Andrew Restuccia

President Biden’s attack on Facebook followed months of mounting private frustration inside his administration over the social-media giant’s handling of vaccine misinformation, according to US officials, bringing into public view tensions that could complicate efforts to stop the spread of Covid-19. The false narratives that Covid-19 vaccines result in widespread death and that the U.S.

With few allies left in the West Wing, President Donald  Trump frequently leans on Dan Scavino, his unassuming social media guru (officially: senior adviser for digital strategy), for affirmation and advice about how his most sensitive policies will be received. To admirers, Scavino is a social media pioneer who fine-tunes Trump’s critical bond with his supporters. To critics, he is a yes-man and enabler who has no business working in the White House. Scavino routinely provides rationalizations or justifications for the president’s most controversial policy directives. 

Poisonous political divisions have spawned an encryption arms race across the Trump administration, as both the president’s advisers and career civil servants scramble to cover their digital tracks in a capital nervous about leaks. The surge in the use of scrambled-communication technology — enabled by free smartphone apps such as WhatsApp and Signal — could skirt or violate laws that require government records to be preserved and the public’s business to be conducted in official channels, several ethics experts say. It may even cloud future generations’ knowledge of the full history of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Conservative advocacy groups also denounce the use of encrypted technologies by career employees, comparing it to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of State. The House Science Committee has demanded an inquiry into the use of encryption by employees at the Environmental Protection Agency — although it has shown no similar curiosity about use of encryption in the White House.

Federal employees worried that President Donald Trump will gut their agencies are creating new email addresses, signing up for encrypted messaging apps and looking for other, protected ways to push back against the new administration’s agenda. Whether inside the Environmental Protection Agency, within the Foreign Service, on the edges of the Labor Department or beyond, employees are using new technology as well as more old-fashioned approaches — such as private face-to-face meetings — to organize letters, talk strategy, or contact media outlets and other groups to express their dissent.

The goal is to get their message across while not violating any rules covering workplace communications, which can be monitored by the government and could potentially get them fired. At the EPA, a small group of career employees — numbering less than a dozen so far — are using an encrypted messaging app to discuss what to do if Trump’s political appointees undermine their agency’s mission to protect public health and the environment, flout the law, or delete valuable scientific data that the agency has been collecting for years, apparently.

Billionaire investor Wilbur Ross is President-elect Donald Trump's leading candidate for Commerce Secretary, apparently. Ross, 78, is the founder of the private equity firm WL Ross & Co., known for restructuring failed companies, and he's an economic adviser to President-elect Trump. Ross has been a vociferous critic of trade deals negotiated over the last 25 years, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Trump has vowed to leave unless Mexico and Canada agree to renegotiate on more favorable terms.

“I think there’s a big difference between the impact of trade agreements on corporate America and the impact on Mr. and Mrs. America,” Ross said earlier in 2016. “Corporate America has adjusted to them by investing lots of capital offshore. … What we’re doing is we’re exporting jobs and importing products, instead of exporting products and keeping jobs.” Along with fellow President-elect Trump campaign adviser Peter Navarro, an University of California-Irvine economics and public policy professor, Ross has called for future trade deals to include automatic renegotiation triggers if trade gains “are not distributed fairly” and other “safeguards” including ironclad sanctions against currency manipulation, zero tolerance on intellectual property theft and stringent environmental and health and safety standards.