I think a judge is going to have a field day with that letter. It’s such an obvious, gross, well-documented example of suppressing First Amendment rights to free speech.
I can’t believe I’m saying this about an Ivy League school, but good for Harvard.
Trump has apparently posted a picture of the flag raising on Iwo Jima to commemorate Victory Day (the end of WWII in Europe).
Clearly not a Harvard educated man.
Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
Nah, when the Continental Army took over the airports
Iwo Jima was the Pacific island that the Marines made an amphibious assault on through sharks-with-laser-beams-attached-to-their-heads-infested waters to take the beachhead.
I think the John Wayne/Mike Myers movie was on TV last night.
Cool, just got an email from the Justice of the Treasury.
Effective May 19th we will be required to submit a justification for every reimbursement request for grants we were already awarded… in 2022. That is monthly written justifications for every expense.
I spoke with our accountant today, she said she’s got one for an opioid addiction program where they have rejected her justification four times in a row. If they don’t get it approved, they can’t make payroll.
They’re calling it “Defend the Spend.”
Fucking fuck.
Were the Marines in battery-powered landing craft?
Coal powered - as Og intended.
Yes, thank Og. Imagine if the landing craft had been solar-powered. A few clouds could have changed the course of the war in the Pacific!
From the Halls of Montezuma
To the Shores of Tripoli;
We fight our country’s battles
Rollin’ coal for all to see.
Trump WILL stamp out all that pesky larnin’ an edumacatin’ an sance an stuff!
Promises Kept!!!1!!!
In this case, he’s standing up against domestic violence survivors on the verge of homelessness, but yeah.
What a legacy.
I have a tendency to assume people understand grants stuff, so I’ll elaborate a bit.
By default, before an award can be granted by the federal government, you have to submit a three-year itemized budget with written justifications for each item. The budget has to fit specific guidelines for de minimus, staffing, etc. Sometimes this is a negotiation process before final approval.
Once the grant is awarded, you may only receive funds after you have incurred expenses. This is a reimbursement system. For staff, every hour must be logged in payroll. For contracts, there is a very specific procurement process. I don’t know all the rules but there are a lot of them. This is already a complicated process. But if you can prove these expenses using the requested documentation, you get your money back until the grant funds are expended. In our case, a period of three years. The federal government tracks and makes sure these reimbursements follow the agreed upon budget.
DOGE has now inserted itself into this complicated but transparent process. Proof of expenses are no longer sufficient. The agreed upon budget doesn’t matter any more. You now have to justify your expenses every time you submit a reimbursement request, using standards and guidelines unknown to anyone but DOGE. Rather than the Office on Violence Against Women deciding what an appropriate expense is for running a program for domestic violence survivors, DOGE gets to decide, despite a glaring lack of expertise or understanding.
This has resulted in, at best, a delay in reimbursement.
This has resulted in, at worst, an inability to pay staff for hours they worked.
“But Spicy,” you say, “Can’t non-profits just pay the money to staff from other funds?”
Not so fast.
For one, non-profits don’t generally have extra cash on hand because they legally cannot.
For another, the minute you have spent non-federal funds on a federally funded staffer, you are no longer in agreement with the original federal contract. You now run the risk of being reimbursed but not having the staff to spend it on, which means failing to spend down the grant as agreed.
This is fucking fucked.
Now take this, and add to that a total lack of future funding opportunities and you will begin to understand. DOGE is intentionally destroying nonprofits.
Yes. It’s not “defend the spend”. It’s “burn it to the ground”.
After 13 popes named Innocent, he’d be Pope Guilty I.
Well there’s your problem. It should be “Office on Violence Against Straight White Christian Men”. Anything else is discriminatory.
I’m assuming of course that you office is opposing violence against women. If I misunderstood the name and your office uses federal funds to support violence against women, then your reimbursements probably won’t be challenged.
True story, not a joke. When I was really small I used to hear the term “firemen” and “firefighters” and somehow got the idea that firemen started the fires, and firefighters put them out.
Later I learned they were the same people which briefly just made me even more confused.
XXXIV
Nitpickiest of nitpicks: he’d just be Pope Guilty, unless and until — Og forbid — there was another Pontiff of the same stripe*. Then he’d become Guilty I and the new infestation of the Vatican would be Guilty II.
* Like a skunk.