The Past 24 Hours Or So

Your Daily Dose of Trump and His Administration News

• The Trump administration will pay for the coronavirus response in part by cutting funds from other health programs, including $4.9 million from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and $37 million from a program that pays for heating and cooling assistance for the poor.

• President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign said on Wednesday it filed a libel suit against the New York Times accusing the newspaper of intentionally publishing a false opinion article related to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. The lawsuit relates to a March 27, 2019, opinion article written by Max Frankel, who served as executive editor of the Times from 1986 to 1994.

• Rush Limbaugh and right-wing fringe sites are attacking Dr. Nancy Messonnier, a top CDC official handling the coronavirus response, because she is Rod Rosenstein’s sister. They’re spreading the lie that she’s part of the deep state and trying to tank the markets to weaken Trump.

• The President has appointed VP Pence to oversee his administration’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak.

• Trump blamed the stock market slide that mostly happened Monday and Tuesday on the Democratic debate that took place after the sharp drop in the market.

• The Trump administration announced on Wednesday that it will be resuming coal leasing on public lands, angering conservationists. The Bureau of Land Management said in a statement Wednesday that it had completed an environmental assessment and found no significant impact from lifting the pause on processing applications for new coal leases.

• The Interior Department is pushing ahead with a controversial proposal, dubbed the Promoting Open Science, that would prohibit the agency from considering scientific studies that don’t make all of their underlying data public. The proposal mirrors a similar effort at the Environmental Protection Agency, which critics argue would block that agency from considering renowned public health studies, particularly in cases where revealing such data would result in privacy violations.

• The Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found significant shortcomings in the Labor Department’s oversight of the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund, costing taxpayers $865 million, almost three times the previous estimate The GAO report found three coal companies have shifted hundreds of millions in liabilities to the Trust Fund – a cost that the Department of Labor was tasked with monitoring. In all three cases, the DOL failed to make sure the companies had sufficient collateral to cover what they owed to the trust fund, according to the report.