Trump administration

Of 577 key federal jobs requiring Senate confirmation, only 106 have had nominees put forward by President Trump. That’s according to the count by the Washington Post and the Partnership for Public Service. Those vacancies include leadership roles at NASA and NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. With no one at the helm, science-based […]

Shouldn’t the person telling you what to do with your retirement accounts be legally required to act in your best interest? Sounds simple enough, but regulation to that affect has long been resisted by the financial industry. The Obama administration pushed for the so-called Fiduciary Duty Rule, but this week the Labor Department sought to […]

Last month President Trump announced a deal with Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn to bring as many as 13,000 jobs to southeastern Wisconsin in exchange for $3 billion in tax breaks. Now legislative analysts are projecting the state won’t break even on that investment for more than 25 years. These sorts of mega-incentives to lure employers […]

Relations between the U.S. and North Korea have seldom been more strained. President Trump has threatened to bring, “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” if North Korea continues to threaten the U.S. with military action. Pyongyang responded by saying it’s considering an attack on the U.S. territory of Guam. If it came […]

The White House has until next week to finish reviewing a federal climate report, but someone leaked a draft to the New York Times, possibly out of fear the Trump administration would sit on it. The report states definitively that climate change is happening, that humans are causing it and that there will be dire […]

President Trump this afternoon acknowledged the epidemic of opioid abuse in the U.S., but took no action on a report by a commission he created to study the crisis. That report urged the president to declare a national emergency to combat the health crisis. In a briefing with his top officials, Trump said there is […]

We’re at the 200-day mark of Donald Trump’s presidency. One policy goal that seems to have been achieved so far: cutting the size of the federal workforce. The July jobs report found that the Trump administration has shed almost 11,000 workers since January. In comparison, President Obama added 60,000 new federal employees in his first […]

Over the weekend, the U.N. Security Council unanimously approved a new round of sanctions against North Korea. The sanctions could shave a billion dollars off the country’s annual export revenue, essentially cutting it by a third. This is in response to North Korea’s recent tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles, which broke existing international sanctions. Is there […]