Tis Life

Countries which Trump has threatened or invaded

I drew St. Hildegard if she was a cat

Aaron Pellish at Politico:

President Donald Trump has outlined his mandate for incoming acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte: He wants to gut the office. Trump said in a Wall Street Journal interview published Friday he believes the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is too bloated, and has tasked Pulte, who will take over for Tulsi Gabbard, with overseeing staffing cuts. “I’d like to see it smaller. I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there,” he told the Journal.

The Journal reported Trump suggested Pulte prioritize firing staff who served during the Biden and Obama administrations. Trump told reporters on Friday he “wouldn’t mind” staffing cuts at ODNI. “I’ve heard that’s way too high for way too long,” he said on Air Force One of the staff levels at the agency. “If he cut, I wouldn’t mind that.” Trump’s vision for ODNI could further alienate Republicans on Capitol Hill, some of whom expressed dismay following the announcement that Trump had tapped a close ally with zero national security experience to lead the government’s intelligence-sharing operation. Trump downplayed Pulte’s lack of national security experience while speaking to reporters at the White House on Thursday. “Bill is a guy that will be able to figure it out very quickly,” he said.

Pulte earned a reputation as a staunch Trump loyalist during his stint as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency — a role he continues to serve in, in addition to his intelligence community responsibilities — when he recommended that the Department of Justice launch mortgage fraud investigations into some of Trump’s political enemies. The president stressed that Pulte’s appointment will be temporary and that he is considering other candidates to fill the role permanently. He told the Journal that serving on an acting basis “gives you more power” to enact the sweeping changes he hopes to impose. Trump said he expects the person he nominates to permanently succeed Gabbard to continue the staffing cuts he’s asked Pulte to start.

Sam Heughan, who played Jamie Fraser in the hit TV series Outlander, joined new Cabinet Secretary for Education, Culture and Gaelic, Màiri McAllan, to mark 40 years since the Association for British Sponsorship of the Arts (ABSA) established an office in Scotland, which today, as Culture & Business Scotland, continues to foster closer links and collaboration between arts, culture and heritage bodies, and Scotland’s business community.

Actor Sam Heughan, who also founded the Galloway Distillery, joined the celebration as the guest of honour. He said:

“As an actor and as a business owner, I’m fully aware of what can be achieved when entrepreneurs, industry leaders and artists work together. Whenever I speak to people around the world about Scotland, they always talk about our artistic output, our iconic exports and our growing reputation for innovation. These are the things which get us noticed on the global stage.

Collaboration between culture and business benefits both sectors, and it was great to hear so much enthusiasm for this partnership in the room.”

Executive Director, David Nelson, said:

“It was truly inspiring to be in a room with such a diverse group of people from the arts, heritage, business, third sector, all united by a belief in the importance of close collaboration between culture and business.

“We were honoured to welcome the Cabinet Secretary to her first official engagement, and we are hugely grateful to the Scottish Government for its continued support for our unique investment model. It was also a real privilege to have Sam Heughan in the room, who shared some intimate reflections on the value of collaboration between culture and business.

Erin Reed at Erin In The Morning:

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"—with terms broad enough to encompass any acknowledgment that gender identity differs from sex assigned at birth or that transgender people even exist. If finalized, the rule would reach every hospital, university, school district, state government, nonprofit, and homeless shelter that receives federal funding, effectively requiring much of American institutional life to discriminate against transgender people as a condition of receiving federal money. And unlike an executive order, the rule would require significant work by a future administration to reverse. The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." The word "recipient" is doing critical work here: the review evaluates the organization, not just how the grant money will be spent. An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked. For grants that have already been issued, provisions also allow for the termination of funding.

The prohibition is vast. The rule bars federal awards from being used to "fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate" gender ideology—and as mentioned before, because the screening evaluates the recipient as a whole, even indirect support could trigger enforcement. Since the rule was published, Erin in the Morning has been contacted by those worried about its impact on homeless shelters, which could be required to turn transgender people—any acknowledgment of a resident's gender identity could be grounds for a funding investigation. Colleges and universities, among the largest recipients of federal grants in the country, would face renewed federal pressure to enact bathroom bans, sports bans, and restrictions on name and gender marker changes—any institutional process that recognizes a gender identity different from sex assigned at birth could be deemed "gender ideology." Nonprofits and federally qualified health centers could be forced to stop acknowledging that transgender people exist entirely or serving their needs—a step some organizations briefly took during the chaos of the initial executive orders before pulling back when courts and advocates signaled they lacked enforceability. This rule is designed to give them enforceability.

Importantly, the gender ideology prohibition has no age limitation—hospitals could be targeted not just for providing care to minors but for providing gender-affirming care to adults, because prescribing hormone therapy to a transgender patient of any age could be deemed promoting the belief that "sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." The Trump administration has already used funding threats and federal subpoenas to target hospitals providing gender-affirming care to transgender youth, a campaign that caused multiple institutions to suspend their programs even before any legal determination was made. The extraordinary broadness of the "gender ideology" definition—which covers not just care for minors but any endorsement of the idea that “sex is mutable”—would give the administration the regulatory infrastructure to expand that targeting to care for transgender adults if it so chose.

The rule was jointly proposed by 42 federal agencies—from the Department of Health and Human Services to the Department of Defense to the National Science Foundation to NASA—each of which signed the document through its senior leadership. Signatories include Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at HHS, Kelly Loeffler at the Small Business Administration, and Troy Edgar at the Department of Homeland Security. It is the broadest interagency rulemaking effort of the Trump administration, and it is designed to ensure that no single agency can opt out or slow-walk implementation.

The Trump Regime released an extreme anti-trans new rule that requires federal funding recipients to deny the existence of trans people or be denied federal funding.