White House says furloughed federal workers not entitled to back pay amid shutdown
OMB argues an amendment to a 2019 act would not guarantee furloughed workers post-shutdown payThe White House’s office of management and budget (OMB) is arguing that federal workers who are furloughed amid the ongoing government shutdown are not entitled to back pay.
Whether it’s wholly true or not is another matter. But it’s very fun all the same.
Trains packed with volunteers arrive at tourist town of Guangfu, days after typhoon sent millions of tonnes of mud and water crashing through its streets
Students, monks, and retirees. Gym bros, migrant workers, mums and dads with their children, even tourists. As a crowd of hundreds disembarks from the train a crowd of people cheer “jiayou”, a chant of encouragement which translates to “add oil”.
Dubbed the “shovel supermen”, they have come to Guangfu in their tens of thousands, as volunteers ready to help after a distant typhoon burst a natural dam and sent millions of tonnes of water, mud and silt crashing through the streets.
Clearing up the mess is going to take the labour of some tens of thousands of Taiwanese. Sure, they can mediate it through government and the efforts be collected through tax. Or they can turn up with shovels and gumboots and do it directly.
But clearly this would be done better if proper attention were being paid to diversity, equity and inclusion, no? To gender equity, to raciual discrimination and so on?
Yep, that’s right, it should be government. Can’t have the peopl just truning up and solving problems now, can we?
Donald Trump has blamed Democrats for stalled talks that have made a US government shut down all but certain, and has threatened to punish the party and its voters during any stoppage by targeting progressive priorities and forcing mass public sector job cuts.
It is an opportunity, isn’t it?
The president added that a “lot of good can come down from shutdowns” and suggested he would use the pause to “get rid of a lot of things we didn’t want, and they’d be Democrat things”.
Now, I’m not sure that I’m wholly right about this but I have the impression that government shutdown used to be a really big thing. Mebbe under Reagan it happened – and I was in DC – and this was the very terror. It was certainly unusual, even unprecedented.
Now it’s just one of those things that happens every few years. Congress – really the H of Reps – is incapable of getting a budget out on time or even in form. There should be a bill from each committee with spending for their area. Instead, as these near never appear on time, we get a series of continuing resolutions and little that would actually be considered a consideration of the actual budget. Just a last minute thrashing around like we’ve just had.
Essentially, my observatiomn is that government isn’t getting any better even in its basic task of being the government, let alone what it does to the rest of us.
The Trump administration is set to oversee the largest mass resignation in US history on Tuesday, with more than 100,000 federal workers set to formally quit as part of the latest wave of its deferred resignation program.
….
The mass exodus is the largest single-year decline in civilian federal employment since the second world war.
More, eh?
So, lossa potholes. Yep, they used a cheaper road surface. Which could have been fine if only they maintained it properly. Guess what?
Department for Transport figures show that in the early 1990s, preservation work was carried out on about 7 per cent of the UK’s roads each year. By 2024, this had fallen to less than 3 per cent for A roads, and 2 per cent for minor roads.
The decline has accelerated in recent years. “We were doing about 90 million square metres of surface dressing in 2008,” says Hansford. “By 2023 we were down to 35 million square metres. It’s because budgets have been squeezed. Highways are up against things like rising costs in adult and children’s social care, and they often lose that battle.”
Governments are shite at maintenance.
Last week’s £5bn Pride In Place initiative, disbursing £500m a year to 339 disadvantaged neighbourhoods for the next 10 years and putting responsibility for spending money on local social revival firmly in the hands of community leaders, is important. Not only because it will prove popular, but the approach – unleashing the bottom-up energy of local social entrepreneurs and community founders – potentially taps into a rich vein of social creativity.
Why not not tax people £5 billion and leave actual entrepreneurs – not social ones – to build what people actually desire with the money?
But to Will Hutton everything must be intermediated through the hute bourgeois, d’ye see? Actual people getin’ on wi’ stuff isn’t right. Not enough direction from and power to Willy.
See?
The aim, for example, would be for each British region and nation to have a globally competitive city, and there would be 12 “missions” with accompanying metrics – ranging from the issues above to R&D spend to numbers receiving high-quality training – which would eventually drive equality with London.
This from the same people who spent decades insisting no one ever be allowed to build anything new in either Birmingham or Coventry so as to spread the new to other towns.
Rebuild the Tyburn Tree.
Keir Starmer’s plan for digital IDs risks creating “an enormous hacking target”, a cybersecurity expert has warned, as technology companies prepared to bid for contracts that could run into billions of pounds.
Every script kiddie on the planet will be trying to get in. Odds on more than one of them will too…..
That is to say, Little Layton is one of the nicer parts of Blackpool. Yet it is one of 169 places across the UK awarded up to £20m over 10 years as part of a £5bn government programme to spruce up parks, pubs and public buildings.
The fund, nicknamed “levelling up 2.0”, is hoped by Labour to help them tackle the threat of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, whose popularity is growing in many of the places allocated money on Thursday.
…
Mark Walmsley, 45, the chair of the Layton Together community project, welcomed the money and hopes it could be used open a youth club long planned for the area. “It’s a good idea – if the decisions are made locally,” he said. “That’s the key.”
You mean local bloke who will get to spend the money thinks it’s very important that local blokes get to spend the money?
Didn’t see that one coming, did you?
The scheme, announced on Thursday, will see communities handed powers to seize boarded-up shops and buy beloved local assets like libraries and cinemas.
If they were beloved they’d be well used. That they need subsidy shows they are not well used. “Seizure” is also known as theft.
On Thursday lunchtime, a queue of about 50 people snaked outside the door of Layton Methodist church. They were there not to pray but to eat. Each week, Blackpool’s Big Food Project opens the church hall to people who pay between £5 and £16 for a hamper of groceries and toiletries that would cost far more in a supermarket. Some leave with platform trolleys piled with £60 worth of goods, for which they pay £16.
Ever wondered why the shops are boarded up if everyone’s getting everything for free?
An outside review of Los Angeles county’s response to January’s deadly wildfires found a lack of resources and outdated policies for sending emergency alerts led to delays in warning residents about the need to evacuate as flames began consuming neighborhoods in Altadena and Pacific Palisades.
Who could have guessed eh?
Everyone must pay more tax to those who will not clear the underbrush that catches fire – those who will not even allow others to clear the underbrush which catches fire.
The government could start buying parts from Jaguar Land Rover’s suppliers in a plan to protect manufacturing jobs from the impact of a severe cyber-attack, as it explores options to support companies supplying the stricken carmaker.
The business secretary, Peter Kyle, is considering a plan that would lead to the government buying parts made by the suppliers, then selling them back to JLR when it resumes production of its vehicles, according to a report by ITV News. It is among several options under consideration.
Clever wheezes often are of course.
For example, who wants to bet that parts made for the government stockpile will meet normal production standards?
China announced its plans for future cuts to greenhouse gas emissions on Wednesday, producing a scathing response from experts who said they were much too weak to stave off global catastrophe.
Oh, right.
But experts said China was failing to show leadership in its climate commitments. Kaysie Brown, associate director for climate diplomacy and governance at the E3G thinktank, said: “China’s 2035 target falls critically short of what is needed. It’s neither aligned with China’s economic decarbonisation, nor its own 2060 carbon neutrality goal.
“Without stronger near-term ambition, China risks undermining its claim to upholding multilateralism and its clean economy leadership, and sending mixed signals to global markets.”
Who pays for that think tank?
Well, we do. DfID, DBEIS, Bristol City Council (who would have guessed that wicks would get dipped into the finances of a Green Party council?), FCO, London Sustainable Development Commission (which I assume is us taxpayers again) and so on.
Aren’t we lucky that we get to pay for some grifter to advise Mr Xi on how to burnish his international reputation?
…setting out a plan for a UN-mandated international stabilisation force in postwar Gaza that is expected to find support in many countries but not in Israel or the US.
You know, given that UNWRA is major part of why there’s the problem?
The leftwing mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has been thrown on the defensive after revelations that she claimed more than €12,000 for luxury fashion on her council expenses.
Among the claims, Hidalgo, 66, who has been mayor since 2014, are that she charged €6,320 for two Dior dresses last year, a Burberry coat for €3,067 in 2023 and a Dior blouse priced at €1,120 in 2021. Copies of receipts for €84,200 of clothing and travel expenses were obtained under a Freedom of Information request by Civic Transparency, an anti-corruption campaign group, after Hidalgo refused to release her expense claims.
But the rules for the little people don’t apply to me!
Taxpayers lose £400m as result of investment fund set up by Rishi Sunak
Report shows 334 companies backed by Future Fund, set up in May 2020 by then chancellor, have since gone under
And who thinks that any of the other such clever wheezes will do any better?
Shortly after the launch, the BBB’s then chief executive, Keith Morgan, warned ministers that the scheme would mostly attract “second-tier” companies that could not attract investment from elsewhere and that achieving value for money for the taxpayer was “highly uncertain”.
Exactly.
In the US, the Congressional Budget Office projects federal deficits of roughly $1.9tn in 2025 — 6.2 per cent of GDP — and expects debt to climb towards 118 per cent of GDP by 2035. France’s debt stands above 113 per cent of GDP, heading towards 118 per cent by 2026, whilst UK gilt yields have surged to multi-decade highs on debt concerns. Across the developed world, the challenge of mounting debt now falls squarely to governments.
One way to describe this – only one way – is that the right also discovered the joys of spending the shit out of everything.
Traditionally, and by and large, the left when in power spent lossa on expanding the state. Hey, it’s fun. As the political pendulum swung the right would, when in power, manage that previous increase in wastrelness down. A bit at least. So, next time the left came in there was the fical possibility of spending like shit again.
What’s changed, more than anything else – in this incomplete explanation – is that the last couple of sets of rightish govt (and this is US and UK only, don’t know about other places) didn’t manage spending down. The right had discovered the joys of spending etc.
This is, sorta, true of the US since Bush. And it’s deffo true of the UK since Blair. Cameron etc just never did reduce the spending. Which is what is causing all the confusion among Labour MPs. What do you mean there’s no money to spend?
And, obviously, is getting debt roaring toward 120% and more of GDP in both places….
Mandelson is a repellent schmoozer — just what we need in DC
Mandy’s spent a lifetime sucking up to everyone with money and or power like Esptein. That’s why he knows them all. Pretty dire that makes him as a person but quite possibly a damn good ambassador.
A council is rowing with residents and opposition parties over proposals to charge small business owners £450 to use parks.
Bristol city council, led by Tony Dyer, a Green councillor, proposed the introduction of licensing fees for those using public green spaces as part of their work.
Yoga teachers, dog walkers, and other exercise tutors would pay £450 a year to use one park, or £900 for several.
Rather violating the idea of a public park, no? But then this is Bristol. Not the brightest over there…..
The public backs cuts in public spending over tax rises by more than two to one if Labour is to plug the “black hole” in the nation’s finances, a poll shows.
Odd how it never does produce what the people want…..
Councils across England are increasingly spending millions of pounds a year in incentive payments to private landlords to persuade them to house homeless families, with campaigners describing it as a “senseless waste of public money”.
So, what are these payments?
Chris Norris, the policy director at the National Residential Landlords Association, said the incentives were a “poor way of funding the housing system” but had come out of an “enormous shortfall between local housing allowance rates in almost every area of the country and market rents”.
He said landlords were “increasingly finding that people who are reliant on local housing allowance or universal credit simply can’t afford to rent”, and the incentives allowed landlords to take on families who were likely to fall into arrears.
Norris also said incentives were offered to landlords to get them to take on tenants “perceived to represent a higher risk”, such as people with substance abuse issues or who had come out of prison.
They don’t make it clear but it looks like an advance on hte rent for tenants who might not be wholly and fully expected to pay the rent. Which seems like a very sensible and pragmatic action TBF.