I hope your holiday has been a relaxing one so far, and you've managed to get a little bit of down time. You may have noticed I've been having a bit of mercy on your inbox these past few days, but I did want to take a moment to thank you for reading.
I just checked, and at this time last year, there were about 145,000 people subscribed to this email, a number that has now grown to more than 205,000. Much of that is thanks to readers who've told friends and family about it and gotten them to sign up. My wish for this Boxing Day is that you continue to help spread the word. If you know anybody who would enjoy this occasional note, please send them this link, and tell them you've gifted them with a free lifetime subscription. All they have to do is sign up: https://actionnetwork.org/forms/sign-up-to-get-ryan-grims-bad-news-in-your-inbox
Meanwhile, here's a must-read new story by Rachel Cohen about the creeping takeover of the Health and Human Services Department
Maggie Wynne's career as a foot-soldier in the anti-abortion movement began in Congress, where throughout much of the 1990s she was a staffer for the so-called Pro-Life Caucus. When George W. Bush took the White House, she moved to the Department of Health and Human Services to work in the office that connected Congress and the agency.
A few years later, in 2005, she became a special assistant within HHS. But as the administration neared its end, Wynne pulled off a bureaucratic move known as "burrowing," in which an appointed official becomes a career government employee, with all the job protections that entails.
So when Barack Obama's HHS team arrived, Wynne was there waiting for them at the Office of Refugee Resettlement, continuing to wage her bureaucratic battles on behalf of the unborn. Career staff are famously difficult to fire, but they can be marginalized so that they can't stall an agenda. In 2011, HHS got her out of the agency temporarily by "detailing" her to the staff of the House Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights Subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., the most zealous right-to-lifer in the House and co-chair of the Pro-Life Caucus. The reassignment was part of an effort to keep her away from the bidding process for federal funding for anti-trafficking work, as Wynne was known to favor the U.S. bishops who fought a new Obama-era requirement to offer victims access to abortion services.
She managed to involve herself in the process regardless, and, in 2015, Wynne's department was reorganized to strip most of her authority; she was left directing a relatively small trafficking office, helping to determine whether foreign-born victims qualified for public services. Less than a year later, with the punditry convinced Hillary Clinton would become the next president, Wynne finally called it quits. For the next several months, she went to work for the Knights of Columbus and was the pilgrimage director at the St. John Paul II National Shrine in Washington.
But then Donald Trump won.
Read the full story, by Rachel Cohen, here.
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