Trump47 First Week & Beyond Catch-All

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“… “The Biden FAA specifically recruited and hired individuals with ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities, psychiatric issues and complete paralysis over other individuals who sought to work for the FAA,” an accompanying White House fact sheet said.

During Trump’s first administration, however, FAA conducted similar initiatives to recruit and hire people with disabilities.

Shortly after a door blew out on a plane in January 2024, Fox News published an article headlined “FAA’s diversity push includes focus on hiring people with ‘severe intellectual’ and ‘psychiatric’ disabilities.”

The original article seems to have been taken down (although a similar article is still up on its website), but it was republished by the New York Post and shared on social media at the time by Elon Musk, the leader of the newly established Department of Government Efficiency.

The fact-checking website Snopes, however, pointed out that the language from the FAA’s website that Fox News highlighted, which discusses hiring of people with targeted disabilities, was present for all of Trump’s first term and had been published as early as 2013.

Targeted disabilities are generally manifest, such as deafness, blindness, significant mobility impairments and intellectual disabilities.

“The implication that the policy is new, or that it stems from efforts that began under U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and President Biden, was demonstrably false,” Snopes investigative journalist Alex Kasprak wrote.

… Additionally, during Trump’s first term, FAA launched a pilot program in 2019 to enroll up to 20 people with disabilities in training for careers in air traffic operations. …”
 
Rasmussen had him as high as 56%, down to 52% yesterday.

Trump starts second term with higher approval than in 2017, poll shows​

A Quinnipiac University poll put Trump 10 points ahead of his approval at the start of his first term.

Days into his second administration, 46 percent of voters approve of the job Trump is doing, a 10 point bump from the university’s January 2017 poll where he had a 36 percent approval.The president’s disapproval rating sits at 43 percent and 11 percent of voters did not give an opinion.


For Trump, historically, that is stellar.
 

Billionaire Elon Musk’s influence over a traditionally nonpartisan agency that oversees the federal workforce culminated in the government’s stunning proposal Tuesday offering employees an inducement to resign, according to four people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal talks.

The proposal, emailed late in the day to many of the nation’s 2.3 million federal workers, blindsided some advisers to President Donald Trump, including officials in the budget office and agencies that typically would be consulted in advance of such monumental changes to personnel and spending policies, the people said.
 
Remote workers actually aren’t more productive. Will bosses finally call them back in this year?
Jan. 4, 2024 3 AM PT

These days, it looks like the bloom is coming off the rose for remote work: Many employers are talking tougher. New research shows employees are actually less productive when they work from home full-time. And, with the tight job market starting to slacken, some predict 2024 will be the year employers finally clamp down.

But don’t be too quick to conclude things are going back to the days of 9 to 5 in the old cubicle.

It’s true that widespread studies based on standard measures of efficiency have found that fully remote employees are 10% to 20% less productive than those working on company premises. Challenges related to communications, coordination and self-motivation may be factors in the decline.

And some employers have been warning that those who fail to meet new standards for being in the office may find adverse effects on their performance evaluations and incomes.

But the new research that showed lower productivity by full-time remote workers also found that those on a hybrid schedule — some days at home and some on site — were about as productive as those in the office full time. And there’s some evidence that companies offering greater flexibility to workers may achieve better financial results.

Potentially even more important than abstract data are the surprisingly deep feelings of a great many workers about holding on to at least some degree of flexibility. And those personal feelings, which involve such cut-to-the-bone issues as commuting and the cost of child care, are being reinforced by gains in communications technology and the persistent shortage of qualified workers.

Since the pandemic, John Sturr, a 58-year-old social worker for Sonoma County, has been working two to three days a week from his desk in his bedroom. On days in the office he confers with colleagues and responds to walk-ins. He’s come to love the arrangement.

“The commute is beautiful, through vineyards” along the Russian River Valley, he says, “but it’s an hour out of your day.” The time that Sturr saves he uses to put dinner on early and run errands.

“I’ve never been able to telework my whole career. Previous managers were always suspicious. This is kind of amazing.”

Productivity vs. profitability
Today, about 30% of all full-time employees are on a hybrid schedule, according to WFH Research, which monitors remote work trends by surveying thousands of workers every month. Deborah Lovich, who leads Boston Consulting Group’s work on “people strategy,” sees more employers adopting hybrid work as they see the financial and nonfinancial benefits. “I do think people will come around,” she said.

The outlook for fully remote workers, who currently make up about 10% of all employment, appears more cloudy. Those job openings have been shrinking faster in recent months as the job market has slowed.

Many people working full time from home are in high-paying tech and information industries, which explains why San Francisco and Los Angeles metro areas are No. 1 and 2, respectively, when it comes to the share of all full-time workdays done at home, at 46% and 40% as of November.

At the other end of the pay scale are fully remote workers in administrative and more routine functions, such as customer service representatives at call centers, where many jobs may be further eroded by artificial intelligence.

But even fully remote work has things going for it. For many employers, what may be lost in productivity can at least partly be made up in cost savings from cutting back on office and related expenses. Plus, these companies can hire workers more cheaply anywhere in the world. All told, Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University estimated that those savings may average 10% of a company’s operating costs.

“Firms shouldn’t care about productivity, they should care about profitability,” said Bloom, who is part of the WFH Research group.

Whatever the productivity studies may show, Bloom said, what’s happening is intuitive. “Look at their actions,” he said. “This is no longer a pandemic, and millions of firms in a capitalist economy are doing something consistently [in sticking with remote work]. I can only conclude it’s profitable.”

Santa Monica-based TrueCar decided to go fully remote after the pandemic. “It gives us full access to talent,” said Jill Angel, chief people officer at the firm, which operates a digital platform helping consumers shop and price cars.

TrueCar has cut back about two-thirds of its office space and eventually plans to get down to just 4,000 square feet, enough for client meetings and team-building events.

The company currently has about 325 employees across the country. And over the last three years, 48 employees have moved out of California to other states, with Texas and Washington being the most popular destinations.

Workers are happier when they have control and certainty over their work schedules, Angel said, and the firm is betting that over time that will help make it both more productive and more profitable.

“I do know we’re not going back,” she said.

We have hybrid and I think it works well. I’m in about 4.5 days a week, but we are required 3 days. I let my team leave midday many days and finish from home.
If efficiency were the goal, Elon could try the hybrid approach.
But that isn’t the goal. The goal is to make people quit. If efficiency were the goal they would reduce the workforce with a scalpel, not a hand grenade.
 
Gallup’s first poll has Trump at 47% approve, 48% disapprove.




Reuters has Trump at 45% down from 47%. 46% disapproval rating.


Mandate, indeed.
 
I'm really struggling to imagine a first two weeks worse than what we've seen from Trump 2.0. Yes, Lincoln inherited an absolute shitshow in 1861, and it went downhill from there. But Trump 2.0 inherited an extremely strong economy, a functional federal government, and most notably, a lack of states threatening to leave the Union. AND YET, we've seen mismanagement of historic levels in the last two weeks.

I remain terrified about what this administration can do to destroy the strength of our republic. But at the same time, I'm encouraged that the incompetence and idiocy we've seen in the first two weeks doesn't just match 2017. It vastly exceeds it.
 

Trump Administration Orders Agencies to Find More DEI Workers to Ax​

Government offices have cut dozens of positions and canceled millions of dollars in contracts​

"
Trump administration officials are pressing federal agencies to dig deeper to find diversity workers to push out of the government, according to current and former officials familiar with internal conversations.

President Trump’s Office of Personnel Management last week required federal agencies to close offices that focus exclusively on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility and place employees of those divisions on paid administrative leave by Jan. 22. Agency leaders were required to submit a list of all DEI employees the following day.

After doing so, agencies were asked to identify additional staff who worked on those areas during a meeting with OPM staff last week, the officials said. These people said it seemed that the Trump administration had expected the number to be larger. Some agency officials parsed through position descriptions to find additional related roles.

The Trump administration has followed up with agencies about employees thought to be working on diversity issues as well as those who have attended internal diversity events, people familiar with the matter said.

It isn’t clear how many DEI-related jobs have been identified by agencies so far. The Department of Veterans Affairs said this week it had placed nearly 60 people, with average annual earnings of $136,000, on paid leave. Other officials said their agencies’ initial counts were far lower. The Education Department said it had canceled $2.6 million in ongoing DEI training and service contracts. ..."



 
Trump 2.0 was already teetering on the edge of worst first 10 days ever. And that includes 1861. After today's disastrous, embarrassing press conference, Trump 2.0 is running away with the race.
 
Quick summary of the press conference?

President Donald Trump on Thursday, without evidence, sought to blame the policies of previous Democratic administrations for Wednesday’s deadly mid-air collision over the Potomac River.

“We must have only the highest standards for those who work in our aviation system,” Trump said. “I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best to extraordinary.”

He continued: “You remember that. Only the highest aptitude. They have to be the highest intellect and psychologically superior people were allowed to qualify for air traffic controllers. That was not so prior to getting there.”

Trump added: “When I arrived in 2016, I made that change very early on, because I always felt this was a job that, and other jobs too, but this was a job that had to be superior intelligence, and we didn’t really have that. And we had it. And then when I left office and Biden took over, he changed them back to lower than ever before.

“Their policy was horrible,” the president said, “and their politics was even worse.”
 
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