Today's administrative news was dominated by their budget proposal. Let's have at it.
- Trump's first budget proposal is in. What do you think it contains? If you said huge spending increases for the military and commensurate cuts to all domestic programs and foreign aid, you'd be right! The proposal requires taking out $54 billion from domestic programs/foreign aid, which essentially means terminating a lot of them completely, but without touching social security/medicare. Expect this budget to be DOA in Congress.
- Trump's pick for Secretary of the Navy has withdrawn from consideration, citing trouble disentangling themselves from financial conflicts of interest.
- The Justice Department has reversed course on the Texas voter ID laws, having come to the conclusion (under their new head, Jeff Sessions), that suppressing the vote is AOK. I hope the ACLU will be sufficiently scathing without the support of the government.
- Further evidence that the administration is trying to bury the Russia story. Not only are they trying to convince the intelligence agency to help them, they're trying to pressure the media to help them too. But of course, nothing to hide here.
- Apparently hiring 10,000 ICE agents is tough, because you have standards for such a job. So, they're planning on lowering standards to actually fill the roles. This is the worst idea in a long list of terrible ideas regarding immigration enforcement.
- Wilbur Ross, Trump's proposed Secretary of Commerce, has been confirmed, despite allegations of shady deals involving Russia.
- House democrats forced Republicans to take a stand on releasing Trump's tax returns (or not). It failed in a party-line vote, with two Republicans abstaining.
No comments:
Post a Comment