Trump tells everyone in reach to shut up
This is the worst yet. He’s imposing a gag order on federal agencies.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has moved to curb the flow of information from several government agencies whose mandate impacts environmental issues since last week, in actions that appeared designed to tighten control and discourage dissenting views.
Employees at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Interior Department, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have seen directives from the newly minted leadership seeking to limit how they communicate to the public, according to multiple sources.
Who the FUCK does he think he is? What makes him think he gets to do that? What makes him think he has a mandate to do that? What makes him think he gets to make himself a dictator?
On Tuesday, a source at the EPA said that staff had been told by members of the Trump administration not to speak to reporters or publish any press releases or blog posts on social media. EPA staff have also been asked not to publicize any talks, conferences, or webinars that had been planned for the next 60 days, the staffer said, asking not to be named.
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The agency also was asked by the White House on Monday to temporarily halt all contracts and grants pending a review, according to multiple sources. The EPA awards billions of dollars worth of grants and contracts every year to support programs around environmental testing, cleanups and research.
Environmental groups reacted with outrage. New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, said in reaction to the freeze that his office “will examine all legal options to ensure the EPA meets its obligations to keep our state’s air and water safe.”
The Department of Agriculture also has seen efforts to curb communication. On Tuesday, employees were informed in a memo seen by Reuters that all communications with the media should be approved by the administration, and social media posts should be reviewed by managers “to remove references to policy priorities and initiatives of the previous Administration.”
The department, meanwhile, disavowed an email sent on Monday to its scientific research unit ordering the suspension of releasing “any public-facing documents,” including news releases and photos, saying it was sent without permission and should not include a ban on publication of peer-reviewed scientific papers.
Officials at HHS also received a memo ordering them not to send “any correspondence” to other public officials.
Instead, they must refer any requests for information to senior leaders, who are not to do anything until they have received instructions from the White House staff on its policies, according to a source who read the memo.
He thinks he’s been given absolute powers.
On Tuesday, Badlands National Park, part of the Department of Interior, posted a series of Tweets about climate change: “Today, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years. #climate,” one of the tweets read. By Tuesday afternoon, the tweets were gone.
So everybody on Twitter should be sharing the content of that tweet.
Also the Trump gang needs to hurry up with the renaming, now that it’s the Environmental Destruction Agency.
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck FUUUUUUUUUUCK!
Although that kind of behaviour was what I fully expected him to indulge, and was why I was so against his even being allowed to run, part of me always hoped that I was being paranoid; that he’d be reined in by the career politicians around him.
Instead, it seems that they have decided to give him his head for the time being.
Perhaps so that when they finally decide it is time to get rid of him, people will be so relieved that they’ll not notice that the post-Trump world is nothing like the beautiful, and hopeful, world he inherited.
Of course, they’ll use him as a scapegoat, but they’ll not hand back to the people all the stuff they stole and ruined, unless they and their cronies don’t want it any more.
Fuck.
The problem is, ‘we’ elected a Congress that hates the environment as much as he does. They’ll let him get away with it, because they’ve been trying to do it for a long time, but someone has always stopped them.
Yeah, this is right out of the Autocrat’s Handbook. Harper did this to our Departments of Fisheries, Ministry of the Environment and in fact the entire Canadian Federal Public Service. That was prior to the wholesale destruction of decades of environmental data under the guise of “cost containment”.
It’s telling just how far they have to go to preserve their narrative. Even the merest suggestion of fact is corrosive.
You’ve already seen the beginning of this: Trump has to silence out any dissenting voives because the narrative is a house of cards.
This is what happens when someone like Trump is put in charge. He gets to do these things.
The President of the United States. Head of the executive branch of the government, which includes all of the agencies you named. They work for him. “The buck stops here” and all that. Subject to the limits of the Constitution, Trump is the boss of the federal government.
Article II of the Constitution? (Well, that’s what actually gives him the power to do that. Trump may think it’s the Umpty-Third Amendment to the Declaration of Independence or something.)
It’s entirely within Trump’s power to do this. Those government agencies work for him. Some of them are clearly behaving in a manner intended to undermine the White House — for example, the tweet from the DoD account about mental health and social media usage was clearly someone mocking the President.
Private citizens can tweet whatever they want about the President, more or less. You can blog and I can comment about what an incompetent malevolent child he is. Government staffers speaking in their personal capacities — well, that’s a little murky and depends on the details. But Government staffers do not have the right to use the official government account to speak in opposition to government policy.
If some HHS employee during the Obama years used the HHS Twitter account to declare that the ACA was unconstitutional, they would have been fired. General Flynn got fired for insubordination.
Now, this situation is probably in large part attributable to the mismanagement of Trump’s transition team, for which Trump is responsible. They’ve been so neglectful in nominating undersecretary and other sub-Cabinet positions, and filling other jobs, that there’s probably nobody minding the shop at a lot of these places who could have reined in this stuff.
And I fully expect to object to the policy decision behind what does and doesn’t get published in the future, especially regarding things like climate change. But do you really think that unelected government employees have the right to use the government megaphone for their own purposes in defiance of their elected boss? And if you don’t think that, then who do you think is authorized to tell them to knock it the fuck off and have any communications approved by their superiors?
It’s not totally true that they work for him. This is not (yet) a fully owned subsidiary of Trump Enterprises. This is a country, and it officially belongs to we the people. The fact that many have behaved irresponsibly with their franchise doesn’t change that. At this point, Trump works for us, even though he obviously doesn’t understand that. The employees of those agencies are not Trump ‘S personal staff, they are under the jurisdiction of the United States government, which is bigger than one man.
Yes, the president can appoint his people. But no, he cannot just hire and fire at will. There are gad zillions of layers of bureaucracy in place designed to prevent just that very thing. Do I think Trump will honor that? Not on your life. It is up to us to keep the heat on not only Trump but the entire rapacious Congress. They work for us, all of us (not just the jerks who voted for them). We have a right…no, make that a responsibility…to ensure that our voice is heard and would be dictators are held at bay.
He already has a MiniTru in his coterie of shameless liars, and now he is trying to turn the EPA into the MiniPlenty.
Does anyone still believe that ‘all major party candidates are the same?’ That some smoke-filled room of Serious Guys is going to control Trump and his post-Tea Party gang?
John, false equivalency appears to be the drug of choice for the modern American media professional – and often for the modern media consumer, as well.
I asked one of my friends yesterday who was doing the ‘let’s give him a chance’ thing if it was okay to stop giving him a chance. He agreed with a miserable tone in his voice.
Screechy Monkey @ 4 –
The hell they do. They work for all of us; they work for the country as a whole. This isn’t the fucking Apprentice, and it’s not one of Trump’s companies, it’s a massive federal government, and he’s the chief administrator, not the Absolute Boss.
Fine, but who gets to speak for “the country as a whole?” Who gets to decide how the Twitter account of a government agency is used? Whichever unelected social media intern got put in charge, or the person who was actually elected — as much as you and I hate the fact — to run the government?
If during the Obama transition, some conservative government employees were using official government platforms to declare that abortion is murder, abstinence education works great, and coal mining is super duper clean, and Obama ordered a stop to it, would that be dictatorial tyranny?
I’m not saying there aren’t any limits. iknklast is right that individual employees may enjoy civil service protections as to firing or other discipline. And there may be some statutory obligations that the president can’t override or instruct an agency to ignore — but note that there’s a huge grey area there, as evidenced by the litigation over the Obama Administration’s orders on immigration policy.
But wanting to get some control and message discipline over what government departments are saying seems pretty commonsense and standard to me, especially in light of some hints of insubordination on that front.
I mean, I’d be happy to buy a beer for whichever persons put out those tweets. But I don’t see anything tyrannical about the administration taking action to put a stop to it.
You seem to be ignoring the distinction between science and policy. Trump is preventing these agencies from publishing scientific findings. No I don’t think he has some sweeping right to do that. He apparently has the legal authority to do it, but that’s not what I’m talking about, as I think you probably realize.
Screechy, social media has led a lot of this into an area that no real precedent exists for. This is being done pretty ad hoc, but when it is ordered that they cannot tweet public scientific findings, then, yes, the president is wrong. There is a difference between “controlling the message”, which would be covered by that “abortion is murder” or “Trump is a poopyhead”. They can still do that (in theory) on their private accounts, but not on government accounts. But if they are presenting public scientific information that is part of their job, then he is wrong. Just as Obama would have been wrong to have squashed any finding that went contrary to his beliefs.
This is the difference between a free society and a dictatorship. There are many ways in which we are suppressed by our bosses as to what we can and can’t say. Some of those things are okay, because certain things shouldn’t have the weight of our position behind them (i.e., I can’t stand up in my classes and say that “Donald Trump is a poopyhead” because I am acting in my capacity as a government employee, and am, therefore, the government). If, however, my boss tells me that I cannot stand up in my classes and say that the scientific evidence supports the conclusion that human-caused global warming is happening, then he would have overstepped his authority (especially since I am the environmental science instructor). I would have cause to consider that outside of his function as my boss.
Trump is in the same position. He can stop people from using official government accounts to personally attack him, but I’m not sure if he does have legal authority on that. After all, Trump is not the only actor in the government. We have separation of powers for a reason, so no one man can do all that. And many of these agencies are supposed to be functioning with a stated mission, which was established by law. I don’t know that Trump can interfere with that, though presidents do control that by the appointments they make.
I’m not sure if that makes sense. I feel like I’m rambling. But I’m getting very nervous by these assumptions that the president has some form of absolute power and can do pretty much what he wants. This is NOT the way it works. In fact, the president was not supposed to have that much power at all as i twas set up, but our Congresses have been ceding more and more powers to the president throughout the past century, until now everyone seems to believe him some sort of king who gets to tell everyone what to do. IT DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY. Trump is going to try to make it work that way – Congress will probably let him, at least until they get everything they want out of him – the courts are mostly Republican appointees, and probably won’t do much – it is up to us to continue pointing out that TRUMP WAS NOT ANOINTED KING. He is bound by the law, and required to follow it, no matter what he might think or say. He won’t. So we have to have people willing to challenge him and point out that he is not above the law – just like we did 50 years ago for Richard Nixon, much to his frustration and anger.
Ophelia @11,
Actually, no, I didn’t. When you were referring to this as him being a “dictator,” I kind of assumed you were accusing him of overstepping his legal authority.
These distinctions matter to me. A president who is implementing lousy policy should be protested loudly and defeated at the polls in four years. A president who is overstepping his legal authority should be impeached. I didn’t like it when Republicans spent eight years calling Obama a “dictator” every time he implemented a policy they didn’t like but that was entirely within his authority (or at least arguably so), and I’d like to be consistent.
Screechy, while in theory I agree with you, this should not stop us from calling someone a dictator when they are acting like a dictator. The problem is, there are too many words that have been thrown about freely when they are not accurate, to the point that they become meaningless when they are used correctly, and people can just say, well, we didn’t like it when they said that to us.
In this case, I think the word is appropriate, because, as I explained above, it doesn’t appear clear to me that he actually has that authority (or any other president who has done the same thing) but that it has just been taken, and nobody has said anything much about it.
iknklast,
I disagree with your implication @14 that this particular action (or set of actions) constitutes acting like a dictator. But I certainly agree that we shouldn’t hesitate to use that word when it is appropriate, and I’ve been agreeing for a long time that Trump has disturbing dictatorial tendencies. His reaction to anything he sees as “bad” is that it shouldn’t be “allowed,” which is especially troubling now that he’s in a position to do some disallowing.
I think your post @12 makes some good points, and I’ll just respond generally by saying that the details are going to matter a lot here. Freezes and moratoria on executive branch actions aren’t all that unusual when a new administration takes over, so I want to see whether this ends up being just that — putting the brakes on things until the new administration has a chance to review and make appropriate decisions — or if it’s a prelude to essentially shutting down or corrupting government functions.
Of course, this administration hasn’t exactly earned a lot of trust or leeway, so I get the inclination to see this as the tip of the iceberg. I guess I just feel that there are so many clear and obvious present outrages