Dedicated hard working federal employees deserve our respect, dignity and American support.

In defense of federal employees: Echo opinion letter published in the Las Vegas the Courier Journal: 

https://www.recordcourier.com/news/2025/apr/09/april-9-2025-r-c-letters-to-the-editor/

Editor:  First, full disclosure, I’m a retired federal employee. I worked for the Air Force as a Financial Manager for 25-plus years. (Maine Writer- Thank you!)

What Trump and Musk are really doing to destroy our country reported in Slate

Outraged❗ The attitude about federal employees can be traced almost directly to the Republican Congress, using them as a scapegoat for their failure to properly monitor, fund, change regulations or responsibilities of those agencies. 

What Congress doesn’t want you to know is that these agencies are only doing what Congress authorizes them to do. They can limit activity by appointees of one administration, but usually don’t do that because they don’t want those activities limited by the other party when administrations change. 

They just create political theater by calling agency leadership to congressional hearings that don’t produce anything substantive because agency leaders generally aren’t doing anything illegal.

There isn’t one agency or organization that is part of the federal government that wasn’t created, funded, and approved annually by Congress. That extends to the civilian and military employees of those agencies. Most federal employees aren’t political, as a matter of fact, there are laws that prevent political activity by those employees. Some senior leadership at most agencies are specially created and approved as political appointees; they regularly change with the change in administration, by design. These are the positions that set the agenda for the agency and can change agency political direction based on the party in the White House. Again – by design by Congress. When Congress creates a new agency, it defines what that agency can do, what its responsibilities are, etc. Most times, Congress intentionally makes those rules pretty flexible, to allow for changes in policy depending on elections. Congress also has the responsibility to monitor activities and performance in those agencies by calling them to testify before different committees in the House or Senate.

This administration’s, and especially Musk/DOGE’s random and indiscriminate firing of federal employees, most of the time without even knowing what functions they support in the agencies affected, is cruel and really ignorant. It is not getting rid of fraud, waste, inefficiencies – there’s no what they could have done the intense analysis required to find those things. And I guarantee you ❗the 19 year old tech bros don’t understand the mission about the agencies they’re attacking, much less the service these employees provide to the American public. It’s insulting and cruel – these are people that have families, mortgages, just like us. Many are truly dedicated, patriotic, and want to build life long careers in these agencies because of their personal beliefs and interests. Many have worked long and hard to get their jobs, just to have them eliminated for some cruel political stunt. Too bad we don’t have a Congress that take back their Constitutionally assigned power and reverse this senseless activity.

From Deborah Huelsman in Gardnerville, Nevada

Donald J. Trump kicks off a terrible second term while his evilism embarrasses all Americans

I won't be celebrating Donald Trump's inauguration because my values as a citizen and humanitarian won't let me. | Opinion
I’ve not been able to shake the sense that I don’t understand my country anymore. The United States has a problem. It's not united.
by Paul Wesslund Opinion Contributor published in he Courier Journal in Louisville, Kentucky:

I amd not among those who are wrongmindedly celebrating Donald Trump’s inauguration.

I’m not happy about my lack of enthusiasm, for one of our nation's major civic events. But I’ve not been able to shake the sense that I don’t understand my country anymore.

I grew up learning that the worst thing you could do to our democracy is try to overthrow it. Last November half our country said with their vote that they don’t care about that.

I’m aware (and still stunned) that some would consider what I just wrote a controversial paragraph. So I’m amazed I’ll need to state clearly that the man elected president called a mob to Washington to overthrow the government on Janary. 6, 2021. 

In fact, Trump watched on TV as they threatened to kill the vice president and actually beat the living daylights out of law enforcement. 

More than 140 police were injured. More than 900 rioters have been convicted of crimes committed in connection with the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Trump is calling them patriots and, worse, he quickly pardoned them.

Sadly, the United States I grew up in is torn apart:

To me, January 6 disqualified Trump from the presidency. The campaigns last year featured a lot of important issues: The price of eggs, the need for immigration reform, crime, foreign policy. All are topics for legitimate debate. Unapologetic leadership of a violent coup is not.

Clearly, half the country disagrees with me. The scary part about that is that half the country also agrees with me. We’re torn apart.

Yes, I was hoping for a president who campaigned on a promise of being president for everyone. Nevertheless, the winner doesn’t act interested in the half of the country that clearly voted against him.

Trump has vowed to prosecute high-profile people who opposed him. He scoffs at global warming, one of my top issues facing the world. I detect only contempt for immigrants from the incoming officeholders. Yet my Christian faith calls me to have compassion for refugees fleeing war and other violence.

(Question from Maine Writer❓- Did the Trumpzi Bible, the one printed in China and sold for profit, include the Beatitudes❓ Or, were those verses edited out❓❓  “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” is a Bible verse from Matthew 5:7. It is part of a series of sayings called the Beatitudes.)

As a lifelong citizen of this country I might expect at least a passing nod to my values. Instead, I feel scorn.

While January 20 will be a joyous occasion for the more than 77 million who voted for Trump, for more than 75 million of us it will be a day where our beliefs and priorities will only be targets of ridicule.

I see the endless stream of post-election analysis headlines about how the Democrats screwed up this way and that. How Republicans got this right and that right. But I don’t read those stories. None of that seems to matter when I seem so out of touch with so many of my neighbors.

Senator Mitch McConnell is missing the environmental moment- as usual!

An echo opinion published in the Kentucky Courier Journal

Green New Deal

Croplands are turning to desert, in parts of China, Kenya and Kansas. Entire species are disappearing. The Great Barrier Reef is dying.

Already, in Lexington, mosquito season lasts 10 percent longer than just a generation ago, exposing more people to the risk of the Zika virus and other diseases they carry. 

A nasty nickname for Senator McConnell happens to be "turtle head", but maybe the label is more of a metaphor than a slur. Certainly, McConnell knows how to hide from the truth about global warming. He could capture the opportunity to do the right thing by acknowledging the science about climate change, but he won't do it and, therefore, is rightly criticized in this Kentucky opinion:

McConnell wildly out of step with Kentucky and US on climate change- by Rhea Suh 

For the first time in his four years as Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell is poised to call a floor vote on a plan to confront the rising costs and mounting perils of global climate change.

But don’t be fooled. The Kentucky Republican means to bury climate action, not praise it, in one of the clearest signs yet of how wildly out of step he and others in his party are with the best interests of the nation — and the people of Kentucky.

McConnell, Donald Trump, and other Republican leaders have no plan of their own for addressing the central environmental challenge of our time, and little but derision for those who do.

To prove the point, McConnell and other Senate Republicans want to make a show of voting down a resolution that outlines the aspirations behind a Green New Deal, an ambitious call to national action to avert climate catastrophe.

A master of Senate process, McConnell knows this resolution contains big-picture goals, not specific legislation: that’s for Senate committees to craft.

Indeed, before McConnell unveiled his scheme to try to shut down talk about a Green New Deal, before the conversation can even begin, the resolution was slated to go before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. There, its animating ideas could be hammered out and refined through the customary process of hearings, expert insights and public debate.

Debate? That’s the last thing McConnell wants. 

Since 1989, he’s received more than $3.3 million in campaign contributions from the coal, gas and oil industries whose fuels produce the carbon pollution that’s driving climate change. McConnell has consistently voted against legislation that would help us reduce that dangerous pollution and confront the widening climate crisis — while there’s still time to act.

Our families deserve better. Nearly eight in 10 Americans — and more than six in 10 in Kentucky — understand the growing climate crisis we face; about seven in 10 expect our government to help fight it, and no wonder.

We just wrapped up the five hottest years since global record-keeping began in 1880. Of the 19 hottest years on record, 18 have occurred in this century.

Seas are rising, glaciers are melting, wildfires, storms and floods are raging.

Croplands are turning to desert, in parts of China, Kenya and Kansas. Entire species are disappearing. The Great Barrier Reef is dying.

Addressing this shouldn’t divide us red state and blue. Of the 15 states projected to pay the highest costs for climate change, 14, including Kentucky, voted for Trump.

Kentucky and its people are already paying the price.

Heat waves and attendant health threats are becoming more common, with the Bluegrass State on track to get 70 such days a year by 2050, a five-fold increase over current conditions.

Tourism is starting to sweat. Summer highs average a pleasant 87 degrees at popular Mammoth Cave National Park. That’s set to rise to a scorching 98 degrees, though, by century’s end, unless we take action now.

Already, in Lexington, mosquito season lasts 10 percent longer than just a generation ago, exposing more people to the risk of the Zika virus and other diseases they carry. Scientists predict more frequent and prolonged droughts like the one that slashed Kentucky’s corn output in half in 2012. And they warn that graceful trees like the sugar maple and American beech will be vanishing from the Kentucky landscape by 2100.

All of this and more gets much worse, the science tells us, unless we cut our carbon footprint today, so our children don’t inherit climate chaos tomorrow. That’s why we need assertive climate action that helps us rise to this challenge and create millions of good-paying American jobs doing it.

The people of Kentucky hold proud ground in the history of our country’s economy. They deserve their place in powering our future.

A Green New Deal could help, by promoting a just and equitable transition to the clean energy future we need.

That means bringing clean energy jobs to the state’s hard-hit rural and manufacturing areas. It means shoring up pensions and health care coverage for coal miners. And it means providing retraining for those who lose their jobs in an industry that has shed two-thirds of its Kentucky workforce in just the past decade.

Big ideas seldom arrive fully cooked. Advancing the goals of a Green New Deal with actual bills will take months. If McConnell has helpful suggestions, or any plan at all for confronting the growing dangers of climate change, we’d all love to hear it.

What we can’t afford to do is to allow this vital national conversation to be choked off before it gets started, as one more way to enable big polluters and their Capitol Hill backers to block the action we need to leave our kids and our grandkids a livable world.

Rhea Suh is president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group with more than 3 million supporters nationwide.