Cartoon

Infrastructure Week

Written by SK Ashby

(Cartoonist - Rob Rogers)

In other news, the Supreme Court has rejected a challenge of a Pennsylvania school district’s policy to allow transgender students to use facilities that correspond with the gender they identify as.

Meanwhile, Chinese tourism to the United States is falling for the first time in 15 years.

Finally, the Trump regime is killing a Forest Service program that offers job opportunities to poor communities in rural America.

The Trump administration announced Friday that it will kill a Forest Service program that trains disadvantaged young people for wildland fire fighting and other jobs in rural communities, laying off 1,100 employees — believed to be the largest number of federal job cuts in a decade.

The Job Corps Civilian Conservation Centers enroll more than 3,000 students a year in rural America. The soon-to-close centers — in Montana, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Virginia, Washington state, Kentucky, North Carolina and Oregon — include hundreds of jobs in some of President Trump’s political strongholds. In Congress, members of both parties objected to the plan.

The drawdown of the program, starting in September, will result in the largest layoffs of civil servants since the military’s base realignment and closures of 2010 and 2011, federal personnel experts said. Nine of the centers will close and another 16 will be taken over by private companies and possibly states.

Sure. It's not like we need more fire fighters.