Author: Kevin Drum

Oh come on:

The Defense Department wiped the phones of top departing DOD and Army officials at the end of the Trump administration, deleting any texts from key witnesses to events surrounding the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, according to court filings.

[The officials include] former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, former chief of staff Kash Patel, and former Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy, among other prominent Pentagon officials.

The Pentagon's explanation is that this is routine: When anyone leaves DOD they turn in their phone and the phone is wiped. I must have at least a few readers who have worked for DOD and then left. Is this true? CNN quotes one person who's sketpical:

A former Defense Department official from a previous administration told CNN that it is ingrained into new hires during their onboarding that their work devices were subject to the Presidential Records Act and indicated their communications would be archived. The source said it was assumed when they turned in their devices at the end of their employment, any communication records would be archived.

This ought to be easy enough for an experienced Defense reporter to check out. The question, as with the Secret Service, is why this stuff isn't backed up or archived in some way. Is that routine procedure too?

This is the Long Beach skyline seen through the Seal Beach pier. The roundish building a little left of the midpoint is the Long Beach Arena. You can see the Queen Mary between the farthest left pilings. A cruise ship is docked at the far left.

I was thinking once again about the myth of deadlock the other day, and in particular I was thinking about what Joe Biden has managed to get done in his first 18 months. Here's a list of big things, ranked from top to bottom:

1. Afghanistan withdrawal
2. $1.9 trillion COVID stimulus
3. Infrastructure bill
4. Climate change bill
5. Rallying the world to assist Ukraine
6. More than 40 federal judges appointed—a near record rate
7. CHIPS Act
8. PACT Act
9. Student loan forgiveness
10. Electoral Count Reform Act (probably)

The bill at the bottom will move up the list when it passes. For now, however, Republicans remain an obstacle to enacting it.

But the one that really gets me is #1. For years liberals have been saying that we can't do any more good in Afghanistan and we need to withdraw—even if it's ugly and allows the Taliban to take over.

Well, it was ugly and the Taliban took over. But even now, a year later, it seems like we remain traumatized by those pictures of the first day, as if a rescue operation of this size under these circumstances could possibly start up without problems. The truth is that everyone showed monumental courage throughout the entire month of the airlift. The military risked their lives daily and rescued 124,000 people—including all but a few hundred Americans—under the worst circumstances imaginable. Since then nearly a thousand more people have been quietly flown out. The State Department moved their desks to the Kabul airport and dealt with a huge crush of work made harder by sabotage from the Trump administration. Biden stuck to his guns despite enormous pressure to cave in and stay longer.

Nothing is perfect. Big operations conducted under difficult circumstances always have a rough start. Desperate people always create chaos. Plans never survive contact with the enemy. The US certainly underestimated the incompetence of the Afghani army; the speed of the Taliban's takeover; and the cowardice of Ashrif Ghani and other senior Afghani officials who abandoned their country during the airlift.

But in the end, this was the biggest and probably most successful air rescue in history. It isn't surprising that Republicans criticize it. That's their job. But it's stunning that even Democrats have mostly stayed quiet, refusing to full-throatedly support Biden and the withdrawal. It's an act of both moral gutlessness and political stupidity.

UPDATE: The climate bill was signed into law on August 16th, so I've moved it up to the fourth spot. If and when ECRA is passed, it will move up too.

Here's the average price of gasoline as of August 1:

Adjusted for inflation, the price of a gallon of gasoline has dropped nearly a dollar. Isn't that great?

The are only two kinds of people unhappy about this. The first are climate hawks who think gasoline should be going for about ten bucks a gallon in order to keep drivers off the road.¹

Second, and far more numerous, are conservatives who are suddenly discovering that we all know the president has no influence on gasoline prices. It's funny that they didn't seem to know that when prices were going up.

And anyway, maybe the president does have some influence on gasoline prices. He can jawbone OPEC, which has worked moderately well lately. OPEC production is up and global prices of crude are down. And there's also President Biden's move to sell oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, along with his recent decision to guarantee repurchases in future years, which is likely to stabilize the market. I wasn't a big fan of this move, but who knows? Maybe it's working better than I expected.

¹During 2020-21, the price of a gallon of regular increased from $2 to above $3 and vehicle miles went up and up anyway. By the end of 2021 VMT was nearly at its pre-pandemic level even though gasoline prices were a buck higher:

But how about $5 gasoline? Did that make a dent in how much people used their cars? We don't have travel data yet from March-June, when prices went up from about $3.50 to $5, so we don't know. But retail sales data suggests only a 15% decline in miles traveled—and even that was probably only a short-term effect. I'll bet that in the long term it really would take ten-dollar gasoline to make much of a difference.

WARNING: I have deleted the original version of this post and replaced it with something completely different. Sorry.

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Shall I never be rid of this stupid topic? I'm talking, of course, about the reallocation of veterans funds from the discretionary budget to the mandatory budget. Here's where I am now.

The Congressional Budget Office examined the original PACT Act on February 18 and found no reallocation. It was passed by the House on March 3 and sent it to the Senate. On June 6, in a footnote, CBO makes clear that its estimate of the bill when it passed on March 3 was the same as its original February 18 estimate. In other words, there was no reallocation in the House version.

In its June 6 analysis CBO examined the latest version of the bill while it was sitting in the Senate. In this version, they estimated that the bill would reallocate $400 billion in existing spending from discretionary to mandatory:

This estimate reflects changes in the version of the bill as posted on the website of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

This is clear: The reallocation happened in the Senate. In a show of immense diligence and curiosity, I compared the March 3 House bill to the June 6 Senate bill. Here are the relevant sections:

House Bill Passed on March 3

Senate Bill as of June 6

(b) AUTHORIZATION OF APPROPRIATIONS.—There is authorized to be appropriated to the Fund for fiscal year 2023 and each subsequent fiscal year such sums as are necessary to increase funding, over the fiscal year 2021 level for the Veterans Health Administration of the Department of Veterans Affairs, for any expenses incident to the delivery of veterans’ health care and benefits associated with exposure to environmental hazards in service, including administrative expenses, such as claims processing and appeals, and for medical research related to hazardous exposures.

(c) AUTHORIZATION OF APPROPRIATIONS.—There is authorized to be appropriated to the Fund for fiscal year 2023 and each subsequent fiscal year such sums as are necessary to increase funding, over the fiscal year 2021 level, for investment in— (1) the delivery of veterans’ health care associated with exposure to environmental hazards in the active military, naval, air, or space service in programs administered by the Under Secretary for Health; (2) any expenses incident to the delivery of veterans’ health care and benefits associated with exposure to environmental hazards in the active military, naval, air, or space service, including administrative expenses, such as information technology and claims processing and appeals, and excluding leases as authorized or approved under section 8104 of this title; and (3) medical and other research relating to exposure to environmental hazards.

In the House bill, funding is for (a) incidental expenses such as claims processing and (b) medical research. That's new spending and would be classified as mandatory. The Senate bill includes those two but adds funding for "delivery of veterans health care." That's existing spending, and it would be redefined as mandatory. That's apparently where the $400 billion comes from.

At least, that's what CBO thinks, and I trust their legislative analysis a whole lot more than I trust mine.

So after changing my mind once again, I'm back where I started: This reallocation happened in the Senate, and that means the culprits are probably Sen. Jon Tester and Sen. Jerry Moran.

This is a young man reading a book at the very tip of the Île de la Cité, the island in the middle of the Seine that was the original site of Paris. I had never walked out to the very end, so I decided to do it this time. Maybe next time I'll see if (I'm allowed to) walk out to the other end.

The Wall Street Journal had this story splashed across its front page last night:

Methinks the Journal is trying too hard. It's true that white workers get more career-advancing opportunities than POCs according to this McKinsey report, but the numbers are 55%, 60%, and 62% compared to a white baseline number of 64%. If there's anything surprising here, it's that the POC numbers are within a hair's breadth of the white number. Only Hispanics are lower by any significant amount, and even there it's only nine points.

There's also this about front-line workers:

They are less likely than their white peers to find springboards to higher-paying jobs on the front lines, such as assistant store manager or line supervisor. The drop-off is steepest among Black workers, who make up 17% of hourly jobs at major companies but see their numbers shrink to 9% one step up the ladder in low-level supervisory or management roles.

Apparently the print edition doesn't bother printing the chart for this, but it's in the online edition and I've posted it on the right.

And it's odd. It's true, for example, that Black workers go from 17% of hourly field workers to 9% of hourly field managers. That's a big drop. But then they inexplicably increase to 13% of salaried field managers. That's the best of any POC group—though still considerably worse than white field workers, who are promoted at a higher rate than any other group.

But what's really surprising about this chart is that both Black and Asian American workers are represented at the highest level (salaried field managers) right in line with their numbers in the general population. Only Hispanic workers are represented below their share of the population:

If anything, all this data ought to be presented as surprisingly good news, at least for Black and Asian American front-line workers. Hispanic workers aren't doing as well, but even there they aren't as far behind as I would have guessed—especially given the language issues that might be playing a role here.

The Journal's take is that corporate diversity efforts are floundering at the level of front-line workers. But based just on the statistics they themselves present, I'd say their diversity efforts are paying off pretty well. Am I misreading something here?

You have questions. I have answers.

Yesterday I wrote about Sen. Pat Toomey's opposition to the PACT Act, which funds health care for veterans who were exposed to toxic burn pits and other environmental hazards while serving in the military. Toomey doesn't object to the overall intent of the bill, but he does object to a technical change whose origins are notably murky—as they usually are in Congress. There are probably a few 23-year-old Senate aides who could explain this to me in 60 seconds, but unfortunately I don't have any Senate aides handy on my Rolodex. Instead, because I'm dedicated to bringing you the news you need, I took a dive myself to figure it out.

This was initially made difficult by the fact that Congress is currently considering five different PACT Acts.¹ That delayed but didn't discourage me. Here's the timeline:

• February 18: House posts text of HR.3967 on its website. According to the Congressional Budget Office, this bill contains no reallocation of existing spending from discretionary to mandatory.
• March 3: House passes HR.3967 and sends it back to the Senate. CBO says its budget impact is identical to the February 18 version.
• June 16: Senate passes HR.3967 by a vote of 84-14 and sends it back to the House with "technical corrections." One of those corrections is this one:
  

  There is authorized to be appropriated...(1) the delivery of veterans’ health care associated with exposure to environmental hazards in the active military, naval, air, or space service in programs administered by the Under Secretary for Health;

  ....BUDGET SCOREKEEPING.— (1) Immediately upon enactment...expenses authorized to be appropriated to the Fund in subsection (c) shall be estimated for fiscal year 2023 and each subsequent fiscal year and treated as budget authority that is considered to be direct spending—

  Note that "direct spending" is another term for "mandatory spending." According to CBO, this is the language that reallocates $400 billion of already existing spending from the discretionary budget to the mandatory budget.

• June 23: Toomey speaks on the Senate floor objecting to the reallocation. Nobody cares.
• July 13: House passes S.3373, an old Senate bill repurposed with the text of the PACT Act. It is then sent back to the Senate.
• July 27: S.3373 is brought up in the Senate for a cloture vote but it fails 55-42. Only six Republicans vote for the bill, compared to 36 on June 16th.

The objectionable clause about reallocating funds to the mandatory account was made in the Senate sometime between March and June. Probably in May, when the chair and ranking member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee agreed on the text of the bill.

But who made the change? Sen. Tim Kaine is the sponsor of the bill and Sen. Jon Tester is chair of the Veterans Affairs Committee, so I suppose they're the two obvious suspects. But why did the bill get 36 Republican votes on June 16 and only six on July 27 when nothing changed between those dates? I can think of two or three possibilities:

• Nobody knew the bill had been changed. Toomey figured it out on June 23 and it was only then that Republicans understood what was going on. I find this fairly unlikely. The change to the bill was pretty obvious and pretty easy to find for anyone with legislative experience. What's more, even after Toomey started talking about it, Republicans showed little interest.
• There was lots of initial support because the reallocation had been quietly agreed to on a bipartisan basis, with Democrats and Republicans both promised a piece of the pie. I find this fairly likely.
• Most Republicans don't care one way or the other about this issue, but voted against the bill on the 27th to show that they were pissed off about Joe Manchin's "betrayal" a few hours earlier when he agreed to a new spending bill after Republicans had already helped pass the CHIPS Act and no longer had any leverage to stop it.

My own guess is that Tester and Jerry Moran, the ranking Republican member of the Veterans Affairs Committee, added the reallocation language jointly. The rest of the committee knew about it too, and quietly accepted it because it seemed like a good way to get a little extra money for everyone. Later, when the whole thing blew up and started getting attention on Fox News, they backed off.

That's just a guess, though. Someone with inside knowledge of Senate horsetrading would need to step up if we want to know for sure what happened.

¹The other four are the Partnership Agreements Creating Tangible Savings Act; the Pediatricians Accelerate Childhood Therapies Act of 2021; the Keep Our Promise to America's Children and Teachers Act; and the Platform Accountability and Consumer Transparency Act.

Yesterday Jon Stewart spent the day delivering expletive-laden rants against Republicans for blocking the PACT Act. But Republicans say they have good reason to block it until a teensy weensy little change is made. Who's right?

Fine. I'll start. What's this bill all about?

It creates $280 billion in new funding for veterans who have health problems because of exposure to toxic burn pits in Iraq. A few other kinds of environmental health problems are also included (Agent Orange, nuclear site cleanups, etc.).

Does anyone object to this?

No. Not enough to make a difference, anyway. It can pass Congress easily.

So what's the problem?

In addition to the $280 billion in new spending, the bill takes $400 billion in existing veterans spending and reallocates it from the discretionary budget to the mandatory budget. (Although keep in mind that these are ten-year numbers. The reallocation comes to about $40 billion per year.)

Huh?

The mandatory budget is for things that don't require annual approval by Congress. Social Security is an example. Congress doesn't have to fund Social Security every year. If you're entitled to payments, you get them.

The discretionary budget is the opposite. It's for things like defense spending, national parks, the FBI, and other routine parts of government. All of these things are budgeted by Congress every year.

So some veterans funding became mandatory and doesn't require annual approval. Who cares?

Sen. Pat Toomey cares. You see, the discretionary budget is subject to an overall spending limit that's agreed to each year before the individual committees start work on their pieces of the budget. Toomey figures that if $400 billion gets moved out of the discretionary budget, that leaves a big hole that can be filled without breaching the cap. And who knows what Democrats will fill that hole with?

But it's hard to see how that matters, since even without moving any money around Congress can set the cap to whatever it pleases. If Democrats wanted to spend a different amount of money they could just set the annual cap higher or lower in order to include more money or less, and nobody could stop them.

The most recent budget resolution was passed a few weeks ago. The House set the cap at $1.6 trillion for the upcoming fiscal year.

OK, but if that's the case then why did the Senate move that $400 billion around? Toomey says it wasn't in the House version of the bill, so it must have been added deliberately.

Well . . . getting extra space under the cap might not matter much in a general sense, but like I said, the budget cap for the next fiscal year has already been set and can't be changed. So the PACT Act probably would create a new funding hole of $40 billion for FY2023.

Have any Democrats offered an explanation for this?

Not that I can tell. Sen. Jon Tester, chair of the Veterans Affairs Committee, said this:

Toomey wants to take away the ability of appropriators to do their job. Every appropriator should be mad as hell about that … But I’m not gonna allow that to happen. If we can’t trust our own ability to appropriate, fund and defund that, what the hell have we turned into?

That's not exactly a ringing defense of the reallocation, is it? In fact, it seems like it sort of confirms Toomey's view that it allows Democratic committee chairs to casually "appropriate, fund and defund." What does Jon Stewart have to say?

He basically said that Toomey was a hypocrite because the federal budget contains plenty of other slush funds that he's never objected to.

Um, that sounds like Stewart is agreeing that the bill creates a big pile of funding authority with, as he says, "no guardrails"—i.e., a slush fund.

It kinda does, doesn't it?

How about Chuck Schumer? He's the Democratic majority leader. What's his take?

He's offered Toomey a vote on an amendment to remove the reallocation.

But he knows that would never pass, right? It requires 60 votes and that means Democrats have all the votes they need to kill it.

Yeah. He knows that.

So it sounds like Toomey just might have a point.

It does.

On Friday, NPR's Marketplace ran this headline: "Eviction filings hit pre-pandemic levels a year after the end of the moratorium."

The evidence presented is slim—which is hardly surprising since data on evictions is all but nonexistent in the US. Eviction is a local court action and the county numbers aren't aggregated by any federal agency. In fact, literally the only organization even trying to track evictions is the Princeton Eviction Lab, and there's a hard limit to what they can do. They only track 31 cities, and only five of the top ten, a list that excludes both Los Angeles and Chicago.

That said, the show interviewed Carl Gershenson, the project director at the Eviction Lab, who said "Eviction activity in the United States looks like it’s returning approximately to where it was before the pandemic." A Federal Reserve paper using the Lab's database of evictions estimates that early this year we were up to about 200 evictions per 100,000 renters compared to 300+ before the pandemic.¹ Finally, my own eyeball look at the Lab's data suggests that evictions have returned to pre-pandemic level in the sunbelt but are still significantly below that in other areas.

For what it's worth, however, there's another bit of data that doesn't address evictions directly but does address the general health of the rental market. It's our old friend, the Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey, and for the past couple of years it's been asking renters how they're doing:

It stands to reason that you're only at risk of being evicted if you're behind on rent, and that number has stayed rock steady since the pandemic started. Government payments and eviction moratoriums helped during 2020 and 2021, while economic recovery picked up the slack late last year.

Overall, then, what little evidence we have suggests that the rental market is back to its normal, pre-pandemic state. Evictions are down in some cities but up in others, and the ability of renters to pay their rent has been stable all along. We're neither in nor heading toward a crisis, just stuck in our usual state of chronic, low-level stress, where we treat the poor in an offhandedly crappy way and no one cares much. I suppose you can call that whatever you want.

¹The paper also concluded that the eviction moratorium in the CARES Act was ineffective while the CDC moratorium had a very large effect.