

[Audrey2]

58 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Trump to nominate David Bernhardt, a former lobbyist, as the next Interior secretary"

  Reveal hidden contents

President Trump tweeted Monday that he will nominate David Bernhardt, a veteran lobbyist who has helped orchestrate the push to expand oil and gas drilling at the Interior Department, to serve as its next secretary.

If confirmed, Bernhardt, a 49-year-old Colorado native known for his unrelenting work habits, would be well positioned to roll back even more of the Obama-era conservation policies he has worked to unravel since rejoining Interior a year and a half ago. He has helmed the department as acting secretary since Jan. 2, when Ryan Zinke resigned amid multiple ethics probes.

“David has done a fantastic job from the day he arrived, and we look forward to having his nomination officially confirmed!,” Trump tweeted.

While Zinke reveled in public displays of his affinity for the outdoors — riding horseback while on the job and touting his enthusiasm for hunting — Bernhardt is the ultimate insider. A former Capitol Hill staffer who served as Interior’s top lawyer under George W. Bush, Bernhardt has made it his mission to master legal and policy arcana to advance conservative policy goals.

“It’s a humbling privilege to be nominated to lead a Department whose mission I love, to accomplish the balanced, common sense vision of our president,” Bernhardt said in a statement Monday.

A former partner at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, he walked into the No. 2 job at Interior with so many potential conflicts of interest he has to carry a small card listing them all. He initially had to recuse himself from “particular matters” directly affecting 26 former clients to conform with the Trump administration’s ethics pledge.

While Bernhardt has deliberately adopted a low profile as he steers the 70,000-person department, he has used his expertise to promote the president’s agenda at every turn. He is working to streamline environmental reviews to expedite energy projects and has promoted overhauling the Endangered Species Act to provide more certainty to developers.

In an interview last year with The Washington Post, Bernhardt said he immerses himself in the details of every significant policy decision because he knows they can have enormous ramifications for Americans across the country.

“I don't shy away from reading a massive amount of material before decision,” he said. “And I don't, for a minute, not think about the impact that it's going to have for good or ill.”

During the 35-day shutdown, Bernhardt employed novel tactics to ensure oil and gas drillers could continue to obtain permits and national parks would stay open even as most of the department was shuttered. When trash piled up and human waste began posing a health risk at popular national parks, for example, Bernhardt instructed superintendents to tap fees these sites had collected to address their most visible problems.

Industry representatives praised the selection. Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Denver-based Western Energy Alliance, said in an email that, like Trump’s recent nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Andrew Wheeler, Bernhardt is better prepared to enact policy changes than his predecessor.

“He’s done an excellent job setting and implementing policy the last year and a half, so it will be a seamless transition,” she said. “As with EPA, the environmental groups forced the original Cabinet secretaries out only to have the even more capable policy people who know the agencies in depth take over.”

Dan Eberhart, a Trump donor and CEO of the drilling-services company Canary, offered his praise for Bernhardt with a succinct description: “There is no one who knows DOI better than David Bernhardt. He is effective and competent.”

Bernhardt’s industry-friendly policies, coupled with his extensive work as a lobbyist, have earned him the enmity of environmental groups and many Democrats.

“The ethical questions surrounding David Bernhardt and his commitment to pandering to oil, coal and gas executives make former interior secretary Ryan Zinke look like a tree-hugging environmentalist in comparison,” said Vicky Wyatt of Greenpeace USA. “And Ryan Zinke was a disaster."

Liberal advocacy groups such as the Western Values Project, which targeted Zinke while he was in office, have argued that Bernhardt’s lobbying past disqualifies him for serving in Interior’s top post. On the day Trump announced that Zinke would step down, the group launched a website to highlight Bernhardt’s work in the private sector.

“The bottom line is that Bernhardt is too conflicted to even be acting secretary,” Western Values Project executive director Chris Saeger said. “At the very least the American public deserved to know more about the man behind the curtain who is actually running the show at Interior and could soon be fully responsible for managing our country’s public lands, wildlife and natural resources.”

The head of one centrist conservation group, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, said in an email Monday that his organization would back Bernhardt despite their policy differences.

“He has been a steady hand during challenging times at the Department and he has worked to strengthen relationships with the states and the nation’s sportsmen and women,” said the group’s president, Whit Fosburgh. “Mr. Bernhardt’s nomination to be secretary of the Interior places him in an unenviable position to balance the priorities of the Trump Administration with the mission of the Department.”

Initially Bernhardt was reluctant to take the post when approached by the White House, according to administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters. And as recently as a week ago, Trump was considering tapping former congresswoman Cynthia M. Lummis (R-Wyo.), a conservative who retired from the House in 2017.

But the shutdown, coupled with Zinke’s departure, also gave Bernhardt an opportunity to spend more time with the president as Trump weighed the vacancy. During a Cabinet meeting last month, Bernhardt sat next to the president, and he also accompanied Trump and Vice President Pence on a recent trip to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial near the Mall.

A former senior administration official said Bernhardt rarely interacted with Trump in the first two years because Zinke was so determined to be in front of the president and taking credit for the department’s accomplishments. But Bernhardt “actually ran the agency,” the official said. “Zinke wasn’t running the agency.” The official requested anonymity to describe internal conversations between the White House and the agency.

Bernhardt made it clear he was prepared to leave the administration if the president tapped someone else for the top job, according to two individuals familiar with the matter.

Even Bernhardt’s opponents described him as a skilled policy and legal expert who has spearheaded the regulatory rollbacks and accelerated oil and gas leasing at a department that manages 500 million acres of U.S. land.

“As a former lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry, Bernhardt would be even more adept than his predecessor at advancing Trump’s drill-anywhere agenda that prioritizes pollution over people,” said Jamie Williams, president of the Wilderness Society.

In the last two years Interior has auctioned off more than 16.8 million acres of public land for oil and gas drilling, according to the advocacy group Center for Biological Diversity, 2.3 million of which was leased. In the first quarter of 2019, nearly 2.3 million more acres are on the chopping block.

Bernhardt has played a key role in shrinking two national monuments in southern Utah, as well as pushing to open up the land now outside their boundaries for coal and mineral mining.

Dan DuBray, who worked for Bernhardt on Indian trust issues during the Bush administration and retired last year as the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s director of public affairs, said his former boss was focused on maximizing efficiency even as they toured some of America’s most scenic sites.

“We’d have long days, in Portland, Anchorage and Arizona; I think David was still game to keep going; others might have wanted to see a local site or get outside,” DuBray said. “There’s a finite amount of time, and David has always been keenly aware of that — we have limited time to get our agenda accomplished.”

Bernhardt has made a point of consulting with Republican lawmakers since returning to Interior, but his support among congressional Democrats has slipped since he was confirmed. The Senate approved him as deputy secretary on a vote of 53 to 43, largely along party lines. While the Republican margin of control in the Senate all but ensures that he will win confirmation, he is unlikely to attract as much Democratic support as he did a year and a half ago.

House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) has already indicated that he intends to call Bernhardt before his panel to testify about some of the department’s policy decisions, and confirmation hearings in the Senate would allow Democrats to press for answers on an array of fronts.

Bernhardt, for his part, has made an effort to reach out to Interior staff through a series of occasional department-wide emails. On Sunday, he sent an email praising their dedication, even as he blasted Obama administration officials for not upholding the department’s ethical standards.

“I believe that serving the public is one of the highest callings a person can undertake,” he wrote in an email Sunday, which was obtained by The Washington Post. “This belief has been reaffirmed in the past few weeks as many of you carried on fulfilling the Department’s mission with the knowledge that the timing of your pay was highly uncertain. This perspective is why the notion that a public servant would breach the public trust to enrich themselves so deeply offends me. Such conduct undermines everything I believe in regarding public service.”

 

I've got my new Public Enemy #2 (Trump is #1). Don't mess with our public lands, National Parks, and National Monuments.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[onekidanddone]

7 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

The Honorable Maxine Waters. I'm going to marry her one day.  Yea,  I've said this before about other in Congress, but this time I mean it.

[GreyhoundFan]

38 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

The Honorable Maxine Waters. I'm going to marry her one day.  Yea,  I've said this before about other in Congress, but this time I mean it.

The look on her face in that picture says, "don't fuck with me".

[Audrey2]

15 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

The look on her face in that picture says, "don't fuck with me".

Yes, I would definitely call that the mom face! 

[milkteeth]

On 1/30/2019 at 9:20 AM, Howl said:

There's a book about Epstein.  He's worse then evil and is clearly a sexual predator at a huge scale. Obviously the victims were threatened and paid off.  Again, a scenario where vulnerable teenaged girls were targeted and then used to recruit other vulnerable teenaged girls. 

I glad to see this is being looked into again, because it NEEDS to be looked into again. 

 

I don't know why people need to make up ridiculous conspiracy theories like Pizza Gate when there is plenty of real evidence of real pedophiles with political power and influence like Jeffery Epstein around. You only need to look at the flight logs of the 'Lolita Express' to see how many politicians, celebrities and other powerful people were around that slug. Not only was Trump a frequent flyer, but Bill Clinton, Larry Summers (former Treasury Secretary and President of Harvard), Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew too.  

[onekidanddone]

3 minutes ago, milkteeth said:

 

I don't know why people need to make up ridiculous conspiracy theories like Pizza Gate when there is plenty of real evidence of real pedophiles with political power and influence like Jeffery Epstein around. You only need to look at the flight logs of the 'Lolita Express' to see how many politicians, celebrities and other powerful people were around that slug. Not only was Trump a frequent flyer, but Bill Clinton, Larry Summers (former Treasury Secretary and President of Harvard), Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew too.  

My theory is that the people making up conspiracy crap is that they are distracting from the real stuff. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"This grievance board for federal workers has one person left — and he’s about to leave"

Spoiler

Mark Robbins soon will pack up his belongings from his sixth-floor corner office, ride the elevator to the lobby on M Street in downtown Washington for the last time, and leave behind 240 employees and a federal agency that could be leaderless.

His departure as acting chairman of the Merit Systems Protection Board, which serves as a personnel court for federal employees, raises an existential question: Can the board still live and function with no one at the top? The answer could determine whether thousands of federal workers will have their grievances heard.

Two of the board’s three seats have been vacant for the entire Trump administration. President Trump didn’t nominate a new board for more than a year — and then a Senate committee deadlocked last year on his picks. Now, the third seat could be empty, too, unless the Senate can confirm the same three people.

Experts say they’ve never heard of a similar case. At midnight on Feb. 28 — when a one-year extension of Robbins’s seven-year term expires — the board could enter uncertain legal territory. Justice Department attorneys have told Robbins that once he leaves, the office could be operating illegally.

House and Senate lawmakers, scrambling to head off a crisis, have scheduled hearings for this week.

Coming after the recent partial government shutdown and with another possible shutdown lurking later this week, the quagmire at the board is another blow for federal workers. Employees who have been waiting for their appeals of firings, demotions, suspensions and alleged misconduct to be heard will have to wait longer; even if a new board were appointed soon, it could take two years to eliminate the backlog.

The board has been “basically neutered, and I think it’s ridiculous,” said John Palguta, a retired director of the board’s research department. “It’s not overly dramatic to say that the civil service is at risk here.”

The board has evaded the crosshairs of a White House that has proposed eliminating or slashing the budgets of dozens of small agencies. But in an administration determined to shrink government and with it protections for civil servants, the quasi-judicial merit systems board has been kept more or less frozen in time.

“The context of what’s happening here,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D), whose Northern Virginia district includes tens of thousands of civil servants, “is an administration that’s hostile to employee rights. This seems deliberate and by design.” A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

The agency, with eight regional offices, was created in 1978 to ensure that personnel decisions in the executive branch are free from partisan politics. Administrative judges hear complaints from employees, and their rulings can be appealed to the three-member, bipartisan board. Members serve staggered terms.

With two of the three seats vacant for more than two years, the board has been unable to render decisions. During his lonely tenure, Robbins dutifully has written his opinion on 1,900 cases and filed them in cardboard boxes; those decisions will land in the trash if no other board members join him before he departs, he says.

His board of one already has created legal predicaments. Congress passed a special statute last year giving just one member the authority to order agencies to grant relief in cases involving whistleblowers. “We joked that it’s the Mark Robbins Home Alone Act of 2018,” said Jim Eisenmann, who was executive director until last fall.

Waiting years

Robbins, 59, a Republican holdover from the Obama administration who wears small, round wire-frame glasses, has stayed even-tempered. “When people say, ‘Has Robbins been sitting around doing nothing for two years?,’ I tell them I’ve been voting cases,” he said on a tour of his darkened headquarters last month when his staff was furloughed. “That presupposed I’d be joined by two people by now.”

Stuck in the backlog are civil servants who have been waiting years for resolution. Some won rulings from administrative judges in their favor, only to have them languish before the board when the agency appealed. The government is required to give them back pay or return them to work while they wait. But amid the dysfunction of the past two years, that hasn’t always happened.

In September 2017, an administrative judge ordered the FBI to reinstate Matthew Litton to his job on the agency’s elite Hostage Rescue Team and give him hundreds of thousands of dollars in interim pay. He had been fired for failing to disclose drugs he was taking to deal with infertility.

But the FBI’s appeal has been pending since then. And Litton’s attorney says the FBI has taken advantage of the void on the board, violating the judge’s order to restore his salary. “We made a stink,” said Kristin Alden, a D.C. employment lawyer, “but there was no one there to listen to us. They knew there was nowhere for us to go. We were stuck.”

An administrative judge also sided last year with a file clerk at Veterans Affairs who was fired and is back to work while the agency appeals, said her attorney, Kevin Owens of Silver Spring, Md. But he said VA still has not paid six months of wages she lost after her firing.

The crisis has been building since Trump took office. He was slow to staff the government, lagging behind his predecessors in nominating political appointees. After 14 months, Trump finally nominated two from his party and one Democrat for the merit board, as the law requires.

None made it out of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee during the last Congress, after partisan objections led to a tie vote on one of the Republicans. Trump renominated the same group in January. It is unclear whether anyone has enough votes to get out of committee. Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said he would continue to work with his colleagues and the White House to “ensure the Merit Systems Protection Board has the three confirmed members needed to function properly.”

Divided opinion

Robbins said he was on a conference call last fall with attorneys from the Justice Department’s Civil Division on an unrelated board matter when he offhandedly mentioned that his term expired at the end of February.

Several attorneys grew alarmed and questioned whether the administrative judges could issue rulings legally without a board. If not, the judges, staff attorneys and support staff would be superfluous, they argued. “They said, ‘If a nominee isn’t confirmed, wouldn’t the board have to close down?’ ” Robbins recalled.

The attorneys told him they would investigate the legality of an independent agency continuing operations without a board. Robbins said he has not heard back. Kelly Laco, a Justice spokeswoman, declined a request for comment.

Opinion is divided on what should happen next.

“Without a Board, it seems difficult to imagine how they can fill their statutory mandate,” Laurie Beyranevand, a professor of administrative law at Vermont Law School, said in an email. Her reasoning comes from her reading of the Code of Federal Regulations, Section 1201, which directs the three-member board to handle appeals and set policy for the agency.

But William Wiley, a former board chief counsel, said the agency’s functions would simply be delegated to the staff. “It seems to me there’s still an organization that exists,” he said, “unless the Trump administration just doesn’t want the board to be there at all.”

Experts agree that while other independent agencies have gone without board quorums, none has faced the impending scenario of the merit board.

Keep calm

The Senate committee has scheduled a vote Wednesday on the slate of nominees. As a backup plan, it will consider legislation to extend Robbins’s holdover term by another year or until another member is confirmed.

But that would create new complications. Trump tapped Robbins in December to serve concurrently as the board’s acting chairman and acting general counsel for the Office of Personnel Management, the same position he held in the George W. Bush administration.

He’s been shuttling back and forth since. The dual appointment creates a potential conflict of interest, though. The personnel office weighs in on some board cases that involve personnel policies across the government. Robbins has recused himself from writing any cases until he leaves.

With his last day inching closer, he’s wistful. He prays that he doesn’t have to walk out the door during another potential government shutdown that looms this week, because no one would be there to say goodbye.

He plans to pack up his bust of Teddy Roosevelt, his old-school Rolodex and a towering ivy plant. He’ll leave a large sign for his staff he found years ago in the trash in his condo building. It reads, “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

He’ll also leave behind dozens of boxes containing his decisions, which spill into the hallway and beckon to be read by future board members. If Robbins is gone before they arrive, he’ll become a former member of the board, his voice and vote but a distant echo as two years of his work becomes null and void.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"A Trump nominee’s family company paid $290,000 fine for sexual harassment and discrimination"

Spoiler

AccuWeather, a private weather company whose former chief executive is President Trump’s nominee to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, agreed to pay $290,000 as part of a settlement after a federal oversight agency found the company subjected female employees to sexual harassment and a hostile work environment.

The conciliation agreement was published in June after an investigation by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. The agreement was first reported Monday by the Centre Daily Times. The agreement states AccuWeather subjected women to "sexual harassment and a hostile work environment” and would pay out thousands to dozens of women as part of a settlement.

Barry Myers, tapped by Trump in 2017 to lead NOAA, became Pennsylvania-based AccuWeather’s chief executive in 2007 and stepped down Jan. 1, agreeing to divest himself of any company ownership in accordance with an ethics pledge to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, according to the company. His brother, Joel Myers, is founder and president of AccuWeather.

The White House acknowledged receipt of The Washington Post’s inquiry into the settlement but did not return a request for comment before this story published.

The agreement alleges that AccuWeather did “not exercise reasonable care to prevent and correct” the improper treatment and harassment against women there. It includes a letter that was sent to former employees who worked at AccuWeather between Jan. 1, 2014, and Dec. 21, 2017, who were notified they were eligible to receive a payment of at least $7,250 as part of the settlement.

AccuWeather denies the allegations of harassment in the letter. However, as part of the agreement, the company promised to institute a number of changes — including mandatory in-person training for managers in how to identify and prevent unlawful harassment. The company was also asked to hire a third party to “receive and investigate complaints of harassment, intimidation, threats, retaliation and coercion against employees throughout 2018.”

At least four women had received payment by the time the agreement was signed by Joel Myers, and the agreement indicates at least 35 other women had an opportunity to receive money in the settlement. Rhonda Seaton, director of marketing communications at AccuWeather, said in a statement Monday the company cooperated fully with the OFCCP audit before signing the conciliation agreement in June.

“The agreement confirmed our compliance with, and implementation of, continuing equal opportunity programs to strengthen our commitment to diversity and inclusion,” she said. “AccuWeather clearly denied the allegations raised after the audit, yet we are using this opportunity to partner with the OFCCP voluntarily to further enhance our strong programs to promote workplace inclusion and diversity.”

The Post has previously reported that former NOAA administrators expressed concern about Myers’s nomination — two of whom said he had conflicts of interests that should disqualify him. His controversial nomination was highlighted by the fact that Myers, a businessman and lawyer, is not a scientist. The Post’s Jason Samenow reported in October 2017 that every past NOAA administrator but one, attorney Richard Frank, who served from 1977 to 1981, has held a science degree — though advocates argue Myers brings private-sector experience that will help advance the organization.

NOAA oversees the National Weather Service, which compiles data used by AccuWeather. Samenow reported that AccuWeather has previously supported measures to limit what the Weather Service can make public, granting private companies a chance to create their own value-added products using the same information.

Myers and his brother Joel gave money to then-Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) in 2005, for example, who introduced legislation aimed at curtailing government competition with private weather services. Myers and his brothers also pressed the government on weather-related programs that could affect AccuWeather’s finances, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The Post.

“Barry Myers defines ‘conflict of interest,' ” Ciaran Clayton, communications director at NOAA in the Obama administration, told The Post in 2017. “He actively lobbied to privatize the National Weather Service, which works day in and day out to protect the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans, to benefit his own company’s bottom line.”

 

[Howl]

Taxpayer dollars subverted for the corporate good: 

Spoiler

NOAA oversees the National Weather Service, which compiles data used by AccuWeather. Samenow reported that AccuWeather has previously supported measures to limit what the Weather Service can make public, granting private companies a chance to create their own value-added products using the same information.

 

[AmazonGrace]

Another "acting" coming up just as Trump wants to divert disaster relief money to the wall 

 

[onekidanddone]

9 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

Another "acting" coming up just as Trump wants to divert disaster relief money to the wall 

 

Why do they even bother with the 'spend more time with my family' crap?