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Trump Targets Two Critics, Accuses Them of Treason

By dianeravitch
April 10, 2025 //
11

In his vendetta against law firms who represented his opponents, universities whose high standards offend him, and anyone who dared to stand up to his lies, Trump has selected two former government employees for retribution. These actions are typical of dictators. Trump is wannabe dictator. He certainly aspires to be a full-fledged fascist. He has a compliant Departnent of Justice. Attorney General Pam Bondi thinks she works for Trump, not the people of the United States.

The blog SpyTalk is written by Jeff Stein.

He writes:

President Trump on Wednesday signed an executive ordering the Justice Department to investigate two prominent former senior Homeland Security officials, saying they could be guilty of “treason” because of their criticism of him. 

Trump also stripped Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs of their security clearances, although it was not clear if they maintained any. The order “also suspends any active security clearance held by individuals at entities associated with Taylor, including the University of Pennsylvania,” where Taylor is an adjunct professor, “pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest.”

Likewise, the order also suspends security clearances held by associates of Krebs at SentinelOne, a California-based cyber security firm, where he is currently employed as the company’s chief intelligence and public policy officer.

Taylor, who served as the chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly during the first Trump administration, drew Trump’s wrath for writing a blistering, New York Times Op-ed, titled, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration“, and later a book, A Warning, both under the pen name “Anonymous,” detailing his concerns about the president’s policies. The Op-ed unleashed a furious media campaign to identify him. After he surfaced in October 2020, he became a prominent TV critic of Trump 

“You can’t have that happen,” Trump said as he signed the executive order, adding, “I think he’s guilty of treason if you want to know the truth, but we’ll find out.” 

The executive order called Taylor “a bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his government position, prioritizing his own ambition, personal notoriety, and monetary gain over fidelity to his constitutional oath.”

Taylor responded on X (formerly Twitter): “I said this would happen. Dissent isn’t unlawful. It certainly isn’t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path. Never has a man so inelegantly proved another man’s point.”…

It’s almost funny to see Trump criticize anyone for failure to be faithful to their “constitutional oath,” since he has violated his own constitutional oath on a daily basis.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Injustice, Trump

Washington Post: Social Security Facing Chaos After DOGE Cuts

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2025 //
6

What is Elon Musk’s agenda? His DOGE teams are wreaking havoc across the federal government. His claims of saving “billions” are making government inefficient. Thousands of researchers, scientists, and essential personnel have been fired. Is he working to destroy our government? Or is he settting up a scenario of failure as a prelude to privatization?

The Washington Post reported on chaos at the Social Security Administratuin:

Retirees and disabled people are facing chronic website outages and other access problems as they attempt to log in to their online Social Security accounts, even as they are being directed to do more of their business with the agency online.

The website has crashed repeatedly in recent weeks, with outages lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to almost a day, according to six current and former officials with knowledge of the issues. Even when the site is back online, many customers have not been able to sign in to their accounts — or have logged in only to find information missing. For others, access to the system has been slow, requiring repeated tries to get in.

The problems come as the Trump administration’s cost-cutting team, led by Elon Musk, has imposed a downsizing that’s led to7,000 job cuts and is preparing to push out thousands more employees at an agency that serves 73 million Americans. The new demands from Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service include a 50 percent cut to the technology division responsible for the website and other electronic access.

Many of the network outages appear to be caused by an expanded fraud check system imposed by the DOGE team, current and former officials said. The technology staff did not test the new software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, these officials said.

The technology issues have been particularly alarming for some of the most vulnerable Social Security customers. For almost two days last week, for example, many of the 7.4 million adults and children receiving monthly benefits under the anti-poverty program known as Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, confronted a jarring message that claimed they were “currently not receiving payments,” agency officials acknowledged in an internal email to staff.

The error messages set off widespread panic until recipients discovered that their monthly checks had still been deposited in their bank accounts. Another breakdown disabled the SSI system for much of the day on Friday, prompting claims staff to cancel appointments because they could not enter new disability claims in the system and blocking some already receiving benefits from gaining access to their accounts.

“Social Security’s response has been, ‘Oops,’” said Darcy Milburn, director of Social Security and health-care policy at the Arc, a national nonprofit that advocates for people with disabilities. The group fielded dozens of calls last week from nervous clients who saw the inaccurate message and assumed their monthly check, usually paid on the first of the month, would not arrive.

“It’s woefully insufficient when we’re talking about a government agency that’s holding someone’s lifeline in their hands,” Milburn said.

The disruptions are occurring as acting commissioner Leland Dudek and the DOGE team move to lay off large swaths of the workforce in a new phase of downsizing. Thousands of employees already have been pushed out — many in customer-facing roles, others with expertise in the agency’s cumbersome technology systems. At least 800 of the 3,000 employees left in the division that manages all of the Social Security databases face layoffs, a senior official said on Friday. The newly named chief information officer, Scott Coulter, a Musk-aligned private equity analyst, has demanded a cut of 50 percent, the official said.

The network outages are one in a cascade of blows to customer service that also have hobbled phone systems and field office operations as the workforce shrinks.

A surge in visitors to the website is overwhelming the computer system as customers — nervous that the rapid changes at the agency will compromise their benefits — download their benefit and earnings statements and attempt to file claims. President Donald Trump has said that his administration will not reduce Social Security benefits.

The chaos could accelerate starting April 14, when new identification measures are set to take effect that will require millions of customers applying for benefits to authenticate their identity online, part of the administration’s campaign to root out allegedly fraudulent claims.

“We’re just spiking like crazy,” said one senior official, who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about agency operations. “It’s people who are terrified that DOGE is messing with our systems. It’s the sheer massive volume of freaked-out people.”

The Social Security press office said in a statement that officials are “actively investigating the root cause” of the incidents, which they called “brief disruptions” averaging about 20 minutes each with the exception of the SSI error message. But on several occasions, including during an outage last Monday, customers were shut out of the website for hours. The system was back online last Monday after two hours, but lingering issues lasted through the afternoon while all backlogged queries were processed, current and former officials said. And a system upgrade on a Saturday in late March took several hours longer than anticipated and knocked out the network.

Three times in a recent 10-day stretch, the online systems the field office staff rely on to serve the public have crashed, said one employee in an Indiana office.

The downed programs included tools employees use to schedule visits, to see who has booked an appointment and to check who has arrived, the employee said. It is unheard-of for the system to fail this often, and each outage has led to chaos, they said.

Suddenly forced offline as they were taking claims, the staff members scribbled down clients’ information, then had to wait until later to load it into the computer, doubling or tripling the amount of time and work involved, the employee said.

In other instances, managers or security guards improvised a solution after the online scheduling system failed, the employee said. They walked out to the reception area, wrote down numbers on paper slips and started handing them out to people waiting in line.

The network crashes appear to be caused by an expansion initiated by the Trump team of an existing contract with a credit-reporting agency that tracks names, addresses and other personal information to verify customers’ identities. The enhanced fraud checks are now done earlier in the claims process and have resulted in a boost to the volume of customers who must pass the checks.

But the technology staff did not test the software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, current and former officials said. Connectivity issues and bugs with the expanded system have caused the portal that manages log-ins and authentication for many Social Security applications to go down, officials said.

At a weekly operations meeting on March 28 that was made public last week, Wayne Lemon, deputy chief information officer for infrastructure and IT operations, acknowledged the network crashes and said, “While they’ve been brief, we prefer no outages.” He said the outages were under investigation and may involve “challenges we’ve experienced with a number of partners.” Part of the problem may be that the outages have occurred during “high volume use of the network.”

“Is there a spike in demand or something in the environment causing the issues?” Lemon said.

Customers, meanwhile, are growing more frustrated.………..

What readers are saying

The comments express strong concerns about the recent IT staff cuts and website outages at the Social Security Administration, suggesting these actions are deliberate attempts to undermine the system. Many commenters believe this is part of a broader strategy to privatize Social Security.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Health, Hoax, Ignorance, Musk, Elon, Science, Stupid, Trump

Gary Legum: Elon Musk Is Screwing Up Social Security

By dianeravitch
April 7, 2025 //
11

Social Security is called the third rail of American politics. The third rail is the one you never touch because it will electrocute you. millions of retirees will want your scalp. Many have no other income.

But Elon Musk is fearless. He thinks he knows how to “fix” Social Security. Not only is he sure that billions are wasted on dead people but now he thinks the computer code must be rewritten.

Gary Legum of Wonkette explains how Musk is touching the third rail:

Having already fucked up the Social Security Administration six ways from Sunday with staff cuts and new ID requirements and field office closures, the incels of the ironically named Department of Government Efficiency are reportedly plotting one more big step in their rampage: They are planning to rewrite the SSA’s entire computer codebase in a more modern programming language. And they plan to have this project completed in “a few months.”

Oh guess what, it’s Saturday morning (Gary wrote this post Friday afternoon) and the Social Security website is already down.

It has been a long time since we had a database/computer technology-adjacent job, but we know enough to understand that migrating a huge system with a reported 60 million lines of code is not something that happens that quickly. This is a years-long sort of job, one that will take the efforts of hundreds, if not thousands, of people. It’s a delicate undertaking, and the vampires of DOGE have proven themselves anything but delicate.

Of course, they have also proven that they genuinely don’t give a shit if you wind up sleeping under a railroad trestle after their hacky changes leave you listed as “dead” in Social Security’s databases, so there is one more reason to not trust them if you needed one.

So, we hope you current Social Security recipients enjoyed getting your benefit checks or your benefit direct deposits on time! Hell, we hope you enjoyed getting them, period. Because there is an excellent chance all that is about to be deader than Elon Musk’s soul.

Wired reports on the new plan in a frightening new story with the words “System Collapse” prominently displayed in the title. It all reads as stupid as it sounds. The basic gist is that SSA systems still run on COBOL, a common, business-oriented programming language that has been around since the 1950s. COBOL has lasted this long for a variety of reasons, but a big one is that it still works really well. Programmers at the SSA still actively work with it despite the existence of newer, more modern programming languages for a few reasons, one of which is that it is very robust. So robust, in fact, that quite a few federal government systems still run on it.

The federal government tends to lag way behind in modernizing the technology that bureaucrats use to keep the country running. But as the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

And DOGE has already proven that it is unfamiliar with COBOL conventions, as Wired already explained in an earlier story about why, contra Musk’s band of Nazi virgins, there were not actually millions of Social Security checks going out to 150-year-olds.

This is one system you do not want to screw up until you are absolutely, positively sure any replacement system is up and chugging along. The computers at Social Security are paying benefits to 65 million Americans every month. For many of them, this is their only source of income. Fuck it up, and people, especially the elderly, can’t pay rent or buy food. Their existence is already precarious enough.

Yet that is likely to be the result when the weasels of DOGE (we very much appreciate the Wired locution referring to it as “the so-called Department of Government Efficiency,” as it is anything but that) get through here.

How enormous an undertaking is it to move the SSA off of COBOL? Let Wired tell you:

In order to migrate all COBOL code into a more modern language within a few months, DOGE would likely need to employ some form of generative artificial intelligence to help translate the millions of lines of code, sources tell WIRED. “DOGE thinks if they can say they got rid of all the COBOL in months then their way is the right way and we all just suck for not breaking shit,” says the SSA technologist.

Lot of problems with that, starting with the fact that even generative AI code still has to be checked for errors. And if it’s wrong, someone still has to manually fix it. What do you think the chances are that DOGE will thoroughly test any changes made by either humans or a technology capable of about the same level of thought as a blender? We’re not talking about Jarvis from the Iron Man movies, we’re talking about Large Language Models of code trained on other code written by humans that likely contains plenty of its own errors. The possibilities for disaster are infinite.

DOGE would also need to develop tests to ensure the new system’s outputs match the previous one. It would be difficult to resolve all of the possible edge cases over the course of several years, let alone months, adds the SSA technologist.

This is just basic quality assurance testing. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned about the sorts of dweebs hired by Elon Musk — and by Donald Trump for that matter, he’s still allegedly the president — is that they simply shrug when something breaks before moving along to the last thing. Careless people smashing things up and then leaving the mess in their wakes for others to clean up, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once memorably said of another generation of arrogant, over-moneyed chucklefucks.

Wags online are suggesting that breaking Social Security is the entire point. Conservatives have long wanted to end the program. But too many people rely on it, so cuts are impossible to get through Congress. It’s the infamous third rail of American politics.

If, on the other hand, Social Security broke because a bunch of nerds broke it, and then nobody could get hold of anyone at the agency to help sort out why their measly $2,000 check hasn’t come through this month because DOGE shut down all phone help lines and closed many field offices that people could otherwise have gone to, well, that’s just an act of God that can’t be helped. Shrug and move on to the next thing, the Silicon Valley ethos.

We doubt it is one reason more than another. Sure, ending Social Security through the back door would fulfill a long-term goal of the Right. It could also be that the DOGE guys really are so high on themselves that they look at government programmers and think, What a bunch of dinosaurs! Get out of the way, old people, and let us show you how this shit gets done.

Well, we weren’t going to be able to retire for awhile anyway. Now maybe we’ll just work until we drop dead under that railroad trestle where we’ll spend our dotage.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Ignorance, Musk, Elon, Stupid, Technology

Washington Post: Trump and RFK Jr. Are Destroying Public Health Agencies

By dianeravitch
April 6, 2025 //
4

The Washington Post editorial board warned that Robert Kennedy’s deep cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services will damage the economy. They will also damage the nation’s health. Kennedy is not laying off paper-pushing bureaucrats. He is firing scientists and closing divisions working on drugs and cures for dangerous diseases and conditions.

The editorial board wrote:

The market took no time to weigh in on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s mass layoffs at the nation’s health agencies. As Health and Human Services employees arrived to work on Tuesday to discover their badges no longer worked, stock prices for health-care and biotech companies plunged. By the end of the day, the S&P’s index for the pharmaceutical industry had dropped 4 percent.

This should be a warning to the new HHS secretary and President Donald Trump: The employees of these institutions are as essential to the U.S. economy as they are to public health.

HHS officials have defended their planned 25 percent reduction in force (affecting about 20,000 employees) as a means to achieve efficiency. They claim it will save taxpayers about $1.8 billion annually. But this amount — minuscule relative to the multitrillion-dollar federal budget — could be wiped out by the economic damage that comes from discarding broad institutional knowledge.

The Food and Drug Administration, for instance, is slated to shed 3,500 staffers, or about 19 percent of its workforce. Among those who received layoff notices on Tuesday were many experts who assist with reviews at the Office of New Drugs. The director of this office, Peter Stein, resigned after being reassigned to patient affairs. Other top leaders have also been pushed out, including Hilary Marston, the FDA’s chief medical officer, and Peter Marks, its highest-ranking vaccine scientist.

HHS insists these layoffs will not weaken the agency’s core functions, especially drug approvals — but given how many high-level positions now sit vacant, this is hard to believe. Scott Gottlieb, who was FDA commissioner during Trump’s first term, said on X that the “barrage” threatens to bring “frustrating delays for American consumers, particularly affecting rare diseases and areas of significant unmet medical need.”

The National Institutes of Health, a sturdy engine of biomedical innovation, also saw many of its leaders defenestrated. Directors of at least four of the 27 institutes that make up the agency were removed from their posts, including Jeanne Marrazzo, the country’s most senior infectious-diseases official.

Meanwhile, hundreds of other layoffs at the agency’s research centers threaten to diminish its scientific prowess. The National Human Genome Research Institute, for one, which has made countless discoveries about the roles genes play in diseases, lost dozens of staffers as well as its acting chief, Vence L. Bonham Jr., who was installed just last month.

This turmoil comes amid the administration’s attempt to slash funding that NIH provides to outside research institutions. The administration seems not to care about U.S. investments in science that have been essential to building and maintaining a strong economy.

Equally concerning is what these layoffs could mean for public health. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is set to lose 2,400 workers (an 18 percent reduction in staff), HHS cost-cutters have erased entire offices, including those dedicated to curbing HIV, tuberculosis, tobacco use, lead poisoning, substance abuse, birth defects and many other health threats. Kennedy — who also laid off many of the department’s communications staffers — has provided little rationale for any of these cuts. But if his goal is to save money, this is the wrong strategy. By keeping health-care costs down, public health programs often bring substantial returns on investment.

What makes these risky cuts especially baffling is that they’re being made only a few years after the covid-19 pandemic taught Americans about the need for a strong public health system, and amid the worst domestic measles outbreak in years. Bird flu also has begun spreading to humans — yet among those laid off were nearly all of the leading staffers at the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, which is assisting the government with its bird flu response.

It’s true that HHS’s vast bureaucracy has long needed serious — even radical — reforms to eliminate waste and make its agencies more effective. The CDC often acted clumsily during the pandemic and struggled to communicate effectively with the public. And although the FDA was streamlined during the Biden administration, it could use innovative ideas to energize its food division — perhaps by making it a stand-alone agency.

But the job cuts this week do not amount to efficient reform. The Trump administration has shown great skill at “moving fast and breaking things,” to borrow the motto used by chief bureaucracy-smasher Elon Musk. But Trump and Kennedy should remember, too, that when “you break it, you buy it.” The damage they do to the country’s public health and biomedical research infrastructure is their responsibility, and they will bear the political consequences.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Disruption, Extremism, Funding, Health, Science, Stupid, Trump

Olga Lautman: Trump Cancels Efforts to Save Kidnapped Children of Ukraine

By dianeravitch
April 5, 2025 //
2

Olga Lautman keeps a close watch on Trump’s tyranny and his allegiance to Putin. She is especially appalled by his decision to abandon the thousands of Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russian troops and transported to Russia. Trump doesn’t care. Anything to make Vladimir happy.

Lautman writes:

For years, the world watched as Russia systematically kidnapped tens of thousands of Ukrainian children, erasing their identities and forcing them into Russian families. This isn’t just a war crime—it’s genocide in real time.

Now, Trump’s regime is actively helping Russia cover up this genocide. His State Department quietly terminated a crucial contract that was facilitating the transfer of evidence on Russia’s mass abduction of Ukrainian children to European law enforcement, according to The New Republic.

This decision cripples efforts to track and recover abducted children, making it harder to hold Russia accountable for what international courts have already labeled a war crime. By cutting off this support, Trump’s regime is not just abandoning Ukraine—they are actively obstructing justice.

This isn’t just inaction—it’s complicity in one of the most horrific acts of genocide and war crimes.

Russia’s War Crime: The Mass Kidnapping of Ukrainian Children

Under Putin’s direct orders, at least 20,000 Ukrainian children—though the real number may be much higher—have been stolen from Ukraine and transported to Russia. Many have been ripped from orphanages and hospitals in occupied territories, while others—despite having living relatives—have been abducted and placed in “re-education” camps designed to erase their Ukrainian identity. These children are tortured, subjected to psychological reprogramming, and stripped of their Ukrainian heritage, culture, and language. They are then forcibly granted Russian citizenship and placed with Russian families as part of an illegal state-run program aimed at assimilating them into Russian society and erasing their Ukrainian identity forever.

Russia does not even attempt to hide these hideous crimes. Grigory Karasin, head of the international committee in Russia’s upper house of parliament, openly boasted that 700,000 children from illegally occupied territories in Ukraine have been taken to Russia. The sheer scale of this state-sponsored mass abduction is staggering—one of the largest forced deportations of children in modern history. This is not just a war crime— it is clear evidence of Russia’s genocidal intent to erase Ukrainian identity by targeting children, severing them from their families, their culture, and their homeland.

The International Criminal Court recognized this as a war crime as investigations continue. In March 2023, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights, for the “unlawful deportation and forced transfer of Ukrainian children.” This systematic abduction is not just a violation of international law—it is genocide. Russia is not merely stealing children but destroying Ukraine’s future by erasing an entire generation.

And now, Trump, Musk, and Rubio are actively helping Russia cover up the genocide and war crimes.

Trump’s State Department Blocks Efforts to Track Abducted Ukrainian Children

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, the U.S. State Department funded a Yale research team that tracked kidnapped Ukrainian children using satellite imagery and open-source intelligence. Their work was crucial in exposing Russia’s state-run program of forced deportation and illegal adoption, providing undeniable evidence of war crimes committed against Ukrainian children.

Now, that work is under threat. Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has canceled the program, cutting off funding and blocking the transfer of key evidence to European law enforcement. Without this support, it will be significantly harder to locate and rescue kidnapped children, hold Russia accountable for genocide and war crimes, and ensure that stolen children are returned to Ukraine.

The Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale worked with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Bring Kids Back UA campaign, which has helped track and locate hundreds of abducted children, successfully repatriating approximately 1,240 so far. With funding cut off, these efforts are now at risk.

Genocide and War Crimes: What’s at Stake

Under the Genocide Convention, the forced deportation and assimilation of children meets the legal definition of genocide, as it involves forcibly transferring children from one group to another with the intent to erase their identity, conducting mass deportations under state policy, and destroying cultural, linguistic, and familial ties. The International Criminal Court has already taken action by issuing arrest warrants, but its ability to prosecute and hold Russia accountable depends on cooperation from governments like the United States.

Instead of aiding these efforts, Trump is actively sabotaging them, cutting off crucial funding for investigations and making it harder to track abducted children and bring perpetrators to justice. Even the U.S. Congress, led by Rep. Susan Wild (D-PA-7), recognizing the horror of this crime, overwhelmingly passed a resolution in 2024 condemning Russia’s abduction and forced transfer of Ukrainian children. 

Yet, Trump’s regime is doing the opposite—helping obstruct justice while aligning itself with Russia’s war crimes.

Trump’s Loyalty to Moscow

This isn’t an isolated incident—it’s part of Trump’s broader fealty to the Kremlin and his regime’s Russia-aligned policies. From cutting off military aid to amplifying Kremlin propaganda, Trump continues to systematically weaken Ukraine’s ability to defend itself while strengthening Russia’s position. Every move he makes advances Russia’s strategic goals, further undermining Ukraine’s sovereignty and the West’s ability to hold Russia accountable.

We all saw as JD Vance ambushed Zelensky in the Oval Office meant to send a clear message that the U.S. is no longer a reliable partner. Trump echoes Kremlin propaganda at every opportunity, falsely branding Zelensky a “dictator” and insisting that Ukraine must hold elections immediately—a demand that directly serves Russia’s interests, as Moscow has repeatedly attempted to assassinate Zelensky and would exploit an election to further destabilize Ukraine.

Trump’s so-called “peace plan” is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to force Ukraine into surrender, as he insists that Kyiv must “negotiate”—a demand that would strip Ukraine of its sovereignty and hand Putin exactly what he wants. 

Meanwhile, Trump’s State Department is actively obstructing efforts to hold Russia accountable for war crimes, cutting off support for investigations into the kidnapping and forced deportation of Ukrainian children. At every turn, Trump is working to weaken Ukraine, embolden Russia, and dismantle any accountability for Russia’s crimes—all while seeking to reestablish financial deals with Moscow and prioritizing his personal and political interests.

As part of carrying out Russia’s agenda, Trump is also attacking NATO and attempting to dismantle alliances that have kept America safe, further isolating the U.S. while handing Putin exactly what he wants.

What Can We Do?

We cannot stay silent while the U.S. government helps Russia cover up genocide. And if Trump is willing to excuse war crimes against children, what won’t he justify?

Please call your members of Congress and demand answers. Ask them why the State Department cut funding for tracking abducted Ukrainian children and why the U.S. is turning its back on accountability for Russian war crimes. 

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Cruelty, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, International, Trump

Immigrant Women in ICE Detention Endure “Hell on Earth”

By dianeravitch
April 4, 2025 //
3

Lauren Villagran of USA Today wrote about the inhumane conditions for women in an ICE detention center called Krome. Krome is one of about 130 such centers around the country. It is managed by a for-profit company called Akima Infrastructure Protection, which has a contract for $685 million. Given the horrible living conditions, DOGE and Musk might want to check out waste, fraud, and abuse. We taxpayers are paying a lot for such a tawdry facility.

Villagran writes.

Immigrant women say they were held “like animals” in ICE detention and subjected to conditions so extreme they feared for their lives.

Chained for hours on a prison bus without access to food, water or a toilet. Told by guards to urinate on the floor. Held “like sardines in a jar,” as many as 27 women in a small holding cell. Sleeping on a concrete floor. Getting one three-minute shower over three or four days in custody.

“We smelled worse than animals,” one detainee said. “More girls were coming every day. We were screaming, begging them, ‘You can’t let them come.’ They didn’t have space.”

Four women were held in February at the Krome North Processing Center in Miami – a detention center reserved for men. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took the women into custody on alleged immigration violations, but none has a criminal background, according to a review of law enforcement records. They shared their experiences with USA TODAY on condition of anonymity, fearing retaliation by the government because they are still detained.

The allegations come after two men at Krome died in custody on Jan. 23 and Feb. 20.

USA TODAY provided ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, with a detailed list of the allegations on March 11. A day after publication, on March 24, an ICE spokesperson responded with an emailed statement saying the agency can’t substantiate specific allegations without the names of the individuals.

“ICE takes its commitment to promoting safe, secure, humane environments for those in our custody very seriously,” the statement said. “These allegations are not in keeping with ICE policies, practices and standards of care.”

The government’s own investigators have repeatedly found serious problems in immigration detention centers around the country. The problems have persisted through Democrat and Republican administrations and range from fatal medical neglect to improper use of force.

Last year, a report on unannounced inspections at 17 detention centers from 2020 to 2023 – bridging the Trump and Biden administrations – found that “regardless of time, location, detainee population and facility type, ICE and facility staff have struggled to comply with aspects of detention standards.”

But the women’s allegations at Krome, which was one of the 17 centers reviewed in the report, suggest detention conditions have deteriorated rapidly as the new Trump administration works to deliver on the president’s promises for tougher immigration enforcement.

ICE reported holding 46,269 people in custody in mid-March, well above the agency’s detention capacity of 41,500 beds. Immigration detention is “non-punitive,” according to ICE policy, in recognition that most immigration violations are civil, not criminal.

Mich González, an immigration attorney representing the family of the Ukrainian man who died Feb. 20 in Krome custody, visits the facility regularly to meet with clients. The guards there “are overwhelmed,” he said.

“Guards themselves have made those comments to us: ‘It shouldn’t be like this,'” said González, founding partner of Sanctuary of the South.

The shift from a “flexible” immigration policy to a “very aggressive” one means “the system simply can’t process all of these people,” said Miami-based immigration attorney Nenad Milosevic.

Krome is overwhelmed and understaffed, he said. “I know the conditions are extremely bad, and they’re not supposed to be that way.”

‘He didn’t want to scare me more’

One of the four women wanted to explain what she went through to her fiance. She wrote what she remembered on paper and titled it “Hell on Earth.”

She dialed out on a scratchy phone line and asked him to record her as she read from her notes.

“The officer only say that I am going to spend the night in Miami,” she said, using the English she learned during nearly two decades in the United States. “Now remembering his face, like I knew he knew that I am going to go through hell and he didn’t want to scare me more.”

This account is based on that 15-minute audio recording detailing the alleged mistreatment, as well as numerous telephone and video interviews with the woman and her fiance and with three other detained women, their family members and attorneys, as well as the two attorneys who independently witnessed the deteriorating conditions.

All four women described being chained at the wrist, waist and chest and loaded onto a prison bus, where they were held, in one case, for six hours; in another, for 11 or 12 hours.

“They took us to a bigger bus,” the woman said in the audio recording. “They checked us, and then they put like chains on us, hands to waist, connected. It was very scary because they chained my chest super-tight and I couldn’t breathe properly. I was really scared because I thought, ‘I’m not going to be able to breathe.'”

There was no access to a toilet, so guards told the women – whose accounts in some cases occurred on different days or different buses – to urinate or defecate on the floor. They watched, helpless, as some did.

“A man in the back of the bus – we were separated with a door – he was screaming, ‘Somebody wants a bathroom,'” the woman said in the audio. “And somebody peed there. It stank so badly.”

She described her first impression of Krome as “a really chaotic-looking place.” Guards rushed the women through a corridor, past the male dormitories where men pressed their faces to the glass, “wildly staring … like they had never seen women before.”

“We were pushed in a room, filled with women, like sardines in a jar,” she said. “I will never forget those first seconds when I heard the door behind me locked.”

Open the link to continue reading.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Ethics, Extremism, Health, Immigration

Arizona: Why Does a Low-Performing Charter School Collect $80 Million a Year from Taxpayers?

By dianeravitch
April 4, 2025 //
3

Laurie Roberts, columnist for The Arizona Republic, asked the question that is the title of this post. Why indeed? Charters and vouchers, we were promised, would “save poor kids from failing schools” but all too often, school choice is far worse than the neighborhood public school.

When you see the abysmal test scores for this online school, you understand why the operators of voucher schools demand exclusion from state testing. This charter school has horrible scores, but as Trump often reminds us, “parents know best.” Except when they don’t.

Roberts looks beyond the promises and follows the money. That’s always a good strategy.

Roberts writes:

Pity poor Primavera Online Charter School.

It seems dastardly “activists” are trying to shut down this fine academic institution — to deny the school the $80 million in public money it needs annually to provide students with a “D” education.

It’s “lawfare”, we are told. An attack on President Donald Trump’s agenda and a sneak attempt to shut down school choice.

“The voters of this country have spoken loud and clear … that President Trump’s agenda, which includes school choice, is highly favored by the voters,” Jesse Binnall, the school’s lawyer, declared. “Instead of getting on board with this policy, you have some people that are trying to use various versions of lawfare … in order to get in the way of school choice.”

Binnall and Primavera CEO Damian Creamer, surrounded by some of the state’s elected leaders, held a press conference outside the state Capitol on Wednesday to bemoan Primavera’s plight as the Arizona Board of Charter Schools considers shutting down the online alternative school.

No less than U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs stood with them.

Biggs, who has enjoyed more than $32,000 in campaign contributions from Creamer, according to Open Secrets.

Creamer also has donated to a who’s who of Republican state legislators, which likely explains why some of them showed up to support him on Wednesday.“We hope that everyone is going to do the right thing,” Binnall continued. “But, unfortunately, we know activists have infected this process far too much.”

Primavera gravy train could be slowing down

Earlier this month, the charter school board — a board dominated by appointees of former Republican governor and school choice champion Doug Ducey — took the first step toward revoking the school’s charter.

This, after 12News reporter Craig Harris — yeah, he’s the “activist” to whom Binnall was referring — began asking questions about why we’re paying Creamer tens of millions of dollars to fail children.

The state Board of Education has slapped Primavera with a “D” rating in each of the last three years. It is the only charter school in the state to rate three straight D grades.

The charter board, meanwhile, has given Primavera its second worst rating — Does Not Meet Standard — over the last two years and its worst rating — Falls Far Below Standard — four times since 2017.

Yet, the school continues to rake in our money. Nearly $80 million last year.

Of that, Harris reports that Primavera paid $54 million to its parent company, StrongMind, for curriculum and management.

StrongMind has just one shareholder: Creamer.

Just $12.4 million of that $80 million went to teachers, with another $6 million for advertising.

In all, Harris has reported that Creamer has pocketed at least $24 million in public money via shareholder distributions and direct payments since 2017.

We are paying $80 million for this?

Now, however, the gravy train appears to have run its course. So the push is on — with a little oomph from politicians who have enjoyed Creamer’s contributions — to make sure it doesn’t get derailed.

“We have to be confident that these people who serve … the people of Arizona are going to do the right thing for the children of Arizona,” said Binnall, who also has worked for Trump.

Creamer maintains his school, which caters to at-risk students, would have earned a grade of “C” had it been judged as an alternative school. But he’s the one who failed to apply for the designation.

Even so, the school’s record of academic achieved has dropped even as its enrollment has jumped to 8,000 students.

According to state assessment results, the percentage of students rated proficient in English has dropped from 36% in 2022 to 23% last year.

Math proficiency dipped from 13% in 2022 to 9%.

The only thing booming is Creamer’s bank account.

But, sure, it’s lawfare to question whether we should be doling out $80 million every year to this school.

“We hope that everyone is going to do the right thing,” attorney Binnall said. “But, unfortunately, we know activists have infected this process far too much.”

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) at @LaurieRobertsaz, on Threads at @LaurieRobertsaz and on BlueSky at @laurieroberts.bsky.social.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, Funding

Trump’s Tariffs: A Global Mess?

By dianeravitch
April 3, 2025 //
8

Yesterday after the stock market closed, Trump held a press conference to announce his much-ballyhooed tariff plan. He used the opportunity to insult other nations, as is his custom. Commentators noted that he slapped tariffs on uninhabited islands. Trump believes that the greatest period in the American economy ended in 1913, when the federal government adopted the income tax. When I was a junior in high school in high school, I learned that the enactment of a federal income tax was progressive because it reduced the vast gap between the very rich and everyone else. I also learned about the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, which set off a global trade war and contributed to the Great Depression. Apparently, these topics were not taught in Trump’s elite military academy. His history classes must have been taught from the perspective of the robber barons.

The Washington Post wrote:

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he will impose a new 10 percent tariff on all imported goods along with higher import taxes tailored for each of about 60 countries that his advisers say maintain the largest barriers against U.S. products, in a sharp turn toward the kind of protectionism that the United States abandoned nearly a century ago.

To impose the new tariffs, the president declared a national emergency, citing the annual merchandise trade deficit that the United States has run each year since 1975.

“For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike,” Trump said. “But it is not going to happen anymore.”

The tariff increases that the president announced had little modern precedent and would erect towering impediments to products from dozens of foreign countries, many of them poor nations that embraced exporting as a tool to escape grinding poverty….

Speaking in blunt, sometimes intemperate language, the president assailed the nation’s trading partners, including some of its closest allies, as “foreign cheaters” and “foreign scavengers” who had “ripped off Americans” for 50 years. Trump’s tone echoed the dark portrait of “American carnage” that he had sketched in his first inaugural address in 2017….

“In the short run, the effect is probably a recession. It’s going to raise the price of so many goods that can’t be made in the United States,” said economist Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations. “In the long run, it’s a vision of the U.S. that is very isolated from the world.”

Jay Timmons, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, warned that his members operate on thin profit margins and cannot absorb the tariffs. Small businesses and restaurant owners issued statements decrying their added costs.

“This is catastrophic for American families,” said Matt Priest, president of the Footwear Retailers and Distributers of America.

********************************

Daniel Dale of CNN fact-checked only a few of Trump’s outlandish statements during his press conference about his tariffs. He imposed tariffs on uninhabited islands, populated only by penguins.

Dale wrote:

President Donald Trump made a series of false claims about tariffs and trade – most of which he has made before – in the Wednesday speech in which he announced a sweeping set of global tariffs.

Here is a fact check of some of Trump’s remarks.

Canada’s dairy tariffs

Trump correctly noted that Canada has tariffs exceeding 250% on some US dairy products. However, he falsely claimed that merely “the first little carton of milk” exported to Canada faces a “very low price,” but “then it gets up to 275, 300%.”null

In reality, Canada has guaranteed that tens of thousands of metric tons of imported US milk per year, not merely a single carton, will face zero tariffs at all; Canada conceded a certain guaranteed level of tariff-free US access to its dairy market as part of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) that Trump’s own first administration negotiated.

Trump also didn’t mention something the US dairy industry acknowledges: The US is not hitting its zero-tariff maximum level of exports to Canada in any category of dairy product, so the Canadian tariffs aren’t being applied; with regard to milk in particular, the US isn’t even at half of the tariff-free quota. (There is a vigorous US-Canada debate about why the US is so far from the maximum, with each country blaming the other. Regardless of who’s right, the tariffs aren’t hitting US milk.)

Trump has persistently omitted key facts about Canada’s dairy tariffs. You can read more here from a previous CNN fact check.

US trade deficit with Canada

Trump, claiming “we subsidize a lot of countries,” falsely said “it’s close to $200 billion a year” with Canada. Trump has repeatedly used this $200 billion figure to describe the US trade deficit with Canada in particular, which is actually far lower than $200 billion; official US statistics show the 2024 deficit with Canada in goods and services trade was $35.7 billion and $70.6 billion in goods trade alone.

Trump didn’t mention the trade deficit in particular this time, but even if he was intending to use the word “subsidize” more broadly, there is no basis for the claim.

Who pays tariffs

Trump repeated his frequent false claim that, because of the tariffs he imposed on China during his first term, the US “took in hundreds of billions of dollars” that “they paid.” In fact, US importers, not foreign exporters like China,make the tariff payments, andstudy after studyhas found that Americans bore the overwhelming majority of the cost of Trump’s first-term tariffs on China; it’s easy to findspecific examplesof companies that passed along the cost of the tariffs to US consumers.

Previous presidents’ tariffs on China

Trump also repeated his frequent false claim that, before his first presidency, China “never paid 10 cents to any other president” from tariffs. Aside from the fact that US importers make the tariff payments, the US was actuallygenerating billions per year in revenuefrom tariffs on Chinese imports before Trump took office; in fact, the US has had tariffs on Chinese imports since1789. Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama,imposed additional tariffson Chinese goods.

US wealth

Touting the supposed benefits of tariffs, Trump claimed that “the United States was proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been” from 1789 to 1913, when tariffs made up a higher percentage of federal revenue before the passage of a 1913 law reestablishing the federal income tax.

Trump didn’t explain what he meant by “proportionately the wealthiest,” but by standard measures, the US is far wealthier today than it was in the early 20th century and prior. Per capita gross domestic product isnow many times higherthan it was then.

Douglas Irwin, a Dartmouth College economics professor who studies the history of US trade policy, said in February after Trump had made similar claims, that if Trump’s unclear comments are interpreted to be about per capita income, as “economists usually take this,” it is “obviously not true,” since “real per capita income and standards of living are so much higher today than the past. … It is nice to have indoor plumbing, running water, not outhouses, etc.”

This is only part of the article. Open the link to finish reading. Dale reviews inflation, the cost of gasoline, and other issues.

Categories Accountability, Economy, Extremism, International, Lies, Stupid, Trump

DOGE Creates Chaos and Fear at HHS

By dianeravitch
April 1, 2025 //
3

Government Executive reports that the Secretary Of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to lay off 10,000 of the Department’s 80,000 employeees. Entire divisions will be eliminated or merged. But no one knows who will be laid off. Decisions about layoffs are being made by Elon Musk’s DOGE. Since no one knows who will be fired or why, everyone is fearful.

Government Executive writes:

The Health and Human Services Department has told its employees that 10,000 of them will soon receive layoff notices, though it has not offered any details on who will be impacted or when they will learn of their fates. 

The uncertainty has dangled over the more than 80,000 HHS employees since Thursday, when the department first announced it was planning to shed around 25% of its workforce and half of those eliminations would come through reductions in force. Leadership at individual components and offices are regularly seeking to update their employees on what is happening, according to seven individuals within HHS, though they have all said they have been fully kept out of the loop and only a small group of political leaders within HHS know the plans.

The Food and Drug Administration is expected to lay off 3,500 employees, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2,400, the National Institutes of Health 1,200 and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services 300, according to an HHS fact sheet. HHS did not respond to an inquiry into why the notices were delayed or when they would go out.

Several employees were told to expect RIF notices to hit inboxes on Friday. When that did not happen, they were told to expect them Friday evening or over the weekend. As of Monday afternoon, the notices have still not gone out. 

“FDA leadership doesn’t know who will be cut,” said an employee briefed on the matter. “They didn’t have any input into these cuts whatsoever.” 

Employees at CDC and NIH expressed similar messages were going out from leadership to the workforce. 

“It’s unnecessarily cruel,” said one CDC employee of the uncertainty and delays. 

A second CDC employee said they spent the entire weekend refreshing their email waiting to see if a RIF notice arrived. The employee was resigned to their fate, but wanted an answer: “Just put me out of my misery,” the staffer said. 

Prior to an “all hands” meeting at one NIH office, employees were encouraged to download their complete personnel files, current position description, pay stubs, tax documents, awards information and contact information for human resources and their supervisor in case they lost access upon being laid off. 

The department will not allow those who are subject to RIFs to be allowed back onto HHS campuses, according to two employees briefed on the matter. Some staff were told to bring their laptops homes each day in case they were laid off and not allowed back into their offices. Unlike other agencies that have gone through RIFs, which have immediately placed impacted staff on administrative leave, at least some HHS employees will be expected to work until their date of separation. 

At FDA, conversations with office directors were taking place to identify U.S. Public Health Service Commission Corps members who could escort laid off employees to their desks to collect their laptops and personal belongings. The uniformed personnel would be available for the RIF-affected staff who need to retrieve items on campus.

The RIFs are expected to take effect May 27, according to the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents much of the HHS workforce. That date could get pushed back given the delay in sending out official RIF letters, however, as agencies typically provide 60 days notice before separations take effect. 

Directors at the highest level of the component agencies have communicated “have no knowledge over what is happening,” one employee said in a sentiment echoed by those throughout the department. 

A senior HHS official said even HR at component agencies have received no information on who is being laid off or when the notices were going out, though the latest expectation was the letters would be delivered Monday. 

“Radio silence,” the official said. “It is madness!” 

Government Executive previously reported that top officials were being left out of the workforce reduction process. At NIH, for example, liaisons from the Department of Government Efficiency dictated staffing targets without input from the agency or anyone else at HHS. 

Some informal notices were beginning to trickle out Monday afternoon. CDC is planning to eliminate its entire Freedom of Information Act office, according to an impacted employee, which could create legal questions as agencies are required to maintain those functions. The official notices had not yet gone out as of Monday afternoon but all of the office’s 40 employees are expected to receive them. 

The reductions will be part of a comprehensive reorganization of HHS. The cuts will save $2 billion annually, department Secretary Robert Kennedy said last week, and HHS will go from 28 divisions throughout the department down to 15. Department-wide functions such as human resources, IT, procurement, external affairs and policy will be centralized into the Administration for Healthy America and regional offices will be slashed in half to just five.

The new AHA will fold into its structure the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. HHS will divide up the functions of the Administration for Community Living, which provides oversight of those serving older and disabled Americans, into CMS, the Administration for Children and Families and the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. ASPE itself will be combined with the Agency for Health Research and Quality into the Office of Strategy.

This hurried reorganization is being imposed by the young engineers and computer geeks who work for Musk, apparently without consulting anyone who has done the work. The changes are rushed, haphazard, and carried out without the participation of those with knowledge and experience.

Please open the link to continue reading the article.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Health, Musk, Elon, Science, Trump

An Update on Downsizing of Federal Workforce

By dianeravitch
March 31, 2025 //
13

Government Executive has gathered data on the number of layoffs, RIFs, and firings in various federal agencies. These cuts of employees are supposed to make government more efficient, but they are so haphazard that government is likely to be less efficient. The data are current as of March 28.

The cuts are expected to help fund massive tax cuts for the richest Americans.

A President Trump executive order and subsequent guidance from the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management has to plan for the “maximum elimination” of federal agency functions not required by law. As a starting point for the cuts, OMB and OPM said, agencies should focus on employees whose jobs are not required in statute and who face furloughs in government shutdowns—typically around one-third of the federal workforce, or 700,000 employees.

Agencies are expected to eliminate some offices wholesale and slash their regional offices across the country. 

Here are the departments and agencies where Government Executive has confirmed RIFs have taken place or about to occur. We will update as we learn more. More in-depth reporting is linked where available:

Commerce Department: Commerce is seeking to cut its workforce by 20%, or nearly 10,000 employees, but plans to use attrition, incentives and other measures to get to that level without RIFs. 

Defense Department: Defense plans to issue RIFs in the coming weeks for 5% to 8% of its civilian workforce, or as many as 61,000 employees. It will fire 5,400 probationary employees as part of those cuts. 

Education Department: Education has laid off one-third of its workforce, or about 1,300 employees. The notices went out on March 11 and the department closed its offices on March 12 for the day. Education previously offered buyouts of up to $25,000 to most of its employees, who had until March 3 at 11:59 p.m. to accept the offer. About 300 employees accepted those and combined with other voluntary separations, Education’s total workforce is set to be about half the size it was before Trump took office. 

Environmental Protection Agency: RIFs began to take shape at EPA on March 11 when agency Administrator Lee Zeldin eliminated offices related to environmental justice and diversity. Those were expected to impact around 170 employees. President Trump said during a cabinet meeting that he expected 65% of the workforce, or nearly 11,000 employees, to be let go. An EPA spokesperson declined to verify that number, saying only that Trump and Zeldin are “in lock step” to find efficiencies in government and those efforts would include “organizational improvements to the personnel structure.” A White House spokesperson subsequently told Politico Trump meant to say EPA would slash 65% of its “wasteful spending.”

Federal Trade Commission: FTC dismissed around a dozen employees on Feb. 28, impacting its Bureau of Competition, Bureau of Consumer Protection, Office of Public Affairs and Office of Technology. 

Open the link to see reports on the cuts in more departments and agencies.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Economy, Funding, Trump, Tyranny
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