I don’t know who in the Trump transition team is behind the inquiries that are being made of various cabinet agencies. We just got over the controversy at the Energy Department over efforts to identify officials who work on climate change and now the State Department is absolutely freaking out that they’ve been compelled to turn over information on people who work on “gender-related staffing, programming, and funding.” More specifically, the inquiry demanded that “each office should include information on all existing programs and activities that ‘promote gender equality, such as ending gender-based violence, promoting women’s participation in economic and political spheres, entrepreneurship, etc.’”
It’s true that this inquiry could have an innocent explanation, like the transition team is looking to promote gender equality and help women excel at entrepreneurship, but I’m not betting on it.
It seems like these inquiries are designed to give the new administration a head start on purging government agencies of employees who believe in climate science or empowering and protecting women.
Despite that ambiguity, fears spread quickly Wednesday throughout State Department headquarters that the incoming Trump administration might use this information to single out both political appointees and career officials who worked on these programs.
“These types of requests send a cold chill through the Department and career diplomats dedicated to their work and service to the country,” a different State Department official told me. “It’s devastating to morale.”
I’ve got news for the State Department. They haven’t yet begun to understand what a devastating blow to morale looks like.
Purges come in different forms, I believe the Trump tactic will be forcing resignations.
Harass, demote, transfer.
Like I said before…someone approaches you and says ‘I want you to land right, where DON’T you want to go?’
Then that is where they send you.
HT ‘The Wire’
.
Straight out of the Malek Manual.
Presumably the job is to kill programs–they can’t fire career CS–leaving the workers to try to find someplace to transfer to or quit. And they really want to get rid of the programs because they’re for empowering women.
Reagan did. You can do it wholesale, just not retail.
Oh yes!
A purge is in the works.
Just like the “purges” every other presidential change of party has caused.
The new people come in and bring in their people. Right on down the line.
So nu?
This one will be a little more upfront and nastier than usual. Just like the new preznit.
But to use the word “purge” in this instance is to try to awaken old anti-Russian/anti Red Chinese cold war fears. The Stalinist purges…like…dead, in Siberia or both. The Maoist purges.
Purge-Wikipedia
The latest North Korean “purge” involved a high-ranking military official who fell asleep at a meeting and the wrong end of an anti-aircraft gun.
The latest Turkish “purge” involved the firing, beating and imprisonment of thousands and thousands of so-called “Gulanists” in all levels of the government and military.
Now those are “purges!!!
This?
This is so far just a fairly normal DC readjustment. I am quite sure that Trump and his cabinet are capable of real “purge” work, but I don’t think that they can get away with it here. Not yet, maybe not ever. Why? Too many armed opponents of that sort of thing, including the military. Try it and the administration might get purged.
Cool it a little, Booman.
The sky hasn’t fallen yet.
Don’t rush things.
AG
And Mr. Trump will find out that running the USG isn’t like his little family cottage business where “You’re fired” is all it takes to get rid of employees.
Trump private security force `playing with fire’ Guess the paranoid Trump believes his private security folks are more likely to take a bullet for him than the Secret Service agents would. More likely his private security will interfere with the pros and increase the risk to him.
That is in addition to Secret Service faces massive bill for protecting Trump
Heh, I work close to Daddy Marmalade’s building. When I saw the fortress deployed around the block. my first question was, “Who’s going to be paying for all this.”
Apparently USG/us. A situation that was never contemplated by congress as it authorized security services for the president and other senior officials and there’s no legal means to close the loopholes now.
Somehow Pat and Dick Nixon managed to live for many number of years without post-office Secret Service protection. (Nixon viewed it as an unnecessary cost to government and declined the protection.) In the late 1990s the lifetime protection was reduced for future former presidents to ten years. With a wave of his pen, Obama restored the lifetime protection for a former president and spouse. Also, Clinton, GWB, and Obama extended the protection for their children beyond the time statutory limitations (how long isn’t publicly disclosed for security reasons as is the cost of protecting fmr presidents and spouses, but it’s not cheap.)
in his own employee would be more reliable than the Feds at carrying out his bidding in matters which might impinge upon such niceties as civil/Constitutional rights (think “protestors”; think “what you saw at Trump rallies”; think “same goons”).
Still time:
Your move.
Put a period after “capability” and it’s the current USG policy.
Not so much.
New generation. Not so many needed to get the same bang. Have you not been following Ash Carter’s moves?
Sure, but it is a capability replacement strategy with fewer launch platforms and MIRV batteries with more actual re-entry vehicles.
Would love to know how Vladimir Vladimirovich intends to explain the suddenly renewed nuclear arms race to Xi Jinping. Where will they find the money? I realise Trump is a nincompoop but he may have accidentally strayed into the opening moves of a replay of Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ strategy.
Not good for humans, to be sure, but unintended consequences abound.
Or he could have strayed into revealing that Cold War II is still on. Not that I suspect most of his voters wouldn’t approve.
Reagan’s Star Wars only cost $200 billion (1980-90s dollars). Trump’s yuuge wall would cost less and be about as operationally effective as SDI was.
But hey, we’re a really wealthy country that can afford to do lots of stupid stuff that cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Just so long as it’s for war making and not people nor peace.
Cold War 2.0 would probably cost Putin more than he can afford. The US and China are the only Great Powers when it comes to the size of their treasuries.
It is also infrastructure spending; so bye, bye bridges. But from Trump it is just as likely disinformation and bluff.
The Iraq War cost Saddam more than he could afford, but that hardly justified the $4 trillion we spent on it and a rational analysis would reveal that we couldn’t afford it either.
Bankrupting the competition to become an unrivaled #1 is capitalist crackpot realism (to borrow from C Wright Mills).
No argument there.
Let me Fisk this:
“We need to strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear forces…” Not increase the size of the arsenal or its deployment, mind you, but like our current policy to modernise, upgrade capability and, by implication, lower cost-of-ownership over time. However…
Putin being Putin he plays offence, “…especially with missile complexes that can reliably penetrate any existing and prospective missile defence systems.” Ah, there it is, the joker. “There is no point deploying missile defence systems against us.” Outside of rattling restless NATO members this seems more an exhortation to the Russian defence industry than a genuine threat, frankly.
“We must carefully monitor any changes in the balance of power and in the political-military situation in the world, especially along Russian borders…’ translates to “I have no navy to speak of and conceive geopolitics as a traditional continental struggle so watch closely territory more closely within my reach than yours.” So, Ukraine, Baltic states.
“…and quickly adapt plans for neutralising threats to our country.” To me, “Autocrats can still run rings around you neo-liberal fools, look for me in the sky.”
The rest of his speech is an infomercial for Russian arms in guaranteed supply to autocrats everywhere. Also, did you notice the ‘Kremlin strongman’ attribution. I thought that was cute; there must have been a memo.
… especially along Russian borders,
I’m sure that if a Chinese treaty org existed and began placing “strategic” nukes in Canada and MX that we wouldn’t respond calmly and rationally, but we’d freak out. Came much to close to blowing up the world the last time that happened; so, feel confident in projecting what our response would be to a future similar event.
Yeah but Putin’s not talking about Russian borders in a nuclear strategic context in this instance; he’s talking about the Baltic States; do we have nukes there? Unwise if so. They never should have been admitted to NATO; Bush’s riskiest strategic gamble and that’s saying something, eh? We will live to regret that. Putin’s next move if you ask me.
Anyhow he’s the one most recently shifting nuclear assets around; witness Kaliningrad.
We kept on pushing to deploy that useless missile defense in Poland supposedly to counter Iran, although a glance at a globe would show an eight-grader that it’s really aimed at Russia. It’s way offside for Iran.
‘We’ being the Bush administration; the same imbeciles who invited the Baltic States in to NATO.
Well they did beg to come in to have protection from Russia. We foolishly convinced Ukraine to give their soviet missiles to Russia and what I thought would come to pass has come to pass. After Russia digests Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, they will move West to take another bite. I thought the world had learned from Neville Chamberlain.
The recent deployment of Oniks anti-shipping cruise missiles to Kaliningrad interdicts the sole Baltic Sea shipping route supporting Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and the S-400s that went with them threaten airspace both over the Baltic and the only supply route overland to Lithuania from Poland. It was like moving a bishop out.
I saw absolutely nothing on the news about this, but plenty of “who’s sleeping with whom”. Thank you.
Wrangling political arguments keeps us all well informed; have a happy Yuletide.
You too!
Here’s a first:
I guess ‘Chinese carrier group’ is too hard to say.
It looks to me like it’s the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party that’s pushing the Cold war with talk of “retaliating against Russia for interfering in the US election”, “Trump is a KGB agent” and other tantrums.
It was the Democratic Party that pushed the Cold War hot in Vietnam and Korea also for that matter. For all the rhetoric, RR only attacked small powerless countries and the Dod expansion just replaced Civil Servants with contractors (think foxes and chicken coops) and barrels of cash for connected companies.
As I understand it “modernization” was a Republican Senators’ demand in return for approving New Start treaty in 2010, naturally more about the boondoggle than defense needs, and they’ve been stuck with it ever since. The treaty could have been worth it had Medvedev been able or Putin willing to follow up with further progress.
You all do realize that plutonium warheads have a limited lifespan before the plutonium must be chemically reprocessed to remove accumulated americium radioactive decay daughter product. (Americium produced highly penetrating radiation that makes the warheads hazardous to be near.)
I knew that nuclear warheads require expensive maintenance and components must be removed and replaced but not why. The weapons systems themselves remain largely unaffected in availability and capability when this is done, however.
A man who knows Physics!
I keep hearing about? May be new, but don’t seem so goldarn clear! (h/t Walt Kelly/Pogo.)
Interesting that all this new Cold War rhetoric began right at the end of the Megatons to Megawatts program.
Cheap fuel/oil is one way for a country to appease the US war machine.
They’re being pretty blunt about it, but maybe they don’t need to be subtle to pull it off?
Have to consider that this may be propaganda to feed the rightwingers that aren’t so pleased with some derT’s post-election moves. The masses are very naive about how governments function (helpful to get them all exercised about nothingburgers). So, when candidate derT said that he’s going to DC to drain the swamp, they’re thinking all those public employees with salaries, benefits, and pensions they derT’s supporters don’t enjoy will get the “you’re fired” treatment. And that’s what they want.
It’s looking like a good year for Civil Service lawyers.
Only if it’s a good year for winning victories and exacting some personal penalties.
Those guys know the law like a card shark knows his marked deck. I’ve never seen them lose. Usually management gets hysterical as the trial date nears and cuts a deal. There’s what? about a century and half of case law? Most of the precedents are from very employee friendly DC judges.
My sister fears losing he SS benefits. She won’t. They may throw out future COLA’s but Obama has made those a joke anyway. My daughter has felt for at least a decade that she will never see SS, but taking it away from current beneficiaries would unleash tens of millions of law suits. Ryan’s medicare vouchers now are another thing. it could be argued that the government is not cutting benefits, just delivering them in a different form.
Well, yes, “it could be argued that the government is not cutting benefits, just delivering them in a different form”, but analyses of Ryan’s medicare vouchers proposal show that it would cut these benefits substantially, so you are credulously forwarding a lie by suggesting that the GOP may not be planning to cut Medicare benefits.
Even the motherfucking liar Ryan fails to entirely disguise the fact that he is cutting benefits in his own summary of the plan here. From Lyin’ Ryan’s own website:
“First, we would ask higher income seniors to contribute more to their care–something we have called for in the House Republican budget for years. Starting in 2018, seniors who make more than $133,000 a year would pay a higher premium for their doctor and prescription-drug coverage. Secondly, our plan would discourage unnecessary doctor visits and give seniors the incentive to seek out the most effective care. Many seniors have “Medigap” insurance–a private plan that helps pay for costs that Medicare does not cover, such as co-payments and deductibles. These plans insulate people from costs and, experts believe, encourage the overuse of health care. Beginning in 2020, this agreement would prohibit Medigap plans for covering the first $147 of out-of-pocket spending, so cost is once again a consideration in health care decisions.”
The word structure of this paragraph intends to disguise the fact that the Medicap benefit cut is administered to all beneficiaries, even the poorest. Given that, the sinister sociopathy of the final sentence of the paragraph is awful.
The motherfucking liar Ryan also fails to admit that many of the structural, incentive and quality problems which Medicare carried in the past are already being addressed by the ACA’s Medicare reforms. These sentences from Ryan are astonishing in their malicious intent to mislead:
“In their most recent report, the Medicare Trustees projected that the account that funds Medicare’s hospital benefit will be exhausted in 2028. Reports like this illustrate that we can no longer let politicians in Washington deny the danger to Medicare…”.
First off, “exhausted” implies that the account for hospital benefit would have $0 in it. That is untrue. Under current circumstances, the Trustees report shows that the account will be able to pay out 100% of anticipated expenses until 2028, at which point it could pay out 90-something% of anticipated expenses, something that could be bumped back up to 100% by simple fixes, the most appealing of which would be simply taxing wealthy people and businesses more substantially. There has been a substantial improvement in the actuarial health of this account; yearly estimates earlier this century estimated the account would only be able to pay 100% of benefit claims for seven out years. Now it’s at a dozen out years and growing.
The authors of the ACA stated that one of the most important reasons to pass the law was to save the Medicare program. The CAO’s analysis of the ACA anticipated that the financial health of Medicare would be substantially improved by the Law, and that is exactly what has happened. Ryan claims over and over that Medicare’s health has been deteriorating since the ACA’s passage and implementations; this is a total lie, absolutely the opposite of the truth.
Here’s a link to some of the many analyses which show that Ryan’s plan would cost the average Medicare beneficiary many, many thousands of additional dollars. This summary is particularly telling:
“According to the CBO analysis, the total cost of providing health care benefits (premium and other costs) to a typical 65-year old in a private plan would be about $20,500 in 2022. The government would contribute $8,000 or 39 percent toward the total cost, and the remaining $12,500 would be paid by the beneficiary. The CBO projects that out-of-pocket costs for the typical 65-year old would be more than twice as large under the proposal than under traditional Medicare ($5,630) in 2022, because the cost of providing benefits is greater under private plans than under traditional Medicare.”
Please don’t be snookered by Ryan.
“…so you are credulously forwarding a lie by suggesting that the GOP may not be planning to cut Medicare benefits.” I never dd any such thing. I said it could be argued. I never said I agreed with the argument. It could be argued and a judge could agree and an appellate court could agree. That is not the case with cutting SS benefits. (Except for completely asinine judges like Scalia)
The argument would undoubtedly be that although the vouchers cut government expenditures the magic of the marketplace will increase the efficiency of delivery once the nasty inefficient cumbersome government regulations are thrown out such that benefits actually increase. That argument is a line of BS of course, but conservative and neoliberal judges will buy it.
That’s the same line of reasoning used when RR changed the Civil service Retirement System (CSRS) into the Federal Employees Retirement System(FERS) with lower benefits but adding a 401K like plan (TSP). Notice that not only existing retirees were not touched but existing employees were given the choice of whether or not to switch plans. Even when I was re-employed in 2004, because I had left before FERS was created, I had a six month window to decide which plan I wanted to stay on.
Got your first point.
It seems to me that the Medicare issue is a political issue, not a judicial issue. If Congress changes the law in this area, it’s hard for me to see how the courts could successfully intervene. Civil rights, maybe, as Ryan’s changes would result in a mass deprivation of health care for the elder class? I have no confidence that the courts would support that argument.
The program is billed as something paid in advance by contributions so it’s fraud to take the contributions and deny the benefit. Ending the program for those not in it is different, ala FERS.
Might be a good time for folks already in jobs not to put in a courtesy resignation. The US Attorneys from Bush’s administration didn’t. Consider that a new norm.
American tradition is the spoils system. Although that has been moderated with the civil service system in order to get things done and keep continuity at the worker bee level, management and technical staff bound by professional ethics might be suspect.
Guess the Trump team heard about the experience trying to dispose of the EPA libraries in the Bush administration.
Signalling that there will be no burrowing in and sabotaging of Trump Donald I’s decrees.
It’s not a purge until there is a meeting in a large hall with the Trump presiding. The Trump asks for self-criticism and then turns to the assembled asking what should be done with the miscreant. After which, the miscreant is made an example and shot. Thereafter, those who offer opinions of what is to be done soon realize the the correct answer is that shooting is too good an end. Thus, the authoritarian involves his underlings in the guilt of his butchery.
I don’t think the system is quite there yet. But Kellyanne Conway has been grinding the rhetorical axes promising retribution.
We have pitchforks too…