TRUMP REGIME

Political Wire - Members of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team have told advisers they plan to make a federal framework for fully self-driving vehicles one of the Transportation Department’s priorities,“ Bloomberg reports. “If new rules enable cars without human controls, that would directly benefit Elon Musk, the Tesla Inc. chief executive officer and Trump mega-donor who has become a powerful fixture in the president-elect’s inner circle. He has bet the future of the EV maker on self-driving technology and artificial intelligence.”

 Free Press - Which is the Trumpiest generation in America? No, it’s not the Boomers. It’s Generation X. They backed the Republican by a ten-point margin, according to one exit poll. That’s no surprise to Free Press senior editor Peter Savodnik, a Gen Xer himself. This was the election where the American people decided they were fed up with being told what to do, and that, argues Peter, might be the defining feature of Gen X. 

 “There was, about us, an all-pervasive don’t-give-a-shit quality, and it was reflected in our Ray-Bans, our irony, our apathy,” writes Peter. “Mostly, we wanted to be left alone—by our parents, by the sex ed counselors preaching abstinence, by Nancy Reagan telling us to ‘Just say no.’ We were, for the most part, ideologically committed to nothing.”

MSNBC -  The guide to fighting back against Trump 2.0

MSNBC - One of the linchpins of Project 2025 — the collection of policy proposals that some in Trump world have now warmly embraced after spending six months claiming they had nothing to do with it — is the planned replacement of up to 50,000 career civil servants with political appointees loyal to President-elect Donald Trump. But it’s not an idea confined only to Project 2025: Trump’s own “Agenda 47” calls for an “executive order restoring the president’s authority to fire rogue bureaucrats,” and Trump himself said of civil servants, “They’re destroying this country. They’re crooked people, they’re dishonest people. They’re going to be held accountable.”

This position is at odds with American public opinion. A survey conducted by the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, released last March, found that 87% of Americans said that “having a nonpartisan civil service is important for having a strong American democracy.”

Trump said of civil servants, ‘They’re destroying this country. They’re crooked people, they’re dishonest people. They’re going to be held accountable.’

The key to the plan is something called Schedule F, which the Trump administration created out of thin air in an executive order published on Oct. 21, 2020. That order reclassified into a new “Schedule F” all “career positions in the Federal service of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character.” Such employees would lose their employment protections and could thus be fired at will. (Schedule F had been in development for years but it had been delayed first by fears of alienating large swaths of government employees, and then by the pandemic.)

This order never went into effect, because Trump lost the election and President Joe Biden immediately rescinded it. The Biden administration went even further, though, pushing through a regulation that was finalized on April 9, 2024, to “reinforce and clarify longstanding civil service protections and merit system principles.”

That step means that, at a minimum, the Trump administration would have to issue and finalize a new regulation to replace the 2024 one, because presidents can’t overrule a final regulation by executive order. The rulemaking process usually takes months; the 2024 Biden rule was first proposed in October 2023 and not finalized until seven months later.

CNN -  President-elect Donald Trump is refusing to back down over his controversial Cabinet picks despite unease on Capitol Hill following fresh revelations and allegations about their pasts. Two of Trump's selections are facing particular scrutiny: The House Ethics Committee is under pressure to release its report on sexual misconduct allegations against attorney general pick Matt Gaetz, and sources say Trump's team was caught off guard by a 2017 sexual assault allegation against Trump's choice for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth. Many of Trump's picks must now be confirmed in the Senate, although the president-elect has pushed to bypass the typical confirmation process.