Thursday, January 30, 2025. Annette’s News Roundup.
Every day, remember.
January 20, 2025. A beast entered the White House.
January 20, 2025. The brutal takeover of America began.
January 20, 2025. We continued to fight.
Let’s fill in some facts you may want.
Buyouts
We are in the early stages of a constitutional crisis.
Last night the Trump administration’s Office of Personnel and Management sent a “buyout” offer to 2 million government employees. The email appears to have been ghost written by either Elon Musk or his young lackeys, who now occupy places of power in the federal government.
This “buy out” offer is not legal. It instructs employees to respond with “resign” in the subject line—as if that is a legally-binding document.
The compensation in the offer is not legal, either. The OPM email offers eight months of pay; the law allows only up to $25,000 for voluntary separation agreements.
There is no funding for this buyout regime. Just do some rough math with me: The government has offered 2 million workers eight months of pay. The average federal employee makes roughly $100k. If everyone took the offer that’s a $132 billion.¹ Where has that money been appropriated from? Show me the line-item in the budget which made this funding law and show me which members of Congress voted for it.
The OPM email came a few hours after Trump’s Office of Management and Budget directed the government to cease disbursement of all legally-mandated federal funding. Which is not something the executive branch can do, according to the law.
And these two attacks on the legislature came days after Trump issued a baldly unconstitutional executive order directing the federal government to cease issuing citizenship documents to some persons born in the United States.
This is a crisis. The executive is attempting to subjugate the two other branches of government.
The president knows that Congress wants to be subjugated. He hopes the judiciary will consent to subjugation, rather than risking a showdown it might lose.
After all, how many divisions does John Roberts have?... (The Bulwark)
Yes, the Trump Admin had to withdraw the “freeze.”
The White House rescinded the directive on Wednesday after legal challenges and widespread condemnation and confusion, including the interruption of the Medicaid system, which provides health care to millions of low-income Americans. President Trump was angered by the media coverage of the order and its aftershocks, according to a person who spoke to him.
During a bill signing at the White House on Wednesday, Mr. Trump cast blame on the media for the confusion. “We are merely looking at parts of the big bureaucracy where there has been tremendous waste and fraud and abuse,” he said.
The episode, which amounted to the first significant reversal of the new administration, echoed Mr. Trump’s early-2017 effort to ban people from mostly Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. That order caused mass confusion at airports, sparked damaging headlines and was temporarily blocked in court and pared back.
But while that first travel ban was emblematic of a new administration stocked with governmental novices, the chaos this week stood out because the second term Trump administration has so far shown far more discipline and skill at execution.
Behind the scenes, senior White House officials were caught off guard on Monday when the Office of Management and Budget released the memo, which ordered a pause in grants, loans and other federal financial assistance to ensure that federal programs aligned with Mr. Trump’s policy priorities.
The reversal from the Trump administration was surprising given how vociferously top officials had initially defended it, including Mr. Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff for policy.
New York Senator, Chuck Schumer.
“Today, we saw what happens when Americans fight back against disastrous policies,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, told reporters. “Americans made their voices heard.” (New York Times).
Jim Acosta’s first interview since leaving CNN.
Watch it below.👇
Live with Jim Acosta and Norm Eisen
Special elections are coming.
Be ready for them.
Get ready to party!
I am not joking. That is the answer to their disgusting actions.
💃🕺🎉
Remember also there were good ole days.
Or so they claim.
2025 version.
1989