Biden Signs Orders To “Undo The Damage” From Trump Health Care Policies

By News & Guts

WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 28: (L-R) Vice President Kamala Harris looks on as U.S. President Joe Biden signs executive actions in the Oval Office of the White House on January 28, 2021 in Washington, DC. President Biden signed a series of executive actions Thursday afternoon aimed at expanding access to health care, including re-opening enrollment for health care offered through the federal marketplace created under the Affordable Care Act. (Photo by Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images)

President Biden signed two executive orders that he says just return the Affordable Care Act to what it was before Donald Trump became president. Or as he characterized it, “undo the damage Trump has done.”

The orders are designed to expand access to reproductive health care at home and abroad (specifically for “women, Black, Indigenous and other people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and those with low incomes”) and health insurance through the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid.

In addition to opening up a special enrollment period from Feb. 15 to May 15 for Americans who lost their health care coverage during the pandemic, the first order urges federal agencies to reexamine current policies that may undermine the Affordable Care Act or make it difficult for Americans to enroll in Medicaid.

The second order aims “to protect and expand access to comprehensive reproductive health care” by rescinding the Mexico City Policy. Also known as the “global gag rule,” this policy (which was not only re-instated but expanded upon by the Trump administration) bars international non-profits that provide abortion counseling or referrals from receiving U.S. funding.

Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California

·

Jan 28, 2021

BREAKING: @POTUS is repealing the dangerous #GlobalGagRule AND will take immediate steps on the #TitleX gag rule. There’s more work to do as we keep pushing to scrap this dangerous rule, but these are vital first steps in undoing the harm of the past and building a better future.

President Biden

@POTUS

US government account

I believe every American deserves the peace of mind that comes with having access to quality, affordable health care. That’s why today, I’ll take action to strengthen Americans’ access to care.

Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California

@PPActionCA

The #ACA has provided historic levels of access to health care for people across the country and has made a significant difference in sexual and reproductive health coverage. Great to see the Biden-Harris administration expanding open enrollment.

11:40 AM · Jan 28, 2021

Biden starts rolling back Trump anti-abortion rules

Executive orders aim to put new administration's reproductive rights stamp on the global stage.


President Joe Biden is set to sign executive orders aimed at rolling back some of the Trump administration’s most far-reaching abortion restrictions. | Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images


By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN

01/28/2021

President Joe Biden signed a series of executive orders on Thursday aimed at rolling back some of the Trump administration’s most far-reaching abortion restrictions, including one denying U.S. aid to health groups abroad that provide information about the procedure.

The actions will begin restoring federal support to abortion providers and organizations that offer abortion counseling while promoting the new administration's reproductive rights agenda on the global stage.

Speaking from the Oval Office, Biden said the actions will “reverse my predecessor’s attack on women’s health access” and “undo the damage that Trump has done.”

One of the orders rescinds the so-called Mexico City policy — a rule barring U.S. foreign aid from going to any organization that provides abortions or abortion counseling that the Trump administration expanded over his four years in office. The decades-old funding ban has been killed and reinstated several times by presidents along party lines and has been in effect for 20 of the past 35 years. The order directs agencies to immediately waive the Mexico City policy for current grantees abroad and instructs the secretary of State to resume funding to the United Nations Population Fund.

Biden's order also withdraws the U.S. from the anti-abortion “Geneva Consensus Declaration” the Trump administration signed last year with dozens of other countries, which asserted that “there is no international right to abortion, nor any international obligation on the part of States to finance or facilitate abortion.”

Domestically, Biden additionally signed a memorandum directing the Department of Health and Human Services to review and consider scrapping the Trump administration’s rule that overhauled the Title X federal family planning program, stripping tens of millions of dollars in grants from Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers. Hundreds of providers have left the Title X program over the past couple of years, leaving big gaps in care.

But a senior administration official said Thursday there is no specific timeline for a decision on Title X. The White House cited legal constraints for not rescinding the Trump rule immediately.

"This policy was implemented through rulemaking and to reverse it, there will need to be another rulemaking," the official said. "Decisions about what to do here will reside with the HHS secretary so I'm not in a position to pre-judge the outcome."

The situation is further complicated because the Supreme Court is also currently weighing the legality of Trump's overhaul of the program.

A source close to Biden told POLITICO that a more conservative federal judiciary fortified with Trump appointees may mean slower and more cautious rule-making.

"They will not risk taking policy actions that can be undermined in court," the source said. "They will design a strategy and policy that puts them in the strongest possible position to not just propose new rules but defend and sustain them."

Once Biden signs the memorandum, HHS could announce an interim final rule reflecting the policy change in 30 days. But it would take months longer for the hundreds of providers that left the program over the Trump administration’s ban on abortion referrals to reapply and rejoin their states’ networks.

“It won't just be like flipping a switch to get all the providers of the Title X program back in,” Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson told reporters on Tuesday.

Recipients of U.S. foreign assistance similarly say the reversal of the Mexico City policy won’t immediately undo the effects of the Trump rule, which expanded the policy to shut out groups involved in activities beyond family planning, including those working on eradicating global HIV and malaria.

Melvine Ouyo, the founder and executive director at Hope for Kenya Slum Adolescents Initiative, which works with teenage girls, told POLITICO that some clinics in hard-to-reach areas closed as a result of the rule, at times leaving people there without any health care.

Congressional Republicans were quick to criticize Biden's moves, which Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned would "run over the consciences of American taxpayers and put them back on the hook for funding abortions overseas."

More than 100 GOP lawmakers led by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) sent a letter to Biden Thursday asking him to reconsider the repeal of the Mexico City policy, arguing that it “was designed to mitigate U.S. taxpayer complicity in global abortion.”

Progressive lawmakers and abortion rights advocates, however, cheered Thursday's executive actions while pressing Biden to go further, saying that a simple reversal of the Trump rules isn’t enough.

“Being bold and really pushing forward an agenda and not just focusing on incremental changes is what is needed over the next two years,” said McGill Johnson.

Progressives in Congress, such as Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), are calling on Biden to next undo Trump rules requiring insurance companies to bill separately for abortion coverage and take steps to shore up the contraception mandate stemming from the Affordable Care Act so that fewer employers can refuse to cover their workers’ birth control. She and others have also demanded that the first budget Biden sends to Congress repeals the longstanding ban on federal funding for abortions.

“I am confident that Biden will be our pro-choice president and he will move swiftly to undo much of the harm of the Trump administration,” Chu said.

Biden was for decades was one of the Democratic party’s staunchest anti-abortion voices, but as a candidate pledged to advance abortion rights. Advocates who met with his transition team, including Silvia Henriquez, the co-president of the group All* Above All, believe more administrative actions are on the way.

“Our issues in the past have often been put on the back burner, but we are hopeful this administration will deliver,” she said.

Carmen Paun contributed to this

Progressives push Biden for recurring stimulus checks

The left is eager to go big on the next coronavirus relief proposal.


Progressives say President Joe Biden must go further on stimulus checks, which remain overwhelmingly popular with the public. | Matt Rourke, File/AP Photo

By SARAH FERRIS POLITICO

01/28/2021 

More than 50 House progressives are pushing President Joe Biden to prioritize recurring direct checks instead of one-time payments in the next rescue package, upping the demands on Democratic leaders in their race to draft a bill.

The group of House Democrats, led by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), sent a letter to the Biden administration on Thursday calling for regularly delivered checks through the end of the pandemic, rather than a single $1,400 payment that is likely to fall short of expenses like rent or mortgage payments.

The letter obtained by POLITICO — which was also signed by Congressional Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) — does not call for a specific dollar amount. But Omar and other progressives have been vocal in their support for monthly $2,000 checks.

“One more check is not enough,” progressives wrote in their letter to Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

White House and congressional officials are moving quickly to draft the next stimulus package, with Democrats working on legislation that would meet the broad outlines of Biden’s $1.9 trillion proposal and could pass by mid-March.

Biden’s proposal includes long-time priorities of the left, like a $15 minimum wage and a paid leave program — though it remains unclear if either can make it into the package given initial GOP resistance and certain procedural constraints if Democrats deploy budget reconciliation to evade a Senate filibuster.

Now progressives say Biden must also go further on stimulus checks, which remain overwhelmingly popular with the public despite resistance from the GOP’s deficit hawks as well as some Democrats.

While the lawmakers do not threaten to withhold their votes, the progressives’ push to prioritize recurring payments could drum up pressure on top Democrats in a narrowly divided House and Senate.

“Recurring direct payments until the economy recovers will help ensure that people can meet their basic needs, provide racially equitable solutions, and shorten the length of the recession,” the letter reads.

The group also told Biden and Harris that the checks should go to “all immigrant workers, refugees, and their families,” which would include people who file federal taxes but are not legally authorized to work in the U.S.— a group that is not currently eligible for payments.

The letter also calls for more outreach by state and local officials “to ensure families are aware of payments” and to offer more help to people who may not have access to bank accounts.

The letter is endorsed by more than two dozen progressive groups, including Demand Progress, Indivisible and the Universal Income Project.

A SATANIC COVEN
GOP senator stocks office with 13 former Trump staffers

Judd Deere, the former deputy White House press secretary, will be Hagerty’s deputy chief of staff for communications.


Bill Hagerty speaks to Mike Pompeo Thursday, June 27, 2019. 

| Jacquelyn Martin, Pool/AP Photo

YOU WOULD NOT KNOW HIM WITHOUT THE PICTURE

By DANIEL LIPPMAN

01/28/2021 

As Trump administration alums face a tough job market after the Capitol riot, one new Republican Senate office has turned into a full-employment factory for Trump officials looking for their next gig.

Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) announced on Thursday that he’s hired 13 former Trump administration officials to work in his office.

WHAT WILL Q SAY

Judd Deere, the former deputy White House press secretary who stuck it out until the final day of the Trump presidency as the last remaining press spokesperson, will be Hagerty’s deputy chief of staff for communications, while Julia Hahn, who was the deputy White House communications director, will be senior communications adviser. Hagerty himself is a Trump alum and served as the U.S. ambassador to Japan.

John Rader, a native of Cookeville, Tenn., will be Hagerty’s chief of staff and was most recently deputy assistant to the president for strategic initiatives at the White House and also previously served on the National Security Council, working on policy and strategy. The new job is a return to Capitol Hill for Rader, who once was counsel on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Hagerty also looked to former Trump officials to fill out his policy team, hiring Robert Zarate, who was on the policy planning staff at the State Department and previously worked for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), to be his national security adviser; Jonathan Greenstein, a deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury Department and a former Goldman Sachs employee, to be senior policy adviser; and Kevin Kim, who was previously a senior adviser to the Special Presidential Envoy for Arms Control, to be his national security fellow.

Retired U.S. Army colonel Joel Rayburn, the former U.S. Special Envoy for Syria at State and former senior director for Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon on the NSC, will hold the unusual Capitol Hill title of “Special Advisor for Middle East Affairs.” Hagerty also hired Adam Telle, who most recently headed up the Senate team of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, to be his chief adviser.

“Not only does the team I have assembled in my Washington office augment the strong on-the-ground state organization announced this month, they also bring a wide array of experiences and qualifications that will serve our state and the country well,” Hagerty said in a statement.

Other former Trump aides who Hagerty hired include: Addison Osborne, a former intern for the White House political affairs office, to be assistant scheduler; Rachel Leong, a former White House legislative affairs staffer, as a legislative correspondent; Shane Harris, who was most recently associate director for the White House Staff Secretary’s office, as special projects coordinator; Lucas Da Pieve, a former staffer for the Office of Presidential Correspondence, to be projects director; and Natalie McIntyre, a former legislative affairs staffer at the Office of Management and Budget, to be deputy legislative director.

Republican Capitol Hill offices have hired a number of former Trump officials, both from the White House and various agencies, but Hagerty’s hiring of 13 former Trump staffers goes above and beyond what other GOP lawmakers have done.

“Senator Hagerty ran on and told the people of Tennessee to send him to Washington to build on the successes of President Trump, and there is no better way to do that than by hiring the best from the outgoing administration," Deere said in a statement, responding to questions on why so many Trump officials had been hired. "The Senator also wanted to hire the most talented people in their respective fields, and he is fortunate that these individuals with decades of combined experience — particularly on issues related to foreign policy and the economy, top priorities for Hagerty — were excited to join his staff and serve the American people.”

International authorities disrupt 'world's most dangerous malware'

BY MAGGIE MILLER - 01/27/21 THE HILL

© iStockphoto


A team of international law enforcement and judicial groups on Wednesday announced they had disrupted infrastructure used by cyber criminals to spread what authorities described as the “world’s most dangerous malware” and attack organizations around the world.

The Emotet botnet, one of the most prolific malware viruses used by cyber criminals over the past decade, saw its infrastructure disrupted by a coalition of authorities in the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Lithuania, Canada and Ukraine, with European Union agencies Europol and Eurojust providing coordination support.

As part of the effort, hundreds of servers around the world used to spread the botnet were taken over by law enforcement, with Europol noting in a statement that as part of this effort, “the infected machines of victims have been redirected towards this law enforcement-controlled infrastructure.”


The botnet had been used by cyber criminals since as early as 2014 as a backdoor into computer systems, with the Emotet virus sold to other cyber criminals once it had established access to these networks, increasing cases of data theft and ransomware attacks.

“EMOTET was much more than just a malware,” Europol wrote. “What made EMOTET so dangerous is that the malware was offered for hire to other cybercriminals to install other types of malware, such as banking Trojans or ransomwares, onto a victim’s computer.”

The malware was spread through Microsoft Word documents attached to emails, which were often presented as invoices or shipping notices, or documents having to do with the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Europol.

Significant data theft was also involved in use of the botnet, with Dutch authorities discovering a database that included stolen email addresses, usernames and passwords.

In the U.S., the FBI and the Department of Justice were involved in disrupting the botnet’s infrastructure, while in Ukraine, authorities shared a video of a raid carried out that involved the seizure of dozens of pieces of computer equipment used to support the botnet.

Sherrod DeGrippo, the senior director of Threat Research and Detection at cybersecurity group Proofpoint, described the Emotet botnet as “one of the world’s most disruptive threats.”

“What makes Emotet particularly dangerous for organizations is that it has been the primary foothold for the future deployment of other banking trojans,” DeGrippo said in a statement provided to The Hill on Wednesday. “At this point, any mainstream banking trojan may lead to devastating ransomware attacks. Their campaign volume is typically large, as we usually observe hundreds of thousands of emails per day when Emotet is operating.”

“Considering this appears to be a law enforcement action on the backend infrastructure of the Emotet botnet, this really could be the end,” DeGrippo noted.

Bureau of Land Management exodus: Agency lost 87 percent of staff in Trump HQ relocation

BY REBECCA BEITSCH - 01/28/21 

After the Trump administration announced its plans to relocate the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) headquarters to Colorado, more than 87 percent of Washington-based employees decided to leave the agency, according to new numbers released by the Biden administration.

The figures show that following a July 2019 announcement the Department of the Interior would uproot the majority of BLM employees, just 41 agreed to relocate, while a staggering 287 either retired or left the agency before the end of 2020.

The flight of employees came after Trump’s BLM rolled out a plan that would leave just 60 of the agency's 10,000 employees in Washington, D.C., establishing a new headquarters in Grand Junction, Colo., while spreading the majority of Washington-based staff to various offices across the West.

“The bureau lost a tremendous amount of expertise; those were very seasoned people,” said Steve Ellis, who held the highest-ranking career position at the BLM under the Obama administration. “The numbers confirmed my worst fears. I hope we can get some of them back.”

Critics saw the move as a way to dismantle an agency that at times stands in the way of development on public lands, particularly for the fossil fuel industry.

Previous reporting from The Hill found the move would split apart a key public lands team, spreading across seven states those who review the environmental impacts of government decisions.

A senior policy analyst, several legislative affairs specialists and a public affairs specialist were among the positions of note shown in the documents to be heading to Reno, Nev.

Democrats frequently questioned why Grand Junction — a town of 60,000 four hours away from any major airport — would be the site of the BLM’s top officers.

The move was first announced by then-Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) as he prepared for a tough reelection campaign.

But as the Biden administration puts its own stamp on the BLM, it’s not yet clear what it plans to do with the Grand Junction headquarters, where 40 employees currently work, or the rest of the employees based out West.

“The Interior Department’s new leadership will work with BLM career staff to understand the ramifications of the headquarters move and determine if any adjustments need to be made," the agency said in a statement. "We are committed to engaging with a number of stakeholders through this process, including Tribes and Members of Congress."

“BLM’s important mission and the communities served by the agency deserve a deliberate and thoughtful process," it added.

Ellis advised that such a process should be handled “surgically.”

“It was a tough four years to be a federal employee,” he said. “Just because the last administration treated them badly, you don't want to do that again.”

THIS WAS STEVE BANNON'S IDEA OF DECONSTRUCTING GOVERNMENT, IF YOU CAN'T FIRE PUBLIC SECTOR WORKERS BECAUSE OF UNION CONTRACTS YOU MOVE THEIR ENTIRE

DEPARTMENT (PHYSICALLY IF NECCASARY) FORCING THEM TO QUIT.

IT WAS TRUMP AND KUSHNER POLICY APPLIED BY SONNY PERDUE TO THE USDA AS WELL.

Calculations Show Humans Can't Contain Superintelligent Machines



Researchers say we’re unlikely to ever be able to contain a large enough superintelligent artificial intelligence>>>P.

The premise sounds scary, but knowing the odds will help scientists who work on these projects.

Self-teaching AI already exists and can teach itself things programmers don’t

“fully understand.”

In a new study, researchers from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Human Development say they’ve shown that an artificial intelligence in the category known as“superintelligent” would be impossible for humans to contain with competing software.

That... doesn’t sound promising. But are we really all doomed to bow down to our sentient AI overlords?

➡ The world is f#@!-ing weird. Let's make sense of it together.

Berlin’s Institute for Human Development studies how humans learn—and how we subsequently build and teach machines to learn. A superintelligent AI is one that exceeds human intelligence and can teach itself new things beyond human grasp. It’s this phenomenon that causes a great deal of thought and research.

The Planck press release points out superintelligent AIs already exist in some capacities.“[T]here are already machines that perform certain important tasks independently without programmers fully understanding how they learned it,” study coauthor Manuel Cebrian explains.“The question therefore arises whether this could at some point become uncontrollable and dangerous for humanity.”

Mathematicians, for example, use complex machine learning to help solve outliers for famous proofs. Scientists use machine learning to come up with new candidate molecules to treat diseases. Yes, much of this research involves some amount of“brute force” solving—the simple fact that computers can race through billions of calculations and shorten these problems from decades or even centuries to days or months.

➡ Cool Stuff We Love: The Best Books About AI






Because of the amount that computer hardware can process at once, the boundary where quantity becomes quality isn’t always easy to pinpoint. Humans are fearful of AI that can teach itself, and Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics (and generations of variations on them) have become instrumental to how people imagine we can protect ourselves from a rogue or evil AI. The laws dictate that a robot can’t harm people and can’t be instructed to harm people.

The problem, according to these researchers, is that we likely don’t have a way to enforce these laws or others like them. From the study:

“We argue that total containment is, in principle, impossible, due to fundamental limits inherent to computing itself. Assuming that a superintelligence will contain a program that includes all the programs that can be executed by a universal Turing machine on input potentially as complex as the state of the world, strict containment requires simulations of such a program, something theoretically (and practically) impossible.”

Basically, a superintelligent AI will have acquired so much knowledge that to even plan a large enough container will exceed our human grasp. Not just that, but there’s no guarantee we’ll be able to parse whatever the AI has decided is the best medium. It probably won’t look anything like our humanmade, clumsy programming languages.

This might sound scary, but it’s also extremely important information for scientists to have. Without the phantom of a“failsafe algorithm,” computer researchers can put their energy into other plans and exercise more caution.