Author: Lone Candle
USAID Paying for Politico Is a Nontroversy
“the $8 million figure represents total government expenditures to Politico since 2016, not USAID dollars specifically. The amount paid by USAID to Politico totals $44,000.
A government agency directly transferring cash to a journalistic outlet that’s supposed to cover it impartially might still constitute a scandal; in general, the feds should not subsidize journalistic projects. But importantly, USAID was not generously donating the money to Politico—the government paid the money in exchange for subscriptions to Politico’s premium content. This is a pretty important difference; USAID is paying for the service Politico provides, in much the same way that a government agency has to pay for janitorial services, electricity, or office supplies. If a federal office buys a new printer, it isn’t necessarily malicious. It could be malicious, if the printer costs too much money, is defective, or was purchased as part of some kickback scheme—but the reality that government offices need printers isn’t really up for argument.
When confronted with these facts, many of the conservative social media accounts asserted that something must be awry, since $44,000 is still way too much for a Politico subscription. They assume that USAID is overpaying in exchange for favorable coverage of progressive causes and unfavorable coverage of Trump.
But that’s not what USAID and the other government agencies are paying for. In truth, Politico’s premium product isn’t political news coverage, progressively slanted or otherwise: It’s minute-to-minute updates on regulatory decisions that impact specific industries. This is information that political and government agencies need and that Politico supplies, for a premium price. As independent journalist Lee Fang points out, Politico isn’t the only game in town: Bloomberg and LexisNexis run similar services. Politico’s price tag is comparable to theirs.
“Politico provides paywalled ‘pro’ subscription services that cost over $10,000 per login for up-to-the-minute, detailed reporting on policy decisions and regulations,” writes Fang. “The $8.1 million in Politico subscriptions referenced above relates to years of subscriptions by agency officials across the government.”
These services are clearly valuable—in fact, Republican legislators pay for them, too. Customers of Politico’s services include Rep. Lauren Boebert (R–Colo.), Rep. Elise Stefanik (R–N.Y.), and even Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R–La.). Republicans want their staffers well informed of legislative updates. Corie Whalen, a communications director for former Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.), notes that it would be both impractical and ultimately more expensive to expect legislative staff to gather the necessary information some other way.”
https://reason.com/2025/02/06/usaid-paying-for-politico-is-a-nontroversy/
Trump’s Foreign Policy Is a Lot of Noise
“On Sunday, Trump ordered 25 percent tariffs on Canada, demanding that Canadians surrender their sovereignty to become “our Cherished 51st State.” He suspended the tariff order the next day, after Canada announced it was stepping up border security. The Canadian government, of course, was mostly rehashing a border security plan that it had already announced in December 2024.”
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“Trump threatened economic sanctions on Colombia after it refused to take U.S. military flights carrying deportees, then claimed Colombia had backed down when it sent its own military to pick them up. Trump threatened to take back the Panama Canal, and the Trump camp claimed victory when Panama announced that it would let its Belt and Road Initiative economic agreement with China expire.”
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“Trump’s threats to Greenland have alarmed Europe, which can act a lot more independently than U.S. neighbors can. European officials are having a “conversation” about whether to cozy up to China in response to U.S. pressure, The Financial Times reports.
“The European borders are sovereign whether it’s north, south, east and west,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said on the radio, offering to send the French military to defend Greenland. “Nobody can allow themselves to mess around with our borders.”
While it’s unlikely that the United States will get into a shooting war over Greenland, it seems pointless to alienate an important power bloc that was otherwise eager to cooperate against Russia and willing to play ball against China. And the payoff is unclear. Greenland’s population of 60,000, who largely don’t want to be ruled by either the U.S. or Denmark, have been otherwise happy to host U.S. military bases and mining companies, the main U.S. interests in the island.
The real test is how the Trump administration’s bluster fares against rival great powers of China, Russia, and Iran.”
https://reason.com/2025/02/06/trumps-foreign-policy-is-a-lot-of-noise/
How Elon Musk Is Infiltrating Washington
How Elon Musk Is Infiltrating Washington
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ-gvaIVXeo
Trump is using a nearly 50-year-old law to justify new tariffs. It may not be legal.
“The International Emergency Economic Powers Act, passed in 1977, grants the president broad authority over economic transactions, and a wide range of abilities to deal with “any unusual and extraordinary threat,” stemming in whole or in part from foreign sources.
Presidents, including Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden, have used the law to impose economic sanctions on other countries, including on Russia after it launched its 2022 war on Ukraine.
But the closest a president has come to citing a national emergency to impose tariffs was when President Richard Nixon used a different law — the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 — to levy a temporary universal tariff on all imports in 1971.
Trump justified his new tariffs Saturday by pointing to “the major threat of illegal aliens and deadly drugs killing our Citizens, including fentanyl,” which he claims Mexico, Canada and China are not doing enough to keep from coming into the United States.
But Bill Reinsch, a former Commerce Department official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Trump’s use of IEEPA to justify his trade actions “doesn’t really pass the red-face test,” setting the stage for a company or trade association whose members have been harmed by the action to sue.
“The question will be, can you find a judge who will write an injunction to stay the tariffs from going into effect,” Reinsch said. “And my prediction is that will be hard, because you’re asking a federal judge to essentially say, ‘I know more than the President does about what an emergency is.’ And I think judges are going to be reluctant to do that.”
That won’t stop a lawsuit from proceeding, most likely all the way to the Supreme Court, Reinsch said, but it could be years before there is a conclusion to the legal battle.
“The courts have historically upheld the president’s power to take emergency actions, especially when they are related to national security. But one important question is whether they will uphold the use of tariffs. In the past, [IEEPA] has only been used to impose sanctions,” said Tim Brightbill, a trade attorney at the law firm Wiley Rein in Washington, DC.
“While it is possible that companies or industry groups would seek an injunction, they probably face an uphill battle blocking the new tariffs,” Brightbill said.”
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“the U.S. effectively killed the WTO Appellate Body during Trump’s first term by blocking the appointment of new judges, leaving it without the ability to adjudicate disputes. And there’s little to suggest the Trump administration would abide by a WTO ruling even if the organization were able to issue one.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/03/trump-tariffs-legal-00202063
Trump Is Ignoring the Law — and Congress Doesn’t Care
“For over a week now, Donald Trump and the Justice Department have been flouting the law meant to shut down TikTok. The legislation was unambiguous and was passed by large, bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress; it was affirmed by a unanimous Supreme Court less than two weeks ago. And for the most part, both Republicans and Democrats have sat quietly by as Trump has waved away their previously stated concerns, as well as the constitutional powers and institutional prerogatives of Capitol Hill.
The TikTok ban was supposed to be a critical national security response to the threat posed by the Chinese government and its control over an app with 170 million users in our country. Shortly before the law went into effect, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said in a speech on the Senate floor that “without question, TikTok’s lethal algorithm has cost the lives of many American kids.” He announced that there would “be no extensions, no concessions and no compromises for TikTok.””
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“On his first day in office, Trump declared that he would effectively ignore the law, and so TikTok lives. He appears to have engineered a short-term bailout for TikTok — whose app should have gone dark in the U.S. by now — after a wealthy donor supported the move and amid some belief that TikTok helped him get reelected.”
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“he has created a precedent — that he can direct his own administration to ignore laws that he believes are politically or personally unhelpful to him — that ought to trouble Republicans and Democrats alike.
To start, there is no real question about the state of the law on paper: Trump is breaking it.”
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“His executive order was little more than a public declaration that he would ignore the law on the theory that it interfered with his ability “to assess the national security and foreign policy implications.” Not only did he direct the attorney general not to enforce the law for 75 days, he also instructed the Justice Department “to issue a letter” to each TikTok service provider “stating that there has been no violation of the statute and that there is no liability for any conduct” during the 75-day period.
Some Republican China hawks, like Cotton and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, had taken the position that state attorneys general could enforce the law anyway, but Trump unilaterally decided that they were wrong about that too. His executive order purports to prevent “attempted enforcement by the States or private parties” and to grant the Justice Department “exclusive authority to enforce the law.”
This is generally not how executive orders are supposed to work. They are not supposed to be vehicles for the president to pick and choose which laws passed by Congress he wants to enforce — or which ones he wants to change by fiat.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/01/28/trump-tiktok-bailout-00200800
Opinion | All Presidents Test the Limits of Their Authority. Trump Is Doing Something Far More Radical.
“The Constitution’s text is clear that Congress must authorize appropriations and the president must “take Care” that those laws are “faithfully executed.” There is no basis in constitutional text or history for the president to claim open-ended power to impound funds in the manner of the OMB memo. In 1975, the Supreme Court rejected former President Richard Nixon’s claim to be able to spend less than Congress had appropriated. That ruling would have had to come out the other way if the president had a constitutional power to impound. (Perhaps aware of this reality, OMB issued a later memo claiming the freeze was not, in fact, an “impoundment.” But this is just a semantic sleight of hand: For entities that need federal funds this or next week in particular, there is no meaningful difference.)”
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“If anything, the Supreme Court has tightened the constitutional leash on such unilateral claims of executive authority untethered from a statutory anchor. With Justice Neil Gorsuch leading the charge, it has stressed instead the need for clear authority from Congress for the exercise of any delegated power, including the power to write regulations. The OMB memo makes a mockery of those decisions by allowing the president to do with money what now isn’t allowed with regulations.
It is true that there is a scattering of past instances of impoundment. But these isolated cases largely concern foreign affairs and national security matters. In 1803, for example, Thomas Jefferson declined to spend funds for 15 gunboats for fear that they would upend secret talks with a foreign sovereign, Napoleonic France. Whatever unilateral presidential authority exists over foreign affairs cannot constitutionally be spread with reckless abandon to cover any or all domestic spending.
Past presidents have also confronted conflicts between a legislative command and Congress’ failure to appropriate funds to execute that command. There, presidents are forced to make a choice between dueling statutory orders. Courts rarely address these conflicts. But it is striking to note that in a 2012 case involving competing mandates, the Supreme Court rejected the executive’s claim to be able to withhold promised funds.”
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“The impoundment power Trump’s White House asserts would drive a stake through Congress’ constitutional authority.
Exactly like the line-item veto invalidated by the Supreme Court in 1998, the claimed impoundment power is de facto power to selectively edit duly enacted laws. This claimed nonenforcement should elicit whiplash among conservatives. After all, it was red states such as Texas, aided by Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller, that once excoriated the Biden administration for negating federal laws on immigration via nonenforcement. (The Biden administration, however, could point to statutory conflicts that don’t exist in this case.)”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/01/29/trump-funding-freeze-power-grab-00201186
Medicare Advantage: Good? Or Bad? Part Two: Medicare Advantage Costs the Taxpayer More
Medicare Advantage: Good? Or Bad? Part Two: Medicare Advantage Costs the Taxpayer More
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFkm7WMxIc8
The GOP’s Unreliable Cutter-in-Chief
“The problem for Trump is that for all of his talk of prioritizing loyalty in his second term, he has staffed his administration with a number of conservative ideologues who could have very different ideas about what the government should be doing — none more influential than his likely soon-to-be budget director, Russ Vought.
Vought is a well-known quantity on Capitol Hill from his time as a staffer there, to say nothing of his work as a Project 2025 author and all-around warrior for small government. Republicans there saw his fingerprints on the spending freeze — or the “Vought memo,” as some are calling it.
“This has Russ’s name written all fucking over it,” said one GOP aide who works in appropriations, adding, ”I see a disparity between what Trump wants to do and what Russ wants to do.”
In other words, the battle between fiscal hawks and populists is set to rage not only on Capitol Hill and elsewhere in the coming months, but inside the White House itself.
“There’s an undercurrent of the old Republican Party at play where they’re like, ‘We’re going to cut benefits’ and all this,” the lawmaker said. “And like the new Republican Party is like, ‘Yeah, we don’t care about that.’””
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/01/trump-unreliable-spending-cuts-column-00201754
The Real Reason Trump is Threatening to Seize Greenland
Greenland is super valuable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8j2uWw3WfU