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Crista Jakacky of Glenburn is a marketing specialist for a nonprofit organization that supports Maine foster families and children in care. She is also a singer for a local acoustic act.
The supposed trimming of the fat in the federal government continues, just as the illusory majority of voters supposedly demanded.
But not by decreasing taxes (unless you’re in the top 1 to 3 percent). Or by lowering grocery or utility expenses. Or by reducing health insurance costs.
But instead by:
By drastically cutting National Institutes of Health research funding provided for human health, sickness, contagions, and terminal illnesses. Cancer research could be drastically affected.
That research funding also includes agricultural health, e-coli infection, avian flu, bovine tuberculosis, anthrax, and crop-devastating pests, just to name a few.
By discontinuing USAID, impacting farmers across the country who are already struggling with rising costs, low prices, and concerns with tariffs, and who rely on that market for surplus sales.
Yes, there is a surplus in some agricultural markets and for some items that we can afford to share. Those food programs not only contribute to economic growth and development here in the United States, but they also help feed the hungry across the world.
By handing the purse strings of the U.S. government to a civilian, who is, in partnership with presidential directives, recklessly cutting federal funds and funding, dispensing of programs and positions, and impounding money appropriated by Congress. Doing things such as burrowing into the Treasury Department’s payment system, as well as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. They’ve also apparently accessed government personnel files, personal financial data, and potentially everyone’s federal tax returns, Social Security numbers, government assistance payments, and medical records.
By making drastic cuts to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has recovered more than $17 billion for consumers from fraudulent or predatory practices since it began in 2011.
By firing government employees from various programs at will and without oversight.
By purging the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the civil service, decimating the agencies that keep the U.S. safe. They are not the enemy, regardless of what you’re being told. They are the ones doing the quiet, behind-the-scenes work that no one will do now, the work that kept the United States protected and secure. The work like busting global child trafficking rings, preventing terrorists from boarding planes, rescuing soldiers held by the Taliban and other foreign entities, intercepting school threats like shootings and bomb scares, monitoring and investigating and arresting deep cover foreign intelligence officers, and on, and on, and on.
And, by firing those perceived as an enemy to the president (anyone who stood up to him, disagreed with him, or heaven forbid, prosecuted him).
All the while, claiming – without evidence – that these entities and people are corrupt, thereby supporting the divide-and-conquer agenda and feverishly igniting Donald Trump’s supporters.
This is all but dismantling the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. government.
And this is just a recent set of events. This doesn’t include the multitude of other unilateral, unchecked measures, actions, and executive orders that have attacked our country’s most vulnerable communities and citizens.
This madness is what nearly half of voters asked for?
