Trump's cabinet of characters grows
Trying to keep up with President-elect Donald Trump's conflicts of interest, Twitter insults and largely disastrous cabinet and senior adviser picks is a bit like trying to drink from a fire hose.
Yet another Goldman Sachs guy, Gary D. Cohn, is expected to be named director of Trump's National Economic Council, which oversees economic policy in the White House. There are three Goldman Sachs alums now in line for administration offices (Cohn joins former Goldman partner and Treasury nominee Steven Mnuchin and Goldman alum and Trump Chief Strategist Steve Bannon), despite Trump's campaign attacks against Hillary Clinton and Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz for their ties to the investment bank.
Then there's Trump's nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency - a climate denier and fossil-fuel advocate - a choice that is sending shock waves through the environmental advocacy community.
That pick is Scott Pruitt, an Oklahoma attorney general and former state senator who has sued EPA multiple times, targeting regulations that limit air pollution haze in national parks, methane leaks from drilling and mercury and arsenic seeps from power plants. After all - what's wrong with a little seeping mercury and arsenic?
And we mustn't forget Trump's pick to head the Department of Labor - a fast-food mogul.
Yep. That's right. Andy Puzder is the CEO of CKE Restaurants, an umbrella company for fast-food restaurants including Hardee's. Puzder is a foe of the Labor department's controversial overtime rule and the "Fight for $15" minimum-wage campaign.
"He will save small businesses from the crushing burdens of unnecessary regulations that are stunting job growth and suppressing wages," Trump said in a statement announcing his pick.
Crushing burdens like paying workers. Puzder was quoted earlier this month in Business Insider as saying robots are much easier to deal with than humans. "They're always polite, they always upsell [steer customers toward higher-priced products], they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case."
Kendall Fells, organizing director for the SEIU-funded Fight for $15, reacted this way: "Puzder as labor secretary is like putting Bernie Madoff in charge of the Treasury."
Drain the swamp.
The war on science hits warp speed
If you're hearing sirens, they may be coming from the Department of Energy. Think Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
President-elect Trump's transition team has circulated an unusual questionnaire that appears to target climate science research and clean energy programs.
The 74-point questionnaire requests the names of all employees and contractors who have attended domestic or international climate change policy conferences, as well as emails associated with the conferences.
"These questions don't just indicate an attack on civil servants here in Washington," an energy department employee told The New York Times. "They amount to a witch hunt in D.O.E.'s 17 national labs, where scientists have the independence to do their work - yet here are questions that are reminiscent of an inquisition rather than actual curiosity about how the labs work."
Energy Department employees described the questionnaire as unprecedented and worrying. They shared the questionnaire with The Times and spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, according to a Friday story on nytimes.com.
The questionnaire asks for lists of employees involved in key climate change programs, including all those who have attended United Nations climate change conferences. It also asks for names of employees involved in designing a metric known as the Social Cost of Carbon, a figure used by the Obama administration to measure the economic impact of carbon dioxide pollution and to justify the economic cost of climate regulations.
"It specifically asks which Energy Department programs are essential to meeting the goals of President Obama's climate change agenda, which Mr. Trump has vowed to roll back," according to the Times story.
This is scary, indeed.