Doctor says Michigan Chief Medical Officer Tried to Conceal Data Linking Flint Water to Legionnaires’ Outbreak

From [HERE] Michigan Chief Medical Officer Eden Wells was trying to conceal information related to the connection between Flint’s lead contaminated water and a 2014-15 Legionnaires’ outbreak, a Wayne State University professor contends in an email exchange this year with Wells.

Wayne State professor of medicine Marcus Zervos accused Wells of trying to “suppress our findings of the serious deficiencies in the investigations and mitigation efforts” of the state and Flint area health departments related to the Legionnaires’ outbreak, according to early March emails The Detroit News obtained from the state in an open records request.

Zervos was referring to a Wayne State-led investigation in which he was participating that was studying whether Flint’s switch to Flint River water in April 2014 was responsible for a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak that killed 12 and sickened 79 others in the Flint area in 2014-15. The state of Michigan contracted with the Flint Area Community Health and Environment Partnership in March 2016 for the $3.1 million study. [Legionnaires' disease is a form of atypical pneumonia caused by any type of Legionella bacteria. Signs and symptoms include cough shortness of breath, high fever, muscle pains, and headaches. Nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea may also occur.^[1] This often begins two to ten days after being exposed]

The legal team of Attorney General Bill Schuette has charged Wells with lying to a special police agent and with obstruction of justice, a felony punishable by up to two years in prison. A court document shows Schuette’s team hopes to prove its case with planned testimony from Zervos, who is also division head of infectious diseases at Detroit’s Henry Ford Health System.

Schuette’s team alleged that Wells obstructed justice by “threatening to withhold funding for the Flint Area Community Health and Environment Partnership if the partnership did not cease its investigation into the source of the Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in Flint.”

The emails provide insight about the prosecution’s case against Wells, who became the state’s part-time chief medical officer on May 1, 2015. She became a full-time official on Feb. 1, 2016, about four months after lead contamination in Flint’s water was publicly acknowledged and less than a month after Gov. Rick Snyder declared Flint to be a state emergency.

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[40,000 non-white voter registrations have vanished!] Will new Jim Crow scam tip Georgia Congressional Race?

 From [HERE] 

Sup Court Ruled gov not allowed to deny trademarks on basis of the name being offensive- like Redskins or Niggers

[From HERE] The US Supreme Court [official website] ruled [opinion, PDF] Monday in Matal v. Tam [SCOTUSblog materials] that a law prohibiting disparaging trademarks is a violates the First Amendment [text]. The Lanham Act [text] provides that no trademark shall be refused registration on account of its nature unless, inter alia, it "[c]onsists of ... matter which may disparage ... persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute." The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) [official website] denied trademark registration to Simon Tam's band, The Slants [band website], finding the name derogatory to Asian-Americans. In a plurality opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito, the court held, "that this provision violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment. It offends a bedrock First Amendment principle: Speech may not be banned on the ground that it expresses ideas that offend."

The case is expected to have implications for the Washington Redskins trademark dispute [JURIST news archive]. In June 2014 the USPTO announced that it would cancel six trademark registrations [JURIST report] belonging to the Washington Redskins. Administrative trademark judge Karen Kuhlke cancelled trademarks associated with the team's name, logo and the name of their cheerleading squad. The Washington Redskins' name was criticized [JURIST report] by UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, James Anaya, who called for the team to change their name out of respect for the "historical and cultural legacy of the Native Americans in the US."

A plurality opinion is the opinion from a group of judges, often in an appellate court, in which no single opinion received the support of a majority of the court. The plurality opinion did not receive the support of more than half the justices, but received more support than any other opinion, excluding those dissenting from the holding of the court.

In Marks v. United States, 430 U.S. 188 (1977), the Supreme Court of the United States explained how the holding of a case should be viewed where there is no majority supporting the rationale of any opinion: “When a fragmented Court decides a case and no single rationale explaining the result enjoys the assent of five Justices, the holding of the Court may be viewed as that position taken by those Members who concurred in the judgments on the narrowest grounds.” Marks, 430 U.S. at 193.

That requires lower courts to look at all opinions to determine which is the most narrow compared to others. This opinion will be called the controlling opinion, and can be a mere concurrence, not the plurality.^[1]

Republican Data-Mining Firm Exposed Personal Information for Virtually Every American Voter

From [Intercept] THE GOP’S 2016 presidential upset wasn’t surprising just because it put Donald Trump in the White House; it also proved the party had vastly improved its ability to exploit data, including precision ad targeting campaigns on Facebook. Now comes the fallout of all that information hoarding: A California-based security researcher says Republican-linked election databases were inadvertently exposed to the entire internet, sans password, potentially violating the privacy of almost every single registered voter in the United States.

The data trove was apparently made public by accident by one of the data-mining companies that compiled it. It includes a mix of private information and data gleaned from public voter rolls: “the voter’s date of birth, home and mailing addresses, phone number, registered party, self-reported racial demographic, voter registration status” as well as computer “modeled” speculation about each person’s race and religion, according to an analysis provided to The Intercept.

The leak was discovered by Chris Vickery, an analyst at the U.S. cybersecurity firm UpGuard, who last year discovered an enormous breach of Mexican voter data and in 2015 a 300GB leak of records of 191 million voters. This new incident is more extensive, according the analysis, written by UpGuard:

UpGuard’s Cyber Risk Team can now confirm that unsecured databases containing the sensitive personal details of over 198 million American voters was left exposed to the internet. The data, which was stored in a publicly accessible cloud server owned by Republican data firm Deep Root Analytics, included 1.1 terabytes of entirely unsecured personal information compiled by DRA and at least two other contractors, TargetPoint Consulting, Inc. and Data Trust. In total, the personal information of nearly all of America’s 200 million registered voters was exposed, including their names, dates of birth, home addresses, phone numbers, and voter registration details, as well as voter ethnicities and religions as “modeled” by the firms’ data scientists.

(DRA, TargetPoint, and Data Trust were not immediately available for comment.)

Two of the firms linked to the database, Deep Root Analytics and Target Point, were among three firms hired by the RNC to do most of its data modeling and voter scoring in 2016, according to a December Ad Age story, with a mandate to shore up unconvinced Trump-leaning voters, sway weak Hillary Clinton supporters, and capture undecided voters.

What UpGuard appears to have discovered, sitting on an Amazon cloud storage drive with no password or username required for access by anyone on the internet, was terabytes of the data used to map the voter proclivities and demographics key to finding voters in those buckets. Beyond personal information like religion, age, and probable ethnicity, certain database files among those made public include individual scores for nearly 50 different beliefs, according to UpGuard’s analysis:

Each of fields under each of the forty-eight columns signifies the potential voter’s modeled likelihood of supporting the policy, political candidate, or belief listed at the top of the column, with zero indicating very unlikely, and one indicating very likely.

Calculated for 198 million potential voters, this adds up to a spreadsheet of 9.5 billion modeled probabilities, for questions ranging from how likely it is the individual voted for Obama in 2012, whether the agree with the Trump foreign policy of “America First,” and how likely they are to be concerned with auto manufacturing as an issue, among others.

The below screenshot, provided by Vickery, shows just some of the alignments on which 198 million Americans were scored: [MORE]

Foot On Throat in Racist System: Subprime Car Loan Companies Crush Debtors After Repossessing Cars -suing & garnishing

From [HERE] More than a decade after Yvette Harris’s 1997 Mitsubishi was repossessed, she is still paying off her car loan.

She has no choice. Her auto lender took her to court and won the right to seize a portion of her income to cover her debt. The lender has so far been able to garnish $4,133 from her paychecks — a drain that at one point forced Ms. Harris, a single mother who lives in the Bronx, to go on public assistance to support her two sons.

“How am I still paying for a car I don’t have?” she asked.

For millions of Americans like Ms. Harris who have shaky credit and had to turn to subprime auto loans with high interest rates and hefty fees to buy a car, there is no getting out.

Many of these auto loans, it turns out, have a habit of haunting people long after their cars have been repossessed.

The reason: Unable to recover the balance of the loans by repossessing and reselling the cars, some subprime lenders are aggressively suing borrowers to collect what remains — even 13 years later.

Ms. Harris’s predicament goes a long way toward explaining how lenders, working hand in hand with auto dealers, have made billions of dollars extending high-interest loans to Americans on the financial margins.

These are people desperate enough to take on thousands of dollars of debt at interest rates as high as 24 percent for one simple reason: Without a car, they have no way to get to work or to doctors.

With their low credit scores, buying or leasing a new car is not an option. And when all the interest and fees of a subprime loan are added up, even a used car with mechanical defects and many miles on the odometer can end up costing more than a new car.

Subprime lenders are willing to take a chance on these risky borrowers because when they default, the lenders can repossess their cars and persuade judges in 46 states to give them the power to seize borrowers’ paychecks to cover the balance of the car loan.

Now, with defaults rising, federal banking regulators and economists are worried how the strain of these loans will spill over into the broader economy.

For low-income Americans, the fallout could, in some ways, be worse than the mortgage crisis.

With mortgages, people could turn in the keys to their house and walk away. But with auto debt, there is increasingly no exit. Repossession, rather than being the end, is just the beginning.

“Low-income earners are shackled to this debt,” said Shanna Tallarico, a consumer lawyer with the New York Legal Assistance Group.

There are no national tallies of how many borrowers face the collection lawsuits, known within the industry as deficiency cases. But state records show that the courts are becoming flooded with such lawsuits.

For example, the large subprime lender Credit Acceptance has filed more than 17,000 lawsuits against borrowers in New York alone since 2010, court records show. And debt buyers — companies that scoop up huge numbers of soured loans for pennies on the dollar — bring their own cases, breathing new life into old bills.

Portfolio Recovery Associates, one of the nation’s largest debt buyers, purchased about $30.2 million of auto deficiencies in the first quarter of this year, up from $411,000 just a year earlier. 

One of the people Credit Acceptance sued is Nagham Jawad, a refugee from Iraq, who moved to Syracuse after her father was killed. Soon after settling into her new home in 2009, Ms. Jawad took out a loan for $5,900 and bought a used car.

After only a few months on the road, the transmission on the 10-year-old Chevy Tahoe gave out. The vehicle was in such bad shape that her lender didn’t bother to repossess it when Ms. Jawad, 39, fell behind on payments.

“These are garbage cars sold at outrageous interest rates,” said her lawyer, Gary J. Pieples, director of the consumer law clinic at the Syracuse University College of Law.

The value of any car typically starts to decline the moment it leaves the dealer’s lot. In the subprime market, however, the value of the cars is often beside the point.

A dealership in Queens refused to cancel Theresa Robinson’s loan of nearly $8,000 and give her a refund for a car that broke down days after she drove it off the lot.

Instead, Ms. Robinson, a Staten Island resident who is physically disabled and was desperate for a car to get to her doctors’ appointments, was told to pick a different car from the lot.

The second car she selected — a 2005 Chrysler Pacifica — eventually broke down as well. Unable to afford the loan payments after sinking thousands of dollars into repairs, Ms. Robinson defaulted.

Her subprime lender took her to court and won the right to garnish her income from babysitting her grandson to cover her loan payments.

Ms. Robinson and her lawyer, Ms. Tallarico, are now fighting to get the judgment overturned.

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GOP Works to Disappear the Surging Black & Latino Votary in Georgia's 6th Cong district in Hoax [s]Election

Shrinking White Party [GOP] Must Rig Elections to Survive. Georgia's 6th congressional district is a congressional district in the U.S. state of Georgia. It was represented by Republican Tom Price until he was sworn in as Secretary of Health and Human Services on February 10, 2017. A special election will be held to fill the vacant seat. The district's boundaries have been redrawn following the 2010 census, which granted an additional congressional seat to Georgia. The first election using the new district boundaries was the 2012 congressional elections. [MORE]

From [ThinkProgress] Georgia’s sixth district will conduct one of the most closely watched congressional elections in recent history on Tuesday. The race, which is being called a toss-up, could flip the historically red district to Democrats. But according to one security researcher, the results could potentially be rigged.

Cybersecurity researcher Logan Lamb discovered last summer that a security hole leaves the state’s online voter records accessible by hackers, who could plant malware and potentially rig the election, according to an interview with Politico.

Even before he told Politico of the dangers of the state’s electronic election system, voters in the state had been raising concerns. In late May, two voters in the sixth district teamed up with a Colorado-based nonprofit to file a lawsuit arguing that Georgia’s voting system is “vulnerable to hacking, errors, and other mischief.”

Concerns with the state’s system, combined with troubling reports about the extent of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, are causing some Georgia voters to worry that their ballots for Democrat Jon Ossoff or Republican Karen Handel may not be fairly counted.

About 44 percent of Georgia's population are classified as non-white, according to the Center for American Progress. That's up from 37 percent just a decade ago. During that period, non-whites have accounted for 81 percent of the state's population growth.

African-Americans account for the largest share of that growth, followed by Hispanics, whose numbers nearly doubled during that period to more than 850,000, making it the 10th-largest state by Hispanic population.

"Marietta is a microcosm of the nation," May said. "Marietta was once overwhelmingly white, but now more minorities are living here and there is a sizable Hispanic population." [MORE]

States know how to secure ballots—but just don’t follow through

Election and computer security experts agree that the best way to secure elections is to make sure that voting machines have paper records to back up the electronic results. But Georgia uses direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines, so if someone were to call for a recount, the machines would only be able to spit out the same number. There would be no paper backups.

“There’s no way to independently verify individual votes,” Nse Ufot, director of the New Georgia Project, told ThinkProgress. “There have been open letters written by computer science professors and political science professors from universities all across the country to Georgia's secretary of state. The secretary of state’s response has been that this is a state issue, so we’re going to dismiss them. People are really concerned.”

In late May, 16 computer scientists wrote Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp (R) “expressing profound concerns about the lack of verifiability and poor security of Georgia’s DRE-based voting system,” according to the complaint. The lawsuit also alleged that failures in the DRE system allowed improper memory cards to be uploaded into the election database during the April 18 election and that the physical security of the voting machines has been inadequate. The weekend before the election, four voting machines were stolen from a Cobb County precinct manager’s vehicle. It took two days for the manager to report the crime.

There have also been breaches to the security of the online systems. Lamb, the security researcher who discovered the hole in the state’s system, said he is concerned that hackers may have already accessed the website of the Kennesaw State University’s Center for Election Systems, which tests and programs voting machines for the state of Georgia. Hackers could plant malware that would record votes for different candidates, and the state would never know without a paper trail to back up the votes.

In December, someone with the Department of Homeland Security also tried to hack Georgia’s voter database, but the attempt was unsuccessful.

Kemp has ignored all of the concerns, the lawsuit alleges.

In the past, Kemp has also been reluctant to address Georgia’s vulnerabilities. When the federal government offered assistance to states for election security before the 2016 election, Kemp declined, citing state sovereignty. Democrats have criticized that and other election-related decisions Kemp has made in recent years, calling them politically charged. In March, Kemp entered the 2018 race for Georgia governor.

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Colin Kaepernick on Philando Castile Verdict: 'Cops Function Like Slave Patrol in System That Must be Dismantled'

Taking a stand against the systematic oppression of Black people is an adventure for a Black NFL quarterback with a shaky future. Kaepernick has spoken about a system that refuses to punish race soldier cops who murder Blacks & Latinos in broad daylight and rewards them for doing so. The same system may now punish him or act to filter him out.

Here again he gambled - or risked the known for the unknown. ["only the gamblers know what life is"] Can you do the same? 

Red Silver J: GOP Baseball Massacre was Staged by the Government

[RedSilverJ] and [HERE] until removed or censored by YouTube/Google. 

Witness Falisa Peoples described the shooter as a white man, dressed in T-shirt and shorts. His demeanor was "calm," she said. 

"He didn’t say anything -- he was just shooting," said Peoples, a fitness instructor at the YMCA location right next to the ball park. "They were shooting at each other. I thought it was some exercise." [MORE]

Whether you agree with Mr. Silver J or not the GOP propaganda resulting from the baseball massacre has been designed to polarize and [like an election - as defined by Dr. Blynd] an attempt "to silence legitimate outrage at psychological, social, judicial and economic oppression and demands of self determination." Certainly attempting to murder congressman b/c you are mad at Trump is crazy. But being opposed to this mindless racist simpleton is normal, healthy. Similarly, elite white media would have you believe it is deviant to be outraged at police brutality. But speaking out against the already unlawful use of excessive force by government servants is really not a radical thing to do. Only zombies with screens over their eyes and whose minds function as puppets controlled externally by others could think otherwise.

Standing Rock Sioux Chair on Militarized Repression & Ongoing Lawsuit to Stop Dakota Access Pipeline

Obama’s Barrage of Complete Sentences Seen as Brutal Attack on Trump

From [NewYorker] In an appearance at the University of Chicago former President Barack Obama unloaded a relentless barrage of complete sentences in what was widely seen as a brutal attack on his successor, Donald Trump. 

Appearing at his first public event since leaving office, Obama fired off a punishing fusillade of grammatically correct sentences, the likes of which the American people have not heard from the White House since he departed. 

“He totally restricted his speech to complete sentences,” Tracy Klugian, a student at the event, said. “It was the most vicious takedown of Trump I’d ever seen.” 

“About five or six sentences in, I noticed that all of his sentences had both nouns and verbs in them,” Carol Foyler, another student, said. “I couldn’t believe he was going after Trump like that.” 

Obama’s blistering deployment of complete sentences clearly got under the skin of their intended target, who, moments after the event, responded with an angry tweet: “Obama bad (or sick) guy. Failing. Sad!” 

Trump [Obsessed with Black President] Moves to Erase Obama's Accomplishments: Keeps DACA in place but rescinds DAPA

What happened to the Sphinx's nose? Napoleon blew it off. From [HERE] The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) [official website] announced in a memorandum [text, PDF] on Thursday that it will keep the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) [materials] program in place for the foreseeable future. DACA allows for immigrants who came to the US as children, known as "Dreamers," to obtain work permits and remain in the country legally. According to the New York Times [report], though, the White House and the DHS said Friday morning that the statements made regarding DACA were "intended only to clarify that immigrants enrolled in the DACA program would not immediately be affected by a separate action officially ending a similar program for the parents of those immigrants." The same memorandum rescinds another Obama-era policy, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) [materials], which was designed to protect the immigrant parents of children who are US citizens or have permanent resident status. DAPA was never fully implemented [DHS fact sheet] because "federal courts halted the policy." Rather than continue to defend it, the DHS formally rescinded the program.

President Donald Trump pledged to repeal DACA and DAPA during his 2016 campaign. As a result, both been contentious issues in recent months. In February John Kelly [official profile], Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), signed several memos [JURIST report] detailing plans to facilitate the detention and deportation of immigrants in the US illegally. In January DACA-protected Mitzie Perez and the California League of United Latin American Citizens filed a lawsuit [JURIST report] against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank refused to extend Perez and other similarly situated students loans solely because of their immigration status. A Georgia state court refused to back down from its earlier ruling granting in-state tuition to Georgia university students protected by DACA. Also in January the US House of Representatives passed a funding bill [JURIST report] that included amendments designed to repeal key elements of DACA. A collection of mayors from major US cities, including Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, warned [JURIST report] then president-elect Trump in December about potential negative economic consequences of repealing DACA.

Trump’s healthcare plan would have a devastating, disproportionate impact on Black People

From [HERE] As the debate between Trumpcare and Obamacare continues in Washington D.C., there has been one glaring omission ― the devastating impact that Trump’s healthcare plan would have on Black people. The combination of severe racial disparities in health outcomes and the ever-widening wealth gap means that Black people will be hit first and hardest by Trump’s proposed “reform.” Let me be perfectly clear with you; none of this is by accident.

The racist suspects pushing Trumpcare like to pretend that their motives are pure of racial intent. But the reality is that a huge percentage of those who will lose healthcare coverage under Trumpcare are Black. These misguided efforts will be racist in their consequences.

The Republican plan includes an option for states to let insurance companies deny people coverage based on pre-existing conditions ― something prohibited under Obamacare...

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) boosted the African American insured rate by 5 percentage points, to 88 percent, slightly below the 91 percent national figure.  The House Republican plan, by contrast, would cause large numbers of African Americans to lose coverage.  About 15 million of the nearly 40 million African Americans in the country get coverage through Medicaid, which the House plan would cut by $880 billion over ten years. About 1.5 million of them are covered through the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, which the House plan would effectively eliminate.  Many other African Americans have private insurance through the ACA’s marketplaces, where coverage would become less affordable for many consumers under the House plan, due partly to its much weaker premium tax credits to help them buy coverage.

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[Invisible Legislative Process] To Minimize Dissent the media is helping GOP keep their health care bill secret

From [Media Matters] Senate Republicans are deliberately crafting legislation in complete secret. And it’s not just any legislation. This is a sprawling social policy bill that would directly impact the welfare of tens of millions of Americans.

The bill represents the hallmark legislative promise that the Republican Party has been making for seven years: to repeal and replace Obamacare. For Republicans, it’s arguably their most important piece of lawmaking this century.

Spooked by the prospect of mass public resistance to the legislation, Republicans are strategically keeping it under wraps from the press and the public so they don’t know exactly what’s being planned. (And who’s in charge of drafting the bill? According to press reports the secret bill is being negotiated by a core group of 13 men.)

Note that what the public does know of the bill, it hates -- a lot. (Here’s one small reason why.)

The idea that a major party in American politics is going to try to pass landmark health care legislation without scheduling a single hearing, without listening to testimony from any health care experts, without allowing the other party to offer up amendments, and most importantly, without letting the American people know what’s in the bill in a timely manner is the antithesis of an open democracy.

While some voices in the media have been loudly ringing alarm bells, in terms of the day-to-day newsroom coverage of this secretive spectacle, reporters seem to be nonplussed by the GOP’s highly unusual -- and completely private -- approach to overhauling the health care system, which represents roughly 20 percent of the U.S. economy.

Too often, the Beltway press’s reaction to the Republicans’ extreme maneuver has been remarkably subdued and almost nonchalant.

Here’s how a recent Politico update on the health care bill briefly dealt with the issue of secrecy: “A public copy of the bill or the CBO score are not expected until just days before any vote, minimizing the ability of opposition to mobilize, aides said.”

Later, the article noted:

Senators said no draft bill has been completed, and aides said the party is fearful of leaks of the party’s plans falling into the hands of conservative or liberal activists who would seek to scuttle the GOP’s negotiations. Those factors are leading to a secretive and opaque process that Republicans say is the only way to have a chance at success without the party’s ideological divides bringing down any early draft.

“This is typical with the process,” said Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). “We’re under pressure with the rules of reconciliation and everything else. This is not that unusual.”

That was it.

There was no context about how completely unheard of it is to a try to create a nationwide health care bill in secret; instead, the piece offered up Republicans’ excuses for why they are proceeding with major legislation in secret. Also of note, the article quoted four Republican senators by name and no Democrats.

Even articles that have done a good job of highlighting some of the negative impacts of Republicans’ proposed health care overhaul have dropped the ball on explaining the absurdity of the legislative process. Last month, at very end of an article about the bill, the Los Angeles Times inserted this brief mention (emphasis added):

What effect the [CBO] report will have on the Senate Republican discussions remains unclear, however: All the debate is taking place behind closed doors.

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Rep. Barbara Lee: Trump Expanding Unlimited War in Afghanistan is Unauthorized

From [HERE] U.N. investigators say U.S.-led bombing has killed 300 Syrian civilians over the last three months in the city of Raqqa. A U.S.-led bombing campaign in Mosul has also reportedly killed dozens of Iraqi civilians over the last week alone. For more, we speak with Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee of California. In 2001, she was the lone vote against the Authorization for Use of Military Force after the September 11 attacks.

Trump's Budget Proposes to Cut the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division

From [HERE] The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights announced Friday it will commence a two-year investigation to learn whether President Trump's proposed budget and staffing cuts to civil rights offices across the country will hurt their ability to function.

The independent, bipartisan federal agency voted unanimously to launch the probe out of concern the budget "would result in a dangerous reduction of civil rights enforcement across the country, leaving communities of color, LGBT people, older people, people with disabilities, and other marginalized groups exposed to greater risk of discrimination."

Among offices set to be affected by the possible budget cut is the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, which could see 121 positions eradicated.

The Education Department is also set to lose 46 full-time employees in its Office for Civil Rights, while the Labor Department, Health and Human Services Department and Environmental Protection Agency are also bracing for cuts.

The commission touted its congressional authority to look into the issue.

"For 60 years, Congress has charged the Commission to monitor Federal civil rights enforcement and recommend necessary change. We take this charge seriously, and we look forward to reporting our findings to Congress, the President, and the American people," Commission Chair Catherine Lhamon said in a statement.

Government departments and agencies are not the only ones being examined in the probe. The commission said it will also look at cabinet and senior administration officials.