Anonymous no more

Monsters of 2020: Miles Taylor

The former Department of Homeland Security official is anonymous no more.

NOAH LANARD

Just before the election, Miles Taylor revealed that he’d written the anonymous New York Times op-ed “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” while serving as the Department of Homeland Security’s deputy chief of staff. I was curious what kind of person would present himself as a heroic resister after having helped lead a department that separated thousands of families at the border. So I did some Googling and found 2020’s Monster of the Meritocracy.

Taylor’s path to power started in the halls of Congress, where, working as a congressional page as a teenager, he ran into Vice President Dick Cheney and wished him luck in his reelection bid. Taylor wondered in his high school paper why he, a Democrat, would wish a Republican good luck. But in what would become a pattern, he cut himself some slack. While his classmates were worrying about how they looked to that “special someone,” he was worrying about how he looked to the vice president. He styled himself a young insider, having already interviewed Chris Matthews and dined with Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.).

On a break from Indiana University, he interned for the Defense Department and then for Cheney before becoming, at 20, the youngest political appointee in the Bush administration after getting a spot at DHS. As a Marshall Scholar, he split his time between Washington and Oxford while working to open a DC charter school, write a book on “The Rise and Fall of America’s Post-9/11 ‘Freedom Agenda,’” and produce a documentary about congressional pages. After Oxford, he worked on the Republican staff of the House Homeland Security Committee.

Taylor could have left Capitol Hill for any number of lucrative (if mildly monstrous) gigs. Instead, under President Donald Trump, he rejoined DHS, which had just implemented the first Muslim ban. From there, he quickly rose from an adviser position to chief of staff of the 240,000-person department.

Here are a few of the things DHS did as Taylor climbed the ladder there: It implemented a new Muslim ban, which Taylor publicly defended. It moved to strip some 700,000 immigrants who’d come to the country as children of their work permits, and it tried to do the same to hundreds of thousands of people who’d been living with Temporary Protected Status for decades. It announced a wealth test for prospective immigrants. It separated thousands of families at the border and forced asylum seekers to wait in dangerous Mexican border cities, where they were extorted and kidnapped.

What exactly Taylor was doing while all this happened is unclear. In his telling, he resisted. He claimed, for example, that he tried to stop, or at least slow down, the “zero tolerance” policy that split up families at the border. A Trump administration official provided a different perspective to BuzzFeed, saying, “On multiple occasions, I sat within inches of Miles Taylor during meetings solely focused on ‘zero tolerance’ policy, and he was neither silent nor vocally opposed to the weighty decisions before us.” We do know that none of Trump’s assaults on immigrants prompted Taylor to publish his anonymous op-ed; he decided to write it because Trump resisted lowering flags to half-mast after John McCain died. 

Taylor faced no immediate consequences for his work at DHS. After he left, Google quickly hired him as its head of national security policy engagement. When some employees later objected, the company misled them by saying Taylor was “not involved in the family separation policy.” As emails obtained by BuzzFeed showed, Taylor provided talking points and a “Protecting Children Narrative” to then-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen as she claimed that there was no family separation policy.

Along with his Google responsibilities, Taylor found time to write his book, the #1 New York Times bestseller A Warning. In the book, the author, “Anonymous,” writes that family separation was a stain on the country and the leaders of DHS without revealing that he was one of them. Taylor later said he regretted not doing more to stop the policy. But when news broke a few months afterward that more than 500 parents separated from their children still hadn’t been found, Taylor returned to his usual obfuscating, falsely suggesting that it was because a lot of the parents didn’t want to “claim” their kids.

A week before the election, Taylor revealed he was Anonymous. By December, he was playing the victim. A Washington Post profile reported that he was moving between undisclosed locations after receiving death threats, that his finances were in “tatters” but not in tatters enough to be without private security, and that he’s had “serious marital problems.” Told that he sounded like someone with electoral ambitions, he wouldn’t say whether he was planning to run for office. The meritocracy has more rungs to climb.

Ski Vacation....... And eating cake...

 Mike Pence Was Enjoying a Ski Vacation While Millions Lost Unemployment Benefits

JACOB ROSENBERG

According to reporting by RealVail.com, a Vail, Colorado news outlet, Vice President Mike Pence is celebrating the holidays in the wealthy ski town. His frivolity is not the experience of many of those living in the United States—especially those struggling as they wait for the government to move toward a deal on a COVID relief bill that has stalled because of President Donald Trump.

On December 18, Pence received the first of two shots of the coronavirus vaccine. But until he has received his second the vaccination process is not complete. As of today, there have been over 19 million cases, with more than 200,000 reported yesterday.

Vail, Colorado is famously “tony,” a small ski town with a median income over $80,000.  Gerald Ford, a fan of hitting the slopes, went to the valley often. It was dubbed, during his tenure, the “Western White House.

So while millions of Americans worry about how they will feed their families or make rent, Mike Pence is skiing. Trump, meanwhile, is golfing.

Pence has still not commented on or confirmed his current location.

Horrendous Loeffler’s Conflict of Interest

Kelly Loeffler’s Conflict of Interest Is Even Worse Than Reported

The senator had power over regulators whose work directly affected her own financial interests.

DAVID CORN

As she campaigns for reelection in the January 5 run-off, Kelly Loeffler, the super-wealthy former corporate executive and Republican donor who was appointed in late 2019 to a vacant US Senate seat in Georgia, has had to deal with bruising revelations about her personal finances and business dealings. These include the fact that when she entered the Senate in January 2020, she was given a spot on the Agriculture Committee, which oversees government regulators of the Fortune 500 business where she was recently a top officer. The company, Intercontinental Exchange (known as ICE), owns and operates a number of financial and commodity exchanges regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which falls under jurisdiction of the Agriculture Committee.

Loeffler’s assignment to the committee seemed a whopping conflict of interest: She still owned between $5 million and $25 million in ICE stock, and her husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, is its CEO. Worse, Loeffler was placed on the committee’s subcommittee on commodities, which has direct oversight of the CFTC. In response to criticism, she left the subcommittee in May but remained a member of the full committee.

Yet one piece of this tale has received little notice. Her conflict of interest was even more pronounced, for while Loeffler was on the commodities subcommittee, the CFTC took several actions that impacted ICE. This means Loeffler was overseeing regulators at the same time they were engaged in activity affecting a company she was intimately tied to as a current shareholder, former executive, and spouse of its CEO. That’s very swampy.

The CFTC is highly important for ICE. As the firm’s annual report put it, several of its exchanges are “subject to extensive regulation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.” The Wall Street Journal noted that the CFTC’s “rule-making agenda can have a major impact on the company’s operations.” While a senior exec at ICE, Loeffler criticized the CFTC for proposing “excess regulation.”

One particular conflict was rather obvious. In 2018, Loeffler left the ICE corporate team to become head of Bakkt, a new federally regulated market for trading Bitcoin that ICE launched. A short time later, when she was a senator overseeing the CFTC, ICE was concerned that Bakkt could be severely hurt by CFTC regulations. ICE pointed this out in a filing it submitted to the Securities and Exchange Committee in February 2020. The filing noted that the “CFTC has designated bitcoin as a commodity…subject to the CFTC’s jurisdiction and enforcement powers.” It stated that if the CFTC pursued an aggressive approach to this exchange, “it may have a significant adverse impact on Bakkt’s business and plan of operations.” ICE pointed out that CFTC activity—or the lack thereof—was crucial for the future prospects of the venture Loeffler once headed: “Ongoing and future regulatory actions may impact the ability of Bakkt to continue to operate, and such actions could affect the ability of Bakkt to continue as a going concern.” (In March 2020, the CFTC issued a major decision affecting cryptocurrency markets.)

And Loeffler had a direct financial interest in Bakkt. In early 2019, she was awarded a $15.6 million stake in a company that owned a chunk of Bakkt—about half of which she cashed out at the end of that year when she left the firm, in an arrangement criticized by corporate governance experts. 

So Loeffler was one of a handful of senators on the subcommittee that keeps a watch on the CFTC when the commission was making decisions essential to her old company and a subsidiary she had run—two corporate entities in which she held large investments. 

At this time, the CFTC was taking other actions that held consequences for ICE. On March 17, 2020, the commission, in response to the coronavirus pandemic, eased reporting requirements for financial exchanges known as “swap execution facilities” and “designated contract markets.” ICE has a swap trade business. It also had a subsidiary, ICE Futures US, that was a designated contract market. As the CFTC noted in its letter announcing this regulatory change, the action had been requested by ICE Futures US and five other exchanges. At the same time, the commission adopted similar steps for “futures commission merchants.” Bakkt was registered as a futures commission merchant with the CFTC. 

These regulatory shifts, as the Wall Street Journal explained, would “allow trading venues, banks, brokers and other parties to skip certain record-keeping requirements until June 30 if they work from home. Under normal circumstances traders must have systems in place to record phone calls in which trades are executed, as well as timestamps for derivatives transactions. Because they are unlikely to have access to recorded phone lines and other systems in their homes, the CFTC will allow traders to keep manual records of transactions.” But this move had a possible danger, as Justin Slaughter, a former CFTC official, told the Journal: “There is a risk that some traders will operate in ways that are contrary to regulation or law. That is a very unfortunate risk. It’s the reason we don’t let people trade at home under normal circumstances for large desks. But at the moment we have to take into account other considerations.” Though traders contended this suspension of regulations was necessary during a pandemic, some international regulators feared that permitting traders to put aside crucial means of recording trades would lead to assorted abuses, including insider trading and market manipulation.

The CFTC frequently issued rules related to Loeffler’s old company, as she sat on the subcommittee. In February—pre-COVID—the CFTC revised other regulations for data record-keeping and reporting requirements relevant to ICE and its subsidiaries. And in late January 2020, the commission approved new regulations governing seven different commodity contracts run by ICE. 

During this stretch in early 2020, ICE was busy lobbying the Senate, the House, and the CFTC regarding the “regulation of the trading system for agriculture, energy and other futures” and related legislation, according to a lobbying disclosure form the company had to fill out. In the first three months of 2020, ICE spent $726,454 on these lobbying efforts. (ICE’s well-connected lobbyists included Alex Albert, once an aide to former Sen. Zell Miller, a Georgia Democrat, and Hope Jarkowski, a former aide for the Senate Banking Committee.) The firm spent nearly another $500,000 on similar lobbying in the subsequent six months. ICE’s lobbying disclosure forms do not require it to state whether its lobbyists had any contact with Loeffler.

Even though Loeffler departed the subcommittee overseeing the CFTC amid criticism, by remaining on the Agriculture Committee, she did not fully resolve the conflict of interest. And a review of the CFTC’s regulatory actions—particularly when Loeffler was a member of the subcommittee—shows just how far Loeffler went in ignoring the conflict between her official responsibilities and her private interests. She had power over regulators whose work affected her previous companies and her own current financial condition (and that of her husband). In her world, it seems, there was nothing wrong with that.

Monsters

Monsters of 2020: Sonny Perdue

He spent the year campaigning for Trump while harming poor people and food workers during a pandemic

TOM PHILPOTT

Presumably, some political appointees who served in the Trump administration did so with earnest intentions, hoping to bring dignity and professionalism to the task of advancing the Republican agenda of deregulation, austerity (for non-cronies), and upward wealth redistribution. Then there were the full-on MAGA-bots like, say, Sonny Perdue, Georgia politician and agribusiness entrepreneur who became agriculture secretary. He spent his 2020 like he spent the other years of his Washington stint: flattering his boss at every opportunity, and lavishing largesse on political allies while undercutting poor people and food-system workers.  

Perdue is a kind of an easy-going Southern version of the president he served so zealously. Like Trump, he’s a former Democrat who ascended to political power (in Perdue’s case, Georgia governor) in a stunning upset. As governor from 2003 until 2011, he celebrated the state’s legacy of chattel slavery—signing 2009 legislation making April “Confederate History and Heritage Month,” honoring the “more than 90,000 brave men and women who served the Confederate States of America.” He was an early adopter of race-motivated voter suppression, signing into law one of the nation’s first “strict” ID laws.

Purdue merged the voter-fraud myth with another racist fantasy, also fervently indulged by Trump, that undocumented immigrants burden taxpayers by siphoning welfare benefits. “It is simply unacceptable for people to sneak into this country illegally on Thursday, obtain a government-issued ID on Friday, head for the welfare office on Monday, and cast a vote on Tuesday,” he declared, backing up his rancid lies with a crackdown on undocumented people. His anti-immigrant machinations worked all too well, creating a crippling labor shortage for Georgia’s immigrant-dependent farms and poultry slaughterhouses. 

As governor, Perdue mastered the Trumpian strategy of using know-nothing bigotry as a beard for brazen self-dealing, sometimes involving his own family. In 2005, Georgia state Rep. Larry O’Neal—Perdue’s personal lawyer—managed to pass what the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called a “seemingly mundane tax bill” that included a “a last-minute change” that saved the governor an estimated $100,000 in state taxes.

In 2010, at the tail end of his second term as governor, Perdue named his cousin, David Perdue—who had just stepped down as chief executive of Dollar General discount stores—to the board of the Georgia Ports Authority. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, it was a plum post for the political novice, which he used as springboard that helped propel him to a US Senate seat in 2014. In this 2017 post, I recount some of the port-related shenanigans the cousins Perdue got up to together, including launching a port-reliant export business. (David Perdue is now locked in a tight runoff election that could decide which party controls the Senate in the next Congress.)

Meanwhile, in 2020, the pandemic ravaged meatpacking workers and put millions of out of work, causing a surge in the need for food assistance—both very much areas of concern for the agriculture department. @SecretarySonny (to use his folksy Twitter handle) stayed the course that characterized his entire time at UDSA. The COVID-19 crisis served as yet another opportunity to promote the political fortunes of his boss, without impeding his pursuit of a pro-agribusiness, anti-worker agenda. In July, with the economic fallout from the pandemic generating a massive hunger crisis, Perdue alighted on North Carolina, a key swing state, to stage a rally promoting congressionally mandated food aid as an example of the personal benevolence of Donald Trump. The harangue, which ended with the ag secretary leading a chant of “four more years,” earned Perdue a knuckle-rap from the Office of Special Counsel for violating the Hatch Act, which forbids government employees from campaigning while on the job. The Perdue USDA also insisted that federally funded grocery boxes distributed by food banks contain a letter signed by Trump, touting the administration’s coronavirus response.

While Perdue puffed up the generosity of his boss, the USDA was busy botching the food-relief effort, awarding fat contracts to distributors ill-equipped to handle them, with the result that “some parts of the country got a lot of food, while others got very little,” NPR reported.

Undeterred by the pandemic-led spike in hunger, Perdue also doubled- and tripled-down on a long-held goal: boosting work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that would eliminate food aid for at least 1.2 million people—about a third of them households containing senior citizens, nearly a quarter with children, and 11 percent with a disabled person, according to nonpartisan think tank Mathematica.

Not satisfied with fighting to take food off the tables of poor families, Perdue also set his sights on farm workers. At the beginning of 2020, Perdue yearned publicly for a way to cut federally mandated wages for migrant farm workers on guest visas. Then the pandemic hit, ripping through migrant farm worker communities, who toiled on with little in the way of protective gear or opportunities for social distancing. Perdue’s response? He continued his effort to cut their wages, ultimately teaming with the Department of Labor on a rule change that will result in an aggregate wage cut worth at least $170.68 million annually over the next ten years—a transfer of money from low-wage workers to relatively wealthy farm owners.

Similarly, while the pandemic ravaged meatpacking workers, killing at least 563 as of mid-December, the ag department kept on with a trend it had started in 2019: allowing giant poultry companies to speed up their slaughterhouse kill lines. Faster kill lines boost packer profits even as they put already pandemic-stressed workers under greater strain, while also making proper social distancing even more difficult. An investigation by the Food and Environment Reporting Network’s Leah Douglas found that at least 40 percent of chicken plants operating at the higher speeds experienced COVID outbreaks, versus 14 percent for the overall meat sector. Coronavirus-riddled slaughterhouses, in turn, emerged as primary vectors for spreading the pathogen to surrounding communities.

The Perdue USDA’s largesse to large-scale farmers and agribusinesses went beyond cutting wages and protective measures for their workers. In July, as the general election heated up, the department tapped a Depression-era funding mechanism called the Commodity Credit Corporation to come up with $14 billion—without having to consult Congress—to hand to producers of commodities like corn, soybeans and wheat, ostensibly for losses due to the coronavirus. Using the CCC to hand billions to big farmers—major Trump supporters in 2016— is a signature move of Perdue’s USDA. Citing export losses from Trump’s trade war with China, the USDA lavished mainly huge soybean, hog, and cotton farmers with $28 billion in 2018 and 2019—more than double the price tag of President Barack Obama’s 2009 auto bailout.

Through it all, Perdue maintained his extraordinary podcast, The Sonnyside of the Farm, a monthly testament to the genius of his boss and the glory of big agribusiness. Launched in October 2019, a week after the House of Representatives announced an impeachment inquiry against Trump, the show began with an appearance from Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Entitled “President Trump’s Affection for American Farmers,” the episode featured the host and former White House press secretary competing to see who could lavish the most praise on Trump. Was it Sanders with “the most fun, engaging, charming, and charismatic people I’ve ever been around”? Or Perdue’s observation of how Trump “has an amazing instinctive ability to make decisions”? 

In the podcast’s final episode before the election, released Oct. 29, Perdue hosted another MAGA loyalist, the high-living former Wall Street man and TV personality Larry Kudlow, the non-economist who Trump improbably chose to lead the National Economic Council. Kudlow used the opportunity to fluff Trump’s economic record. He praised the tax cuts and the program of deregulation, which, he claimed,  “benefitted the people who needed it most,” those “in the middle, and the lower rungs.” It’s little wonder, that Trump would train his benevolence on the little people, because “he’s a blue-collar guy” who “worked for years in the construction yards, with all kinds of folks, all colors,” Kudlow informed Perdue’s listeners.

Enlivened by these bald lies, and perhaps feeling a competitive spark, Perdue replied that Trump is “the embodiment of the amazing spirit that built this country.” He sounded quite satisfied after a year spent campaigning for his boss while inflicting lasting damage to poor people and food-system workers during a deadly pandemic that the administration did so very little to control.

Oversee certification of Biden's Electoral College win

Gohmert suit may force Pence's hand in effort to overturn Trump's defeat

The vice president is set to oversee certification of Biden's Electoral College win.

By KYLE CHENEY

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) and President Donald Trump's defeated electors from Arizona may force Vice President Mike Pence to publicly pick a side in Trump’s bid to overturn his 2020 election loss.

Gohmert and a handful of the would-be electors sued Pence in federal court on Monday in a long-shot bid to throw out the rules that govern Congress' counting of electoral votes next week. It’s an effort they hope will permit Pence — who is tasked with leading the Jan. 6 session of the House and Senate — to simply ignore President-elect Joe Biden's electors and count Trump's losing slates instead.

The lawsuit asserts that the 1887 law known as the Electoral Count Act, the vague statute that has long governed the electoral vote counting process with minimal drama, unconstitutionally binds Pence from exercising total authority to choose which votes to count.

"Under the Twelfth Amendment, Defendant Pence alone has the exclusive authority and sole discretion to open and permit the counting of the electoral votes for a given state, and where there are competing slates of electors, or where there is objection to any single slate of electors, to determine which electors’ votes, or whether none, shall be counted," the suit contends.

The lawsuit comes before Judge Jeremy Kernodle, a Trump appointee to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. It's unclear if he'll grant the request for an expedited judgment.

Though the lawsuit itself is unlikely to gain legal traction, it does put Pence in the position of having to either contest the suit — putting him on the opposite side of Trump and his GOP defenders — or support it and lay bare the intention to subvert the will over the voters in the 2020 election.

Pence has engaged with GOP lawmakers seeking to reverse the election results but has avoided publicly taking a side in the matter, and he has given no indication how he intends to handle his role presiding over the Jan. 6 session of Congress set to certify Biden's victory.

Though Biden was the certified winner in states like Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and others, the Republicans who would have been Trump's electors met anyway and purported to cast their votes for Trump's reelection. They're counting on Pence and congressional Republicans to treat those informal votes as equal to the slates certified in those states where Trump was defeated.

Pence, the suit contends, may only be guided by constitutional provisions and may exercise "sole discretion in determining which electoral votes to count for a given State, and must ignore and may not rely on any provisions of the Electoral Count Act that would limit his exclusive authority."

Gohmert indicates in the suit that he will be one of the House Republicans who intend to challenge Biden's electors from key states. Dozens of other House Republicans intend to follow suit, and at least one incoming GOP senator — Tommy Tuberville of Alabama — has signaled he's likely to join them. It's unclear if other GOP senators will as well.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has worked to dissuade his caucus from participating in the challenges, and the second-ranking GOP leader, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), drew a fierce attack from Trump after he told reporters that any challenges to the results were doomed to fail.

Under the rules Gohmert is challenging, all it takes is a single member of each branch to challenge electors from multiple states to force a vote on the matter. But any challenge is likely to fail under the expected rules. The Democrat-led House will vote to uphold Biden's win, and numerous GOP senators have indicated they do not intend to support Trump's efforts.

Throwing out those rules, per Gohmert, would allow Pence to decide which electors to consider in the first place, raising the specter that he could simply choose to count Trump's slate.

Trump allies have repeatedly pointed to Pence's role at the center of the Electoral College certification process as a reason to take hope that the election results could still be reversed. Trump even amplified one such theory last week, retweeting a suggestion that Pence could intervene in the transmission of electoral votes to the National Archives.

At least earlier this month, Pence was planning to oversee Biden’s victory and then try to escape Trump’s ire by heading abroad for what might be his final diplomatic trip in office. If Pence ultimately opts out of participating in the session, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the Senate president pro tem, would likely preside.

Vanishing ranks

Yellen’s looming headache: Treasury’s vanishing ranks

Janet Yellen, if confirmed, would have a special urgency to replenish the Domestic Finance division.

By VICTORIA GUIDA

Janet Yellen, poised to become U.S. Treasury secretary, will be focused on preventing the collapse of the fragile economic recovery. Her first order of business will be making sure there are enough people at the department to help.

Key divisions at Treasury have been hollowed out by attrition during the Trump administration under Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who has sought to cut “wasteful spending,” including on personnel he sees as superfluous. Between fiscal years 2016 and 2019, the department’s main offices — Domestic Finance, Economic Policy and International Affairs, among them — saw their staffing levels plunge by nearly a quarter as budgets were slashed.

Yellen, if confirmed, would have a special urgency to replenish the Domestic Finance division, which functions as the nerve center for the department’s response to economic crises, overseeing grant programs, housing policy and financial markets. Its budget has been drained the most severely.

“The entire team that is going to be focused on a national recovery is the one that is hurt the most right out of the gate,” said Kody Kinsley, who served as assistant Treasury secretary for management from 2016 to 2018. And hiring new career staff can take several months at least.

“They’re not going to be able to hire up fast enough to consider the task ahead of them,” Kinsley added. “They’re going to have to leverage the talent they have.”

The economic recovery is faltering as President-elect Joe Biden prepares to take the oath of office, with job growth slowing and coronavirus cases rising. Congress is unlikely to pass much major legislation next year, unless control of the Senate flips, and interest rates set by the Federal Reserve are already near zero, making the Treasury Department’s role in returning the economy to its prepandemic health that much more central.

In fiscal 2019, the number of full-time employees at Treasury’s main departmental offices — excluding the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, where staffing has steadily increased — fell to 645 from 1,003 in 2016, a 35 percent decrease. Even with the terrorism division, whose budget and staff are listed separately, the drop was 24 percent.

The department expected staffing to jump to 746 in fiscal 2020, though final numbers are not yet publicly available. Along with the terrorism and financial intelligence division, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States — a Treasury-led panel that vets foreign purchases of U.S. companies for national security risks — saw a budget increase in fiscal 2020 compared with 2016.

“Since Secretary Mnuchin assumed office in early 2017, the [departmental office] headcount has remained essentially flat,” a Treasury spokesperson said in an email. “Under his leadership, the Department has redirected resources to high priority offices such as TFI and CFIUS, expanding them considerably.”

But staffing could still dwindle further. A recent federal survey of department employees suggests that as many as 1 in 5 career officials at Treasury plan to retire within the next three years.

Mnuchin has also never had a full complement of political appointees, partly because he likes it that way and partly because the confirmation process is arduous. In addition to providing policy direction to career staff, those appointees perform managerial duties.

Mnuchin operated without a deputy for the first two years of his tenure. The division of Domestic Finance has not had an official exclusively tasked with running its operations since Craig Phillips, who had the title of “counselor,” left in June 2019. Much of the department’s duties now are performed by a few unconfirmed advisers.

The department already has shown signs of strain as it worked to keep the economy afloat amid the crippling pandemic this year.

The Treasury had joint responsibility with the Small Business Administration for implementing the massive Paycheck Protection Program, which doled out $525 billion in loans to employers to keep them afloat. While the program aided millions of businesses, it was hampered by a rocky rollout and controversy about whether the smallest businesses had adequate access to the money.

Although the program was always destined to face some bumps due its unprecedented scope, Treasury drew scorn from banks — which were on the front lines of giving out the loans — because of a hurried launch that left lenders in the dark about key rules of the program. Mnuchin was then drawn into a backlash against the effort after initial loans went to large, well-heeled businesses such as Shake Shack and the Los Angeles Lakers, which both later returned the money.

“The executive branch derives much of its power from having many more people,” said Aaron Klein, who was a deputy assistant Treasury secretary for economic policy under President Barack Obama. “Treasury’s position as one of the premier agencies is largely driven by its excellent career staff.”

“Treasury’s domestic finance operation was even too small when I was there,” added Klein, now a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “There are some structural issues that are at play, like the graying of the federal workforce, but there’s also management concerns. The Trump administration purposely understaffed the political ranks of Treasury, which has to have consequences for effectively managing the career staff.”

A former Treasury official argued that it made some sense that Mnuchin allowed staffing to decrease; once implementation of sweeping new financial rules after the 2008 credit crisis began to wind down, the domestic finance division probably didn’t need as big of a staff at the beginning of the Trump administration.

“But you always have to think about the tail risk — a financial crisis or a pandemic that causes a financial disturbance,” the former official said. “That’s when a smaller staff can expose some problems.”

Klein said it was positive that Yellen, a former Federal Reserve chair, already knows what it’s like to run a large agency, and her designated deputy, Wally Adeyemo, has extensive experience at Treasury, including as deputy chief of staff.

But Yellen and Adeyemo could face barriers to bringing in their own people, given the possibility of a Republican-controlled Senate. That will create pressure for the new leadership to find ways to bring people on board quickly, such as by appointing counselors.

While Treasury has long had such advisers, the conception of the counselor title changed slightly when Obama appointed Antonio Weiss as counselor for Domestic Finance in early 2015 to run the division. Weiss, the onetime head of investment banking at Lazard, had faced opposition, notably from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and was installed without confirmation.

Mnuchin has expanded that idea to fill more roles that traditionally have been held by Senate-confirmed officials with counselors.

“It’s almost impossible for [Yellen] not to [resort to appointing counselors], depending on what happens on Jan. 5,” a former Trump administration official said, referring to the two Georgia runoff elections, which will determine control of the Senate. “I can’t imagine that the Senate’s going to work exceptionally fast to confirm an entire suite of politicals.”

At the career staff level, Yellen could bring in temporary aides on detail from other agencies, such as from the independent financial regulators, which often poach Treasury employees by offering higher pay. Kinsley also said there’s a lot of knowledge spread out across different bureaus housed within Treasury.

“Knowing where to find those people is going to be really, really critical,” he said.

Blocks voter purge......

Judge blocks voter purge in 2 Georgia counties

Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner, sister of Stacey Abrams, rejected a call for her to recuse.

By KYLE CHENEY and JOSH GERSTEIN

A federal judge in Georgia on Monday ordered two counties to reverse a decision removing more than 4,000 voters from the rolls ahead of the Jan. 5 runoff elections that will decide control of the U.S. Senate.

The judge, Leslie Abrams Gardner — the sister of former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, a prominent ally of President-elect Joe Biden who has led voter registration efforts across the state — concluded that the counties appeared to have improperly relied on unverified change-of-address data to invalidate registrations in the two counties.

The bulk of the registrations that the counties sought to rescind, more than 4,000, were in Muscogee County, which Biden won handily in November. An additional 150 were from Ben Hill County, which Trump won by a wide margin.

The suit, brought by Majority Forward, represented by National Democratic Party attorney Marc Elias, followed an effort to challenge the lengthy roster of voters simply because their registrations appeared to match U.S. Postal Service change-of address records. Voting officials in the two counties agreed to remove the voters, despite warnings from Democrats that such postal data is not a reliable or conclusive indicator that a voter has given up their local residence.

After Gardner’s ruling, Elias hailed the decision as a “blow to GOP voter suppression.”

“We continue to monitor how other Georgia counties respond to the suppression scheme,” he added. “Where necessary, we will sue and we will win.”

The evidence to challenge the 4,000 registrations in Muscogee County was particularly sparse. The challenge was lodged Dec. 14 by a local voter named Ralph Russell who alleged that he had compared evidence from publicly accessible voter registration databases to prove that these voters had moved out of Georgia.

“I believe that each of the individuals named ... as a result of registering their name and change of address to a location outside of Muscogee County, removed to another state with the intention of making the new state their residence,” Russell told the county board. “Thus, each individual has lost their residence in Muscogee County, and consequently, each individual is ineligible to vote in Muscogee County.”

The Muscogee board met Dec. 16 and backed Russell’s motion 3-1, even though he didn’t attend the meeting and provided no additional evidence to support his challenge. Voters on Russell’s list, per the board, would be required to vote by provisional ballot and present additional evidence of residency to vote.

In Ben Hill County, the board voted 2-1 to support a challenge lodged by Tommy Roberts, a member of the City Council in Fitzgerald, Ga. Roberts similarly relied on change-of-address data, and the board backed him despite evidence that the data could not be verified and would be inadmissible in court.

“Despite this advice from the County Attorney, the Ben Hill Board voted to find that there was probable cause to sustain the challenges,” Gardner noted.

Gardner’s 11-page ruling released Monday night noted that the removals of the voters appeared to violate federal law because they were not given proper notice and because they qualify as the type of systematic voter roll cleaning that is not permitted within 90 days of a federal election.

The Muscogee board filed a motion earlier Monday arguing that Gardner must remove herself from the case based on her relationship with her sister, Abrams.

Lawyers for the board, described Abrams as “a Georgia politician and voting rights activist who was the Democratic candidate in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election and has since engaged in various highly publicized efforts to increase voter registration and turnout for the 2020 general election in Georgia.”

The motion requesting Gardner’s recusal noted that a voter registration group affiliated with Abrams, Fair Fight, filed a suit in another federal court in Georgia last week complaining that a national organization dedicated to targeting voter fraud, True the Vote, is making unjustified challenges to Georgia voters in the lead-up to the Jan. 5 runoffs.

“Abrams’ involvement in the Fair Fight Litigation ... is sufficient to satisfy the standard for mandatory judicial recusal,” the board’s attorneys wrote. “Abrams has a clear interest in the outcome of this proceeding and other similarly situated litigation in Georgia due to her voting advocacy through projects such as Fair Fight and the New Georgia Project.”

Gardner, an appointee of President Barack Obama, noted the recusal request in her ruling granting the restraining order and said she is declining to step aside.

“The Court has reviewed the motion and finds no basis for recusal. An Order detailing the Court’s reasoning is forthcoming,” the judge wrote.

Republicans splinter

House passes stimulus check boost as Republicans splinter

With Trump calling for more economic relief, Democrats are eager to squeeze the GOP.

By HEATHER CAYGLE

The House voted overwhelmingly Monday to roughly triple pandemic-related stimulus checks — but it may amount to more of a political maneuver than an effort to ultimately deliver additional relief.

The 275-134 vote came with a few dozen Republicans joining nearly all Democrats to back the increase, which was first demanded by President Donald Trump last week as he threatened to kill a massive aid package.

The House’s move comes 24 hours after Trump relented and signed the $2.3 trillion funding and coronavirus relief bill, narrowly avoiding a government shutdown. For days, Trump had refused to sign the bill and complained on Twitter that the direct payments should be increased from the current $600 to $2,000 per individual.

“We could’ve passed the bill four days ago but our colleagues on the other side went against the president’s wishes and blocked it,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) said Monday.

Action now turns to the Senate, where it’s unclear if the chamber will even take up the House proposal, despite Trump insisting Sunday night he had secured an agreement from Republican leaders to do so. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer will try to pass the House bill by unanimous consent Tuesday but Republicans are expected to object. Many GOP senators have previously resisted higher stimulus checks.

Unless there's cooperation from all 100 senators, it would take several days to set up a roll call vote on the proposal and it would need to garner 60 votes. That's a steep path toward approval — and it's all occurring during what should be a holiday break for Congress.

But even if Democrats cannot secure higher payments for the public, Trump has handed them an opportunity to seize a politically popular stance and divide the GOP in the process. Just 44 House Republicans voted for the larger checks, with 130 opposed.

“The president of the United States has put this forth as something he wants to see,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said before the vote. “I hope that view will be shared by the Republicans in the Senate.”

President-elect Joe Biden also weighed in on the issue Monday, telling reporters he was in favor of boosting the checks to $2,000. Trump was unusually quiet on Monday, with the only reported sightings of the president occurring at his golf course in West Palm Beach.

In a press conference Monday, Schumer said Trump needs to be much more vocal in demanding Republican support if he wants to get the stimulus boost enacted.

“These Senate Republicans have followed you through thick and thin,” Schumer said. “To the president: talking is not enough. Act. Get on the phone and get those Republicans in the Senate to support $2,000 in relief.”

In a sign that the bigger checks are gaining some favor among conservatives, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) endorsed the $2000 payments as the House voted: ”I share many of my colleagues’ concern about the long-term effects of additional spending, but we cannot ignore the fact that millions of working class families across the nation are still in dire need of relief.”

Still, Democrats expect, many Republicans will use the cost increase as a justification for not backing the bill. Increasing the direct payments to $2,000 would cost about $464 billion, up from the roughly $160 billion now, according to a congressional estimate released Monday.

A handful of Republicans, including Ways and Means Ranking Member Kevin Brady (R-Texas), spoke out in opposition to the bill, citing the added expense or saying the money could be better spent elsewhere in the economy.

The House was already scheduled to be in session Monday to dispatch another Trump-related wrinkle — the president’s veto of the annual defense policy bill. The bill, which has been signed into law for nearly 60 years straight, passed both chambers earlier this month with veto-proof majorities. If the House and Senate are successful this week in bucking Trump, it will be the first veto override of his presidency.

Late Monday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said he would block Senate consideration of the veto override until Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell agreed to bring the House's stimulus check bill up for a vote. The odd couple of Sanders and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) joined together to push for $1,200 stimulus checks during the coronavirus relief negotiations earlier this month.

The House stimulus vote on Monday caps off an unusually frenetic week in Washington, a town that even for its unpredictable political gambits is usually quiet over the Christmas and New Year holidays.

A week ago, Congress finally broke an eight-month logjam to pass the desperately needed aid bill after days of drama and hard-fought negotiations. Lawmakers quickly jetted out of town only to be blindsided mid-week by a video Trump posted on Twitter railing against the bill.

The ambush left Washington in limbo for several days, as the president continued to criticize the direct payment amounts negotiated by his own Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and the foreign aid levels requested by his own White House.

The move also teed up a game of chicken with congressional leaders, who refused to haul lawmakers back to Capitol Hill to address Trump’s demands and began making contingency plans in case the president allowed government funding to lapse Monday at midnight.

The House first tried to pass the bill boosting direct payments on Christmas Eve via unanimous consent but Republicans objected. Over the weekend, Trump continued to rail against the relief package only to finally sign it late Sunday after days of lobbying by some of his closest congressional allies, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

While Trump avoided a government shutdown, his delay caused at least a temporary lapse in critical unemployment benefits to millions of struggling Americans; the programs expired the day after Christmas and were renewed in the relief package.

In additional to unemployment aid and direct payments, the roughly $900 billion measure provides coronavirus funding for schools, small businesses and vaccine distribution.

Votes to override

House votes to override Trump veto of defense bill

The Senate is set to return to the Capitol on Tuesday to take up the issue.

By CONNOR O’BRIEN

The House on Monday rejected a bid by President Donald Trump to derail major defense policy legislation, rendering a bipartisan rebuke to the president in the final weeks of his administration.

Lawmakers voted 322 to 87 to override Trump's veto of the National Defense Authorization Act. If the Senate follows suit, lawmakers will deliver Trump the first and only veto override of his presidency.

The Senate is set to return to the Capitol on Tuesday to take up the issue, though a final vote may not occur until later this week. Two thirds of both chambers must sign off to enact the bill over Trump's objections, and lawmakers have until the new Congress is sworn in on Jan. 3 to finish the task.

Trump rejected the bill, H.R. 6395 (116), last week after lawmakers refused to budge on his last-minute demand to include a repeal of legal protections for social media companies. He also objected to provisions in the bill that would remove the names of Confederate leaders from military bases and place restrictions on U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and Europe.

But lawmakers in both parties closed ranks to salvage the popular legislation, which has become law each year for nearly six decades. This year's bill passed the House earlier this month 335-78 and a sailed through the Senate by a vote of 84-13.

Monday's override vote was a rare rebuke of Trump by Republican lawmakers, who have been hesitant to cross the president even as he fights a losing legal and political battle to overturn the results of the presidential election.

Republicans could have sunk the legislation if they sided with Trump and switched their votes en masse. But a slew of GOP lawmakers did switch votes — 109 House Republicans voted to overturn Trump's veto compared to the 140 who supported the compromise bill earlier this month.

Democrats, meanwhile, boosted their support for the bill, with 212 voting to override compared to 195 who supported the bill nearly three weeks ago.

Ahead of the vote, lawmakers from both parties warned that torpedoing the bill would have harsh consequences for the military, with many key pay and benefit provisions expiring on Dec. 31.

Leaders of the House Armed Services Committee underscored that Trump's chief objection is unrelated to national security and falls outside the panel's jurisdiction.

"The president vetoed this because of something that isn't in the bill and was never going to be in the bill, something totally unrelated to national security," Armed Services Chair Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said. "There is literally no reason for to veto this bill for the reasons that the president did, and certainly no reason for us not to uphold what we did in passing this bill."

The top Armed Services Republican, Mac Thornberry, pushed lawmakers to hold the line and noted that more than 80 percent of the House supported the same defense bill earlier this month.

"It's the exact same bill," Thornberry said. "Not a comma has changed."

"Our troops, the country, indeed the world is watching to see what we will do, whether we can tune out other difference and still come together to support the men and women of the military and American national security," he added.

No lawmakers spoke in favor of upholding the veto ahead of the vote.

The bill is named in honor of Thornberry, who is retiring from Congress after 13 terms in the House. Following Trump's veto last week, the Texas Republican circulated a note urging GOP lawmakers to base their votes on the myriad provisions in the bill rather than "distortions or misrepresentations" about the legislation.

A presidential veto has loomed over the must-pass bill for months.

Trump first threatened to veto the defense bill over the summer after the Senate Armed Services Committee adopted an amendment from progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to force the renaming bases that honor Confederates over a three-year period. The House followed suit with a provision to rename bases within a year, and a compromise bill included Warren's provision.

Trump also threatened to nix the bill late in negotiations between the House and Senate this month unless lawmakers repealed the online liability protections, known as Section 230. The issue is unrelated to national security, and many Republicans have called for a separate debate and vote on legislation to overhaul the law.

Trump said he'd received a pledge for a vote on a repeal of Section 230 after signing a separate full-year government funding package and coronavirus stimulus on Sunday.

"Congress has promised that Section 230, which so unfairly benefits Big Tech at the expense of the American people, will be reviewed and either be terminated or substantially reformed," Trump said in a statement.

Lawmakers in both parties contend Section 230 should be overhauled, but Democrats have rejected Trump's calls for a full repeal of the statute.

End of an era

America’s voice goes silent in Berlin as last US radio station closes

KCRW Berlin went off air this month.

BY NETTE NÖSTLINGER

American radio is a Berliner no more.

The postwar American presence on Berlin’s airways that began in the summer of 1945 when the city was still digging itself out of the rubble of World War II ended this month as the last U.S. radio station in the German capital ceased operation. For years, the station, known in its final iteration as KCRW Berlin, offered listeners a daily helping of local English-language news and eclectic music.

The idea behind the station was to deliver Berliners a dose of unfiltered Americana and to serve as a transatlantic bridge. Even in an era of podcasts, the offering found a loyal if small audience, from daily commuters to American expats.

“It’s a sad moment embodying the end of a tradition,” Anna Kuchenbecker, a member of KRCW Berlin’s board, said, blaming the shutdown on the pandemic. KCRW Berlin was operated in partnership with a California public radio affiliate with the same call sign. The economic fallout of the coronavirus forced the U.S. station to make steep cuts, including layoffs.

The closure comes at a time of deepening estrangement between the U.S. and Germany following years of Donald Trump’s attacks on Berlin. The longtime allies have recently been at odds across a range of issues, from climate policy and trade to foreign policy. 

KCRW Berlin wasn’t eligible to receive any of the billions in broadcast fees the German government collects in order to finance domestic public television and radio. Former station officials say it would have been up to KCRW in California and NPR, which is partly funded by the U.S. government, to save the Berlin operation.

“The pain that we are feeling with KCRW Berlin going away is something that is not necessarily felt in the U.S.,” the station’s program director Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson said.

But even in its home city, the station’s death received little attention; Berlin media barely took notice of KCRW’s shuttering or what it signified, noting the move only in passing.

End of an era

The tradition of U.S. radio in Germany began when the American Forces Network (AFN) went on air in the summer of 1945 from Berlin-Dahlem, a leafy suburb where U.S. forces were headquartered. The station’s mission was to keep the thousands of American troops stationed in the city informed and entertained, but its audience was much wider.

After Germany’s unconditional surrender to the allies in 1945, the country’s radio stations were first shut down and then reorganized with the aim of helping to “denazify” the country.

In a country that had been force-fed a steady diet of Hitler’s favorite brass-band marches and Wagner for more than a decade, AFN’s American sound ­— from George Gershwin to Billie Holiday — was new and titillating. That was especially true in the 1950s, when rock ‘n’ roll emerged as the West’s most powerful cultural weapon.

The old post-war AFN network was “probably the best foreign policy instrument the U.S. had ever thought of,” former U.S. Ambassador to Germany John Kornblum, who also helped start KCRW Berlin, told the station recently.

During the Cold War, the U.S. also operated German-language RIAS (Radio in the American Sector), which served as an antipode to the pro-Soviet radio programming in the East, calling itself “a free voice in a free world.”

After the Cold War ended and American troops left Berlin, AFN was eventually shuttered. RIAS’ radio operations were rolled into German public station Deutschlandradio, while its television arm went to Deutsche Welle, Germany’s state-funded international broadcaster.

But that wasn’t the end of American broadcasting in Berlin. AFN’s Berlin frequency was sold off to a rock station that carried Voice of America news broadcasts. Then, in the early 2000s, NPR — which serves as a national syndicator to over 1,000 radio stations in the U.S. — brought American public radio to the German capital. 

Jeff Rosenberg, the founding father of NPR’s only self-managed station abroad, campaigned for years to get a frequency. “Tears were running down my face” when NPR Berlin went on air in 2006, he said.

The station enjoyed a loyal local following, both in Berlin’s burgeoning international community as well as among long-time Berliners. Still, NPR Berlin struggled to stay afloat. The “listener support” that sustains American NPR stations — voluntary financial donations collected during regular funding campaigns — is a foreign concept in Germany, where households pay nearly €20 per month for public broadcasting.

In 2017, Kornblum helped lure KCRW to take over from NPR. Ultimately, however, the American public station model proved unsustainable, especially during a crisis.

The snap announcement of KCRW’s closing prompted hundreds of listeners to contact the station, with many offering to help. But by then, it was already too late.

“I had no idea they had these problems,” said Charles Gertmenian, a Californian from Pasadena who has been living in Berlin for 20 years. “Now, I kick myself for not having organized a fundraising.”

CORRECTION: This article has been corrected to clarify the relationship between KCRW Berlin and the U.S. government. It was run by KCRW in California and NPR, which is partly funded by the U.S. government.