Sheryl. Your article exemplifies the biased reporting we have come to expect from you and @nytimes. It was unfair, inimical, and inaccurate. All one needs to refute your argument is to glance at my publicly available calendar and to review my unprecedented list of accomplishments on a wide range of issues, all of which I drove. You evidently never undertook these foundational due diligences. Why let facts obscure a good story?
You fault me for missing a couple of monthly counselor meetings. However, I meet one-on-one with my counselors every day to decide policy and strategy. We schedule the monthly meetings to give the divisions a chance to keep each other informed about HHS-wide policies with which I’m already intimately familiar. Had you read my calendar, you would have seen that I have back-to-back meetings all day, every day, with both career and political staff, with my counselors and with outside stakeholders, interspersed with press conferences and other policy announcements.
I am knowledgeable and active on every issue in every division of my department, and I always make the final decisions. I meet with the principals at FDA, NIH, CDC, and my senior counselor every morning, something, I’m told, is unprecedented in HHS history. I try to get out of the office between 4:30 and 6:00 PM, so that I can spend three hours, in quiet, responding to emails. I normally work until 11 PM every night, mostly on phone calls to staff.
In order to prove your preconceived case for my disengagement, you quote anonymous employees, some of whom I fired or who quit to avoid being fired. You also deceptively quote HHS employees without identifying whether they were among those I fired, thereby depriving your readers of the opportunity to make an independent judgment about their credibility.
I came into this job to change the culture of a broken agency that has presided over the worst decline in public health in American history. Of course I fired people—lots of them! It's an easy task for even the laziest journalist, to comb that flotsam and jetsam for malevolence toward the Trump administration. And of course, this species of journalist will always be able to find disgruntled individuals among the 70,000 employees of the Department from whom to cherry pick "facts" to flesh out a preordained hit piece. All that is required for this brand of journalism is the ethical elasticity that you seem to have in spades. You had a preconceived thesis, and you set out to prove it. This is a widely accepted technique in journalism today, but I grew up in an era when it would not have been tolerated by the New York Times.
Ultimately, God puts us all on this earth to search for existential truths. I've tried to instill this mission at HHS by implementing gold standard research to end the regime of politicized science that COVID exposed to the American public. There was a time that journalists were proud to be the fearless and uncompromising champions of truth. Standards have devolved, and journalism is dead. The Times now employs propagandists. Your capitulation to partisanship further compounds your journalistic challenges; since we all are aware of your predictable bias, we at HHS are unwilling to talk to you about the topics that are important. The fact that you have minimal access to decision makers leaves you covering trivia and relying on your own capacity for invention.
Btw. When I took this job, the building was empty. About 90% of the employees were not coming to work. I changed that, but your newspaper never covers my reforms. Nor did you cover the fact that my predecessor almost never showed up for work here during his four years in office. When we came in, there were still artifacts from the first Trump administration in many of our office drawers because no one showed up for work during the Biden years. Just as Rochelle Walensky spent her entire term as CDC Director in Cambridge, Xavier Becerra reportedly spent most of his term as HHS Secretary in California. (I live in California, but I’ve only been there once in fifteen months).
His only notable accomplishments here were losing 300,000 children, referred to HHS for custody and care, to human traffickers and drug runners, encouraging transgender surgeries, and disabling the entire program-integrity apparatus, allowing hundreds of billions of dollars of theft from my agency. I have set out to find the children Becerra lost. He is now the front-runner for the governor of California. These are not invented stories; they are genuine scandals that the Times will never cover, presumably, because the malefactors are Democrats.
Finally, you criticize me for spending time with the Indian tribes in Alaska. I consider that part of my job. I run the Indian Health Services, and I’ve had unprecedented success in transforming IHS from a backwater to a top priority for this department. I’ve made more trips to Indian country and to Indian health clinics and hospitals than any HHS secretary in history, and I’ve brought Indians into high positions on the sixth floor for the first time in agency history. This is another success story that the Times will never cover.
Brits in England: “This is the worst world cup ever!”
Germans driving a Mustang through Georgia with the top down to a game: “🎶AND I’M PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN, WHERE AT LEAST I KNOW I’M FREE!!!🎶”
Hey @RealCandaceO, the video is real (as you apparently have known for 7 months)! Charlie wasn’t kidding. Your obsession is unhinged!
Hope that takes care of your show prep for the next couple of days. Welcome back to the greatest country on the planet.
P.S. That’s 3 questions, comrade. Onward 🇺🇸
The Reflecting Pool is reflecting, and it is absolutely SPECTACULAR. You can see the Washington Monument, the flags at the base, the U.S. Capitol and the flags at the WWII Memorial prominently. WOW. Not even full and proven it can be done. Thank you @POTUS and @SecretaryBurgum 🇺🇸
Wildest takeaways from my time at the Ballot Processing Center today.
✍🏻 Signatures only need to be 40% accurate (!) this is the setting the machines are set at for LA County (called the ASV)
🗳️ The last two drops disproportionately supported Raman. Are those coming from specific neighborhoods since they’re such an anomaly? Or are the neighborhoods pretty spread out that you count from on a given day? “We’re not sure.”
💌 If you’re unable to sign, you can make a “mark” like a dot or slash instead of signing. A witness then signs below.
I asked them how they verify these signatures. Turns out, they simply don’t.
Well, you must check the witness signatures, right? “No, we don’t.”
So what if I stole a ballot, made a dash by the person’s name, and signed my name? “You shouldn’t do that, but in theory it would be counted,” they said.
How many of these “marked” ballots get in per election? “We don’t know,” they said.
Ripe for fraud, no?
When the murderer plays the victim after admitting to caring for his dog more than his own child he murdered. Don’t ever again question why a loving God permits a Hell.
I had never seen this clip anywhere before. This guy is an actual, biblically defined heretic.
If you wonder why I have a bit more of an edge when I'm talking about James Talarico, this is why 👇
🚨 James Talarico just won the Dem primary in Texas. Still, many people still have no idea who he is or how his campaign was built on the intentional distortion of scripture.
Watch this *full* episode of the Live Free Podcast to learn how to spot a wolf in sheep's clothing 👇