Tag: heritage foundation
Trump Withdraws Nomination Of Top BLS Official Amid Critical Blast

Trump Withdraws Nomination Of Top BLS Official Amid Critical Blast

President Donald Trump is now withdrawing the nomination of the Heritage Foundation's E.J. Antoni to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

That's according to a Tuesday article in CNN, which reported that the White House has officially submitted its withdrawal paperwork to the U.S. Senate, where Antoni is awaiting formal confirmation. While the White House hasn't officially given a reason for its decision, CNN reported that it may be due to revelations that Antoni administered a secret social media account in which he repeatedly made derogatory remarks about top Democrats and minorities.

CNN reported earlier this month that Antoni was confirmed to be behind an account named "phdofbombsaway" that had been named "ErwinJohnAntoni" up until 2019. That account shared posts implying former Vice President Kamala Harris performed sexual favors to advance her political career, and that referred to Christine Blasey Ford — who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of assaulting her when he was in high school – as "Miss Piggy." At the time, the White House stood by Antoni.

"President Trump has nominated Dr. EJ Antoni to fix the issues at the BLS and restore trust in the jobs reports," White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said earlier this month. "Dr. Antoni has the experience and credentials needed to restore solution-oriented leadership at the BLS — solutions that will prioritize increasing survey response rates and modernizing data collection methods to improve the BLS’s accuracy."

Antoni was nominated to replace former BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer, who Trump fired after the August jobs report showed anemic job growth and issued revisions lowering job growth estimates from previous jobs reports (a common occurrence, as employer surveys tend to trickle in over time). The White House alleged without evidence that McEntarfer had been purposefully publishing weak jobs numbers in order to embarrass the administration.

As of Tuesday evening, Congress has been so far unable to pass a bill to keep government agencies funded beyond September 30, meaning a federal government shutdown is imminent. This means that the BLS will not be publishing an October jobs report next Friday. And even if Congress manages to pass a funding bill and end a shutdown by October 7 (when the House of Representatives is scheduled to return), a clean jobs report with a full month of data isn't likely until September.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Donald Trump

'Lost Leverage': Top Law Firms That Bowed To Trump Now Ignore Him

Even though President Donald Trump's administration secured promises from some of the nation's biggest law firms to contribute more than $1 billion worth of pro bono work to further the administration's goals, the White House is now reportedly having a hard time getting some of those firms to follow through on their promises.

According to a Thursday report in the Wall Street Journal, many of those promises law firms made to perform free legal services have already been broken. This could be partially due to the success that firms who have sued in response to Trump's executive orders targeting them have had in court, with the Journal reporting that all four firms that fought back have so far prevailed. And firms that haven't fulfilled their commitments are reportedly hoping the administration will be too distracted with the work of governing to follow through on threats to suspend security clearances, federal contracts and access to federal buildings.

The Journal reported that the firms that agreed to help Trump only typically perform between $4 million and $5 million worth of pro bono work per year, meaning that in order to fulfill some of those commitments — like the firm Skadden's $100 million promise — it would take decades. And because Trump will leave office in January of 2029, many firms likely aren't taking their commitment to his administration seriously.

The paper further reported that far-right groups who have inundated the firms with requests for legal assistance have so far been stiff-armed. This includes the far-right Heritage Foundation (which is responsible for the notorious Project 2025 playbook), which has asked for help but has yet to receive any outside of initial meetings with some attorneys.

And while Attorney General Pam Bondi has asked the Department of Justice to create ways to help law enforcement officers facing misconduct allegations receive free legal representation from the firms in question, none of them have responded to inquiries. California-based attorney Harry Stern, who represents police officers facing legal proceedings, told the Journal: "It's not happening."

Gary DiBianco, who leads a pro bono litigation group, told the Journal that the administration has likely lost its credibility with any lawyers it hopes to strong-arm into performing free work.

"I think the administration has completely lost the leverage it has over future firms," DiBianco said.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Trump Threatens The Stability Of Social Security

Trump Threatens The Stability Of Social Security

Donald Trump's tax and spending plans would add enormous amounts to the national debt, with some estimates as high as $15 trillion over a decade. But some of his tax cuts stand apart in threatening one of America's most revered programs, Social Security. They would essentially bankrupt it by 2031.

This is not some far-off worry. We're talking like six years from now. And the source of this scary news is the reliable and nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

How would Trump pull the legs out from under it? Start with his vow to stop taxing Social Security benefits. That sounds nice, but these taxes help fund the program. Add to that his call to exempt taxes for overtime pay and tips, further eating into Social Security payroll tax collections.

Seemingly unrelated stances would also speed up cuts in scheduled benefits. Trump's tariffs would unleash inflation, thus raising the program's cost-of-living adjustment. And his immigration plans would remove workers who pay into the system.

What a lot of people don't understand about Social Security is that there is no magical pile of government money to back up its promises. Social Security is largely self-funding by law. (Medicare is another story.) Social Security must pay for itself. Unlike the Treasury, it's not allowed to borrow.

This is how it works: Social Security payroll tax collections go into a trust fund. Any surplus funds left after benefits are disbursed get invested in special U.S. Treasury securities. These are loans to the federal government. Like other bonds, they collect interest and have to be paid back.

Foes of Social Security have long complained that general revenues are used to make good on these special Treasuries. True, but let us repeat. These securities represent loans to the government, not some new kind of spending. The Treasury must repay this debt just as it must back Treasury bonds held by China, Japan and investors all over the world. (Some on the right make the ludicrous tough-luck claim that the dough is already gone.)

The point here is that monkeying around with the flow of money going into the Social Security program is a way of deep-sixing public support for it. As president, Trump applied the same sneaky tactics in his attempt to kill the Affordable Care Act. Recall how he went repeatedly after its funding.

Shoring up Social Security will be necessary even without Trump's sabotage. The program is still forecast to be unable to meet promised payouts in 2035. But this is fixable with some overdue changes. One obvious step is raising the income level at which payroll taxes are charged. The maximum is now $168,600.

The Heritage Foundation, author of Project 2025, has an alternative plan: reduce benefits. It calls for raising the age, already hiked to 67, for collecting full benefits. So much for Americans worn out from years of hard physical labor.

Heritage also proposes lowering benefits to higher-income retirees. Two problems here. One is that, as noted, benefits to wealthier retirees are already taxed. The other is that reducing the program's value to better-off participants turns what was conceived as an earned benefit into something resembling welfare.

And there's Heritage's perennial plan to privatize the program, that is, expose beneficiaries to the whims of the stock market and other investments. Of course, no one is stopping future retirees from putting their money in stocks, crypto or trading cards. Social Security is best kept dull and simple.

Without changes in how Social Security is currently funded, benefits would be cut 23% by 2035. With Trump's tax plans, benefits would be slashed 33 percent. No two ways about it. Trump is threatening Social Security's stability.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Kevin Roberts

Under Fire Over Project 2025, Heritage Chief Delays Book (Details Revealed Here)

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ book will be published after the November elections, according to a report from Real Clear Politics.

This comes after backlash against the Heritage-led initiative Project 2025, which aims to provide policy and personnel to the next Republican presidential administration and is backed by an advisory board of more than 100 conservative groups. Project 2025 has deep ties to former President Donald Trump and his running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH). Vance wrote the foreword to the now-delayed Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, calling Roberts’ ideas an “essential weapon” in the “fights that lay ahead.”

The effort to hide the ball is futile, as Media Matters has obtained a galley copy of the book.

A review found Roberts rails against birth control, in vitro fertilization, abortion, and dog parks. He says that having children should not be considered an “optional individual choice” but “a social expectation or a transcendent gift,” and describes “contraceptive technologies” as “revolutionary inventions that shape American culture away from abundance, marriage, and family.” He labels reproductive choice methods as a “snake strangling the American family.”

From page 63:

We need to understand what could be called contraceptive technologies—revolutionary inventions that shape American culture away from abundance, marriage, and family—in the same vein. They shift norms, incentives, and choices, often invisibly and involuntarily. Conservatives inveigh against no-fault divorce, the Sexual Revolution, and the destruction of a culture of hope without recognizing that these cultural changes are all downstream of technological ones.

“If you change a culture on a profound level, you can break the most basic functioning elements of civilization,” Roberts continues. “In the case of contraceptives, we are a society remade according to a research agenda set by the Party of Destruction."

Roberts also attacks in vitro fertilization. From page 64:

Once you understand this pattern (individual choice masking cultural upheaval), you will see it everywhere. In vitro fertilization (IVF) seems to assist fertility but has the added effect of incentivizing women to delay trying to start a family, often leading to added problems when the time comes.

Roberts blames contraception for a rise in abortion rates. Also from page 64:

As other kinds of contraceptive technologies spread, abortion rates went up, not down. Why? Because technological change made having a child seem like an optional and not natural result of having sex and destroyed a whole series of institutions and cultural norms that had protected women and forced men to take responsibility for their actions.

He condemns childlessness as well, recalling the broader political problem sparked by Vance’s unearthed comments attacking “childless cat ladies."

A culture of childlessness is, in the final analysis, a culture of despair.
Getting married and having kids, on the other hand, gives you skin in the game for the future of your country. It forces you to grow up, give up childish things, and live in the real world. It grounds you, gives you a sense of purpose in life, and helps generate community, gratitude, and joy. A culture of children is a culture of hope.

On page 69, Roberts targets the Swampoodle dog park in Washington, D.C., for having too much room for dogs to play and not enough for children, blaming this on “the antifamily culture shaping legislation, regulation, and enforcement throughout our sprawling government."

The publication delay reflects a political crisis in the MAGA movement, as the worldview outlined by Roberts and Vance in Dawn’s Early Light has proven to be deeply unpopular with the public. Trump has attempted to distance himself from Heritage and Project 2025, especially after Kevin Roberts appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast and declared that “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."

But as the Trump campaign has deliberately refused to provide a detailed policy platform, instead putting forth only a barebones platform both on his campaign site and through the Republican National Committee, Project 2025 has effectively filled in the blanks of what a second Trump term might look like. The initiative includes a more than 900-page policy book titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, which outlines extreme positions on virtually every major political issue and includes plans to restrict abortion access, eviscerate tools to fight climate change, and turn the Department of Justice into an unaccountable weapon for Trump to enact his retribution agenda against political enemies, among others. An analysis by CNN found “nearly 240 people with ties to both Project 2025 and to Trump,” and many of its authors and contributors worked directly in his administration.

Project 2025 has also recently attempted to downplay its own significance after years of aggrandizement. Trump administration alum Paul Dans recently resigned from his position as president of Project 2025, and now Roberts’ book is delayed. But it’s proving impossible to wash Project 2025’s stench off the campaign.

Roberts himself has admitted that the artificial attempt to shield Trump from Project 2025 backlash is disingenuous. “No hard feelings from any of us at Project 2025,” he told conservative radio host Vince Coglianese in July, “We understand Trump is the standard bearer and he's making a political tactical decision there.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

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