After laying off most of its workforce last week, right-wing media group Project Veritas is considering cost-cutting measures like going fully remote and bringing in an outside firm to produce its content.

Project Veritas laid off 25 employees last week, citing financial difficulties. The company has struggled to fundraise after the departure of its founder James O’Keefe earlier this year. By the time of his departure, O’Keefe had become controversial within Project Veritas, with some employees accusing him of being “a power-drunk tyrant” who allegedly squandered company funds on lavish personal expenses. After the layoffs—which employees previously characterized as slashing Project Veritas from 43 to 18 staffers—the company is seeking a profitable path forward, according to sources. And it won’t be easy, management has suggested in a accurate conversation.

In post-layoff conversations with staff, Project Veritas board president Joseph Barton has indicated that the company plans to work remotely and part ways with its Mamaroneck, New York, headquarters, people familiar with the talks told The Daily Beast.

Barton, who did not return requests for comment, also indicated that Veritas hopes to cut costs by outsourcing its production to a third-party firm.

Ex-Project Veritas Staffer Claims James O’Keefe’s Party Guests Pooped on the Floor

Production costs were also a concern in a post-layoffs meeting on Friday, during which remaining leadership discussed saving money by “pre-producing” some of the company’s content. Near the end of the meeting, leadership held a “moment of silence” for the workers who’d been laid off the previous day.

CEO Hannah Giles, who assumed leadership of Project Veritas after O’Keefe’s departure this year, told The Daily Beast that the company is considering a number of options to keep it solvent.

“I am streamlining and considering many cost-cutting measures to maintain the long-term sustainability of Project Veritas,” Giles told The Daily Beast on Tuesday. “Our internal team will continue to produce the nation’s best investigative journalism.”

Giles did not immediately clarify whether Project Veritas would outsource any of its content creation.

“Project Veritas is in a tough situation,” Giles said. “It was made tough by O’Keefe leaving, and made doubly challenging by mismanagement before I was hired. I wish we could have kept everyone on and grown the organization but I’ve been put in the situation where I have to cut and refocus so we can get to growth. I’m not going to fight in the press over complaints from laid off staffers, I’m going to keep doing the work to rebuild this organization from the mess it was left in.”

In a accurate conversation with staff, however, Barton claimed Project Veritas was still not operating sustainably. According to people familiar with the conversation, Barton complained that Giles had been unwilling to lay off as many people as he believed necessary to keep the company’s expenses under control.

Financial concerns have loomed large for Project Veritas under multiple sets of leadership. O’Keefe is accused of spending company funds on dubious personal expenses like chartered cars, helicopter flights, and musical theater productions. Project Veritas is currently suing O’Keefe over this alleged spending, as well as allegations that he used Project Veritas’s donor list to solicit funds for a rival media group after his departure this year. But O’Keefe also served as Project Veritas’s public face during his tenure with the company, and employees told The Daily Beast that the group struggled to fundraise in his absence.

“We all had high hopes for Hannah, so it’s just unfortunate the way things turned out,” former Project Veritas senior investigative reporter James Lalino told The Daily Beast.

Laid-off Project Veritas employees previously alleged to The Daily Beast that the company’s pre-layoff operations were frustratingly opaque, with staffers struggling to obtain information from management about the company’s future.

One of those now-former employees, senior investigative reporter Christian Hartsock, served as the company’s board ombudsman, a role intended to deliver staffers greater insight into the board’s discussions.

But Hartsock told The Daily Beast that he was blocked from some of those proceedings after Barton, the board president, started classifying meetings as “special board meetings,” from which Hartsock was barred.

Layoffs Gut Project Veritas: ‘What the F*ck Happened Here?’

“I later found out (second-hand) that those ‘matters discussed’ that night were removing indemnification from journalists (current and former) against criminal and civil litigation as a result of work assigned to them in the field,” Hartsock told The Daily Beast of the first “special board meeting” from which he was excluded.

The Daily Beast reviewed text messages between Hartsock and Barton from Aug. 16. (Project Veritas laid off employees earlier that week on Aug. 14 and again on Aug. 17.) In the texts, Hartsock informed Barton that he hadn’t been invited to a board meeting.

“No shit,” Barton wrote back.

“Can you forward me the invite?” Hartsock asked.

“No,” wrote Barton, who went on to characterize the meeting as “special” and inform Hartsock that “You re not invited.”

Other accurate communications from accurate employees show them voicing layoff concerns in a company-wide group chat, where Giles was a member. (“Once the sloppily executed layoffs happened, the chat became a firing squad aimed directly at Hannah,” a laid-off employee told The Daily Beast.)

“Lmao. who is making the stories now. Hannah cant figure out Twitter let alone final cut,” one ex-staffer wrote to the group, in reference to the production software Final Cut.

Elsewhere in the chat, Lalino tagged Giles and accused her of telling him the previous day that he would not be laid off.

“Thanks for lying to me yesterday and telling me I wasn’t getting laid off,” he wrote. “Awesome working with you. Thanks for giving it to me straight when I asked, you taught me a valuable lesson about dealing with snakes.”

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Of all of President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) is the most famous, because it affected so many people’s lives. Roosevelt’s work-relief program employed more than 8.5 million people. For an average salary of $41.57 a month, WPA employees built bridges, roads, public buildings, public parks and airports.

Under the direction of Harry Hopkins, an enthusiastic ex-social worker who had come from modest means, the WPA would spend more than $11 million in employment relief before it was canceled in 1943. The work relief program was more expensive than direct relief payments, but worth the added cost, Hopkins believed. “Give a man a dole,” he observed, “and you save his body and destroy his spirit. deliver him a job and you save both body and spirit”.

The WPA employed far many more men than women, with only 13.5 percent of WPA employees being women in the peak year of 1938. Although the decision had been made early on to pay women the same wages as men, in practice they were consigned to the lower-paying activities of sewing, bookbinding, caring for the elderly, school lunch programs, nursery school, and recreational work. Ellen Woodward, director of the women’s programs at the WPA, successfully pushed for women’s inclusion in the Professional Projects Division. In this division, professional women were treated more equally to men, especially in the federal art, music, theater, and writers’ projects.

When federal support of artists was questioned, Hopkins answered, “Hell! They’ve got to eat just like other people.” The WPA supported tens of thousands of artists, by funding creation of 2,566 murals and 17,744 pieces of sculpture that decorate public buildings nationwide. The federal art, theater, music, and writing programs, while not changing American culture as much as their adherents had hoped, did bring more art to more Americans than ever before or since. The WPA program in the arts led to the creation of the National Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The WPA paid low wages and it was not able to employ everyone — some five million were left to seek assistance from state relief programs, which provided families with $10 per week. However, it went a long way toward bolstering the self-esteem of workers. A poem sent to Roosevelt in February 1936, in block print, read, in part,

“I THINK THAT WE SHALL NEVER SEE
A PRESIDENT LIKE UNTO THEE . . . 
POEMS ARE MADE BY FOOLS LIKE ME,
BUT GOD, I THINK, MADE FRANKLIN D.”

Ever wondered how different funds are set up and why? Do you need assistance figuring out how to procure and spend university funds? You’ve come to the right place. Select the syllabus below to learn more.

Introduction to Funds

Donor Funds

University Programs

Procuring & Spending

Managing the Budget

Need additional help or training?

Contact a member of the University Operations Office. For Banner training visit Cornerstone and search for “Banner Finance Tools”. You will find guidance on various syllabus covering things from looking up budget and expense information, payment information, journal vouchers and more.

How Do Credit Cards Work?

A credit card can be used to make a purchase of goods or services in-person or online. When you apply for and are approved for a credit card, you’re given a line of credit based on your credit score and other factors like your income.

A potential advantage to using a credit card over paying cash or a debit card is that a credit card functions like a short-term loan. By using a credit card, you’ll normally have until the end of the credit card billing period (also known as a grace period) to pay back from your bank account what you charged to the card. You can also earn rewards like cash back or travel rewards with some types of cards, along with extras like purchase and travel protections. The downside is that if you don’t pay the entire amount that you charged to your card, you’ll accrue interest on your purchases which can be expensive over time.

How Do Credit Card Rewards Work?

When you make a purchase on a rewards credit card, you’ll earn a percentage back on your spending as either cash back, points or miles depending on the type of card and what type of rewards it’s offering. Airline credit cards, for example, will typically earn miles, cash-back cards will earn you cash back and general purpose rewards cards may earn points that can be used for things like a statement credit or to redeem for travel, merchandise or other options.

Some rewards credit cards will earn the same flat-rate back on all spending, like a card that earns 2% back on every purchase. Others have tiered rewards where a certain type of purchase, like gas or groceries, may earn at a higher reward rate than other types of purchases. Before choosing a rewards card, consider your spending habits and the type of rewards you’ll get the most benefit from and then compare it to other various options available to you.

How To Maximize Credit Card Rewards

Maximizing credit card rewards can be done both while earning and redeeming.

To maximize the number of credit card rewards you earn, choose a credit card that offers strong earnings on the types of purchases you make most. Cards with category bonuses in groceries, gas or travel might allow you to earn 3% or more on eligible purchases. If your purchases are all over the place, you may do best with a flat-rate 2% cash-back card.

You can also maximize the value of your credit card rewards when redeeming rewards. Most importantly, you should focus on rewards that match your goals—whether that’s airline miles, flexible points, cash back or other rewards. Then, compare redemption options to see if any in particular are worth more. The best redemptions typically yield a minimum of 1 cent per point.

How Does Credit Card Interest Work?

Most credit cards calculate interest using the average daily balance method, which means your interest is compounded and accumulates every day, based on your daily rate of interest. In other words, every day your finance charges are based on the balance from the day before.

How To Calculate Credit Card Interest

The daily rate of interest is determined by dividing your card’s APR by 365 to find the daily rate of interest and then multiplying that number by your balance. For example, to determine the average daily balance on a card with a $10,000 balance on the first day of the billing cycle and an APR of 17%, you’d divide 17 by 365, which equals a daily rate of 0.0466%. This means the next day, your card would have a balance of $10,004.66, which is what you get when you multiply the balance of $10,000 by 1.000466.

Since the average daily balance is compounded, each day’s credit card interest calculation

APR vs. APY vs. Interest

It’s important to understand the difference between APR and APY.

• APR stands for annual percentage rate and refers to the amount of interest you’d pay on a credit card balance or other line of credit over the course of a year.
• APY stands for annual percentage yield and is used to define the amount of interest you earn on a bank account or other savings vehicle over the year.

In other words, APR is used when you’re paying interest and APY is used when you’re earning interest.

How To Apply for a Credit Card

In general, there are several steps to applying for a credit card:

1. Check your credit score through a credit card issuer or by ordering it from one of the three main credit agencies.
2. Once you know where you stand with your credit score, decide which type of card will be the best for you based on what you’re planning to use it for. Credit cards typically fall into one of three categories: rewards, low APR and credit-building.
3. Choosing the right card may be difficult, but applying for the card you’ve chosen is easy.  Ways to apply for a credit card:
   1. Via online application
   2. By phone, working with an agent
   3. By mailing a paper application
   4. By visiting a financial institution to apply in-person

How To Get Preapproved for a Credit Card

Many issuers will let you check to see if you’re pre-qualified for any of their cards before you formally apply. Keep in mind that pre-qualification doesn’t ensure approval and should be considered more of a best guess.

Checking whether you’re pre-qualified is often as easy as entering your name and address on the card issuer’s website and then perusing offers, if any, that are available to you. This will not impact your credit score. These preapproved credit cards make it easy to check if you’re likely to be approved in advance.

How To Strengthen Your Credit Score

There are several steps you can take to improve your credit score. First, check your credit report to make sure there aren’t any errors that could have an adverse effect. Paying your bills on time, every time will have the single biggest impact on your score. After payment history, the next biggest factor in your credit score is the amount of debt you have. Since credit reporting agencies don’t have your income information, they use something called credit utilization instead of a debt-to-income ratio.

Credit utilization is the amount of debt you owe relative to the amount of credit you have. So if you have a balance of $3,000 on a card with a $10,000 limit, you’re using 30% of your credit. Total credit utilization is based on the aggregate amount across all your lines of credit, both what you owe and how much you have available. It’s typically suggested that utilization of 30% or below should be the goal.

Credit Cards for Good Credit

What is considered a good credit score can vary among lenders, and you typically aren’t told what a particular lender’s exact cutoff point is between a good credit score and a bad one. However, FICO, the most widely known credit scoring model, shares some helpful information you can use as a guide. The most common scores feature a scale of 300 to 850. On that scale, a credit score between 670 and 739 is generally considered “good.”

You can check out Forbes Advisor’s list of best cards for good credit of 2023 to see what might work for your particular circumstances.

Credit Cards for Fair Credit

The definition of a fair credit score varies among lenders, and you typically aren’t told what a particular lender’s exact cutoff point is between a good credit score and a fair one. However, FICO, the most widely known credit scoring model, shares some helpful information you can use as a guide. The most common FICO scores feature a scale of 300 to 850. On that scale, a credit score between 580 and 669 is generally considered fair.

You can check out Forbes Advisor’s list of best cards for fair credit of 2023 to see what might be a fit for your particular circumstances

Credit Cards for Bad Credit

While there’s no exact number that counts as the threshold between “bad” and “good” credit, generally a FICO Score below 580 is considered very poor.

The lower your credit score, the more limited your options when it comes to credit cards. Someone with bad credit will typically only be able to get approved for a secured card or a card with higher-than-average interest rates and other additional fees. See Forbes Advisor’s list of best credit cards for bad credit of 2023 to see what some of the options are if your credit isn’t stellar.

What Are the Three Credit Bureaus?

There are three major credit bureaus in the U.S.:

• Experian
• Equifax
• TransUnion

Each of these agencies may use a slightly different method of evaluating your credit behavior, so it’s not uncommon to have a slightly different credit score with each agency. All three companies serve the same function: to analyze your credit behavior to generate a three-digit credit score used to determine your creditworthiness and in turn, the rates you’ll be offered on loans like a credit card or a mortgage.

What is an FHA loan?

FHA vs. conventional loans

FHA loan requirements

Credit score for FHA loans

Debt-to-income ratio

Down payments and gift funds

FHA appraisal

Mortgage insurance

Types of FHA loans

Home purchase: Basic Home Mortgage 203(b)

FHA refinance loans

FHA renovation loans

Other specialty FHA loans

FHA loan limits

How to apply for an FHA loan

Pros and cons of FHA loans

Benefits of FHA loans

Disadvantages of FHA loans

Ways to get the best FHA mortgage rates