---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2020 13:42:54 -0700
Subject: Re: April 22, 2020
a fire storm hit Washington DC.
Carl Jarvis
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Heather Cox Richardson from Letters from an American
<heathercoxrichardson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Apr 22, 2020 11:47 PM
Subject: April 22, 2020
To: alcocanfield@xxxxxxxxx
Cc:
I’m going to start tonight with an important story that slipped under the
radar on a day when one outrageous performance after another grabbed
headlines. On its surface, the story doesn’t seem terribly important. A
number of congressional committees have asked the Office of Personnel
Management for updates on how the OPM is handling working conditions for
federal employees during the coronavirus crisis. OPM is declining to
answer the requests. “It has always been difficult to get information from
this administration, but the refusal to provide Congress with a basic
briefing during a pandemic is especially egregious,” said a Democratic
Senate aide to Politico reporter Daniel Lippman. “We’ve never been denied
a briefing like this
before.”
April 22, 2020
Heather Cox Richardson
Apr 23
I’m going to start tonight with an important story that slipped under the
radar on a day when one outrageous performance after another grabbed
headlines.
On its surface, the story doesn’t seem terribly important. A number of
congressional committees have asked the Office of Personnel Management for
updates on how the OPM is handling working conditions for federal
employees during the coronavirus crisis. OPM is declining to answer the
requests. “It has always been difficult to get information from this
administration, but the refusal to provide Congress with a basic briefing
during a pandemic is especially egregious,” said a Democratic Senate aide
to Politico reporter Daniel Lippman. “We’ve never been denied a briefing
like this before.”
But the story is actually very significant. The OPM oversees the 2 million
workers in the federal government. In mid-February, after Republican
Senators acquitted him in his impeachment trial, Trump set out to purge
the federal workforce of civil servants, whom he sees as “snakes,” and
replace them with political appointees loyal to him.
To head the Presidential Personnel Office, which recruits candidates for
the executive branch, Trump brought in John McEntee, who had been fired
from a former position in the White House by former chief of staff John
Kelly over a security clearance. On March 17, McEntee forced the director
of the Office of Personnel Management, Dale Cabaniss, who had significant
personnel experience, to resign. Michael Rigas, formerly of the right-wing
Heritage Foundation, took his place. (Phew. I know… but this is going
somewhere important.)
The change from Cabaniss to Rigas at the head of OPM transpired just as
the novel coronavirus pandemic hit the nation hard.
Rigas has said he believes the 1883 Pendleton Act is unconstitutional.
Congress passed the Pendleton Act, also known as the Civil Service Act,
after a mentally-ill office seeker shot President James Garfield in 1881.
Until then, government positions had been handed out to political
loyalists, regardless of their capacity to do the job, but the
assassination created a public outcry. Charles Guiteau shot Garfield with
the expectation that, once elevated to the presidency, Garfield’s vice
president would give Guiteau the position his delusions made him think he
deserved. The assassination built momentum behind the idea that government
should be non-partisan, and that positions should be filled by people
actually equipped to do the job. This sentiment has ruled the nation ever
since.
Non-partisan civil service has proved a blessing to the nation in two
ways. First of all, over time, as more and more positions came under the
act, the government got much more efficient. Second, a non-partisan corps
of officials has kept the nation stable since they give their loyalty to
the country’s government, rather than to any particular president.
Administrations come and go, but government bureaucrats keep the nation on
an even keel.
Now, Rigas, the man at the head of the federal government’s 2 million
workers, wants to get rid of that system and make all employees of the
executive branch political appointees, loyal not to the country but to
Trump. Rigas is working with McEntee at the PPO. As of a few weeks ago,
agencies now have to submit job openings to the PPO to see if they have
anyone they want in the position before they can submit their own choice
for it. PPO is filling positions with keen regard for their loyalty:
recently it has hired four college seniors to become administration
officials.
OPM is the office that is refusing to tell Congress what it’s up to.
Today offered some guesses. Dr. Rick Bright, the director of the
Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and
Development Authority, or BARDA, claimed that he was let go from his job
for crossing Trump. BARDA is charged with protecting us from pandemic
influenza and emerging infectious diseases (EID) and Bright is a
specialist in those areas. He headed the federal agency developing a
coronavirus vaccine, and refused to use the agency’s significant budget to
promote hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug Trump has been pushing
as a treatment for the coronavirus. Bright was transferred to a less
central position at the National Institutes of Health, but has refused to
resign his position at BARDA.
Bright and his lawyers say his removal is retaliation and that he will be
filing a whistleblower complaint. “I believe this transfer was in response
to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars
allocated by Congress to address the Covid-19 pandemic into safe and
scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other
technologies that lack scientific merit,” he said in a statement. “I am
speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics
or cronyism — has to lead the way.”
Bright’s defense of science over politics got a boost with Tuesday’s news
that hydroxychloroquine is not only ineffective against Covid-19, but
possibly worsens the outcome for those who take it. A study of 368
patients at Veterans Affairs showed that those given the drug were more
likely to die than those who weren’t. After much hyping of the drug, Laura
Ingraham and other Fox News Channel personalities have suddenly gone quiet
on it. Trump, who hailed the drug as a “game-changer” but who has stopped
talking about it lately, said he did not know of the bad report, “but
we’ll be looking at it.”
Demanding loyalty to Trump is about cementing the power of the president,
and service to that power means he will sacrifice his loyalists whenever
necessary to protect himself. People are noting that Trump tossed Georgia
Governor Brian Kemp under the bus today over Kemp's reopening of certain
Georgia businesses against the advice of public health officials. After a
week of calling for states to reopen, Trump told reporters that he
“disagree[s] strongly” with Kemp’s decision to start that process.
But Kemp and Trump have clashed before—Trump wanted Kemp to appoint key
Trump supporter Doug Collins to the Senate seat that Kemp gave to Kelly
Loeffler (now in trouble for insider trading)—so it’s not a huge surprise
that Trump hung Kemp out to dry.
Today’s more significant underbussing was that of Alex Azar, the secretary
of the Department of Health and Human Services, who was skewered in a
piece in the Wall Street Journal for what appears to have been
extraordinarily inept handling of the coronavirus crisis. My guess is that
he is shortly going to be out of a job, taking the blame for the White
House’s poor response to the pandemic.
Considering that Trump’s OPM wants to remove qualified civil servants from
the government in favor of political cronies, the piece of the Azar story
that has attracted the most outrage is ironic. Azar tapped a key aide with
little experience or education in public health, management, or medicine
to head up the response of Health and Human Services to the coronavirus
crisis.
Before going to work for Azar, the aide, Brian Harrison, was a dog breeder
who specialized in labradoodles.
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Notes:
McEntee:
https://www.axios.com/johnny-mcentee-white-house-d1c29eee-8b0a-4c4d-8ba4-9355f3c27f4f.html
Cabaniss resigns:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/17/opm-chief-resigns-134541
PPO and OPM:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/21/democrats-blast-trump-federal-workers-coronavirus-199026
Bright:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/coronavirus-live-coverage.html
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/04/22/business/ap-us-virus-outbreak-hhs-whistleblower.html
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/22/politics/rick-bright-barda-trump-coronavirus/index.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/study-of-hydroxychloroquine-trump-promoted-coronavirus-drug-finds-more-deaths
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/business/media/virus-fox-news-hydroxychloroquine.html
Kemp:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-reverses-course-says-too-soon-georgia-reopen-n1190061
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/22/trump-kemp-georgia-reopen-coronavirus-202117
Azar:
Rebecca Ballhaus @rebeccaballhaus
FDA chief Stephen Hahn asked HHS in January if he could contact companies
about possible shortages of PPE and other equipment. He was told no. Azar
told associates such calls would alarm the industry and make the
administration look unprepared. Health Chief’s Early Missteps Set Back
Coronavirus ResponseAlex Azar, the Health and Human Services secretary,
waited for weeks to brief the president, oversold his agency’s progress
and didn’t effectively coordinate the health-care divisions under his
purview.wsj.com
April 22nd 2020
1,698 Retweets2,019 Likes
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-hhschief-speci/special-report-former-labradoodle-breeder-tapped-to-lead-u-s-pandemic-task-force-idUSKCN2243CE
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