Latest news with #BradHeath
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
US Justice Dept takes next steps to merge ATF and DEA, sources say
By Sarah N. Lynch and Brad Heath WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department plans to press ahead with a merger of its two agencies that investigate drug and firearms offenses, though the effort would still need approval from Congress, four sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. In a meeting on Thursday, officials from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were informed that the merger could be executed as soon as October, one of the sources said, speaking anonymously because the discussions are not public. As part of that plan, the White House is expected to propose consolidating the budgets for both agencies when it releases its full fiscal year 2026 spending proposal, the four sources told Reuters. Such a move would require congressional approval. Currently, the federal spending law in place explicitly states that no funds appropriated for the ATF can be transferred to other agencies or departments. A spokesman for the Justice Department referred questions to the White House Office of Management and Budget. A spokesperson for OMB could not be immediately reached. The proposal to merge the ATF and DEA first surfaced in March, when Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche floated the idea in a memo that proposed a broader series of major structural changes at the Justice Department. The proposal at the time caught officials in both law enforcement agencies by surprise. Many aspects of the other re-organization proposals in Blanche's memo, such as breaking up the department's Tax Division and Consumer Protection Branch, have already received a green light and are proceeding, according to an internal email reviewed by Reuters that was sent out earlier this month to employees in the Criminal Division. A merger of the ATF and DEA would represent one of the biggest shakeups of the Justice Department since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. It would also pose a challenging task for the Justice Department to seamlessly try to combine the DEA's complex role of regulating pharmacies, doctors and drug manufactures, and the ATF's responsibility for regulating the firearms industry. Earlier this month, the White House released a scaled-back "skinny" version of its fiscal 2026 budget which proposed drastic spending cuts for the FBI, the DEA and the ATF. Officials in the ATF and DEA have raised concerns that merging the budgets of the two agencies would still not cover the cost of their operating expenses, one of the sources said.
Yahoo
04-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
DOGE website offers error-filled window into Musk's government overhaul
By Brad Heath and Tim Reid WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A spartanly furnished web page with columns of numbers and bar charts on a dark background is the only official window into billionaire Elon Musk's effort to slash U.S. government spending and the size of the federal workforce. However, the view it offers of the cost-cutting enterprise is often muddied by major errors. President Donald Trump and Musk's Department of Government Efficiency say that in just six weeks they have already saved American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars through rapid-fire moves to cancel contracts, fire workers and root out fraud and waste in the government. See for yourself — The Yodel is the go-to source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories. By signing up, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy. The only support for the assertions comes from data posted by DOGE to a newly created website that went live last month. But in the last two weeks alone, DOGE has deleted hundreds of claimed savings, including some of the largest items it had previously boasted about. Trump is expected to laud the work of Musk and his team when he addresses a joint session of the U.S. Congress on Tuesday. DOGE claims to have slashed $105 billion so far, but it is impossible to verify that calculation because the unit has so far posted a detailed breakdown for only a fraction of those savings, and that accounting keeps changing, according to a Reuters analysis of the data. Musk has said he is operating transparently in his cost-cutting effort, but budget experts like Martha Gimbel, director of the Budget Lab at Yale, a non-partisan budget analysis organization at Yale University, disagree. "Anyone can put numbers and words on a website," Gimbel said in an interview. "In order to be transparent, the numbers and words have to be accurate. They've already been shown not to be accurate so why should I trust it?" A DOGE spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment. But Musk has acknowledged that mistakes will be made and will be corrected when they are discovered. THE `WALL OF RECEIPTS` DOGE has provided the most details about the contracts it says it has terminated, listing them on what it calls a "wall of receipts" meant to show its work to the public. Errors in that accounting appeared from the start. It took credit for eliminating contracts that had already ended, sometimes years ago, and inflated the value of other items that it had axed, the Reuters analysis found. The first time DOGE posted a list of canceled contracts to its website, in mid-February, it added up to about $16 billion. By Monday, the total had dropped to under $8.9 billion. A canceled contract DOGE said saved taxpayers $8 billion was only worth $8 million. In another instance it tripled counted a $655 million contract, claiming more than $1.8 billion in savings that did not exist. Last week it deleted from the website all five of the biggest savings it had claimed. "I'm all for eliminating waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, but there's no veracity in what they're saying because you can't quantify it in any way," said Bill Hoagland, a former Republican staffer and director of the Senate Budget Committee for more than 20 years. DOGE is not a government agency but a temporary advisory team that has been given enormous power by Trump to drastically reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy. To be sure DOGE has made major cuts to parts of the federal bureaucracy since Trump created it six weeks ago. It has entered about 20 government agencies, hollowing out some of them, helped to fire at least 25,000 government workers, and persuaded another 75,000 to take buyouts, out of the 2.3 million-strong civilian federal workforce. It has also canceled thousands of contracts. Yet government spending is actually higher in Trump's first month in office than in the same period a year ago, when former President Joe Biden was in office. In its latest update this week, DOGE either modified or removed more than 1,000 entries on its list, nearly half of the spending arrangements it had listed the week before, the Reuters examination of its records found. In some cases, it changed its estimate of how much taxpayers had saved; in other cases, it stopped listing the contracts altogether. As of Monday, DOGE's accounting shows that 941 of the 2,300 contracts it cut saved no money at all.
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Analysis-With blitz of policies, Trump goes beyond Project 2025's goals
By Brad Heath and Mike Spector WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump's early actions in office have in many cases expanded upon proposals from Project 2025's conservative policy blueprint that the Republican tried to distance himself from on the campaign trail, a Reuters review found. From actions halting U.S. aid abroad to fortifying the southern border and restrictions on transgender athletes, Reuters identified more than a dozen Trump executive orders or other policy moves that exceed in ambition or scope what Project 2025's 900-page 'Mandate for Leadership' book advocated in a series of detailed policy proposals. See for yourself — The Yodel is the go-to source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories. By signing up, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy. The conservative initiative caused an uproar on the campaign trail, with Democrats calling it a set of extremist ideas that would form the basis for Trump's potential second-term agenda if elected. Trump, however, repeatedly distanced himself from Project 2025 during the presidential campaign, saying he had not read the policy blueprint. While Trump has so far not adopted some of Project 2025's most aggressive ideas, his blizzard of more than 50 executive orders and series of other policy moves during his initial weeks in office have gone beyond some of its other proposals. For example, Project 2025 recommended 'scaling back' roughly $40 billion of annual U.S. aid spending through the U.S. Agency for International Development, which administers much of America's foreign assistance. But the administration, after tapping billionaire Elon Musk to downsize the federal bureaucracy, has moved to dismantle the agency altogether. A U.S. judge on Thursday extended for one week a pause on the administration's plan to put thousands of the agency's workers on leave. Where Project 2025 advocated Congress fund a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, Trump simply declared an 'emergency' and ordered U.S. troops and Homeland Security officials to build it. And Trump's order effectively barring transgender girls from women's sports goes beyond Project 2025's recommendation to roll back some of President Joe Biden's efforts to extend civil rights protections to transgender students. Trump has installed one of Project 2025's architects, Russ Vought, as the head of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought on Friday became acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and told its nearly 2,000 employees to stop working. Project 2025 had called for the agency's elimination. A union of Treasury employees filed a lawsuit this week seeking to block the stop-work order. The White House said Trump's moves are the fulfillment of pledges he made on the campaign trail. The president 'had nothing to do with Project 2025,' White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said. "In his first few days in office, President Trump has delivered on the promises that earned him a resounding mandate from the American people – securing the border, restoring common sense, driving down inflation, and unleashing American energy,' Fields said. Musk did not respond to a request for comment. Ellen Keenan, a spokesperson for the Heritage Foundation, which organized Project 2025, said: 'This is about President Trump delivering on his promises to make America safer, stronger, and better than ever before, and he and his team deserve the credit.' Trump's administration has so far not taken on some of the blueprint's most contentious ideas, including rescinding approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. And where Project 2025 recommended banning TikTok, Trump has said his administration won't enforce a law that blocks the popular short video app. Courts have begun issuing orders blocking some of the administration's more aggressive actions, including its efforts to unilaterally halt government spending, end birthright citizenship and move transgender women inmates to men's prisons. Still, a federal judge on Wednesday allowed Trump to proceed with a buyout offer to federal workers, which the government said 75,000 people accepted. Despite Trump's campaign promises, his push to reshape Washington through unilateral executive action – which has upended U.S. foreign aid, thrown the top ranks of federal law enforcement into disarray and moved to redefine who can be a U.S. citizen – has surprised even allies in the conservative legal movement. "There are broad divisions within the conservative legal movement about whether any of this is appropriate," said Jonathan Adler, a Case Western Reserve University law professor and conservative legal scholar.
