Executive Orders
President Donald Trump signed the following Executive Orders:
EO 14212 Establishing the President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission
Congress
The Senate confirmed politician, lawyer, climate activist, and author Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services Secretary in a 52 to 48 vote on Thursday. Per Wikipedia, RFK Jr. is a son of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and a nephew of President John F. Kennedy. He is also the founder of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine advocacy group and proponent of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. In January, more than 17,000 doctors signed an open letter in opposition to Kennedy’s nomination, arguing that he was a danger to national healthcare and unqualified to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
Government
Office of Personnel Management officials met with government agencies on Thursday and ordered them to begin terminating probationary employees. Part of Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk’s plans to cut up to 10 percent of the federal workforce, the layoffs come at the close of their deferred resignation offer Wednesday evening, after a court ruling ended a temporary restraining order that extended the initial February 6 deadline.
Mass firings began at top federal agencies including the Office of Personnel Management, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Veterans Affairs, and others.
Probationary employees are recent full-time hires who have been employed less than two years, before reaching tenure at three years. This classification also includes some career service employees who have transferred positions, but it does not include seasonal or temporary workers. They’re easier to terminate because they do not have the same job protections as tenured staff.
The New York Times reports that Airbnb co-founder and board member Joe Gebbia is joining Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Gebbia is also a board member at Tesla and a close associate of Musk. A former Democratic Party donor, Gebbia says he changed parties and is now Republican, aligning his support for Robert Kennedy Jr.
National
The attorneys general of the state of New Mexico and 13 other states filed a lawsuit in Washington DC federal court to halt the “unchecked legal authority” of billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, claiming that he was illegally appointed without Congressional approval and acting unsupervised as an “agent of chaos” in the government.
World
Vice President JD Vance, with his wife Usha, visited the Dachau concentration camp memorial on Thursday.
“I’ve read a lot about the Holocaust in books. But being here, and seeing it up close in person, really drives home what unspeakable evil was committed and why we should be committed to ensuring that it never happens again.“
Source: Vice President JD Vance, Associated Press
Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are in Germany for the Munich Security Conference that begins on Friday, during which Vance will meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to initiate Ukraine peace negotiations.
Also on Thursday, European leaders expressed their concerns over Trump’s comments from Wednesday indicating that the US is planning direct talks with Russia to end the Ukraine war, excluding Ukraine and NATO allies from the negotiations.
Celebrities
Adding his voice, billionaire Sir Richard Branson issued a powerful rebuke of Trump’s negotiations and urged the critical necessity of including Ukraine and Europe in any peace talks with Russia.
At this juncture, it’s worth paying attention to the cautioning words of Eastern European and Baltic leaders who understand better than most what is at stake. Putin’s ambitions will not stop with Ukraine. His dark vision of regional hegemony includes a sphere of weakened states under Russia’s control.
Sir Richard Branson
He spoke of the need for the US to uphold the security guarantees it made to Ukraine in 1993, and criticized Trump’s negotiation tactics:
He chose to put his cards on the table and offered major concessions before any negotiations had begun. Anyone who knows a thing or two about negotiations – whether in business or in politics – will agree that that’s not the art of the deal. It’s the exact opposite.
Business
Ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court on Thursday night against parent company Unilever. The suit accuses Unilever’s ice cream chief of censorship via a company ban on any social media posts criticizing President Trump.
Culture
In January, Vice President Vance, who recently converted to Catholicism in August 2019, ignited a philosophical religious debate over his interpretation of the Catholic term “ordo amoris” in an interview on Fox News about immigration.
As an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. It doesn’t mean you hate people from outside of your own borders. There’s this old school, and I think it’s a very Christian concept by the way, that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that, they seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society.
Vice President JD Vance, Fox News
When asked to clarify, Vance said, “Just google “ordo amoris.’”
According to the National Catholic Register, Pope Francis addressed the matter in a letter to US bishops on February 10, writing, “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.” The Pope added, “the true ordo amoris” is a heart that is “open to all, without exception” and then he issued a plea of compassion for displaced people:
The act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution, or serious deterioration of the environment damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness. I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of goodwill, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters.”
Pope Francis, National Catholic Register
String Board Notes
According to Politico, Vance credits his religious conversion to the mentorship of Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who he met in 2011 after a presentation at Yale Law School. Vance joined Thiel’s firm as a partner in 2015 and later launched his own venture capital firm, of which Thiel was an investor. The billionaire donated $15M to Vance’s successful Senate run in 2022 — the largest amount of money donated to a Senate candidate ever. Thiel was an early investor in Elon Musk’s SpaceX, of at least $20M, and remains in Musk’s sphere of influence — both are former PayPal co-founders and members of the PayPal Mafia, an elite group of techno-libertarians now represented within Trump’s administration.
Further Reading
The PayPal Mafia is taking over America’s government; The Economist; December 10, 2024
13 Things to Know About J.D. Vance’s Catholic Journey; National Catholic Register; July 17, 2024
55 Things to Know About JD Vance, Trump’s VP Pick; Politico; July 15, 2024
10 Minute Actions
- Buy some Ben & Jerry’s, it’s now your patriotic duty. Our two favorite nondairy flavors are Ava DuVernay’s Lights! Caramel! Action!™ and Colin Kaepernick’s Change the Whirled™. You can buy online, they deliver!