The Dictatorship

Even with a second chance, Trump is unable to carry out an orderly presidential transition

Published

2 years ago

January 15, 2025

Even with a second chance, Trump is unable to carry out an orderly presidential transition

This is an adapted excerpt from the Jan. 13 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

It would be hard to run a presidential transition that could be worse than the last one. That transition included the outgoing president, Donald Trump, encouraging his followers to march on the Capitol to try to keep him in power.

This is the presidential transition when the president-elect officially became a 34-times convicted felon 10 days before he was sworn in.

The last inauguration had to have thousands of National Guard troops on hand to protect the proceedings from the threat of more violence from Trump’s followers. The outgoing president also didn’t even bother to show up for his successor’s swearing-in.

To be blunt, the last transition was the worst presidential transition in the history of the country — by a mile. Given how disastrously Trump performed during the last transition, you may have assumed this one would be better. But it looks like it’s going to be close.

During this transition, the president-elect has continued to sell his self-branded watches sneakers and Bibles — including the new Inauguration Day edition. He’s also selling boots commemorative coins and guitars.

Over the last few weeks, Trump has made unprovoked threats to seize territory from three countries — which is inexplicable to most Americans but very exciting to the dictators of both Russia and China, who have been seizing territory from other countries (or planning to), and now — whether or not Trump follows through on these weird threats — have Trump’s words to throw back at us.

This is the presidential transition when the president-elect officially became a 34-times convicted felon 10 days before he was sworn in, and then named another convicted felon, one of his relatives, to be ambassador to France. He also picked his son’s ex-girlfriend to be ambassador to Greece and reportedly lobbied for his other son’s wife to be made a U.S. senator … until that collapsed.

He picked his son-in-law’s friend to be his special envoy for hostage affairs. The same son-in-law then announced that his firm received another $1.5 billion from government-controlled funds in Qatar and Abu Dhabi, on top of the billions he already got from Saudi Arabia.

This is the transition when the president-elect appears to have just randomly picked people off the TV for almost every imaginable senior government job. He chose a syndicated daytime TV doctor to run Medicare. He’s picked Fox News contributors or hosts or their relatives for roles like secretary of transportation, national security adviser, FDA commissioner, counterterrorism director, ambassador to Israel, surgeon general, ambassador to the Dominican Republic, border czar, Ukraine envoy and defense secretary.

This is a shambolic, ridiculously bad transition. It is not going well. And now, with less than one week until Trump’s inauguration, we’re entering the part of this very poorly run transition where the confirmation hearings start falling apart.

On Tuesday, the Senate was supposed to hold a hearing for Trump’s nominee to run Veterans Affairs, Doug Collins. Most people couldn’t pick Collins out of a line-up, but as a nominee to run the VA, he is a bit of a walking scandal. The only thing he’s really known for when it comes to the VA is his desire to get rid of it and privatize veterans’ health care.

But on Monday, Senate leaders announced they had to delay Collins’ confirmation hearing because the FBI hasn’t finished the paperwork and background checks necessary to start his hearings.

Tuesday was also supposed to be the confirmation hearing for Trump’s interior secretary nominee, Doug Burgum. You might remember him as the obscure Republican presidential candidate who seemingly paid his way into the debates. There was a provision in the Republican primary debate rules where you had to get a certain number of people to donate to your campaign in order for you to get onto the stage. Burgum did not have a sufficient number of donors so he paid people to donate to him, offering some of those who donated $1 to his campaign a $20 gift card. That’s how he got into the Republican presidential debates, and now Trump wants him to run the Interior Department. But we’ll have to wait to hear from Burgum since his hearing was also postponed due to paperwork delays.

With less than one week until Trump’s inauguration, we’re entering the part of this very poorly run transition where the confirmation hearings start falling apart.

As was the hearing for Trump’s pick to be director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. Amid reports of yet more trouble getting the paperwork together, Gabbard’s confirmation hearing has still not been scheduled. And this might be one to watch to see if it ever gets scheduled at all. The Trump team has already had to pull two of their nominations, for attorney general and the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, and we should watch for this one, too, given what’s emerged in public reporting on Gabbard, including how poorly she’s allegedly done in her meetings with senators. There’s also the conspicuous silence from Capitol Hill in terms of whether there’s sufficient support for her even to make it through committee.

This is their level of performance even before they have responsibility for governing. We will watch what they do and not just what they say, from now, and for the first hundred days, and for the duration.

But what they are saying and what they are doing thus far is utterly shambolic. And none of us should be afraid to say so.

Allison Detzel contributed.

Rachel Maddow

Rachel Maddow is host of the Emmy Award-winning “The Rachel Maddow Show” Mondays at 9 p.m. ET on BLN. “The Rachel Maddow Show” features Maddow’s take on the biggest stories of the day, political and otherwise, including in-depth analysis and stories no other shows in cable news will cover.

The Dictatorship

US civil rights agency moves to end demographic data collection after 60 years

Published

4 hours ago

July 22, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

US civil rights agency moves to end demographic data collection after 60 years

NEW YORK (AP) — How many women hold executive-level positions at top U.S. companies? What is the racial and ethnic breakdown of those roles? What is the gender and racial breakdown of the lowest-paid roles at those companies?

The Trump administration is making it harder for the public to know, moving to toss aside a 60-year-old requirement for tens of thousands of private sector employers to submit workforce demographic reports each year to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency responsible for enforcing anti-discrimination laws in the workplace.

The EEOC’s Republican majority voted 2-1 Tuesday to rescind the data collection requirement, submitting the proposal to a 30-day public commentary period before final approval. The proposal is a quiet but profound salvo in President Donald Trump’s shake up of civil rights enforcementending a practice that has endured through 10 Republican and Democratic administrations.

EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas, an outspoken critic of diversity and inclusion practices who has urged white men to come forward with discrimination complaints, argued that requiring companies to submit the annual demographic reports risks encouraging companies to justify discriminatory practices to diversify their workforce.

“It may promote racial stereotyping at work, and it may encourage employers to engage in discrimination,” Lucas said during a hearing ahead of the vote.

Former Democratic EEOC commissioners and civil rights organizations have denounced the proposal, saying it will deprive the agency of a critical tool for uncovering discrimination patterns and tracking how women and racial minorities have fared since the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which created the EEOC and prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, national origin and religion.

The EEOC, which receives more than 88,000 worker complaints each year, has historically used the data to guide its enforcement priorities and inform some of its investigations.

Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal, the sole Democrat left on the EEOC since Trump moved to wrest control of the agencyvoted against the proposal.

“Today, the commission discusses whether to turn back time to a period before the civil rights movement, kneecapping its ability to protect workers,” Kotagal said.

Here’s what to know about the reporting requirement and the proposal to end it:

Sign up for Morning Wire: Our flagship newsletter breaks down the biggest headlines of the day.

How the EEOC has collected the data

Since 1966, the EEOC has required companies with at least 100 employees, or federal contractors with at least 50 workers, to submit a form called the EEO-1 each year.

The form, which has evolved over time, identifies 10 job categories from “Executive/Senior Level Officials and Managers” to “Laborers” and “Service Workers.” It asks employers to report on the number male and female workers in each job category, as well as the number of workers from different race and ethnicities: Hispanic or Latino, Black or African American, Asian, Native Hawaiian, American Indian or Alaska Native and two or more races.

The data typically covers more than 50 million employees and 73,000 employers nationwide.

A view into gender and race in the private sector

The EEOC launched during the Biden administration an interactive tool allowing the public to explore historical demographic metrics across industries and job categories. The most recent data is from 2023. Under the Trump administration, the EEOC last collected EEO-1 data for the year 2024 but has not publicly disclosed it. Collection of the year 2025 would have begun this year.

The data shows white men dominating executive and senior manager roles at private companies, though women and minorities have made inroads, especially in the years following the #MeToo and Black Lives Matters movements.

Women remain underrepresented in the top ranks of companies. While they make up nearly half the workforce at the companies surveyed, women held just 34.5% of executives and senior manager roles in 2023. That was up from 29.2% a decade earlier.

White and Asian women made the fastest gains, and by 2023, were no longer underrepresented in senior roles compared to their numbers in the overall workforce. In contrast, Black and Hispanic women remained sharply underrepresented in executive and senior manager roles despite making modest gains.

Asian men have been proportionally represented in senior roles for years, while Black and Hispanic men remained underrepresented in 2023.

Of those demographic groups, only one was overrepresented in senior roles: white men, who made up a third of the overall workforce at the companies surveyed but held 52.7% of executive and senior management roles.

Why the government wants to end the data collection

Lucas said the annual reporting requirements impose “hundreds of millions of dollars” on costs on employers, a burden she argued was unnecessary absent “any allegation, indication, or evidence of discrimination.”

The move was recommended by Project 2025the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint that has guided many of the Trump administration’s policies.

A group of former Democratic EEOC commissioners and legal counselors said there is little evidence that companies are routinely using employment data to engage in quotas or race-based hiring.

“This is simply inaccurate and unsupported speculation, at odds with the ways in which this data is actually collected, managed and used,” the former officials said in a statement.

Instead, the officials said, tracking such data encourages companies to proactively examine their hiring, promotion, benefits and other policies to ensure they are not unnecessarily erecting barriers.

Kotagal said the agency has used the data to determine whether a discrimination charge might be part of a deeper pattern at a company. She cited a recent investigation of California supermarket chain Vallarta Food Enterprises, in which the EEOC alleges the grocer failed or refused to recruit, hire or promote non-Hispanic individuals. In that case, EEO-1 data showed that “nearly 100 percent of its employees were Hispanic,” Kotagal said. “It’s a key tool in our toolbox.”

The agency has also issued special reports on demographic employment trends across certain industries or roles.

Kotagal highlighted a 2024 report on the tech sector, which showed that women had made virtually no gains between 2014 and 2022, and that workers under 40 years old had actually lost ground. The report also found tech company workers were more likely that others to file age or pay discrimination charges, suggesting systemic barriers to women and older workers in the industry.

The report has been removed from the EEOC’s website.

Corporate retreat from demographic disclosure

The EEOC is prohibited from publicly releasing an individual company’s EEO-1 form, only publishing the information in the aggregate. In recent years, however, a growing number of the country’s top companies began publicly releasing their forms in response to pressure from shareholders and Democratic elected officials to show transparency in their diversity efforts.

Many of those companies have complained that job categories in the EEO-1 forms don’t align with their internal structures, a point Lucas echoed Tuesday, saying the categories don’t reflect the modern workforce. But advocates of EEO-1 disclosure argued it’s the only standardized form that allows for comparison across companies, and offer more detail.

However, the trend toward transparency has started to reverse.

Companies have started to pull back on publicizing both EEO-1 forms and their own diversity reports, which conservative advocates and the Trump administration have seized on to argue that companies are using discriminatory tactics to add women and minorities to their ranks.

In 2025, 24 companies in the S&P 100 — the largest U.S. publicly traded companies — chose not to disclose their EEO-1 data after having done so the year before, according to Andrew Jones, principal researcher at The Conference Board Governance & Sustainability Center. Still, 60 S&P 100 companies did release the data.

Meanwhile, fewer companies are publicizing any form of demographic metrics. The number of Russell 3,000 companies that disclosed metrics on women in the workforce fell from 75% in 2024 to 62% in 2025, according to a study by The Conference Board. Those disclosing metrics on minority representation fell from 30.9% to 26.5%.

Why companies may keep gathering data

Companies are still likely to keep track of their demographic data, whether or not they disclose any of those metrics publicly, and even if they are no longer required to submit annual EEO-1 reports. That’s because Title VII requires employers to keep records that could be pertinent to any discrimination investigation, and the EEOC is empowered to request them.

“What we are generally advising is to stay the course,” Jennifer Robins, counsel in law firm Saul Ewing’s Labor and Employment Group. “Private litigants, employment discrimination lawsuits are not going away, and this data is helpful to defending oneself.”

The EEOC has demanded extensive demographic data from companies to bolster Lucas’ own marquee cases. Those include an investigation into diversity, equity and inclusion practices of sports giant Nike, which Lucas has alleged discriminate against white employees; a lawsuit against the New York Times for allegedly discriminating against a white man who was passed over for a promotion, and an investigation into alleged antisemitism against staff at the University of Pennsylvania.

Lucas emphasized Tuesday that the EEOC would continue to demand data in the course of its investigations. Kotagal warned employers that under future leadership, the EEOC could reinstitute the EEO-1 collection.

Jocelyn Frye, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families, said she sees the elimination of EEO-1 data as part of an effort to obscure the prevalence of discrimination against racial minorities and women and create of a sense of urgency around protecting white workers from DEI-related policies.

But Frye said the data “doesn’t suggest that their top priority ought to be discrimination against white men.

“If the chair is moving forward with an agenda that thinks she ought to be focused on men and ought to be focused on white people, my answer is, ‘Well, does the data tell you that?’” Frye said.

___

The Associated Press’ women in the workforce coverage receives financial support from Pivotal Ventures. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

The Dictatorship

HHS to delay $1B in Medicaid money for California and Minnesota

Published

4 hours ago

July 22, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

HHS to delay $1B in Medicaid money for California and Minnesota

The Trump administration on Tuesday said it was deferring more than $1 billion in Medicaid payments to Minnesota and California because of “suspected fraud and noncompliance,” the latest in a series of punitive steps it has linked to allegations of fraud in mostly Democratic-led states.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the new actions — which come after previously announced Medicaid funding deferrals in those states — are part of the administration’s strategy to “stop the fraud before it happens” rather than claw back problematic spending after bad actors are prosecuted, as previous administrations had done.

“We have a duty to stop the payments, demand answers and then follow the evidence wherever it leads,” Kennedy told a news conference.

The tactic is part of the administration’s sweeping campaign to show it’s cracking down on fraud and saving taxpayers money when rising healthcare costs and other economic stressors have made affordability a top voter concern in November’s midterm elections.

In March, Vice President JD Vance launched a new anti-fraud task force at the request of President Donald Trump, bringing together officials from various departments to use data and technology to identify and investigate suspected wrongful use of federal dollars.

But the federal government hasn’t provided “data or explanation on how the deferral amount was calculated or what it was based on” to Minnesota, said John Connolly, the temporary commissioner and state Medicaid director for Minnesota’s Department of Human Services.

“Today’s actions show that the federal government is acting again in unprecedented and punitive ways as part of their war on Medicaid and its recipients,” he said in a statement. “Partnership — not politics — is required to stop criminals and protect services for the people who need them.”

Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz suggested the Republican administration was deferring the funds to pay for Trump’s tax cuts to wealthy Americans. California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom accused the administration of targeting it for political reasons.

The Trump administration intensified anti-immigration efforts in Minnesota earlier this year, sending in a robust force of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers whose actions there caused weeks of counterprotests and included the shooting deaths of two civilians. Trump himself has frequently denounced California as a badly governed state.

States are facing obstacles because of the actions

The strategy has led to some false starts and headaches for states.

In April, for example, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services acknowledged to The Associated Press it made a significant error in figures it used to help justify a fraud probe in New York. Last month, California’s Medicaid director told a congressional committee that CMS had not yet provided “any instances of fraud, waste or abuse” to the state in its justification of a $1.3 billion Medicaid funding deferral announced in May.

And in Minnesota, state officials have been executing a thorough corrective action plan to defray CMS concerns that have led the agency to defer some $260 million in federal money and to threaten future cuts.

“We have cooperated in good faith and proactively engaged the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to first raise the alarm on fraud in Minnesota’s Medicaid program, to effectively investigate fraud and to institute further safeguards against future misuse of funds,” Connolly said.

Kennedy didn’t specify in Tuesday’s announcement whether the new deferrals — $867.5 million in federal Medicaid payments to California and $199 million to Minnesota — are in addition to, or overlap with, earlier deferrals announced this year.

CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz didn’t provide concrete examples of fraud in the two states in justifying the deferrals. He did mention some patterns the agency noticed that it found questionable, including that some providers were billing for four or more patients at the same time, or billing after the date of a Medicaid beneficiary’s death.

Oz also highlighted a fast rate of growth in California’s home care program as a reason for concern. California officials have disputed that idea, explaining that the state’s home care program has grown because of an intentional strategy to keep people out of more expensive nursing homes.

“In-home care growth reflects intentional, federally encouraged expansion, not improper spending,” said Anthony Cava, spokesperson for the California Department of Health Care Services. “California is calling on CMS to stop threatening care for California’s most vulnerable residents.”

Flow of money could be restored — with documentation

Kennedy and Oz said states could restart the flow of federal funding by providing documentation proving the payments in question were legitimate.

Officials in both states have previously acknowledged they are working with the federal government to provide the requested information. Oz said Minnesota had already returned documents to the federal government and they were being “reevaluated very carefully.”

Kennedy also suggested Tuesday that he would extend the power to exclude providers from Medicaid, Medicare and other federal health programs to CMS. In the past, that authority has rested solely with his department’s Office of the Inspector General.

“This is going to be a full force multiplier,” HHS Inspector General Thomas March Bell told a news conference. “It’s going to create additional momentum, and it’s going to exclude additional bad actors.”

The Dictatorship

Pressed for answers on scandals, Texas’ Ken Paxton abandons press conference

Published

11 hours ago

July 22, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Pressed for answers on scandals, Texas’ Ken Paxton abandons press conference

Although Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had already earned a reputation as the most scandal-plagued U.S. Senate candidate in recent memory, the Republican’s troubles have managed to take a turn for the worse.

Just in the past couple of weeks, Paxton has been accused of using an address where he did not live while voting in recent elections and has faced allegations that he and his estranged wife declared three separate homes as their primary residence in mortgage documents — a practice that his party has, in other situations, characterized as an outrageous abuse.

Complicating matters, property records now suggest that the state attorney general, either in his personal capacity or through his trusts, now owns at least 15 properties, worth roughly $9 million.

The good news is, Paxton finally held a press conference Tuesday — a “rare” occurrenceas one outlet called it, for a politician who doesn’t seem to care for questions — offering journalists an opportunity to ask the Texan about his many controversies. The bad news is, Paxton didn’t want to answer any questions about his many controversies, and he then abruptly abandoned his own event when reporters treated him like a Senate candidate.

“General, I wanted to give you a chance to respond to [Democratic state Rep. James Talarico] and his campaign,” one reporter said. “They’ve made a lot about the reports that have come out, one in The New York Times about you acquiring properties worth —”

At that point, Paxton, surrounded by 22 local sheriffs who support his candidacy, interrupted and said he only wanted to field questions related to “law enforcement.”

But in the United States, politicians don’t get to limit the scope of journalists’ questions, and so another reporter asked the state attorney general why he allegedly voted in one county while living in another. A Paxton aide, seemingly eager to rescue her boss, tried to intervene as the Republican walked away from his podium.

A Talarico spokesperson said in a statement, “Ken Paxton just refused to answer basic questions about reports he committed voter fraud and expanded his real estate portfolio to 15 properties on a government salary — because he has no answers for his corruption. If Ken Paxton can’t answer these simple questions, what is he planning to do in a debate?”

For the record, Paxton hasn’t agreed to any debates. He also hasn’t offered substantive answers to the same questions ahead of Tuesday’s event.

Stepping back, the embarrassing display underscored two notable elements of the Senate race in the Lone Star State. First, Paxton genuinely seems to believe he can go the entire campaign without fielding questions from independent news organizations about the brutal list of scandals that follows him like cans tied to a bumper.

And second, Republicans invested a remarkable amount of time and energy into trying to make the Texas race a referendum on, of all things, masculinity. But watching Paxton flee his own press conference in response to predictable and reasonable questions, a variety of words came to mind. “Manly” wasn’t one of them.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”