Speaking of the House: What’s in store for the 118th Congress?

Besides the tragedy-comedy drama over selection of a House Speaker, there is a rather potent agenda for the 118th Congress. Authorizations. Appropriations are so far off. Debt ceiling. And the gambits Republicans in the house are hoping to launch. To cover it all in 10 minutes, spoke with Federal Drive with Tom Temin Bloomberg Government Deputy News Director Loren Duggan. Interview transcript: Loren Duggan It has been these normally routine steps that often are dispensed with pretty quickly have obviously taken much longer this year to name a speaker and…

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You’re not the only one squinting to understand what’s happening on Capitol Hill

Best listening experience is on Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Subscribe to Federal Drive’s daily audio interviews on Apple Podcasts or PodcastOne. The duck is officially lame with apologies to our real life feathered friends, the 117th Congress. At least the House will be back in session this week and casting votes. For a look at what remains before the arrival of the 118th Congress, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin  turned to Bloomberg Government Deputy News Director Loren Duggan. Interview transcript: Tom Temin: And this really is one of those kind of special…

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What’s Really Going On With the Crime Rate?

Turn on a television in any state with a competitive Senate or gubernatorial race, and you’ll see that the criminal-justice reform agenda is under constant attack. Republicans are pinning higher crime rates on Democrats who have expressed sympathy for almost any aspect of the movement to confront racial inequities in the criminal-justice system. In New York, a conservative super PAC opposing Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul is slamming her for defending “the state’s disastrous cashless bail experiment” and refusing to “remove liberal prosecutors, like [Manhattan’s] Alvin Bragg, who too often downgrade…

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Your agency after COVID: What’s next for you?

Once the war against COVID (with 900,000 plus U.S. casualties) is declared to be over, long-time feds know what’s next: The media will be there of course, second-guessing decisions which, at the time, seemed like the right (or only) thing to do. But first steps will be taken by Washington-based politicians with jurisdictions over the various federal departments, agencies and bureaus involved in the pandemic fight. Those conducting the investigations/witchhunts (choose one) will either be savvy long-time pols who survived the mid-terms or newcomers anxious to make their political bones.…

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What’s Driving Media Becoming Woke? Money

Years before Donald Trump became president, legacy media was already moving in a woke direction. While no doubt some reporters are ideological, the trend was influenced by the growing prominence of the internet. Online, articles that generated an emotional response became income generators, because they led to readers spending a longer time interacting with the article. In 2017, the New York Times launched a program called Project Feels to track how younger readers responded emotionally to certain articles. “What they found was the more emotional the reader was, the longer…

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