Tag: Trump swamp

‘They basically swallowed hard’: Trumpy Census Bureau hires revive fears of political meddling’They basically swallowed hard’: Trumpy Census Bureau hires revive fears of political meddling

The White House installed two political appointees in the studiously nonpartisan agency responsible for the 2020 census, and officials there aren’t happy.

The White House and Commerce Department forced the Census Bureau to take two new political appointees last week whose unexpected arrival has deepened fears at the agency that the 2020 census will be politicized, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Last Monday, Commerce deputy secretary Karen Dunn Kelley informed Census Bureau director Steven Dillingham and his career deputy, Ron Jarmin, that the two new appointees, Commerce aides Nathaniel T. Cogley and Adam Korzeniewski, had been installed in senior roles at the Census Bureau — a move that blindsided both of them, according to a Census Bureau official.

Cogley, a frequent radio commentator who received a Ph.D. in political science from Yale in 2013 and was the head of the department of government, legal studies and philosophy at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas, will be deputy director for policy. Korzeniewski, now a senior adviser for Cogley, once worked as a Republican political consultant for the failed Staten Island congressional run of Joey Saladino, a Trumpy young YouTube star known as “Joey Salads.” Continue reading.

Former Interior scientist calls out ‘culture of fear, censorship, and suppression’ under Trump

“The American people lose when we end up with manipulated, suppressed, or distorted information.”

There is a “culture of fear, censorship, and suppression” within the Trump administration that is impeding government scientists from doing their best work, former Interior Department policy director and scientist turned whistleblower Joel Clement warned on Wednesday.

Speaking to lawmakers on the House Science Committee, scientific experts spoke about the need for stronger rules to support the integrity of their research and ensure that political agendas don’t dictate or interfere with the data.

“There is not Democratic science, there is not Republican science, there is just science,” said Michael Halpern, deputy director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Former Southwest Key leader who ran migrant child shelters for U.S. government earned $3.6 million in 2017

Washington Post logoThe former leader of a nonprofit organization that shelters migrant children for the U.S. government resigned this year after it was publicly disclosed that he earned nearly $1.5 million in 2016. New tax records obtained by The Washington Post indicate he earned more than double that — $3.6 million — in total compensation in 2017.

Juan Sanchez, founder of Southwest Key Programs, the Texas-based nonprofit that houses thousands of children and teens for the Department of Health and Human Services, left his job on April 1 amid outrage over his compensation and business dealings. Members of Congress fumed about individuals profiting off migrant detention just as the Trump administration was separating migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border, prosecuting adults for illegal entry and shuttling their children to Southwest Key and other shelters.

Southwest Key is one of the main contractors involved in housing unaccompanied migrant children as they wait to be placed with family members or sponsors, housing approximately 4,500 minors in Texas, California and Arizona. The organization cares for just more than one-third of the 12,500 minors in HHS custody. Southwest Key has an annual contract of approximately $460 million a year to shelter children, and federal records show the nonprofit has collected more than $1.1 billion since 2014.

View the complete July 13 article by Maria Sacchetti on The Washington Post website here.

Senate confirms Wheeler to lead EPA

The Senate on Thursday voted to confirm Andrew Wheeler as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in a 52-47 mostly party-line vote.

Every Democrat voted against Wheeler, while Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) was the only Republican to vote against him.

Collins in a statement Wednesday said she would not vote for Wheeler, a former energy lobbyist, because of his track record backing policies that weaken rules protecting air pollution and lowering car emissions.

View the complete February 28 article by Miranda Green on The Hill website here.

Corporations that have donated to Trump’s racist PAC get ridiculous returns on their investments

The following article by Rebekah Entralgo was posted on the ThinkProgress website June 1, 2018:

CVS and Southern Co. among them.

Pres. Trump gestures during a roundtable discussion on the advancement of women business leaders Credit: Kevin Dietsch, Pool via Bloomberg

Campaign finance watchdog MapLight published a report Thursday that exposed three major corporations for their contributions to America First Policies — a pro-Trump “dark money” PAC established last year by Trump officials that has been criticized for its use of a racist, xenophobic, and sexist phrase.

America First Policies received $1 million from gas and electric utility corporation Southern Co., $100,000 from Dow Chemical, and $500,000 from pharmaceutical retail chain CVS Health. According to disclosure forms, all three have reported lobbying on the Republican tax bill passed in December that dramatically cut the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent. Continue reading “Corporations that have donated to Trump’s racist PAC get ridiculous returns on their investments”

White House has some serious legal questions to answer about Pruitt’s scandals

The following article by Natasha Geiling was posted on the ThinkProgress website April 6, 2018:

What did the White House know? How involved was energy lobbyist Steven Hart? And did Pruitt break the law at any point?

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt is facing a mounting ethics crisis, from revelations that he rented a luxury Capitol Hill condofrom a lobbyist couple for $50 a night to allegations that he reassigned senior staffwho questioned his spending habits at the agency.

This week, as a fuller picture of the lobbyist-linked condo deal has emerged, both Democrat and Republican politicians have called for Pruitt to resign as administrator. But even as new details continue to emerge about Pruitt’s conduct, several key questions remain unanswered. Continue reading “White House has some serious legal questions to answer about Pruitt’s scandals”

Batch of Shadowy Trump Appointees

The following article by Derek Kravitz, Isaac Arnsdorf and Marina Affo was posted on the ProPublica website August 31, 2017:

The administration continues to quietly hire political staffers — more than 1,000 so far, many of them regulating industries they previously worked for — but we’ve uncovered more identities. “The swamp continues,” says a Trump campaign official who is now a lobbyist.

Trump walks on the South Lawn of the White House on Jan. 26, 2017. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)

President Donald Trump has left hundreds of government jobs unfilled that require a vote by the Senate. Yet his administration has installed more than 1,000 people through political appointments at every major federal agency, handing over control of the government’s day-to-day operations to industry insiders and loyalists to an unprecedented degree.

Among the latest Trump administration appointees is a lobbyist who until March worked for a leading hepatitis C drugmaker that priced its treatment at $1,000 a pill and is now leading a White House working group setting drug pricing policies. The list includes the new head of the government’s offshore oil drilling safety and enforcement agency, who previously sat on the board of Sunoco Logistics and who told an industry conference earlier this month that deepwater drilling should ramp up. Then there’s the Hollywood actor who has called global warming and climate change a “leftist political tool” and “not sound science” on Twitter and who is now the communications director at the Department of Health and Human Services. Finally, this group also includes the 80-year-old retired chief legal officer of Morgan Stanley, who once told government lawyers he was “going to kick your ass” and is now a deputy attorney general in the Justice Department’s antitrust division, overseeing litigation while his boss awaits Senate confirmation. (At the time, Kempf denied using the expletive in exactly those terms.) Continue reading “Batch of Shadowy Trump Appointees”