Author: Bob Mery

Can India Gain From the US and China’s Trade Problems? Is India Set?
Container trucks are seen while waiting for cross the border at Huu Nghi border gate connecting with China, in Lang Son province, Vietnam February 20, 2020. REUTERS/Kham/File Photo
Even when India was staring down the barrel of a 27 percent tariff on most of its exports to the United States, business executives and government officials saw an upside. India’s biggest economic rival, China, and its smaller competitors like Vietnam were facing even worse.
India has been pushing hard in recent years to become a manufacturing alternative to China, and it looked as if it had suddenly gained an advantage.
Then India and its smaller rivals got 90-day reprieves, and President Trump doubled down on China, boosting its tariff to 145 percent.
The sky-high tax on Chinese imports to America presented “a significant opportunity for India’s trade and industry,” said Praveen Khandelwal, a member of Parliament from the ruling party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and a top figure in the country’s business lobby.
India, with its enormous work force, has been trying to elbow into China’s manufacturing business for a long time, yet its factories are not ready. For the past 10 years Mr. Modi has pursued a goal he named “Make in India.”
The government has paid incentives to companies producing goods in strategic sectors, budgeting over $26 billion, and tried to attract foreign investments in the name of reducing India’s dependence on Chinese imports. One of its goals was to create 100 million new manufacturing jobs by 2022.
There have been successes. The most eye-catching one is that Foxconn, the Taiwanese contract manufacturer, has started making iPhones for Apple in India, moving some work from China.
Yet the role of manufacturing in India over a decade has shrunk, relative to services and agriculture, from 15 percent of the economy to less than 13.
Manufacturing and the jobs it can bring are thought to be crucial to India’s rise as a global power. China, with an economy five times the size of India’s, is the biggest of the Asian countries to have sped toward prosperity by making and selling stuff the rest of the world wants to buy. But manufacturing accounts for a 25 percent share of most East Asian economies — twice as much as in India.
Image Source: Bloomberg
A factory for electric scooters in Tamil Nadu. Public infrastructure has improved under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s direction, but the growing work force requires more training to match businesses’ needs. Credit…Atul Loke for The New York Times
Public infrastructure has come a long way under Mr. Modi’s direction. But 10 years has not been enough time to train the country’s growing work force to match businesses’ needs. And the route remains bumpy when it comes to connecting India’s pockets of economic strength to one another.
Barely an hour from New Delhi on a new eight-lane elevated highway, the Rai Industrial Estate in Haryana occupies land that grew wheat and mustard crops earlier this century. Some of the factories on the dusty grid inside have been grinding out auto parts and processed foods for 20 years. Others are just starting, hoping for an imminent breakthrough.
Vikram Bathla, who in 2019 founded LiKraft, which manufactures lithium-ion batteries for vehicles, said access to technology was the most frustrating obstacle to his business. He depends heavily on imports, which need to be bought in bulk and take time to ship, and finds it difficult to hire the people he needs to do highly technical work.
“We can buy the equipment, and we do” — and most of it comes from China. “What we don’t have,” he said, “is the skilled workers to use it.” For five years, he said, he has been trying to catch up with competitors that started 15 years before him.
Mr. Bathla, tall, mild-mannered and English-speaking, paces among LiKraft’s 300 workers, most of them migrants from poorer Indian states, quietly bent over brightly lit benches, assembling batteries. They start with cells imported from China, some of them turquoise cylinders labeled “Made in Inner Mongolia.”
Other workers operate larger machines, also imported from China, to weld cells and electronic components into batteries. The finished products will be marked “Made in India.” But the supply chain is foreign.
It is not just a high-tech phenomenon. Another factory, half a mile away in the same industrial park, depends on foreign inputs, too.
Factory workers in Navi Mumbai, a city in the state of Maharashtra. A problem for many Indian factories is the reliance on foreign inputs.Credit…Elke Scholiers for The New York Times
A factory in Silvassa. Among the problem manufacturers face are the high cost of land, a shortage of the right kinds of engineers and a lack of good financing from banks.Credit…Elke Scholiers for The New York Times
AutoKame designs, cuts and sews car-seat covers for the Indian market. Its high-precision fabric cutters, with whirring, robotic arms, are imported from Germany and Italy. The synthetic fiber also has to be imported.
Expensive raw materials are only the tip of the iceberg, said Anil Bhardwaj, the secretary general of a trade organization for manufacturing businesses. Also contributing to the problem, he said, are the high cost of land, a shortage of the right kinds of engineers and a lack of good financing from banks. Many difficulties that he and other owners face are about inconsistent government policy and red tape, problems that have dogged Indian industry for many decades.
Mr. Bhardwaj also cited a less obvious need faced by manufacturers: a well-functioning justice system. India’s courts are slow and their rulings arbitrary, he said, putting small businesses like his colleagues’ at the mercy of larger firms that can afford better lawyers and political influence.
“That’s why people really fear the big companies in India,” he said.
Smaller companies can’t afford to confront them, or the politicians and regulators who accommodate them. India’s court system is so disastrously backed up — with more than 50 million cases pending — that any entanglement can turn deadly for a smaller player. So they avoid growing, and miss out on efficiencies of scale.
He and other experts acknowledge significant improvements in recent years. For instance, power, which was in short supply 10 years ago, has become plentiful in places like Haryana’s industrial parks, though it is not as reliable as the small factories there would like. Many government processes have been streamlined during Mr. Modi’s time in office.
And states have managed to replicate some parts of the production system that made China’s factories the world’s envy. A cluster of Apple suppliers in the state of Tamil Nadu is by some estimates producing 20 percent of the world’s iPhones. Until the past few years, nearly all were made in China.
Records from Tamil Nadu’s main airport show that in the weeks before Mr. Trump announced his 27 percent tariff, outbound shipments of electronics doubled, to more than 2,000 tons a month, as Apple and other companies stocked up. A decision on Friday by Mr. Trump to exclude smartphones and other electronics could tamp down the rush to ship iPhones to America.
Still, long-term changes are afoot. A person who works closely with Apple’s suppliers, who was not authorized to discuss their plans publicly, said the suppliers were hoping to ramp up production so India could make 30 percent of the world’s iPhones.
Mr. Khandelwal, the politician, said India was ready to seize the overnight advantage created by the 145 percent tariff against China across many industries, including electronics, auto parts, textiles and chemicals.
Smaller factory owners are eager for the same things. But they see big old Indian obstacles in their way, the very kind that have resisted reform for decades.
April 15, 2025
The big trade fight with China doesn’t look like it’s going to get better anytime soon.
President Trump’s rapidly escalating trade war with China has resulted in eye-watering tariffs on products exchanged between the countries and scrambled prospects for many global businesses that depend on the trade. And there is no end in sight.
The Trump administration has been waiting for the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, to call Mr. Trump personally, but Beijing appears wary of putting Mr. Xi in an unpredictable and potentially embarrassing situation with the U.S. president.
With the two governments at an impasse, businesses that rely on sourcing products from China — varying from hardware stores to toymakers — have been thrown into turmoil. The triple-digit tariff rates have forced many to halt shipments entirely.
Mr. Trump has rapidly ratcheted up tariffs on Chinese products, from 54 percent on April 2 to 145 percent just one week later. The Chinese government has argued that the actions are unfair and closely matched his moves, raising its tariffs on American goods to 125 percent on Friday.
But on Friday night, the administration created a significant carve out to its tariffs on China when it exempted some electronics, including smartphones, laptops and televisions. Those products will still be subject to other tariffs that Mr. Trump has put in place, like a 20 percent fee he added to Chinese goods in response to the country’s role in the fentanyl trade.
Mr. Trump has said he would like to speak with Mr. Xi, but he has stopped short of requesting a phone call, believing that it is the Chinese government’s turn to ask for such a call, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump officials say that dozens of countries have reached out to the administration about negotiations since the levies were imposed. China did not, and instead responded with harsh words and tariffs of its own.
Across the Trump administration, some officials are concerned that the trade war could soon escalate into a national security crisis, potentially causing the Chinese to move up plans for a military invasion of Taiwan.
The Pentagon is assessing the impact of China potentially cutting off rare earth exports to the United States and possibly blocking certain critical components used in U.S. weapons systems, according to a person with knowledge of the preparations. The aim is to fully ascertain what harm the Chinese could inflict on America’s ability to produce and maintain certain weapons and ammunition.
Mr. Trump continues to express optimism, saying that he has always gotten along with Mr. Xi and that “something positive” will come out of the relationship. But analysts have suggested that the situation may already have spiraled out of control.
Julian Evans-Pritchard, the head of China economics for the research firm Capital Economics, said the fact that the Chinese authorities had repeatedly matched U.S. tariff hikes suggested that they were in no rush to negotiate.
“A partial rollback of tariffs still seems likely at some point,” he said. “But it is hard to envisage a meaningful reset in the U.S.-China relationship.”
At a briefing on Friday, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, declined to say whether the countries were in communication.
“I’m not going to comment on communications that are happening, or may not be happening, or either way, we’ll leave it to our national security team to get these discussions underway,” she said. She said the president was optimistic, and that he had “made it very clear he’s open to a deal with China.”
Speaking last week at the White House, Mr. Trump said that “China wants to make a deal. They just don’t know how quite to go about it.” He added that the Chinese were “proud people.”
Mr. Trump’s moves have taken tariffs to a level far past what would be prohibitive for trade, creating crises for many American businesses that depend on imports from China.
Rick Woldenberg, who runs Learning Resources, an Illinois-based maker of educational toys, said the latest tariffs had already forced him to pause some shipments from China. He called the rates that Mr. Trump had imposed “a joke” and said that even concessions from his suppliers could not make a dent in the fees he would owe to the U.S. government.
Learning Resources contracts with factories in Taiwan, India, Vietnam and other countries to make its products, but China is by far its biggest supplier, as it is for most toymakers. China accounted for two-thirds of all imports of toys and sporting goods to the United States last year.
Learning Resources employs about 500 people, most of them in the United States. It had planned to hire more this year to keep up with its fast-growing business, but has now abandoned some of those plans.
“We’re being asphyxiated by our very own government,” Mr. Woldenberg said.
Mr. Woldenberg said he paid about $2.3 million in tariffs and duties in 2024. This year, he would end up paying more than $100 million if sales somehow kept up with his projections from before the trade war. That’s more than he could pay if he cut every expense in the company other than base payroll.
At this point, Mr. Woldenberg said, the number hardly matters — beyond a certain level, the tariff is simply no longer something anyone in his business can afford to pay.
“He could raise it to 100 billion percent — it doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s like a legal ban.”
Christophe Lavigne, the president of Highfield, which manufactures boats in China and the United States, said he expected to be subject to 198 percent tariffs on some of his imports, and that he has decided to simply stop his shipments for now.
He said his entire company, and the jobs of his employees and his dealers, was on the line. The pace of change was too fast and unpredictable, he added.
“We cannot adjust our production lines quickly enough,” he said. “Converting our entire supply chain in just two months is not feasible.”
Major multinational corporations have been in a better position to source products from countries besides China, but they too are reeling. Hobby Lobby, the crafting retailer, told vendors on Thursday that it was delaying shipments from China as a result of the escalating trade war, according to correspondence viewed by The New York Times.
The retailer told vendors that the back-and-forth tariffs had resulted in “a rapidly shifting and unpredictable landscape” and that it hoped diplomacy between the United States and China would “yield a more stable and balanced outcome.”
The implications of disrupting business with one of the country’s biggest trading partners have ricocheted through the economy. The dollar fell to a three-year low on Friday, while Treasury yields continued to swing. A measure of consumer sentiment also tumbled, indicating that Americans were becoming nervous about how higher tariffs might affect them.
Mr. Trump abruptly announced on Wednesday a 90-day pause on the “reciprocal” tariffs that he had unveiled the previous week on countries around the world, and which had gone into effect just hours earlier. But the threat of those tariffs, and of retaliation against U.S. exports, continues to hang over the global economy.
It remains to be seen if the United States and China might try to reach some agreement soon. People familiar with the conversations said that members of the White House National Security Council were in touch with counterparts at the Chinese Embassy, and that Cui Tiankai, the former Chinese ambassador, had held meetings in Washington and New York over the past several weeks to discuss the relationship. But there has been little sign of communication between higher-ranking officials in the Trump administration and the Chinese government.
Early in Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Xi flew to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to meet with Mr. Trump for hours, sharing what Mr. Trump later referred to as “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you’ve ever seen.” But that did not stop the countries from entering into a bruising trade war. And in his second term, Mr. Trump has been even more emboldened and unpredictable.
Mr. Trump has given few indications publicly of what he wants the Chinese to do. But Trump officials say the issues are well known. In an annual report released March 31, the Office of the United States Trade Representative detailed the trade barriers that U.S. businesses face when selling abroad, dedicating almost 50 of its nearly 400 pages to China.
In recent weeks, in addition to countering Mr. Trump’s tariff threats, China has added some U.S. companies to an unreliable entity list that essentially bars them from doing business in the country. It has also imposed licensing systems to restrict exports of rare earth elements, which are essential for electric cars and other products.
On Friday, as it announced its latest increase in tariffs on American products, the Chinese government said it would not raise the rate further because it was already so high that the number no longer made any difference.
China’s Ministry of Commerce said that the United States had used tariffs “for bullying and coercion” and had ultimately become “a laughingstock.”
“If the U.S. continues its tariff numbers game, China will ignore it,” it said.
China also ratcheted up pressure on U.S. companies as it issued new regulations on Friday that will subject semiconductors made by U.S. firms overseas to higher tariffs.
The move will put pressure on companies like Intel, Global Foundries and others that have U.S. chip factories. It may also encourage chip companies to shift manufacturing out of the United States to maintain access to the Chinese market, where the bulk of global electronics are made.
April 13, 2025
Trump Changes Stance on Global Tariffs, Introduces 90-Day Delay
President Trump on Wednesday abruptly reversed course on steep global tariffs that have roiled markets, upset members of his own party and raised fears of a recession. Just hours after he put punishing levies into place on nearly 60 countries, the president said he would pause them for 90 days.
But Mr. Trump did not extend that pause to China, opting instead to raise tariffs again on all Chinese imports, bringing those taxes to a whopping 125 percent. That decision came after Beijing raised its levies on American goods to 84 percent on Wednesday afternoon in an escalating tit-for-tat between the world’s largest economies.
In a post on Truth Social, the president said that he had authorized “a 90 day PAUSE” in which countries would face “a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff” of 10 percent. As a result, nearly every U.S. trading partner now faces a 10 percent blanket tariff, on top of 25 percent tariffs that Mr. Trump has imposed on cars, steel and aluminum.
Slumping markets quickly rallied after Mr. Trump’s post. The S&P 500 climbed several percentage points in a matter of minutes and closed with a rise of more than 9 percent, sharply reversing days of losses. Wednesday was the best day for the S&P 500 since the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis.President Trump on Wednesday abruptly reversed course on steep global tariffs that have roiled markets, upset members of his own party and raised fears of a recession. Just hours after he put punishing levies into place on nearly 60 countries, the president said he would pause them for 90 days.
But Mr. Trump did not extend that pause to China, opting instead to raise tariffs again on all Chinese imports, bringing those taxes to a whopping 125 percent. That decision came after Beijing raised its levies on American goods to 84 percent on Wednesday afternoon in an escalating tit-for-tat between the world’s largest economies.
In a post on Truth Social, the president said that he had authorized “a 90 day PAUSE” in which countries would face “a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff” of 10 percent. As a result, nearly every U.S. trading partner now faces a 10 percent blanket tariff, on top of 25 percent tariffs that Mr. Trump has imposed on cars, steel and aluminum.
Slumping markets quickly rallied after Mr. Trump’s post. The S&P 500 climbed several percentage points in a matter of minutes and closed with a rise of more than 9 percent, sharply reversing days of losses. Wednesday was the best day for the S&P 500 since the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis.
Nearly every stock in the index rose. Airlines, some tech companies and Tesla were among those companies to soar over 20 percent. Shares of automakers rose sharply even though 25 percent tariffs on imported cars remain in place. Ford and General Motors both rose more than 7 percent.
Mr. Trump, who for days had insisted he was not concerned about the market rout, acknowledged on Wednesday that the downturn had fed into his decision.
“Over the last few days it looked pretty glum,” Mr. Trump said. “I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line,” he said, in explaining his decision. “They were getting yippy. They were getting a little bit afraid.”
Mr. Trump’s change in course came amid a sharp sell-off in U.S. government bond markets and the dollar, which are typically seen as the safest corner for investors during times of turmoil. Investors large and small had watched trillions in stock market value vanish in a matter of days, and economists increasingly sounded urgent alarms that the United States might be careening toward a recession of its own making.
Asked Wednesday if the bond market reaction had caught his attention, Mr. Trump said he noticed over the weekend that investors were getting “queasy.”
“I was watching the bond market; the bond market’s very tricky, but if you look at it now, it’s beautiful,” he said.
The 90-day halt to tariffs ultimately caused stock prices to skyrocket, prompting the president to suggest on the sidelines of an event at the White House that the gains might have set a “record.”
Earlier in the day, Mr. Trump had told Americans to “BE COOL!” and quickly followed up with a post saying “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!”
That prompted some Democrats to suggest that Mr. Trump was intentionally manipulating stock markets. In a hearing in the House of Representatives Wednesday, several Democrats questioned Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, about the president’s aim.
“It’s not market manipulation,” Mr. Greer said. “We’re trying to reset the global trading system.”
The president announced last week that he would raise tariffs to levels not seen for a century, a change he said would make global trade more fair even if it caused some “discomfort.” As markets gyrated, Mr. Trump and his advisers insisted that they were committed to keeping the tariffs on until other countries lowered their trade barriers and made other economic changes.
Dozens of foreign countries raced to assemble delegations to appeal to the Trump administration. In his hearing on Wednesday, Mr. Greer said he had meetings Tuesday with officials from Europe, South Korea, Ecuador and Mexico, in addition to conversations with countries such as the United Kingdom in recent weeks.
Vietnamese officials had offered to cut their tariffs on American apples, cherries and ethanol, and brought along a term sheet to a meeting spelling out changes they were willing to make, Mr. Greer said. He predicted the negotiations would lead to “open markets overseas,” creating a “virtuous cycle” for American manufacturing.
Mr. Greer criticized the typical way to negotiate trade deals, describing them as “where you ask others nicely to give you market access and to do a dialogue with you for several years, and at the end you have no more market access.”
“And then there’s the Trump way,” he added.
As the hearing was nearing its end, Mr. Trump sent out his post announcing the pause, which took the gathering by surprise and rippled through the chamber.
“This is amateur hour,” shouted Representative Steven Horsford, Democrat of Nevada. “It looks like your boss just pulled the rug out from under you.”
Image source: Apples at the 4PFoods distribution warehouse
But while Mr. Trump lowered tariffs on most countries globally, at least until July 9, Wednesday’s events left punitive tariffs in place on China, the second-largest source of U.S. imports last year.
China makes the bulk of the world’s cellphones, computers, toys and many other products. When those items are brought into the United States, importers — most of which are American companies — are expected to pay more than the cost of the item itself in fees to the government.
Beijing and Washington have been engaged in a tit-for-tat conflict since Mr. Trump returned to the White House. The president has vilified China as an economic aggressor whose entry into the World Trade Organization decimated workers and communities across the United States. While China has become a manufacturing powerhouse, many U.S. industries have benefited from access to the Chinese market.
Asked on Wednesday whether he expected to continue raising levies on China, Mr. Trump said no and suggested he was waiting for a call from China’s leader, Xi Jinping, so the two could work out a deal.
“China wants to make a deal,” he said. “They just don’t know quite how to go about it.”
Last week, after Mr. Trump imposed a 34 percent tariff on China, Beijing responded with an equal levy. Mr. Trump then added an additional 50 percent tariff, which China matched with a 50 percent levy of its own.
The Ministry of Commerce announced separately on Wednesday that it was putting export controls on 12 American companies and had added six more American companies to its list of “unreliable entities,” meaning they will be mostly barred from doing business in China or with Chinese companies.
Mr. Trump’s advisers quickly tried to spin his decision to remove most tariffs globally as a win and not a capitulation. Mr. Bessent said that the tariffs had worked to get some of China’s closest neighbors such as Vietnam and Cambodia to seek deals with the United States.
On Wednesday afternoon, the president told reporters that he might consider exempting some U.S. companies from the tariffs, in addition to the 90-day pause. He said his decision on this would be made “instinctively.”
April 10, 2025
Kari Lake to be detailed to State Department to dismantle VOA parent agency
Kari Lake, senior adviser to the parent agency of Voice of America, is set to be detailed to the State Department, a move that could thwart her ambition of transforming U.S.-backed news content worldwide, according to two people with knowledge of the move who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to share internal decisions.
President Donald Trump tapped Lake to lead VOA, which delivers news to audiences around the world, after she had eagerly sought a position in the new administration. Lake, a one-time Republican candidate for Arizona governor and U.S. Senate, had told her associates that she wanted to transform the outlet into a powerful “weapon” to fight an “information war.”
But Trump’s campaign to dismantle the federal bureaucracy effectively gutted VOA and its parent, the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), through an executive order. Lake never became director of VOA. She was instead named a senior adviser to USAGM with an uncertain long-term role.
The individuals did not say exactly what post she will fill at the State Department, or whether Trump’s initial plan of eventually installing her over VOA fizzled after billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. Doge Service called for the news agency to be shut down. This is the first high-profile shuffle for a political appointee of the new administration.
Lake’s move is intended to help her coordinate closely with USAGM and the State Department to scale back the agency and its affiliated outlets to their statutory minimum, a third person familiar with her movements said: “She will be detailed over to State to accomplish this mission.”
Those plans face their own uncertainty. Trump’s executive order initiating the process faltered in the wake of a string of judicial decisions blocking the effort, leaving the news operations and their employees in a holding pattern.
Lake’s new role is expected to take effect as early as this week, the two people said.
“I remain committed to effectuating President Trump’s mission to modernize and reform the way we tell America’s story around the world while protecting the interest of the American taxpayer,” Lake said in a statement to The Washington Post on Tuesday. “In order to do that effectively, we look forward to working with interagency counterparts including the Department of State under the strong leadership of Secretary of State Marco Rubio.”
Lake initially pushed back against Musk’s efforts to dismantle VOA in February in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
“I believe it is worth trying to save,” she told the audience, just before she was named special adviser to USAGM. Trump intended to install her as VOA director later this year before abandoning those plans, according to the two people familiar with Lake’s future moves.
Voice of America was founded to deliver news coverage to countries around the world where a free press is threatened or nonexistent. At its start, VOA told stories about democracy to people in Nazi Germany. VOA and affiliates such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia were designed as a form of soft diplomacy, a way to tout the United States’ free-press values in countries where antidemocratic forces prevail.
Trump has accused VOA of speaking “for America’s adversaries — not its citizens.” And Lake, an ardent Trump surrogate who has echoed his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, also repeated his criticism of national media outlets — and of the content at VOA.
Trump’s directive targeted both VOA and its parent agency, and severedcontracts for privately incorporated international broadcasters that the agency also oversees, including Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. All told, about 3,500 journalists and other media workers were affected by the moves.
The swift action threatened to force VOA to go dark for the first time since it launched during World War II. It also revealed the uncertainty facing the people Trump has installed to lead federal agencies — and the tension between their ambitions to be relevant and his own desire to cut those agencies out of existence.
Various federal judges have temporarily halted the administration’s efforts to shut down the different news outlets, ruling that the administration cannot shut down a news organization that Congress established by law.
Lake, a former local TV news anchor, became one of Trump’s favorite surrogates over the past few years, largely because she adhered to his “Stop the Steal” message and delivered it with her signature soft-focus style.
At times, Trump expressed skepticism about her political viability in Arizona and wondered whether she could “drag” down his vote margins in a state he saw as key to his electoral success.
At one point in 2023, after grumbling that she visited his Mar-a-Lago Club too frequently, Trump suggested she should leave his Florida retreat and campaign for Senate in her home state.
Trump won the state last November. But Lake lost her U.S. Senate race in Arizona to Democrat Ruben Gallego — and quickly positioned herself for a role in Trump’s administration. Her name was mentioned as a possible contender for ambassador to Mexico or as an agency spokesperson. She fixed her attention on a position with VOA, according to a person familiar with Lake’s thinking.
At the time, according to an Arizona associate, there was “some uncertainty” about her long-term prospects in Washington because the Trump administration aimed to “gut” VOA.
“Then we’ll figure out something else for you to do,” the person recalled of the discussions.
“The idea was: Just come out here and we’ll figure it out. There’s a zillion comms jobs, face-of-the-franchise jobs,” the person said.
Amid a legal battle over the administration’s moves to essentially shut down VOA and other U.S.-funded outlets, Lake has mused about her future prospects with the administration.
During one recent conversation, she told the Arizona associate that she was enjoying the job, and she marveled at her efforts to ferret out waste.
“She said she was enjoying it,” the person recalled. “She had a mindset of trying to fix things and make it doable — but not a lot was worth saving.”
Lake presented the latest move as a continuation of her role as a storyteller for the country.
“I am thrilled to be working on behalf of President Trump and this administration. He put me in this role because I’m a fighter,” her statement read. “And I’m disgusted how Washington DC and this agency, in particular, has been screwing over hardworking Americans.”
April 9, 2025
Anti-Trump Secret Service Agent Leaving With Pay, Pension
Michael Cohen once famously said he’d take a bullet for Donald Trump — even though his position as Trump’s personal lawyer hardly required that type of life-on-the-line loyalty. As things turned out, Cohen didn’t really mean it, but by then his life and livelihood had been torn apart because of his extreme fealty to Trump, which earned him tens of millions of dollars but then backfired in spectacular fashion.
In stark contrast, a senior Secret Service agent whose job is literally to take a would-be assassin’s bullet for the president defiantly told colleagues and friends just a few weeks before the 2016 election that she’d refuse to do any such thing for Trump.
As with Cohen, the agent’s life has been irrevocably changed by her public remarks about Trump. But Kerry O’Grady, the Secret Service agent in question, has emerged from the entire spectacle virtually unscathed financially despite the black mark on her law enforcement reputation.
Although she is leaving the Secret Service, O’Grady appears to have quietly settled a disciplinary action against her and is poised to walk away with her federal government pension intact. In early 2017, shortly after media reports surfaced about her incendiary comments, O’Grady was removed as head of the Secret Service’s Denver field office while her she was investigated for possible misconduct.
She contested the disciplinary measures taken against her and appears to have settled her case with the Department of Homeland Security in October 2017. Before that settlement, she was on paid administrative leave, and afterward remained on either paid or unpaid leave and is set to retire with a taxpayer-funded pension in roughly three weeks, according to sources close to the Secret Service and a public settlement decision between O’Grady and DHS.
Earlier this month, the human resources department of the Secret Service sent an internal notice to all employees announcing O’Grady’s retirement, effective March 20. The notice was then deleted a few days later, fueling agency-wide speculation about O’Grady’s actual status.
A Secret Service spokesperson on Wednesday declined to comment on O’Grady’s retirement plans, saying only that the agency does not discuss personnel matters.
The retirement announcement has again roiled the agency over its handling of the discipline charges against O’Grady, whose case has been followed closely by agents since she first made the incendiary Facebook comments about Trump.
Most fellow agents did not know the outcome of the investigation into O’Grady’s misconduct because there was a shroud of secrecy hanging over it. Several agents and other employees who tried to look up her employment status on an internal Secret Service database of active agents were hauled before higher-ups and warned not to discuss the case in any capacity, numerous sources in the Secret Service community have told RealClearPolitics.
O’Grady’s legal problems began amid an uproar in that community – among active agents and retirees – after she posted several Facebook condemnations of Trump in the weeks before and after he was elected.
In the set of comments that got her into the most trouble, O’Grady posted in October 2016 that she was endorsing Hillary Clinton for president and would surrender her career and freedom rather than defend Trump from assassination.
“As a public servant for nearly 23 years, I struggle not to violate the Hatch Act. So I keep quiet and skirt the median,” she wrote. “To do otherwise can be a criminal offense for those in my position. Despite the fact that I am expected to take a bullet for both sides. But this world has changed and I have changed. And I would take jail time over a bullet or an endorsement for what I believe to be disaster to this country and the strong and amazing women and minorities who reside here. Hatch Act be damned. I am with Her.”
The statement appeared to transgress on two levels. First, it pledged intentional dereliction of duty. Second, Secret Service employees are among those federal workers subject to enhanced Hatch Act restrictions, which bar executive branch staff (except for the president, vice president and some other senior executive officials) from engaging in certain political activities.
Enhanced Hatch Act employees are specifically prohibited from posting comments to a blog or social media that advocate for or against a partisan political party, candidate or partisan political office or partisan political group. They also may not use email or social media to distribute, send or forward content that advocates for or against a partisan political party, candidate for political office or a partisan group.
At first the agency took no action against her. A complaint had been filed with the agency shortly after O’Grady’s Facebook posts appeared, but Secret Service managers didn’t respond until a story broke in late January 2017, fueling a media firestorm and public backlash against her comments. The premier organization for retired Secret Service agents, the Association of Former Agents of the U.S. Secret Service, also known as Old Star, quickly expelled her from its ranks.
O’Grady was then removed from her position as head of the Denver office but has remained on paid or unpaid administrative leave for more than two years and retained her security clearance, according to knowledgeable sources. Lawyers who have represented Secret Service employees accused of misconduct say many of their clients haven’t been so lucky.
Sean Bigley, a partner at Bigley Ranish, a law firm specializing in federal employment cases and security-clearance denials, said Secret Service managers often impose unpaid leave and revoke security clearances in misconduct cases in order to force a person to quit rather than go through the lengthy appeals process to try to get their security clearance reinstated.
“The Secret Service, when it comes to security clearances, tends to shoot first and ask questions later,” Bigley told RealClearPolitics. “And in every case I’ve had that I can recall, the person has been put on unpaid leave while the investigation is being conducted and while their security clearance is suspended.”
Now, the official retirement notice informing all Secret Service employees that DHS is allowing O’Grady to quietly retire in three weeks is fueling further intra-agency resentment. It’s also raising questions about whether DHS is abiding by a new law designed to stop the once common practice of allowing problem federal employees to remain on paid or unpaid leave long enough to hit key retirement dates.
O’Grady in recent months boasted to other agents that she “beat” the agency’s misconduct charges and that she planned to retire within the next 60 to 90 days when she reaches a key milestone date, the sources told RealClearPolitics.
Congressional leaders have recently faulted DHS for the use of paid and unpaid leave to allow employees facing substantiated claims of misconduct to remain long enough to attain full retirement benefits.
Just days before leaving his role as Judiciary Committee chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley released the results of a nearly four-year investigation of the U.S. Marshals Service, into which a flood of Secret Service agents have transferred in recent years. The probe, he said, uncovered a culture of misconduct that echoed similar problems his committee and others have uncovered at the Secret Service.
Among myriad management problems, the new report specifically criticized the Marshals Service for allowing employees with substantiated misconduct to remain on paid or unpaid leave long enough to reach retirement.
“We found a culture of mismanagement, abuse of authority and lax accountability that started clear at the top and has set a terrible standard for other employees across the agency,” the longtime Iowa senator said.
Along with Grassley, several taxpayer watchdog groups have also taken issue with the questionable practices.
“Any federal employee who breaches the public trust through poor performance or unethical behavior should be subject to a fair but swift termination process,” said Curtis Kalin, a spokesman for Citizens Against Government Waste. “Any attempt to skirt the disciplinary process for the purpose of extracting pension benefits should be exposed and halted.”
Debra D’Agostino, a founding partner of the Federal Practice Group, which specializes in federal employment law, suggested that O’Grady may have had unrelated legal grievances with the Secret Service that allowed her to remain at the agency on paid or unpaid leave for roughly a year and a half after her October 2017 settlement.
“These days, that’s really an extraordinary amount of time” to remain an employee after a settlement without coming back to work in some capacity, D’Agostino said.
Additionally, O’Grady can start collecting a pension immediately after retiring if she hits the 25-year mark of her service. Her precise age is not known, but knowledgeable sources say she is in her upper 40s and nearing that 25-year anniversary with the agency. Certain federal law enforcement jobs, including the Secret Service, allow employees to start collecting retirement immediately if they leave the agency after 25 years or more.
The official Secret Service retirement notice says O’Grady is retiring at a GS13 federal pay grade, which suggests that the agency downgraded her from a GS15, her pay grade before the misconduct charges. All agents who hold the top position in a Secret Service field office must hold the rank of GS15, which she did, according to multiple sources in the Secret Service community.
As an employee in her first few years at the GS15 paygrade, O’Grady likely made between $105,000 and $120,000 annually, before any overtime, according to federal pay scales. Although she was knocked down to a GS13, putting her in the $85,000 to $100,000 range, that pay scale likely only applied for the time since her settlement. That punishment also likely wouldn’t substantially impact the value of her pension, which is based on an employee’s three highest salary years at the agency. By the time she turns 70, it’s likely that the taxpayers will have paid O’Grady more in total salary after she declared publicly that she wouldn’t do her duty than in all the years before.
March 1, 2019
Google Acquires YouTube for $1.65 billion
Early YouTube homepage (2005)
Google Inc. is snapping up YouTube Inc. for $1.65 billion in a deal that catapults the Internet search leader to a starring role in the online video revolution.
The all-stock deal announced Monday unites one of the Internet’s marquee companies with one of its rapidly rising stars. It came just hours after YouTube unveiled three agreements with media companies in an apparent bid to escape the threat of copyright-infringement lawsuits.
The price makes YouTube, a still-unprofitable startup, by far the most expensive purchase made by Google during its eight-year history.
Although some cynics have questioned YouTube’s staying power, Google is betting that the popular Web site will provide it an increasingly lucrative marketing hub as more viewers and advertisers migrate from television to the Internet.
“We are natural partners to offer a compelling media entertainment service to users, content owners and advertisers,” said Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive officer.
YouTube will continue to retain its brand, as well as all 67 employees, including co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year.
“I’m confident that with this partnership we’ll have the flexibility and resources needed to pursue our goal of building the next-generation platform for serving media worldwide,” said Hurley, YouTube’s 29-year-old CEO.
“One of the problems with YouTube is that they’ve been known to carry copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holders,” Magid said.
But Hurley and Chen, 27, have spent months dealing with the copyright hurdle by cozying up with major media executives in an effort to convince them that YouTube could help them make more money by helping them connect with the growing number of people who spend most of their free time on the Internet.
While Google has been hauling away huge profits from the booming search market, it hasn’t been able to become a major player in online video.
That should change now, predicted Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li. “This gives Google the video play they have been looking for and gives them a great opportunity to redefine how advertising is done,” she said.
Investors applauded the possible acquisition as Google shares climbed $8.50, or 2 percent, to close at $429 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
Several other suitors, including Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. and News Corp., reportedly have discussed a possible YouTube purchase in recent weeks.
“This deal looks pretty compelling for Google,” said Standard & Poor’s analyst Scott Kessler said. “Google has been doing a lot of things right, but they are not sitting on their laurels.”
Google’s YouTube coup may intensify the pressure on Yahoo to make its own splash by buying Facebook.com, the Internet’s second most popular social-networking site. Yahoo has reportedly offered as much as $1 billion for Palo Alto-based Facebook during months of sporadic talks.
“Yahoo really needs to step up and do something,” said Roger Aguinaldo, an investment banker who also publishes a deal-making newsletter called the M&A Advisor. “They are becoming less relevant and looking less innovative with each passing day.”
Selling to Mountain View-based Google will give YouTube more technological muscle and advertising know-how, as well as generate a staggering windfall for a 67-employee company that was running on credit card debt just 20 months ago.
Since Hurley and Chen founded the company in February 2005, YouTube has blossomed into a cultural touchstone that shows more than 100 million video clips per day. The video library is eclectic, featuring everything from teenagers goofing off in their rooms to William Shatner singing “Rocket Man” during a 1970s TV show. The clips are submitted by users.
“What’s nice from YouTube’s perspective is that they don’t even have to pay for a lot of that content,” reported Magid. “Much of it is uploaded by people who just want to use the service to show off their talent.”
YouTube’s worldwide audience was 72.1 million by August, up from 2.8 million a year earlier, according to comScore Media Metrix.
YouTube’s conciliatory approach with major media has recently yielded several licensing and promotional agreements that have eased some of the copyright concerns while providing the company with some financial breathing room until it becomes profitable.
To conserve money as it subsisted on $11.5 million in venture capital, YouTube had been based in an austere office above a San Mateo pizzeria until recently moving to more spacious quarters in nearby San Bruno.
As its negotiations with Google appeared to near fruition, YouTube on Monday announced new partnerships with Universal Music Group, CBS Corp. and Sony BMG Music Entertainment. Those alliances followed a similar arrangement announced last month with Warner Music Group Inc.
The truce with Universal represented a particularly significant breakthrough because the world’s largest record company had threatened to sue YouTube for copyright infringement less than a month ago.
Li and Kessler expect even more media companies will be lining up to do business with YouTube now that Google owns it.
“It’s going to be like, ‘You can either fight us or you can make money with us,”‘ Li predicted.
October 10, 2006