Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
“The Trump administration has unexpectedly taken down the online application form for several popular student debt repayment plans, baffling borrowers as well as experts who say the decision could create complications for millions of Americans with outstanding loans.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-administration-removes-application-for-popular-student-loan-repayment-programs-100008394.html
“Trump’s new budget blueprint, which is also known as a resolution, does three things.
First, it calls for extending the president’s 2017 tax cuts, which would otherwise expire at the end of the year, at a cost of $4 trillion over the next decade. It also makes room for another $500 billion in tax cuts Trump talked about on the campaign trail, such as no tax on tips, for a grand total of $4.5 trillion.
Second, the blueprint greenlights modest spending increases targeted toward immigration enforcement (up to $110 billion), customs and border protection (up to $90 billion) and military involvement in border security (up to $100 million) — top Trump priorities.
And finally, at the behest of conservative deficit hawks, the resolution mandates $2 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years to partially offset new border spending and the trillions in revenue lost to Trump’s tax cuts. (Even then, the new budget would still directly add $2.8 trillion to the deficit.)
For now, Trump’s budget blueprint doesn’t say which programs will be slashed; instead, it instructs specific House committees to cut specific amounts from the programs under their jurisdiction.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/the-biggest-spending-cuts-in-trumps-new-budget-bill–and-how-they-could-affect-you-172157094.html
“The permanent staffers who are fired or taking the buyout include people who collect fees at park entrances, maintenance workers who clean park facilities and rangers who patrol the backcountry and rescue lost and injured hikers.
Adding to the operational chaos for Park Service supervisors, the Trump administration in January notified thousands of seasonal workers who staff America’s 433 national parks and historical sites during peak seasons that their job offers for the 2025 season had been “rescinded.” The move set off panic in the ranks of park employees, and threw into limbo the vacation plans of hundreds of millions of people who visit the parks each year.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/amid-staff-cuts-budget-chaos-110046115.html
FBI second-in-command has said he doesn’t believe in the separation of powers and all that matters is power. If someone would have said that he’d be appointed second in command before it was done, he would be accused of Trump-derangement syndrome.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZBa_0IOasY
The Trump-Musk attack on Academia and DEI is doing more harm than good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXx5Ziwh6is
Innovation gets you fried in the Trump-Musk bureaucracy. If you just got a promotion, you have a new job, and therefore are easier to fire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ49uNckZjE
“only 121 of those 293 B.T. (Before Trump) Republican legislators (41 percent) still have an office on Capitol Hill.
Some of this, of course, is normal attrition. Nineteen of the Republicans who left Congress did so to seek another office, something House members do all the time. Thirty lost a general election, indicating they didn’t want to leave Congress. Some of the 70 who retired from elected office, such as 82-year-old former Rep. Kay Granger, probably did so for age or health reasons rather than political ones. There were even four Republican members of Congress who died in office.
But some undeniably left because they no longer fit in in Trump’s GOP. Most obviously, 10 lost a primary election to a fellow Republican, including former Reps. Liz Cheney, Jaime Herrera Beutler and Tom Rice, who all faced a Trump-backed primary challenger after voting to impeach him in 2021. Several others, like Trump critics former Sen. Jeff Flake and former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, likely chose not to run for reelection because they were worried they would meet the same fate. Other departed Republicans, like former Sen. Rob Portman, former Speaker Paul Ryan and former Rep. Ken Buck, expressed frustration with the direction of their party on their way out the door. Two, former Reps. Justin Amash and Paul Mitchell, even left the Republican Party before retiring from Congress.”
https://abcnews.go.com/538/gop-trumps-party-now/story?id=118574467
https://abcnews.go.com/538/americans-voted-trump-support-agenda/story?id=119136603
“What happens when one of the world’s largest repositories of free information becomes unreliable?
That dire situation came to pass in late January, when many federal websites took down entire datasets to avoid possibly violating a series of executive orders from President Donald Trump. At the same time, the Department of Government Efficiency, the Elon Musk-directed task force that is slashing government operations, has canceled contracts for the collection of data and cut workers who analyze and evaluate information about various facets of American life, such as education, housing and consumer protection. These developments led to widespread concern that some data that researchers have long relied on the government to collect would no longer be readily available, potentially hindering various initiatives meant to help Americans — both inside and outside of government.
Although some information has come back online, the availability and transparency of government-collected data is suddenly no longer a given. This isn’t a worry just for data journalists like us, either. Experts I spoke with laid out how the public and private sector, companies large and small, and even the average person use government data to make decisions about program effectiveness, business prospects and life choices. With this in mind, I delved into this recent interruption in data access, why this data has significant value and what challenges may lie ahead if government data becomes less accessible and reliable moving forward.”
https://abcnews.go.com/538/matters-trump-deleting-government-data/story?id=119003153
“More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”
“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” the 21 staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”
The employees also warned that many of those enlisted by Musk to help him slash the size of the federal government under President Donald Trump’s administration were political ideologues who did not have the necessary skills or experience for the task ahead of them.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/21-federal-technology-staffers-resign-160229566.html