Here are the people Trump has picked for key positions so far

President-elect Donald Trump is starting to fill key posts in his second administration, putting an emphasis so far on aides and allies who were his strongest backers during the 2024 campaign. Here’s a look at who he’s selected so far. Susie Wiles, chief of staff Wiles, 67, was a senior adviser to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and its de facto manager. Wiles has a background in Florida politics. She helped Ron DeSantis win his first race for Florida governor. Six years later, she was key to Trump’s defeat of him…

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Trump and Vance Are Harming the People They Claim to Care About

Springfield, Ohio, is just the sort of beleaguered heartland manufacturing town that Donald Trump and J. D. Vance say the MAGA movement wants to help. Instead, the Republican ticket has chosen to make life miserable for the town and its residents for the sake of political gain. The thing to remember is not just that Trump and Vance are lying about immigrants eating pets in Springfield. It’s that Vance is happy to admit that they’re lying. He’s done that twice, first in an X post last week and then once…

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What Trump Supporters Think When He Mocks People With Disabilities

Last weekend, I stood among thousands of Donald Trump supporters in a windy airfield, watching them watch their candidate. I traveled to the former president’s event just outside Dayton, Ohio, because I couldn’t stop thinking about something that had happened one week earlier, at his rally in Georgia: Trump had broken into an imitation of President Joe Biden’s lifelong stutter, and the crowd had cackled. Mocking Biden is not the worst thing Trump has ever done. Biden is a grown man, and the most public of figures. He does not…

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Yes, people, the House leadership failure also affects acquisition

The longer the House of Representatives remains in stasis, the closer the next budget deadline comes without any action to resolve it. There is lots at stake, including how the federal acquisition function will operate. Not that acquisition was getting any easier with so many new rules coming. For a look at the situation, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin talks with federal sales and marketing consultant Larry Allen. Interview Transcript:  Larry Allen Tom, here we are again. And with so many variables, it’s really difficult to predict what’s going to…

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What do people really mean when they say government should operate like a business?

When the nearly endless debates over the debt ceiling were raging on, the United States didn’t look very businesslike to the rest of the world. Internally, though, you never stop hearing that federal agencies should operate more like a business. This is both true and not true, according to my next guest. The  Federal Drive with Tom Temin got commentary from American University professor Bob Tobias. Interview Transcript:  Tom Temin Somehow, at these times when things are stressful on the political front or whenever people turn to federal agencies like…

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