The Apprentice Season 2 - The Second Presidency of Donald Trump

[waitingtoconnect]

In Weimar America there isn’t time for them to catch up.

[Zaxxon]

I… agree with Trump?

[Kraken]

Hah, me too. I read last week that Elon was going to slay the penny. Cash transactions (remember those?) will round up or down to the nearest 5 cents, and electronic transactions will go unchanged.

Every now and then one's adversaries do something right. Stopped clocks and blind squirrels deserve acknowledgment when they do.

[stessier]

I always thought it was a blind pig, but yeah. Here's John Green's reasoning from 14 years ago for anyone interested.

[Zarathud]

Changes to currency and economic transactions should not be announced without discussion on SuperBowl Sunday. Even if it makes economic sense, this is just a way for Trump to hide the inflation he’s going to create. Retail isn’t going to round down.

[Zaxxon]

Changes to currency and economic transactions should not be announced without discussion on SuperBowl Sunday. Even if it makes economic sense, this is just a way for Trump to hide the inflation he’s going to create. Retail isn’t going to round down.

Absolutely. And there's also the point that Obama tried to do this many years back and was stopped by... the GOP.

[Rumpy]

Canada done away with pennies at least a decade ago now. They are pretty much useless and just take up space.

[Isgrimnur]

Judge says he will continue to pause Trump's federal buyout offer

During an hour-long hearing Monday, a lawyer for the Department of Justice framed the deferred resignation offer as a "humane off-ramp" for federal employees before President Donald Trump enacts sweeping changes to "rebalance and reorganize the federal workforce."
...
Elena Goldstein, a lawyer representing the unions that brought the challenge, hammered the Trump administration for attempting to enforce an "unprecedented program" with a "slapdash exploding deadline"
...
While Goldstein acknowledged that Trump has the right to downsize the federal government, she emphasized that OPM has not gone through any of the steps necessary to carry out such a sweeping move -- including analyzing the cost and benefits of their approach, evaluating its impact on the government's function, and accessing potential conflicts of interest for Musk. She added that the exact terms of the buyout are "shifting" for thousands of employees who have gotten inconsistent guidance from their agency.

"OPM appears to be making this up as they are going along," she said. "When the government wants to decide, there are ways to do this correctly ... none of that happened here in the two weeks since they enacted this program."
...
Just hours ahead of Thursday's original deadline for employees to accept the offer, Judge O'Toole -- who was nominated to the bench by President Bill Clinton -- temporarily blocked the offer until Monday so he could consider issuing a temporary restraining offer pausing the order.
...
According to the plaintiffs, Trump's offer violates federal law, lacks congressionally appropriated funding, and does not offer employees reassurance that the president would follow through with the offer. Their claim in part relies on a federal law from the 1940s called the Administrative Procedure Act that governs how federal agencies create and enforce rules.
...
The plaintiffs also argued that the buyout is unlawful because it relies on funding that Congress has yet to appropriate, violating the Antideficiency Act.

[$iljanus]

Hahaha conservative farmers. The leopard really tore into your face didn't he?

Farmers report missing millions of dollars of funding they were promised by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, despite promises from the Trump administration that a federal funding freeze would not apply to projects directly benefiting individuals.

On his first day in office, President Donald Trump ordered the USDA to freeze funds for several programs designated by President Joe Biden’s signature clean-energy and health-care law, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The freeze paused some funding for the department’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which helps farmers address natural resource concerns, and the Rural Energy for America Program, which provides financial assistance for farmers to improve their infrastructure.

I'm sure there's a lot of farmers with different political leanings who are being screwed. All the more reason to band together.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2 ... ng-frozen/

[Max Peck]

That's on top of a couple billion dollars a year of lost crop sales to USAID as Trump guts that agency.

[Smoove_B]

Between the farm subsidy cuts and the culling of animals over H5N1, I am not sure people are really processing what's happening to our food supply.

[LordMortis]

Between the farm subsidy cuts and the culling of animals over H5N1, I am not sure people are really processing what's happening to our food supply.

Don't forget the threats, attacks, and ice raids on immigrant workers and threats of tariffs.

[Max Peck]

Well, it stands to reason that they'll stop "culling" so-called "sick" animals and just ship the carcasses to the processing plants. Nobody ever caught the Fake Flu from eating McNuggets or a Big Mac.

[Punisher]

Well, it stands to reason that they'll stop "culling" so-called "sick" animals and just ship the carcasses to the processing plants. Nobody ever caught the Fake Flu from eating McNuggets or a Big Mac.

To be fair, I'm skeptical that mcnuggets contain much, if any chicken.

[Smoove_B]

It feels like this should be headlines everywhere as it's presumably the scenario many have said will be an indication we're in trouble. Specifically, the courts ordered the Trump administration to stop the federal funding freeze, and yet there are still numerous agencies around the nation that don't have access to their funds:

When the federal courts first blocked the Trump administration’s funding freeze, Jessyca Leach was cautiously optimistic.

For days, the pause had prevented her from accessing the money she needs for her Phoenix health clinic to serve thousands of at-risk people, most of them poor and many of them members of the LGBTQ+ community. Things had gotten so bad that she had to lay off three employees and cut the salaries of her leadership team, including her own.

So when the funding started to flow again last week, days after the court orders, Leach hoped her ordeal would be over. It wasn’t.

Her federal dollars were accompanied by an ominous note from the payment processing arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Citing “Executive Orders regarding potentially unallowable grant payments,” the agency said that it would continue “taking additional measures to process payments” and that its reviews “will result in delays and/or rejections of payments.”

“If it’s not there,” Leach said of the federal money that covers the salaries for 40% of her staff, “things get really bad, really fast.”

The notice Leach received was one of several indications over the past week that the Trump administration is not backing down in its fight to slash spending and dramatically reshape the federal government, despite multiple court orders explicitly restraining the president’s sweeping executive actions. In some cases, to get around the judges’ rulings, the administration has cited a memo that it says is not subject to the existing orders. In others, it denied funding to organizations because their granting agencies are not defendants in one of the ongoing legal challenges. In others still, it has withheld funds by citing the agencies’ own judgment, not the president’s directives.

There's quite few agencies nationwide that are mentioned:

In New York, a top accounting official wrote that, as of Wednesday, the state could not access money that low-income people use to buy groceries, a block grant for maternal and child health services and nearly $6 million in education funding. In New Mexico, the official who heads services for the elderly and disabled adults said further spending pauses could force them to stop delivering hot meals.

The only response:

On Thursday, for example, a Department of Justice lawyer denied the administration was not abiding by the court’s rulings in one of the two cases challenging the government’s spending freezes, this one brought by a coalition of state attorneys general. He told an attorney representing Oregon that the Environmental Protection Agency was “working through the process of unsuspending grants, which is taking some time given the nature of the process.”

In another email, the same official wrote to a lawyer for New York that the delays in releasing funds to the state were not examples of the administration’s obstinance but were instead “very likely related to” the federal Payment Management System’s “ongoing process of working through the unusually large number of payment requests they received.”

In a filing, the lawyer explained the cause of the “operational delay,” writing that in the four days after OMB issued the spending freeze memo that kicked off the litigation, so many grantees tried to draw down funds — in many cases for their full grant balance — that the payment system automatically flagged 7,000 of them as unusual, prompting further review. As of Sunday, the lawyer wrote, the backlog was fewer than 600 requests.

Even if it's not intentional, just doing it has screwed up the regular flow of monies in a way that's still impacting people and communities. I want to give the benefit of the doubt here, but can't shake the idea that it's not accidental at all.

[Holman]

Between the farm subsidy cuts and the culling of animals over H5N1, I am not sure people are really processing what's happening to our food supply.

Don't forget mass deportation of farm and slaughterhouse workers. And kitchen staff.

[Max Peck]

"We're not defying the court's order, we're just super incompetent because doing a job is a lot harder than simply not doing a job" almost seems like an honest response.

[RunningMn9]

It would be so easy for them to inflict all of this unapologetic cruelty in a perfectly legal way, that the judiciary could do nothing about.

Just do it the way that the system is designed to do it. You control all branches of government. Just pass laws in Congress.

Of course, then the rest of the GOP would have to go on record, and when the shit hits the fan in their district/state, there might be consequences. So I guess that’s out?

[Blackhawk]

It would be so easy for them to inflict all of this unapologetic cruelty in a perfectly legal way, that the judiciary could do nothing about.

Just do it the way that the system is designed to do it. You control all branches of government. Just pass laws in Congress.

Of course, then the rest of the GOP would have to go on record, and when the shit hits the fan in their district/state, there might be consequences. So I guess that’s out?

Fastest and easiest would be to just flip the switch on everything (what they outwardly seem to be doing)
Slowest and the most work would be to follow the process.
The compromise they seem to be going for is to flip the switch on 100 things, then be forced to go back and do 10 of them right.

The side benefit is to so overwhelm everyone that nobody knows half of what's actually happened, while a few things (like conquering Canada) take 90% of the attention, providing cover for their other actions.

[RunningMn9]

I maintain that they are doing it this way so that they can claim “it wasn’t us!!” In 2026. If they have to record votes, they can’t do that.

[Blackhawk]

As with most things, the truth is likely a little of what each of us said, and a little of things we never thought of.

[raydude]

I maintain that they are doing it this way so that they can claim “it wasn’t us!!” In 2026. If they have to record votes, they can’t do that.

It amazes me still that none of the Republicans can see the writing on the wall with respect to Trump and his cronies disregarding or slow walking judicial rulings. All it takes for me is one blatantly ignored ruling and I can already see that the next step is for Trump to just hand wave away Congress when he wants to. Why no R in Congress thinks their job is in peril is beyond me.

[Smoove_B]

Why no R in Congress thinks their job is in peril is beyond me.

Because people like Susan Collins, Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham get re-elected every cycle - even over the last decade with all the insanity they've enabled.

[Kraken]

Why no R in Congress thinks their job is in peril is beyond me.

Their jobs aren't in peril. They're turning into genteel retirement gigs. The Roman Empire kept a Senate and well-off patricians long after the Republic was overturned.

[Zarathud]

What makes me furious is that the media takes the bait and calls it "Trump reforming government." The media and Democrats have allowed Trump to define the issue.

This isn't a reform. It's breaking government ... to increase corruption, not decrease wasteful spending. To avoid the accountability of having to take an open vote in Congress ... that wouldn't pass because even most Republicans wouldn't willingly vote for all of the cuts. We haven't had a budget for the last year because REPUBLICANS can't agree. They broke it before they owned it, and they want Elon Musk to be responsible for being their hatchetman.