May 2, 2020

Trump Moves to Replace Yet Another Inspector General

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From the Friday evening news dump files:

President Trump moved on Friday night to replace a top official at the Department of Health and Human Services who angered him with a report last month highlighting supply shortages and testing delays at hospitals during the coronavirus pandemic.

Ha ha. Of course he did. Before long, every inspector general in the executive branch will understand that their careers are at risk if they criticize anything that Trump doesn’t want criticized. The Senate, of course, will not provide any oversight either. And the House is hobbled by the fact that Trump refuses to respond to their subpoenas. This leaves only the press doing real oversight, and Trump works day and night to convince the public that the press is a lying bunch of jackals whose only goal is to support Democrats by making him look bad.

What happens to oversight of the executive branch if we have four more years of this? I suppose it won’t be completely gone, but it will be as close to eradicated as makes no difference.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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