A travesty...

Navy weighs renaming carrier slated to honor Black war hero, potentially switching it to Trump

By Haley Britzky, Pamela Brown

The US Navy is working to rename an aircraft carrier under construction that was set to honor a Black sailor hailed for his heroic actions during the attack on Pearl Harbor, three sources familiar with internal discussions told CNN.

During President Donald Trump’s first term, the Navy announced that the Ford-class carrier would be called the USS Doris Miller, recognizing an enlisted sailor who helped defend US forces from Japan’s attack.

It’s unclear what the Navy is seeking to change the name of the carrier to, though two of the sources said there have been internal conversations about renaming it to honor Trump. It would be an unprecedented move to name an aircraft carrier after a sitting president.

The Navy is looking instead to rename another warship after Miller, according to one of the sources, and is recommending him for the Medal of Honor, the highest decoration for military valor. The final authorization for the award is up to Congress and approval from Trump.

Thomas Bledsoe, Miller’s great-nephew, said Miller’s family had not been informed of the change or the renewed effort to award his great-uncle with the Medal of Honor. The family has been working to get him the Medal of Honor “for years,” Bledsoe said, and called the Navy’s move to recommend the honor “very positive.”

The family of Doris Miller unveil a plaque commemorating the future Navy ship, Ford-class aircraft carrier USS Doris Miller, at a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration event on Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, in January 2020.

The family of Doris Miller unveil a plaque commemorating the future Navy ship, Ford-class aircraft carrier USS Doris Miller, at a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration event on Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, in January 2020. Mass Communication 2nd Class Justin R. Pacheco/US Navy

The Navy directed questions from CNN to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. A Department of Defense spokesperson said they had nothing to announce at this time.

The effort to rename the USS Doris Miller has been underway since earlier this year, the sources said. Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao and his office have also been looking into updating the official guidance for how ships should be named and specifying who they can be named after, including presidents, two of the sources said.

Amid conversations over the ship’s name, the Navy has effectively stopped referring to the ship as the USS Doris Miller internally and is only calling it by its hull number, CVN-81, one of the sources said. A recent White House executive order on shipbuilding also referred to the ship only as CVN-81, tasking the Secretary of Defense and Secretary of the Navy to report back with a plan to replace the ship’s electromagnetic aircraft launch system with steam and hydraulic systems.

The Navy is under a time crunch to finalize the name of the carrier as the ship’s keel-laying ceremony is expected at the end of this year. The ceremony is a public event marking an important step in a ship’s construction. The ship is not expected to be delivered until 2034, USNI News first reported, due to shipbuilder constraints.

Former Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly announced the new carrier’s name in honor of Miller in January 2020, during a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day ceremony in Pearl Harbor.

“Dorie Miller was the son of a sharecropper,” Modly, a Trump nominee who had Navy leadership positions from 2017 to 2020, said at the ceremony, according to a Navy release. “And, he was an American sailor – so designated by the uniform that he wore — the same uniform all sailors wore, and still wear, regardless of race, ethnic background, or political persuasion.”

Doris “Dorie” Miller, from Waco, Texas, enlisted in the US Navy in 1939, according to the National Museum of the Pacific War. On the day of Japan’s attack, Miller — a Mess Attendant Third Class at the time — was retrieving laundry when bombs began falling on the US fleet. Mess attendant was one of the only jobs in the Navy open to Black men, according to the Department of Veteran Affairs. Damage by Japan’s attack kept him from returning to his assigned battle station.

Miller proceeded to aid his wounded commanding officer, and then, despite having received no training on the system, took control of an anti-aircraft gun and opened fire on the Japanese aircraft.

“Although untrained,” the VA’s website says, “he laid down effective fire and stopped firing when he ran out of ammunition and the ship began to sink. Even then, he persisted in helping his fellow sailors to safety until he finally made his way to shore.”

Miller was famously portrayed by Cuba Gooding Jr. in the 2001 film “Pearl Harbor.”

In 1942, Admiral Chester Nimitz presented Miller with the Navy Cross, and he was then sent out on a War Bond tour with several white service members, “making him the first African American allowed on the speaking tour,” according to the VA. Roughly a year later, Miller was killed during the Battle of Makin when his ship was hit by a Japanese submarine’s torpedo.

The Navy convened a renaming commission in 2025 under former Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, to review how ships and other military assets were named. Phelan believes aircraft carriers specifically should be named only after presidents, Navy admirals, and consequential Navy battles, a person familiar with his thinking said. While secretary, Phelan requested a study be done by the Naval History & Heritage Command on the issue, but he was removed as Navy Secretary before the review was complete, the source said, adding that Phelan did not weigh in officially on the Doris Miller specifically.

The Navy commission came amid broader efforts in the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to remove names selected for what the administration considers diversity, equity, and inclusion purposes.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, for example, immediately sought to revert the names of US Army bases honoring Confederate Army officers by finding other military personnel that shared last names with those confederate officers. And in 2025, he took a rare step and ordered the Secretary of the Navy to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, which honored the Navy veteran and gay rights activist.

It’s highly unusual for a ship to be renamed after its commissioning. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said at the time of the Harvey Milk’s renaming that Hegseth was committed to names “reflective of the Commander-in-Chief’s priorities, our nation’s history, and the warrior ethos.”

The choice of USS Doris Miller marked the first time an aircraft carrier would honor an enlisted sailor, and the first aircraft carrier to be named for an African American. Asked about his decision to name the carrier after Miller, Modly told CNN that it was recommended to him by a group of retired Black admirals, and that he believes “one of our most powerful warships should bear the name of a sailor like Miller to bring greater attention to what makes our Navy so unique — and great.”

“Ultimately, these names are meant to be symbolic and unifying for the Navy, and the nation it serves,” Modly told CNN. “When they are named for people like Doris Miller, they raise broader awareness of the heroism, patriotism and sacrifices of all American sailors — not merely their commanders.”

Many of the US’ active aircraft carriers are named after past US presidents, to including the USS Abraham Lincoln, USS George H.W. Bush, USS Ronald Reagan, and USS George Washington, though none of those ships first set sail while their namesakes were in office. But not all carriers are named after presidents. The USS Nimitz, for example, is named after the admiral who commanded the US Pacific Fleet during World War II. The USS Carl Vinson is named after a Georgia congressman who chaired the House Naval Affairs and Armed Services Committee.

He has a small dick, that's why....

Trump Enraged South Korea to Please the North. It Didn’t Work.

North Korea test-fired more ballistic missiles on Thursday—for at least the third time this month.

Alex Nguyen

North Korea launched several ballistic missiles toward the Sea of Japan on Thursday, according to South Korea’s military—just a day after the North dismissed Donald Trump’s seeming attempt at appeasement by cutting back on joint military training with South Korea. 

“The provocative, aggressive nature of the drills won’t change even though their duration and size were reduced,” Kim Yo Jong, a top figure in North Korea’s ruling party and supreme leader Kim Jong Un’s sister, said on Wednesday, pointing to other military drills the US and South Korea carried out earlier this year and to South Korea accelerating its development of nuclear-powered submarines.

Before the drills began this week, North Korea said it would retaliate with “a new level of a deterrent.” North Korea had already fired at least two ballistic missiles into the sea earlier this month before the barrage on Thursday.

While Kim Yo Jong said relations between her brother and Trump are “still excellent”, she said she was “completely unaware” of any communications between the pair following Trump’s decision to scale back the joint drills this month by about half—a claim the US president made earlier this week. 

The back-and-forth between Kim Jong Un and Trump goes back to Trump’s first term, where peace negotiations between the pair collapsed in 2019 amid disputes over how much sanctions relief North Korea would receive for partial denuclearization. Kim has since sought to further militarize and cooperate with Russia, but he said last September that he would be open to resuming talks if the US dropped its “obsession” with eliminating North Korea’s nuclear weapons.

But Trump’s decision to cut military training with South Korea looks to have had only negative consequences, angering that country to the point of President Lee Jae Myung calling to retake full control of its military operations from the US—despite Trump both claiming that the move would keep countries like South Korea and Japan safe and pushing other countries in Asia to ramp up their own defense spending and look for new allies.

I am hoping for a stroke soon.... For the fat orange turd...

Trump’s Minions Say He’s Mulling New Tax Breaks—They’re Mainly for the Rich

The guy has impeccable timing, and yep, that’s a joke.

Mike Mechanic

Donald Trump apparently wants to cut taxes for the rich yet again. Is this some kind of twisted midterms strategy? Hard to say. But as Timothy Noah points out in The New Republic, the current and former National Economic Council directors Kevin Hassett and Larry Kudlow were on Fox News last week talking about two tax proposals the president is mulling, and both are pretty misguided.

The first one, which they would likely try and sell as a middle-class tax cut, is to expand the current (fairly generous) capital gains exclusion on profits from home sales. Under current law, when a couple sells their residence for more than they paid, the first $500,000 in gains is nontaxable. Kudlow seemed to be advocating for a $2 million exclusion.

Now, some kind of means-tested relief for people who have owned their primary residence for decades may be reasonable, but a $2 million exclusion, let’s be honest, doesn’t exactly scream middle class. Especially when you consider that the rule also applies to second homes. That means the Van Doughs, after unloading their $10 million Aspen ski chalet for $12 million, won’t pay a dime on the proceeds.

We’re already paying handsomely for the smaller exclusion. I reported in June that this $500,000 tax break, combined with the mortgage interest deduction for first and second homes, will cost the government $574 billion from 2025-2029. That’s according to the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT). And since we talk about budgets in 10-year terms, we can say it will add at least $1.15 trillion to the national debt—which, in case you haven’t heard, just passed $40 trillion.

Quadrupling this real-estate tax break is not gonna help with that.

A more appropriate response to out-of-control deficits would be to repeal the ill-conceived tax giveaways in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, legislation that the nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center calculated will cost the federal government $4.5 trillion in lost revenues over a decade. DOGE’s mindless cuts to the federal workforce, executed with Trump blessing and encouragement, will cost America a fortune as well.

And now Trump wants to double down on all the losses he’s created with his profligate policies, pet construction projects, and inept military adventures?

The second proposal, indexing capital gains to inflation, is even stupider. I wrote about this idea last summer, after none other than Reagan-era anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist told the Washington Post that he’d urged Trump to make it happen with an executive order.

Here’s the thing: Taxes on capital gains are already wildly discounted relative to taxes on labor, discounts that, based on the JCT’s numbers, will cost the government at least $2.5 trillion in lost revenue over 10 years. The current top rate for capital gains is 23.8 percent, which includes a 3.8 percent surcharge enacted to help cover the cost of the Affordable Care Act. By contrast, as I wrote previously:

A couple reporting $1,000,000 in salary income pays an effective rate of about 30 percent. That’s a huge difference, and part of why families whose money comes primarily from asset growth have amassed wealth so much faster than working families have. It’s no lefty exaggeration to say America’s economic system is rigged against workers and in favor of investors. It’s right there in the tax code.

Also…

Indexing capital gains to inflation, according to 2018 estimates from the Tax Policy Center and the Penn Wharton Budget Model, would add yet another $100 billion to $200 billion to the [deficit]—with the richest 1 percent reaping 86 percent of the benefits.

TNR’s Noah, citing more recent estimates from the Yale Budget Lab, writes that “indexing capital gains would cost $170 billion over 10 years if it applied only to assets purchased after 2025, and almost $1 trillion if it applied to all assets.”

All of which is to say that these hare-brained proposals, apart from being likely unconstitutional due to their sidestepping of Congress on tax issues, would exacerbate Dickensian wealth disparities and make our bloated federal deficit even worse, just as borrowing costs have reached a two-decade high.

Those midterms cannot come soon enough.

Not Funny

 

Balls

Gavin Newsom picks the West’s most complicated fight

His final legislative push is angering insurance companies, wildfire victims and local officials — and billions of dollars are at stake.

By Noah Baustin, Jeremy B. White and Camille von Kaenel

With just months left in office, Gavin Newsom is reopening one of California’s most bitter political fights.

At the center of it is a question the state has struggled with for years: When a power company sparks a catastrophic wildfire, who ultimately shoulders the cost?

Newsom took office in the aftermath of the deadly 2018 Camp Fire, which sent Pacific Gas and Electric into bankruptcy and threatened to destabilize the state’s electricity system. Now, as he prepares to leave office and embark on a likely presidential run, he is pushing eleventh-hour legislation that would sharply limit how much utilities can be forced to pay when their equipment sparks a wildfire, in an effort to avoid another financial collapse.

It is an extraordinarily complex — and risky — undertaking, and almost everyone with a stake in California’s wildfire fights has something to lose.

If Newsom gets his way, he’ll anger insurance firms, which argue his proposed changes would upend their marketplace. Local officials worry they won’t be able to secure enough money to rebuild after future fires. And wildfire victims, fearing that future survivors could be shortchanged, staged a recent protest on the steps of the governor’s mansion.

Utilities are making the opposite case, warning that without changes, the system could deliver a severe blow to their finances.

The fight has spurred millions of dollars in advertising blitzes from outside groups looking to sway voters and lawmakers. Opponents are already calling the proposal a corporate and utility “bailout.”

But Newsom argues that doing nothing also carries enormous risks. It may be his last chance to resolve an issue that has haunted his entire time in office, and that could disrupt the state’s power system in the years to come. California’s electricity costs are already among the highest in the nation, fueled in part by the costs of making the grid more fire-resistant.

“Here’s my response to those that don’t want change: It’s untenable,” the governor said on Wednesday. “The status quo is not going to work.”

If Newsom runs for president, his opponents will be eager to highlight the state’s most intractable issues, from homeless encampments sprawled across city sidewalks to homeowners struggling to rebuild incinerated properties — and, of course, costly electricity. Newsom now has less than five months left as governor to do something about that problem.

The controversy points to the difficulty of retaining California’s status as a pioneer in renewable energy and climate policy while also shoring up a power system increasingly strained by wildfire costs. There’s just over a week left in the legislative session, and Newsom has shared his proposal with lawmakers, but there’s still no bill in print. That’s intensified criticism, with wildfire survivors accusing the governor of negotiating an opaque, utility-friendly deal.

“There is literally nothing about this situation that does not include tradeoffs,” said Kate Gordon, who headed the state’s catastrophic wildfire commission when she led the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research under Newsom. “There is not a political win-win-win where everyone walks away with what they want.”

Baptism by fire

Newsom was elected governor just two days before Pacific Gas & Electric equipment sparked the Camp Fire, which burned the town of Paradise, then the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. Weeks after he took office, PG&E filed for bankruptcy, setting off a scramble among the scores of people and entities the distressed company owed money. Insurance companies, financial firms, local governments and wildfire survivors all had to duke it out in court.

In the end, the heavyweight institutions secured multibillion-dollar settlements, but survivors weren’t compensated enough to cover the full cost of rebuilding, according to Newsom’s office.

That fact, they say, is animating the governor now.

Back in 2019, Newsom ultimately oversaw the creation of a ratepayer- and shareholder-funded wildfire fund, a behemoth back-up pot of money that power companies can tap to cover claims from fires they spark.

Newsom acknowledged to reporters this month that critics called that first effort a “bailout,” too. He faced similar criticism last year, when he successfully pushed state lawmakers to reup the fund to make sure it had enough money to cover the tens of billions of dollars in claims against Southern California Edison for starting the Eaton Fire in Pasadena in January 2025.

Michael Wara, a Stanford scholar who served as a consultant to the state Senate during the PG&E bankruptcy, called the episode eight years ago a “baptism by fire” for Newsom and his closest energy aides. It left such a lasting impact, he said, that it continues to shadow them as they look to the next big chapter.

“This is not easy politics,” Wara said. “But having a second utility bankruptcy while Governor Newsom is running for president would not be easy politics either.”

One last attempt at a fix

Thorny questions of who pays for what have only grown more challenging over Newsom’s tenure, as climate change’s impacts intensify and mounting costs increase the strain on utilities, homeowners, and insurers.

Power companies across the fire-prone West are increasingly shaping legislation aimed at lowering their costs and remaining solvent, while insurance companies are hiking their premiums or pulling out of fire-prone regions altogether. California Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, a Democrat who chairs the energy committee, has warned that tinkering with wildfire costs does little to solve the larger crisis.

“If we make a bunch of changes, but we’re just shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic, that doesn’t feel like a very productive use of our time or energy,” Petrie-Norris said.

But the scale of the Eaton Fire last year, which raised the specter of a Southern California Edison bankruptcy, made clear the system is more fragile than even Newsom or lawmakers expected.

To prevent power companies from collapsing financially when they spark big wildfires, Newsom wants to stop insurers from suing them to recoup what they paid policyholders.

He also wants to bar financial firms from purchasing those claims from insurance companies, which can bring deep-pocketed competitors into a utility bankruptcy proceeding.

And he wants to create a state-run fast-pay program to get cash to wildfire survivors quickly.

Unsurprisingly, that’s drawn the ire of the insurance industry, which argues that it would have to raise rates to compensate for the loss of income.

Local governments have taken issue with a provision that would prevent them from recouping the full replacement cost of damaged infrastructure from power companies.

And prominent wildfire victim groups are against the plan because Newsom wants to limit how much survivors can recover from utilities that spark blazes.

Newsom’s proposal would bar anyone who wasn’t within the perimeter of a fire from getting compensation for emotional distress, and it would cap claims at $150,000 for anyone who fled the “zone of danger.” (People who were injured or witnessed a family member get injured could still bring an unlimited claim for emotional distress.)

“The proposal would cripple fire survivors,” said Joy Chen, executive director of the Every Fire Survivor’s Network.

Altogether, the chorus of opponents is arguing that rather than fix California’s wildfire problems, the proposal could simply shift more of the bill from now-profitable power companies onto everyday people.

“If the utilities are concerned about the cost of wildfires, and it’s untenable, they have to ask themselves, ‘What can we do to stop wildfires?’” said Chris Holden, a former California Democratic lawmaker who chaired the Assembly energy committee and wrote the 2019 bill that created the first wildfire fund. He now leads LA Fire Justice, a group of lawyers who represent wildfire survivors.

“If you do something wrong, you have to be held responsible,” Holden said.

The Newsom administration has been fending off that characterization of its proposal, arguing that it would maintain utility accountability while easing upward pressure on electricity rates.

“California is the only state in the nation that holds investor-owned electric utilities strictly liable for damages caused by their equipment, even if the company was not negligent,” Cynthia Stein, Newsom’s senior counselor for the LA recovery, wrote in a letter last week. “This would not change under this proposal.”

Looking ahead to 2028

The dicey politics of the issue haven’t factored into Newsom’s decision to elevate it in his final months in office, spokesperson Bob Salladay said. He noted Newsom has been steeped in wildfire recovery issues since the opening weeks of his term.

“This is so outside of any political calculation because of the deep damage from these wildfires,” Salladay said. “It doesn’t matter if someone is running TV ads against you or someone is mad at you. It’s too big of an issue.”

Gordon said Newsom had little choice but to tackle an issue that touches on core concerns for voters both in California and nationally as he prepares to leave office and looks ahead to a potential presidential run.

Just this month, California’s chief energy regulator called wildfire “the enemy” of energy affordability. The credit downgrades now looming over California’s utilities could drive those costs even higher. Meanwhile, high electricity rates have become a top issue for voters, driving both of the candidates to replace Newsom to make energy costs a focal point of their campaigns.

“It’s such a top-of-mind issue for people really viscerally — (energy costs) are where affordability is hitting people in a real way,” Gordon said. “That’s an issue for him as head of state now, but this is going to be an issue for him in whatever he chooses to do next, so I think he has to address it.”

Need to stop the revolving door.....

White House official’s move to oil company she aided raises ethics questions

Brittany Kelm’s departure from the White House to lead the Washington office of a Houston oil company has raised questions about the close proximity between a government official and the interests of a private corporation.

By Ian M. Stevenson, James Bikales and Scott Waldman

People milling around before a press conference in Santa Barbara, California, in early June might have mistaken Brittany Kelm, a White House staffer, for an oil company representative.

During the tour of oil facilities run by Sable Offshore Corp., a company that owns an offshore pipeline which the Trump administration had recently helped to get oil flowing through, Kelm sported a Sable-branded cap and a Sable-branded shirt with her name embroidered on it, according to a photograph she posted to LinkedIn.

“We’ve unleashed California’s offshore oil production!” Kelm, a senior energy adviser for the White House’s National Energy Dominance Council, wrote in the post.

Less than three months later, Kelm would announce her departure from her job at the council to take over Sable’s Washington policy office. The move, even by Washington’s normally swampy standards, threatens to erode the lines between public officials and the industries they interact with, according to experts and former government ethics officials.

More specifically, it gives rise to questions about how the company’s new lead at its Washington office will represent its interests while abiding by ethics requirements.

The Trump administration as late as June hailed Kelm’s work helping to restart the pipeline system off the California coast owned by Sable, despite the objections of state and local officials. Indeed, both she and the administration made her heavy involvement very publicly clear for months in official statements and social media posts.

Top administration officials even touted her work on behalf of the company on LinkedIn, the professional networking platform that’s become vital to career mobility and advancement in many industries.

“Brittany Kelm never gave up on Sable Offshore Corp.,” Jarrod Agen, executive director of the National Energy Dominance Council, wrote on LinkedIn shortly after the June visit. Her work “unlocked production in California,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who chairs the council, said in a statement last week praising her work at the White House.

At the Santa Barbara event in June, Sable’s CEO Jim Flores thanked the Cabinet members and council for their help, saying that “you don’t get a project like this off the ground without help from everybody, top to bottom.”

“Jarrod and Brittany, thank you for your help working with that,” he said.

Kelm’s work as a government official subjects her to strict ethics laws before and after she took the job with Sable, according to five ethics experts. The rules should have barred her from doing any work related to Sable after starting to negotiate her new job and prohibited her for life from appearing before any federal agency on certain specific matters she worked on at the White House, they said.

While departing government for the private sector is not inherently improper, “the ethics concern arises when that distance between an official’s public responsibilities and the private employment is so exceptionally close together, particularly when the official moves directly to a company whose interests she personally worked on while exercising governmental authority,” said Davina Hurt, director of government ethics at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. “That is what sort of has red flashing lights to me about the ethical implications of that change.”

Kelm and Sable did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.

The White House said Kelm did not work on “official” matters with Sable while negotiating a job with the company — as is prohibited by ethics laws — and Kelm does not plan to work on any “ongoing official matters” between Sable and the administration when she takes on her new role as vice president of policy and commercial. It is unclear when her first day at Sable will be; she left the White House Aug. 14 and said on LinkedIn that this week was her first in the “private sector.”

In a statement, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said White House employees follow ethics laws.

“As is standard practice in every administration, White House employees coordinate their departures with ethics officials to ensure full compliance with all applicable guidelines and restrictions during offboarding,” Rogers said. “The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public’s distrust in what they read.”

Before joining the council, Kelm worked for three months as a senior policy adviser in the Interior Department. For the seven years before that, she worked at various oil companies, including Shell.

The council has been particularly keen on wresting jurisdiction over the small oil pipeline off the coast of Santa Barbara, owned by Sable. Production had been idle for years at the offshore platforms following a 2015 oil spill, but the Houston-based company bought the infrastructure in 2024 and has worked to bring the system back online.

‘Let’s go Sable’

The company has faced pushback from California regulators, who are trying to clamp down on oil and gas activity off their coast. But its bid to turn on the spigots dovetailed with Trump’s efforts to challenge blue states’ aims to transition away from fossil fuels.

After Sable sent a letter to council leaders last September asking for assistance, help arrived from the administration, which seized oversight of the pipeline from the state. Agen said in February that his office was “working with Sable,” and then the Department of Energy in March ordered a restart of the platforms’ oil production, citing emergency powers.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, has sued the administration over Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s emergency order, joining a set of other legal challenges to the project. Earlier this week, a federal judge assigned to the case ruled that oil can keep flowing in the pipeline.

Kelm heavily touted her work with Sable on LinkedIn, writing “We are bringing more US production online ASAP 🇺🇸 let’s go Sable Offshore Corp.” In January, she highlighted on LinkedIn the administration’s work ensuring that Sable’s pipeline wouldn’t be stopped by litigation after lawsuits from the state were first filed earlier that fall.

“Thank you Sable Offshore Corp. for trusting the Trump Administration to deliver on regulatory certainty for your operations to provide Americans with affordable and reliable energy,” she wrote.

In a LinkedIn post on June 5, Kelm posted photos of her visit to Sable’s California property along with Burgum, Wright and Rogers, the White House spokesperson.

“The list of energy projects we have permitted and gotten to (final investment decisions) is too long for a LinkedIn post,” Kelm wrote in a parting post on Monday, adding that she has been referred to as a “deal closer” and had been the lead official working on oil and gas development issues at the council.

“The revolving door between government and the private sector is nothing new, but it’s troubling how brazenly and frequently it’s been on display of late,” one oil industry executive told POLITICO regarding Kelm’s move from the White House to Sable.

Anthony Martinez, a spokesperson for California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, called the council a “taxpayer-funded lobbying shop for the fossil fuel industry, dressed up to look official while it guts clean air and water protections and tramples on states’ rights.”

“It should surprise no one that a senior official from what is really Big Oil’s personal concierge service inside the White House is now heading straight to the payroll of the company she spent her time at the White House clearing a path for,” Martinez said.

Trump admin cuts ethics guardrails

Presidents since Barack Obama have issued executive orders strengthening revolving door requirements for administration officials both before and after their time in government, which have imposed requirements beyond those required by federal law.

Trump administration officials are bound by the least restrictive ethics requirements of any presidential administration in the last 15 years. While Trump in his first term implemented a similar order, last year he rescinded a Biden-era ethics order but never issued a new one.

But criminal statutes that limit former officials from taking on the same projects they advanced while in government are still in effect.

Former officials are subject to a lifetime ban on attempting to influence the government on specific matters they were “personally and substantially” involved in as an official, such as contracts and grants, according to federal law. They also face a one-year prohibition against communicating with or making official appearances before their former office.

Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University Law School, said the statute covering post-government work, as well as another covering pre-employment discussions, are both “highly fact-specific, and both carry criminal penalties.”

“The timing question is critical: when did the employment discussions begin, and what Sable matters was she working on at the time?” Tillipman said. “At that point she had three options: recuse from the Sable matters, terminate job discussions, or obtain a waiver.”

Margaret Dylus-Yukins, who served as an attorney-adviser in the U.S. Office of Government Ethics until March, said in an email that in her new position Kelm is barred from engaging with the White House on any government matter for a year. But she can communicate with other agencies on “broad policy or regulatory issues…so long as she is careful to abide by criminal ethics laws,” said Dylus-Yukins, who is now a senior legal counsel for ethics at Campaign Legal Center.

Another key part of Kelm’s work in the White House was opening up Venezuela’s oil sector after the U.S. deposed former President Nicolás Maduro in January. She traveled to the country on the first commercial flight to Caracas in seven years and touted her work crafting policy that will make it easier for energy companies to begin operations there.

“A highlight of our work at NEDC this year has been establishing diplomatic relations with Venezuela and assisting with the bolstering of Venezuela’s natural resources, specifically with oil and gas and critical mineral development,” she wrote on LinkedIn earlier this summer.

On Tuesday, four days after concluding her White House role, Kelm was in Houston at a signing ceremony for oil contracts with Venezuela’s state-run oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, which she told POLITICO had invited her.

“Happy to be included and invited by PDVSA and the Venezuelans to see the deals we started at NEDC signed,” Kelm said.

They need to: Impeach, Put on trial, and drag if out for 2 years.....

Democrats put Trump’s ‘corruption’ front and center as they plan possible 2027 probes

Planning for a potential majority, House committee leaders say they are staying focused on “the president and the family.”

By Chris Marquette and Riley Rogerson

Democrats haven’t yet won the House majority. But top party leaders are wasting no time in preparing an all-out oversight campaign targeting President Donald Trump, his family and administration should they flip the chamber in November.

At the center of the effort are California Rep. Robert Garcia, who is poised to lead the Oversight Committee under a Democratic takeover, and Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, who is in line to lead the Judiciary Committee. They are each already planning to use their potential gavels to investigate key Trump controversies — such as his acceptance of a Qatari jet for use as his new Air Force One and his family’s massively profitable cryptocurrency investments.

Garcia and Raskin both said in interviews they have a long list of administration officials that they plan to probe and possibly bring before their committees. But each said they intend to focus intently on Trump himself.

“Ideally, it’s the president’s sons and the president and the family,” Garcia said, adding a litany of other members of the Trump inner sanctum he wants to hear from. They include chief of staff Susie Wiles, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and son-in-law and foreign envoy Jared Kushner, as well as former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Cory Lewandowski, who served as her chief of staff.

In addition to the crypto profits and the much-criticized Qatari 747, Garcia said he planned to probe federal contracts awarded to members of Trump’s family and the series of pardons Trump has granted early in his second term.

Raskin, a veteran of the investigative onslaught that took place in the second half of Trump’s first term, said he planned to focus on allegations of self-enrichment by Trump and his family — as well as illicit foreign influence on American institutions and rising authoritarianism in government.

“We are going to be looking at systems of bribery, kickback and financial corruption and opportunities for disgorgement and restitution to the American people,” Raskin said. “That would be No. 1.”

Asked to comment on Democrats’ oversight plans, White House spokesperson Olivia Wales responded with a statement outlining Trump’s legislative achievements.

“The President will continue to draw a sharp contrast with his commonsense agenda and radical Democrats who want to massively raise taxes, defund the police, and are soft on crime,” she said. “The choice has never been more clear: doubling down on President Trump’s winning agenda or far-left liberal policies and partisan gridlock.”

Raskin and Garcia are forging ahead even as voters reject some Democrats who were at the forefront of the Trump accountability effort that unfolded eight years ago. And while the preparations Garcia, Raskin and others are making now in many ways resemble how their predecessors planned ahead of the 2018 midterms, there are differences.

Democrats in the leadup to the elections that year warily tiptoed around the prospect of impeachment in fear of alienating voters, and they laid out some investigative targets that did not implicate Trump personally.

Once in power, though, they launched a flurry of investigations aimed at Trump — including the president’s tax returns, his acceptance of foreign “emoluments” and later his effort to leverage aid to Ukraine for political favors. In virtually every case, the administration stonewalled Democratic investigators.

Now, after two impeachments that failed to remove Trump from office and with a party base intent on pulling no punches, House Democrats are reluctant to take anything off the table — while also recognizing the limitations of impeachment as a check on Trump’s power.

“Nobody on the Democratic side is afraid of impeachment,” Raskin said this week, adding that he considers it a “tool in the toolbox.”

The larger project for Democrats if they win power in November is to use subpoena power and public hearings to provide a backbone for the accountability message they intend to continue into the 2028 presidential election season.

Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries emphasized the wide-reaching scope of oversight inquiries during his campaign kickoff speech last month, in which he unveiled House Democratic midterm messaging that included a pledge to “hold the crooks accountable.”

“Anyone,” Jeffries said, “who is stealing from the American people, screwing over the American people, or shortchanging the American people is going to be held accountable beginning on Day 1.”

While the Oversight and Judiciary panels would be the leaders of the investigatory push in a Democratic House, other committees are set to target Trump as well in a bid to deliver the bold action Democratic primary votes have demanded.

Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), a member of the Ways and Means Committee, said he expected the oversight subpanel would be a highly sought-after assignment should Democrats win gavels — with a potential “big” emphasis, he said, on probing Trump family corruption.

He added he was “very concerned” about how the Trump administration has managed the IRS and Social Security, particularly after the Department of Government Efficiency upended federal agencies last year.

“We certainly will exercise our oversight responsibility,” said Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts, who is expected to return as Ways and Means chair in a Democratic majority.

Garcia and Raskin, meanwhile, have other pet priorities beyond the personal benefits Trump and his family have allegedly garnered in office.

Raskin said he intends to probe what he deems “fraudulent and vindictive prosecutions” including those of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Leticia James.

“The prosecution function has been utterly tainted and the Judiciary Committee obviously can’t let that go,” he said.

He has also set his sights on Paramount Skydance’s proposed $110 billion buyout of Warner Bros. Discovery, a deal Democrats have blasted not only as an antitrust violation but also a threat to national security and free speech.

Previewing his intentions for the majority, Raskin requested a transcribed interview with Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison in a letter last week. While he cannot haul Ellison, a close Trump ally, before the committee now as a member of the minority party, Raskin said his inquiry into Paramount would be a “priority” if Democrats win subpoena power.

Garcia, meanwhile, said he is determined to fill in gaps he sees in the GOP-led investigation into the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. He said he wants to bring key witnesses back to testify under oath, potentially in public hearings “because most of them were not called under oath and most of them were not called under subpoena.”

That could include big names in the world of finance, such as Leon Black, the co-founder of Apollo Global Management, and Jes Staley, a former top executive at JPMorgan Chase — both of whom had substantial communications with Epstein and met with the committee privately.

“I think we’re going to have, in the majority, public Epstein hearings,” Garcia said.

The Epstein investigation is similar to the Trump corruption probe in that it would potentially span multiple committees, and Garcia and Raskin both praised each other and said they are planning to work in concert on both issues.

Raskin said he doesn’t envision any issues with coordination between two panels

“There’s enough Trump family corruption to go around,” he said. “I don’t think we have to worry about that. We will just be dividing it up.”

Just fucking with everyone....

Trump pauses quota tariff on 300,000 tons of beef ahead of midterms

Domestic farmers and ranchers are likely to protest any policy that floods the U.S. market with imported product.

By Gregory Svirnovskiy

President Donald Trump on Friday morning said he would exempt from tariffs 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef, the administration’s latest bid to lower prices ahead of midterm elections in which voters appear set to punish the GOP for the rising cost of living.

“This deal will reduce prices for Americans while giving space for our Great American Beef Herd to grow again,” he wrote on Truth Social. The administration had secured a commitment, he said, “that this beef will be sold at 25 percent below current market prices.”

The president framed the measure as an important tool to let ranchers grow the U.S. beef herd without facing market pressures. But he also shifted blame onto former President Joe Biden, whom he continues to claim bears responsibility for the sky-high prices that have hampered the president’s popularity since returning to the White House some 20 months ago.

“As everyone knows, under President Biden, beef prices soared at their fastest rate and the American beef herd fell to its smallest size in modern history,” he wrote.

Voters, meanwhile, blame the administration for the rising prices. The biggest failure of the president’s second term — many of his own supporters told The POLITICO Poll in July — is the cost of living.

It’s not the first time the president has weighed a temporary tariff reduction on beef. Trump shelved a long-telegraphed White House plan to do just that in May, amid fierce resistance from Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.

Domestic farmers and ranchers are likely to protest any policy that floods the U.S. market with imported product.

Congress’ funding power

Republicans bristle at Trump’s latest tactics to undermine Congress’ funding power

GOP lawmakers are bracing themselves for a possible rerun of the White House’s “pocket rescission” gambit.

By Jennifer Scholtes

Republican lawmakers are still locked in a power struggle with the White House over control of federal cash, long since President Donald Trump swept back into office with unprecedented orders undermining Congress’ power of the purse.

Earlier this month, GOP senators overwhelmingly agreed to a bipartisan government funding bill that would temporarily block the Trump administration from finalizing a federal rule to let political appointees steer money toward grants “aligned with the president’s agenda.” The House could clear that bill next month, and Trump is expected to sign it to avert a shutdown before the midterms.

And while the days of widespread funding freezes might be over, the Trump administration continues to create new rules for federal grants and then deny funding based on them — only to be repeatedly shot down in court this summer.

Lawmakers in both parties have also blasted White House budget director Russ Vought this year for delaying the release of cash for congressionally backed programs for antipoverty services, foreign assistance, banking in underserved areas and more.

“Congress has appropriated money, and you don’t have the authority to impound it,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) chastised Vought this spring over the withholding of hundreds of millions of dollars the Trump administration is supposed to send quarterly to states.

Now Republicans are watching for clues about whether Vought, between now and Sept. 30, will claim the authority to nix appropriations in the final weeks of the fiscal year through what’s known as a pocket rescission. He used the move last year to unilaterally cancel $4.9 billion in foreign aid through the legally dubious maneuver.

“Pocket rescissions would be a very interesting way to curry favor with the legislative branch — especially the one part of the legislative branch which has delivered on all of the administration’s shit,” Rep. Mark Amodei of Nevada, a senior Republican appropriator, said in a recent interview.

Indeed, the White House needs the support of GOP appropriators in both chambers to advance Trump administration priorities.

Those top lawmakers have already taken some modest steps to stop the White House from shirking Congress’ intent on spending by inserting stricter language into bipartisan funding bills Trump signed into law for the current fiscal year. That included new rules for shifting money between accounts and more explicit instructions for how dollars should be spent.

Some Republican lawmakers have also been resisting the administration’s push this summer to enact billions of dollars for the military and agriculture programs through another party-line budget reconciliation package. Top House Republican appropriators slammed the White House in June for pursuing a “risky and uncoordinated” strategy to enact funding for the Iran war through a party-line bill that’s not guaranteed to pass.

Relying on the reconciliation process to skirt the Senate filibuster is a key step to achieve the “paradigm shift” Vought has touted throughout Trump’s second term, designed to make funding negotiations “less bipartisan” so Republicans don’t have to agree to nondefense increases in order to get enough votes to boost military budgets.

“At what point did we stop legislating?” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), another senior appropriator, said last month after Vought privately pitched Senate Republicans on the latest party-line plan, which would inherently take funding power away from the appropriations committees.

Murkowski was also among the Senate Republicans who chided the White House for not seeking input from lawmakers before forging ahead with its plan to put political appointees in charge of approving federal grants and minimize the role of the objective peer-review process for selecting recipients of those dollars.

“There was no consultation at all,” she said. “When you start issuing grants based on political connections, that’s not good for the system here.”

Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) publicly called on Vought to extend the public comment period for the plan last month, to no avail.

She also continues to pan the pocket rescission gambit, saying in a recent interview that the administration should “go through the proper process with the Appropriations Committee” if it wants to rescind money intended for a specific program.

Under a decades-old law, the White House is allowed to send Congress a request to revoke funding, then withhold the cash for 45 days while lawmakers consider whether to approve, reject or ignore the proposal. Republicans last summer voted to approve Trump’s request to rescind $9 billion for public media and foreign assistance.

Then Trump used that same law weeks later to send Congress a request to rescind $4.9 billion in foreign aid — this time with less than 45 days left before the end of the fiscal year. Vought immediately declared the funding canceled, arguing that the administration had to withhold the funding until it expired at the end of September, regardless of congressional action.

The Office of Management and Budget did not respond to requests for comment on whether the White House plans to execute new pocket rescissions in the coming weeks. But Trump’s new pick for deputy director at the agency, Hal Duncan, told lawmakers this summer that the agency isn’t ruling out any “fiscal tools.”

House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole said White House officials have given him no assurances that they won’t deploy the tactic again this year and that his reaction would hinge on the type of funding eliminated.

“It would depend on what it is — it really would,” the Oklahoma Republican said last month.

In courtrooms throughout the country, federal judges continue to weigh in on whether Trump is illegally encroaching on Congress’ funding power.

Last month a federal judge declared that the administration can’t cancel grants based on new rules or goals established after the fact. The Trump administration later admitted in a different case that it canceled $7.6 billion “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state.” Then a federal judge halted changes to teen-pregnancy prevention grants, concluding that it’s unlawful “to impose conditions … that Congress did not intend or that are unreasonable or unexplained.”

The Supreme Court has yet to conclusively rule on the president’s spending tactics, and many Democrats on Capitol Hill argue Republicans shouldn’t rely on the courts to defend Congress’ authority. GOP leaders have repeatedly bucked Democratic calls for action, including to reverse the cancellation of specific grants, nullify Trump’s pocket rescission last fall and head off a future end-run around Congress by barring rescissions requests in the last months of the fiscal year.

“When are our Republican colleagues going to assert our legislative authority?” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, a top appropriator, said in an interview. “I mean, why in the hell did they run for Congress?”

Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, a senior appropriator in line to be the No. 2 Democrat in the next Congress, was more charitable.

“I just think there’s a bipartisan desire to get back to the way the Constitution is supposed to operate,” he said in an interview, “where we decide how the money is spent.”

Fatality rate of 47.4%

Congo's Ebola outbreak reaches 5,000 cases as it outpaces response efforts

By The Associated Press

The Ebola outbreak in Congo has reached 5,000 cases, government data showed Wednesday, as responders warn it is spreading at an unprecedented speed outpacing efforts to slow it in one of the country's remotest regions.

Data from Congo's Ministry of Health showed the outbreak had so far recorded 5,021 cases, including 2,378 deaths as of Sunday, as it rages in some of the most challenging conditions imaginable fueled by insecurity, displacement and intense population movements.

The outbreak has infected and killed more people at a greater speed than any other outbreak in history. The World Health Organization estimates it will likely surpass the outbreak of 2014 to 2016 across West Africa, which was the deadliest Ebola outbreak on record with more than 11,000 deaths.

Starting from the first detected case, the current outbreak has spread about three times faster than the deadliest on record.

The outbreak "has spread rapidly and the risk of further national and international spread remains high," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Tuesday at a meeting convened by the agency.

"We must be frank: the epidemic is far from being under control," he said.

Thérèse Anyiya, a nurse working in Ituri's capital Bunia, said she is exhausted by the work demands and poor working conditions. Some health workers have gone on strike after not being paid.

"If the managers don't take things seriously, we too will end up withdrawing. The way this epidemic is being managed is exhausting," Anyiya told The Associated Press.

A key challenge has been the lack of approved vaccines or treatments for the rare Bundibugyo virus, which is responsible for the current outbreak. Most new cases are being reported outside of the people being monitored, showing it has spread quickly and left surveillance teams racing to catch up.

Lack of information in Ituri causes attacks on health workers

Ituri, the province that has been hit the worst by the outbreak, has become a primary location for violence that has limited the response as health workers are targeted.

Residents on Monday attacked a health team in the territory of Aru after a suspected case was reported there. A mob set fire to an ambulance and damaged two other vehicles, according to Michael Wani, president of the Union of Cultural Associations for the Development of Ituri.

Dr. Martin Cwinyay, who is involved in the Ituri response efforts, explained it is "essential to bring the response closer to the people, particularly in rural, mining and displacement areas."

Trish Newport, an emergency coordinator with Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF, said not all the people in the impacted areas have the essential information they need.

"The community needs to be aware about the outbreak. They need to be involved in the response. They need to know what the signs and symptoms are and what to do if they get sick," Newport said.

Limited care is resulting in more deaths

Experts believe the virus began spreading from the mining town of Mongbwalu as early as February, months before authorities declared the outbreak on May 15.

Responders racing to catch up are also battling several other challenges including threats by rebel groups, anger from communities that have been traumatized for years and bad roads into the affected territories.

Although the 2014-2016 outbreak is considered the deadliest among the virus types that causes Ebola disease, government data shows this Bundibugyo outbreak has killed a higher percentage of people as care and support are not getting to patients quickly enough, while many are not reporting symptoms or doing so late.

The situation also varies across the six affected provinces. While the case fatality rate is so far 47.4%, it is far worse in some places where response efforts are more challenging, such as in North Kivu province where the fatality rate is 70%.