Latest news with #Trump-installed
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
VA secretary says 80,000 job cuts at agency are a ‘goal' but not yet ‘targeted'
With the threat of up to 80,000 job cuts at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the new head of the agency faced angry senators Tuesday with few answers. Meanwhile, lawmakers offered legislation aimed at protecting a veteran's crisis hotline amid the agency's turmoil. VA Secretary Doug Collins appeared in front of the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs for the first time Tuesday, where he faced contentious questioning over staffing upheavals at the VA. In two February rounds of firings, the VA dismissed 1,000 and then 1,400 more employees, which included veterans (a federal judge has temporarily halted the second round of firing). But when senators pressed Collins on the threat of much larger cuts, he called the reports of an additional 80,000 positions on the chopping block — or 15% of the agency workforce — a 'goal to look at our restructuring,' but not yet a reality. Collins declined to explain the 'deliberative process' over reductions in front of Congress. 'There's not been 83,000 people targeted for firing,' he said. 'You start with what you're looking for, and then you use the data that you find from your organizations to make the best choices you can.' Staff cuts, Collins said, would spare doctors, nurses and claims processors but phase out non-essential roles 'like interior designers and other things DEI.' But Democrat Sen. Richard Blumenthal, ranking member of the Senate Veterans Affairs committee, said the reduced staff has already led to postponed mammogram appointments, as well as reduced availability for prosthetic fitting services, operating rooms, and inpatient recovery room care. 'Support personnel are absolutely necessary, answering the phones, cleaning the surgical equipment, preparing the operating rooms, scheduling the appointments, or fixing the IT systems,' Blumenthal said. 'Those burdens will fall to others, or they will simply fall through the cracks if you slash and trash.' Notably, a Republican Senator offered cautiously critical remarks on the VA reductions, a departure from the typical Republican approach of overwhelming silence on staffing cuts by Trump-installed officials. Chairman of the committee, Sen. Jerry Moran from Kansas, told Collins that cuts at the VA should not be arbitrary. 'I have told you on the phone that it ought not be a set number that you're trying to reach. It ought to be about right-sizing,' Moran said. 'I want to hear from you that the changes underway at the VA are backed by data.' One program that lawmakers have put under the spotlight is the Veterans Crisis Line, a toll-free hotline connecting veterans and service members in crisis with mental healthcare providers. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) plans to introduce a bill Wednesday to expand Congressional oversight of the hotline, requiring a 48-hour notice on crisis line terminations, justifications for the firings, and an indication of whether those let go would be veterans or military spouses. The bill also calls for a report on the hotline staffing, operations and performance. At an American Legion event in February, Collins said only 'backroom staff' had been cut from the crisis line, adding that any employees who answered the phones or worked directly with veterans had been spared. But Duckworth said she knew of at least one veteran let go from the crisis line who had not been rehired. She said that contradicted Collins' response to a letter sent by Senate democrats about crisis line firings. In an April 7 letter, Collins wrote that 24 crisis line employees 'erroneously received probationary termination notices, all notices were rescinded. All terminated employees were reinstated and have been rehired into the same position they previously held.' When Moran asked if the crisis line now had fewer staff, Collins said the same number of staff who were let go were brought back. Duckworth emphasized that any cuts, including support staff at the crisis line, would impact its mission. 'Crisis line serves veterans in their darkest hour, and it is our responsibility to make certain that it operates to the highest standards, just as every military commander understands that our war fighters' effectiveness, indeed their lethality, depends on a fully resourced, diverse network of enablers,' she said. 'You can't just say, okay, we're going to take care of the pilots, but not the refuelers and the mechanics who maintain that jet. A second bill Duckworth plans to re-introduce Wednesday would expand VA clinical staff's collective bargaining rights and give them the right to speak up about workplace safety issues that impact care, an issue democrats have highlighted as a potential impact of the mass firings. In April, Collins began the process of stripping unionizing rights from VA workers by issuing a federal register notice concurring with the Trump Administration's executive order that precludes federal workers in 'national security' from collective bargaining rights as union members. During questioning by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) about the executive order and whether VA workers are a 'threat to national security,' Collins said: 'I don't think that was the purpose of the EO.' The bill titled 'The VA Employee Fairness Act' would allow VA clinical staff like nurses, doctors, dentists, and physician assistants to speak out against poor working conditions and other workplace issues. A House version of the bill by the ranking member of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.), will also be introduced on Wednesday. It previously passed the House in December 2022 with bipartisan support. 'The VA Employee Fairness Act would grant these indispensable workers the collective bargaining rights they deserve and have been fighting for while improving VA employee retention,' Takano said in a statement. 'This legislation is more critical than ever, given the Administration's efforts to fire VA employees and make cuts that continue to diminish VA employee morale.' According to the American Federation of Government Employees, a union representing hundreds of thousands of federal and D.C. workers, VA title 38 staff have limited rights compared to other federal agency workers and even those like VA psychologists and pharmacists who are classified as Title 5 employees. Title 38 workers, according to AFGE, are not allowed to negotiate their schedules, raise concerns 'over things like staffing shortages that undermine patient care,' challenge pay law violations, or VA policies. Commandant says Marines should have a say in whether they change duty stations Space Force Special Operations Command is on its way Army reverses course on banning fun and games for soldiers in Kuwait A meal card foul-up at Fort Johnson underscores a bigger Army problem Sailor wins $7,500 settlement after his car was towed and auctioned off while deployed
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's Takeover Wrecks Kennedy Center as Subscriptions Plummet
Subscriptions to the Kennedy Center have dropped by more than a third since Donald Trump took over the arts institution and promised to remake it in his image. Sales are down by about $1.6 million, or roughly 36 percent, compared to this time last year, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. By June 2024, subscription sales had produced $4,413,147. But so far this year, the Kennedy Center has only made $2,656,524 off of subscription sales, as well as an additional $155,243 from a special deal, according to internal data shared with the Post by former Kennedy Center staffers. A current staff member anonymously confirmed the numbers. Subscriptions are just one source of revenue for the Kennedy Center. Others include donations, individual ticket sales, and government funding. But the current staffer said it was important to provide an indication of what is going on behind the center's closed doors. 'We understand providing information like this can be seen in a bad light,' the current staffer told the Post. 'But we feel that it is necessary to show that mismanagement by the new leadership is becoming a real problem for the health of the organization.' The employee said that the new Trump-installed leadership has ignored staff opinions and even fired people who disagreed. As a result, 'we feel that we no longer have a choice but to force complete transparency with the public.' Trump took over the prestigious arts organization earlier this year, saying he plans to 'bring it back' from disrepair—meaning get rid of any performances he deems too 'woke.' So far, multiple productions have already backed out of performing at the center in protest against Trump. Interestingly, though, one of the shows Trump has apparently approved to run at the Kennedy Center is Mrs. Doubtfire, which famously features a man in drag. When asked about Trump's effect on the Kennedy Center's popularity, the new leaders pointed to large audiences at events such as a fireworks show by artist Cai Guo-Qiang and a screening of the animated film The King of Kings. Both of those events were free, according to the Post.
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Ed Martin Announces He Will Abuse The Powers Of His Next Office, Too
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. I don't recall an outgoing interim U.S. attorney holding a press conference at the end of their brief tenure, but then no one else has been a rolling clown show like Ed Martin. His endless self-promotion, Trump brown-nosing, and flagrant abuse of office sets a standard only his successor Jeanine Pirro could hope to match. Don't count her out. In an especially painful example of the Peter principle, the failure of Martin's nomination to the permanent position as U.S. attorney for D.C. means he's getting bumped up to Main Justice, where he will be, in his words, the 'captain' of the brazenly corrupt 'Weaponization Working Group' that Attorney General Pam Bondi has set up on orders from President Trump. Martin used his press conference as an opportunity to preview his work weaponizing the Justice Department on behalf of Donald Trump: 'There are some really bad actors, some people that did some really bad things to the American people. And if they can be charged, we'll charge them. But if they can't be charged, we will name them,' Martin said. 'And we will name them, and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed. And that's a fact. That's the way things work. And so that's, that's how I believe the job operates.' As my former colleague Ryan Reilly put it, naming and shaming is 'a major departure from longstanding Justice Department protocols.' Under Trump, with the White House running DOJ, all of the old standards to prevent abuse of power and prosecutorial misconduct are out. The law is now a tool to serve Trump, as either shield or sword, depending on the exigencies of the moment. Martin is no more or less corrupt that the rest of the Trump-installed yahoos turning the Justice Department upside down. He's just the most buffoonish of the bunch, though his successor might vie that title. Pirro is set to be sworn in as interim D.C. U.S. Attorney today. The WSJ has a good rundown on the flagrant corruption of the pardon process in Trump II. Into this Wild West strolls Ed Martin as the new U.S. pardon attorney for the Justice Department, a position that came open when the prior pardon attorney was fired. At his farewell presser, Martin was already making noises about reviewing the Biden pardons. The Trump DOJ has now secured an indictment of Wisconsin state judge Hannah Dugan on allegations that she helped an undocumented criminal defendant in her court briefly evade capture by federal agents. The two-count indictment mirrors the original charges brought against her in the case, but take a closer look at the specific affirmative acts that the Justice Department is alleging amount to criminal obstruction of a government proceeding: In a weak and strangely written opinion, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Lou Haines of Western Pennsylvania became the first judge to mostly uphold President Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act on the merits – though she found the Trump administration's lack of proper notice to be constitutionally deficient and ordered a 21-day notice going forward. Even as President Trump is consistently losing the court cases challenging his executive orders against major law firms, he has revoked the security clearances of at least two lawyers from one of the targeted firms, WilmerHale. In his letter alerting the judge to the latest development, WilmerHale counsel Paul Clement did not say which government agency had revoked their clearances. The Trump administration yanked another $450 million in federal grants from Harvard, which promptly expanded its existing lawsuit against the federal government to include the newest rounds of attacks on its funding. 'This is a once-in-a-century brain gain opportunity.'–Australian Strategic Policy Institute, urging its government to woo U.S.-based scientists and researchers caught in the Trump II attack on research and development Morning Memo has mostly eschewed the dead-end practice of parsing every utterance by Senate Republicans for signs of splitting from Trump. But the White House incursion into the Library of Congress, using the Justice Department, does seem to have set off alarm bells among some Republicans that we haven't seen to this point: Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) said it was important for there to be a consultation on nominees such as the librarian of Congress, whom he described as having a 'hybrid role between…Article I and Article II branches of government.' Asked if there had been consultation with the White House before the firing of the librarian last week, Thune replied, 'Not exactly.' That's still tepid language, but there was enough concern to force Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the improbable new acting Librarian of Congress, to meet with the staff of the Senate Rules Committee, the WSJ reported. It's not just the Library of Congress but a list of legislative branch agencies, like the Government Accountability Office, that are under threat if the executive branch asserts control over them. The Department of Agriculture has begun restoring information on climate change that it had scrubbed from its website and promised to restore the purged content within days, but it took a lawsuit from organic farmers and environmental groups to force the restoration, which makes these kinds of victories while necessary ring a little hollow. It has taken some self-control not to turn Morning Memo into a running newsletter on the Trump II demolition of NOAA and the National Weather Service, but if anything I've over-steered in the other direction. So to right that wrong, here's a quality rundown on the very real and present threats to human life and property that we're going to begin confronting immediately as a result of the NWS teardown. On the occasion of the Qatari jumbo jet fiasco, Aaron Blake runs through Donald Trump's long history of pretending to decry foreign money when it came to the Clintons. 'My goal is to keep foreign money out of American politics,' Trump said during his 2016 campaign. 'Hillary Clinton's goal is to put the Oval Office up for sale to whatever country offers the highest price.' We're going to need to shake ourselves out of our old assumption that revelations like this one – a tiny company with China ties securing funding to buy as much as $300 million of the $TRUMP memecoin – is going to set off investigations or further revelations that lead to some form of accountability for Trump's rampant corruption. That's just not going to happen with a Trump DOJ and a GOP-controlled Congress and immunity from the Roberts Court. As a result, this kind of report from the NYT is going to be the full extent of what we know. There's no bigger reveal coming. There's no other shoe to drop. This is it. This is the corruption. German authorities have reportedly foiled an allegedly Russia-sponsored plot to use parcel bombs to target logistics operators in Germany. Fascism experts Jason Stanley and the husband and wife team of Marci Shore and Timothy Snyder talk about why they have all left Yale for the University of Toronto:
Yahoo
29-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's Kennedy Center Head Rages Against WaPo Report on Financial Woes
President Donald Trump's pick to lead the Kennedy Center raged at the Washington Post on Friday after the outlet reported on its crumbling finances. With donors pulling financial backing and artists cancelling upcoming appearances, the Kennedy Center is $40 million in debt and has an operating deficit of $100 million despite turning a profit of $6 million less than two years ago, Post reporter Travis Andrews revealed on Friday. 'Oh Travis. This isn't remotely journalism,' wrote Ric Grenell, the Kennedy Center's interim executive director. 'You've never looked at *any* of the financial details. You aren't a financial expert. You've never been involved in high level budgeting. You've never seen the balance sheet. I've never talked to you.' Grenell alleged Andrews only spoke to 'left wing activists who helped create this financial crisis.' Trump announced his takeover of the storied Kennedy Center in February, firing most of its board. New, Trump-installed board members then elected him chair. Before being named as the Kennedy Center's interim executive director, Grenell served as a special missions envoy in the first Trump administration. He also sought to be Trump's pick for secretary of state but was ultimately skipped over for Marco Rubio. In a separate post, Grenell also laid in on CNN's Christiane Amanpour and Vince Warren, the director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. 'Warren and Amanpour constantly undermine the rule of law. They are insurrectionists. They support picking and choosing which laws you follow,' he said.
CNN
17-02-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Four top deputies to Eric Adams have resigned, New York mayor says
Four top deputies in Eric Adams' administration submitted their resignations Monday, in the latest sign of the New York City mayor's cratering support among rank-and-file workers and the city's elected officials. Maria Torres-Springer, first deputy mayor; Anne Williams-Isom, deputy mayor for health and human services; Meera Joshi, deputy mayor for operations; and Chauncey Parker, deputy mayor for public safety, all notified Adams on Monday that they would step down from their posts. 'I am disappointed to see them go, but given the current challenges, I understand their decision and wish them nothing but success in the future,' Adams said in a statement announcing the resignations. It is not yet clear when the resignations will take effect. In the statement, Adams said the 'deputy mayors will remain in their roles for the time being to ensure a seamless transition.' The resignations of the city's highest-profile public servants mark a significant shift for the Adams administration, which has been struggling to reset after a Department of Justice memo last week ordered federal prosecutors in New York to dismiss corruption charges against the mayor. The DOJ's order sparked a mass resignation of prosecutors in New York and Washington, including the Trump-installed acting US attorney in the Southern District of New York, who resigned rather than carry out the order to dismiss the corruption case against Adams, a Democrat. The prosecutors decried the order to drop the charges — which cited in part Adams' role as mayor helping the Trump administration combat illegal immigration — as a bargain amounting to a 'quid pro quo.' The four deputy mayors held a call with Adams on Sunday and agreed to hold off on making a final decision on stepping down, an official familiar with the discussions said. However, Joshi, Torres-Springer and Williams-Isom reached out to Adams on Monday morning and said they had finalized their decisions to step down. 'Due to the extraordinary events of the last few weeks and to stay faithful to the oaths we swore to New Yorkers and our families, we have come to the difficult decision to step down from our roles,' Torres-Springer, Williams-Isom and Joshi said in a joint statement. Torres-Springer, Williams-Isom and Joshi are career public servants and highly regarded in the city's government circles. They are also responsible for putting much of the mayor's agenda into place. Their portfolios include some of the city's biggest agencies, including the public hospital system, the Department of Homeless Services, and the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs, to name a few. Since Adams was indicted on federal corruption charges last year, the group was seen as a steady hand that could keep city government churning along even as the mayor found himself distracted by the case against him. Parker, a relative newcomer to the administration, said in a statement, 'Serving as deputy mayor for public safety under Mayor Adams has been an honor of a lifetime. … I am confident that the administration will continue on our mission to deliver for the people of this city.' Monday's departures come months after another round of high-profile officials left the administration shortly after charges against the mayor were announced in September. The Justice Department last year brought public corruption charges against Adams in the first prosecution of a sitting mayor in the city's modern history. Adams pleaded not guilty to federal counts of bribery, corruption, wire fraud, and soliciting and accepting donations from foreign nationals, and the case was set to go to trial this spring. Last week's order says the charges should be dismissed 'without prejudice,' meaning they could be refiled at a later date. The Justice Department's directive highlighted the mayor's need to cooperate with federal immigration authorities — which lawmakers in New York said puts Adams in a position of being 'beholden' to President Donald Trump's administration. After news of the directive last week, Adams also met with Trump's border czar and said he would use his executive powers to increase the city's law enforcement collaboration with federal immigration authorities. Adams told Fox News on Friday that there was no 'quid pro quo' to get the DOJ to drop the charges in exchange for his cooperation on immigration enforcement. Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, on Sunday also called it 'ridiculous' that concessions made by Adams to let Immigrations and Customs Enforcement into Rikers Island jail were related to the DOJ directive. Several city and state lawmakers have called for Adams' resignation or for Gov. Kathy Hochul to use her power to remove him. The Democratic governor has said she is weighing her options but has not committed to taking any action. In response to the deputies' resignations Monday, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said the mayor should resign. The speaker said in a tersely worded statement that the mayor had 'lost the confidence and trust of his own staff, his colleagues in government and New Yorkers.' 'He now must prioritize New York City and New Yorkers, step aside and resign,' she said. 'These resignations are the culmination of the mayor's actions and decisions that have led to months of instability and now compromise the City's sovereignty, threaten chaos, and risk harm to our families.' City Comptroller Brad Lander, who is running against Eric Adams in the June mayoral primary, also issued an immediate response, sending a letter to the mayor asking the administration to detail its contingency plans as four senior officials prepare to depart their posts. 'These departures would create an unprecedented leadership vacuum at the highest levels of City government and wreak havoc on the City's ability to deliver essential services to New Yorkers,' Lander said. The demand for a plan also included a warning: If the mayor does not submit one by the end of this week, Lander said he would convene a meeting of the Inability Committee. The Inability Committee could set in motion what can be described as New York City's version of impeachment, a move that has never been used in the city's modern history. According to the city charter, a 'committee on mayoral inability' would be made up of five members: the city's corporation counsel, the comptroller, the City Council speaker, a deputy mayor selected by the mayor, and the most senior borough president. Four of the five would have to agree to form the committee, and then the City Council — where Adams does not hold wide support — would vote to declare Adams temporarily or permanently 'unable' to discharge the powers and duties of the office, according to the charter. This story has been updated with additional information.
