Happy Martin Luther King, Jr., Day
The National Part Service reminds us, “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a tireless advocate for racial equality, working classes, and the oppressed around the world. Commonly called Martin Luther King, Jr. Day or MLK Day, the third Monday of January is a federal holiday to honor his life and legacy.” RIP
Donald J. Trump was sworn into office as the 47th President of the United States at noon today.
The Wall Street Journal reports, “President Trump signed an executive order creating the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency. “That’s a big one,” he exclaimed. Trump said Musk would get an office for about 20 staffers.” * * *
“Trump’s executive order calls on agencies to set up DOGE teams of at least four employees, which will include a team leader, an engineer, a human resources specialist and an attorney. Under the new structure, the United States Digital Service, which provides information technology services to federal agencies, will be renamed the United States DOGE Service with an administrator who will report to the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles.”
President Trump also signed the following additional executive orders of relevance to federal employment and the FEHB Program —
- Initial Recessions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions, which lengthy list includes “The Presidential Memorandum of January 3, 2025 (Designation of Officials of the Office of Personnel Management [OPM] to Act as Director).’
- Regulatory Freeze pending review
- Freeze on the hiring of Federal civilian employees, to be applied throughout the executive branch
- “Heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch of Government shall, as soon as practicable, take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis, provided that the department and agency heads shall make exemptions they deem necessary.”
- Create a federal hiring plan within 120 days
The President formally nominated Scott Kupor of California to be OPM Director.
Rescission of the January 3 memorandum is understandable because the President named an OPM IT executive Charles Ezell to be acting OPM Director. Here is a link to Director Ezell’s first formal action in that role.
The House of Representatives and the Senate are in session this week for Committee business and floor voting. The Senate unanimously confirmed now former Senator Marco Rubio to be Secretary of State this evening.
The Senate committees will be holding confirmation hearings and meetings while committees in both Houses will be engaged in organizational activities. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs held a business meeting this evening on whether to confirm the President’s nominee to Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought. The Senate Budget Committee will hold a hearing on Mr. Vought’s nomination tomorrow. In the meantime, OMB Assistant Directors for Legislative Reference Matthew Vaeth is the acting OMB Director.
STAT News reports,
- “A next-generation form of chemotherapy from AstraZeneca and Daiichi Sankyo has won Food and Drug Administration authorization for a form of breast cancer, the first U.S. approval for a drug for which the companies have high expectations.
- “The FDA on Friday announced it had approved the drug, to be marketed as Datroway, for certain advanced breast cancer patients. Datroway, also called datopotamab deruxtecan, or Dato-DXd, was approved in Japan for a form of breast cancer last month, its first regulatory green light.
- “The U.S. list price for Datroway is roughly $4,900 per 100 milligram vial and the recommended dose of the drug is 6 milligrams per kilogram of patient weight every three weeks.
- “Datroway is what’s known as an antibody-drug conjugate, an emerging type of therapy that aims to deliver the powerful cancer-killing ability of chemotherapy directly to tumor cells, staving off the toxic side effects of standard chemo. AstraZeneca and Daiichi are also partnered on a top-selling ADC called Enhertu.”
MedPage Today lets us know
- An observational study of 175 health outcomes using Veterans Affairs (VA) data for nearly 2 million individuals uncovered new insights about possible risks and benefits of GLP-1 receptor agonists.
- “Over a median of 3.68 years, adults with type 2 diabetes who added a GLP-1 agent to their treatment plan had significantly decreased risks for 42 diverse outcomes, increased risks for 19 outcomes, and no association with 114 outcomes compared with usual care, reported Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, of Washington University in St. Louis, and colleagues.
- “The results may be useful for informing clinical care, enhancing pharmacovigilance, and guiding the development of mechanistic and clinical research to evaluate the broad pleiotropic effects of GLP-1 receptor agonists,” the researchers wrote in Nature Medicine.
- “GLP-1 agents “have an intricate web of various effects,” Al-Aly said in a press briefing. For example, the analysis showed that use of GLP-1 agonists was associated with a 5% risk reduction in neurocognitive disorders, driven by an 8% decreased risk of dementia and 12% lower risk for Alzheimer’s disease.
- “It’s weak, but it’s not null,” Al-Aly said about the Alzheimer’s relationship, adding that this finding “is still welcome” given the limited number of treatments for the disease.”