In other news, Joe Biden has nominated Pennsylvania Health Secretary Rachel Levine to be the assistant secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). If confirmed, Levine would be the first transgender woman ever confirmed by the Senate. This is a big deal to me! I never even dreamed I would see this.
Meanwhile, former DHS officials including some Trump era officials say the department botched the attack on the capitol because Trump's adviser Stephen Miller stocked the department with anti-immigrant hardliners who don't know shit about shit.
"For Miller to get his policies through, he put people in positions who had no qualifications whatsoever. While Stephen was solely focused on immigration, the department does other things. And the more critical parts of the department were impeded," said Neumann, who endorsed Biden for president after having left DHS last year.
Finally, now that the Trump era is over, a Reuters review of publicly available data found that despite the existence of Trump's trade war, he did virtually nothing to stop the flow of jobs overseas when compared to the Obama administration.
While complete data does not exist to pinpoint all U.S. jobs that are lost to offshoring, the Labor Department tracks cases where workers petition for help under a federal law designed to aid those harmed by trade.
During the four years of the Trump administration, that program certified 2,095 petitions covering 202,151 workers who lost jobs that moved overseas. That’s only slightly less than the 2,170 petitions approved during the last four years of the Obama administration, which covered 209,735 workers.
Programming note... I'm going to be offline tomorrow. I'm going to watch Joe Biden's inauguration and tomorrow evening I'm cooking a birthday dinner for my father who is turning 71 years old. Tomorrow night I'm going to get lit and (virtually) celebrate the end of Trump with some friends. We'll back here on Thursday to start a new era.
Please drink responsibly.