Ron Brownstein, Atlantic - Agricultural producers could face worse losses than any other economic sector from Trump’s plans to impose sweeping tariffs on imports and to undertake what he frequently has called ‘the largest domestic deportation operation’ of undocumented immigrants ‘in American history.’ Hospitals and other health providers in rural areas could face the greatest strain from proposals Trump has embraced to slash spending on Medicaid, which provides coverage to a greater share of adults in smaller communities than in large metropolitan areas. And small-town public schools would likely be destabilized even more than urban school districts if Trump succeeds in his pledge to expand ‘school choice’ by providing parents with vouchers to send their kids to private schools.
Kennedy’s Lawyer Has Asked the F.D.A. to Revoke Approval of the Polio Vaccine
NY Times - For the third year in a row, Elon Musk’s charitable foundation did not give away enough of its money... New tax filings show that the Musk Foundation fell $421 million short of the amount it was required to give away in 2023. Now, Mr. Musk has until the end of the year to distribute that money, or he will be required to pay a sizable penalty to the Internal Revenue Service.
Mr. Musk, in his new role as a leader of what President-elect Donald J. Trump is calling the Department of Government Efficiency, is promising to downsize and rearrange the entire federal government — including the I.R.S. But the tax records show he has struggled to meet a basic I.R.S. rule that is required of all charity leaders, no matter how small or big their foundations.
Axios - Meta and Amazon are each donating $1 million to President-elect Trump's inauguration fund, as major tech companies aim for a fresh start with him. Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, both are meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, following Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's dinner there last month.
Big Tech has long been a target for Trump, "who has lambasted the industry as biased and anticompetitive and targeted some of the biggest tech companies with threats of punitive action," notes The Washington Post, owned by Bezos."...
Amazon will stream Trump's inauguration on Prime Video, as it did for President Biden — a separate in-kind donation valued at another $1 million.
Protecting your data from Trump
Roll Call - The incoming Trump administration plan to slash federal spending would have to overcome decades of court decisions and likely face a Supreme Court showdown, experts say, a legal headwind highlighted by President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of deputy director for the Office of Management and Budget. Trump and allies, including OMB director pick Russ Vought and external advisors Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, have argued the president can unilaterally choose not to spend funds appropriated by Congress — a process known as impoundment.
A 1974 law called the Impoundment Control Act mandates that presidents spend funds appropriated by Congress. A report published by the Vought-led Center for Renewing America argued that the appropriations clause only put a “ceiling” on federal funding and said the 1974 law was an “unprecedented break” with the nation’s history.
The report said that “for much of the Nation’s history, such a congressional power was so beyond the realm of constitutional permissibility that it was almost never even asserted.”
Musk and Ramaswamy, tapped to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that the 1974 law is unconstitutional and “we believe the current Supreme Court would likely side with him on this question.”
And Trump in a campaign video last year said he intends to use the “long-recognized impoundment power to squeeze the bloated federal bureaucracy for massive savings.”
For decades courts have ruled that presidents cannot ignore Congress’ power to appropriate funds and decide on their own not to spend them, experts said.
After briefly commenting on border concerns, Trump told NBC News’ Kristen Welker, “I won on groceries. Very simple word, groceries. Like almost — you know, who uses the word? I started using the word — the groceries ... I won an election based on that.”... The president-elect concluded his thought by saying, “We’re going to bring those prices way down.”
That was the message the public heard on Sunday, when the “Meet the Press” interview aired. Four days later, Time magazine published the transcript of its latest interview Trump, which included a rather pointed question: “If the prices of groceries don’t come down, will your presidency be a failure?” The president-elect replied:
I don’t think so. Look, they got them up. I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard. But I think that they will.
... In the same interview, Trump added that he “can’t guarantee” that his trade tariffs won’t actually raise prices.
If you voted for the GOP ticket because you believed Trump when he vowed that consumer prices would “come down fast,” I have some bad news for you: His position is burdened by incoherence.
CNN - Americans paid 22% more for groceries last month compared to when Donald Trump left office in January 2021, according to the latest Consumer Price Index data released earlier this week.
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