The Trump administration just denied Kansas’ request to create an unprecedented “lifetime limit” on Medicaid, a federal insurance largely for the poor and disabled.
“We seek to create a pathway out of poverty, but we also understand that people’s circumstances change, and we must ensure that our programs are sustainable and available to them when they need and qualify for them,” Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Seema Verma ...
Donald Trump
How Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo blew it at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is expected to vote against the nomination of Mike Pompeo for Secretary of State on Monday — which would be the first such vote for a secretary of state nominee.
CIA Director Pompeo, who would replace Rex Tillerson (who was fired in March), has thus far not received the support of a single Democrat on the SFRC (nor Kentucky Republican Rand Paul).
Bracing for the SFRC vote, Trump tweeted on Monday morning that it was partisan politi...
Trump administration health announcement is latest blow to transgender Americans
The Trump administration’s campaign to make life more difficult for transgender Americans entered a new phase this weekend. On Saturday, according to the New York Times, the administration announced that it would gut an anti-discrimination statute when it comes to health care access for transgender patients.
The rule, passed under the Obama administration in 2016, had prevented health care providers receiving federal financial assistance — including those receiving Medic...
The Trump administration is paying Focus on the Family to stop the AIDS epidemic in South Africa
The State Department gave a prominent anti-LGBTQ religious organization a grant to combat HIV/AIDS in South Africa through a religious program that pressures kids into pledging that they will abstain from sex until marriage.
An affiliate of Focus on the Family (FOTF) received a $49,505 grant under the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) from the State Department’s Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator on September 18, 2017, while the department was un...
Larry Kudlow says the CBO is always wrong, but he regularly cited their numbers
Weeks into his tenure as Donald Trump’s director of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, former CNBC host Larry Kudlow dismissed estimates by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that the tax cuts and spending bills Trump signed will swell the budget deficit. In a Fox News interview on Tuesday, he claimed that the office’s analyses are “always wrong.”
“Never believe the CBO,” Kudlow told Fox & Friends. “Very important....
Grading Paul Ryan: Did the Tea Party’s weightlifting wunderkind deliver?
Few lawmakers have risen through the US political system in modern times with as much speed and fanfare as Paul Ryan, outgoing House Speaker.
The Wisconsin native was elected to the House of Representatives in 1998 at the age of 28, after defeating an opponent twenty years his...
Trump spokesman twists himself into a pretzel on immigration reform
After Donald Trump spent the weekend abandoning his pretense that he wants to make a deal to restore protections to the hundreds of thousands of immigrant kids whose Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) protections he unilaterally stripped, his spokesman Hogan Gidley went on Fox News on Monday to blame his decision on congressional Democrats and Barack Obama.
Asked about Trump’s announcement that there would be “no DACA deal,” the White House deputy press ...
Pence secretly drafted Trump’s latest transgender military ban
When President Trump announced a new ban on transgender people serving in the military late Friday, it was somewhat of a surprise — Defense Secretary Jim Mattis had reportedly recommended in February that Trump allow transgender people to serve. It turns out that Vice President Pence and some of the country’s most prominent anti-LGBTQ activists had a role in reversing the outcome, which explains why the report explaining the decision is rife with anti-trans junk science.
Slate...
In bizarre opioid speech, Trump barely mentions treatment but has a lot to say about immigrants
In a strange Monday afternoon speech on opioid policy, President Donald Trump dedicated the bulk of his time to ideas that would be likely to worsen the crisis.
Reporters who had been briefed on the administration’s plans ahead of time wrote that the White House seeks to put force behind a 12-point guideline for the proper, safe prescribing of opioids that has languished for two years after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released them. The move would be a rare ...
Trump’s new economic adviser is really bad at economics. Here are the receipts.
Larry Kudlow is President Donald Trump’s choice to replace Gary Cohn as director of the National Economic Council (NEC). Cohn spent over 25 years at Goldman Sachs, and was president and COO for ten years before he joined the Trump administration. Past NEC directors have had law degrees from Yale or Harvard or Cornell, MBAs from Harvard or Wharton (not a bachelor’s with an economics major like the president), a Ph. D in economics from Harvard or MIT, decades of business experien...