The Crazy Reason Treasury Department Officials Can’t Get Their Work Done
Treasury Department officials are being driven to distraction these days, but it’s not because of the expiring debt ceiling or other pressing financial controversies.
Instead, loud music from a New Orleans-style street band known as Spread Love has reportedly driven some officials and employees at the Treasury building to wear earphones to block out the noise and even move meetings to other parts of the building to find some peace and quiet.
Related: The Next Debt Crisis Could Be Much Worse than in 2013, GAO Warns
“We have to relocate our conference calls,” one Treasury employee told The Washington Post. “We can’t have meetings in that corner of the building anymore. It’s like they’re playing music in the building.”
Members of Spread Love have become fixtures of downtown Washington’s street scene and are collecting generous donations for playing their drums, trombone and other brass instruments. Tourists and other office workers out during their lunch hour appear to love the group, but not so the serious-minded economists and bean counters at the Treasury – especially when the band moves within easy shouting distance at the corner of 15th and G Streets NW.
Treasury Secretary Jack Lew’s staff members aren’t the only ones complaining about the jarring music. Partners and associates at the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom find it hard to concentrate on their cases with daily interruptions. It got to the point that the firm dispatched a security guard to offer band members $200 a week if they would play somewhere else. Lonnie Shepard, one of the trombonists, told the newspaper that he laughed at the offer because “We can make that in an hour.”
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Rob Runyan, a spokesperson for the Treasury Department, said that employee complaints have made their way to the office of the assistant secretary for management, Brodi Fontenot, but there really wasn’t much that could be done.
“The band and other street noise are part of the distractions of working in downtown D.C.,” Runyan said in an interview Friday.
Stat of the Day: 0.2%
The New York Times’ Jim Tankersley tweets: “In order to raise enough revenue to start paying down the debt, Trump would need tariffs to be ~4% of GDP. They're currently 0.2%.”
Read Tankersley’s full breakdown of why tariffs won’t come close to eliminating the deficit or paying down the national debt here.
Number of the Day: 44%
The “short-term” health plans the Trump administration is promoting as low-cost alternatives to Obamacare aren’t bound by the Affordable Care Act’s requirement to spend a substantial majority of their premium revenues on medical care. UnitedHealth is the largest seller of short-term plans, according to Axios, which provided this interesting detail on just how profitable this type of insurance can be: “United’s short-term plans paid out 44% of their premium revenues last year for medical care. ACA plans have to pay out at least 80%.”
Number of the Day: 4,229
The Washington Post’s Fact Checkers on Wednesday updated their database of false and misleading claims made by President Trump: “As of day 558, he’s made 4,229 Trumpian claims — an increase of 978 in just two months.”
The tally, which works out to an average of almost 7.6 false or misleading claims a day, includes 432 problematics statements on trade and 336 claims on taxes. “Eighty-eight times, he has made the false assertion that he passed the biggest tax cut in U.S. history,” the Post says.
Number of the Day: $3 Billion
A new analysis by the Department of Health and Human Services finds that Medicare’s prescription drug program could have saved almost $3 billion in 2016 if pharmacies dispensed generic drugs instead of their brand-name counterparts, Axios reports. “But the savings total is inflated a bit, which HHS admits, because it doesn’t include rebates that brand-name drug makers give to [pharmacy benefit managers] and health plans — and PBMs are known to play games with generic drugs to juice their profits.”
Chart of the Day: Public Spending on Job Programs
President Trump announced on Thursday the creation of a National Council for the American Worker, charged with developing “a national strategy for training and retraining workers for high-demand industries,” his daughter Ivanka wrote in The Wall Street Journal. A report from the president’s National Council on Economic Advisers earlier this week made it clear that the U.S. currently spends less public money on job programs than many other developed countries.
