2 federal sites in Sault Ste. Marie on DOGE closure list; both house tribal services
SAULT STE. MARIE — As part of the sweeping efforts by the Department of Government Efficiency to reduce federal spending, two buildings in Sault Ste. Marie are set to close.
The sites appear on the Department of Government Efficiency's (DOGE) "Wall of Receipts" under a list of federal properties with upcoming lease terminations.
According to DOGE, the Indian Health Services Sanitation office has an annual lease of $34,375, providing a total savings of $85,937. The local Bureau of Indian Affairs office at 2845 Ashmun St. is the other site slated for closure.
The two buildings house services that are intended to help enhance the quality of life for tribal members and create economic opportunities for Native Americans and Alaska natives.
Subscribe: Get unlimited access to our coverage
Officials from the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians are still in the process of investigating how much the building closures will impact services going forward.
Sault Tribe Chairman Austin Lowes said he is concerned about the lack of communication from DOGE regarding the closures.
"It's unclear at this time whether that means the offices will be permanently closed, if they will relocate to a different location or if the leases will be renegotiated," Lowes said in a statement on Facebook. "Tribes don't know because we weren't consulted by this administration prior to the closure announcement, which is an obvious problem."
Lowes also noted that the Sault Tribe Health Division is not directly impacted by these closures.
— Contact Brendan Wiesner: BWiesner@Sooeveningnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Sault News: 2 federal office sites in Sault Ste. Marie on DOGE list to close
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Post
an hour ago
- New York Post
Bill Gates pleaded with Marco Rubio to reverse Elon Musk's DOGE cuts to USAID: report
Bill Gates paid a secret visit to the White House on Friday to personally plead with Secretary of State Marco Rubio to reverse cuts to foreign aid that were spearheaded by tech rival Elon Musk, according to a report. Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist who has been vocal in his opposition to cuts made by Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, sought an audience with Rubio after his boss's fallout with the Tesla mogul, former Puck reporter Tara Palmeri reported on her Red Letter newsletter. President Trump and Musk, once close political allies, traded barbs on social media last week — ending a partnership that began during the 2024 presidential campaign. Advertisement 4 Bill Gates paid a secret visit to the White House on Friday to personally plead with Secretary of State Marco Rubio to reverse the cuts made to foreign aid, according to a report. REUTERS 'With Musk on the outs, Gates clearly saw an opportunity to argue for the reversal of the DOGE cuts,' Palmeri reported. DOGE slashed more than $8 billion in funding for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which provides assistance in the areas of HIV and AIDS prevention in Africa as well as treating malaria and other infectious diseases on the continent. According to Palmeri, however, Gates' pleas fell on deaf ears as Rubio told the software mogul that there are no plans to reverse the USAID cuts. Advertisement '[Rubio] said the country is insolvent, we can't pay back our debts,' a source with knowledge of the situation told Palmeri. Gates was likewise observed in the West Wing and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on Friday, making his appearance around 4 p.m., according to Palmeri. The mogul appeared just after Trump's departure for his Bedminster golf course. Advertisement Officials within the administration would neither confirm nor deny that Gates met with the president, whose attention on Friday was reportedly consumed by calls from journalists inquiring Elon Musk. Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, told The Post: 'We don't comment on private meetings that may or may not have occurred.' The New York Times' Teddy Schleifer reported over the weekend that Rubio had refused to meet with Gates for months despite Gates's repeated attempts. Advertisement 4 Secretary of State Marco Rubio rebuffed Gates, according to a report in Red Letter. AFP via Getty Images 4 Gates was incensed by the DOGE cuts, accusing Musk of 'killing the world's poorest children.' REUTERS Senior State Department officials told Palmeri that Gates sought a meeting with Rubio in April. 'The Secretary's position on making important and necessary cuts to foreign aid has not changed,' a senior State Department official told Palmeri, confirming the meeting. 'He does not believe US taxpayers should be burdened with covering the costs for progressive projects abroad, including funding contraceptives, electric buses, and DEI.' The official added that 'as the secretary has repeatedly mentioned, the future of foreign aid under the Trump Administration means that we will only be funding true lifesaving programs and initiatives that advance our national interests.' 4 Musk's DOGE made more than $8 billion in cuts to the US Agency for International Development. AP The Post has sought comment from Gates and Rubio. Advertisement Gates was incensed by the DOGE cuts, accusing Musk of 'killing the world's poorest children.' Musk hit back last month, lashing out at Gates over his past ties to the late convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. 'Who does Bill Gates think he is to make comments about the welfare of children given that he frequented Jeffrey Epstein?' Musk said during an interview on Tuesday at the Bloomberg Qatar Economic Forum. 'I wouldn't trust that guy to baby-sit my kids, I can tell you that.'
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Republicans Have a Revenue Problem
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Congressional Republicans love to talk about the deficit and federal spending, particularly when Democrats are in power. Before he became House speaker, Mike Johnson argued in his 2018 statement titled '7 Core Principles of Conservatism' that America was facing 'an unprecedented debt and spending crisis.' In Johnson's view, Congress had 'a moral and constitutional duty' to bring expenditure under control. In 2023, before he became the Senate majority leader, John Thune inveighed against 'reckless, out-of-control government spending' and argued that if spending reform is a priority for the GOP alone, then there is 'something seriously wrong with the Democrat Party.' They had a point. Aside from the brief period from 1998 to 2001, the federal government has run deficits for more than 50 years. When Ronald Reagan entered office, the federal debt-to-GDP ratio—a standard metric economists use to measure government indebtedness—stood at just 32.5 percent. It currently stands at 121 percent, an extraordinary level for peacetime. In President Joe Biden's last year in office, the government brought in revenues of $4.9 trillion against outlays of $6.75 trillion, resulting in a deficit of $1.8 trillion, or about 6.4 percent of GDP. And President Donald Trump's One Big, Beautiful Bill Act will only compound the problem: The Congressional Budget Office estimates that its proposed extension of his 2017 tax cuts for another 10 years will add more than $2.4 trillion to the national debt. The United States is now experiencing a structural deficit with potentially dire fiscal consequences. Serious efforts to curb spending—which DOGE is not—are desperately needed. Yet the task of closing the huge gap in our government finances has another dimension besides cost-cutting: Raising revenue, too, is desperately needed. [Jonathan Chait: Why DOGE could actually increase the deficit] The Republicans' focus on spending—when they're not responsible for it—obscures the fact that the U.S. collects significantly less money as a share of GDP than comparable countries, and less than it has taken in historically. Among OECD countries in 2023, the United States ranked 32nd out of 38 for the revenue it collects as a share of GDP. Among advanced industrial democracies, only Ireland and Chile collect less. And at 17 percent of GDP in 2024, federal revenues are well below their peak of nearly 20 percent in 2000, at the end of the Clinton administration. The following year, the United States enjoyed a $128 billion surplus, and the Congressional Budget Office projected that the national debt would be paid off by 2009. Instead, tax cuts under George W. Bush in 2001 added $8 trillion to the deficit; a further round of cuts by Trump in 2017 contributed another $1.8 trillion. Spending went up as well, but the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that 37 percent of the current deficit can be attributed to these tax cuts. For the Republican Party, tax cuts are now divorced from any specific fiscal context and have become a way of life. In a fusion of ideology and self-interest, a powerful nexus of monied interests, lobbying groups, members of Congress, conservative intellectuals, and media worked together to enforce anti-tax orthodoxy and stamp out dissent. Tax cuts were one of the few policy areas that the party's disparate factions—Wall Street Republicans, Main Street Republicans, Silicon Valley libertarians, and social conservatives—could all agree upon. Yet this long-established anti-tax consensus now confronts several looming challenges. The first is the party's shifting composition. The Republican base has become more populist in temperament and more working class in character, and low-income voters are less sympathetic to tax cuts that mainly favor their high-income peers. Recent polling by the Pew Research Center reveals that a plurality of Republicans and Republican leaners actually prefer raising taxes on households with incomes greater than $400,000, by a margin of 43 to 27 percent. (Among all Americans, 58 percent favor raising taxes on those with high incomes, whereas only 19 percent favor lowering them and 21 percent would keep them level.) Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's claim during his confirmation hearing that high-income 'job creators' need the incentive of tax cuts may have been welcome to the GOP's wealthy donors and 'starve the beast' enthusiasts, but such views are now a minority in the party. A second challenge is the distributional impact of the new bill's tax-cutting measures. Many commentators wonder why, during a time of record deficits and debt, a further round of upper-income tax cuts is necessary. Analysis from the Tax Policy Center notes that while average effective tax rates barely changed from 1945 to 2015 for most Americans, the rates for high-income households have fallen sharply. Tax Policy Center scholars have also noted that nearly half the benefits of an extension of the Trump cuts would go to the top 5 percent of households (those making $450,000 or more). Democrats have been quick to seize on the inequity of cutting Medicaid and SNAP benefits to finance this upper-income giveaway. The third challenge is that, by taking revenue increases off of the table, Republicans have saddled themselves with an unsolvable fiscal conundrum. Cuts on the order of 27 percent across the entire federal budget would be needed to bring spending in line with revenue. If major categories of expenditure such as Social Security, Medicare, defense, and debt servicing are exempted, spending cuts alone cannot tackle the deficit. Acknowledging the magnitude of this gap, a few fiscal hawks in Congress, such as Senator Rand Paul and the House Freedom Caucus, have called for even deeper cuts. But many Republicans fear with justification that such a course would bring grave political risk. What Republicans are not grappling with, but should, is the disconnect between their intellectual justifications and economic and fiscal reality. Their first rationale is that tax cuts ultimately pay for themselves in higher government revenues through increased economic growth. To be blunt, no persuasive evidence exists for this contention at either the federal or the state level, including in the record of the 2017 cuts now proposed for extension. Republicans' second rationale makes a more nuanced assertion that higher taxes will depress economic growth, reducing jobs and inhibiting the downward distribution of income. Yet rigorous comparative analyses across multiple countries have found no serious evidence to support this contention. The economist Paul Krugman has referred to such arguments as 'zombie' ideas that keep 'eating people's brains' long after their intellectual credibility is dead and buried. Buffeted by these forces, cracks are starting to appear in the GOP's anti-tax orthodoxy. Some MAGA voices, such as Steve Bannon, have recently come out in favor of a tax hike on the wealthy to finance cuts for the middle class. Others, such as Vice President J. D. Vance and Project 2025 eminence Russell Vought, have expressed interest in raising taxes on those earning more than $1 million a year. They met fierce resistance from Republican luminaries such as Newt Gingrich, Larry Kudlow, Sean Hannity, Mike Johnson, and Ted Cruz. And the ultimate enforcer of tax-cutting orthodoxy, Grover Norquist, recently compared any Republicans willing to consider tax increases to a 'little cancer cell in the party.' Trump himself has tried to have it both ways, toying with the idea of raising taxes on the wealthy to cater to his populist base without actually doing anything to forestall his tax-cut extensions. His gesture toward putting America on a sounder financial footing is to argue that his tariffs can play an important role in replacing income-tax revenues. The Congressional Budget Office has calculated that, under certain configurations, tariffs could raise significant additional revenues over the next decade. But all credible projections suggest that tariffs will be unable to compensate for the lost income tax. They are also a highly regressive form of taxation that may spark retaliation by other countries, result in higher inflation, and reduce both economic growth and the tax revenues that flow from it. [Read: Republicans still can't say no to Trump] Republicans who are serious about the deficit have several options. The most obvious one would be to close the gap between the tax revenues owed to the government and what it actually collects. The IRS estimates that in 2022, about 13 percent of taxes, totaling $606 billion, owed to the federal government under our existing tax code were not paid. Many analyses of federal tax policy and enforcement—including some by conservative scholars—have argued for beefing up the IRS, with a focus on high-net-worth individuals and households. Few investment opportunities yield a higher rate of return than IRS audits on upper-income filers, yet the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have moved in the other direction and sought to cut the agency's staff and funding. Other steps Republicans could take would aim to end tax breaks for the über-rich. Sunsetting the 2017 bill's higher estate-tax deductions, which now stand at $14 million for individuals and $28 million for married couples, would bring in an estimated $201 billion over the next 10 years. The state and local tax (better known as SALT) deduction changes in the proposed bill are extremely regressive, with much of the benefit flowing to upper-income households; they are another loophole that could be closed. Republicans could also raise revenue specifically for transportation infrastructure by increasing road-user fees and gas or mileage taxes. (The gasoline tax has been frozen at 18.4 cents a gallon for more than 30 years.) None of the above will be easy, or even possible, to achieve in this Congress. The Republican Party has come a long way from the days when Ronald Reagan raised taxes four times after his 1981 tax cuts led to higher projected deficits. The official posture of fiscal rectitude continues, but the GOP's $10 trillion secret—the amount that tax cuts have contributed to the national debt—is that, if forced to choose, many on the anti-tax right would prefer bigger deficits to higher taxes. The United States no longer has that luxury. The government's interest payments have become larger than its defense expenditures, debt-rating agencies are downgrading the U.S., bond traders are demanding higher yields on U.S. treasuries, and risks to the dollar as the world's reserve currency are piling up. To redeploy Thune's phrase, something is 'seriously wrong' with a party that worries about running deficits yet refuses to consider any sustainable way to pay for them—and instead slashes services to its rural and working-class constituents. Rigid principle must give way to pragmatism: Any genuine deficit-reduction conversation needs to include not just spending cuts but higher revenues. Article originally published at The Atlantic
UPI
2 hours ago
- UPI
DOGE results murky amid Elon Musk's exit
1 of 5 | Elon Musk and President Donald Trump take part in a press conference in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., on May 30. Musk's work in the government has ended after five months and former White House staff have serious doubts about the Department of Government Efficiency self-reported results. File Photo by Francis Chung/UPI | License Photo June 10 (UPI) -- Elon Musk's work in the government has ended after five months and former White House staff have serious doubts about the Department of Government Efficiency self-reported results. To date, DOGE claims that it has saved the government about $180 billion by slashing the federal workforce, ending contracts, selling assets and cutting grant programs. However, its so-called "Wall of Receipts" is filled with questionable or inaccurate entries, according to Elaine Karmarck, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Karmarck led President Bill Clinton's Reinventing Government Initiative, a program that cut 426,000 civil servants from the federal payroll and cut federal and agency regulations. There are three metrics Karmarck told UPI she uses to measure how effective DOGE is. Some of those metrics will not be available until the next administration takes office on Jan. 20, 2029. The first metric is whether there are fewer people working in the federal government at the end of President Donald Trump's term. There are about 2.2 million federal employees, a number that -- despite narratives claiming the government continues to grow -- has been consistent for decades. In the 1940s, there were as many as 3 million federal employees. In the 1950s, there were about 2.5 million. In the 1980s, the number of federal employees increased back to about 3 million. It has remained between 2 and 3 million since. Federal judges have ruled that some federal employees DOGE advised to be fired must be rehired. Musk also said that it has made mistakes in some layoffs, including laying off employees with the National Nuclear Safety Administration who are responsible for the safekeeping of the U.S. nuclear stockpile. The second metric is whether there are fewer government contracts and fewer dollars spent on those contracts. DOGE lists more than 11,000 contract terminations totaling $34 billion in savings. It says more than 15,000 grants have been terminated resulting in about $44 billion in savings. Third is the government's performance as measured by economic markers such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics' unemployment reports as well as people's own experiences receiving government services. "That's a biggie. In other words, you can cut the government but if you have airplanes crashing and you have massive mix ups in Social Security checks, nobody is going to be applauding you for this," Karmarck said. DOGE's goal has been to cut about $2 trillion in federal spending. UPI reached out to the White House Press Office and Tesla's press office for interviews or comments. Neither responded to the requests. About a quarter of the government's budget is discretionary spending, meaning spending that is subject to appropriations by Congress. It amounts to less than $2 trillion. In fiscal year 2024, discretionary outlays totaled about $1.8 trillion. The rest of the budget is mandatory spending, also known as direct spending. This funding goes toward programs like Social Security, Medicare, veterans' benefits and other programs. Jenny Mattingly, vice president of government affairs for Partnership for Public Service, told UPI it would be difficult to reach DOGE's goal without cutting into mandatory spending. "Most of the U.S. budget is this mandatory, non-discretionary spending," Mattingly told UPI. "Just a small portion, comparatively, goes to the federal workforce." While the number of federal employees has remained relatively consistent, Mattingly notes that there are fewer federal employees per capita as the population has grown. "When you look at the U.S. population, that's exploded," she said. "So we actually have fewer federal employees per capita than in the past and they're doing an enormously greater magnitude and scope of work than the federal government did, say 30, 40, 100 years ago. What Congress and administrations have authorized the government to do is far greater and far more complex than it was." Measuring DOGE's progress five months in remains a challenge. The most recent date that DOGE updated its payment statistics or "receipts" was May 13. At that time, less than half of those receipts were itemized. The most cost savings, indicated by DOGE's "Agency Efficiency Leaderboard," have come from the Department of Health and Human Services, followed by the General Services Administration, the Department of Education and the Office of Personnel Management. "The list they put on the DOGE website turns out to be about 40% inaccurate," Karmarck told UPI. "We can't take their word for it. They were very sloppy. They made no effort at transparency other than a website which just has a list of things." An example of the inaccuracies shared by Karmarck is that DOGE has taken credit for ending contracts that ended before Trump was inaugurated. Faith Williams, director of the Effective and Accountable Government Program for Project on Government Oversight, agrees that DOGE's website cannot be trusted based on its inaccuracies and a lack of transparency. Inaccuracies have been brought to DOGE's attention on social media and it has made some corrections, though questions remain about its transparency. "Transparency has been an issue since day one," Williams told UPI. "This is an example of where DOGE has the power of a cabinet-level agency when it wants to but doesn't have to recordkeep when it doesn't want to. DOGE gets to be whatever is convenient in the moment." Musk's initial role -- as stated by him and Trump -- was to lead DOGE in an effort to tackle waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government for the purpose of making it run more efficiently. The White House later downplayed his direct role with DOGE, referring to him as an adviser to the president. The murkiness of Musk's true role in DOGE underlines why Williams has concerns about its structure, mission and lack of transparency. She has been investigating the office since it began, looking into its structure, who works for DOGE and its potential conflicts of interest. "One thing we learned fairly early on DOGE, its structure was very questionable. It was very opaque and it was opaque by design," Williams said. "That opacity really helped shield it and its actors and its actions from any kind of accountability, whether that's from members of the public or even congressional accountability or even in the courts." "Who led DOGE and worked at DOGE was one thing one day and a different thing on a different day depending on what was advantageous," she continued. Project on Government Oversight filed a lawsuit against DOGE over its lack of recordkeeping made available to the public and accessing sensitive records. DOGE faces lawsuits from other organizations related to its alleged lack of compliance with the Freedom of Information Act. In March, U.S. District Court Judge Casey Cooper ruled that DOGE's records are likely subject to the Freedom of Information Act. This was in response to a lawsuit by the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. There are several more lawsuits against DOGE related to its handling of data, compliance with FOIA and methods of cutting federal workers. In contrast, Karmarck's Reinventing Government Initiative did not face any litigation. "The reason we had no lawsuits is we followed the law," she said. "We passed a buyout bill so we had the congressional authority for buying people out. We simply followed the law." Instead of recommending Congress take actions like laying off federal employees or rescinding funds it has approved, DOGE has taken unilateral actions resulting in lawsuits. Funding approved by Congress requires congressional action to end. DOGE is not a congressionally approved agency, as a president cannot unilaterally create a new agency. He can create a new office, as past presidents have done. The authority of that office to take actions is limited, making it closer to an adviser than a federal agency. Accessing federal data systems and making changes is among the actions DOGE has taken that have raised the greatest concerns. Beth Noveck was the founding director of the White House's Open Government Initiative, a program started under President Barack Obama's administration that focused on using technology and data to modernize and improve government operations. She is currently the director of the Governance Lab and its MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance at New York University. Noveck told UPI oversight on DOGE is past overdue, due to reports of the data it has accessed or attempted to access, including Medicare and Medicaid payment data, Social Security records, student loan data and the Office of Personnel Management systems. "Who has access and how it is being used is something we need an accounting of," Noveck said. "It's concerning and it seems that we're giving access to the likes of Palantir [Technology] to combine data that will effectuate mass surveillance and control. The risk is not just a failed attempt at cost savings, it's a successful attempt at authoritarian overthrow." The main tenets of DOGE are not new, evidenced by the work Noveck and Karmarck did for past administrations. There are nonpartisan government oversight entities that existed before Trump's current term as well, including the Office of Government Ethics and the inspectors general. However, shortly after Trump returned to office he fired the head of the Office of Government Ethics and 18 inspectors general. Last week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., released a report on Musk's 130 days working in the government. The report alleges that Musk used his position to direct lucrative government contracts toward himself and his companies SpaceX, Tesla, Boring Company and Starlink. Amid an online feud with Musk following his departure as a White House Adviser, Trump has threatened to cancel all contracts with his companies. Warren's report also alleges that Musk and DOGE undercut agencies responsible for regulating his businesses and stopped enforcement actions against them.
