News of the Week: Funding for poor in jeopardy
Each week we share articles on subjects that are important to NUHW and its members. Here are several must-read stories over the past seven days:
Donald Trump has directed his agencies to raise the bar for recipients of food stamps, Medicaid, rent subsidies and other welfare programs, and find ways to put more of them back to work, according to Politico. In an executive order signed Tuesday afternoon, Trump directed the Departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture and other agencies to make a top-to-bottom review of their safety-net programs, with the goal of finding ways to push more people into the workforce and off of welfare.
The Trump Administration won’t let the National Labor Relations Board spend money allotted to the agency by Congress because it wants to take some of it back, according to Bloomberg Law. The move comes as NLRB General Counsel Peter Robb has cited looming budget cuts to justify controversial proposals to overhaul the labor board and shrink its field office foot print. Robb, who Trump appointed as the board’s general counsel last year, is considering stripping the board’s regional directors of some of their authority and revamping board investigations to speed the process.
A new poll by UC Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society shows that while California residents value diversity and inclusion their viewpoints on politics, race and culture are sometimes complex and even contradictory, The San Jose Mercury News reports. Nearly half of Californians support temporarily banning people from Muslim-majority countries, according to the poll. In the Bay Area, 44 percent of residents support the ban, the least out of any region in California. However, 71 percent of Californians think that establishing a pathway to citizenship for immigrants is somewhat or very important; 79 percent support a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers — the young immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children — and 66 percent reject the idea that a border wall is an important immigration policy.
For the first time in nearly a decade, Republican candidates across the country find themselves bereft of what was once their favorite talking point: repealing and replacing President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act — and all the havoc they alleged it has wreaked, the Washington Post reports. That is because the GOP failed dramatically in its efforts last year to roll back the ACA as its first big legislative delivery on the promise of single-party control of Washington from Congress to the White House. That defeat has quickly turned attacks on Obamacare from centerpiece into pariah on the campaign trail, a sudden disappearing act that Democrats are looking to exploit as they seek to regain power in the midterms.