Tag: crony cabinet
Like Phosphorus In Your Water? With Trump’s EPA, You’re In Luck!

Like Phosphorus In Your Water? With Trump’s EPA, You’re In Luck!

Soon after being confirmed as the new chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt said this to a conference of conservative activists: “I think people across the country look at the EPA the way they look at the IRS.”

Pruitt’s remark makes clear the sort of people he’s listening to and aims to serve. Corporate polluters look at the EPA the same way corporate tax cheats look at the IRS — as the enemy.

Regulation can be burdensome even for good companies trying to do the right thing.

But for those dumping waste into rivers or spewing toxins in the sky, the slightest shadow of oversight is threatening and therefore despised, for obvious reasons.

The good people of Flint, Michigan, whose tap water turned undrinkable, likely hold a different view of the EPA than, say, coal lobbyists. If you live in Flint, you might wish the agency were stronger, not weaker.

As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruitt, in league with gas and oil companies, made a sport of suing the EPA. So far, he seems content with the White House notion to whack the agency’s budget by 24 percent and fire 3,000 employees.

Polluters have been whining about the EPA since it was signed into existence 47 years ago by that radical environmentalist Richard Nixon. The idea was that the American families have a right to breathe clean air and drink clean water.

This concept lay at grave odds with the prevailing operating practices of copper mines, coal-burning power plants, plastics factories, and industrial farms. Conflict was inevitable, and the EPA was regularly vilified for meddling in local matters.

Here in Florida, the agency became a key player in the complex, politically fraught effort to clean up the Everglades. Progress has been halting and uneven, but without the EPA — and the eye of the Justice Department — there would have been almost no progress at all.

The federal role in Everglades restoration was expanded by U.S. District Judge Alan Gold, now retired, who had become increasingly exasperated by the stall tactics of Florida officials and the weakening of pollution limits for farm runoff waters.

In a 2011 order, Gold irritably concluded that the state and the South Florida Water Management District, “have not been true stewards of protecting the Everglades in recent years.”

He was dead right.

Pruitt’s takeover of the EPA is happy news for Big Sugar and other industrial agricultural interests that have been trying for decades to shake free of federal scrutiny.

They eagerly await the day when anemic state agencies — not the EPA — are the ones in charge of regulating levels of phosphorus, mercury and other chemicals in the farm runoff that flows into public waterways.

The reason for that preference is simple. State politicians are much easier to manipulate than federal bureaucrats. All it takes is money.

Showered with campaign donations from Big Agriculture, Gov. Rick Scott and GOP lawmakers have obediently labored to deliver control of water policy to major landowners and user-groups, with the exception of ordinary Floridians.

Last year’s gift-wrapped water bill placed the state’s farming and ranching companies on a laughable honor system, allowing them to self-monitor their cleanup efforts with only occasional state inspections.

Of course, if the honor system worked and industries cleaned up their own mess, there would have been no need for an EPA all those years ago.

Recently, seeking to shed all federal oversight, Florida officials distributed maps intended to show that water quality throughout the Everglades has improved to the threshold of almost-clean.

This sunny report came from the South Florida Water Management District, whose board is stacked with the governor’s surrogates. The good news puzzled the Miccosukee Tribe, which says phosphorus levels in some reservation waters are seven to 10 times higher than legal limits.

The nutrient-loaded runoff comes from canals transporting farm effluent south to tribal wetlands bisected by Alligator Alley. A spokesman admitted the district has quit monitoring pollution in those canals, saying it was part of a research program that ended.

How convenient.

The state is now safe to shrug off those alarming phosphorus readings from the Miccosukees and promote its own selective, upbeat water data.

There’s a receptive new audience at the Justice Department, and the EPA. Scott Pruitt will probably be delighted to abandon future custodianship of the Everglades to Gov. Scott and Big Agriculture.

It’s true that water flowing off the vast farm fields below Lake Okeechobee is much less polluted than it was 20 years ago, but that’s because federal judges kept kicking the plan forward.

The feds haven’t been perfect partners in the restoration epic, but without that pressure the hacks in Tallahassee would have bailed a long, long time ago.

IMAGE: Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt testifies before a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee confirmation hearing on his nomination to be administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, U.S., January 18, 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts/File Photo

What Should We Do About A Mentally Ill President?

What Should We Do About A Mentally Ill President?

It’s time to face up to the obvious: The President of the United States is deranged.

I don’t mean that he’s merely idiosyncratic or pushing policies that I think are crazy, nor do I say this as just another political jab. I mean that Donald J. Trump literally is mentally ill.

OK, I’m no doctor, but you don’t need a doctorate in mental disorders to see that his behavior in public and on Twitter is beyond abnormal — it’s psychotic. As we’ve seen, he routinely plunges uncontrollably into prolonged fits of petty paranoia; he succumbs to delusions of imperialist grandeur; he spouts absurd right-wing rumors as facts (while simultaneously denying that actual facts are true); and he is pathologically addicted to lying, bizarrely repeating his most blatant fabrications even after they’ve been totally debunked.

A sane, temperamentally-balanced president — possessing all the power and majesty that America’s supreme office conveys to an Oval Office occupant — doesn’t get into demeaning public snits with the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger; doesn’t feel a constant need to puff himself up with ridiculously false claims, like his frantic insistence that the crowd at his inaugural celebration was the largest ever; doesn’t rage rabidly at media outlets that question his competence or displease him, blasting them as “enemies of the people;” and doesn’t unleash a furious, all-out attack on Barack Obama just because some screwball radio talk-show conspiracy theorist made a claim that the former president had wiretapped Trump’s campaign.

These are not mere eccentricities, not just Trump being Trump — it’s obvious that the guy is not well and is unable to handle the stressful demands of being president of our democratic republic. Indeed, his flaky behavior suggests he’s on the brink of a personal breakdown, and his ever-more-frequent retreats to his posh Florida golf resort tells us he doesn’t even want to do the job.

Many people who attain high public office grow in their position of trust. Some, however, just bloat.

Trump has put bloat on spectacular since entering the White House, where he’s had a disastrous start. He chose a cabinet and staff mostly made up of ideological quacks, incompetents and Wall Street grifters. Yet, buoyed by his explosive ego, the president pronounced his start historic: “I don’t think there’s ever been a president elected who in this short period of time has done what we’ve done.”

Sadly, he’s right. For example, they made a reckless, autocratic, and unconstitutional attempt to ban millions of Muslim immigrants from our land. They embarrassed America with a hasty, failed, and deadly military raid in Yemen. They had to ax the kooky guy he chose to be his national security advisor. They’ve even apparently been caught colluding with Russian meddlers in our politics. Some record!

And now Trump has embraced a GOP replacement of Obamacare, hailing a”Trumpcare” substitute that will jack-up our health care costs, cut benefits, and eliminate coverage entirely for millions of working-class and poor people — all while also sneaking in yet another underhanded tax cut for the rich! It’s so awful that even hordes of Republican lawmakers have gagged, refusing to swallow it. Yet, lost in self-deception, Trump calls it “wonderful”.

We have a president who is detached from reality, careening from one mess to another. But who will say: “The emperor has no clothes”? He’s so far gone that when he read his recent address to Congress straight off the teleprompter, without his usual pugnacious ranting, Republican enablers of his antics and even the media establishment he scorns applauded him for being “presidential.”

Huh? The speech was a nasty wad of lies and right-wing nonsense. If the occasional appearance of sanity is all we ask of Trump, then his reign of insanity will be our fault. His loved ones and his party should intervene — for his sake and for America’s. But they won’t. Will we?

IMAGE: DonkeyHotey / Flickr

Meet The Swamp Denizens Trump Has Quietly Installed Across The Government

Meet The Swamp Denizens Trump Has Quietly Installed Across The Government

Reprinted with permission fromProPublica.

A Trump campaign aide who argues that Democrats committed “ethnic cleansing” in a plot to “liquidate” the white working class. A former reality show contestant whose study of societal collapse inspired him to invent a bow-and-arrow-cum-survivalist multi-tool. A pair of healthcare industry lobbyists. A lobbyist for defense contractors. An “evangelist” and lobbyist for Palantir, the Silicon Valley company with close ties to intelligence agencies. And a New Hampshire Trump supporter who has only recently graduated from high school.

These are some of the people the Trump administration has hired for positions across the federal government, according to documents received by ProPublica through public-records requests.

While President Trump has not moved to fill many jobs that require Senate confirmation, he has quietly installed hundreds of officials to serve as his eyes and ears at every major federal agency, from the Pentagon to the Department of Interior.

Unlike appointees exposed to the scrutiny of the Senate, members of these so-called “beachhead teams” have operated largely in the shadows, with the White House declining to publicly reveal their identities.

While some names have previously dribbled out in the press, we are publishing a list of more than 400 hires, providing the most complete accounting so far of who Trump has brought into the federal government.

The White House said in January that around 520 staffers were being hired for the beachhead teams.

The list we obtained includes obscure campaign staffers, contributors to Breitbart, and others who have embraced conspiracy theories, as well as dozens of Washington insiders who could be reasonably characterized as part of the “swamp” Trump pledged to drain.

The list is striking for how many former lobbyists it contains: We found at least 36, spanning industries from health insurance and pharmaceuticals to construction, energy, and finance. Many of them lobbied in the same areas that are regulated by the agencies they have now joined.

That figure is almost certainly an undercount since we only included those who formally registered as lobbyists, a process increasingly avoided by many in Washington.

During the campaign, Trump said he would have “no problem” banning lobbyists from his administration. But they have nonetheless ended up in senior roles, aided by Trump’s weakening of Obama-era ethics rules that modestly limited lobbyists’ role in government.

The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment.

There are many former congressional staffers, several top officials from the George W. Bush administration, and even a handful of holdovers from the Obama administration. The list also includes at least eight staffers drawn from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that forged close ties to the new administration during the transition.

Much about the role of the beachhead teams at various federal agencies is unclear. But close observers of the early weeks of the Trump administration believe they have taken on considerable influence in the absence of high-level political appointees.

“If the public and Senate is in the dark about a team created without a Senate confirmation process, no one will be permitted to shed light on who is hopelessly conflicted or who is obviously unqualified — and who is both,” said Jeff Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

The beachhead team members are temporary employees serving for stints of four to eight months, but many are expected to move into permanent jobs. The Trump administration’s model is based on plans developed but never used by the unsuccessful presidential campaign of Mitt Romney.

“The beachhead teams involve people with considerable authority over the federal government,” said Max Stier, the CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group that advises presidential candidates on smooth transitions. “We need clarity about what they’re doing and what their role is going to be.”

The Obama administration also hired temporary staffers after the inauguration. But Trump has brought in many more, Stier said.

The new list of names was provided to us by the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources agency. We received additional names from other federal agencies in response to Freedom of Information Act requests. At least a few people on the list have changed agencies or left the administration, including, for example, the young Department of Housing and Urban Development staffer who was fired after his anti-Trump writings during the campaign came to light.

Here is a run-down of some of the Trump hires.

The Breitbart wing

Curtis Ellis was a columnist for WorldNetDaily, a website best known for its enthusiastic embrace of the false notion that President Obama was born outside the United States. A column headlined the “The Radical Left’s Ethnic Cleansing of America” won Ellis an admiring interview with Steve Bannon, now Trump’s top aide. He is a longtime critic of trade deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Ellis was hired Jan. 20 as a special assistant to the secretary at the Labor Department. Asked about his role in a brief phone interview Tuesday, he said: “Nothing I can tell you.”

Jon Perdue, a self-described guerrilla warfare expert and fellow at a little-known security think tank, wrote a book called The War of All the People: The Nexus of Latin American Radicalism and Middle Eastern Terrorism. He is also a onetime contributor to Breitbart.

Perdue was featured on CNBC’s reality series Make Me a Millionaire Inventor for his invention, the Packbow, which Perdue came up with while studying “collapsed societies, and what people who lived in those societies came up with to either defend themselves or to survive.” It’s a bow and arrow that doubles as a compass, tent pole, walking stick, spearfishing rig, and water purification tablet receptacle.

Perdue was hired as a special assistant at the Treasury Department. The agency didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

John Jaggers ran the Trump campaign in Maryland and Virginia, where he made headlines for endorsing the conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton was “very, very sick and they’re covering it up.” As he put it last August: “The woman who seeks to be the first female president of the United States wears a wool coat at every single thing. Have you ever stopped to wonder why? It’s a big deal, folks.”

Jaggers was hired Jan. 20 as senior adviser at the General Services Administration, which oversees tens of billions of dollars of government procurement every year. But records show he left the job on March 3. He declined to comment.

Swamp denizens, including health care lobbyists hired by HHS Secretary Tom Price

Alexandra Campau, hired at the department of Health and Human Services, was formerly a lobbyist in Washington for the law firm Cozen O’Connor. According to disclosure records, her firm’s clients included a licensee of insurance giant Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Fresenius Medical Care, a German company that specializes in medical supplies for renal dialysis.

Timothy Clark, a senior adviser to HHS Secretary Tom Price, ran his own political consulting firm in California. His past clients included PhRMA, the powerful trade group that represents the pharmaceutical industry.

Keagan Lenihan, also a senior adviser to Price, was a director of government relations at McKesson Specialty Health, a firm that supports independent health providers. Disclosure records show Lenihan directly lobbied HHS. For Lenihan, the new post represents a return trip through the revolving door between government and the private sector, and a reunion with an old boss. Before registering as a lobbyist, she was a senior legislative assistant for Price, when the now-HHS secretary was in Congress.

Asked about the three HHS staffers, an agency spokeswoman said: “We are not confirming or commenting on personnel at this time.”

Justin Mikolay, hired at the Department of Defense, was previously a registered lobbyist for Palantir. His title at the tech firm was “evangelist.” Mikolay lobbied for the “procurement/deployment of the Palantir Government software platform” throughout intelligence and defense agencies, according to disclosure records.

Mikolay was a speechwriter to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta between 2011 and 2013, according to his LinkedIn profile. Mikolay also previously served as a speechwriter for current Secretary of Defense James Mattis. He declined to comment.

Chad Wolf, a Bush-era Transportation Security Administration official turned lobbyist, is currently serving as an adviser to the TSA at the Department of Homeland Security. His clients have included defense and homeland security contractors.

Reached Tuesday, Wolf declined to comment. George Rogers, CEO of Wolf’s lobbying firm, Wexler Walker, told ProPublica that Wolf is currently on unpaid leave.

As we’ve previously reported, lobbyists for the construction industry trade association and financial services firm TransAmerica are on the team at the Department of Labor.

Trump campaign vets — including very young ones

The list also includes what appear to be dozens of former Trump campaign staffers, including several who graduated from college last year. One, Danny Tiso at the Department of Labor, graduated from high school in 2015, according to his LinkedIn profile. He worked for the Trump campaign in New Hampshire.

Seth Harris, who was on the first Obama-Biden transition team and later became a top Labor Department official, said it’s not uncommon to bring in campaign staff to agencies — “as long as there are senior political people to direct the junior people.”

“This is how you incorporate the people who are your strongest supporters into the government,” he said. “There are plenty of junior jobs in the government that these people can do — public-affairs jobs, special assistant jobs.”

Reporting was contributed by Robert Faturechi, Jesse Eisinger, Alison Gregor, Jessica Huseman, Lauren Kirchner, Alec MacGillis, Clifford Michel, T. Christian Miller, Charles Ornstein, Andrew Revkin, Marcelo Rochabrun, Lisa Song, and Annie Waldman.

IMAGE: A reviewing stand is seen outside of the White House for the upcoming presidential inauguration in Washington, U.S., January 15, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

How The Trump Administration May Be Skirting Its Own Ethics Rules

How The Trump Administration May Be Skirting Its Own Ethics Rules

Reprinted with permission fromProPublica.

The Trump administration appears to be either ignoring or exempting top staffers from its own watered-down ethics rules.

As we have detailed, President Trump in January issued an order weakening Obama-era ethics policies, allowing lobbyists to work at agencies they had sought to influence. The Trump order did limit what lobbyists could do once they entered government, banning them from directly handling issues on which they had lobbied.

But the administration may not be even following that.

We’ve found three hires announced this week who, in fact, are working on the same issues on which they were registered lobbyists while in the private sector.

Consider Shahira Knight, President Trump’s special assistant for tax and retirement policy.

Lobbying disclosures show that Knight lobbied the government on a host of retirement and tax issues for financial services giant Fidelity. In one case, she lobbied against a regulation requiring financial professionals to act in the best interests of their clients when it comes to retirement accounts such as 401(k)s. The regulation is strongly supported by consumer advocates and strongly opposed by Fidelity. Retirement savers lose billions of dollars a year because of conflicts of interest in the industry, the Obama administration estimated.

The Trump executive order says former lobbyists like Knight cannot work in the “specific issue area” in which they lobbied, though that phrase is not defined.

Given that Knight lobbied on tax and retirement issues and is now working as Trump’s assistant on tax and retirement issues, how can she be in compliance with the ethics policy?

It’s not at all clear.

One possibility is that the Trump administration has issued waivers exempting Knight and the other lobbyists they’ve hired from the new rules.

Unfortunately, there’s no way for the public to know if this has been done. In a little-noticed action, Trump killed the Obama-era requirement that the Office of Government Ethics publish an annual report disclosing such waivers. Trump’s order also removed the requirement to provide a public interest justification for waivers.

That means Trump can exempt an official from the lobbying limits at any time, for any reason, with no public disclosure.

Critics of the administration’s approach to conflicts of interest said it is impossible to know whether the rules are being ignored or rendered irrelevant by the officials implementing them.

“I very much suspect that Trump’s ethics executive order either is not understood within the administration and not enforced, or the White House counsel is single-handedly interpreting the restrictions of the executive order so narrowly that they are next to meaningless,” said Craig Holman of the watchdog group Public Citizen.

The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment about whether any waivers have been issued or the how the ethics policy is being enforced.

Asked about Knight, White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said in a statement:

“Shahira Knight has been working with the Office of White House Counsel since before she joined the White House staff to ensure she is in compliance with all rules and regulations.”

Walters wouldn’t provide any further details.

The two other lobbyists hired this week, whose names were first flagged by The Intercept, are Michael Catanzaro and George David Banks. They, like Knight, were named to National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn’s senior staff.

Just a few months ago Catanzaro was lobbying on fuel standards and greenhouse gas regulations for the ​American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers. He is now special assistant to the president for domestic energy and environmental policy.

As for Banks, disclosure records state he recently lobbied on environmental issues for a business group. He is now special assistant to the president for international energy and environment.

In an interview, Banks told ProPublica that he had signed an ethics pledge but no one from the White House Counsel’s office has contacted him about any restrictions on his job or the fact that he was a registered lobbyist.

“I haven’t had a conversation about it yet,” he said. He has not received a waiver.

Banks also said that he was mistakenly registered as a lobbyist due to an error by his office manager. His former employer, the American Council for Capital Formation, said in a statement that Banks “did not meet the legal threshold for registering with Congress as a lobbyist” and it is seeking to correct the filings.

That distinction matters because the Trump ethics policy applies only to officials who were registered lobbyists.

The law requires a lobbyist to register based on a complicated test including spending more than 20 percent of his or her time lobbying. In recent years, there has been a well-documented decline in the ranks of registered lobbyists, who must report details of their work publicly, and a rise in so-called shadow lobbying by people who do not meet the registration requirements.

The White House spokeswoman said that Knight and Catanzaro “have been working with the Office of White House Counsel since before they joined the White House staff to ensure they are in compliance with all rules and regulations,” but declined to provide any details.

There are multiple signs the Trump administration is not aggressively policing ethics issues beyond its handling of the rules on lobbyists. In January, Trump’s team cancelled a previously scheduled ethics and leadership training course for White House appointees, Politico reported. The White House Counsel’s office also gave a pass to Trump aide Kellyanne Conway for violating ethics rules by urging Americans to buy Ivanka Trump’s clothing line.

During the Obama administration, the White House posted copies of ethics waivers on its website. Obama issued a handful to former lobbyists during his eight years in office.

The current White House website still has a page for ethics waivers, but it is empty. It states: “Ethics pledge waivers will be published as they become available.”

IMAGE: U.S. President Donald Trump meet with Pharma industry representatives at the White House in Washington, U.S., January 31, 2017. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas