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Virginia Lt. Guv, Who Backed Trump in 2020, Tells Him to Go Away

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Virginia Lt. Guv, Who Backed Trump in 2020, Tells Him to Go Away

The GOP knives proceed to return out for former President Donald Trump following his occasion’s disastrous midterm exhibiting. Throughout an look on Fox Enterprise Community on Thursday, Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears stated it was “time to step off the stage” for Trump after quite a lot of fringe candidates the ex-president backed imploded of their races, leading to an anticipated “purple wave” changing into extra of a tinkle. Echoing different conservatives’ calls that Trump delay his deliberate marketing campaign announcement subsequent week, Sears—who chaired the MAGA group Black Individuals to Re-elect the President in 2020—added that she wouldn’t again a Trump presidential run in 2024. “I couldn’t help him. I simply couldn’t as a result of we now have seen, for instance, in these states the place he has endorsed the candidates, actually, the Republicans on the identical ticket who he didn’t endorse overperformed, whereas his candidates completely underperformed by as a lot as ten factors,” she stated. “We’ve a transparent mission and it’s time to transfer on.”

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Trump envoy to meet Venezuelan leader Maduro on migrant deal

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Trump envoy to meet Venezuelan leader Maduro on migrant deal

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Donald Trump’s crisis negotiator has flown to Venezuela to discuss a deal on migrants with its authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro, sparking alarm among the country’s embattled opposition.

Richard Grenell, the US president’s envoy for special missions, arrived in Caracas on Friday to press Maduro to potentially accept thousands of Venezuelan deportees “without condition”, according to US officials.

Grenell’s visit comes just before Secretary of State Marco Rubio embarks on his own trip to Latin America aimed at demonstrating renewed US interest in the western hemisphere.

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Grenell, a close confidant of Trump’s, made the trip after Venezuela’s authoritarian Maduro signalled his willingness to talk with Trump’s team, sources said. Russia, one of Maduro’s backers, sent a government plane to Caracas that landed 15 minutes before Grenell’s arrival on Friday.

“He is there on a special mission,” said Mauricio Claver-Carone, the US state department special envoy for Latin America. “President Trump expects Nicolás Maduro to take back all of the Venezuelan criminals and gang members that have been exported to US, and to do so unequivocally and without condition.”

Richard Grenell is a close confidant of Donald Trump’s © Rebecca Noble/Getty Images

Details of the discussions with Washington remain unclear. But a deal could involve an easing of US sanctions on Venezuela and dropping a US reward offered for Maduro’s capture in return for Caracas taking back thousands of Venezuela migrants from the US, shipping more oil to American Gulf Coast refineries and releasing US nationals held in Caracas.

Maduro, a close ally of Russia and Iran, has been shunned by the West and much of Latin America after claiming victory in a presidential election last July, whose result was widely regarded as fraudulent. The Biden administration and the European parliament recognised the main opposition candidate, Edmundo González, as “president-elect”.

Rubio and Claver-Carone are both Cuban-American hawks who have strongly opposed a deal with Maduro in the past. However it is not clear whether their view will prevail with Trump.

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Claver-Carone stressed that the US demands were not part of a diplomatic haggle and said Maduro would be pressed to release US “hostages” in the country. “This is not a quid pro quo, this is not a negotiation in exchange for anything. President Trump himself has made very clear, we don’t need Venezuelan oil,” he said.

If Maduro did not heed Grenell’s demands and the proposal he offered, “there will be consequences”, said Claver-Carone, who insisted that the Trump administration remained committed to democratic change in Venezuela.

It is unclear how many US citizens are being held in Venezuela, though officials there have mentioned at least nine in public statements, with most accused by Maduro’s regime of terrorism and coup-plotting.

Grenell tweeted on January 20 that “diplomacy is back”, saying he had held “multiple conversations with Venezuelan officials” and that “talking is a tactic”. He held a private meeting with Maduro’s top political operator Jorge Rodríguez in Mexico in 2020 in the final days of the first Trump administration.

González this week urged Trump not to cut a deal with Maduro and the Venezuelan opposition has been alarmed by meetings it held with him before Grenell travelled to Caracas.

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“Grenell’s nonchalance and lack of concern for democracy and human rights has left everyone very concerned,” said an opposition source. The opposition fears that business interests will lobby Trump to cut a deal giving the US more access to Venezuela’s oil reserves, the world’s biggest.

Trump’s own position on Venezuela is unclear. He has said little about the country during the election campaign or since taking office, beyond accusing Maduro of ruining the country and saying on January 20 that “we don’t have to buy their oil” — remarks interpreted by some as a negotiating tactic to put pressure on Maduro.

A former official who worked in Trump’s first administration said the US president was mainly concerned about migration. “He’s just revoked temporary protected status for 600,000 Venezuelan (migrants) in the US and there are easily twice that number there illegally,” the former official said. “Trump has got to get rid of them all from the US.”

During the first Trump administration, the president imposed “maximum pressure” sanctions on Maduro’s government and recognised then-opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate president. But the strategy failed to dislodge Maduro, who remained in power with the help of Russia, China and Iran, while Guaidó eventually fled to Florida.

“Trump regards the opposition as losers,” the former official said. “He gave them a lot and they failed. There is no way he is going back down that road again.”

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Trump wants to cut the federal workforce. Who they are and what that means

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Trump wants to cut the federal workforce. Who they are and what that means

President Trump arrives to speak at the House Republican members conference dinner at Trump National Doral Golf Club in Miami on Jan. 27.

Mark Schiefelbein/AP


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Mark Schiefelbein/AP

It has been a confusing several days for federal workers: First came a federal hiring freeze, the announcement of an end to remote work and an executive order reclassifying thousands of civil servant positions. Then came Tuesday’s government-wide email giving nearly all federal employees until Feb. 6 to decide whether to opt into a “deferred resignation program.”

But how well do most Americans understand this group that has been in the news so much — who they are, where they work and what they do? Here are six things to know about this vast pool of workers:

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How big is the federal workforce?

About 2.4 million workers are employed by the federal government, excluding uniformed military personnel and U.S. Postal Service employees, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By contrast, Walmart, the largest private-sector employer in the U.S., has 1.6 million workers.

Where do most federal employees work?

If you guessed Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia, you’d be wrong — and not by a little. Although a sizable concentration of the federal workforce does work in the District of Columbia and the surrounding states (about 459,000 as of March 2024, according to the Office of Personnel Management), 80% of federal civilian employees can be found at military bases and in government offices outside the region: about 181,000 in California, 168,500 in Texas, 115,000 in Florida and 88,000 in Georgia.

That means the effects of cuts in the federal workforce won’t be felt in just the D.C. area but will be “scattered across the country,” according to Don Moynihan, a professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

Fifty-four percent of federal workers are 100% on-site. That’s according to May 2024 data from the Office of Management and Budget cited by the Federal News Network that was originally posted on a since-removed White House page. The other 46% are eligible for telework, most of which are on hybrid schedules. Only 10% of them are working entirely remotely.

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Also, one-third of nonuniformed federal workers are military veterans, according to Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, which describes itself as a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to a better government and stronger democracy.

“Most people don’t understand that lots of people in the military go into civil service because they want to continue to serve,” he says.

Just a few agencies and departments employ most of the workers. And their numbers haven’t been growing much

“The vast majority of the [federal] civilian nonuniform employees are either in Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security or the Department of Defense,” Moynihan says.

Despite what may be conventional wisdom, the relative size of the federal workforce hasn’t skyrocketed in recent years, according to a Pew Research Center report released this month.

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“While the number of federal workers has grown over time, their share of the civilian workforce has generally held steady in recent years,” the report says.

That’s “despite the fact that our government is doing lots more stuff,” Stier adds.

Salaries of federal workers take up just a fraction of the government’s budget

Moynihan says the government spends “about $350 billion on federal employees every year, out of a $6.5 trillion budget.”

That represents “a tiny sliver of total government spending — just around 5% to 6%,” according to Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

There are concerns that cuts could affect vital services that impact average Americans

It depends on how many federal employees leave and which agencies and positions see the most departures.

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But regardless, “programs that provide retirement, health and income support — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — need to be administered,” Bivens says.

“Claims have to be filed and examined, and problems need [to be] addressed,” he says. “Payments to farmers need [to be] processed and administered,” and “key public goods like pandemic monitoring and response” need to take place.

More esoteric government responsibilities, such as economic data collection and analysis, are also vital, he adds.

Stier offers up a few examples of what could go wrong. The administration says it wants a 10% cut, he says, but “what happens if that is 50% of the food safety inspectors or 50% of the air traffic controllers or 50% at the FBI?”

“You’re talking about a fairly arbitrary reduction. … It’s entirely unpredictable about who actually walks away and who decides to stay,” he says.

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Cuts could have other downsides

Buyouts and incentives aimed at shrinking the number of federal employees aren’t new. They were tried in the mid-1990s, during Bill Clinton’s presidency. But the results were mixed at best, according to a 1997 report by what’s now called the Government Accountability Office.

“[A]gencies often granted buyouts across the board rather than prioritizing them to achieve specific organizational objectives,” the GAO concluded.

“This contributed to a variety of adverse operational impacts. For example, 15 agencies said that they had experienced a loss of corporate memory and expertise, and 11 agencies said that there were work backlogs because key personnel had separated,” the report said.

As a result, Moynihan says, those agencies lost vital skills and ended up hiring more outside consultants — some of the very same federal workers who had quit — at a higher cost to taxpayers, “because people who had the most capabilities and most value on the private sector job market were the first to leave.” 

“Rational employees who think, ‘You know, I can make more in the private sector than I’m making in government, and it’s not worth the hassle of continuing to stay in this new environment,’” he says.

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Canada warns Donald Trump’s tariffs could leave US reliant on Venezuela’s oil

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Canada warns Donald Trump’s tariffs could leave US reliant on Venezuela’s oil

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The US would be forced to buy oil from geopolitical rivals such as Venezuela if it disrupted trade with Canada, Ottawa’s foreign minister has warned.

Mélanie Joly told the Financial Times the US president’s threat to impose levies of 25 per cent on Canadian imports would hit “real people” if relations between the two countries descended into a trade war.

“We ship oil at a discount which is, ultimately, refined in Texas. If it’s not us, it is Venezuela,” Joly said, referring to the heavy grades of oil produced in Venezuela and Canada on which many American refineries depend.

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“There’s no other option on the table, and this administration doesn’t want to work with Venezuela,” Joly said.

US President Donald Trump imposed sweeping sanctions on Caracas during his first term in the White House.

Joly was in the US capital spearheading Canada’s last-minute effort to avert the first full-blown trade war of Trump’s new administration, with the president threatening again on Thursday to apply tariffs of 25 per cent on Canada and Mexico starting on February 1.

The president said he was considering excluding oil imports from the tariffs — reflecting the US’s dependence on its neighbour for huge supplies of energy.

Despite soaring shale oil production in states such as Texas, Canada accounts for about one in every five barrels of oil consumed in the US and about 60 per cent of its imported crude.

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Many US refineries depend on the kind of heavy oil produced in Canada or Venezuela — not on the lighter grades produced by America’s prolific shale industry.

Joly, who had travelled to Washington to meet US secretary of state Marco Rubio and other senior US officials, said she had also warned lawmakers on Capitol Hill that trade tensions would hit “real people”, particularly in Republican states.

“We don’t want that,” Joly said. “We want us to be in a win-win position, and we think we can offer that.”

Ottawa and Mexico City have both drawn up lists of retaliatory tariffs to issue against the US in the event that Trump pulls the trigger on tariffs against them, people with knowledge of the matter previously told the FT.

Canada’s energy minister, Jonathan Wilkinson, has vowed “tit-for-tat” levies on American goods such as steel and orange juice if Trump follows through on his threats.

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Trump has launched repeated broadsides against Canada in recent weeks, describing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a “governor” and claiming the country should become the US’s 51s state.

Trump said in a speech earlier this month that a US annexation of Canada “would really be something” and he could use “economic force” to do so.

Joly said the idea had not come up in any of her meetings with US officials. “Absolutely not,” she replied, when asked.

“We can be really good friends, best friends, but we will never be a state, nor a colony, period,” she said.

Canada and Mexico have also tried to demonstrate to Trump that they are securing their extensive land borders with the US in response to his claims that drugs and migrants are crossing illegally into his country.

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“On the border, I think we’re getting good traction,” Joly said, adding that she would meet with Trump’s border tsar Tom Homan on Friday.

Canada has pledged to spend $1bn on border security, and has recently deployed newly leased Black Hawk patrol helicopters, extra dogs and 60 drones at the border partly in response to Trump’s demands — as well as concerns about weapons and undocumented migrants arriving from the US.

Joly said: “We wanted to reinforce the border as well on our side, because we are concerned with the flow of illegal guns coming from the US and the potential flow of illegal migrants coming from the US.”

Trump has threatened to deport millions of people without permanent legal status from the US, prompting concerns that some migrants will travel to Canada to seek refuge.

Joly said that while the US president had clearly linked his early threat of 25 per cent tariffs with border security, the US and Canada would review their broader trade relationship, including the North American trade deal signed by Trump during his last administration, as part of a separate process.

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