President Donald Trump declined to issue a public statement of confidence in Steve Bannon Tuesday, indicating his chief strategist is indeed on the chopping block.

Rumors of a major shakeup that could involve Trump firing Bannon are swirling in Washington following his demotion from the National Security Council last week, and a number of reports from White House insiders who say Trump is fed up with the infighting between Bannon and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. Another report said Bannon threatened to quit over the NSC demotion.

New York Post reporter Michael Goodwin asked Trump Tuesday whether Bannon still has the president’s full confidence, and the president’s response was tepid. (Read more from “Trump Indicates Steve Bannon Is Actually on the Chopping Block” HERE)

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In six months, the Trump administration plans to produce a plan to shrink the size of government, eliminate programs, and reduce the federal workforce—and is seeking public input on how to proceed.

The memo from Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney directs federal agencies:

As part of their planning efforts, agencies should focus on fundamental scoping questions (i.e. analyzing whether activities should or should not be performed by the agency), and on improvements to existing business processes.

Requiring agencies to justify their functions is long overdue, said Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. He said the “scoping” should include determining if activities are “nonessential, whether they violate federalism, and whether they would flunk a cost-benefit test.”

Still, he said the success of the plan could depend on the will of both Congress and political appointees implementing the reforms.

“This could be the best shot we have of eliminating agencies,” Edwards told The Daily Signal. “A lot will depend on the quality of political appointees, and are they committed to smaller government. During the [George W.] Bush administration, a lot of the political appointees were just corporate climbers.”

“Also, will members of Congress be supportive? After [President Donald] Trump’s skinny budget, we saw a lot of Republicans in Congress, unfortunately, defend programs in their region,” Edwards added.

Trump has moved at a very deliberative pace in filling political positions thus far, noted Robert Rector, a senior research fellow with The Heritage Foundation, who is skeptical of the plan.

“Policy changes can’t come from the bureaucracies themselves,” Rector told The Daily Signal. “Policy change needs to come through Congress and comes when you bring outsiders in to impose reforms.”

Rector said neither the Department of Health and Human Services nor the Department of Housing and Urban Development were likely to come back with viable plans for change.

“If they did, it’s the exact opposite of what reform you would want,” he said.

In a White House video, Mulvaney said, “President Trump calls it draining the swamp. What it really means is making government more accountable to you, more effective and more efficient.”

The Mulvaney memo doesn’t outline cuts, but with the requirements, the video says, “Mulvaney is building a case to cut government a year from now.”

Mulvaney released the 14-page memo Wednesday, titled “Comprehensive Plan for Reforming the Federal Government and Reducing the Federal Civilian Workforce,” that aims to save tax dollars and require each government agency to submit a proposal to modernize and streamline operations in 180 days. The OMB is seeking input from the public, and will incorporate the final plans into the fiscal year 2019 budget proposal issues next March. President Donald Trump’s signed an executive order on March 13 directing the OMB to submit a comprehensive plan to reorganize the federal government.

The Mulvaney memo proposes “crosscutting reforms” to streamline all programs over the next four years, including reducing the number of federal employees.

But the plan will have opponents. The leader of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union representing federal workers, said, “There are some good ideas and some very dangerous ideas” in the memo.

One he didn’t like stresses more outsourcing, when the government already spends twice as much on contractors as employees, according to the union.

“Nobody knows precisely what these contractors do, how well they do it, who they’re hiring, or where they’re working,” American Federation of Government Employees President J. David Cox said in a statement. “In contrast, the data on federal employees’ jobs, pay, productivity, demographics, and location are completely transparent and widely scrutinized, as is appropriate.”

Cox also defended funding for the Environmental Protection Agency workforce. But the union president did find some common cause with the Trump administration’s report.

He said that it would be useful to evaluate layers of management—or the problem of having too many supervisors per worker.

“As representatives of front-line employees, AFGE members can tell you that excessive ratios of managers to workers on the front lines creates operational inefficiency and takes resources away from the direct provision of services to taxpayers,” Cox said in the statement. “The government does have too many managers and some of those positions should be converted to jobs that serve the American people.”

Reducing the workforce is important, but eliminating whole government programs is where the money is, Edwards said. The report requires agencies to justify why government should be involved in a specific function.

“There is no doubt the left has built a fortress to defend programs,” Edwards said. “Federal money goes to the states and then to city and local governments and every level will defend that money. So will government employees, contractors, and interest groups. It’s a fortress, but it’s not insurmountable. When Republicans are able to cut spending, it doesn’t hurt them politically. It usually helps them.” (For more from the author of “Trump White House Moves Forward with Plan Government Employee Union Dubs ‘Dangerous'” please click HERE)

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It has become quite clear that Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin has come to deeply regret throwing the weight of his security state behind now-President Donald Trump’s election campaign. Unlike the administration preceding him, Trump has acted decisively to combat Russia’s worldwide influence. From the American missile strikes against the Assad regime in Syria to the inclusion of Montenegro to NATO, Putin massively miscalculated in his strategy to use his state-media and other influence and intelligence operations to support President Trump’s bid for the presidency.

Moscow is infuriated that Trump officials have charged Russia with being intimately involved in Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons attack on innocents in Syria last week. According to top U.S. officials, a Russian-made fighter jet bombed a hospital to cover up for the Assad regime’s use of the Sarin nerve agent (which is classified as a weapon of mass destruction) against Syrian men, women, and children. A senior National Security Council official told reporters Tuesday that the U.S. was able to confirm the aforementioned events thanks to a combination of open source intelligence, signals intelligence, and evidence samples.

In another move that angered Moscow this week, Trump approved the addition of Montenegro to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which was originally conceived — and remains partially purposed — to stop Russian intrusion into northern and eastern Europe. Russia fiercely opposes the expansion of NATO, which the Kremlin sees as an adversarial military entity.

Russian strongman Putin has basically admitted the honeymoon period between he and Trump is over, telling state-media on Wednesday: “One could say that the level of trust on a working level [with the United States government], especially on the military level, has not improved but has rather deteriorated.”

His remarks come as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson traveled to Moscow to meet with Russian officials. Tillerson was initially set to converse with the Russian president, then Putin cancelled their meeting. Now it appears that they will indeed meet Wednesday.

Tillerson’s counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, has added himself to the long list of Moscow officials who have become upset with Trump’s policies.

“I won’t hide the fact that we have a lot of questions, taking into account the extremely ambiguous and sometimes contradictory ideas which have been expressed in Washington across the whole spectrum of bilateral and multilateral affairs,” Lavrov pouted during his meeting with Tillerson. “And of course, that’s not to mention that apart from the statements, we observed very recently the extremely worrying actions, when an illegal attack against Syria was undertaken.”

Doubling down on his anti-Putin stance, President Trump has personally added weight to critiques against the Russian leader. Discussing the Syrian strikes on Fox Business Wednesday, Trump said Putin “is backing a person that’s truly an evil person.”

Trump has also ramped up pressure on Russian allies in Iran and China. White House officials continue to refer to Moscow as being on a diplomatic “island,” utilizing the metaphor to showcase Putin’s waning influence over global affairs.

Additionally, both U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and Secretary Tillerson have called out Russia for its moral depravity in a way rarely seen in overt channels.

Last week, both Haley and Tillerson unleashed intense critiques against Russian involvement in Syria. Russia has “no interest in peace” in Syria, Ambassador Haley opined. Secretary Tillerson added that Russia and Iran “bear moral responsibility” for Assad’s slaughter.

During the American presidential campaign, Russia acted decisively in selling out in Trump’s favor. To be clear, no firm evidence has ever been presented to indicate that the Russians swung the election in Trump’s favor or even successfully influenced a single voter. Still, from the time in which he was the GOP frontrunner up to Election Day, Russian state television had nothing but good things to say about candidate Trump.

President Trump held his cards close, while his opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was much more up front in criticizing the Russian government.

All indications seemed to imply that Trump was the dream candidate for Moscow. He refused to criticize Putin for his country’s vast human rights abuses, seemed open to cooperating with Russia on a variety of issues, and was openly skeptical about NATO and the European Union.

In response, Moscow appeared to observe the rhetoric of Clinton and Trump as an indicator for future action. To the honest observer of Russian media, it became very clear who the Kremlin supported, given that the state controls the media agenda. The U.S. intelligence community concluded that Russia took their efforts a step further and attempted to influence the election in Trump’s favor by harming Secretary Clinton’s favorability. An intelligence community assessment stated that “Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference” for Trump and attempted to “denigrate” and “harm” Clinton’s electability.

In their rage, leftist media outlets floated countless conspiracies involving Trump being allegedly controlled by Putin. In one such example, Clinton partisan and former CIA official Mike Morrell called Trump an “unwitting agent” of Russia. To this day, zero evidence has surfaced to confirm their wild allegations. The establishment media, like the Russians, appeared to misread Trump in a similar manner.

The Russians grossly miscalculated. It’s hard to imagine, just 82 days into a presidency, that Hillary Clinton would move so decisively against the Putin regime in the way that President Trump has. In less than ninety days, Trump has managed to infuriate Putin to the point where, in a sulking fit, he canceled a meeting with the U.S. secretary of state.

President Trump was never the “unwitting agent” of Russia the media made him out to be. In the end, Trump played the Russian government like a fiddle, leaving the Kremlin more vulnerable than ever. (For more from the author of “Putin and the MSM Just Learned a Painful Lesson … Trump Played Them Like a Fiddle” please click HERE)

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