President Donald Trump fired five of the seven members of the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico (FOMBPR) on Friday, as reported exclusively by Breitbart News.
An official at the White House informed Breitbart that Chairman Arthur J. Gonzalez, Cameron McKenzie, Betty Rosa, Juan Sabater, and Luis Ubiñas were taken off the board, while the remaining two members, Andrew Biggs and John Nixon, remain in place.
“The Financial Oversight and Management Board of Puerto Rico has been run inefficiently and ineffectively by its governing members for far too long, and it’s time to restore common sense leadership,” the official said.
The official said, and a 2017 Daily Caller report supports, that the average salary of the board members is approximately $214,000, which is 10 times the median household income of $20,078 in Puerto Rico.
All of the board members were appointed by former President Barack Obama in 2016. He also appointed Robert F. Mujica Jr., previously the “budget guru” for former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), as the board's executive director at a reported salary of $625,000.
Mujica formerly made $216,000 as Cuomo's budget guru, so it was a huge jump for him as well.
“The Board is tasked with working with the people and Government of Puerto Rico to create the needed foundation for economic growth and to restore opportunity to the 3.5 million Americans of Puerto Rico,” an Obama press release read at the time.
Besides the $3 million budget for staff, the board spent north of $1 million on McKinney each month for "strategic consulting," according to a 2017 New Yorker article.
“Millions more have gone to other firms—many of which have political connections—to cover costs that include catering and inflated photocopying charges," the article said.
The far-left newspaper Jacobin noted in a critical article in 2023 that Puerto Rico has been bankrupt since 2016; in other words, the board's activities have not benefited the territory.
Democrats love to portray Republicans as profiting off the poor (by running legitimate businesses and paying employees), but how much worse is it to take hugely inflated salaries and spend tens of millions of dollars every year while doing nothing to help this nation, where many live on next to nothing?
It's unconscionable, and it happens way too often in Latin American countries where leaders routinely take all the wealth for themselves and leave the people no better off than before.
It's even worse when the American government does it to one of its own territories, which it should presumably protect and help.
Hopefully, Trump will get rid of Mujica, too, and will put in his own people who will actually improve economic conditions in Puerto Rico.
