Trump Executive Action thread

[Winehole23]

Columbia called the cops on the protestors, even surveilled and disciplined them afterwards

Trump administration cuts $400 million in federal funding to Columbia

The cuts come just days after the Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced it was considering stop work orders on $51.4 million in contracts with the University.

The Department of Education, the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the General Services Administration announced the cuts “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”

https://www.columbiaspectator.com/ne...g-to-columbia/

[Winehole23]

AI is the future old man. Bitcoin is ultimately going to $1M, all other crypto is crap so you're partially correct on that

What do you think the gubmint should do with seized bitcoin?

AI might be the future, it might not be

remember the Metaverse?

I think it's fine if seized Bitcoin is sold off, the USG shouldn't distort the market by holding it and using it for operations

The proposal at HUD indicates a new way that the administration may seek to bolster the industry: by incorporating blockchain and possibly cryptocurrency into the routine spending and accounting practices of federal agencies. It’s a move that would align with the apparent desire of Trump adviser Elon Musk to use the blockchain to monitor federal spending.

https://www.propublica.org/article/h...an-development

[Winehole23]

extra Congressional action no longer needed for POTUS to alter student loan terms

[Winehole23]

"advice and consent" of the US Senate is getting bypassed by Trumplandia again, they sure do hate checks and balances

at some point there's going to be a substantial number of people who want to kill the mother ers who are wrecking our government in capacity and form

The full extent of the confrontation at USADF became public when the president of the independent agency filed a lawsuit Thursday trying to block the White House’s assault on its independence. The lawsuit refers to a Feb. 28 missive to USADF management from the White House Presidential Personnel Office claiming to appoint Pete Marocco – a Trump official known for helping strangle USAID from within – as “acting chair” of USADF’s board.

TPM has obtained the email in question, which contains the broadest assertion of presidential power over independent agencies yet made by the second Trump administration. In it, Trent Morse, deputy assistant to the President and deputy director of presidential personnel at the White House, stakes out a legal position that would undercut the Senate’s power to confirm new officers at agencies like USADF, experts say. Trump, Morse asserted, would have the “inherent authority under Article II” to appoint acting officials without going through the Senate’s process of advice and consent.



Anne Joseph O’Connell, a professor at Stanford Law School, called the argument “so much more of an executive power claim than a lot of what they’ve done.”


“Why have a confirmations process?” she told TPM. “We wouldn’t need a confirmations process – and that’s written into the Cons ution.”

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/e...ent-the-senate

[Winehole23]

https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/na...ed-415000-jobs

[Winehole23]

"from now on"

[Winehole23]

Trump administration cuts $400 million in federal funding to Columbia

The cuts come just days after the Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced it was considering stop work orders on $51.4 million in contracts with the University.

The Department of Education, the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the General Services Administration announced the cuts “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”

https://www.columbiaspectator.com/ne...g-to-columbia/

which btw is totes illegal

amazing how quickly we've progressed to POTUS ruling by decree

This "immediate cancellation" violates the law. If the Admin thinks Columbia has violated le VI by being deliberately indifferent to antisemitic harassment, it has to give Columbia a chance for a hearing first, make findings on the record, & wait 30 days.

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which btw is totes illegal

amazing how quickly we've progressed to POTUS ruling by decree

..."But, I'm President, and they're not."

It's that Millimeter Miracle that the Black reverend out of Detroit lodged during his Inauguration Benediction.

[Winehole23]

in the eyes of some that may render Trump akin to a saint, for others it may not

[Winehole23]

the judicial purge may not be far off, federal judges are getting pissed

this is from the OPM mass firing lawsuit, Judge Alsup quoted below

[Winehole23]

"You chose to submit his declaration. And then you said, 'no but he can’t be cross-examined.' You can’t just say: 'Here’s a declaration—you have to accept it without question,' when there is a question!”

[Winehole23]

https://storage.courtlistener.com/re...44883.45.0.pdf

[Winehole23]

Trumplandia's war on evil law firms is heating up

I'm guessing since all this is being raised "in the national interest", pesky federal judges will eventually be liable to be purged for obstructing the righteous persecution of bad guys

Was Trump allowed to write any of this? There's a word salad resemblance.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/president...om-paul-weiss/

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Trumplandia's war on evil law firms is heating up

I'm guessing since all this is being raised "in the national interest", pesky federal judges will eventually be liable to be purged for obstructing the righteous persecution of bad guys

Was Trump allowed to write any of this? There's a word salad resemblance.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/president...om-paul-weiss/

Whatever it takes.

[Winehole23]

pausing funding in this case could be considered a crime

poisoning hundreds of thousands of people in another country is a choice that El0n/Trump made

In mid-February, Trump administration leaders received a desperate warning from their diplomats posted in Vietnam, one of the most important American partners in Asia.


Workers were in the middle of cleaning up the site of an enormous chemical spill, the Bien Hoa air base, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly halted all foreign aid funding. The shutdown left exposed open pits of soil contaminated with dioxin, the deadly byproduct of Agent Orange, which the American military sprayed across large swaths of the country during the Vietnam War. After Rubio’s orders to stop work, the cleanup crews were forced to abandon the site, and, for weeks, all that was covering the contaminated dirt were tarps, which at one point blew off in the wind.


And even more pressing, the officials warned in a Feb. 14 letter obtained by ProPublica, Vietnam is on the verge of its rainy season, when torrential downpours are common. With enough rain, they said, soil contaminated with dioxin could flood into nearby communities, poisoning their food supplies.


Hundreds of thousands of people live around the Bien Hoa air base, and some of their homes abut the site’s perimeter fence, just yards from the contaminated areas. And less than 1,500 feet away is a major river that flows into Ho Chi Minh City, population 9 million.


“Simply put,” the officials added, “we are quickly heading toward an environmental and life-threatening catastrophe.”


They received no response from Washington, according to three people familiar with the situation.

Instead, Rubio and Peter Marocco, another top Trump appointee, have not only ordered the work to stop, but they also have frozen more than $1 million in payments for work already completed by the contractors the U.S. hired. The company overseeing the project is Tetra Tech, a publicly traded consulting and engineering firm based in the U.S., and a Vietnamese construction firm has been tasked with the excavation work.


Then, on Feb. 26, Rubio and Marocco canceled both companies’ contracts altogether before apparently reversing that decision about a week later, agency records show. As of Thursday, the companies had not been paid.

https://www.propublica.org/article/t...am-poison-risk

[Winehole23]

DOGE is wrecking important

They handled the secure transport of nuclear materials — dangerous, demanding work that requires rigorous training. Four of them took the Trump administration’s offer of a buyout and left the National Nuclear Security Administration.

A half-dozen staff members left a unit in the agency that builds reactors for nuclear submarines.

And a biochemist and engineer who had recently joined the agency as head of the team that enforces safety and environmental standards at a Texas plant that assembles nuclear warheads was fired.

In the past six weeks, the agency, just one relatively small outpost in a federal work force that President Trump and his top adviser Elon Musk aim to drastically pare down, has lost a huge cadre of scientists, engineers, safety experts, project officers, accountants and lawyers — all in the midst of its most ambitious endeavors in a generation.

The nuclear agency, chronically understaffed but critically important, is the busiest it has been since the Cold War. It not only manages the nation’s 3,748 nuclear bombs and warheads, it is modernizing that arsenal — a $20-billion-a-year effort that will arm a new fleet of nuclear submarines, bomber jets and land-based missiles.

Since the last year of the first Trump administration, the agency has been desperately trying to build up its staff to handle the added workload. Though it was still hundreds of employees short of what it had said it needed, it had edged up to about 2,000 workers by January.

Now, with the Trump administration’s buyouts and firings, the agency’s trajectory has gone from one of painstaking growth to retraction.

More than 130 employees took the government’s offer of a payout to resign, according to internal agency do ents obtained by The New York Times that have not previously been reported. Those departures, together with those of about 27 workers who were caught up in a mass firing and not rehired, wiped out most of the recent staffing gains.

Engaged in top-secret work, tucked away in the Energy Department, the agency typically stays below the public radar. But it has emerged as a headline example of how the Trump administration’s cuts, touted as a cure-all for supposed government extravagance and corruption, are threatening the muscle and bone of operations that involve national security or other missions at the very heart of the federal government’s responsibilities.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/u...-android-share

[Winehole23]

enabling waste, fraud and graft is one of the reasons DOGE is doing what it's doing

Among the departures: At least 27 engineers, 13 program or project analysts, 12 program or project managers, six budget analysts or accountants, five physicists or scientists, as well as attorneys, compliance officers and technologists, according to internal lists.


The agency lost not only officials deeply steeped in the weapons modernization program, but also a noted arms control expert at a time when President Trump has said he hopes to restart talks with Russia and China about limiting nuclear arsenals.

“Here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons, “ Mr. Trump said in the Oval Office last month. “We’re all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things.”

Ben Dietderich, the Department of Energy’s chief spokesman said, “Contrary to news reports, the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons production plants and nuclear laboratories are operated by federal contractors and have been exempt” from cuts.

But multiple current and former officials of the agency said the loss of staff would hobble the agency’s ability to monitor the more than 60,000 contract employees who carry out much of the agency’s work. That could encourage fraud or misuse of taxpayer dollars, rather than limit it, as Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk have vowed the new Department of Government Efficiency initiative will do.


“The federal oversight is vital,” said Corey Hinderstein, the agency’s deputy administrator for nonproliferation under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “Do you have any construction projects at your house? You wouldn’t just say to the contractor: ‘I want something like this room. Have fun.’”

[Winehole23]

20 years of ing about woke humanities departments and the first thing they do is defund STEM

[Winehole23]

Admissions in some graduate programs have have been cut in half or paused altogether, said Emilya Ventriglia, president of UAW 2750, the union representing around 5,000 early career researchers at NIH facilities in Bethesda, Maryland, and elsewhere.

“At this rate, with the hiring freeze, there may be no Ph.D. students next year if it’s not lifted soon,

because usually people make their decisions by April,” Ventriglia said.

https://apnews.com/young-scientists-...dddf3fa7cc0000

[Winehole23]

hey look, a court order got obeyed at DOE

The Department of Energy late Thursday reinstated employees who had been fired last month in governmentwide cuts, according to a DOE memo viewed by POLITICO’s E&E News.
“You will be returned to your previous position with DOE, and to federal service effective the date of your” firing, the memo says.

https://www.eenews.net/articles/doe-...red-employees/

[Winehole23]

Trump to gut core functions of the EPA

We'll all be living in the sacrifice zone pretty soon -- Trumpism is hardcore necropolitics

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to eliminate its scientific research arm, firing as many as 1,155 chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists, according to do ents reviewed by Democrats on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

The strategy is part of large-scale layoffs, known as a “reduction in force,” being planned by the Trump administration, which is intent on shrinking the federal work force. Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the E.P.A., has said he wants to eliminate 65 percent of the agency’s budget. That would be a drastic reduction — one that experts said could hamper clean water and wastewater improvements, air quality monitoring, the cleanup of toxic industrial sites, and other parts of the agency’s mission.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/c...a-science.html

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Trump to gut core functions of the EPA

We'll all be living in the sacrifice zone pretty soon -- Trumpism is hardcore necropolitics

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/c...a-science.html

More power to him!

[Winehole23]

More power to him!

everybody is cool with someone else eating until it happens to them, or someone they love

you might even live long enough for it to happen to you, too

[Thread]

everybody is cool with someone else eating until it happens to them, or someone they love

you might even live long enough for it to happen to you, too

I always recall Danny Glover hitting this dead center..."If you live long enough some bad is gonna happen to you."

...-Grand Canyon-...

[Winehole23]

well, yeah

but think of the liberal tears