It’s been just seven days since Donald Trump took office. While the
media spent most of that time spilling digital ink over inauguration
numbers, the new administration was diminishing women’s health and
safety around the world, chipping away at health care for millions of
Americans and pouring money that could feed and insure children into a
useless garbage heap along the border. It was a bad week for politics
and decency, which have always been on bad terms, but are now dead to
each other.
There were other things, too. Trump
threatened Chicago
with martial law on what he thought was a double-dog dare from fellow
racist Bill O’Reilly. He promised to install monitors—moles and
glorified tattletales, really—to oversee federal agencies and report
back to top brass at the
White House. After again trotting out the lie about immigrants and dead people voting, Trump
promised an investigation
into the widely debunked issue of election fraud (though not on Russian
election meddling), which should begin with his own
family and staff. Speaking of Steve Bannon, the
grand wizard of the so-called alt-right and White House senior adviser
continued the Trump
team’s cynical campaign to keep their base paranoid, uninformed and
stupid by pretending their boss is a victim of the press. And as the
final, delusional cherry on the poisonous cake, Trump
compared himself to Abraham Lincoln.
Trump
also signed a bunch of executive orders. Far more important than the
background noise you hear is the crazy that Trump is codifying into law.
These plans and policies will wreak irreparable havoc and damage,
causing suffering and pain to millions, in the U.S. and beyond. This is
just seven days' worth of destruction; imagine what will happen over the
next four years.
1. Greenlights the Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines.
On
Tuesday, Trump signed three executive orders to benefit oil pipelines
and remove Obama environmental protections. The Dakota Access
memorandum
notes the pipeline is “90 percent complete,” and seeks to expedite
approvals for permits to “construct and operate the DAPL, including
easements or rights-of-way to cross Federal areas.” The
Keystone order invites
“TransCanada Keystone Pipeline to promptly re-submit its application to
the Department of State” for fast-tracked approval within 60 days.
Trump also signed
an order demanding
that the Secretary of Commerce devise a plan ensuring all pipelines are
constructed using U.S. iron and steel. There are outstanding questions
about what the orders will actually mean, since they mandate quick
turnarounds on approvals but include no actual directives about resuming
construction.
It’s worth pointing out here that Trump, who has
refused to divest of his many business conflicts, is an investor in the
pipeline and stands to profit from its completion. As
Huffington Post writer Michael McLaughlin notes:
In
May 2015, according to campaign disclosure reports, Trump owned between
$500,000 and $1 million worth of shares of Energy Transfer Partners,
the pipeline’s lead developer, but had less than $50,000 invested when
he sold off the remainder of his shares this summer, according to The Washington Post.
As of last May, Trump had at least $100,000 invested in Phillips 66,
which owns a quarter of the oil line, according to the AP.
Kelcy Warren, head of DAPL builder Energy Transfer Partners,
donated more than
$100,000 to various Trump supporting entities over the course of the
presidential campaign. Trump, a former shareholder in ETP, reportedly
sold off his holdings last year, but other investors were surely heartened by the executive action.
Fortune reports that one day after the memorandum was signed, shares of the company were moving precipitously upward.
2. Reinstates the anti-abortion global 'gag rule' that will increase the number of unsafe abortions around the world.
The
Helms Amendment has
outlawed the use of U.S. foreign aid dollars to fund abortion services
to women since the early 1970s. That is not enough to appease the rabid
anti-reproductive justice movement in this country, which won’t be
satisfied until it threatens the health of every woman around the world.
Hence Trump’s signing of
an order that
brings back Ronald Reagan’s 1984 Mexico City Policy—last in effect
during the Bush 43 era—which bans U.S. support to foreign organizations
that offer abortion or abortion counseling to women. Essentially, the
U.S. will now tell foreign organizations it helps support in even the
smallest of ways how to spend their own money. As Planned Parenthood
head Cecile Richards
explains:
This
means that if a clinic receives even $1 of U.S. foreign assistance for
family planning, its doctors and nurses are limited in what they can do
to help their patients. They can’t counsel a woman on the full range of
health options legally available to her, refer her to another provider
for specialized care or even give her a pamphlet with medically accurate
information. That’s why we call it the global gag rule, because it
prevents doctors from talking to their patients and providing services
that are legal in their own countries—and in the U.S.—and it keeps
people from participating in the democratic process of their own
countries. This means clinics closing their doors, more unintended
pregnancies and more unsafe abortion.
It also means
that potentially billions of dollars will be withheld with organizations
doing lifesaving medical research and other work beyond U.S. borders.
Vox notes that the Trump order expands on the amount of affected funding
by 15 times:
According to the Kaiser Family
Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on health issues, the
policy will now apply to aid money coming not just from the US Agency
for International Development (USAID), as before, but also from the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Department of
Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the
Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and even to Peace Corps volunteers
working on family planning in the field.
3. Scraps a money-saving fee cut for new homeowners.
The
very first post-inaugural move Trump made was signing an executive
order voiding President Obama’s mortgage cost reduction. The .25 percent
cut to federal mortgage insurance, set to take effect today, would have
saved new homeowners roughly
$500 a year. The rate drop would
have benefited first-time
and lower-income home buyers with Federal Housing Authority-backed
mortgage loans. For a self-proclaimed warrior for the middle class, it’s
a seemingly contradictory first action to take, unless said warrior is
also a pathological liar, in which case it makes total sense.
4. Freezes federal hires.
On Monday, Trump
ordered a hiring
freeze on most government workers. The memorandum states that “no
vacant positions existing at noon on January 22, 2017, may be filled and
no new positions may be created,” with exceptions for military, public
safety and national security personnel. The order
cuts off positions
for thousands of highly skilled scientists, engineers and nurses—who
are not exempt under the “public safety” clause—many of whom are
actually indispensable to the stated goals of the Trump administration.
The order also places a burden on job-seeking veterans, who represent 30
percent of federal workers and are given preferential treatment in
government hiring, according to
Military.com.
Vets who were already in process toward being hired for a federal
position will no longer be up for those roles. The site also notes, "the
hiring freeze would apply to the VA, which had been seeking to bring on
2,000 new employees to help clear up appointment backlogs and improve
care.” More than half a million veterans already endure month-long waits
for attention at the agency.
“President Trump’s action will
disrupt government programs and services that benefit everyone and
actually increase taxpayer costs by forcing agencies to hire more
expensive contractors to do work that civilian government employees are
already doing for far less,” David Cox Sr., president of the American
Federation of Government Employees, told the
Washington Post.
“This hiring freeze will mean longer lines at Social Security offices,
fewer workplace safety inspections, less oversight of environmental
polluters, and greater risk to our nation’s food supply and clean water
systems.”
5. Begins plans to build the big, stupid wall and other nods to his base of anti-immigrant hysterics.
Citing “alternative facts” not worth repeating about
Mexican immigration, Trump’s “Border Security”
executive order states
that Congress will allot federal funds—that’s “taxpayer dollars” in
plainspeak—for the “immediate construction” of a southern border wall.
It includes plans to increase the number of border patrol agents by
5,000 and construct more detention facilities, and outlines a broad
crackdown on immigrants who cross the southern border.
Paul Ryan, who is apparently confused about what the term “fiscal conservative” means,
says Congress
will pony up the $10-$15 billion it does not have for children and
veterans’ health care or welfare to build Trump’s completely useless
monstrosity. The entire Republican Party is still peddling the lie that
Mexico will pay as soon as it receives the invoice for the wall order,
though Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto again
dismissed that insane, illogical idea on Wednesday. On Thursday, Nieto
canceled a meeting with Trump.
6. Targets sanctuary cities.
In a
separate order,
Trump takes aim at sanctuary cities, banning federal funds to
jurisdictions that “willfully violate Federal law in an attempt to
shield aliens from removal from the United States.” As activist and
policy analyst Samuel Sinyangwe notes on
Twitter,
the State Homeland Security Program, Urban Area Security Initiative and
Department of Homeland Security collectively provide $275 million to
New York City each year in federal anti-terrorism funds that would be
cut under Trump’s new action.
For
an added touch of useless pettiness, Trump’s order includes an attempt
at public shaming in Section 8b, which states the administration will
“make public a comprehensive [weekly] list of criminal actions committed
by aliens and any jurisdiction that ignored or otherwise failed to
honor any detainers with respect to such aliens.” The next time you
wonder how government is wasting time and money, remember that your tax
dollars (but not Trump’s, because he reportedly
doesn’t pay
taxes) are funding junk like this.
7. Starts dismantling the Affordable Care Act.
In
an order purporting
to “minimize the economic burden” of the ACA, Trump instructs the
Secretary of Health and Human Services and heads of other departments to
“waive, defer, grant exemptions from [and] delay” requirements of the
Obamacare law. Because of the lack of preciseness in the order, experts
were unable to pin down precisely how and when changes would start to
take effect. There’s also the fact that Republicans, despite dozens of
attempts to repeal the plan and years of time to brainstorm, have
offered neither a replacement plan nor concrete strategy for its
implementation.
"The order could affect virtually anything in the
law, provided it is couched as a delay in implementing the law," Stuart
Butler, of the Brookings Institution, told
Reuters.
Robert Laszewski, head of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, has
spoken and
written about
the problems with Obamacare over the years. Despite recognizing the
plan's imperfections, Laszewski believes Trump and the GOP’s actions on
health care will harm millions of ACA subscribers.
“Instead of
sending a signal that there’s going to be an orderly transition, they’ve
sent a signal that it’s going to be a disorderly transition,” Laszewski
told the
Washington Post. “How does the Trump administration think this is not going to make the situation worse?”
8. Demands half-assed environmental reviews so development can proceed, consequences be damned.
“Too
often, infrastructure projects in the United States have been routinely
and excessively delayed by agency processes and procedures,” the
executive order expediting
environmental reviews and approvals reads. “These delays have increased
project costs and blocked the American people from the full benefits of
increased infrastructure investments, which are important to allowing
Americans to compete and win on the world economic stage.”
To keep
pesky things like clean air and water quality concerns from getting in
the way of quick and dirty major infrastructure developments, Trump’s
executive order will “streamline and expedite...environmental reviews
and approvals for all infrastructure projects."
The order directs
the chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality to make
a decision within 30 days on “high priority” projects such as “port
facilities, airports, pipelines, bridges, and highways.” All things that
are utterly useless if we all sicken and die from drinking polluted
water or breathing toxic air.
Once
again, predicting how this will all shake out is difficult. “It
remained unclear how Trump’s order would expedite those environmental
reviews,” Steven Mufson and Juliet Eilperin write at the
Washington Post. “Many are statutory and the legislation that created them cannot be swept aside by an executive order.”
9. Puts gag orders on multiple government agencies; removes vital internet content.
Staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of
Transportation, Interior Department, National Institutes of Health, Department of Agriculture, Health and Human Services (which
includes the CDC and Food and Drug Administration) and other agencies were reportedly told not to
speak to
the press or provide information to the public for an indefinite
period. New projects were also halted at a number of agencies.
The EPA was instructed by the Trump administration to take down its website page on climate change, according to a
Reuters report. There were
reports that
the Trump team would be reviewing previous EPA studies and numbers, and
also embargoing new studies pending review. Those steps follow the
Trump transition team’s
request that
the Energy Department fork over the names of staff who worked on
climate change issues. The team also asked the State Department
for a list of positions and programs aimed at achieving gender equality.
That
effectively muzzles agencies concerned with science, health, the
environment, medicine and food. Essentially, everything critical to
human survival.
Perhaps bowing to public outcry, USDA officials
reportedly rescinded
the gag order on Tuesday. There were reports of agencies going rogue,
like these supposed unauthorized Twitter accounts of
federal science workers, or the now offline
but cached at the @WhiteHouseLeaks account. There was also the Badlands National Park
Twitter, which for a few hours rebelliously tweeted climate change facts.
In the minutes after Trump's inauguration,
pages dedicated to
civil rights, climate change, LGBT rights, and health care disappeared
from the White House website. Spanish language pages were also removed,
while a page titled “Standing Up For Our Law Enforcement Community” was
newly added. “The Trump Administration will be a law and order
administration,”
the page reads. “The dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America is wrong.”
Altnet.com
