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Trump’s USDA Relocation Plan Could Upend Nutrition Programs
• yesterday

Trump’s USDA Relocation Plan Could Upend Nutrition Programs

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.

2028 Democrats Litmus Test: Billionaires, I’m Coming After Your Money
• yesterday

2028 Democrats Litmus Test: Billionaires, I’m Coming After Your Money

Imagine you were buying a car, and the only thing you knew about it was the color. Not the horsepower, not the number of cylinders, not the options; none of that. Just the color. Obviously, you wouldn’t make such a purchase. You’d demand to know more, and quite rightly so. Well, voters choose candidates on the basis of scant information all the time, especially when it comes to the economic realities that obtain in this country. This is largely the Democrats’ fault. The Republicans don’t want people to know these facts. The Democrats should, but they don’t talk about them nearly enough. Now that America has freshly minted its first actual trillionaire in Elon Musk and Donald Trump has made working people’s lives far harder than they already were with his pointless, gas-price-raising little war, those of us who do know those realities need to demand of Democrats that they talk more about them.Before I get into it, let me say clearly: I’m not calling voters stupid. It isn’t their fault they don’t know this stuff—it’s, as I said, the Democrats’, and to some extent the media’s, which doesn’t talk about these things enough because they aren’t “news.” People do know in their bones that the U.S. economic system is rigged—although, as we shall see, they generally have no idea how rigged. OK. So: Let’s start with the fact that the top 1 percent of Americans now own about 32 percent of the wealth. You may know this. This one fact does get reported or mentioned pretty frequently. It’s a shocking number, though. It’s not OK, and it’s not normal. Look at this historical chart from the authoritative St. Louis Fed. In 1990, it was around 22 percent. It’s been above 30 percent since 2014. And it just keeps going up—except, interestingly, for three dips, two during George W. Bush’s presidency and one during Trump’s first term; not because they were warriors on behalf of income equality but because they tanked the economy.A pretty big chunk of that 32 percent is owned by not just the 1 percent, but the 0.1 percent. That’s about 135,000 households. I couldn’t find precise current numbers for 2025–26 on deadline, but I did find this study, from 2013, by the formidable duo of Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. In that year, the top 0.1 percent owned about 22 percent of the wealth. Again, this is not normal. It’s not “just the way things are.” The last time the top 0.1 percent owned that much wealth was—of course—back in 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression.Trump wants to take America back to the 1950s, does he? In this one respect, we should all wish he would. From the end of World War II until the late 1980s, the top 0.1 percent owned around 10 to 12 percent of the wealth. The current madness started after Ronald Reagan’s two big tax cuts. (The famous joke about everything about the United States going bad after the Reagan presidency isn’t quite as hyperbolic as it sounds.)Now—you may consider the above information old hat. If you read someone like me on a regular basis, you’re more likely to know this sort of stuff. But people—voters—generally do not. In fact, what they don’t know is astonishing.A week or so ago, I tripped across this video on YouTube. It’s old—it’s from 2013. So the reality described in it has only gotten worse. The narrator starts like this: “There’s a chart I saw recently that I can’t get out of my head. A Harvard business professor and economist asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth was distributed in the United States.” They thought the top 20 percent probably owned around 58 percent of the wealth. Then they were asked what they thought the ideal distribution should be. They thought that ideally, the top 20 percent should own around 33 percent of the wealth. The actual distribution, in 2013? The top 20 percent owned 82 percent of the wealth. This was 2013, but in the intervening years, people’s perceptions haven’t changed much. I did find a study from this year in which researchers asked people how many times wealthier an average member of the top 10 percent is than someone in the remaining 90 percent of the population. People said about 13.5 times wealthier. The actual answer is precisely twice that, 27 times.You get the idea. So, what does all this mean for Democrats?I suppose some would say, well, a few things. First, they need to disenthrall themselves from the idea that talking about all this stuff is too “left-wing.” Undoubtedly, such rhetoric will be labeled that by Republicans and elements of the media. But so what? It’s just reality. This country is on an unsustainable economic path. It must be changed. You don’t change things by being afraid of how you’re going to be attacked. Nonconfrontational Democrats are, to be blunt, not fit for purpose.Others would contend that even if the mass of voters knew these numbers and more, they wouldn’t care; it wouldn’t move them, and they wouldn’t vote on the basis of them. I think that too is cowardly nonsense. The study I cited above, in which people’s ideal income distribution is well to the left of where they think it is and way to the left of where it actually is? (And by the way, I’ve seen other such studies, and they all show the same thing.) That suggests to me that most people would welcome a message of income redistribution. And by the way—and this too is a crucial point that Democrats need to get through their skulls—if that many people hold that view, it’s not even “left.” It’s mainstream. Democrats need to accept this and act accordingly.Also, always remember: Be suspicious of people who tell you such and such an issue won’t move voters. One question in a poll or focus group isn’t the same thing as a charismatic candidate making something the centerpiece of his or her campaign in speech after speech. And besides, no candidate has to move “voters,” generally and generically. Candidates have to persuade small, decisive percentages of voters that they will fight for their interests.So, as these billionaires become trillionaires, as their share of the wealth grows ever greater, as some of them express open contempt for democracy itself, it’s time that we demand that the 2028 Democratic aspirants be willing to say: “My fellow Americans, if you elect me and give me a Democratic House and Senate, we’re going to take some money away from the billionaires and give it to you.” How on earth is that a losing message?And while they’re at it, they need to tell Americans the economic facts of our society, over and over and over until they start to hit home. Republicans want voters to think only, “My, what a pretty red car.” Democrats have to tell them what’s in the engine.  

Is Trump Selling Himself Back His D.C. Hotel?
• yesterday

Is Trump Selling Himself Back His D.C. Hotel?

You know already that President Donald Trump is on a rampage to build hideous oversized structures in Washington, D.C. (the Epstein Ballroom, the Arc de Trump) and to deface existing structures using exorbitant no-bid contracts. We got some good news this past weekend when a judge made Trump take “THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND” off the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. I only wish the judge further required the president to hang the removed letters on the clubhouse portico at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, rearranged anagrammatically into UNHAT DAMP NJ TODDLER.What you may not know is that the Trump administration is also on a tear to unload government buildings that it’s judged to be all cost and no value. The General Services Administration, which is the federal government’s real estate arm, is selling off government real estate at fire-sale prices into a historically depressed commercial market. These prices are lousy even within the context of the post-Covid office-space glut, making the GSA look very foolish as it claims thrifty stewardship of the taxpayer dollar. I’ve been primarily concerned about the fate of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which the GSA designated last year for “accelerated disposition.” Gray Brechin, founder of the nonprofit Living New Deal, described the Cohen Building to me last September as “a kind of Sistine Chapel of the New Deal” because of its murals by Philip Guston, Seymour Fogel, Ethel and Jenne Magafan—and, most especially, Ben Shahn, whose dry frescoes along both sides of a 70-foot lobby corridor, “The Meaning of Social Security,” Shahn judged “the best work I’ve done.” (To read my earlier pieces on the Cohen building and the Shahns, click here, here, here, and here. These were followed up in, among other publications, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and USA Today.) I won’t tug your lapel too long about the Cohen, which has yet to be sold, because my subject today is those buildings that the Trump administration has sold already, most especially the Old Post Office Building, which Trump leased during his first administration and refurbished as a hotel. The Trump International Hotel became a kleptocratic vortex before Trump sold it at the end of his first term well above market value. Now Trump is poised to repurchase not just the lease but the entire building at a heavy discount, shredding whatever remains of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses as he uses the presidency to expand his fortune at a rate of $1 billion or more per year.More on that in a moment. Permit me first to update you about the Cohen building. Neither Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, nor her staff knew that the Cohen building housed precious New Deal art before she inserted into a January 2025 water resources bill a provision requiring that it be sold off “no later than two years” after being vacated (which has not yet occurred). Such ignorance is astonishing given that the Cohen lies a mere two blocks from the United States Capitol, but I wouldn’t call it atypical of how the Republican congressional majority operates.After Ernst learned about the art, she said in a written statement: “It speaks volumes that only 2 percent of the folks who were actually paid to work at the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building were showing up to see its murals in person.” Ernst here misconstrues a low occupancy rate attributable to GSA misallocation (the main tenants, Voice of America and its parent agency, used only a small part of the building) to be an entirely made-up absentee rate for supposed civil service malingerers. “Given that fact,” Ernst continued, “let the property’s buyer decide its artwork’s fate.” Which is exactly what the Cohen building’s defenders fear, even though the law requires that New Deal art remain public property even after the building where it resides is sold. These days we can never be sure the executive branch will pay any heed to what the law says.In recent months, various Democratic members of Congress have walked those two blocks from the Capitol to tour the Cohen building’s artworks, and we’ve seen some murmurings from Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas and others, prodded by Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, and Mary Okin, assistant director of the nonprofit Living New Deal, about introducing legislation to block the Cohen’s sale. On April 21, Representative Chellie Pingree, Democrat of Maine, offered an amendment to an appropriations bill for financial services, general government, and related agencies requiring public release of a GSA feasibility study, initiated by the Biden administration and buried by the Trump administration, on refurbishing the Cohen building. As I reported previously, the study proposed a $1 billion green renovation of the Cohen building to make it “a flagship in the federal government portfolio,” including restoration of the murals, which “add a sense of cultural identity in the building that remains from tenant to tenant.” Amen.Pingree’s amendment to make public this taxpayer-funded study failed, as Democratic amendments tend to in the Republican-majority House. But two Republicans, Representatives Ryan Zinke of Montana and Michael Simpson of Idaho, voted with Pingree. “I was glad to see I convinced a couple of my [GOP] colleagues,” Pingree told me afterward. “I got pretty close.” It gave her hope, Pingree said, that Congress would “keep the building off the market.” I hope soon to have more to report on that. Now let’s move on to those government buildings the GSA has sold already.Three of them are in Washington, and the first two, like the Cohen, have been designated for “accelerated disposition.” In March, the GSA’s own Regional Office Building was sold (to the residential developer Dalian Development) for $24.26 million. That worked out to $26 per square foot, or less than one-tenth its market value. In May, the GSA sold the Liberty Loan Building (to Satvik “Vinny” Raj, founder and managing director of Digilent Consulting) for $17 million. That works out to $98 per square foot, which is somewhat better, but still about one-fifth the average sale price for a D.C. office building in the current depressed market. Why the government insists on disposing of these buildings at so inopportune a moment is anybody’s guess. (I’m indebted to the Washington Business Journal for details on these sales, which went unreported in The Washington Post.) The third building, which is not on the accelerated disposition list, is the Old Post Office Building. It sold earlier this month for $80 million, or $172 per square foot. Which sounds like a big improvement on the GSA Annex and the Liberty Loan building until you remember that the Old Post Office is a gorgeous Romanesque revival structure completed in 1899; that a mere 10 years ago Trump spent $200 million, or $430 per square foot, to convert the Old Post Office into a luxury hotel; and that Trump sold the hotel five years ago for a reported $375 million—and that was just for the lease, because until last week the GSA retained ownership of the building and the land. In current dollars, Trump got paid for the renovated Old Post Office $452 million, or $972 million per square foot—again, just for the lease.That means, among other things, that even if the Old Post Office Building’s new buyer gets its asking price of $400 million, the building and the land will sell for less in 2026 than just the lease sold for in 2021. And who’s the likeliest buyer? According to The Wall Street Journal, Eric Trump has been in talks to repurchase the Old Post Office Building since mid-January 2025. Trump wants his Kleptorium back, at a discount.When Trump bought the Old Post Office lease back in 2012, Steven Pearlstein observed in The Washington Post that the likely outcome would be, for Trump, yet another appearance in bankruptcy court. Trump had bad luck with hotels, having previously gone bust with the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, the storied Plaza Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, and the Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts. Pearlstein thought the GSA was crazy to lease the Old Post Office to a screw-up like Trump. He didn’t know the half of it.As he’d done many times before, Trump overpaid for the Old Post Office, agreeing to an inflation-adjusted annual lease payment of $3 million plus the $200 million renovation. Pearlstein was quite right that this would compel Trump to charge room rates well above those of his hotel competitors. What Pearlstein couldn’t know was that Trump would become president of the United States shortly after his Trump International Hotel opened on Pennsylvania Avenue, allowing it to become, as I wrote in May 2022, Washington’s premier shakedown venue. Foreign governments spent $3.8 million at the hotel; the Secret Service spent more than $200,000; the Republican National Committee spent $3,000 per month; Trump’s inaugural committee spent $1 million (prompting a lawsuit from the D.C. attorney general that Trump later settled for $750,000); and so on. But Trump had paid so extravagantly for the Old Post Office that even with all this baksheesh pouring in, the Trump International still lost about $70 million in operating expenses. Then he lost the 2020 election, which meant he no longer needed a Kleptorium. Trump sold the Trump International Hotel for $375 million, pocketing $100 million in profit. The $375 million price tag was, Jonathan O’Connell reported in The Washington Post, the most anybody had ever paid for a Washington hotel, which was all the more remarkable because a) this was a money-losing ventureand b) the building and the land were still owned by the federal government. (I recount the story up to here, in greater detail, in my May 2022 piece.) The new owners, who scraped Trump’s name off the hotel and reopened it in 2022 as a Waldorf Astoria hotel, were a Miami-based investment group called CGI Merchant Group. It isn’t clear why CGI Merchant Group got into this, but the trade publication The Real Deal last year called the firm “financially embattled” because of various real estate investments gone sour. To no one’s surprise, CGI Merchant Group in 2024 had to sell the Waldorf Astoria for $100 million at a foreclosure auction. The purchaser at foreclosure was a private equity firm called MSD Partners (now BDT & MSD Partners). MSD Partners had put up most of the money for CGI Merchant Group to buy Trump’s unprofitable hotel in the first place; of the $375 million purchase price, $285 million came from MSD Partners. After CGI Merchant Group defaulted on that $285 million loan, BDT & MSD Partners decided, what the hell, let’s kick in another $100 million and take it off their hands. And so they became the owners of Trump’s unprofitable former hotel—or rather, the owners of a lot of fancy renovations and a lease on same. Now GSA has come along and sold the building itself to BDT & MSD for an additional $80 million. I don’t know who’s a more generous soul—BDT & MSD for acquiring this dog of an enterprise, or GSA for handing over title at so low a price.We know why GSA would be charitable; these folks work for President Donald Trump, who wants to repurchase the Old Post Office, this time at a less burdensome price. But why would BDT & MSD Partners be charitable? Because when Trump was trying to unload the Old Post Office back in 2021, MSD Partners’ chief executive was a Palm Beach neighbor named John Phelan. (Phelan left the firm in June 2022, seven months after the sale.) Phelan is one of Trump’s biggest financial supporters. In April 2024, Phelan threw a Trump fundraiser at his Aspen vacation home, with contribution tiers rising from $25,000 to $500,000. Phelan himself donated $927,000 to Trump’s 2024 campaign.Shortly after that election, Trump named Phelan to be secretary of the Navy, despite Phelan’s notable lack of armed forces experience in either a military or a civilian capacity. Experts told the Associated Press that Phelan was chosen because he wouldn’t give Trump any pushback. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly grew jealous of Phelan’s closeness to the president, and in April Hegseth fired Phelan, apparently annoyed that Phelan was currying favor with Trump by proposing to create an expensive new “Trump Class” of battleships. This may be the single instance in which Hegseth fired someone from the Pentagon who was actually unqualified.BDT & MSD Partners, I’ll wager, would very much like to sell the Waldorf-Astoria at a price that lets them recoup their investment in the property, which (between the unpaid portion of its loan to CGI Merchant Group, its foreclosure purchase, and its purchase from GSA of the building and land) probably isn’t much lower than its $400 million asking price. Indeed, given operating expenses on the less-than-thriving hotel, BDT & MSD may be out even more than $400 million. If Trump pays $400 million to buy back the Old Post Office, he’ll get it for $52 million less, after inflation, than he sold it for five years ago—and this time he’ll have the building and the land. That’s a pretty good deal! But if I know Trump, he’ll demand a lower price than $400 million, leaning heavily on his knowledge that the GSA sold it to BDT & MSD Partners for a mere $80 million and pretending not to remember MSD Partners’ previous exertions to bail him out. He has no time to delve into such petty details. And anyway, he gave that guy the Navy secretary gig and he blew it. Trump probably doesn’t remember how. He’s a very busy man.

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