President Donald Trump on Friday fired five members of the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico (FOMBPR), Breitbart News can exclusively report.
A White House official informed Breitbart News that Chairman Arthur J. Gonzalez, Cameron McKenzie, Betty Rosa, Juan Sabater, and Luis Ubiñas were relieved from their positions on the board. The other 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.
On average, FOMBPR staff salaries are 1,065 percent greater than the median household income in Puerto Rico, per the official, which is reinforced by a 2017 Daily Caller report.
The report from December 2017 found that the salary budget alone for the FOMBPR board was $3 million a year for a total of 14 employees:
Budget figures obtained by The Daily Caller show a projected payroll of $3 million, which works out to an arithmetic mean of $214,000 per employee salary.
This average salary of $214,000 is Financial Oversight and Management Board is 1,065 percent of the $20,078 median annual household income in Rico.
Moreover, Robert F. Mujica Jr., previously the “budget guru” for former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), serves as the board’s executive director, per a report from far-left magazine Jacobin in 2023. He pulls a salary of $625,000 annually, a steep hike from the roughly $216,000 he made as New York’s budget chief, per the outlet.
Then-President Barack Obama’s administration appointed the seven original members of the board under the 2016 Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act. Gonzalez, a former federal bankruptcy judge in New York, was one of the original appointees, as was Biggs.
“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,” a press release from the Obama White House read at the time.
Jacobin criticized the “antidemocratic” board for operating in “secrecy” in its 2023 article:
The US territory of Puerto Rico has been bankrupt since 2016 and subject to the antidemocratic Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB) put in place by Barack Obama’s administration. Touted during the 1950s and ’60s as a beacon of democracy and economic success whose inalterable “compact” with the United States had vanquished colonialism, the island is today largely governed by a few mainland board members and a New York federal judge who control Puerto Rico’s local government.
In 2017, the board regularly shelled out millions to consultant firms, according to The New Yorker.
“For much of 2017, more than a million dollars a month went to McKinsey for ‘strategic consulting,’” wrote the New Yorker’s Sheelah Kolhatkar at the time. “Millions more have gone to other firms—many of which have political connections—to cover costs that include catering and inflated photocopying charges.”
“The old investing maxim ‘Where there is pain, there is profit’ seems to hold especially true here. The vultures profiting from Puerto Rico’s misery are unlikely to go hungry; the same can’t be said for the people who live on the island,” she added.
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