Book Club: The Next Chapter Trailer #1 (2023)

There's one government agency that the Washington Post says can push back on President Donald Trump, but they don't have long to do it.

Writing Monday, the Post explained that the Government Accountability Office has an appointee whose term expires in two months.

"The agency’s leader, Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, has about two months left in his term, and Trump will nominate his replacement, potentially scuttling some of the Government Accountability Office’s most forceful attempts at oversight — including by taking the White House to court if necessary," the report said.

Already, the agency has retained a law firm to navigate whether the White House is breaking the law over spending issues.

“They are looking at everything,” said a source when speaking to the Post.

Once Trump is able to appoint his own people to the post, the agency will be "defanged," the Post described.

Congress can send Trump a list of who they think should be appointed, but the president can ignore it and pick whomever he wishes.

Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought has spent his first few months in the post claiming the GAO is illegitimate and that it "shouldn't exist" to begin with. Republicans in Congress already tried to kill funding to the agency so that they couldn't afford to sue the administration on behalf of Congress, the report said.

"But the agency has taken on more prominence in recent months. A federal appeals court in August held that only GAO had the standing to sue over violations of spending laws, cutting out the groups that claimed harm from Trump’s decisions," the report explained.

“If Trump nominates the next comptroller general — I don’t want to make a political thing out of it, but his track record about caring about oversight and independent evaluations is not terribly strong,” said Henry Wray, a former GAO lawyer and ethics counselor. “GAO is really the only truly independent source of executive branch oversight in government.”

The most recent legal example is Trump attempting to kill funding allocated by Congress before he was president. The GAO could step in and say that it violates the Impoundment Control Act.

Read the full report here.

A pair of extreme new Trump administration rules aimed at functionally banning gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth could force even more hospitals to close down.

NPR reported Thursday that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) drafted a proposed rule that would prohibit federal Medicaid reimbursement for medical care provided to transgender patients younger than 18 and prohibit the same from the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for patients under 19.

Another proposed rule goes even further, blocking all Medicaid and Medicare funding to hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to youth.

As Erin Reed, an independent journalist who reports on LGBTQ+ rights, explained, this “would effectively eliminate access to such care nationwide, except at the few private clinics able to forgo Medicaid entirely, a rarity in transgender youth medicine.”

The policies are of a piece with the Trump administration and the broader Republican Party’s efforts to eliminate transgender healthcare for youth across the country.

Bans on gender-affirming care for those under 18 have already been passed in 27 states, despite evidence that early access to treatments like puberty blockers and hormones can save lives.

As Reed pointed out, a Cornell University review of more than 51 studies shows that access to such care dramatically reduces the risk of suicide and the rates of anxiety and depression among transgender adolescents.

The new HHS rules are being prepared for public release in November and would not be finalized for several more months.

But if passed, the ramifications could extend far beyond transgender people, impacting the entire healthcare system, for which federal funding from Medicare and Medicaid is a load-bearing piece. According to a report last year from the American Hospital Association, 96% of hospitals in the US have more than half their inpatient days paid for by Medicare and Medicaid.

It is already becoming apparent what happens when even some of that funding is taken away. As a result of the massive GOP budget law passed in July, an estimated $1 trillion is expected to be cut from Medicaid over the next decade. According to an analysis released Thursday by Protect Our Care, which maintains a Hospital Crisis Watch database, more than 500 healthcare providers across the country are already at risk of shutting down due to the budget cuts.

Tyler Hack, the executive director of the Christopher Street Project, a transgender rights organization, said that the newly proposed HHS rule would be “forcing hospitals to choose between providing lifesaving care for trans people or maintaining the ability to serve patients through Medicare and Medicaid.”

“Today’s news marks a dangerous overreach by the executive branch, pitting trans people, low-income families, disabled people, and seniors against each other and making hospitals choose which vulnerable populations to serve,” Hack said. “If these rules become law, it will kill people.”