Where is Trump's Cabinet? It's anybody's guess.

[DonViejo]

Agency heads are carrying out the Trump administration's agenda largely in secret, in many cases shielding their schedules from public view.

By EMILY HOLDEN 12/26/2017 05:05 AM EST

The Cabinet members carrying out President Donald Trump’s orders to shake up the federal government are doing so under an unusual layer of secrecy — often shielding their schedules from public view, keeping their travels under wraps and refusing to identify the people and groups they’re meeting.

A POLITICO review of the practices of 17 Cabinet heads found that at least seven routinely decline to release information on their planned schedules or travels — information that was more widely available during the Obama and George W. Bush administrations. Four other departments — Agriculture, Labor, Homeland Security and Education — provide the secretaries’ schedules only sporadically or with few details. The Treasury Department began releasing weekly schedules for Secretary Steven Mnuchin only in November.

In addition, at least seven Cabinet departments don’t release appointment calendars that would show, after the fact, who their leaders had met with, what they discussed and where they traveled — a potential violation of the Freedom of Information Act, which says agencies must make their records “promptly available to any person.” At least two departments — Education and the Environmental Protection Agency — have released some of those details after activist groups sued them. This information clampdown is occurring with little oversight by Trump’s White House, which said only that agencies should follow the law when it comes to deciding what information to release.

“The White House does not issue guidance specifically addressing the daily schedules of Cabinet agency heads,” Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley said in a statement. On the other hand, he added, “The White House expects federal agencies to comply with FOIA requests.”

more
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/26/trump-cabinet-agenda-secret-319046

[RKP5637]

1. They function as a cult, and not in the public interest. We are in exceptionally dangerous times IMO

[dalton99a]

2. Rick Perry MAGA: Special rate hikes to keep coal mines in business

http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/rick-perrys-preposterous-coal-plan-hits-a-snag-10169353
Rick Perry May Be Under the Radar in Washington, But Nobody Here Would Count Him Out
Jim Schutze | December 15, 2017 | 4:00am

He just manages, somehow, to make less noise than the others. In recent weeks, Perry’s main focus has been to get the federal government to bail out a handful of coal-mine companies, especially five major miners, one of which is owned by a big Trump supporter.

The logic of the Perry plan is what you might call a bit of a reach-around: 1) We need to maintain operations at older, inefficient, high-polluting coal-fired generating plants in case terrorists attack us. 2) Those plants should store more coal for the attack. 3) The federal government should order special rate hikes to be imposed on customers for all that extra coal. 4) That way the energy companies will get billions of dollars from the ratepayers, which they can spend keeping those coal mines in business.

It’s free enterprise. Just not for you and me. Vox reported this week on a series of serious reports from both within and outside government calling Perry’s proposed policy a major transfer of wealth from working- and middle-class ratepayers to a few wealthy investors in over-the-hill coal mines, with no positive effect on national security. The most devastating was a report ordered by Perry from within the Department of Energy, a study of “grid resilience” intended to show how Perry’s plan would protect the nation from blackouts caused by over-regulation and Muslim extremists.

The report came back saying the opposite. It said government regulations have little to do with the shuttering of older coal and nuclear plants, most of which close down because they can’t compete with new, cheaper, cleaner, more efficient technologies. Blackouts, the report said, are caused by bad planning and bad distribution systems, not running out of fuel.