DOJ says goodbye to Rod Rosenstein
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National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) chief David Redl resigned abruptly from his position on Thursday, officials confirmed.
Redl has been at the helm of the NTIA, the body tasked with advising the Trump administration’s telecom policy within the Department of Commerce, since November 2017.
An NTIA spokeswoman said that Diane Rinaldo would be taking over as acting administrator. Rinaldo is a former staffer with the House Intelligence Committee who has been Redl’s deputy at NTIA for the past year.
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Nick Geale is leaving the Labor Department
The top aide to Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta is leaving the Trump administration after a clash with White House officials who regarded him as personally difficult and an impediment to President Trump’s deregulatory agenda, according to sources with direct knowledge.
Behind the scenes: Senior White House officials — especially within the Domestic Policy Council — have made it clear to Acosta that they’re frustrated that, in their view, the Labor Department hasn’t been moving quickly or aggressively enough on deregulation. And some have pointed to Geale as the problem. The White House also separately lodged a complaint about Geale.
A source who is close to the president and has direct knowledge of the situation told me: “The pace of change has not been sufficient. [Acosta] tends to be fairly fearful of taking hardline positions. He tends to be solicitous of the unions, often making the argument that that’s what the president wants.”
- “The only question in my mind is, is it Nick Geale that’s the problem? Or is he just doing his boss’s bidding? It’s not clear to me that Nick is the only problem. You take your cues from the top.”
- Geale has told Secretary Acosta that he will be leaving shortly. A source with direct knowledge told me Geale’s departure date is May 31.
- Geale told me: “We in the administration all want to do what is best for the country. There are lots of passionate people in the administration and I certainly am one of them. I believe I’ve done a great job in implementing the president’s vision and I wish everyone good luck in continuing their important work.”
A Labor Department spokesperson defended the department against White House accusations that it had been slow on deregulation.
- “The U.S. Department of Labor had $3.28 billion in deregulatory savings in FY 2018 — the second most in the Administration,” the spokesperson said. “Even more actions like the current rulesmaking on overtime, joint employer and regular rate are in process.”
- “Nick Geale plays an important role in these efforts. The Department of Labor will continue to work aligned with presidential priorities.”
Context: The White House’s frustrations with Acosta’s Labor Department are not new. Bloomberg News describes the clashes and philosophical disagreements between the White House and the Labor Department exhaustively in this article. They boil down to a view among conservative White House officials that Acosta hasn’t cracked down hard enough against unions and has been too cautious to implement deregulatory policies that might spark a uproar on Capitol Hill.
- But, but: Two sources familiar with the situation told me that while White House officials had been frustrated for months with what they perceived as Acosta’s unwillingness to aggressively deregulate, they think Acosta has shown signs of improvement over the past six months.
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Johnny DeStefano, one of President Trump’s top advisers who served as a bridge between the Republican Party and the administration, is leaving the White House on Friday, according to officials familiar with his decision.
DeStefano — one of the last remaining aides from the start of the administration — was a key contributor to the administration’s political strategy during the 2018 midterms and ran the Office of Presidential Personnel in the early days of the administration, where he was responsible for staffing a large portion of the government during the turbulent early days of the Trump presidency.
He told Trump on Monday that he would be leaving the administration, White House officials said. DeStefano declined to comment. He is expected to advise a number of companies, including Juul, the e-cigarette company, while helping on the campaign, according to people familiar with his plans. Juul has significant business in front of the Food and Drug Administration, and former Trump spokesman Josh Raffel also works for the company.
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President Donald Trump’s point person on Capitol Hill, Shahira Knight, is leaving her post as multiple aides in the White House legislative affairs office and beyond eye the exits heading into a campaign season that will likely freeze legislative activity on both sides of the aisle.
Multiple sources close to Knight say she has discussed leaving the White House for months, and her impending exit was widely expected – particularly because she told colleagues she wanted to last a year in the job, and her anniversary in the role is approaching in mid-July.
"Shahira has done a wonderful job as my legislative affairs director. She was outstanding for us and for our country and will be a tremendous success in the private sector," Trump said in a statement to CNN.
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A plan to move Agriculture Department researchers out of Washington, D.C., has thrown two small but influential science agencies into upheaval. Federal employees at the Economic Research Service (ERS) and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) have quit in unusually large numbers since August, when Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced he would relocate the offices.
ERS leadership has been conducting final site visits this week of candidate locations, and an “announcement Friday is very likely,” said Peter Winch, an organizer for the American Federation of Government Employees, a union that currently represents ERS workers.
Perdue presented his idea as a money-saving plan that will move scientists closer to “stakeholders” and “customers” such as farmers. ERS is a statistical agency that provides research for lawmakers; NIFA funds hundreds of millions of dollars in agricultural research each year. Each office employs between 200 and 250 people, based on employee estimates. During the Obama administration, NIFA had about 400 workers and ERS had 300.
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The Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services resigned from his post Friday at President Donald Trump’s request, according to his resignation letter.
Francis Cissna will be replaced by former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, according to a person familiar with the situation.
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People are noting that Emmet Flood is the man who was supposed to lead Trump’s Executive Privilege angle. Something’s cooking.
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Kevin Hasset, a top Trump advisor and Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, is leaving the administration.
The announcement seems to have caught everybody off guard, as almost no stories about it are up yet save for a few automatically generated ones.
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Top DHS watchdog John Kelly (no, not that John Kelly, a different one) retires early after criticism of his FEMA reports
According to press reports, auditors said John Kelly told them to produce upbeat reports about FEMA’s response to disasters, including Hurricane Sandy.
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White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders will leave the job at the end of the month, President Donald Trump said Thursday.
In a pair of tweets, the president said Sanders will return to her home state of Arkansas. He thanked her for a “job well done.”
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Hah. Just beat me to this 'cause I can’t do three in a row, HUGE news.
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I guess constantly having to make up stuff on the fly has its toll.
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I know I will shed no tears. Nope, not a smokey eye in the house.
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Buh Bye
Jarrod Agen, Vice President Pence’s communications director and a frequent presence at his side, is leaving the White House at the end of the month. He will become a vice president for communications at Lockheed Martin, one of the nation’s leading defense contractors.
Agen had worked in Pence’s office since the beginning of the administration and after 2½ years in the White House said he felt ready for a change, according to friends and associates.
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We knew this was coming…but it does clear out the agency…something that Sen Warren started under Obama.
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Omg! Fuck that guy!
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Headline I’m expecting to read next:
Trump Fires Everyone in Government So He Can Do Whatever the Fuck He Wants
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No surprise here. We’re losing a respected expert on Russia who is also a Putin critic. She’s being replaced by a war hawk/Bolton ally.
Hill’s departure means Trump has almost no experts on Russia and Europe to advise him. Probably doesn’t make that much difference since he does not take advice, nor value expertise.
Fiona Hill, the top official on Russian affairs at the National Security Council, will depart the Trump administration this summer, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Hill, a former Brookings scholar and skeptic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, oversaw rocky Washington-Moscow ties over the past two and a half years. She’s expected to remain in her current post at least through Trump’s expected meeting with Putin at next week’s G20 summit in Osaka, Japan.
She’ll be replaced by Tim Morrison, an arms control specialist who currently serves as the top non-proliferation official at the NSC.
Morrison joined the administration last August and is widely considered a hardliner on nuclear policy – his area of expertise. His hawkish views seem to align with those of White House national security adviser John Bolton who has worked toward transforming the NSC into an entity that is hyper-focused on executing the President’s agenda by bringing in more political appointees and reducing the number of career officials on his staff. …
But the same source close to Hill told CNN that her departure leaves a void in an administration that already lacks expertise on European issues.
“There’s a real void now. Add to that the fact that there’s only an acting Assistant Secretary for Europe and still empty Europe slots at DoD … bottom line, the administration has very little capacity on Europe at a time when there’s considerable challenges,” the source said.
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