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Manufacturers would benefit from establishing a better, more efficient service network and offering more attractive warranty programs.

As her older siblings prepare breakfast, 13-year-old Cynthia Perez waits at the kitchen table, not very hungry. “I’m nervous,” she tells her mom’s friend Mariana Blanco, who gently brushes the girl’s long brown hair. “I know you are, love,” Blanco says. “It’s gonna be okay.” It’s a March morning in Palm Beach County, Florida, and […]

The biggest question in social media bans for kids is whether any of these countries have the guts to make tech companies compliant.

The proposal would separate the cost of producing electricity into distinct components and introduce a regulated wholesale market.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 15 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump just exploded in fury at Jamie Raskin, calling for him to be expelled from Congress. Trump raged that if Democrats win the House, Raskin will lead the president’s impeachment. In saying this, Trump is accidentally admitting that he cares very much about the prospect of another impeachment. In fact, he’s meanwhile reportedly trying to get Republicans to expunge his two past impeachments, indicating how much they eat away at him.All this hands Democrats a weapon. They should say, Mr. President, if we win the House, we absolutely will hold you accountable. And that raises a question: What can a Democratic House really do to hold Trump accountable, anyway? What should it look like?We’re talking about all of it with Andy Craig, a senior editor at The UnPopulist, who often thinks creatively on this topic. Andy, good to have you on.Andy Craig: Good to be with you, Greg.Sargent: So let’s start with Trump’s explosion at Congressman Jamie Raskin. It kind of came out of nowhere. He posted this: “Jamie Raskin, a Loser in Life, who worked endlessly during my First Term to impeach me, will guaranteed be trying to do it again despite one of the most successful Presidencies in history.” Trump then continues: “EXPEL THE BUM. Congress can never be great with people like this who suffer massively from Trump Derangement Syndrome, casting their vote of HATE!”Andy, there’s a lot more of that. What’s your reaction?Craig: Well, it does show that it’s certainly one of his fixations, that he is thinking already about what will happen in the next Congress. He’s not wrong that it’s very likely he will face another impeachment trial. Even though we’ve seen some reluctance from Hakeem Jeffries and from some Democrats to do another impeachment, the pressure will be too much, because the outrages are just too many and will continue to pile on. And this is one of the tools Congress has, and it does have an effect even if you don’t get to 67 votes in the Senate.Sargent: Exactly. The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump and his allies are hatching a plan to get GOP lawmakers to vote on a resolution that somehow voids Trump’s impeachments, whatever the hell they think they mean by that. Trump said this to the Journal: “It should be done because I did nothing wrong.” So he’s saying on the record that he thinks his impeachments should be expunged.But here’s the real kicker. Several GOP lawmakers tell the Journal that such a thing would have a tough time passing. Which means some Republicans in the House don’t want to vote to expunge Trump’s impeachments.Craig: One of the more normal aspects of this midterm is that they’re always a referendum on the president, and this president is deeply underwater on his approval ratings. So they’re making their political calculus—the last thing they want to do is be dredging up January 6, on which he is still particularly unpopular, or going down that route, or just generally having to be more associated with him. They want to be on the attack blasting Democrats for whatever they’re going to do. They don’t want to be defending Trump right now, given where the polls are at.Sargent: So in a way, that’s why Trump’s explosion of fury at Raskin actually reveals weakness and hands Democrats a weapon for the midterms. It’s really a self-own. He’s admitting that he doesn’t want a Democratic House because he will face accountability. So Democrats can say, Trump is plainly afraid of a Democratic House because it will hold him accountable—he’s admitting it himself.And, Andy, Democrats should say that. Even some Republicans don’t want to vote to protect Trump. And I guarantee you, independents who are already tilting overwhelmingly against Trump right now and hate corruption really want a check on Trump and really want him held accountable. What do you think?Craig: Right. Well, that’s the campaign strategy decision for Democrats to make in terms of what’s going to maximize their chances in November. But on the merits, the fact is that the shyness away from talk of impeachment isn’t well justified. The polling numbers show it’s not unpopular. It’s not toxic. It’s not something independents and swing voters repel from. We see a lot of sentiment, understandably, across the board, that people want more elite accountability. The idea that he should get off the hook—whether it’s Trump or whether it’s anybody else, people caught up in the Epstein files—there’s a mood in the air of that kind of thing, where Trump is not immune from this kind of backlash against the sense of elite impunity.Sargent: I agree 100 percent. So let’s talk about what a Democratic House can actually do. Let’s put aside impeachment for now, although I do think Dems should impeach Trump and many of his top officials. If you look at oversight and investigations, a quick list would mean much more digging into the Epstein files, serious investigations into how Attorney General Todd Blanche is deciding to prosecute Trump’s critics and how Blanche oversaw the bogus settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS—which granted Trump IRS immunity—[and] serious investigations into the Trump family’s crypto scams and their dealings abroad. That’s just a start. What do you want to see happen on the investigations front?Craig: Well, the endless litany of outrages in the second term has been so much more extreme in terms of it being a target-rich environment for things to go after. Certainly one thing I’m particularly interested in is the boat strikes campaign. The, frankly, murder that’s going on with that—the commander of Southern Command essentially resigned in protest over this. I think there’s real digging that needs to be done there with Hegseth and what’s been going on in the military in terms of rationalizing how this is somehow legal, which it obviously isn’t.Sargent: Andy, let me just jump in and say about that—you could subpoena Pete Hegseth. You could subpoena top defense officials. You could subpoena the ones who are resigning under protest—there’s at least one of them. You could bring them into Congress and question them all under oath. We’re learning every day in dribs and drabs new things about this campaign of murder on the high seas, basically. And it looks to me like if you were to be able to just dig even a little bit, you’d find an extraordinary lack of any real rationale at the core of this. You might even just find summary executions being carried out just because Trump says, Blow it up. Basically something as really disgusting as that.Craig: That really gets to the important nuts-and-bolts problem of subpoenas and enforcing them and making them work. This is something Josh Chafetz has written about that I highly recommend people look into. For years now—and we saw this in the first term—congressional subpoenas have tried to be enforced through civil litigation, going to the courts and asking a federal district judge, Will you please make this person show up because Congress subpoenaed them? That’s not how it should work. Congress is not dependent on the other branches, nor on the other mechanism, which is referral to the Department of Justice for prosecution, which is obviously a dead end also.Congress really needs to lean into using other tools they have, including its inherent contempt power, where ultimately Congress can arrest somebody on its own say-so, and it’s been done before. Congress can impose financial penalties. Congress can also attach funding fights to this—we won’t fund Pete Hegseth’s own office staff, potentially, or the Executive Office of the President, the White House staff. There are all kinds of tools that they need to use. But the problem with the litigation is it just drags on for years and years. Even if Congress ultimately wins, it never gets done before there’s been a new presidential election and a new administration comes in.Sargent: I just want to break up what you said there into two parts and explore each one, because they’re important. The first one is, how do you get a rogue administration to obey subpoenas? You’re essentially saying Congress has got to maximize its own tools to do that. That’s especially true given that this would be up to this administration, up to Todd Blanche—essentially his Department of Justice—to decide whether to enforce subpoenas. So you have to have Congress exercise something like an imperial power itself and really maximize what it can do to force these subpoenas to be honored, right?Craig: Absolutely. Congress needs to remember that they are their own branch of government. They have coequal—as it’s often put—powers. When Congress issues a subpoena to somebody, that doesn’t depend on the president agreeing. It doesn’t depend on a court agreeing. That is a binding order that has legal force. And ultimately, they need to go after people’s bank accounts or even send the sergeant at arms out to haul in, potentially. Along with the other procedural tools they have, like potentially defunding people who aren’t complying with subpoenas.Sargent: That was the second thing you brought up, which is the act of defunding. I want to try to get at that a little bit more. You’re talking about Congress essentially really using as a hammer the ability to just essentially zap an office. In other words, Congress could essentially say—either to enforce a subpoena or for some other purpose—We’re not funding the White House personnel, we’re not funding this agency, we’re not funding that agency until you do A, B, and C. Correct?Craig: Absolutely. This goes back to the deep fundamentals of our constitutional system in the English parliaments of the Middle Ages. The power of the purse is the ultimate power. That’s why it’s vested in the legislature. So there are different ways you can structure it and procedurally how you tackle it. But if nothing else, these appropriations come up every year. They elapse. And Congress can attach conditions saying, if the secretary of defense—and that’s the title to use for him—is refusing to comply with a subpoena, or the White House chief of staff or whatever, then we’re just not going to pay their salary. We’re going to defund their staff. Or there are other tools—you can defund various programs. You have to be willing to kind of take hostages. This ain’t beanbag.Sargent: A hundred percent. And so let me ask you this. Let’s say the corrupt prosecutions of Trump’s critics really went even further. They’re already absolutely lawless and terrible. But let’s say it kept going. You could theoretically see a Democratic Congress essentially saying, We’re not funding that U.S. attorney’s office anymore. Isn’t that a valid tool?Craig: Absolutely. That’s what it’s there for. We’re not going to have King Charles I ruling without Parliament and funding his own prosecution of critics and that kind of thing. There are some appropriations where there are fights you’ll have to have about trying to claw it back because they’re standing appropriations, they automatically renew, that kind of thing. But most things, including exactly that—the U.S. attorney’s office that’s going after somebody, or anything like that, the whole DOJ—those are on the annual appropriations. They will expire if Congress doesn’t get its act together and pass something.Sargent: I want to hone in on your big point enmeshed in all that, which is basically that this sort of act would, if in a sustained way carried out, be a way of restoring integrity to our constitutional system. It’s worth pointing out that Trump’s abuses are heavily, heavily dependent on Congress utterly checking out of the business of oversight and lawmaking and everything, really. Republicans have neutered themselves, neutered the Congress. That is part of the reason we’ve got this unchecked lawless presidency running rampage everywhere.If we did what you’re talking about, you’d really be restoring balance to the system in a fundamental way. It wouldn’t be that Congress is overreaching. It would be Congress is bringing balance back to the system. Can you talk about that?Craig: Yes. This is the core Madisonian checks and balances. These are the powers Congress is supposed to have. Like so many things, this problem predates Trump. The imperial presidency has been gaining power and Congress has been becoming more dysfunctional and more passive and not being as assertive as it should be going back decades. But as with so many other things we see, this is Trump coming in and turning it up to 11.We’ve created a presidency that is this kind of turnkey tyranny, where it can outrun what even the courts can keep up with. But on a fundamental level, the big-picture political accountability for a lawless executive branch can only come from Congress.Sargent: OK, so let’s just imagine that Democrats win one or both chambers of Congress. It’s most likely that they’ll win the House and not the Senate, but it is possible that they’ll win both—or it’s possible that they’ll win neither, but they probably will win one or both. So what happens if they do something approaching your vision of this? Do we really just see this fundamental shift in how the government is essentially functioning? What would it look like in a day-to-day, week-to-week way? What would the American people be seeing?Craig: Well, there are historical precedents, and the biggest one would be what happened when Andrew Johnson was president after Lincoln during Reconstruction. And Congress was able to act more aggressively because they had Republican supermajorities—the South was unrepresented. What you can do with simple majorities can sometimes be more modest. But even then, what they essentially did is Congress took over reining in the government. It passed laws instructing the Cabinet secretaries what to do. It passed laws against Johnson firing them, which is what got him impeached and within one vote of getting removed from office.We’re not going to have a parliamentary system—it’s not going to look like the United Kingdom where the executive merges into the legislature. We do have an independently elected president. There are certain constitutional powers that the president has.But Congress is the preeminent branch. Congress is the voice of the people. The president is not the sovereign tribune of the American people. Our elected representatives are the ones who have those powers. They can pass laws and use their various tools to pretty directly reduce, in some ways at least, the presidency to a much more constrained role, where there are legal guardrails on what the executive branch agencies, the Cabinet departments, the secretaries, the heads of these agencies are obligated to do. And to craft that in ways that it’s enforceable, both through the courts and by Congress following up with oversight.Sargent: It would really be something else if Democrats would actually go through with that. Of course, for a whole bunch of reasons, they might not, or they might adopt something in between. That’s a topic for another pod.But just to close out here, when Donald Trump explodes in fury because he might be held accountable by a Democratic Congress, it makes me wonder—why don’t Democrats right now go out there and talk the way you’re talking? Maybe not exactly saying that this will be an imperial Congress, but saying something along the lines of, This is an absolutely out-of-control chief executive and that is having an enormously damaging effect in this country and the whole world. And if you put us in charge of Congress, we will rebalance. We will hold this guy accountable. We’ll put guardrails on him. We’ll restore balance and sanity to this system. They should get their heads to this place and talk that way, right?Craig: Yes.… You can have the political strategy arguments about how many votes will this get and what the polls say. There’s pretty solid evidence that this is a winning message. But also what it does is it amounts to a kind of precommitment. It shows that if and when they win, that this is the public mandate they have.When you’re talking about impeachment in particular, even if you cannot get to a major supermajority in the Senate to convict, it’s a kind of censure with teeth. Do you want to be out there hammering these issues, exposing the wrongdoing, creating the historical record, and showing that you’re doing what you can? Or are you going to just kind of roll over with a defeatist, Well, he’s not going to get removed from office anyway, so what’s the point? I think that’s entirely the wrong attitude, and it’s learning the wrong lessons from what happened in the last two impeachments.Sargent: I could not agree more. Andy Craig, I really hope Democrats are listening to you on this. Anyway, folks, if you enjoyed this, check out Andy’s work over at The UnPopulist. He thinks about this stuff very creatively, very frequently. Andy, thanks so much for coming on.Craig: Thanks.

In the past year, the Trump administration has worked to dramatically reduce the federal workforce and—with the support of the Republican-led Congress—slash spending on the social safety net. A move by the Agriculture Department to reorganize the agency that oversees federal nutrition programs could further complicate low-income Americans’ ability to access the assistance they depend upon to stay healthy and avoid food insecurity.As part of the larger reorganization of the Food and Nutrition Service, which oversees the nation’s 16 federal food and nutrition programs, most agency employees will be required to move to five new “hubs” across the country. The USDA is also expected to shutter most of the seven current regional offices across the country, as well as the current agency headquarters building in Alexandria, Virginia. The agency—which is also being rebranded as the Food and Nutrition Administration—will maintain a small footprint in Washington, D.C., according to the USDA.Rather than overseeing nutrition programs based on regions, the new hubs will be divided by program area, with the intention of providing support from a centralized location. The Trump administration argues that moving oversight of these programs to new hubs will make it easier for officials to connect participants across the country. USDA Deputy Secretary Stephen A. Vaden told congressional Democrats that “each hub will have programmatic experts able to assist all states in their execution of USDA’s nutrition programs.” Vaden has also said that the move “reduces duplicative management and complexity within the agency.”Perhaps the most major relocation will be that of the headquarters for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which serves around 40 million people, to Indianapolis. But Kate Howe, executive director of the Indy Hunger Network in Indianapolis, expressed skepticism that the relocations would actually do much to help SNAP participants in her city. “We’re creating these silos of programs that will operate in a much more isolated fashion, and then the efficiencies of being in one place together will be lost,” said Howe. “I can’t imagine that having the SNAP office here will make a difference in terms of customer service. It simply seems like moving an administrative office from one place to another.”Last year, Vaden told a House committee that he believed employees based in and around D.C. would be willing to move due to that region’s flagging job market. But given that many current FNS employees are located in cities with regional hubs that will be closing, this reorganization won’t just apply to workers in the national capital area. A recent internal survey by the National Treasury Employees Union Chapter 226, which represents FNS workers, found that around 80 percent of respondents—comprising around a third of the agency’s 1,200 employees—were unwilling to relocate to keep their jobs.“They already have a regional structure in place that’s been working. There’s nothing that indicates why that’s not working,” said Doreen Greenwald, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union. “This has just not been well thought through, and is ill-conceived.”Greenwald added that it would be far more difficult for FNS employees to “uproot” themselves and their families than the USDA suggests, and warned that the reorganization could cause a “brain drain” wherein the agency could lose staff with extensive institutional knowledge. There’s precedent for this possibility: When the USDA moved the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to Kansas City in 2019, both agencies lost more than half of their staff. Although that number rebounded, the moves resulted in a loss in both employee diversity and productivity.FNS employees often have a deep understanding of how nutrition programs are managed in their specific regions. For example, SNAP administration and access varies across states, with differences such as income requirements, benefit amounts, and even what food items can and cannot be purchased. It may be difficult to replace these employees, not only because it will take time to train up new workers but because working for the federal government is currently not a stable prospect—from repeated shutdowns to mass layoffs, to insecurity about whether a job can be relocated at any moment. The potential loss in staffing also comes amid a dramatic shrinkage in the federal workforce. More than 15,000 employees left USDA last year, accepting early retirement and deferred resignation offers.Another key program, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC—which assists around 6.7 million people, including around 40 percent of all infants born in the U.S.—will be moved to Kansas City, Missouri. Nell Menefee-Libey, senior public policy manager at the National WIC Association, said that administration of WIC was deeply reliant on the “close working relationships” between state agencies that administer the program and FNS staff on a regional and national level. The potential loss of those federal employees could make it more difficult for state officials to provide WIC benefits, or adjust to any changes.“State WIC agencies rely on FNS staff for technical guidance to answer questions or troubleshoot issues as they arrive, for implementation of new policy initiatives, and to get federal resources out to the state level in a timely and appropriate manner,” said Menefee-Libey. Even if WIC recipients aren’t aware of the changes that are being made, she continued, they could soon feel their effects.“I can absolutely understand how it feels sort of nebulous and removed from the day-to-day lives of new parents who rely on WIC to help them raise their kids, but it really is as simple as not having the guarantee that their benefits will get loaded onto their card on time,” said Menefee-Libey. “The state agency might not have the resources that they need to pay for those benefits, because the funds aren’t being dispersed from the regional office, because they don’t have the support that they need from the national office to get those dollars out the door.”The timing of the relocations is still nebulous as the USDA continues negotiations with employee unions, but many of the regional offices are expected to close on a rolling basis as leases expire. Oversight of child nutrition programs will be moving to Dallas; emergency management to Denver; and research organizations to Raleigh, North Carolina. Retailer operations and compliance employees will move to Atlanta, Los Angeles, Dallas, and New York City. Diane Pratt-Heavner, the spokesperson for the School Nutrition Association, or SNA, raised concerns about the timing, given the “forthcoming introduction of new school nutrition standards.”“SNA is concerned that so many staff have reported that they will not be relocating,” she said in a statement. “We worry about the loss of institutional knowledge.”The reorganization also comes after Congress dramatically slashed SNAP last year, pushing more of the cost of administration and benefits onto states over the next several years. The percentage of benefit costs that a state pays will depend on its rate of overpayments or underpayments. As the Food and Nutrition Administration determines SNAP error rates on a national and state level, a dip in staffing could make calculating those rates ever more difficult.“We’re just worried about the impact on the state agency trying to rapidly scale up to meet the new federal requirements,” said Howe. “The loss of institutional knowledge at a time when everything is changing is only going to have negative impacts on people trying to access benefits, because there will be fewer trained and knowledgeable people to help them.”Ultimately, Howe sees this change as a move to make nutrition programs more difficult to obtain, particularly since the law added new work requirements to SNAP last year. She has heard from a local food pantry in Bloomington that they’ve seen a 15 percent increase in visits in the past year, which they believe is “directly correlated to the decline in people accessing SNAP benefits.”“It feels like this is part of a larger plan to reduce the effectiveness of the SNAP program, and we can’t afford that. We can’t afford to have the federal government step back from the obligation to make sure that people are fed,” Howe said.

The department is mounting a defense of last year’s decision to exempt US companies from a global minimum tax ahead of this week’s G7 meeting.

The Kentucky Republican senator, after past tension with the president and Rep. Thomas Massie's ouster, looks more White House-aligned.