TRUMP REGIME

Politicus -  President-elect Donald Trump is poised to pull the plug on President Joe Biden’s yearslong push to cancel student debt for tens of millions of people as Republicans sweep into power in the coming months.

What could get more expensive if Trump launches a new trade war with Mexico and Canada.

The American Prospect -During the 2024 campaign, Trump and his surrogates went out of their way to claim that they had no plans to cut Medicare. But they do have plans to destroy Medicare by stealth. They’ll do this by changing the rules. A key part of that strategy is to expand the private Medicare Advantage program and push more and more Medicare recipients into it, leading to a death spiral of traditional public Medicare. The details are spelled out in the Project 2025 blueprint....

Dr. Mehmet Oz is a big booster of that strategy—and now, Trump’s appointee to head Medicare and Medicaid. On his now-defunct TV show, The Dr. Oz Show, he repeatedly touted Medicare Advantage. Disclosures later showed, during his failed campaign for a Pennsylvania Senate seat in 2022, that Oz owned $600,000 of stock in two of the largest Medicare Advantage sponsors, UnitedHealth Group and CVS/Aetna.

Oz has not gotten as much attention as Trump’s clownishly unqualified cabinet appointees such as RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. He has gotten some negative attention for other conflicts of interest in his use of his TV show to promote quack remedies in which he had a financial interest. But that pales alongside the damage that he could do to Medicare.

Guardian - The return of Donald Trump in the White House is promising many things: mass deportations, an end to inflation, and perhaps the first cryptocurrency-friendly presidency, which is widely expected to loosen regulations on the emergent technology.While that is music to the ears of crypto investors and enthusiasts who poured money into his campaign, there are other unlikely winners for such policies, including far-right extremists and terrorist organizations who are using crypto to finance their ends.“Any loosening of regulations on crypto (or, frankly, the appearance of loosening) is likely to further increase extremists’ use of crypto,” says Jessica Davis, a former analyst at Canada’s spy agency and the president of Insight Threat Intelligence, a consultancy firm specializing in terrorist financing.

“While the integration of crypto into the traditional financial system is not a nefarious goal, steps to do so, without proper regulation and compliance with international counter-terrorist financing standards, will make it easier for terrorists to raise and move funds for their purposes.”

Already on election day, the Base, a designated neo-Nazi terrorist group under a years-long FBI investigation, was soliciting donations in cryptocurrency for its stateside paramilitary training.

 Roll Call -  President-elect Donald Trump late Tuesday said he plans to nominate Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician known for his opposition to COVID-19 lock downs, to lead the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s leading public health agency. Trump said Bhattacharya would work in concert with Health and Human Services Secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “make America healthy again.”

Bhattacharya is a professor of health policy at Stanford and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the director of the Center on the Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, according to a biography posted on the Stanford University website.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, he was one of the leading critics of the NIH. But now, if confirmed by the Senate, he would lead the very office he once criticized. The NIH pays for more biomedical research than any other public institution in the world, allocating more than 90 percent of its roughly $49 billion budget to research.

Daily Beast  - President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team officially signed the necessary docs on Tuesday to commence the transfer of power with the Biden administration after more than a month, according to Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles.However, the team is still refusing to sign at least two major agreements that will allow for the smooth transition of sensitive and classified information.

The New York Times reported that the transition team has rejected signing an agreement that would allow the FBI to conduct security clearances for transition members. Additionally, the team has refused to sign an agreement to obtain secure office space, email accounts, and other security cleared assets from the General Services Administration. According to a statement from Wiles, the rejections were done in the name of government efficiency.