Who doesn’t love a little light pettiness?
There is a difference between my 1-year-old daughter throwing my 3-year-old son’s stuffed Mickey Mouse over the banister so that no one can play with it, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin moving $455 billion in unspent stimulus money into a fund that wouldn’t allow incoming President Joe Biden access to it without Congressional approval.
“That amount includes money that Mnuchin is yanking from the Federal Reserve and unused loans for companies. The funds will be deposited into the Treasury’s General Fund, which requires legislative approval to use the money elsewhere. The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment,” Business Insider reports.
Forget what anyone else tells you: the move is being done specifically to make likely successor Janet Yellen’s job harder. By moving the money into a legislatively controlled fund, Yellen won’t be able to come in and restart the Fed’s lending program. Because Mnuchin is being petty AF, the incoming treasury secretary will only have some $80 billion at her discretion.
“It’s one more enormous risk we are piling onto the winter in the US atop of other risks already there,” Ernie Tedeschi, a policy economist at Evercore ISI, told Business Insider. “We may need that backstop again as cases have now blown through their prior peaks, state and local governments are making cuts, and we’re about to kick off millions of people from unemployment insurance.”
Bharat Ramamurti, a Democratic member of a congressional panel overseeing the funds, noted that there may be hope in spite of all the pettiness.
“This is Treasury’s latest ham-handed effort to undermine the Biden Administration,” he wrote on Twitter. “The good news is that it’s illegal and can be reversed next year.”
Let’s hope so because the Trump administration is treating America the same way I did at the now-defunct Greenbelt Middle School, in which I literally went down the halls destroying lockers and shit, because fuck that school.
The big difference is I was 13 and no one died as a result of my actions. The Trump administration can’t say the same thing.