“Building lethality in the military may be the buzzword for the new Trump administration, but busywork and paperwork have become the reality at the Pentagon, as service members and civilian workers are facing a broad mandate to purge all of the department’s social media sites and untangle confusing personnel reduction moves.
On Wednesday, the department’s top public affairs official signed and sent out a new memo requiring all the military services to spend countless hours poring over years of website postings, photos, news articles and videos to remove any mentions that “promote diversity, equity and inclusion.””
“The Trump administration touted a nearly $1 billion plan Wednesday to combat the spread of avian flu and mitigate skyrocketing egg prices as the outbreak rips through poultry flocks across the United States.
But the measures come as the Agriculture Department is struggling to rehire key employees working on the virus outbreak who were fired as part of the administration’s sweeping purge of government workers. Roughly a quarter of employees in a critical office testing for the disease were cut, as well as scientists and inspectors.”
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“A few reinstated workers were once again sent emails urging them to take the Trump administration’s “deferred resignation” plan, according to two people familiar with the situation.”
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““If … they have projects that are ongoing, all of that work has now essentially been thrown out, discarded and dead in the water,” said Dr. Mary Beth Hall, a retired Dairy Forage researcher. “You’ve got God knows how many millions of dollars of research that’s just been thrown away.””
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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.
“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.”