“The Office of Personnel Management has formally submitted draft regulations that would make it easier for agencies to fire career government officials who push back against presidential orders.
The move laid out in documents obtained by POLITICO on Tuesday is the latest step toward rekindling a plan initiated at the tail end of President Donald Trump’s first term to eliminate civil service protection for federal employees who play a role in policy development or advocacy.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/11/trump-administration-federal-worker-protections-00203598
“Republicans on the Hill are also largely giving Musk and Trump the benefit of the doubt, dismissing criticism from Democrats that they are infringing on their congressional powers. Instead, they are leaning on comments from one of their former colleagues — Secretary of State Marco Rubio — instead of directly grappling with Musk’s actions.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), asked if Trump has the ability to close USAID unilaterally, said the administration’s goal is to ferret out waste.
“I think it’s a lot more about finding out how the dollars are being spent, where they are going and whether or not they’re consistent with this administration’s and our country’s priorities,” he said.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chair of the Judiciary Committee, said that it is a “constitutional question” when asked if Trump can end USAID without congressional approval.
“It’s how you define the executive powers of the president of the United States,” he said, “and I can’t define that for you.”
Career government officials, Democratic lawmakers and nongovernmental organizations have scrambled to shine a light on Musk’s efforts, many of which they’ve argued he doesn’t have the legal authority to carry out absent approval from Congress. Even some conservatives have raised concerns over Musk’s actions. So far, though, they have been vastly outpaced by Musk, who has taken to his social media platform X to build public support for shock-and-awe efforts.
Though Musk posted on X throughout the weekend that it was time for USAID to “die” and bragged that he was “feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” it wasn’t until Monday afternoon that Democratic lawmakers held a press conference in hopes of saving the agency.
Likewise, days after Musk’s allies gained access to the Treasury Department’s payments system, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced that he and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) would work on legislation stopping the “unlawful peddling.” Schumer said, “It’s like letting a tiger into a petting zoo and hoping for the best.””
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/03/musk-washington-trump-doge-00202227
“The opaque office’s early moves have violated the Privacy Act and cybersecurity laws, according to legal experts, and triggered a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s assault on government bureaucracy.
Legal and security experts are particularly exercised by Musk’s move to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development and take control of the Treasury Department’s central payments database.
“The scale here is unprecedented in terms of the risk to sensitive personal and financial information,” said Alan Butler of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “It’s an absolute nightmare.”
The Musk-led effort to gain entry into Treasury’s huge payment database drew a lawsuit Monday from two major federal employee unions and left some lawyers who specialize in regulation of such data nearly apoplectic.
Mary Ellen Callahan, former Chief Privacy Officer at the Department of Homeland Security, called DOGE’s access “a data breach of exponential proportions.” “If we lose control of that data, we’ve lost control forever,” she said.”
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“Other lawyers said DOGE’s access could also violate cybersecurity-related laws, like the Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2002.
Reports that career employees at the Office of Personnel Management were locked out of key databases by DOGE personnel also triggered deep concern Monday among legal and security experts. A key OPM database was breached by hackers in 2013, prompting widespread outrage from lawmakers and federal workers. The U.S. government blamed the hack on China and said the data could be used to target or enlist federal employees in espionage.
“They’re not following the law, they’re not following any semblance of best practice, they’re just hacking and slashing government IT systems in a way that threatens national security and puts everyone at risk,” Butler said.
Claims by Musk that he is shutting down USAID were met with widespread skepticism as well. USAID was created through an executive order issued by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. But it was formally established as a federal government agency by Congress in 1998, creating doubts about Trump’s authority to simply abolish it or, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio has suggested, fold it into the State Department.
“I think it’s the most clearly unconstitutional act that he’s doing,” said Alex Joel, an adjunct professor of law at American University. “He can’t just destroy the whole agency.””
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/03/doge-treasury-usaid-donald-trump-011538
The debt is a huge problem and we need bi-partisan solutions to fix it.
Solutions that the incoming administration have proposed like cutting 70% of the federal workforce: demonize the bureaucracy, will make government function poorly, and are bad ideas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7ZH6hN6Axc
“”Federal law is clear: patients have the right to stabilizing hospital emergency room care no matter where they live,” said Department of Health and Human Services (DHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra. “Women should not have to be near death to get care.”
In July, HHS issued new guidance stating that EMTALA’s provision for stabilizing treatment includes a right to an abortion in some circumstances. “If a state law prohibits abortion and does not include an exception for the health or life of the pregnant person—or draws the exception more narrowly than EMTALA’s emergency medical condition definition—that state law is preempted,” the agency said.
No existing abortion ban lacks an exception for a mother’s life, but some do omit exceptions for women’s health. And determining whether something counts as a life-threatening emergency—as opposed to a mere health-threatening emergency—isn’t so clear-cut. Many pregnancy complications could become life-threatening while not being necessarily or immediately so. The HHS guidance attempts to provide clarity, stating that regardless of what a state law says, physicians must provide an abortion if one is necessary to address an emergency medical condition (including, but not limited to, ectopic pregnancy or severely high blood pressure).
Texas sued over the HHS directive. Joined by the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) and the Christian Medical and Dental Association (CMDA), the state sought to have the HHS “abortion mandate” declared “unlawful, unconstitutional and unenforceable” and for the court to issue a preliminary injunction on its enforcement.”
“These “get off my lawn” conservatives claim to be upholding the principle of local control by arguing that local government officials rather than bureaucrats in far-off Sacramento get to make development decisions. It sounds good in theory given the Jeffersonian concept that the government closest to the people governs best.
The better quotation (actually used by Henry David Thoreau but often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson) is “that government is best which governs the least.” The goal—for those of us who value freedom—isn’t to allow the right government functionary to control us, but to have less government control overall.
Local officials are easier to kick out of office than officials in Sacramento or Washington, D.C., but the locals can be extremely abusive. They know where we live, after all. I’ve reported extensively on California’s defunct redevelopment agencies, and local tyrants would routinely abuse eminent domain under the guise of local control.
“Under S.B. 9, cities are required to approve these lot splits ‘ministerially,’ without any reviews, hearings, conditions, fees or environmental impact reports,” complains my Southern California News Group colleague, Susan Shelley.
Oh, please.
Conservatives have for decades complained about the subjective nature of bureaucratic and public reviews, the evils of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and excessive fees. Now there’s a law that fixes that, albeit in a limited manner, and they are grabbing their pitchforks.
S.B. 9 and S.B. 10 do not put Sacramento bureaucrats in charge of the locals. Instead, they deregulate certain development decisions, by requiring officials to approve a project “by right” provided it meets all the normal regulations. It eliminates subjectivity and defangs CEQA. Yet this greatly upsets them.”
…
“If conservatives seriously believe local control is the trump card, then they should lobby for the repeal of Proposition 13, which is a state-imposed restriction on local governments’ authority to raise property taxes. I find Prop. 13 to be one of the best laws ever passed in this state. They should also oppose Republican efforts at the federal level to limit the ability of blue states to regulate the heck out of us.”
“A recent study of the program’s effects from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) finds that the majority of the funds spent by the program went to business owners and shareholders rather than to workers themselves. Ultimately, “only 23 to 34 percent of the program’s funds went directly to workers who would have otherwise lost their jobs.” The jobs it did keep in place were preserved at very high cost—somewhere between $170,000 and $257,000 a year, far more than the typical earnings of affected workers, which are closer to $58,000 per year.
While the PPP was able to save some jobs, albeit, at a very high cost, the overall result of the program was precisely the opposite of what was intended. The purpose of the program was to preserve the jobs of wage workers, not to funnel money to business owners. As David Autor, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and the lead researcher behind the paper, told The New York Times recently, “it turns out [the money] didn’t primarily go to workers who would have lost jobs. It went to business owners and their shareholders and their creditors.” The program, he added, was “highly regressive.””
“Contrary to what the Times reported, that policy is not “legally shaky.” It relies on the well-established anti-commandeering doctrine, which says the federal government cannot compel state and local officials to enforce its criminal laws or regulatory schemes.
That doctrine is rooted in the basic design of our government, which limits Congress to a short list of specifically enumerated powers and leaves the rest to the states or the people, as the 10th Amendment makes clear. That division of powers gives states wide discretion to experiment with different policies, some of which are bound to offend the Times.
The paper suggests that defending state autonomy is disreputable, because that argument was “deployed in the past in the South to resist antislavery and civil rights laws.” But federalism does not give states a license to violate rights guaranteed by the Constitution or to flout laws authorized by it.
Although the Times tries to tar the anti-commandeering principle as racist, the same basic idea was a crucial weapon for Northern states that refused to help the federal government enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. Today that principle likewise means that state and local officials have no obligation to participate in the “deportation crackdowns” that the Times decries.
Similarly, the ongoing collapse of marijuana prohibition—a development the Times welcomes—would be impossible if states were obligated to participate in the federal war on weed. While both progressives and conservatives might wish that federalism could be limited to achieving results they like, that is not how constitutional principles work.”
“Establishing new Cabinet departments in the US isn’t that unusual either. In fact, more than half of the government’s 15 active departments have been formed in just the past 75 years. But among these executive-level departments and in all the hundreds of federal agencies, not one has a mission solely dedicated to the climate crisis.”
…
“When the US faced grave security threats in the past, it rose to those challenges by reorganizing the executive branch. For instance, after World War II, Congress enacted the National Security Act of 1947 and it was signed by President Truman. The Act reorganized military and intelligence branches, established the National Security Council and Central Intelligence Agency, and merged the War and Navy department into what became the Department of Defense.
Following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the Department of Homeland Security was established, integrating 22 different federal agencies and offices into one unified Cabinet department. In a message to Congress on June 18, 2002, President George W. Bush wrote: “History teaches us that new challenges require new organizational structures. History also teaches us that critical security challenges require clear lines of responsibility and the unified effort of the US Government.””
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“legion of civil servants, who have devoted their careers to combating climate change, are fragmented and lack that clear line of responsibility President Bush described as necessary to address critical security challenges. These leading experts could be convened under one broad mission, with the potential for producing unified actions and outcomes far greater than the sum of their disaggregated parts.
Just as the Department of Homeland Security promises “relentless resilience” to attacks against the United States, a Department of Climate could deploy this same mindset, ensuring the US has the foundation it needs to take on the threats climate change poses to this nation and to future generations.”
…
“federal health agencies’ ability to focus on climate-related health impacts is currently inadequate. This is in part due to leadership that is dismissive of climate change — and in part because their attention is, understandably, on the Covid-19 pandemic. And the 2018 hurricane season before that, and Zika before that, and Ebola before that. While the CDC and other health agencies are full of experts working to mitigate climate-related health threats, their priorities will always be driven by the next new global health crisis — and by each new administration’s political whims.
A new department would not be completely immune to the same geopolitical winds that tug on other federal agencies’ attention; but a dedicated budget and clear language in its mission mandating action on climate change would better position it against such winds. Instead of each new administration interpreting whether work on climate falls within the scope of an agency’s mission, there would be no question that addressing climate change is within the purview of a Department of Climate.
While there are many offices or divisions across numerous agencies engaged in work related to energy or transportation, these cross-cutting topics nevertheless have Cabinet-level leadership and congressionally determined budgets to ensure their missions are met regardless of who sits in the White House. As with education, labor, or agriculture, we should have a Department of Climate so that our nation always has the clear dedication of resources it needs to concentrate on crucial issues.”
“This fiscal year, 2020, the federal government will collect $3.6 trillion in tax revenues. But due to its spending addiction, the government will expend $4.6 trillion. This means that the government will have to borrow $1 trillion this year alone, in order to cover a deficit of 4.6 percent of GDP. This is the first trillion-dollar deficit not due to a global recession.”
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“Thankfully, the economy is doing well for now. This good performance is masking many of the ill effects, not just of the trade war but also of our overall fiscal situation. The reality, however, is that a growing economy during a time of peace should not be accompanied by growing deficits.”