Tag: direct

Republicans Transfer to Restrict a Grass-Roots Custom of Direct Democracy

Post author By
Post date May 22, 2021

In 2008, deep blue California banned same-sex marriage. In 2018, staunchly conservative Arkansas and Missouri raised their minimum wages. And last year, Republican-controlled Arizona and Montana legalized recreational marijuana.

These moves were all the result of electoral initiatives, a centuries-old body of American democracy that allowed voters to bypass their legislation to pass new laws, often with results that contradict the wishes of the elected officials of the state. While in the past they have been a bilateral instrument, in recent years Democrats have been particularly successful in using electoral initiatives to advance their agenda in conservative states where they have few other options.

But this year Republican lawmakers in Florida, Idaho, South Dakota, and other states passed laws restricting the use of the practice. This is part of a broader GOP attempt to secure political control for years to come, along with new legislation restricting electoral access and the party-political redesign of congressional districts that will take place in the coming months.

According to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a liberal group that tracks and supports community-based referendums, Republicans passed 144 bills in 2021 to restrict voting initiatives in 32 states. Of these bills, 19 were signed into law by nine Republican governors. In three states, Republican lawmakers have asked voters to approve electoral initiatives that limit their own right to initiate and pass future electoral initiatives.

“They have implemented web after web of technical details and hurdles that make it really difficult for community-based groups to qualify for the vote and to counter why electoral initiatives were launched in the first place,” said Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, the managing director of the strategy center of the election initiative. “This is directly related to every attack we have seen on our democracy.”

In recent years, Democrats have used electoral initiatives to bypass Republican-controlled legislation, pass laws in red states that raised the minimum wage, legalized marijuana, expanded Medicaid, introduced impartial redistribution and apologetic absentee voting, and restored voting rights for people with it Convictions for criminal offenses.

Republicans seek to block this path in a variety of ways, including blunt measures that target the process directly and others that are more subtle.

“Petitioners have been very resourceful,” said Senator Al Novstrup, a 66-year-old Republican with glasses who sponsored the bill because the text of electoral initiatives is often too small for him to read. “There is no limit to the size of the paper.”

In Mississippi last week, the state’s Conservative Supreme Court, which ruled on a Republican lawsuit, technically invalidated the entire state initiative process, held a 2020 referendum legalizing medical marijuana, and the effort To collect signatures to bring Medicaid’s expansion into the state, suspended 2022 ballot. The constitutional amendment that created the state’s initiative law was passed in 1992 when the state had five congressional districts, each requiring signatures from voters. Mississippi has only four counties as of the 2000 census.

In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that imposed a limit of $ 3,000 on campaign contributions to electoral initiatives. This cuts off an important source of income to subsidize the collection of signatures for petitions.

The Republican efforts, which are now gaining traction, have been in full swing for years.

In South Dakota in recent years, Republicans have limited the window of time for collecting petition signatures to the cold winter months, encouraging all recruiters to register with the state and wear state-issued IDs while collecting signatures. These are hurdles that according to the few Democrats in the state have increased the difficulty of qualifying for the vote.

“Republicans have every national office, 85 percent of the legislature and every constitutional office,” said Reynold F. Nesiba, one of three Democrats in the 35-member Senate. “The only place Democrats can make progress is in the action process in place, and Republicans want to take that away, too.”

Now the state’s Republican legislature will propose a constitutional amendment to voters in South Dakota to raise the threshold for passing referenda – and raise it to 60 percent by simple majority. (The threshold to raise the threshold? Still only 50 percent.)

The question will appear on the state’s main ballot for June 2022, which is expected to be dominated by Republican competitions. The new threshold could apply to the November 2022 general election, if a referendum on the expansion of Medicaid is expected before voters.

Republican Senator Lee Schoenbeck said in March that he specifically intended to block Medicaid’s expansion.

“It is fair protection for the citizens of our state,” he said on Thursday.

The proposals to limit electoral initiatives are part of an ongoing campaign by Conservatives to stifle progressive political efforts. To get a referendum on the vote, petitioners have to collect tens of thousands of signatures. The numbers vary depending on the state. The process can cost millions, so initiative campaigns are often signed by large donors.

In Arizona, Republicans have been smart since 2018 when Tom Steyer, the billionaire Democrat who later ran for president, helped fund an ultimately unsuccessful effort to pass a constitutional amendment that would put half of the state’s energy from renewables Sources.

In February, Tim Dunn, a representative of the Republican state, tabled a resolution to raise the threshold for an electoral initiative from a majority to 55 percent.

“If you look at the actual people actually voting on an electoral initiative, the number of people is quite small compared to the citizens of Arizona, and outside money could affect that pretty easily,” Dunn said.

Florida Republicans gave similar rationale for a new law signed by Governor Ron DeSantis that limits contributions to a citizen-led election initiative to $ 3,000 per person. Republicans were frustrated with some donors who supported electoral initiatives, including John Morgan, a wealthy Orlando attorney who spent millions of dollars on efforts to legalize medical marijuana Raise the minimum wage to $ 15 an hour.

However, civil rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have said the new law will effectively stamp out community-based electoral initiatives, which often require substantial funding to collect signatures.

Campaigns like this are so expensive, proponents say, because of a cascade of restrictions Florida law has placed on the initiative. Recently, lawmakers cut the time it takes for signatures to expire in half. banned the practice of paying signature collectors per signature; urged those collecting signatures to use a separate piece of paper for each signature; and required that every signature be verified, which forbade a much cheaper “random sample” process.

“With every successful initiative or major effort that lawmakers don’t approve, there is a new law that makes it more expensive and burdensome to propose an initiative,” said Nicholas Warren, attorney at the Florida ACLU.

Republican sponsors of the new Florida law agree that constitutional amendments will be harder to pass. That is their goal.

“I’m not denying that holding a referendum on voting under the law will be more difficult, but that’s the point,” said Senator Ray Rodrigues, a Republican who sponsored the bill.

In Missouri, 22 Republican-sponsored bills this year attempted to restrict the state’s electoral initiative process, including a bill that would double the number of signatures required to qualify for the ballot and the threshold for passing one Measure increased from a simple majority to two thirds, that would be the highest in the country.

“These were really just politicians trying to dramatically restrict Missourians’ constitutional rights to use the process while telling us it was for our own good,” said Richard von Glahn, Missouri Jobs With political director Justice, a progressive organization.

In Idaho, Republican Governor Brad Little signed law last month that makes it significantly more difficult to meet the signature requirements for an initiative to be added to the ballot. Previously, an initiative required signatures from 6 percent of the population of 18 different legislative districts. The new law, signed by Mr. Little, now requires signatures from 6 percent of residents in each of Idaho’s 35 legislative districts.

And in Mississippi, the state Supreme Court ruled last week that the initiative process was “impractical and non-functional” because the number of statutory Congressional districts and the number of districts the state currently has differ.

Mayor Mary Hawkins Butler of Madison, Miss., A Republican who filed the lawsuit that led to the invalidation of the state initiative process, said the legal action was designed to protect her city’s ability to deter marijuana retailers through zoning.

“There were government officials who knew it needed to be corrected,” Ms. Butler said of the voting process. “If we want to move forward in the state and protect the initiative process, this must be corrected. If it’s buggy, the only option is to start over. “

Tags Democracy, direct, grassroots, Limit, move, Republicans, Tradition

Politics

Biden will direct states to make all adults eligible by Might 1

Post author By
Post date March 12, 2021

Biden will direct states to make all adults eligible by May 1

WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden announced Thursday evening that he would instruct states to qualify all adults ages 18 and older for the coronavirus vaccines by May 1.

In his first prime-time address to the nation, Biden also set a goal for Americans to gather in person with their friends and loved ones in small groups to celebrate the Fourth of July.

Making the announcements for the one-year anniversary of the pandemic, Biden reflected with fear on its devastation while hoping better days might come soon – if Americans don’t get complacent.

“If we all do our part, this country will soon be vaccinated, our economy will improve, our children will be back in school and we will prove once again that this country can do everything,” said Biden.

But “if we don’t stay vigilant and conditions change, we may have to reintroduce the restrictions to get back on track,” added Biden. “And please, we don’t want to do this again. We have made so much progress. This is not the time to let up.”

“Just as we emerged from the dark winter into a hopeful spring and summer, [now] It’s not time to disobey the rules, “he said.

Biden also said in the speech that his government will set up a website in May to help people find vaccination sites nearby, and that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be issuing new health and safety guidelines for those who have been vaccinated.

The speech from the east room of the White House began shortly after 8 p.m. and lasted about 25 minutes.

United States President Joe Biden speaks in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC on March 11, 2021, on the anniversary of the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Almond Ngan | AFP | Getty Images

It came exactly a year after former President Donald Trump, speaking to the nation at the determined desk of the Oval Office, announced temporary travel bans from Europe to the United States.

Trump in that speech downplayed the threat the virus posed to the economy and to people who are not older, claiming that “for the vast majority of Americans, the risk is very, very small”.

Biden’s speech, on the other hand, emphasized that the pandemic poses a serious danger even with rapidly increasing vaccinations.

“My fellow Americans, you owe nothing less than the truth,” said Biden.

“The goal is with your loved ones on July 4th,” said Biden. “But a lot can happen. Conditions can change. And scientists have made it clear that the situation can get worse again as new variants of the virus spread.”

Biden, without naming Trump, broke the previous administration because she initially responded to the virus with “silence” and allowed it to “spread uncontrollably” for months.

“That led to more deaths, more infections, more stress and more loneliness,” Biden said before recognizing the nearly 530,000 people in the US who have died from Covid.

Biden’s speech also explicitly condemned the rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans who were “attacked, molested, accused and scapegoated” during the pandemic.

The prime-time event came hours after Biden signed the $ 1.9 trillion Covid Relief Act, which he aggressively pushed onto Congress during his first 50 days in office.

The speech also came when the United States administered a record number of vaccines over the weekend. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention administered 2.9 million vaccines on Saturday, a record and 2.4 million on Sunday. This emerges from the agency’s latest assessment. The numbers are subject to change as more data become available to health authorities.

Biden said in his speech that by Thursday, 65% of Americans over 65 had their first vaccination and more than 70% of Americans over 75 had done the same. Those numbers were 8% and 14% when Biden took office.

Biden will be on a nationwide tour next week to announce his government’s first major legislative move. The president will leave on Tuesday for Delaware County, Pennsylvania, an electoral state that was key to Biden’s victory over Trump.

Tags Adults, Biden, direct, Eligible, states

Business

Senate Democrats Plan to Prioritize Extra Direct Funds

Post author By
Post date January 13, 2021

“We have an opportunity to work with our House colleagues and a new administration to defeat the virus, provide the relief the American people need, and reunite the country,” Senator Chuck Schumer, the incoming majority leader, wrote.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times

Senate Democrats plan to prioritize a bill containing more Covid relief, including additional $1,400 payments to many Americans and money to accelerate vaccine deployment, as their “first order of legislative business” when they assume control of the chamber.

The priorities, which Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the incoming majority leader, outlined in a letter to colleagues on Tuesday, echo many of the policies that President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has signaled he will officially unveil on Thursday.

The president-elect has said repeatedly in recent days that he will push Congress to pass an additional pandemic relief bill meant to boost the flagging economic recovery and to accelerate efforts to deploy vaccine doses. In a call with Mr. Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday, Mr. Biden stressed the need for “immediate economic relief for families and small businesses, funding for Covid-19 response, including vaccinations, testing, school reopening, and state and local frontline workers,” according to a readout from the Biden transition team.

Mr. Schumer picked up on those themes in his letter. “The work of the 117th Congress will begin in the wake of a devastating attack, on the heels of a devastating year,” he wrote.

“We have an opportunity to work with our House colleagues and a new administration to defeat the virus, provide the relief the American people need, and reunite the country,” he said.

Mr. Schumer said the immediate relief bill would contain the additional money, on top of $600 individual payments Congress approved last month, to fulfill the promise of $2,000 payments that Mr. Biden made to voters in Georgia’s runoff elections this month: “We will get that done.”

He also said it would contain money for vaccine distribution, schools, small businesses and assistance for state and local governments, which was left out of the last Covid package in a dispute with Republicans. Mr. Schumer said senators would also prepare broader legislation to address climate change, infrastructure, manufacturing, immigration, criminal justice, inequality and elections.

Democrats will control the Senate by the narrowest of margins — it will be split 50-50, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris holding the ability to break any ties. Mr. Schumer said Democrats would look to work with Republicans on legislation “when and where we can” but offered a warning to the other party: “If our Republican colleagues decide not to partner with us in our efforts to address these issues, we will not let that stop progress.”

Credit…Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

Walmart on Tuesday said it would “indefinitely” suspend contributions to members of Congress who voted against certifying the results of the presidential election, as businesses come under pressure to respond after a mob stormed the Capitol last week.

On Sunday, when asked about the Walmart’s corporate donations, including those to the Republican Attorneys General Association, a spokesman told the Times that Walmart examines and adjusts its political giving strategy at the end of every election cycle.

“As we conduct our review over the coming months, we will certainly factor last week’s events into our process,” the spokesman, Randy Hargove, said at the time.

Mr. Hargove on Tuesday said Walmart “is indefinitely suspending contributions to those members of Congress who voted against the lawful certification of state Electoral College votes,” even as the company continues to review its donation strategy.

Many companies, including Google, Goldman Sachs and Coca-Cola, opted to pause donations to both parties following the violence at the Capitol.

Fewer companies specified they will halt funding to only the 147 Republican members of Congress who objected to certifying the election results, as Walmart did on Tuesday. That group includes Marriott International, Dow, Airbnb and Morgan Stanley.

Walmart’s political action committee spent $1.65 million on political donations last year, according to Open Secrets, a program from the Center for Responsive politics that tracks the influence of money in politics.

Walmart’s chief executive, Doug McMillon, chairs the influential business lobbying group Business Roundtable, which after the election released a strongly worded statement acknowledging Mr. Biden’s victory and saying there was no indication that investigations or lawsuits would change the result.

Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times

President Trump is rushing to put into effect a raft of new regulations and executive orders that are intended to put his stamp on business, trade and the economy before President-elect Joseph R. Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20. Here are some of the changes the administration is rushing to make.

Defining gig workers as contractors. The Labor Department on Wednesday released the final version of a rule that could classify millions of workers in industries like construction, cleaning and the gig economy as contractors rather than employees, another step toward endorsing the business practices of companies like Uber and Lyft. — Noam Scheiber

Limiting banks on social and environmental issues. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is rushing a proposed rule that would ban banks from not lending to certain kinds of businesses, like those in the fossil fuel industry, on environmental or social grounds. The regulator unveiled the proposal on Nov. 20 and limited the time it would accept comments to six weeks despite the interruptions of the holidays. — Emily Flitter

Rolling back a light bulb rule. The Department of Energy has moved to block a rule that would phase out incandescent light bulbs, which people and businesses have increasingly been replacing with much more efficient LED and compact fluorescent bulbs. The energy secretary, Dan Brouillette, a former auto industry lobbyist, said in December that the Trump administration did not want to limit consumer choice. The rule had been slated to go into effect on Jan. 1 and was required by a law passed in 2007. — Ivan Penn

Credit…Riccardo Savi/Getty Images for Concordia Summit

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s largest business lobbying group, condemned President Trump’s conduct that led to the siege of the Capitol last week and said on Tuesday that lawmakers who backed his efforts to discredit the election would no longer receive the organization’s financial backing.

The criticism was the latest backlash against Mr. Trump and Republicans from the business community, which has been united in its opposition to an assault on the democratic process, and represented a major rift in the traditional alliance between industry and the Republican Party.

“The president’s conduct last week was absolutely unacceptable and completely inexcusable,” Thomas J. Donohue, the chief executive of the Chamber of Commerce, said. “By his words and actions, he has undermined our democratic institutions and ideals.”

The group said that it is trusting Congress, the vice president and the cabinet to act “judiciously” as it considers whether to invoke the 25th Amendment or impeachment to remove Mr. Trump from office before his term ends next week. The statement did not go as far as one released by the National Association of Manufacturers last week that explicitly called for the removal of the president from office.

The Chamber operates a powerful political action committee that supports candidates across the country. Neil Bradley, the group’s chief policy officer, said that it is evaluating how lawmakers voted last week during the electoral vote certification process and how they vote in the coming days when the House moves to impeach Mr. Trump when making decisions about donations. He said that lawmakers who did not demonstrate respect for democracy would no longer receive financial support.

The relationship between the Chamber and Mr. Trump has at times been fraught. The group opposed his protectionist trade policies and efforts to restrict immigration but supported his moves to cut taxes and roll back regulations.

In a speech on the state of American business on Tuesday, Mr. Donohue called on Mr. Biden to roll back most of those tariffs and work with Congress on immigration reform legislation.

Visa and the financial technology start-up Plaid abandoned their $5.3 billion merger deal on Tuesday, citing a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit.

The agreement between Visa and Plaid, a service that allows companies and apps to securely share customer data, was challenged in November by Justice Department officials who said the credit card giant was trying to eliminate a “nascent threat” to its online payments business.

“Visa is a monopolist in online debit, charging consumers and merchants billions of dollars in fees each year to process online payments,” the Justice Department said in a statement on Tuesday. The department said that Plaid was developing its own payments platform, and that the merger “would have enabled Visa to eliminate this competitive threat to its online debit business before Plaid had a chance to succeed.”

The leaders of Visa and Plaid said they disagreed with the Justice Department’s stance but decided not to fight the lawsuit, which will be dismissed as a result of the merger’s cancellation.

Al Kelly, Visa’s chief executive, said Plaid’s capabilities were complementary, not competitive, to Visa and added that he believed the companies would have prevailed in court.

“However,” he said, “it has been a full year since we first announced our intent to acquire Plaid, and protracted and complex litigation will likely take substantial time to fully resolve.”

Plaid’s chief executive, Zach Perret, added: “While Plaid and Visa would have been a great combination, we have decided to instead work with Visa as an investor and partner.”

The past year was a busy one for financial data companies: Intuit, which owns TurboTax and the personal finance app Mint, announced a $7 billion takeover of the credit reporting company Credit Karma in February, another deal the Justice Department said it would review. In June, Mastercard said it would buy the financial data firm Finicity.

Credit…Jason Redmond/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Boeing’s outstanding plane orders shrank by 500 in 2020, though its fortunes began to shift at the end of the year after the Federal Aviation Administration allowed the aircraft maker’s troubled 737 Max to fly again after a 20-month grounding.

The company said Tuesday that it had received orders for 90 new planes in December, most of which were part of a previously announced deal with the European airline Ryanair. The company also sold eight 777 freighters to DHL, the shipping company. Those orders were offset by 107 cancellations in the month.

“The resumption of 737 MAX deliveries in December was a key milestone as we strengthen safety and quality across our enterprise,” Greg Smith, Boeing’s chief financial officer, said in a statement.

In addition to the Max crisis, which has cost billions of dollars, Boeing was also hamstrung by the pandemic, which has sharply slowed air travel, and by concerns about manufacturing problems and defects involving the 787 Dreamliner, a popular plane airlines use for longer flights.

Boeing received just 184 new orders last year, compared with more than 650 cancellations, virtually all of them for the Max. After taking account of the planes it delivered, cancellations and orders that the company thinks might not be fulfilled, Boeing’s overall backlog shrank by nearly 1,000 planes.

The 2020 figure does not take into account a late-December announcement from Alaska Airlines that it would expand an existing purchase and lease order for the Max by 36 planes.

The Max crisis appears to be receding as aviation authorities around the world prepare to follow the F.A.A. in allowing airlines to resume commercial flights on the plane. Last week, the company also agreed to a $2.5 billion settlement with the Justice Department, resolving a criminal charge that it had sought to defraud the F.A.A.

The pandemic continues to take a toll on Boeing’s airline customers, but with vaccines being distributed, there is hope that travel demand might soon start recovering.

Stocks on Wall Street were mostly unchanged on Tuesday, after struggling to resume the advances that carried the major U.S. benchmarks to records last week.
After drifting between gains and losses, the S&P 500 ended the day with a gain of less than a tenth of a percent. Most major benchmarks in Europe were also flat or declined.
Energy prices rose, West Texas Intermediate crude touching its highest prices since February.
The S&P 500, Dow Jones industrial average and Nasdaq composite all closed at records last week but retreated on Monday.
Investors have mostly looked past the political turmoil in Washington and the state of the pandemic, focusing instead on a future ripe for gains in the U.S. equity market, in part because of the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine and supportive fiscal and monetary policies. They expect gains even though the American stocks haven’t been this expensive since the 2000 dot-com bubble, according to some measures of valuation.
Lombard Odier, a Swiss private bank, said it was also staying invested in U.S. stocks. “The shift in balance of power and stimulus support for the real economy is combining to create a sound environment for risky assets, in particular equities,” Stéphane Monier, the bank’s chief investment officer, wrote in a note. He added that the bank was betting on an economic recovery and was also buying more European and emerging market shares.

Credit…Anna Liminowicz for The New York Times

A small piece of technology that played a big role in helping the National Basketball Association evade the virus in its 2019-20 season is garnering broader attention.

The device, a wristband that players, coaches and trainers could wear off the court, has a digital chip that enforces social distancing by issuing a warning — by light and sound — when wearers get too close to one another for too long.

The bands have been picked up by the National Football League, the Pacific-12 college football conference and other sports leagues around the world, Christopher F. Schuetze reports for The New York Times.

The Munich start-up behind the N.B.A.’s wristbands, Kinexon, is happy with the publicity of helping prevent top athletes from catching the virus, even as such devices raise privacy concerns. Now, it is looking toward broader arenas: factory production lines, warehouses and logistics centers where millions of people continue to work despite the pandemic.

One of the companies working with Kinexon is Henkel, a global industrial and household chemical manufacturer based in Germany. Henkel was already testing an earlier version of Kinexon’s wearable tech designed to avert collisions between forklifts and workers on high-traffic factory floors. Kinexon offered Henkel a chance to test a variation of that technology, called SafeZone.

The company said it was supplying the technology to more than 200 companies worldwide. It estimates its badges have prevented 1.5 million contacts a day, a difficult number to confirm. The sensors are priced at $100 to $200 each.

“What’s important in this is not only to have the technology working in a lab — what’s important now is to be able to bring the technology to where people need it,” said Oliver Trinchera, a co-founder of Kinexon and one of its directors, “be it on the factory floor or on the sports pitch.”

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Twitter on Monday said that it had removed more than 70,000 accounts that promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory in recent days. Twitter, which carried out the suspensions over the weekend, said it acted to clamp down on posts that have “the potential to lead to offline harm.” It added that many of the users who were removed had operated multiple QAnon accounts, driving up the total number of accounts that were taken down.
Cumulus Media, a talk radio company with a roster of popular right-wing personalities including Dan Bongino, Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro, has ordered its employees at 416 stations nationwide to steer clear of endorsing misinformation about election fraud. “The election has resolved, there are no alternate acceptable ‘paths,’” read a memo sent to staff on Wednesday. “Please inform your staffs that we have ZERO TOLERANCE for any suggestion otherwise. If you transgress this policy, you can expect to separate from the company immediately. There will be no dog-whistle talk about ‘stolen elections,’ ‘civil wars’ or any other language that infers violent public disobedience is warranted, ever.”
Amazon said on Monday that it was removing products promoting QAnon, a baseless conspiracy, from its website, after QAnon supporters were prominent in the riot at the Capitol last week. The move followed Amazon’s decision to boot Parler, a right-wing social network, from its web servers and cloud services.
Marriott International, Dow, Airbnb and Morgan Stanley were among those that said they would halt donations from their political action committees to the 147 Republican members of Congress who objected to certifying the election results on Jan. 6. AT&T, whose PAC donated the most of any single public company in the 2019-20 election cycle, also said it would suspend contributions to those lawmakers. At the same time, Citigroup, Coca-Cola, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Microsoft said they were pausing PAC donations to both Republican and Democratic candidates for various lengths of time — a tactic that will also penalize those who voted to uphold the election.

Tags additional, Democrats, direct, Payments, Plan, Prioritize, Senate

Politics

Trump price range chief refuses to direct workers to assist with Biden spending plans

Post author By
Post date January 1, 2021

Trump budget chief refuses to direct staff to help with Biden spending plans

Acting Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Russell Vought speaks to reporters during a press conference at the White House in Washington, the United States, on March 11, 2019.

Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

The head of the White House budget office on Thursday refused to direct staff and resources to help with the incoming Biden administration’s spending plans in an escalating dispute over the bureau’s responsibilities during the transition process.

Russ Vought, Office of Management and Budget Director, pushed back allegations of disability made by President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team, adding that his agency will not partner with alleged efforts to “dismantle” Trump administrative policies.

“Our system of government has a president and an administration,” said Vought in a letter to Biden’s interim chief Ted Kaufman.

Vought’s letter, posted publicly on his Twitter account, fueled the smoldering dispute between President Donald Trump’s administration and the incoming Biden team.

Biden spokesman Andrew Bates in a statement called it “unacceptable” amid a time of economic hardship, “hampering the US government’s ability to budget and efficiently aid those most in need, in particular explicit reasons. ” , declared partiality. “

“The last two paragraphs of this letter confirm exactly what the transition said yesterday and contradict the opening of the letter with an openly political admission of what is really happening – given the way OMB works during each change of president for decades,” said Bates . “The president-elect will continue to work in good faith to get our country out of this emergency as soon as possible. There is a responsible approach.”

In a speech Monday, Biden highlighted OMB and Defense Department leaders for putting up “roadblocks” that are hindering his efforts to prepare for the presidency.

“Right now we just don’t get all of the information we need from the outgoing administration in key national security areas,” Biden said at the time. “In my opinion, it’s nothing less than irresponsibility.”

Acting defense chief Christopher Miller responded later that day, saying in a statement that the Pentagon’s efforts “have already exceeded those of the youngest administrations in more than three weeks”.

In a virtual briefing on Wednesday, the new White House press secretary Jen Psaki and Biden’s advisor Yohannes Abraham criticized these agencies again.

“There is no question that the process will be delayed by what we’ve seen from the outgoing OMB,” said Abraham. “It takes many man-hours to prepare the budget and requires the analytical support that was part of OMB’s commitment to previous transitions that we did not receive.”

In the past, the OMB provided incoming administrations with economic and budgetary information well in advance of Inauguration Day in order to prepare them for the swift presentation of the new President’s budget. The document is technically due on the first Monday in February, but has been delayed in the past.

Bloomberg reported earlier Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter, that Vought was preventing members of the Biden team from meeting with household officials to finalize and publish new regulations before the Trump administration comes to an end.

In his letter to Kaufman, Vought said the record shows that “OMB has fully participated in reasonable transition efforts.”

Vought said the budget agency held more than 45 meetings with Biden staff and provided “all information requested” about ongoing programs. He also said Biden’s team was briefed on the Trump administration’s coronavirus relief efforts, including Operation Warp Speed, the White House’s vaccine development and distribution plan.

“What we didn’t and won’t do is use current OMB staff to write this [Biden transition team’s] Legislative proposals to dismantle the work of this government, “Vought said in his letter.

“OMB staff are working on the policies of this administration and will continue to do so through the last day of their term. Redirecting staff and resources to develop your team’s budget proposals is not the responsibility of the OMB transition.”

Vought added, “OMB will not get involved in developing strategies that weaken border security, undermine the president’s deregulatory successes, and draft budgets that will bankrupt America.”

Tags Biden, budget, chief, direct, plans, Refuses, Spending, staff, Trump