The Trump Administration "Hard Power" budget -- no, I'm not calling it the "skinny budget," not just because "skinny" seems unthreatening, but because we should always call Trump Administration initiatives by their supervillain names, especially when the Trump Administration is dumb enough to hand them to us! -- would cut a lot of government spending that actually helps the good Americans who fund our government in the first place, and one of them is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (or CDC). How much does the CDC get annually? In FY 2016, the CDC's budget was a little over $11.5 billion, which ain't chump change (not even to Donald Trump!), but which also represented less than one-third of one percent of all federal spending that year. You'd think with all the CDC actually does for America as far as fighting infectious diseases, antibiotic resistance, and obesity, we'd actually increase their budget, not cut it. So PennPIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to cut the CDC budget.
Meanwhile, CREDO helps you tell Gap, Disney, and Pepsi to end their association with the reactionary climate change deniers at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Sadly, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has mutated from your grandparents' pro-business organization to a behemoth that lurches as far right as it can on every conceivable topic. Want banksters to stop stealing your money? Then the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will fight you. Want our politicians to stop giving welfare handouts to oil and gas corporations and start helping develop a renewable energy grid that would be the envy of the world if we but had the will to build it? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce will fight you there, too. Getting corporations to quit the Chamber because of its reactionary economic views isn't so effective, of course -- why, big corporations generally have the same views! But big corporations (Gap, Disney, and Pepsi among them) also like getting on the public's good side in re climate change, and so you hit them there.
Finally, the Department of the Interior has reassigned over four dozen high-level employees to new jobs -- including Joel Clement, formerly the head of Interior's Office of Policy Analysis, who spoke out publicly about climate change's impact upon Alaska's Native communities -- so the Sierra Club helps you tell Interior Secretary Zinke to stop moving Senior Executive Service employees around after they say things that make the Trump Administration uncomfortable. Once Mr. Zinke gets down from that horse he always seems to be riding whenever the cameras are around, he'll tell you that he can move employees as he sees fit -- which is true generally, but not if he's doing it in retaliation for whistleblowing, or to force workers to quit. But behold! Mr. Zinke has already said, out loud, that he would use "reassignments" as one tool to reduce the Department's workforce. Logically speaking, how would that work? By sending people to places that would provoke them into quitting, that's how! And why should we allow him to do that?
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