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Notes from New Washington (4) – a ‘tariff-free’ zone
More things you may have missed in the avalanche of news from in and around the Trump White House. We’ve all heard more than we ever wanted to know about tariffs. Here are other insights:
April 22: The US Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has signed an order effectively handing over control of the department to his Assistant Secretary for Policy, Management, and Budget, or AS-PMB. The post would normally be filled by a political appointee subject to Senate confirmation. But these are not normal times in New Washington. According to Wes Siler’s Newsletter on Substack, the post is occupied now by an operative of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency named Tyler Hassen. Hassen is also CEO of Houston-based Basin Energy. Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, said in a statement: “Elon Musk is now effectively in charge of America’s public lands.” A link on the department's website for the assistant secretary points to a page that no longer exists, labelled “joan-mooney”. The Code 403 notice reads: “Its content may have been moved elsewhere — or our site might just be having trouble right now.” Efficiency!
April 22 is the 55th anniversary of Earth Day, proclaimed by President Richard Nixon in 1970 to celebrate protection of the environment. Later that year, Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency by executive order. The White House under President Donald Trump celebrated Earth Day by announcing that “we finally have a president who follows science,” with policies “rooted in the belief that Americans are the best stewards of our vast natural resources—no ‘Green New Scam’ required.”
In her always interesting “Letters from an American”, Helen Cox Richardson provides further perspective on Earth Day, in 1970 and today.
April 21: Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security in New Washington, has first-hand experience of insecurity. According to the New York Times, she was dining in a Washington restaurant when she noticed that her handbag has disappeared. Gone were $3,000 in cash, blank cheques, her medication, the keys to her apartment, her passport, and the security badge that let’s her get into government buildings and her office. Her brief includes deporting illegal immigrants, deporting ones who arrived legally too, and running the Secret Service, which is entrusted not just with the security of the President but also with protecting the Secretary of Homeland Security. Job well done.
March 27: We thought we’d heard it all when Jeff Goldberg of The Atlantic published screengrabs of the now famous exchange of America’s top military and intelligence officials and Vice President Vance. In Germany, the news magazine Der Spiegel soon added another layer of farce.
Donald Trump's most important security advisers used Signal to discuss an imminent military strike. Now, reporting by DER SPIEGEL has found that the contact data of some of those officials, including mobile phone numbers, is freely accessible on the internet.
The piece, by Patrick Beuth, Jörg Diehl, Roman Höfner, Roman Lehberger, Friederike Röhreke and Fidelius Schmid, went on:
[T]he reporters used commercial people search engines along with hacked customer data that has been published on the web. Those affected by the leaks include National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
Most of these numbers and email addresses are apparently still in use, with some of them linked to profiles on social media platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn. They were used to create Dropbox accounts and profiles in apps that track running data. There are also WhatsApp profiles for the respective phone numbers and even Signal accounts in some cases.
It would be funny if it weren’t so serious.
These are more cases of:
