Latest news with #Vaeth
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Data security is a CX issue, too
This story was originally published on CX Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily CX Dive newsletter. Adidas informed customers of a breach last month. An unauthorized entity 'obtained certain consumer data through a third-party customer service provider,' the sportswear retailer said in a statement. Adidas isn't alone. In recent months, retailers have suffered a string of cyberattacks. Nearly 2,900 North Face customer accounts were breached. Cartier was hacked and some client data stolen. Incidents like these weaken customer trust and brand reputation, Sheryl Kingstone, research director of customer experience and commerce, at S&P Global Market Intelligence, and Stuart Vaeth, SVP of strategic business development at Trua, said during a Wednesday webinar. The result can be lost business. 'It absolutely impacts the reputation of that service provider,' Vaeth said. 'Obviously, it erodes trust. People may not come back to your site if your data has been breached.' Customers are worried about their data — and for good reason. Nearly 2 in 5 customers have been the victim of two or more breaches, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. One-third have been the victim of identity theft within the past three years. More than three-quarters are concerned about the risk of trying digital experiences or products that require sharing personal data online. With customer data essential to providing personalized experiences, the safety of that data is as much a cybersecurity issue as it is a customer experience one, Kingston said. 'Because one of the top goals of businesses is to use the growth of this customer data to create more intelligent experiences, right?' Kingston said. The mistake, Kingston said, is that businesses often look at this data in a silo. 'When we do take a look at things like what [chief information security officers] want or what privacy experts want versus what your marketing and your customer experience teams want, it becomes very complicated, because we need to mind the gaps,' Kingston said. 'There's trade-offs between compliance and the customer experience.' Businesses need to balance customer experience with risk and compliance. 'When we do look at how we're measuring and how businesses are measuring the metrics around it, security compliance teams look at ensuring risk and compliance, and what the CX leaders within an organization really wants to do is reducing customer friction points.' While CX leaders in the U.S. are under the impression that they must aim for zero friction to prevent drop off, some friction can be beneficial, Vaeth said. Collecting customer data directly or asking customers for verification can offer that. 'Having this balance of some friction to give stronger safety and keep the user involved … is perfectly acceptable and will not impact drop off rates,' Vaeth said. In fact, S&P Global Market Intelligence found that nearly three-quarters of consumers state that more transparency and control into how their personal data is being used would improve their brand loyalty. 'By building trust, you can really improve repeat purchases, improve that loyalty and satisfy customers so that they're likely to return,' Kingston said. Sign in to access your portfolio
Washington Post
29-01-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
Trump's federal spending power grab is far from over
It took just a week for President Donald Trump to trigger a potential constitutional crisis. The Trump administration backed down Wednesday from its sloppy order — after the edict was put on hold by a federal judge — imposing a sweeping federal spending freeze. But even as it backtracked, the administration made clear it was not retreating from its audacious assertion that the president, not Congress, gets the final say on spending. The eventual outcome will indelibly shape the balance of power between the competing branches of government. If Trump prevails, which he shouldn't, lawmakers might as well pack their bags. There won't be much of a constitutional role left for them. The Constitution, not that it seems to matter much these days, could not be clearer. Congress possesses the power of the purse. It alone controls how much of taxpayers' money to spend, and on what. Spending is paramount among its enumerated powers: 'No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.' The president's job is to 'take care' that these laws are 'faithfully executed.' That means overseeing the spending of the money that lawmakers have appropriated. This separation of powers has chafed since the dawn of the republic, as there is inevitable friction between the two branches about the wisdom and implementation of particular disbursements. But Trump's Office of Management and Budget, run by zealots with an overweening conception of executive authority, seems to envision scarcely a role for Congress at all. To look at the two-page memo issued by acting OMB director Matthew J. Vaeth is to wonder whether he has read the founding document at all. 'Career and political appointees in the Executive Branch have a duty to align Federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through Presidential priorities,' Vaeth proclaimed. Presidential priorities? Vaeth's memorandum never mentions the role of Congress in directing spending. The American people elected them, too. Trump's nominee to take the helm at OMB permanently, Russell Vought, who held the job during Trump's first term, is even more of a fanatic. He has made clear — and repeated in his confirmation hearing — that he believes the Impoundment Control Act, the 1974 federal law outlining how the president and Congress should handle spending disputes, is an unconstitutional encroachment on presidential power. Trump, during the campaign, pledged to 'do everything I can to challenge the Impoundment Control Act in court, and if necessary, get Congress to overturn it.' He started on Day 1, though the action was swamped in the deluge of other executive orders, decreeing an 'immediate pause' on spending money appropriated under Biden-era energy, environmental and infrastructure programs. The Impoundment Control Act was the outgrowth of a series of spending disputes between President Richard M. Nixon and Congress. Among other things, Nixon refused to spend merely half the money allocated to sewage treatment after Congress overrode his veto of the Clean Water Act — how quaintly targeted, in light of Trump's broad order. The law requires the president to spend appropriated money unless he obtains congressional approval not to disburse the funds. There's a provision governing a temporary 'pause,' as the Trump administration has characterized its freeze, but it applies only in limited cases. Even then, the president is supposed to inform Congress of any such 'deferral' and explain the reasons for it; lawmakers may consider overriding his action. No such niceties for the Trump crew. It makes a habit — see the firing of inspectors general — of ignoring such notice requirements. Trump asserts that presidents' refusal to spend appropriated funds is a long-standing practice. 'For 200 years under our system of government, it was undisputed that the president had the constitutional power to stop unnecessary spending through what is known as Impoundment,' Trump said in a June 2023 video. That's another fiction. The earliest historical example — President Thomas Jefferson declined to spend $50,000 on gunboats — isn't an example at all: Congress authorized Jefferson to pay 'a sum not exceeding fifty thousand dollars' but did not order Jefferson to spend any money. In claiming presidential power to override congressional spending edicts, the Trump officials also ignore court rulings, before and after the Impoundment Control Act. In 1838, the Supreme Court ruled that the postmaster general lacked the power to withhold money Congress had appropriated. 'It would be vesting in the President a dispensing power which has no countenance for its support in any part of the Constitution,' the court said, 'and is asserting a principle which, if carried out in its results to all cases falling within it, would be clothing the President with a power to control the legislation of Congress and paralyze the administration of justice.' In the modern era, conservative judicial luminaries have reached the same conclusion. Justice Antonin Scalia, in 1998: 'President Nixon, the Mahatma Gandhi of all impounders, asserted at a press conference in 1973 that his 'constitutional right' to impound appropriated funds was 'absolutely clear.' Our decision two years later in Train v. City of New York proved him wrong.' Future chief justice William H. Rehnquist, as head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, in 1969: 'With respect to the suggestion that the President has a constitutional power to decline to spend appropriated funds, we must conclude that existence of such a broad power is supported by neither reason nor precedent.' Remember, this is the Justice Department office devoted to defending the prerogatives of the executive branch. And future justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, as an appeals court judge, in 2013, citing Rehnquist and the Impoundment Control Act: 'A President sometimes has policy reasons (as distinct from constitutional reasons) for wanting to spend less than the full amount appropriated by Congress for a particular project or program. But in those circumstances, even the President does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend the funds. Instead, the President must propose the rescission of funds, and Congress then may decide whether to approve a rescission bill.' This conservative court has taken an extraordinarily deferential view toward presidential power. It will perhaps bow to Trump's overbroad conception of presidential power and effort to rewrite the Constitution. But make no mistake. This is not presidential business as usual. It is, as Conor Gaffney of the nonprofit group Protect Democracy told me, 'a power grab — an assertion of executive authority that has no basis in law or history.'
Yahoo
29-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's 'Anti-Woke' and DEI Funding Freeze Memo, Explained
All products featured on them. are independently selected by them. editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, Condé Nast may earn an affiliate commission. Bloomberg/Getty Images Them' The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) declared a wide-ranging freeze on grants and financial assistance across the U.S. government this week, causing outcry and confusion across federal agencies before it was rescinded two days later. Legal action had already begun to challenge the OMB memo before it was abruptly canceled on Wednesday afternoon, but its issuance quickly caused widespread confusion and outrage at all levels of government. Staffers of some government programs and nonprofit organizations said they were concerned the freeze could severely impact their work or wipe it out entirely, while administration officials claimed the freeze was necessary to identify and root out 'woke' programs that do not align with Trump's far-right agenda. In the roughly two-day span between its issuance and withdrawal, the OMB funding freeze created significant uncertainty as to how it would affect various programs — if it was allowed to take effect at all. But even though the memo has now been ostensibly canceled as of Wednesday afternoon, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed in a post on X (formerly Twitter) that the rescission applies only to the OMB memo itself, not Trump's general freezes on federal funding as outlined in his executive orders since January 20. The memo was only rescinded '[t]o end any confusion created by' a district court's stay on the memo, issued Tuesday, Leavitt asserted. Even though the memo was withdrawn, it still provides insight into further details of Trump's goals for altering the U.S. federal government through executive action. Here's what we know right now about the OMB memo, its aims, and how officials responded in the immediate aftermath. According to the memo ('Memorandum M-25-13') signed by acting OMB director Matthew Vaeth, 'all federal assistance' including grants, loans, loan guarantees, and insurance was to be paused for programs that conflict with Trump's executive orders — specifically his orders prohibiting DEI programs, rolling back environmental regulations, enacting mass deportations, blocking abortion-related care, and outlawing trans identities, which the memo calls 'woke gender ideology.' Vaeth condemned in the memo what he referred to as 'Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies.' Vaeth's memo instructed all government agencies to perform a 'comprehensive analysis of all of their Federal financial assistance programs' to determine whether they will continue receiving federal funds. Those analyses were set to be due on February 10. It also demanded that all notices of funding opportunities (NOFOs), which are used to communicate opportunities for government funding, be paused. The memo specified that going forward, agencies would also be required to submit to oversight from 'a senior political appointee,' in order to 'ensure Federal financial assistance conforms to Administration priorities.' Exceptions 'may be granted on a case-to-case basis,' Vaeth allowed at the time. On Wednesday afternoon, news agencies obtained another OMB memo officially rescinding the first. 'If you have questions about implementing the President's Executive Orders, please contact your agency General Counsel,' the second memo reportedly read. Even up to the moment the memo was rescinded on January 29, the full range of programs and agencies that would have been affected by the OMB memo was unclear. The memo demanded a halt to 'foreign aid' and assistance to non-governmental organizations (NGOs), but officials have made few other public statements on the scope of those restrictions. During a press conference on January 28, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker stated that there had been 'no communication' with state governments regarding the funding freeze, and in fact, 'we literally were informed that [federal agencies] are not to speak with us.' It's also remained dubious whether the Trump administration's statements about affected agencies and programs were themselves true. The administration claimed that the pause would not affect people receiving individual benefits from the government, like Pell grants and federal student loans, which the Department of Education says are not included in the scope of the memo. But the administration also said that Medicaid would not be affected, even as Medicaid portals in all 50 states suddenly went down on Tuesday — which White House officials blamed on a coincidental 'outage.' Websites for the Head Start educational program were also reportedly inaccessible during that time. 'You think it was an accident the memo came out last night, and today our state agencies couldn't access those systems? It's not. The intention is to disrupt,' Pritzker told reporters on Tuesday. It also seemed likely that the freeze would have affected federal school lunch programs, potentially blocking low-income children from obtaining food during the freeze. GOP Rep. Rich McCormick defended that likelihood on CNN this week, and bizarrely appeared to advocate for child labor in the process, arguing that children in poverty should be 'going to work at Burger King [or] McDonald's' instead of 'stay[ing] at home and get[ting] their free lunch' during summer vacation. In a sense, the memo was already being enacted before it was even issued. According to the Associated Press, the Department of Justice stopped providing legal assistance to people facing deportation last week, and nonprofit groups were informed they should 'stop work immediately' on helping those clients. However, on January 28, shortly before the memo's edicts were set to take effect, U.S. District Judge Loren L. AliKhan issued a stay on the funding freeze. AliKhan's order theoretically pushes the freeze's start date to Monday, February 3 at 5 p.m. That order came as a result of a lawsuit filed against the OMB and Vaeth by several groups on Tuesday, including the National Council of Nonprofits, the American Public Health Association, Main Street Alliance, and SAGE, which advocates and provides services for LGBTQ+ elders. That lawsuit argues that the OMB memo is 'arbitrary and capricious' in its edicts, violating multiple articles of the Administrative Procedure Act. A freeze on foreign aid, separate from the OMB freeze, was also instituted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio this week, specifically blocking the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) from distributing HIV/AIDS treatment abroad. Following public outcry, Rubio later announced a waiver for 'life-saving humanitarian assistance' during the 90-day freeze, which covers 'core life-saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter, and subsistence assistance.' The scope and legality of that freeze were similarly unclear this week. All products featured on them. are independently selected by them. editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, Condé Nast may earn an affiliate commission. Everything You Need to Know About Trump's Executive Order Attempting to Erase Trans Americans The president signed the sweeping order within hours of taking office, signaling that curtailing the rights of trans people is a top priority for his administration. During his press conference this week, Pritzker called the OMB mandate 'illegal' and vowed to challenge it in court. 'I know these are challenging times, and the Trump administration is trying to confuse the American people. That's why it's so important that we speak plainly,' he said. A group of Democratic attorneys general also promised to file suit against OMB regarding the freeze. 'It is astonishing that President Trump, through an agency most Americans have never heard of, would take an action so clearly unlawful that would impact so many Americans in so many ways,' Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said at a press conference this week, per Politico. New York Attorney General Letitia James — who previously presided over Trump's civil fraud case in her state — agreed, saying Trump 'has exceeded his authority [...] violated the Constitution, and he has trampled on a coequal branch of government.' Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, who also signed onto the AGs' legal action, told reporters that the OMB memo did not have the power to override Congress. 'Congress is given the power to appropriate the funding,' Raoul said. 'The executive branch cannot unilaterally disregard those appropriations passed by a separate and equal house of government.' Get the best of what's queer. Sign up for Them's weekly newsletter here. Originally Appeared on them.
Boston Globe
28-01-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
How Donald Trump and Project 2025 previewed the federal grant freeze
Advertisement The order, which was temporarily halted by a federal judge on Tuesday, could reach well beyond policy areas Vaeth singled out. And it is a potential preview of how Trump will attempt to wield executive power throughout his presidency. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Here is an explanation: OMB is a critical power center The president and his conservative allies made clear long before Vaeth's memo that they see the Office of Management and Budget as a linchpin of power across the federal government. Part of the Executive Office of the President, the OMB staff prepares the president's budget recommendations to Congress and oversees the implementation of the president's priorities across all Executive Branch agencies. Lawmakers pass appropriations but executive agencies carry out federal programs and services. The overall process puts OMB on the front and back end of federal government strategy. Project 2025 authors, including Trump's pick for OMB chief, Russell Vought, emphasized this function. Writing the Project 2025 chapter on presidential authority, Vought, who awaits Senate confirmation, made clear that he wants the post to wield more direct power. 'The Director must view his job as the best, most comprehensive approximation of the President's mind,' Vought wrote. The OMB, he declared, 'is a President's air-traffic control system' and should be 'involved in all aspects of the White House policy process,' becoming 'powerful enough to override implementing agencies' bureaucracies.' Elsewhere, Project 2025 authors call for all presidential appointees to control 'unaccountable federal spending' and set a course from the West Wing to subdue what Trump often calls 'the Deep State' of government civil servants. Advertisement 'The Administrative State is not going anywhere until Congress acts to retrieve its own power from bureaucrats and the White House,' they wrote. 'In the meantime, there are many executive tools a courageous conservative president can use to handcuff the bureaucracy (and) bring the Administrative State to heel.' Trump has declared himself the final arbiter of government spending In some ways, the president and his campaign went farther than Project 2025 in asserting presidential power over federal purse strings. In his Agenda 47, Trump endorsed 'impoundment.' That legal theory holds that when lawmakers pass appropriations to fulfill their duties laid out in Article I of the Constitution, they simply set a spending ceiling, but not a floor. The president, the logic goes, can simply decide not to spend money on anything he deems unnecessary, because Article II of the Constitution gives the president the role of executing the laws that Congress passes. Congress acted during Richard Nixon's presidency to reject the 'impoundment' theory. But Trump's circle wants to challenge that — potentially setting up a constitutional fight that would require the Supreme Court to weigh in. Vought did not venture into impoundment in his Project 2025 chapter. But, he wrote that the president 'should use every possible tool to propose and impose fiscal discipline on the federal government. Anything short of that would constitute abject failure.' The memo is a key clue to how DOGE could work The president's preferred path to impose spending cuts quickly now has become clearer. Elon Musk, leading Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency, has suggested he could find federal spending cuts measuring in the trillions, even as Trump has promised to protect Social Security and Medicare. (That pledge was reflected in the memo pausing federal grants.) Advertisement The OMB memo, Trump's theory of impoundment, and his efforts to strip thousands of federal employees of their civil service protections all add up to a concentration of power in the West Wing that could define his second administration and Musk's part in it. For example, Trump cannot on his own repeal legislation like the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act. But OMB could effectively cut off money for the programs, jobs and contractors necessary to enforce those laws. (Trump already has issued a wide-ranging federal hiring freeze.) Similarly, Trump does not have to persuade Congress to change Medicaid laws and appropriations if the White House steps in to adjust or stop Medicaid payments to state governments that administer the programs at ground level.
Yahoo
28-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The power of the purse is up for grabs in the new Trump era
When President Donald Trump named Russel Vought to run the Office of Management and Budget, I warned it was a sign that his administration intended to seize total control of federal spending from Congress. Two weeks ago, I said that if Vought were confirmed, billions of dollars in projects would go unfunded at the president's whim, no matter what legislators have said. I was wrong. They didn't even wait for Vought to be confirmed. Instead, on Monday night, OMB's acting director, Matthew J. Vaeth, sent a memo across the federal government ordering a freeze of 'all Federal financial assistance.' The memo insists on calling this a 'pause.' A federal judge intervened on Tuesday afternoon, issuing an administrative stay to hold off on the OMB order being fully implemented until Monday at soonest. But beyond the immediate and likely catastrophic impact of halting, even briefly, any portion of the $3 trillion in annual spending Vaeth cites, the memo serves as a reminder that any 'temporary' power that Trump claims for himself won't be easily relinquished. 'The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve,' Vaeth wrote in the memo, which was first reported by Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket. It then required federal agencies to go through all grants and loans that it doles out to ensure that they align with the firehose of executive orders that Trump has issued. In the meantime, Vaeth ordered agencies to 'temporarily pause' any programs that could contradict those orders 'including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.' While Vaeth was anything but vague about the reasoning behind the funding freeze, the scope of the pause itself has been wildly confusing. While exempting programs that provide assistance 'directly to individuals,' as well as Social Security and Medicare, the order could potentially affect a big and broad swath of programming. Accompanying the memo was a nearly 900-page spreadsheet for officials to plug in the details of their programs and identify which funding is legally required to be distributed before March 15, when the current short-term spending bill runs out of money. And because the two-page memo lacked specific guidance, the odds are good that program officials — with the encouragement of their newly installed political minders, who the order tasks with overseeing this process— will err on the side of shutting down anything that could conceivably fall into one of Vaeth's ideological buckets. For a glimpse at how this will play out in the short term, look to the halt on foreign aid handed down last week. That freeze didn't just call for a review but a 'stop work' order for all currently funded programs. On Monday, several U.S. Agency for International Development staffers were placed on leave for supposedly violating the pause — a warning to others who might want to keep doing their jobs in the face of a blatantly illegal order. Since that halt, a sense of confusion and concern has reigned in the international aid community. The mess will surely worsen now that domestic programs are included. Not even the administration seems to know the scope of what it's asking: When reporters asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, at her first briefing, if Medicaid would be affected, she replied, 'I'll check back on that and get back to you.' OMB itself issued a follow-up that said Medicaid, SNAP, Pell grants and 'other similar programs' will not be paused. The shifting guidance has had nigh-cartoonish consequences. The spokesperson for Meals on Wheels on Tuesday told HuffPost's Arthur Delaney that 'the uncertainty right now is creating chaos for local Meals on Wheels providers not knowing whether they should be serving meals today.' (Leavitt said at her briefing that the group would not be included in the pause.) The idea that a program as innocuous seeming as Meals on Wheels could see its funding frozen may seem absurd. But as we saw with 'anti-woke' laws in Florida, vagueness prompts pre-emptive cooperation and censorship from those who fear retaliation. Can anyone say with a straight face they know for sure whether MAGA views feeding the elderly as overly 'inclusionary' for old people? Aside from being a major crisis for these organizations, the memo from OMB is a bright red warning sign that any funding the White House 'temporarily' pauses could easily become permanently blocked. Under the Impound Control Act of 1974, it doesn't matter if Trump doesn't like how federal money is being spent. He simply doesn't have the power to withhold, or 'impound,' funds that Congress has appropriated. There are a few exceptions to this, but as University of Michigan law professor Sam Bagenstos noted on Bluesky, even temporary pauses are illegal under the Impound Control Act. But in his Senate confirmation hearing this month, Vought said that he thinks the act is unconstitutional. He has argued in the past that a president can unilaterally withhold whatever funding doesn't align with his vision. And if Congress doesn't like it, Vought says, that's too bad. Speaking of Congress, the ranking Democrats from the House and Senate Appropriations Committees wrote to OMB on Monday night to demand that Vaeth 'reverse course to ensure requirements enacted into law are faithfully met and the nation's spending laws are implemented as intended.' House Democrats are meanwhile out of town for the week but holding an emergency virtual caucus meeting on Wednesday afternoon to discuss the 'illegal Republican funding freeze.' But it seems congressional Republicans are more than happy to give up their power of the purse. The GOP-controlled Senate shows no signs of delaying confirmation of Vought or any of Trump's other nominees, even as the president effectively strips legislators of their authority. Amazingly, House Appropriations Chair Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., is apparently unclear on whether appropriations even count as 'laws' rather than a 'directive.' (They do, but it really shows how far we've come from when the House Appropriations chair was one of the most powerful positions in the country.) With Congress inactive, that leaves enforcement most likely up to the courts. Democratic state attorneys general are already preparing a lawsuit to get the freeze overturned, and further briefings will soon move forward in the suit from an NGO that prompted Tuesday's administrative stay, setting us up for a potential speed run to the Supreme Court. Given Chief Justice John Roberts' views about the separation of powers, it's hard to see him lining up against the Impound Control Act and its clear support for Congress' Article I control over federal spending. But as the Prospect's Daniel Dayen noted, it's clear that the administration wanted to be sued over this action and that Trump's advisers are confident their cause will prevail among enough justices to win out. As the matter winds through the courts, Democrats can't sit back and let this slide. There needs to be members of Congress hitting every local news station to explain why popular programs like Head Start might be shuttered if deemed a "DEI initiative," how the GOP is glad people's medical bills aren't being paid, and exactly who is to blame. Further, it should be a no-brainer that any funding bill that requires Democratic support — including keeping the government open in mid-March — must include clear language repudiating Trump's cash grab before it receives a single Democratic vote. Anything less will be an open invitation for this administration to continue attacking both our constitutional system and the millions of Americans who depend on the funds Trump is illegally slashing. This article was originally published on
