> Effective February 4, 2025, such goods may not receive so-called “de minimis” clearance and enter duty and tax free. Requests for de minimis entry and clearance for ineligible shipments will be rejected. The filer/importer has the option of filing an appropriate formal or other informal entry and paying all applicable duties, taxes and fees.
> The Trump administration took a variety of steps Monday.. The most dramatic was naming Secretary of State Marco Rubio as acting administrator of USAID.. The State Department said in its statement announcing Rubio’s acting role that he has also informed Congress that “a review of USAID’s foreign assistance activities is underway with an eye towards potential reorganization.” .. Rubio explained he was entrusting the duties of deputy administrator to Peter Marocco, the head of the State Department’s office of foreign assistance.. Marocco is also leading the review into USAID activities.
If DOGE will document their claimed savings publicly, those claims can be tracked and challenged publicly. According to their claimed schedule, this will continue for the next 2 years. There can be case-by-case reviews by journalists, lawyers and courts.
You are the one who is claiming that they've saved $1.82 Billion dolars by posting some random website that thinks illegally destroying a federal agency is fiscally responsible.
Just embrace it. If they’re making claims, it would actually be prudent to document those claims and ask them about their methodology. Ask them if they consider any costs from second-order effects as subtracting from the total. If not, why not?
Calculate the totals yourself. Report the data to as many as possible. If you think it will look as bad as I do, there’s every reason to.
USAID is an entity created by Congress, a separate branch of government, via legislation, not via executive order. It lives in a separate universe, in legal terms, than entities created by executive order. This is called separation of powers. The executive branch cannot make substantive changes to an entity created by Congress due to separation of powers. It also cannot prevent moneys allocated by Congress to USAID from being spent, due to impoundment. These are tenets for you to learn, not argue about. The world was not invented with your birth, when you fell out of the coconut tree. You live in an inheritance, a world in which all of this- laws, independent branches, etc etc was already worked out, over many distinct countries and legal regimes over thousands of years.
> A federal judge said on Monday that she intended to temporarily block the Trump administration from imposing a sweeping freeze on trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans, adding to the pushback against an effort by the White House’s Office and Management and Budget.
> Seems bad form to kill a good faith comment made with effort, at least disagree or counter, etc,
If there were multiple fictional social media lobbying teams, which did not have continuous hourly coverage, then downvoting bots could be used during short intervals between time zone work hours.
You can tell if something was auto-killed or flag-killed by if it is [flagged][dead] or just [dead]. In this case, Animats' comment was not [flagged] which suggests either moderator action (unlikely, it was instant I saw it at 0 minutes and it was dead), a banned account (not in this case, check his history), or a spam or content filter.
> he proposes truly radical policy recommendations to delink the United States and China. He would hike tariffs to towering levels, end the benefits China has received from the United States for joining the World Trade Organization (WTO), cut off investment between the nations, block Chinese social media companies, halt cooperation on technology—and keep the measures in place until China’s trade surplus, now nearly $400 billion, disappears. In other words, for decades if not forever.
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