Dirty Donnie sabotages Federal agencies per Putin's plan

The Russians are Here!

photo by Jack Moreh

The General Plan: Dismantle the Federal government
[2017]

...His [Dirty Donnie's] chief strategist Steve Bannon outlined that strategy this week at the Conservative Political Action Conference, describing it as nothing less than the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Bannon’s comments this week suggest a darker, more nefarious purpose to the nascent Trump administration’s dysfunction. It may be the case that the Trump team is deliberately failing to staff, manage, and provide resources for federal agencies so as to sabotage and slowly dismantle them. To make matters worse, the Trump team might be leveraging the controversies regarding its disastrous national security moves to obscure and conceal that slow and steady demolition of the bureaucracy....

Eliminate health care
...April 18[2019]

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) finalizes a rule that raises premiums for 7.3 million people who purchase subsidized coverage in the ACA marketplace and is expected to cause 70,000 to drop insurance coverage. The change will also increase limits on total out-of-pocket costs for millions of people, including many with employer coverage, meaning families that experience costly illnesses or injuries could face an additional $400 a year in medical bills. The Administration finalized the policy even though, as the final rule itself notes, “all commenters on this topic expressed opposition to or concerns about the proposed change.”

The rule scales back the scope of navigator duties so that important consumer assistance functions, like helping applicants appeal eligibility denials, are now considered “optional.” It also eliminates certain training requirements, like training on basic health insurance concepts, the benefits of enrolling in the marketplace, and providing culturally and linguistically appropriate services.

Health Care for America has a convenient factsheet in PDF format.

Abolish the Civil Service

...The Trump administration in March [2018] released its President’s Management Agenda (PMA) that seeks to degrade federal jobs, cut federal employee compensation, and turn large portions of federal functions over to the more expensive and unaccountable private sector, or abandon government functions completely.

One disturbing element of PMA is the section titled “Developing a Workforce for the 21st Century.” Its vagueness and jargon can’t really hide its dark intent. Indeed, the administration sent House Speaker Paul Ryan a 2018 legislative proposal that presumably attempts to implement the PMA. In a nutshell, the proposal cuts federal employee compensation and takes away part of the pensions of widows, orphans, the elderly, law enforcement officers, and working class federal employees who keep our air and water safe, protect our borders, take care of our veterans, cut retirement checks to seniors, protect air travelers, keep our communities safe....

Gut the IRS, cut Federal government income

...Out of every 100 taxpayers who reported more than $1 million in income last year, just three got audited by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

The feds were similarly reticent to examine the filings of corporate taxpayers, auditing less than half of the 633 separate business entities that currently hold assets whose value exceeds $20 billion.

These alarming figures are just the continuation of a multi-year downward trend on basic accountability for those taxpayers who are best positioned to pay fancy accountants to skulk through the tax code looking for places to hide their loot from the public...

Disable the Census; undercount minorities if possible

...U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg found that Mr. Ross committed “the definition of an arbitrary and capricious governmental act” when he ordered that 2020 Census forms include a question on respondents’ citizenship status. Even small-seeming shifts in census response rates can have major effects on how much federal money states and cities receive, and on how many congressional representatives and electoral votes states get. The process must be guided by experts and based on methods insulated from political considerations.

Mr. Ross tried to force the opposite. Mr. Seeborg concluded that “despite unrefuted evidence produced by the professional staff of the Census Bureau that inclusion of a citizenship question would likely result in a significant differential decline in self-response rates within noncitizen and Latino communities and that the requested data could be obtained by other means, Secretary Ross insisted upon adding the citizenship question to the census.”....

 Keep the Justice Department from enforcing Civil Rights

Jeff Sessions ... issued a new policy that all but eliminates federal oversight of state and local law enforcement agencies that engage in unconstitutional and unlawful policing.