Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut is a stalwart ally of public schools. When Democrats controlled the House of Representatives, she was chair of the powerful House Appropriations Committee and she will be again when Democrats regain control of the House. She knows the federal budget.
Check her attachment to see how many teachers will be laid off in YOUR Congressional district. The deep cuts will affect both Republican and democratic districts.
Rep. DeLauro issued a warning about the deep cuts to education that Trump and Musk are planning:
WASHINGTON — Last week, through his unlawful executive order, President Trump took another step in his plan to eliminate the Department of Education. Next, he plans to eliminate Title I grants that help 26 million students learn. House Appropriations Committee and Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Subcommittee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro released a new fact sheet detailing the number of teachers in each district that stand to be kicked out of the classroom, leaving millions of students across the country without a teacher.
“We are in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, and Elon Musk and President Trump are making it worse. President Trump promised to fight for the working class, but instead, he put Elon Musk and billionaires in charge of the government. His plan to eliminate Title I grants that help 26 million students in schools across the country would mean that nearly 300,000 teachers across the United States stand to be kicked out of the classroom. This would leave millions of students without a teacher. President Trump and unchecked billionaire Elon Musk do not care about helping hardworking people build a better life or helping our kids learn. They care only about tax breaks for billionaires and the biggest corporations.”
A fact sheet on the number of teachers in each district that stand to be kicked out of the classroom is here.
Ranking Member DeLauro’s previous statements on the unlawful elimination of Education employees can be found here and here.
Her letter to Secretary McMahon demanding answers to mass firings is here. Her February statement on Elon Musk’s and President Trump’s dismantling of the Department of Education is here.
Always count on Heather Cox Richardson to synthesize the latest news and put it into context. That’s her skill as a historian.
In this post, she recounts the absurdities of the top-secret meeting of the top officials in the Trump administration, which included a journalist. How did any of these clowns get a security clearance? Why did Trump choose the least experienced, least qualified people for such important positions? Did he do it on purpose?
She writes:
Today the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, dropped the story that senior members of the Trump administration planned the March 15 U.S. attack on the Houthis in Yemen over Signal, a widely available encrypted app that is most decidedly not part of the United States national security system. The decision to steer around government systems was possibly an attempt to hide conversations, since the app was set to erase some messages after a week and others after four weeks. By law, government communications must be archived.
According to Goldberg, the use of Signal may also have violated the Espionage Act, which establishes how officials must handle information about the national defense. The app is not approved for national security use, and officials are supposed either to discuss military activity in a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, or to use approved government equipment.
The use of Signal to plan a military attack on Yemen was itself an astonishingly dangerous breach, but what comes next is simply mind-boggling: the reason Goldberg could report on the conversation is that the person setting it up included Goldberg—a reporter without security clearance—in it.
Goldberg reports that on March 11 he received a connection request from someone named Michael Waltz, although he did not believe the actual Michael Waltz, who is Trump’s national security advisor, would be writing to him. He thought it was likely someone trying to entrap him, although he thought perhaps it could be the real Waltz with some information. Two days later, he was included in the “Houthi PC small group,” along with a message that the chat would be for “a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis.”
As Goldberg reports, a “principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.”
The other names on the app were those of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President J.D. Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Brian McCormack from the National Security Council, Central Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe, Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine negotiator Steve Witkoff, White House chief of staff Suzy Wiles, perhaps White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and Trump’s nominee for head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent.
Goldberg assumed the chat was fake, some sort of disinformation campaign, although he was concerned when Ratcliffe provided the full name of a CIA operative in this unsecure channel. But on March 14, as Vance, for example, took a strong stand against Europe—“I just hate bailing Europe out again”—and as Hegseth emphasized that their messaging must be that “Biden failed,” Goldberg started to think the chat might be real. Those in the chat talked of finding a way to make Europe pay the costs for the U.S. attack, and of “minimiz[ing] risk to Saudi oil facilities.”
And then, on March 15, the messages told of the forthcoming attack. “I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts,” Goldberg writes. “The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”
On the chat, reactions to the military strikes were emojis of a fist, an American flag, fire, praying hands, a flexed bicep, and “Good Job Pete and your team!!,” “Kudos to all…. Really great. God Bless,” and “Great work and effects!”
In the messages, with a reporter on the line, Hegseth promised his colleagues he would “do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC,” or operations security. In a message to the team outlining the forthcoming attack, Hegseth wrote: “We are currently clean on OPSEC.”
Two hours after Goldberg wrote to the officials on the chat and alerted them to his presence on it by asking questions about it, National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes responded: “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials.”
When asked about the breach, Trump responded: “I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me, it’s a magazine that’s going out of business. I think it’s not much of a magazine. But I know nothing about it. You’re saying that they had what?” There is nothing that the administration could say to make the situation better, but this made it worse. As national security specialist Tom Nichols noted: “If the President is telling the truth and no one’s briefed him about this yet, that’s another story in itself. In any other administration, [the chief of staff] would have been in the Oval [Office] within nanoseconds of learning about something like this.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is evidently going to try to bully his way out of this disaster. When asked about it, he began to yell at a reporter that Goldberg is a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.” Hegseth looked directly at the camera and said: “Nobody was texting war plans.” But Goldberg has receipts. The chat had “the specific time of a future attack. Specific targets, including human targets…weapons systems…precise detail…a long section on sequencing…. He can say that it wasn’t a war plan, but it was a minute-by-minute accounting of what was about to happen.”
Zachary B. Wolf of CNN noted that “Trump intentionally hired amateurs for top jobs. This is their most dramatic blunder.” Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) told Brian Tyler Cohen: “My first reaction… was ‘what absolute clowns.’ Total amateur hour, reckless, dangerous…. [T]his is what happens when you have basically Fox News personalities cosplaying as government officials.” Foreign policy scholar Timothy Snyder posted: “These guys inherited one of the most functional state apparatus in the history of the world and they are inhabiting it like a crack house.”
Many observers have noted that all of these national security officials knew that using Signal in this way was against the law, and their comfort with jumping onto the commercial app to plan a military strike suggests they are using Signal more generally. “How many Signal chats with sensitive information about military operations are ongoing within the Pentagon right now?” Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) posted. “Where else are war plans being shared with such abject disregard for our national security? We need answers. Right now.”
National security journalists and officials are aghast. Former commanding general of United States Army Europe and the Seventh Army Mark Hertling called the story “staggering.” Former CIA officer Matt Castelli posted: “This is more than ‘loose lips sink ships’, this is a criminally negligent breach of classified information and war planning involving VP, SecDef, D[irector of the] CIA, National Security Advisor—all putting troops at risk. America is not safe.” Former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, who spent seven years as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve, posted: “From an operational security perspective, this is the highest level of f**kup imaginable. These people cannot keep America safe.”
Rhode Island senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said: “If true, this story represents one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen. The carelessness shown by President Trump’s cabinet is stunning and dangerous. I will be seeking answers from the Administration immediately.” Armed Services Committee member Don Bacon (R-NE), a former Air Force brigadier general, told Axios that “sending this info over non-secure networks” was “unconscionable.” “Russia and China are surely monitoring his unclassified phone.”
That the most senior members of Trump’s administration were sharing national security secrets on unsecure channels is especially galling since the people on the call have used alleged breaches of national security to hammer Democrats. Sarah Longwell and J.V. Last of The Bulwark compiled a series of video clips of Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, Tulsi Gabbard, John Ratcliffe, and especially Pete Hegseth talking about the seriousness of handling secret information and the need for accountability for those who mishandle it. When they were accusing then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton of such a breach, they called for firings, accountability, and perhaps criminal charges. Indeed, Trump rose to power in 2016 with the charge that Clinton should be sent to prison for using a private email server. “Lock her up!” became the chant at his rallies.
Today, for her part, Clinton posted a link to the story along with an eyes emoji and wrote: “You have got to be kidding me.”
Remember how Trump ridiculed Hillary Clinton for using a private email server to conduct State Department business? His crowds chanted “Lock her up!” at his rallies. The FBI reopened an investigation 10 days before the election, based on allegations about her emails, closed the investigation a few days later, and she lost the election. No classified information was found on her private server.
Hillary Clinton was baffled by reports of top U.S. officials unwittingly sharing war plans with a reporterduring an unsecure group chat that allegedly took place on the Signal messaging app.
“You have got to be kidding me,” the former Secretary of State wrote next to a wide-eyed emoticon on X.
Clinton’s post included a link to a bombshell Atlantic magazine story about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security director Tulsi Gabbard sharing what appeared to be highly sensitive information about military strikes in Yemen with Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg.
Goldberg wrote Monday he withheld information that could’ve put U.S. troops in danger due to the “shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation.”
But he shared portions of the conversation that included Vance claiming “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now.”
Goldberg said the plan being discussed “included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.”
Throughout her failed 2016 presidential campaign, Clinton was dogged by criticism for using a private server located in her Chappaqua home to conduct official business white serving in President Obama’s cabinet. She lost to Trump, whose crowds regularly chanted “Lock her up” at his rallies.
Hegseth — a Fox News personality prior to being tapped by President Trump to manage national defense — called Goldberg a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again” during a brief interview on a Hawaiian airport tarmac.
National Security Council Spokesman Brian Hughes confirmed the messages inadvertently shared with The Atlantic “appeared to be an authentic message chain” that’s inclusion of a journalist merited further review.
He also argued the success of the strikes that occurred over the weekend proved the alleged leak was no threat to U.S. troops.
President Trump claimed at a Monday afternoon press conference that he knew nothing about the security breach, adding “I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic.”
The funniest blog out there is Jeff Tiedrich’s “everyone is entitled to my own opinion.” He is all over the scandal of Pete Hegseth & Co. including Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, on a top-secret texting group that discussed war plans. The group used an app that was not secure, that could have been easily hacked. It’s one advantage was that it would disappear after a few weeks and would never be archived; apparently that’s the way our government does business now. No transparency.
When asked about it, Trump said he knew nothing at all (does he ever?). Hegseth blamed the journalist and said he lied (he didn’t). What a bunch of clowns we have in charge of our government? Dangerous clowns. Not funny clowns.
I’m not editing Tiedrich’s effusive use of F-words. Too many. If you want to subscribe and see all his links, go to this address.
Tiedrich wrote today:
hey, remember when that commie rat-bastard Hillary Clinton ran a private email server? of course you do. it was the crime of the century — front page news on every paper. HILLARY FUCKS UP BIGTIME, the headlines screamed, in thousand-point boldface type. THE EMAIL LADY IS A WITCH. BURN HER! BURN HER!!!
Republicans fell all the fuck over each other in a mad dash to be the first to demand she not just resign, but impale herself on her dagger, immediately.
I mean, what the fuck, Hillary? how could you endanger national security like that?
Republicans, as everyone knows, are careful stewards of America’s security. you’d never catch a Republican doing something as foolhardy as, for instance, absconding with dozens of boxes of classified documents, lying about having them, refusing to return them, hiding them, bragging about their contents to golf cronies, waving them in the faces of randos, scrawling to-do lists on them, even sleeping with them — and then stashing them in the unspeakably ugly shitter of their vermin-infested Florida golf motel.
that simply wouldn’t happen. that shit’s for traitors like the email lady.
you would never catch Republicans doing anything as clownfucklingly insane as texting war plans to each other over a phone app. and you would most certainly never ever, ever, EVER catch one inadvertently including a journalist in such a discussion, because that would be—
oopsies.
The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.
I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.
was that wrong?
because Piss-Drunk Pete has to plead ignorance on this thing. because if anyone had said anything at all to him when he first started at the Department of Defense that that sort of thing was frowned upon…
seriously, check out this Three Stooges level of dipshittery. a couple of weeks ago, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, was minding his own business, when out of the clear blue—
I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser.
and then,
Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the “Houthi PC small group.”
Goldberg’s phone started blowing up with actual fucking war plans.
so, who besides Couchfuck McGee and Piss-Drunk Pete were on this text chain? according to Goldberg, he received messages from Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, Tulsi Gabbard, Susie Wiles, Scott Bessent, and other sundry Sewer Clowns.
now, the government has its own secure means of communicating internally. there’s no need to use third-party messaging apps that are prone to, y’know, facilitating embarrassing fuck-ups. so why do it? over to you, Heather Cox Richardson.
The decision to steer around government systems was possibly an attempt to hide conversations, since the app was set to erase some messages after a week and others after four weeks. By law, government communications must be archived.
so, were any laws broken? of fucking course laws were broken — this is Donny’s administration we’re talking about here. openly flouting the law is what they do. Heather Cox, please explain it to the nice people.
the use of Signal may also have violated the Espionage Act, which establishes how officials must handle information about the national defense. The app is not approved for national security use, and officials are supposed either to discuss military activity in a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, or to use approved government equipment.
and then on top of that, there’s that whole we sent classified information to a journalist who didn’t have clearance thing.Subscribe
“when I’m president of the United States, neither she nor any of these other people are going to be above the law. whether it’s her, or Eric Holder, for what he did on Fast and Furious, or any of these other folks. people are going to be held accountable if they broke the laws of this country. nobody is above the law, not even Hillary Clinton.”
[taps earpiece] hold on, I’m being informed that this clip isn’t from yesterday. it’s from January 12, 2016, when Marco was campaigning for president and vowing to throw the email lady in jail.
so Marco, you were fairly pissed off when Hillary allegedly played fast and loose with her emails, do you have anything at all to say about Donny’s entire administration disseminating war plans to a reporter?
“One point that doesn’t get made enough about Hillary’s unsecured server illegally used to conduct state business (obviously created to hide the Clintons’ corrupt pay-for-play): foreign adversaries could easily hack classified ops & intel in real time from other side of the globe.”
but about today’s scandal? no comment from Stephen Miller. he’s busy having lunch.
“imagine if it was, I don’t know, Donald Trump, what the media would be doing to him right now. eviscerating him. or imagine if it was a member of the military … they still go after these guys for a tiny tiny fraction of what she willfully did.”
“I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic. to me it’s a magazine that’s going out of business. but I know nothing about it. you’re saying that they had what?”
weird how Donny never knows anything about anything. in eighty years we’ve gone from the buck stops here to why the fuck should I know what’s going on?
watch Donny and the Sewer Clowns sweep this whole thing under the rug — and watch how the media will be too distracted by the inevitable next scandal to follow up on the one that’s happening right under their noses today.
(credit where credit is due: props to Bulwark Sarah Longwell, who did the hard work of tracking down all those old tweets and clips.)
hey, remember Pete’s first few days on the job, when he set about firing every black person and woman who held a position of leadership — because, you know, they were all supposedly DEI hires, and there’s no way any of those people could possibly have been hired for their experience and competence. I mean, obviously.
— Air Force General C.Q. Brown Jr., chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. no, he didn’t. — Admiral Lisa Franchetti, chief of naval operations for the U.S. Navy. no, she didn’t. — Admiral Linda Fagan, the first female to lead the Coast Guard. no, she didn’t. — Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short, the senior military assistant to the secretary of defense. no, she didn’t. — Telita Crosland, the head of the military’s Defense Health Agency. nope, not her.
now let’s check the list of DUI hires.
— Pete Hegseth, fuck yes, he absolutely did.
yesterday, reporters caught up with Pixilated Pete and asked the only question on everyone’s mind: “can you tell us how your information about war plans was shared with a journalist?”
“so I— you’re talking about a deceitful and highly-discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of pedaling hoaxes time and time again to include the, I don’t know, the hoaxes of ‘Russia Russia Russia,’ or ‘the fine people on both sides’ hoax …”
A National Security Council spokesman told the BBC the text message thread “appears to be authentic.”
a president who gave an actual shit about national security would have fired Hegseth on the spot — and a Secretary of Defense who cared about his own integrity would have resigned before Donny had the chance to fire him.
that’s Donny’s Confederacy of Sewer Clowns for you. not one of them was hired for their expertise — or their integrity.they’re all a bunch of incompetent ideologues and toadies who fuck up spectacularly on a daily basis — and as long as they keep kissing Dear Leader’s ass, not one of them will ever face accountability.
hey, Hillary — got anything to say about Pete’s inability to own up to his own self-inflicted scandal?
Mujib Mashal wrote in The New York Times about the desperate starvation facing the Rohingya refugees as a result of the shutdown of U.S. foreign aid. They escaped Myanmar’s “ethnic cleansing” and now live in a United Nations camp, where their survival depends on donations of food from benevolent nations. The U.S., thanks to billionaires Trump and Musk. They should take a tour of the camps and see for themselves why foreign aid is impirtant.
Mashal writes:
More than a million people in the world’s largest refugee camp could soon be left with too little food for survival.
In the camp in Bangladesh, United Nations officials said, food rations are set to fall in April to about 18 pounds of rice, two pounds of lentils, a liter of cooking oil and a fistful of salt, per person — for the entire month.
The Trump administration’s freeze on aid has overwhelmed humanitarian response at a time when multiple conflicts rage, with aid agencies working feverishly to fill the void left by the U.S. government, their most generous and reliable donor. Many European nations are also cutting humanitarian aid, as they focus on increasing military spending in the face of an emboldened Russia.
The world is left teetering on “the verge of a deep humanitarian crisis,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres warned on a visit to the Rohingya refugee camp in southeastern Bangladesh on Friday.
“With the announced cuts in financial assistance, we are facing the dramatic risk of having only 40 percent in 2025 of the resources available for humanitarian aid in 2024,” he said, addressing a crowd of tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees. “That would be an unmitigated disaster. People will suffer, and people will die.”
At the refugee camp at Cox’s Bazar, overcrowded warrens of bamboo and tarp huts on mounds of dirt house more than a million Rohingya people driven from their homeland, Myanmar, by a campaign of ethnic cleansing that intensified in 2017.
Fenced off from the rest of Bangladesh, and almost entirely cut off from opportunities to find work or integrate into the country, the Rohingya refugees remain entirely at the mercy of humanitarian aid. The United Nations, with the help of the Bangladeshi government and dozens of aid organizations, looks after the needs of the traumatized people — education, water, sanitation, nutrition, medical care and much more.
The sudden drop in humanitarian aid threatens a wide range of programs and communities around the world, but the plight of the Rohingya is unusual in its scale and severity.
“Cox’s Bazar is ground zero for the impact of budget cuts on people in desperate need,” Mr. Guterres said. “Here it is clear budget reductions are not about numbers on a balance sheet. Funding cuts have dramatic human costs.”
Even at the current food allowance of $12.50 per person, per month, more than 15 percent of the children at the camp are acutely malnourished, according to the United Nations — the highest level recorded since 2017, when hundreds of thousands of refugees arrived after a sharp escalation of violence in Myanmar.
When a funding shortfall slashed the monthly food allowance to $8 in 2023, malnutrition and crime soared. People tried to flee the camp by embarking on dangerous and often fatal boat journeys.
During Mr. Guterres’s visit to the camp, U.N. officials had set up on a table sample food baskets showing what refugees currently get at $12.50 per person, and what that will be slashed to next month if, as they now project, the allotment falls to $6, barring a last-minute rescue.
Pointing to the sparse basket marked “$6,” Dom Scallpelli, the Bangladesh country director for the World Food Program, said, “If you give only this, that is not a survival ration.”
Even the $6 diet expected for the month of April would be made possible only because the United States unfroze its in-kind contribution, agreeing to send shipments of rice, beans, and oil, Mr. Scallpelli said. The cash contributions — the United States provided about $300 million to the Rohingya response last year, a little over half the entire response fund — remain halted.
“If we didn’t even have that, it would have been a total nightmare situation,” Mr. Scallpelli said about the in-kind donations. “At least we are thankful to the U.S. for this.”
Abul Osman, a 23-year-old refugee who arrived at Cox’s Bazar in 2017, said the refugees were already struggling with the bare minimum and the slashing of rations would be devastating for a population with no livelihood options. The Rohingya in Bangladesh are only allowed schooling inside the camp, and are not allowed access to higher education or jobs outside.
Pregnant women and children will suffer the most from dire food shortages, but the resulting mental health crisis will affect everyone, he said.
“It’s a threat to our survival,” he said.
People will die. Many thousands will die. Should we care? Our government claims to be Christian. What is the Christian response to a humanitarian catastrophe?
Nicholas Kristoff tried to estimate how many people will die because of Elon Musk’s frivolous cutting of foreign aid to desperate people? Of course, Musk relied on the authority given to his phony DOGE by Trump. So together, they bear responsibility for the deadly consequences. If either has a conscience, which is questionable, they will go to their graves someday knowing that they caused mass murders.
As the world’s richest men slash American aid for the world’s poorest children, they insist that all is well. “No one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding,” Elon Musk said. “No one.”
That is not true. In South Sudan, one of the world’s poorest countries, the efforts by Musk and President Trump are already leading children to die.
Peter Donde was a 10-year-old infected with H.I.V. from his mother during childbirth. But American aid kept Peter strong even as his parents died from AIDS. A program started by President George W. Bush called PEPFAR saved 26 million lives from AIDS, and one was Peter’s.
Under PEPFAR, an outreach health worker ensured that Peter and other AIDS orphans got their medicines. Then in January, Trump and Musk effectively shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development, perhaps illegally, and that PEPFAR outreach program ended. Orphans were on their own.
Without the help of the community health worker, Peter was unable to get his medicines, so he became sick and died in late February, according to Moses Okeny Labani, a health outreach worker who helped manage care for Peter and 144 other vulnerable children.
The immediate cause of death was an opportunistic pneumonia infection as Peter’s viral load increased and his immunity diminished, said Labani.
“If U.S.A.I.D. would be here, Peter Donde would not have died,” Labani said.
We worked with experts at the Center for Global Development who tried to calculate how many lives are at risk if American humanitarian assistance is frozen or slashed. While these estimates are inexact and depend on how much aid continues, they suggest that a cataclysm may be beginning around the developing world…
An estimated 1,650,000 people could die within a year without American foreign aid for H.I.V. prevention and treatment.
Achol Deng, an 8-year-old girl, was also infected with H.I.V. at birth and likewise remained alive because of American assistance. Then in January, Achol lost her ID card, and there was no longer a case worker to help get her a new card and medicines; she too became sick and died, said Labani.
Yes, this may eventually save money for United States taxpayers. How much? The cost of first-line H.I.V. medications to keep a person alive is less than 12 cents a day.
I asked Labani if he had ever heard of Musk. He had not, so I explained that Musk is the world’s wealthiest man and has said that no one is dying because of U.S.A.I.D. cuts.
“That is wrong,” Labani said, sounding surprised that anyone could be so oblivious. “He should come to grass roots.”
Another household kept alive by American aid was that of Jennifer Inyaa, a 35-year-old single mom, and her 5-year-old son, Evan Anzoo, both of them H.I.V.-positive. Last month, after the aid shutdown, Inyaa became sick and died, and a week later Evan died as well, according to David Iraa Simon, a community health worker who assisted them. Decisions by billionaires in Washington quickly cost the lives of a mother and her son.
“Many more children will die in the coming weeks,” said Margret Amjuma, a health worker who confirmed the deaths of Peter and Achol.
On a nine-day trip through East African villages and slums I heard that refrain repeatedly: While some are already dying because of the decisions in Washington, the toll is likely to soar in the coming months as stockpiles of medicines and food are drawn down and as people become weaker and sicker.
Two women, Martha Juan, 25, and Viola Kiden, 28, a mother of three, have already died because they lived in a remote area of South Sudan and could not get antiretroviral drugs when U.S.A.I.D. shut down supply lines, according to Angelina Doki, a health volunteer who supported them.
Doki told me that her own supply of antiretrovirals is about to run out as well.
“I am going to develop the virus,” Doki said. “My viral load will go high. I will develop TB. I will have pneumonia.” She sighed deeply and added, “We are going to die.”
In South Africa, where more than seven million people are H.I.V.-positive, the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation estimates that ending PEPFAR would lead to more than 600,000 deaths over a decade in that country alone.
Tesla is in trouble for two reasons: first, Elon Musk entered politics and alienated half the nation’s voters. He didn’t just endorse Trump, he created the slash-and-burn DOGE, which is firing government workers en masse without cause. More people are trading in Teslas than any other brand. Protests are taking place at Tesla showrooms. Teslas are being vandalized by people angry at Musk and his destruction of federal agencies.
Second, a Chinese auto manufacturer recently announced that its electric car can be fully recharged in five minutes, as compared to the hours it takes to recharge a Tesla.
Instead of redesigning our government, Musk should have stuck to building better cars.
Sometimes a chart is just a chart. Sometimes, when you’re looking at Tesla Inc. and BYD Co. Ltd. in early 2025, it’s a striking squiggly metaphor.
Tesla, the biggest US electric-vehicle maker, has shocked the world this year with its overt politicization and slumping sales and stock price. BYD, its great Chinese rival, just shocked the world by announcing its newest model can recharge in five minutes. The symbolism, capturing the lead that China has taken in EVs compared with a US still fighting with itself about the relative wokeness of EVs, could hardly be clearer.
At a Supercharger, you’ll typically be able to add 150 to 200 miles of range to a Tesla in less than 30 minutes—sometimes more, sometimes less. With a typical home EV charger, you can completely recharge a Tesla’s battery overnight, adding roughly 25 to 40 miles of range per hour that it’s plugged in.
Which do you prefer: a battery that recharges in five minutes or one that requires 30 minutes or even hours?
Jay Kuo is a lawyer , blogger, and author who here explains a very important court ruling that finally, at last, challenged the constitutionality of Musk and his DOGE vandals. They have gone through agency after agency, copying personal data, firing employees without any knowledge of their role, and generally wreaking havoc.
Anyone with the barest knowledge of the Constitution knows that the power of the purse belongs to Congress, not the President and certainly not to the President’s biggest campaign donor and his team of young hackers. If they know even more about the Constutution, they know that no one can shut down an agency or Department that was authorized by Congress except Congress itself.
There are a lot of lawsuits and a lot of moving parts. But best I can tell, yesterday’s ruling from Judge Theodore Chuang of the federal district of Maryland was the first time any judge has directly addressed the illegality of Musk’s appointment as head of DOGE and then ordered his actions unwound.
Specifically, Judge Chuang, in a 68-page preliminary injunction, blasted the illegal appointment of Musk, ruled the ensuing shutdown of USAID by DOGE illegal, and barred Musk and DOGE from any further work at USAID.
A lot has happened since Musk first took the reins at DOGE, so to understand the impact of this order—specifically what it does and does not do within USAID and how it might have ripple effects in other cases—it’s useful to go back in time to the beginning of February, when Musk and DOGE first started taking a chainsaw to the federal government.
“Fed to the woodchipper”
In early February, DOGE workers arrived at USAID and sought access to the agency’s systems. Because USAID operates in many foreign countries, intelligence reports and assessments are commonly generated around its work. When DOGE members attempted to gain access to classified files, two security officials with the agency attempted to stop them. In response to the officials’ frankly heroic actions, they were placed on leave by the administration.
That was one of the first signs things were going to get very bad, very quickly. Musk even bragged online that over that weekend he and DOGE had “fed USAID into the wood chipper.”
DOGE proceeded to cut off email and computer access to USAID workers. Then, as CBS News summarized, hundreds of USAID officials were placed on administrative leave, the agency’s website went dark, email accounts were deactivated, and USAID’s Washington, D.C., headquarters were occupied by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio quickly named himself acting director of USAID and then proceeded to cancel 83 percent of its contracts. This left nonprofits around the world unable to continue their life saving work. The New York Times estimated that USAID’s shutdown would lead to hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of deaths worldwide from disease.
Dozens of USAID staffers sued, arguing that Musk’s and DOGE’s actions were wholly unauthorized because Musk was never appointed and confirmed by the Senate, as required under the Constitution. They further argued that only Congress, not the executive branch, has the authority to shutter an agency established by statute rather than by executive order.
An “end-run around the Appointments Clause”
One of the most important parts of Judge Chuang’s ruling confirms that the administration tried to have it both ways with Musk.
On the one hand, there Musk was, with DOGE members already inside of an agency, bragging about how he had destroyed it in the course of a weekend. Musk made public statements and posts claiming he had firm control over DOGE, and Trump even praised Musk for this in his joint address to Congress.
The judge noted that Mr. Musk, during a cabinet meeting he attended at the White House last month, acknowledged that his team had accidentally slashed funding for Ebola prevention administered [by USAID]. He also cited numerous instances in which Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk have both spoken publicly about their reliance on Mr. Musk’s team to effectuate goals like eliminating billions in federal contracts.
In addition to the “wood chipper” post, Judge Chuang noted that Musk wrote in February that it was time for USAID to “die” and that his team was in the process of shutting the agency down.
On the other hand, the government tried to argue that Musk was only serving in some kind of advisory rather than official role. Government attorneys have argued in many cases that Musk does not have formal authority to make government decisions, and therefore he didn’t need to have been formally appointed by Trump and officially confirmed by the Senate.
When pressed as to who was actually in charge of DOGE then, the White House claimed last month that a woman named Amy Gleason, who worked for DOGE’s predecessor, was its acting administrator.
That’s so very odd, because as Kyle Cheney of Politico noted with a journalistic eagle eye, in a recent court filing in another matter the administration revealed that Gleason was actually hired by Health and Human Services as an “expert/consultant” on March 4. That’s just a few days after the White House insisted she was the acting administrator of DOGE.
The fact is, the government has been DOGE-ing the truth for weeks about who was really in charge. Everyone knew and bragged that it was Elon Musk, but that actually created a legal problem because of the pesky Appointments Clause. So they apparently filed false affidavits with the courts to try and backfill the position with someone who was never in charge of it, and then they got caught.
Judge Chuang wrote this while ruling for the plaintiffs on their Appointments Clause claim:
To deny plaintiffs’ Appointments Clause claim solely on the basis that, on paper, Musk has no formal legal authority relating to the decisions at issue, even if he is actually exercising significant authority on governmental matters, would open the door to an end-run around the Appointments Clause.
If a president could escape Appointments Clause scrutiny by having advisors go beyond the traditional role of White House advisors who communicate the president’s priority to agency heads and instead exercise significant authority throughout the federal government so as to bypass duly appointed officers, the Appointments Clause would be reduced to nothing more than a technical formality.
Judge Chuang further noted that Musk appears to have been involved in the closure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau headquarters and that he and DOGE “have taken other unilateral actions without any apparent authorization from agency officials,” including firing staff at the Department of Agriculture and National Nuclear Security Administration.
“Under these circumstances, the evidence presently favors the conclusion that contrary to defendants’ sweeping claim that Musk acted only as an advisor, Musk made the decisions to shutdown USAID’s headquarters and website even though he ‘lacked the authority to make that decision,’” Chuang wrote, throwing arguments made by the Trump administration right back at them.
Musk’s “unilateral, drastic actions”
Plaintiffs also claimed that the executive branch had acted outside of its authority in seeking to shut down an agency established by congressional statute. Judge Chuang agreed.
“There is no statute that authorizes the Executive Branch to shut down USAID,” Judge Chuang wrote, noting that only Congress has the constitutional authority to eliminate agencies it has created.
“Where Congress has prescribed the existence of USAID in statute pursuant to its legislative powers under Article I, the president’s Article II power to take care that the laws are faithfully executed does not provide authority for the unilateral, drastic actions taken to dismantle the agency,” Chuang wrote.
He concluded, “The public interest is specifically harmed by defendants’ actions, which have usurped the authority of the public’s elected representatives in Congress to make decisions on whether, when and how to eliminate a federal government agency, and of officers of the United States duly appointed under the Constitution to exercise the authority entrusted to them.”
But… he can’t truly undo the damage
The judge was stark in his assessment of the fatal injuries Musk and DOGE have inflicted upon USAID. He noted that because of the firings, the freezing of funds, the locking out of staff access to computers and communications, and the shuttering of the building itself, USAID is no longer capable of performing as required by statute.
“Taken together, these facts support the conclusion that USAID has been effectively eliminated,” Chuang wrote.
And while he ordered DOGE to reinstate email access to all employees and to submit a plan to allow them to reoccupy the building, he acknowledged that it wouldn’t be long before someone with actual authority could allow DOGE back in. That’s because even though something may have been illegal and unauthorized at the time it was done, someone with the proper constitutional and legal authority can in theory come back later and ratify those actions.
That effectively means that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is Senate-confirmed and now the acting director of USAID, is still free in a couple of weeks to order the permanent closure of the main facility in Washington, as he had planned. And even though another judge has ordered $2 billion in USAID’s frozen foreign aid funds released, and there might even be enough employees now available to make that happen, once that work is done USAID might still functionally cease to exist.
So is this an empty victory?
If USAID employees get to return to the building and access their emails and computer systems, only to be kicked out of it later and likely fired all over again, isn’t this just a hollow win?
The ruling may not save USAID from its fate, especially with an administration so bent on eliminating it entirely and the power to ratify DOGE’s activities after the fact. But thinking ahead a bit, this ruling could still throw significant sand in the gears of DOGE going forward.
If Elon Musk is, as Judge Chuang has ruled, the effective head of DOGE, and his position and consequential actions as an effective agency head requires him to have been formally appointed by Trump and confirmed by the Senate, then this will help other litigants in other cases put an immediate stop to what DOGE is doing currently. That could gum things up for Musk, who would suddenly lack the power to slash and burn the government using just his team of hackers.
Instead, the agencies and departments themselves would have to order all of the cuts, cancellations and terminations. And there may be far more statutory limits and processes governing what they as agencies can do. Further, plaintiffs are likely far more accustomed to challenging a familiar foe like a big government agency than an inter-agency, non-transparent wrecking crew like DOGE.
We will have to wait and see how this plays out. But I imagine Judge Chuang’s decision is going to start showing up as a big red stop sign in every case challenging the authority of DOGE to have done what it did and to keep doing what it’s doing.
In the U.S., the law requires due process and a presumption of innocence. The Trump administration bypassed the rule of law so they could create the illusion of a crackdown on dangerous immigrants.
The Miami Herald said:
The day after he was arrested while working at a restaurant in Texas, Mervin Jose Yamarte Fernandez climbed out of a plane in shackles in El Salvador, bound for the largest mega-prison in Latin America. His sister, Jare, recognized him in a video shared on social media. As masked guards shaved detainees’ heads and led them into cells at the maximum-security complex,
Yamarte Fernandez turned his gaze slowly to the camera. “He was asking for help. And that help didn’t come from the lips. It came from the soul,” said Jare, who asked to be identified by her nickname because she fears for her family’s safety and who added her brother has no previous criminal record. “You know when someone has their soul broken.”
Yamarte Fernandez, 29, is among 238 Venezuelans the Trump administration accused of being gang members without providing public evidence and sent over the weekend to El Salvador’s Terrorist Confinement Center, a prison about 45 miles from the capital designed to hold up to 40,000 people as part of a crackdown on gangs. They will be jailed for at least one year, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele said in a statement on X, following a deal brokered between the two countries in February.
His sister identified him in a video shared on social media by the Salvadoran government. “He shouldn’t be imprisoned in El Salvador, let alone in a dangerous prison like the one where the Mara Salvatruchas are held,” his sister told the Miami Herald.
“These heinous monsters were extracted and removed to El Salvador where they will no longer be able to pose any threat to the American people,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
But families of three men who appear to have been deported and imprisoned in El Salvador told the Miami Herald that their relatives have no gang affiliation – and two said their relatives had never been charged with a crime in the U.S. or elsewhere. One has been previously accused by the U.S. government of ties to the feared Tren de Aragua gang, but his family denies any connection.
Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor Immigration and Customs Enforcement responded to Miami Herald questions about what criteria was used to select detainees sent to El Salvador, what the plan is for detainees incarcerated abroad, and whether the government had defied a federal judge’s orders to send them there.
Oliver Darcy, media journalist, reports that Mark Zuckerberg has followed the lead of Elon Musk by abandoning fact-checking.
The No-Fact Zone:Meta announced Thursday it will launch its forthcoming “community notes” feature next week to replace fact-checkers, once again going to Fox News for the rollout as the Mark Zuckerberg-led social giant runs to the right. Joel Kaplan, Meta’snew global affairs officer, blasted the company’s own longstanding fact-checking program, telling Fox’sBrooke Singman it “proved to be really prone to partisan political bias” and was “essentially a censorship tool,” echoing false claims parroted by right-wing media figures and lawmakers. Unlike the fact-checking program, Meta’s community notes will rely on users who are not bound by ethical guidelines to police content for fairness and accuracy, taking a page straight out of Elon Musk’s X. Kaplan told Singman that posts with a community note applied will not be penalized and will continue to thrive on the platform, setting the stage for viral misinformation. While Zuckerberg and Kaplan are portraying the move as a win for free speech—earning praise from Donald Trump—it will surely serve to muddy the waters on some of the world’s biggest social platforms.
Diane Ravitch's blog 