Octopus Overlords

Zarathud wrote: Mon Feb 10, 2025 4:20 am 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.

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."
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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"
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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."
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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.
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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.
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The plaintiffs also argued that the buyout is unlawful because it relies on funding that Congress has yet to appropriate, violating the Antideficiency Act.

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.

Smoove_B wrote: Mon Feb 10, 2025 7:56 pm 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.

Max Peck wrote: Mon Feb 10, 2025 8:05 pm 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.

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.

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.

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.

Smoove_B wrote: Mon Feb 10, 2025 7:56 pm 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.

RunningMn9 wrote: Mon Feb 10, 2025 9:57 pm 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?

RunningMn9 wrote: Mon Feb 10, 2025 10:57 pm 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.

raydude wrote: Mon Feb 10, 2025 11:21 pm Why no R in Congress thinks their job is in peril is beyond me.

raydude wrote: Mon Feb 10, 2025 11:21 pm Why no R in Congress thinks their job is in peril is beyond me.