Washington Post- President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters say they want to move 100,000 federal jobs out of Washington to places that they describe as less expensive, closer to stakeholders and, as Trump put it in a campaign video, “filled with patriots who love America.”
In 2019, the Trump administration said it would move the Bureau of Land Management headquarters and its nearly 600 jobs to the small city of Grand Junction, Colo. When the new offices opened a year later, just three of the bureau’s employees walked in the door.
About 40 more were assigned to other offices out West. But nearly 90 percent of headquarters employees opted to leave the agency or
work remotely rather than head West. It was “a giant brain drain,” said
Tracy Stone-Manning, who took over as the agency’s director under
President Joe Biden in 2021.
ABC News: Three former aides to Tulsi Gabbard said she regularly read and shared articles from the Russian news site RT, which the U.S. intelligence community characterized in 2017 as "the Kremlin's principal international propaganda outlet.”
New Republic - Trump just picked the billionaire who did the first private spacewalk for Elon Musk’s SpaceX to head NASA. Jared Isaacman, a processing card company CEO and close friend of Musk, was nominated by President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday. ...
Isaacman’s close business relationship with Musk has raised red flags for some. “Trump has nominated billionaire Jared Isaacman to be the next head of NASA. Isaacman is a close associate of Elon Musk and lacks government experience. And he has been to space, but only on SpaceX missions,” wrote More Perfect Union on X.
“This is a VERY pro SpaceX pro Elon pick. Isaacman has been financing Spacex missions and is a huge champion of the company,” said Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Max Chafkin.
NY Times - Ending the individual tax cuts President Donald J. Trump signed into law in 2017 would have a negligible effect on the American economy over the next decade, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found Wednesday in a projection that could deflate Republican promises to supercharge the economy with tax cuts next year.
The budget office’s analysis comes as Republicans, who will take control of Washington in January, are weighing the fate of the broad tax cut they passed in 2017. That law slashed marginal tax rates across income groups, expanded the standard deduction and made the child tax credit more generous. But many of the cuts expire at the end of next year, and lawmakers are now figuring out how to extend them.
Huffington Post - Democratic strategist James Carville said Tuesday that right-wing media figure Tucker Carlson is behind Donald Trump’s problematic picks for nominations. After being shown a clip of MSNBC’s Jonathan Lemire reporting that Steve Bannon and other extreme MAGA types were heavily influencing the president-elect’s choices, Carville zeroed in on ex-Fox News star Carlson.
“So Steve Bannon does not drive this,” Carville told “The Beat” host Ari Melber. “One person is driving this, I promise you. And it’s Tucker Carlson. Tucker’s an old friend of mine.”
Carville, who co-starred with Carlson on CNN’s “Crossfire” in the aughts, noted that Kash Patel, Trump’s pick for FBI director who was called “profoundly unqualified” by former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, proved that Carlson was pulling the strings.
“I’m just telling you what’s out there,” Carville continued. “And Tucker is 40 times more clever than Steve Bannon. He’s 40 times more connected. He’s also very connected with Elon Musk and everything else. And he’s a very bright man who should not be underrated. But I think he has more influence in this current administration, way more than Vernon Jordan had in the Clinton administration or any of the kind of wise men that were around. But Tucker is very, very, very powerful. And the Kash Patel pick proves that beyond any doubt at all.”
Artnet - President-elect Donald Trump has said he will nominate financier John Phelan, a top art collector and a major museum patron, to run the U.S. Navy upon his return to the White House for his second term in office... Phelan heads the Palm Beach-based private investment firm Rugger Management. He has not served in the Navy or any other branch of the military. He does, however, have an extensive art collection. Phelan and his wife Amy, a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, started collecting art more than two decades ago and they were included on a list of the world’s top 200 art collectors published by Artnews earlier this year.
New York Times - President-elect Donald J. Trump’s cabinet choices and key advisers run the gamut from people who acknowledge the threat of climate change to those who deny the scientific consensus that emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are dangerously heating the planet. But virtually all support Mr. Trump’s plan to extract more oil and gas and erase environmental rules, which would exacerbate global warming. And some who once acknowledged the problem now downplay the danger.
Mr. Trump’s team is shaping up to be the polar opposite of President Biden’s on environmental matters. Mr. Biden applied what he called a “whole of government approach” to climate change, directing each of his cabinet secretaries to prioritize the issue. Mr. Trump, who mocks climate change, wants agencies across the federal government to make it easier and more profitable for oil and gas companies.
MSNBC - It's hard to find many things that 80% of Americans agree on, but they exist. In various polls taken earlier this year, 4 out of 5 Americans said Joe Biden was too old to run for a second term, the government is doing a bad job dealing with migrants at the Mexican border and the cost of prescription drugs is unreasonable. Oh, and here's one more area where 80% of Americans concur: Social Security benefits shouldn't be cut.
On those other issues, politicians are pretty responsive. Biden didn't run for a second term in the end, after all, and both Democratic and Republican lawmakers will at least pay lip service to the idea that something should be done about the border and prescription drug prices.
But despite its unpopularity, Republicans somehow keep coming back to the idea of cutting Social Security.....
In a speech at Trump's Madison Square Garden rally during the campaign, Musk said he wanted to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, which would amount to about 30% of spending. Since Social Security is the largest single program in the budget, that would seem to indicate it might be a target, especially since Musk also said that "everyone's going to have to take a haircut" under his plans.
So, would Trump try to cut Social Security? It's hard to say. Over the years, he has staked out every possible position on Social Security — sometimes within hours of each other.
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