Donald Trump had a long conversation with Putin. They agreed to terms for a ceasefire. The conversation did not include President Zelensky of Ukraine. The U.S.-Russia ceasefire plan was, of course, favorable to the invader. Trump has never felt that it was necessary to find terms that were acceptable to Ukraine.
Putin agreed to stop targeting energy facilities. Hours after agreeing to this, Russia bombed an energy facility, knocking out the energy in one of Ukraine’s major cities.
Viktor Kravchuk is a Ukrainian. He was born in Dnipro and now lives in Kyiv. He is a graphic designer whose posts are found on Substack.
They talked about Ukraine, but Ukraine wasn’t at the table. They spoke of peace, but the bombs kept falling.
They called it a ceasefire, but it’s nothing more than a gift to a war criminal.
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin had their little phone call, their moment of mutual admiration. Trump, a convicted felon. Putin, a wanted war criminal. And together, they came to an agreement: a ceasefire that Ukraine never asked for, that Ukraine was never even consulted on.
As they spoke, Ukraine was under massive missile attack. This is the “result” of their negotiations.
Trump calls it peace. But do you call it peace when entire families are buried under rubble? When stolen Ukrainian children are still trapped in Russia, renamed, brainwashed, erased? When the invader still occupies your home, your city, your country?
That is not peace. That is submission.
Trump says the war “should never have started”, as if it was some tragic accident. As if Ukraine had a choice in whether its cities were bombed, its women raped, its people abducted.
The war didn’t merely “start.” Russia attacked. Putin attacked.
And now Trump wants to reward him with a deal. Not a deal for Ukraine. Not a deal for justice. A deal for Putin, so he can stabilize his economy, sell his gas, stockpile his weapons, and prepare for the next round of war.
Can you believe that?
A ceasefire doesn’t mean Russian troops leave. It doesn’t mean war criminals face trial. It doesn’t mean justice for Bucha, for Mariupol, for every city turned to rubble by Russian bombs.
It means Russia gets time. Time to regroup, time to rearm, time to prepare for another slaughter, another invasion, another genocide.
Because let’s take things clear: this is a war of extermination.
Russia doesn’t just want land. It wants Ukraine erased. Our culture, our people, our history. Russia wants Ukraine to stop existing.
And Trump, whether through cowardice or corruption, probably both, is handing Putin exactly what he wants.
Trump’s plan is simple: protect Russian oil and gas so Putin can keep funding his war.
Not a word about returning abducted Ukrainian children.
Not a word about stopping Russian missile strikes on civilians.
Not a word about justice for those tortured in the occupied territories.
Because this was never about peace. It was about business.About “huge economic deals.”
About Trump’s personal interests.
About the wealthy few who stand to profit from Russian gas, from war, from suffering.
The mask is off. There is no diplomacy, no neutrality here. This is Trump openly doing Putin’s bidding, propping up a dictator who has spent the last 25 years waging war, silencing dissent, assassinating opponents, killing anyone who stands in his way.
We don’t need a ceasefire. We need Russian troops out of Ukraine.
We need war criminals on trial in The Hague. We need the return of every stolen Ukrainian child.
A ceasefire without withdrawal is surrender. Would you call it peace if an intruder broke into your home, killed your family, stole your belongings, then sat down at your table and told you to move on?
A ceasefire without justice tells every dictator that war crimes work.
That genocide is just a phase of war, not a crime.
A ceasefire without Ukraine at the table is an insult. As if Ukraine is some distant land, not a country of millions of people fighting for their lives.
No, we will not accept a “peace” that lets Russia keep its stolen land, its mass graves, its war crimes.
No, we will not pretend that Trump and Putin are negotiating peace when they are simply negotiating how best to carve up a nation that refuses to die.
They are making their choices. To accept occupation, to let war crimes go unpunished.
But we also need to make our choice.
We have already chosen to fight.
If this were your land, what choice would you make?
With Trump, there are no guardrails. The Republican-dominated Congress has given him permission to eliminate agencies and cut budgets and fire people. Normally, under the Constitution, Congress makes the laws and controls the purse, but not now.
Perhaps the most frequently cited quote from Donald Trump relevant to his purported efforts to root out government waste has been “we’re not touching Social Security,” or variations thereof.
I expressed skepticism about this pledge shortly after the election by listing all the oblique ways the Trump administration could hack away at the program.
It gives me no pleasure to update my observation with the words, “I told you so.”
“We’re not touching Social Security.”
— Donald Trump makes a false promise
Among the weapons Trump could wield, I wrote, was starving the program of administrative resources — think money and staff. Sure enough, on Friday the program, which is currently led by acting Commissioner Leland Dudek, announced plans to reduce the program’s employee base to 50,000 from 57,000.
Its press release about the reduction referred to the program’s “bloated workforce.”
To anyone who knows anything about the Social Security Administration, calling its workforce “bloated” sounds like a sick joke. The truth is that the agency is hopelessly understaffed, and has been for years.
I asked the Social Security Administration to reconcile its claim of a bloated workforce with the facts. I got no reply.
Nearly 69 million Americans were receiving benefits as of Dec. 31, according to the agency. That figure encompassed 54.3 million retired workers, their spouses and their children, nearly 6 million survivors of deceased workers and more than 8.3 million disabled workers and their dependents. Agency employment peaked in 2009 at about 67,000, when it served about 55 million people.
“Without adequate staff at the agency,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said at a news conference Monday, “there will be people who can’t get their benefits, period.”
Not only beneficiaries could be affected by Trump’s raid on Social Security. About 183 million people pay Social Security taxes on their earnings. Their right to collect what they’re entitled to based on their contributions is dependent on the system recording those payments and calculating their benefits accurately, to the last penny. Any incursion by DOGE into the program’s systems or the scattershot firings that Dudek forecasts puts all that at risk.
In his testimony, O’Malley talked about how the agency had struggled to establish an acceptable level of customer service. In 2023, he said, wait times on the program’s 800 number had ballooned to nearly an hour. Of the average 7 million clients who called the number each month for advice or assistance, 4 million “hung up in frustration after waiting far too long.” The agency had worked the wait down to an average of less than 13 minutes, in part by encouraging customers to wait off the line for a call back.
Disability applicants faced the worst frustrations, O’Malley said. The backlog of disability determinations, which often require multiple rounds of inquiries, hearings and appeals, had reached a near-record 1.2 million. The program estimated that about 30,000 applicants had died in 2023 while awaiting decisions.
O’Malley had asked for a budget increase in fiscal 2025 to add at least 3,000 workers to the customer-service ranks, but it wasn’t approved.
Make no mistake: The starving of Social Security’s administrative resources, which is currently taking place under the guise of ferreting out fraud and waste, is no accident. It’s part of a decades-long Republican project aimed at undermining public confidence in the program.
Back in 1983, for example, the libertarian Cato Institute published an article by Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis calling for a “Leninist” strategy to “prepare the political ground” for privatizing Social Security on behalf of “the banks, insurance companies, and other institutions that will gain from providing such plans to the public.” Political opposition, as it happens, resulted in the death of George W. Bush’s push to privatize Social Security in 2005.
Germanis has since become a fierce critic of conservative economics and politics. Butler, who had spent 35 years at the right-wing Heritage Foundation before joining the Brookings Institution in 2014, told me by email he now advocates a private retirement system as an “add-on” private option rather than an alternative to Social Security. He also said he thinks “cutting staff and the claim that Social Security is rife with fraud and abuse are both ridiculous.”
The Trump acolytes have already taken an ax to some Social Security operations, as announced by Dudek — a former mid-level agency worker who stepped into the vacuum created by the departure of several managers who had dustups with Elon Musk’s DOGE outfit and by a delay in Senate confirmation of Commissioner-designate Frank Bisagnano, a banking and Wall Street veteran.
Last week, Dudek closed the agency’s office of transformation, which he called “wasteful” and “redundant.” The office was engaged in helping to keep the agency’s website operational and to develop usable online resources for beneficiaries and applicants. He closed its office of civil rights and equal opportunity, certainly functions relevant to the program’s operations. Employees in both offices were laid off or fired, and their pages on the website were removed.
On Monday, Dudek bragged about having “identified” some $800 million in cost savings, including through the cancellation of contracts that, for all he knows, may be crucial to the agency’s functioning. The largest “savings” came from a freeze on hiring and overtime in disability determination services, worth $550 million, according to Dudek.
But that’s an area where hands-on contact between applicants and the agency is indispensable. Academic researchers reported in 2019 that the closing of field offices dealing with disability applications led to “a persistent 16% decline in the number of disability recipients in surrounding areas, with the largest effects for applicants with moderately severe conditions and low education levels.”
In an appearance Friday on Joe Rogan’s webcast, Musk called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” a repetition of an ancient meme that demonstrates only that he knows nothing about Social Security, and nothing about Ponzi schemes. The program boasts an 85-year unbroken record for paying beneficiaries what they’re owed, and currently holds a reserve of nearly $2.8 trillion in Treasury securities, all publicly disclosed.
The GOP brain trust has accepted the claim that Social Security is rife with fraud without devoting a moment’s thought to it. House Speaker Mike Johnson absurdly claimed Sunday on “Meet the Press” that Musk’s “algorithms crawling through the data” are “finding enormous amounts of waste, fraud and abuse.”
There’s absolutely zero evidence for that. Can we trust Musk to find it? This is the guy whose claim that “millions” of people aged 150 or older were receiving payments was decisively debunked — the notion that benefits were going to people that old was merely an artifact of the software program used by the agency. No payments are going to anyone in that category; Social Security automatically ceases payments to anyone who has reached the age of 115. The chief bug in the system is Musk’s ignorance.
Reagan impaneled the so-called Grace Commission, whose chairman, industrialist J. Peter Grace, promised to unearth billions of dollars of the elusive WFA. The commission’s eventual proposals included taxing Social Security benefits, adding soy meat-extender to school lunches ($84-million savings over three years), and eliminating the regulatory agencies that oversaw industries represented by the panel’s members.
The truth is that Social Security is one of the most efficient agencies in the federal government. Its administrative costs are one-half of one-percent of its total costs, which include benefit payments.
What’s the goal of this raid on Social Security, the nation’s premier anti-poverty program and one whose beneficiaries live by the tens of thousands in every congressional district in the land?
It’s as if Trump and Musk are intent on staging a natural experiment on whether Republicans can tick off or terrify 69 million Americans at one fell swoop by taking away their sustenance in old age or disability — and still win election.
They’re bound to learn, to the contrary, that there isn’t a federal program that Americans value more than Social Security. Are they dumb enough to try killing it? We shall see.
I have stopped reporting on court orders because there are so many of them, sometimes different judges give conflicting opinions, and sometimes one opinion supersedes another.
But this one was too good to pass up. The issues will ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. But this is the first to challenge directly the authority of Elon Musk and DOGE.
A federal judge in Maryland on Tuesday temporarily blocked billionaire Elon Musk and the U.S. DOGE Service from taking further actions to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and ordered that steps be taken to allow the agency to reoccupy its headquarters inside the Ronald Reagan building in Washington, D.C., should the plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging Musk’s actions win their case.
The judge also ordered DOGE to restore email and other access to thousands of employees who have been cut off from the agency, including those stationed in dangerous areas with their jobs in limbo. He prohibited DOGE from disclosing USAID employees’ personal information outside the agency and said any other action relating to USAID must be made with the “express authorization of a USAID official with legal authority.”
The preliminary injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Theodore D. Chuang in a federal court in Maryland, though it leaves a door open for the Trump administration to continue its elimination of USAID, marks another blow to the administration’s efforts to dramatically reduce the size of the government after other federal court orders to reinstate thousands of fired federal workers. Chuang’s ruling remains in effect until a further court order, which could come at another point in the lawsuit or after a trial.
On Monday, the Trump administration moved to reinstate thousands of probationary workers after another judge in Maryland ruled that those firings had been conducted illegally, a decision that is now before a federal appeals court.
The lawsuit was brought by the State Democracy Defenders Fund on behalf of more than two dozen USAID workers named only as plaintiffs J. Does 1-26. They allege that Musk’s assumption of vast authority over federal agencies is “unprecedented in U.S. history” and, under the Constitution, could be exercised only by someone who has been nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate as an “Officer of the United States.” The lawsuit also asserts that DOGE’s moves to eliminate USAID violate the Constitution, because the agency was created by Congress and only Congress can do away with it.
In a 68-page legal opinion accompanying the injunction, Chuang agreed that the Trump administration has acted to effectively dismantle USAID and concluded that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed in their claim that those actions violate the Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine.
“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.
The judge’s order, however, applies only to Musk and DOGE — not to USAID officials themselves. Chuang specified that although the dismantling of USAID — even by USAID officials — “likely violates” the Constitution, USAID officials are not parties to the case and not subject to his order. Justice Department lawyers have argued that it is USAID officials, not Musk or DOGE, who have conducted the mass personnel and contract terminations.
Though the lawsuit is not over, the State Democracy Defenders Fund heralded the judge’s ruling while the White House and Musk attacked Chuang.
“Today’s decision is an important victory against Elon Musk and his DOGE attack on USAID, the U.S. government and the Constitution,” said Norm Eisen, executive chair of State Democracy Defenders Fund, in a statement Tuesday. “They are performing surgery with a chainsaw instead of a scalpel, harming not just the people USAID serves but the majority of Americans who count on the stability of our government. This case is a milestone in pushing back on Musk and DOGE’s illegality.”
A White House spokeswoman responded to Chuang’s order by saying he is among “Rogue judges” who are “subverting the will of the American people in their attempts to stop President Trump from carrying out his agenda.” “If these Judges want to force their partisan ideologies across the government, they should run for office themselves,” said Anna Kelly, deputy press secretary for the White House, in a statement. “The Trump Administration will appeal this miscarriage of justice and fight back against all activist judges intruding on the separation of powers.”
The Trump administration seems to believe that federal courts may not overturn Presidential decisions. That matter was resolved in a case called Marbury v. Madison in 1803.
Sherrilyn Ifill is a law professor at Howard University and former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She writes a blog called Sherrilyn’s Newsletter, where this post appeared. Open the link to see her footnotes.
“There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment. The time is always now.”
-James Baldwin
Illustration by Nick Liu
The past week has shown us in stark terms what it means to fight – to actually fight – to protect against the rise of authoritarians. This week we also saw that somehow, despite years of preparation, some of the leaders of our most powerful institutions seem unprepared for the particular nature of this fight. Others appear just…. unwilling to engage.
Last week the Trump Administration took its most bold actions yet. Through the actions of either Trump himself, Elon Musk or members of Trump’s cabinet, this Administration has:
· Unleashed an unprecedented attack on higher education, the centerpiece of which was a targeted attack on Columbia University. In a letter sent to the University, the Administration[i]demanded that university essentially turn over its decision-making to the Trump Administration, insisting that the University close the Middle Eastern Studies Dept, ban mask-wearing, expel students involved in pro-Palestine protests, and announced the withholding of $400 million in federal dollars until the University accedes to Trump’s demands, unless the University took these actions to address “antisemitism on campus.” The Administration underscored its intentions by entering student dormitories and arresting a Palestinian student who is a legal permanent resident of the U.S. As his 8-month-pregnant wife looked on helplessly, ICE officers arrested Mr. Khalil and then disappeared him, moving him from facility to facility, and offering only vague and unsubstantiated justifications for his arrest. His central “crime” appears to be “advancing positions that are contrary to the foreign policy of this Administration,”[ii]– a concept so staggeringly outrageous it can scarcely be absorbed.
· Fired half the staff of the Department of Education[iii] – as a down-payment on the Administration’s vow to close the agency.
· Indicated its intention to “eliminate Social Security;”[iv]
· Continued firing government workers and removing funding from government agencies including NIH[v] and shuttering offices like the Voice of America.
· Intensified tariffs against Canada and rhetoric suggesting that the sovereign nation of Canada should be annexed to the U.S.;[vi] declared that the European Union was created to “screw the U.S.”; declared that the South African Ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome,[vii] continuing the Administration’s Musk-inspired determination to recognize racist white settlers as victims of Black rule.
· Issued Executive Orders targeting law firms who have litigated cases against Trump in the classified documents cases and who provided pro bono counsel to Special Counsel Jack Smith, removing security clearances and blocking government connected work.
· Argued in court that transgender soldiers should be removed from the military.[viii]
· Removed information about Black, Asian American and women military heroes from the Arlington National cemetery website,[ix]disappearing the accomplishments of people of color and women from official recognition.
And that’s just part of it.
But the resistance to Trump’s authoritarian rule has been busy as well:
· Protests across the country have demanded the release of Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian student taken into custody.[x]
· “Tesla Take Down” protests at Tesla dealerships across the country in protest against Elon Musk’s takeover of our government have been so effective in tanking the brand and its stock price,[xi] that President Trump turned the White House into a car lot and personally embodied the used car salesman he was destined to be (if not for his father’s money) in an attempt to gin up Tesla sales.
· Protests nationwide continue to demand an end to government worker firings.
· Voters have shown up at town halls across the country to express anger about proposed plans to cut Medicaid/Medicare and Social Security[xii].
· Lawsuits filed by parents,[xiii] and by a score of states[xiv] have challenged the closing of the Education Department.
· Perkins Coie, the law firm targeted by Trump boldly challenged the Trump administration’s effort to blackball the firm and imperil its business;[xv]
· Federal courts have required Trump to rehire thousands of federal employees fired by DOGE[xvi]
· Federal courts have enjoined Trump’s efforts to freeze spending on governments grants and other funding.[xvii]
· Federal courts enjoined the Administration from removing migrants targeted under Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act – a decision the Trump Administration has defied.[xviii]
But the big stories last week were less about those who have protested and sued, and more about those among the most powerful institutional actors who appear to have lost the plot. Political scientists Steve Levitsky and Ryan Enos offered a blistering and spot-on condemnation of universities that have remained silent in the face of Trump’s authoritarian challenge to the freedom of universities.[xix]Calling out Harvard University specifically (where both scholars teach) for its silence in the face of the hideous attacks on Columbia University, Levitsky and Enos condemned the inaction of universities that have chosen a strategy of “lying low, avoiding public debate (and sometimes cooperating with the administration) in the hope of mitigating the coming assault.”[xx]
Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has faced a wave of outrage and demands for resignation after his decision to vote in favor of cloture to avert a government shutdown. To be sure, the Democrats have few options for stopping the Republicans, who are firmly in the majority in the House and Senate from torching our government. But as many of us have been reminded ad nauseum during the years when Democrats controlled the Senate, the filibuster is one of the few procedural rules the party in the minority in the Senate has to counter being overrun by the majority.
But frustratingly, although Democrats were unwilling to abolish the filibuster in 2022 to advance their agenda, last week they were unwilling to use the filibuster to defy the Republican power grab. Heads the Republicans win. Tails the Democrats lose.
It was hard to understand the point of Democrats affixing their signature to a continuing resolution to fund a government that is being cut to the bone every day by Elon Musk – an unelected billionaire with no official government position – who has been permitted to usurp the appropriation power of Congress. When Trump and Musk lawlessly gut agencies and fire government workers, and Speaker Mike Johnson and his caucus cede the power of Congress to the President, we are in a constitutional crisis.
Trump and Musk’s anti-constitutional usurpation of congressional power with the complicity of the Republicans in Congress is an emergency. It demands an emergency response. Minority Leader Schumer and 7 other Democratic Senators (and I suspect more who were covered by the Leader’s unpopular action) were unprepared to meet the moment in a way that would have upped the stakes. Sometimes when the game is fixed, you have to overturn the tables.
I will concede a serious point Schumer later offered that got lost in the Comms disaster of his Wednesday night statement that suggested there would be a shutdown, and then his Thursday morning announcement that he would vote to avert one. If the government shutdown happened, there would be little chance of obtaining judicial orders enjoining decisions by Trump/Musk to eliminate programs, because legally during a government closure, the President enjoys unfettered power to determine which functions of government are “essential” – standard to which the courts would likely defer. By contrast, with the government open, challenges to DOGE firings and closures continue to do fairly well in the courts and have slowed down the force of Musk’s chainsaw.
In any case, Schumer’s decision and perhaps moreso the clumsy comms that accompanied it have resulted in boiling outrage within the base of the party, including calls for him to step down from leadership.
Of course, none of this compares to the perfidy of the Republican Party. We must never forget the unconscionable and dastardly conduct of Speaker Mike Johnson and the Republicans in the House and Senate – men and women who have abdicated their allegiance to this country and to democracy itself. Their cowardice and complicity in the destruction of this country must never be forgotten or whitewashed. Their betrayal is singular and historic.
But there’s another group that is failing to meet this moment. America’s corporate leadership has been nearly silent during one of the most volatile economic periods in years. Last week the stock market took a nosedive – entering “correction” status as a result of Trump’s manic and unhinged tariff announcements. [xxi] Trump’s erratic tariffs – up one day, down the next, up again two weeks later – are lunacy. Every rational business leader knows that.[xxii] The predictable market response to Trump’s irrationality threatens the retirement plans of older Americans hoping to retire and the American economy. America’s leadership in the world has been compromised by Trump’s saber-rattling, and his insistence on imperialist moves towards Canada, the Panama Canal and Greenland, is destabilizing the integrity of perception of American stability. Combined with the massive government lawyers, Trump’s policies are bad for America and bad for business.
As Trump literally tanks the American economy and the trust of the international business community, where are the voices of America’s business leaders? Are they all hoping that Trump will do a commercial on the White House lawn hawking their products too? Are the leaders of the Business Roundtable (200 CEOs of the nation’s leading corporations) agnostic about the President’s stubborn insistence on policies that are wrecking the U.S. economy and our standing in the world?
These same business leaders enabled the lie that Trump is a “successful businessperson” – knowing full well that Trump does not seem to know what he’s talking about when he wades into economics, knowing of his six bankruptcies, knowing of his refusal to pay contractors, his false representations, and knowing that no responsible Fortune 500 CEO would ever have gone into business with Trump before he was elected President, or even after. Being wealthy is not the same as being a successful businessperson and they all know it.
In an interview on CNBC, even host Maria Bartiromo – a Trump sycophant – felt compelled to remind Trump that successful business leaders need predictability to make coherent decisions about investments, infrastructure, expansion, and product development for markets. She noted that the up-and-down tariff mania undermines predictability. Trump responded, “well they say that. It sounds good to say.” Really? Is that it? Or is it a fundamental tenet of business that even a first year MBA student would know? At other times last week he has repeated with “we’re gonna have so much money from the tariffs” with a desperate insistence that suggested mental instability.
American corporations have either tried to placate Trump by paying tribute,[xxiii] or have “crawled into a protective shell” like the university officials called out by Levitsky and Enos. In either case, it is utterly irresponsible. Their voices and influence – presented collectively and forcefully – are critical to protecting the economic interests of this country, and our democracy. Their failure to act is a betrayal of their responsibility as citizens.
Media owners have shamed themselves – whitewashing their teams,[xxiv] surrendering the independence and diversity of their editorial pages,[xxv] and taking a knee before Trump’s demands rather than standing firm in the face of the challenge to our democracy.[xxvi]
In the week ahead, there will be many additional opportunities for leaders from our most powerful democratic institutions to meet this moment. Already it appears that the Trump Administration has defied a federal court order to turn around planes taking Venezuelan migrants accused of being to El Salvador.[xxvii] The Administration announced that the first 250 migrants arrived in El Salvador.[xxviii] What does that mean? Two hundred-fifty Venezuelan nationals have been disappeared into the one of the world’s most notoriously abusive prisons in El Salvador, without judicially approved trials or due process.
What will judges do as Trump appears to defy judicial orders? This week will test the readiness of our judiciary to defend the rule of law.
Meanwhile ordinary people have been showing tremendous leadership, protesting, launching and participating in boycotts, conducting teach-ins, calling their elected representatives every week, sometimes several times a week, visiting district offices, participating in “die-ins,” writing letters and petitions, and building support for opposition candidates in special elections. A “mass march” has been announced by the organization Hands/Off for April 5th, although information is still spotty [please drop info in the comments]. Black churches have launched a 40-day Lenten boycott of Target for its obsequious abandonment of its DEI commitments.[xxix]
Every day we are called upon to meet the moment. As we see our neighbors seized by plainclothes agents without judicial warrants, and see our workplaces “obey in advance” – removing from websites, official policies and even mission statements expressing their commitment to equality and to inclusion, and as we see law firms crouch before this Administration’s threats, and media outlets silence voices that write the truth about this Administration, we have to decide how we will respond.
All over America ordinary people are looking into their toolboxes of non-violent actions and determining which ones they will use. It’s been beautiful to see.
But we must not absolve the leaders of our most powerful institutions – those who have the money and power, and influence to insulate themselves from the worst consequences of this Administration’s excesses – from their obligation to act and to meet the moment.
To those who are business leaders, captains of industry, university leaders, and media owners, decide who you will be at this moment. If we fully lose democracy in this country, it will be because the most privileged among us refused to accept the responsibility to speak out, to say “no more,” and to lead. History will not kindly remember those who left it to Americans with considerably less power and protection, to do the hard work of saving this country. Your tax cuts will not be large enough to cover your shame. And we will remember.
Proponents of vouchers lied shamelessly about the alleged virtues of vouchers. Critics said that students with disabilities would be turned away from voucher schools, that the main beneficiaries would be wealthy families whose children never attended public schools, and that vouchers were a raid on the state treasury.
State Representative Brad Buckley, Republican House public education committee chair and author of the chamber’s voucher proposal, opened the hearing on House Bill 3 Tuesday morning, stating: “My intent is to provide families with the opportunity to choose the best possible educational setting for their child, and I believe House Bill 3 provides this choice while prioritizing Texas’ most high needs and vulnerable students.”
After hearing testimony over the next 23 hours—more than 300 registered to speak—the committee left the bill pending without an immediate vote. The bill’s numerous opponents who testified often echoed Democratic Representative James Talarico’s statement, that “There is a disconnect between the rhetoric and what the bill actually says.”
HB 3 is a universal voucher program that would provide an estimated $10,330 to students (and more for those with disabilities) who attend private schools and $2,000 for homeschooled students in the program. The amount for private school students is set at 85 percent of the average local and state funding public schools receive per student statewide; it is estimated to grow to $10,889 by 2030 in the bill’s fiscal note. Lawmakers have initially set aside $1 billion for the program for 2027, while the Legislative Budget Board estimates the program’s net cost at nearly $4 billion by 2030.
Proponents of the bill touted that HB 3 prioritizes low-income students and students with disabilities. If applicants exceed capacity, the bill lays out a priority order favoring kids with disabilities and in households at or below 200 or 500 percent of the federal poverty line. Despite that language, critics argue there are barriers for such families.
“Prioritization in a lot of states is window dressing because what matters is who actually gets the funds; who actually gets admitted; or who’s already been admitted,” Talarico said.
Democratic Representative Harold Dutton argued high tuition rates made private schools cost-prohibitive for low-income students, citing an average private school tuition of around $27,000 in the Houston area. “If you get $10,000, you’re still $17,000 short. And for most of these families that are poor families, that creates, you know, a mirage that they can now access it.”
Representatives of the Texas Private Schools Association and the Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops spoke of financial assistance that private schools could offer to some families.
Talarico called for a hard cap on income for eligible families and a provision that would give current public school students priority over current private school students to be added to the bill. “What we’re talking about is we are sending our limited, precious taxpayer dollars to the wealthiest families in the state who are already sending their kids to private school. And if you say that’s not the purpose, then put it in your bill.”
Democratic Representative Diego Bernal recommended adding a mandate for private schools to waive the difference between the tuition and the voucher amount for low-income applicants.
“That would be an inappropriate regulation into the private school and an inappropriate intervention into that process with the parent,” responded Jennifer Allmon, executive director of the Texas Catholic Conference of Bishops.
Matthew Ladner, a senior policy adviser with the right-wing Heritage Foundation, testified that “private schools wouldn’t participate” if that mandate was included in the proposal.
Voucher opponents expressed concerns that it would mostly be current private school students who would ultimately take advantage of the program. Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, testified that only a quarter of voucher program participants nationwide came from public schools. The bill’s fiscal note estimates that of 350,000 students currently attending private schools statewide, “50 percent would apply to participate in the program in the first year, increasing 5 percent each subsequent year.”
HB 3’s per-student funding formula, along with details of its student prioritization and some provisions related to kids with disabilities, distinguish it from its counterpart Senate Bill 2, which the Texas Senate has already passed.
Under HB 3, students with disabilities in private school could receive up to $30,000 a year—but private schools do not have to offer special education services, as public schools are required to under federal special education laws, said Steven Aleman, a policy specialist with Disability Rights Texas. “There is no state law or federal law for that matter that requires an IEP [Individualized Education Program for students with disabilities] be developed by a private school for a student with a disability. The rights that a student gets pursuant to IDEA [the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act], you forgo those rights when you go to a private school.”
Laura Colangelo, executive director of the Texas Private Schools Association testified that 19 percent of private school students currently enrolled have “special needs” and that services students can receive are dependent on the student’s contract with the private school.
Others testified that private schools did not admit or accommodate the needs of students with disabilities. “My name is Felicita, sixth grade, and I use a power walker because I have cerebral palsy,” a student testified. “My mom has tried and looked at private schools for me, but they turned me away because I’m in a wheelchair.”
Liz Piñon, a mother of kids with disabilities and education associate with the pro-public ed Intercultural Development Research Association, testified, “We’ve explored the possibility of private schools all over DFW, but the outcome was always the same. As soon as they learned about our children’s disabilities, the doors were closed.”
“If we truly want to support students with disabilities, we must strengthen, not abandon, our public schools instead of draining money from our public schools. Why not fix our system, fully fund our special ed schools, reduce those class sizes, hire and train more special ed teachers, and expand access to transition programs to prepare students for life after high school?” Piñon said.
Criticism of the bill came from both sides of the political aisle, with conservatives denouncing the program’s high cost to taxpayers. “I’m coming to you as a Texas retired teacher and as a conservative from Harris County. I’m a Republican precinct lead, and I wanted to remind you to please represent your Texas constituents. … My input for you today is to kill this bill,” Mary Ann Jackson said.
Mary Lowe, who testified as a member of the conservative public education group Families Engaged, said the debate around vouchers was “ripping the party apart.” She added, “This bill has an open-ended check for the taxpayer.”
Last week, the education committee heard testimony on House Bill 2, what Buckley has called “a historic school funding bill.” While applauding the bill’s investment in special education funding, school district leaders and teachers criticized the bill for insufficient increases to the state’s basic allotmentand to teacher pay.
JOSEPHINE LEE is a staff writer at the Texas Observer. She has previously worked as an educator and community organizer. Her reporting on labor, environment, politics, and education has been featured in Salon, The Daily Beast, Truthout, and other outlets. She was raised in and lives in Houston.
Jeff Nesbit, who worked at both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, wrote this article for The Contrarian. The question is one that I keep asking about many federal government programs that are being eliminated by Trump and Musk, like USAID.
Why? It makes no sense.
The fact that Trump chose Robert F.Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services should have been an alarm bell; Kennedy is not only unqualified, he is stridently hostile to science.
The only beneficiary of this insane and reckless slashing of our most successful programs would be our international enemies, Russia and China. They want us to fail. Trump and Musk are making their dreams come true.
Nesbit wrote:
A siren call is cascading wildly through the corridors of every major academic center in America right now with a huge question firmly at its epicenter: Why are Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, and President Donald Trump’s White House team hellbent on destroying the National Institutes of Health, the world’s gold standard of biomedical research?
There isn’t an easy answer to the question, unfortunately.
The actions have ground NIH to a halt and sent shockwaves through academia and the biomedical research institutions that have created nearly all our life-saving breakthroughs in the past quarter century. Higher education leaders have halted Ph. D. programs in response. Major research labs are being shuttered or told to stop most of their research.
An American biomedical research enterprise that has been the envy of the world’s science and medical community for decades has been surprised and shocked by the careless destruction of core staff functions and almost mindless efforts to purge NIH of hundreds or thousands of grants for reasons that seem ideological at best and irrational and dangerous at worst.
The question, again, is why? Why are Kennedy, Musk and Trump determined to eviscerate the most successful biomedical research system the world has ever known—a scientific enterprise that produces life-saving medicines and leads to breakthroughs (via basic scientific and medical research) that the private sector would never support?
There was a time, once, that NIH was supported by majorities of Republican and Democratic politicians. NIH’s budget, which supports the entire biomedical research field, has grown year after year with large, non-controversial, bipartisan majorities in Congress.
Until now. Trump and Musk have clearly determined that NIH and the National Science Foundation (NIH’s companion in the world of basic scientific research funding) need to be eviscerated and then reoriented away from life-saving scientific and medical research toward some destination not yet revealed. And while this effort has been racing forward, there has been almost no pushback from politicians—at least not yet.
One reason for this is that scientists are historically apolitical and, to be blunt, quite bad at the political game that dominates Washington, D.C. Scientists aren’t nearly as adept as others at advocating for themselves or their priorities to politicians who make funding decisions…
Trump, Musk and Kennedy don’t trust scientists or academia—and clearly don’t hear or recognize the immense value that the biomedical research enterprise brings to American progress.
The economic impact to states with large bioscience research centers would be enormous. Tennessee, for instance, would be devastated by the NIH cuts. Vanderbilt University Medical Center is one of the top research hospitals in America. It received nearly half a billion dollars in 2024 for medical research, the second most in the country. Its budget would be cut by more than 10 percent. Nearly 50,000 jobs and 4,000 businesses in Tennessee are dependent on the biosciences research enterprise in the state and would be severely impacted by the NIH cuts.
Other states, such as Missouri, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, would be similarly devastated by the cuts. Washington University in St. Louis received $717 million from NIH last year and would lose an estimated $108 million. The University of Michigan received $708 million and stands to see a cut of $119 million. Two Pennsylvania universities – the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pittsburgh – received nearly $1.3 billion and could lose $244 million. All of those add up to massive job losses and devastating impacts to each state’s economies.
But Trump, Musk and Kennedy don’t trust the scientific and medical research enterprise. They don’t hear the entreaties by scientists who merely want to do great work that benefits the greater good. And they don’t listen to those calls of bewilderment from scientific and medical research leaders that are falling on deaf ears. This could be happening because scientists are particularly bad at politics.
But it also could be that Trump, Musk and Kennedy are willing to destroy the most successful biomedical research enterprise the world has ever known simply because it is a direct way to harm elite academic institutions that they believe harbor leaders and academics who are ideologically opposed to their aims and politics.
And that is a dangerous story that every American needs to hear and fully take to heart right now—before the Trump administration capriciously destroys a hundred years of scientific and medical progress in a matter of weeks or months.
Jeff Nesbit was the assistant secretary for public affairs at Health and Human Services (which includes NIH) in the Biden administration, and the director of legislative and public affairs at NSF during the Bush and Obama administrations.
More than 2,000 positions related to global health are being cut from the Johns Hopkins University after the Baltimore institution saw $800 million in federal grants disappear, a spokesperson confirmed Thursday.
Hopkins’ medical school; the Bloomberg School of Public Health, including its Center for Communication Programs; and JHPIEGO, the university’s health initiative that focuses on global public health, will be affected by the cuts. USAID was the main funder for both JHPIEGO and CCP.
“This is a difficult day for our entire community. The termination of more than $800 million in USAID funding is now forcing us to wind down critical work here in Baltimore and internationally,” Hopkins’ spokesperson said in a statement.
The Trump administration, through advisor Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, is slashing federal spending across agencies in an effort to end wasteful spending. Such cuts have an outsized effect on Hopkins, which comes in first of all universities in federally funded research. By extension, those cuts affect Baltimore and Maryland, where Hopkins is the city and state’s largest largest private employer. Hopkins says it accounts for more than $15 billion in economic output in the state.
The funding cuts for research institutions are hurting universities in multiple states.
Who determines that basic research in science and medicine are unimportant?
Trump’s flunkies have eliminated the Inspectors General in every Department; they are the nonpartisan watchdogs who scrutinize contracts and official actions to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse. They were all summarily fired, without even the 30-day notice to Congress required by law and without cause.
Kurtz writes about the purge at the Justice Department, which will never again investigate Trump or any of his allies.
Attorney General Pam Bondi has eviscerated the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section, NBC News reports, in another sign that rampant unrestrained public corruption will be a defining feature of the Trump era.
We didn’t get here overnight. A social, political, and legal transformation over the past decade has removed many of the most important guardrails to contain public corruption. The 2016 Supreme Court decision in McDonnell v. United States was the most overt early sign that democracy’s endemic but manageable corruption was going to be allowed to run free.
The implications of that and similar subsequent decisions are hard to isolate from the wholesale corruption that Donald Trump brought to the table beginning that same year. But the rank corruption of his first term pales next to the structural changes he’s already wrought less than two months into his second term.
The Trump White House’s takeover of the Justice Department writ large is the greatest boon to public corruption, but there have been a series of particularly egregious actions – like Trump’s executive order crapping all over the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act – that have cleared the way for more wrongdoing and less accountability for wrongdoers.
Bondi’s decision to strip the Public Integrity Section bare leaves Main Justice’s experienced career prosecutors on the sidelines in public corruption cases, shifts the onus to bring (and not to bring) such cases to more politically malleable U.S. attorneys, and weakens the mechanism for ensuring nationwide consistency across investigations and cases.
Unrestrained public corruption creates its own perverse political culture. It feeds into cynicism and nihilism about government that in turn is exploited by figures like Trump to justify further weakening and undermining the rule of law. It’s a death spiral and we’re now firmly in the grips of it.
The DeVos family has poured millions into persuading the people of Michigan to endorse vouchers but they have failed. So far. In a statewide referendum in 2000 sponsored by the DeVoses, voters resoundingly rejected vouchers. Since no voucher referendum has ever passed in any state, the voucher pushers have to find another route that does not include letting voters decide.
Josh Owen thinks they may have found the strategy. He wrote the following editorial for The Detroit Free Press. His article was republished by the Network for Public Education.
Noted voucher scholar Josh Cowen wrote an op-ed for the Detroit Free Press warning Michigan that the GOP is trying yet another backdoor approach to getting vouchers into the state.
Michiganders don’t want school vouchers. But the federal government might force vouchers into Michigan, whether we want them to or not.
In the coming days, Congress will consider whether to include the “Educational Choice for Children Act” (ECCA) among many GOP priorities as part of the budget reconciliation process that will set federal spending for next year and beyond.
That bill, which GOP leaders have introduced in both the Senate and the House, is a school voucher plan mixed with a tax credit that would allow donors to divert all or part of what they owe in federal taxes to other organizations that then distribute those funds for private K-12 tuition and other private educational expenses.
Put another way, this is the federal version of the voucher plans spreading in red states across the country — except this one is nestled inside a tax shelter for mostly wealthy donors. Those donors can give either $5,000 or up to 10% of their adjusted income — whichever is greater — for $10 billion in diverted revenue in the first year alone. Then that spending cap can go up. A similar, Michigan-specific version of this scheme was unsuccessfully backed by Betsy DeVos and allies three years ago.
The new federal bill would top off voucher spending in states that have those systems already, and force vouchers into states that have don’t have or want them — states like Michigan.
Our state constitution bans state funding from going to private K-12 schools. But the new voucher tax credit could circumvent that ban by using federal dollars instead. So much for “giving education back to the states,” as the Trump Administration says it wants to do.
This speech by French Senator Claude Malhuret went viral. It has been translated and reproduced at least 1 million times. I personally have received several copies of his speech from friends and family. Recently, it has been translated and published in The Atlantic. Senator Malhuret expresses the shock and dismay that many of us feel about Trump’s decision to abandon Ukraine and Europe and to align the United States with Russia. Please read what he said. This is not normal.
Senator Malhuret said:
Europe is at a crucial juncture of its history. The American shield is slipping away, Ukraine risks being abandoned, and Russia is being strengthened. Washington has become the court of Nero: an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a buffoon on ketamine tasked with purging the civil service.
This is a tragedy for the free world, but it’s first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. [President Donald] Trump’s message is that being his ally serves no purpose, because he will not defend you, he will impose more tariffs on you than on his enemies, and he will threaten to seize your territories, while supporting the dictators who invade you.
The king of the deal is showing that the art of the deal is lying prostrate. He thinks he will intimidate China by capitulating to Russian President Vladimir Putin, but China’s President Xi Jinping, faced with such wreckage, is undoubtedly accelerating his plans to invade Taiwan.
Never in history has a president of the United States surrendered to the enemy. Never has one supported an aggressor against an ally, issued so many illegal decrees, and sacked so many military leaders in one go. Never has one trampled on the American Constitution, while threatening to disregard judges who stand in his way, weaken countervailing powers, and take control of social media.
This is not a drift to illiberalism; this is the beginning of the seizure of democracy. Let us remember that it only took one month, three weeks, and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its constitution.
I have confidence in the solidity of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in the four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator; now we are fighting against a dictator supported by a traitor.
Eight days ago, at the very moment when Trump was patting French President Emmanuel Macron on the back at the White House, the United States voted at the United Nations with Russia and North Korea against the Europeans demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops.
Two days later, in the Oval Office, the draft-dodger was giving moral and strategic lessons to the Ukrainian president and war hero, Volodymyr Zelensky, before dismissing him like a stable boy, ordering him to submit or resign.
That night, he took another step into disgrace by halting the delivery of promised weapons. What should we do in the face of such betrayal? The answer is simple: Stand firm.
And above all: make no mistake. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltic states, Georgia, and Moldova are already on the list. Putin’s goal is to return to the Yalta Agreement, where half the continent was ceded to Stalin.
The countries of the global South are waiting for the outcome of the conflict to decide whether they should continue to respect Europe, or whether they are now free to trample it.
What Putin wants is the end of the world order the United States and its allies established 80 years ago, in which the first principle was the prohibition of acquiring territory by force.
This idea is at the very foundation of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the aggressed, because the Trumpian vision coincides with Putin’s: a return to spheres of influence, where great powers dictate the fate of small nations.
Greenland, Panama, and Canada are mine. Ukraine, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe are yours. Taiwan and the South China Sea are his.
At the Mar-a-Lago dinner parties of golf-playing oligarchs, this is called “diplomatic realism.”
We are therefore alone. But the narrative that Putin cannot be resisted is false. Contrary to Kremlin propaganda, Russia is doing poorly. In three years, the so-called second army in the world has managed to grab only crumbs from a country with about a quarter its population.
With interest rates at 21 percent, the collapse of foreign currency and gold reserves, and a demographic crisis, Russia is on the brink. The American lifeline to Putin is the biggest strategic mistake ever made during a war.
The shock is violent, but it has one virtue. The Europeans are coming out of denial. They understood in a single day in Munich that the survival of Ukraine and the future of Europe are in their hands, and that they have three imperatives.
Accelerate military aid to Ukraine to compensate for the American abandonment, so that Ukraine can hang on, and of course to secure its and Europe’s place at the negotiating table.
This will be costly. It will require ending the taboo on using Russia’s frozen assets. It will require bypassing Moscow’s accomplices within Europe itself through a coalition that includes only willing countries, and the United Kingdom of course.
Second, demand that any agreement include the return of kidnapped children and prisoners, as well as absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia, and Minsk, we know what Putin’s agreements are worth. These guarantees require sufficient military force to prevent a new invasion.
Finally, and most urgently because it will take the longest, we must build that neglected European defense, which has relied on the American security umbrella since 1945 and which was shut down after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The task is Herculean, but history books will judge the leaders of today’s democratic Europe by its success or failure.
Friedrich Merz has just declared that Europe needs its own military alliance. This is a recognition that France has been right for decades in advocating for strategic autonomy.
Now it must be built. This will require massive investment to replenish the European Defense Fund beyond the Maastricht debt criteria, harmonize weapons and munitions systems, accelerate European Union membership for Ukraine, which now has the leading army in Europe, rethink the role and conditions of nuclear deterrence based on French and British capabilities, and relaunch missile-shield and satellite programs.
Europe can become a military power again only by becoming an industrial power again. But the real rearmament of Europe is its moral rearmament.
We must convince public opinion in the face of war weariness and fear, and above all in the face of Putin’s collaborators on the far right and far left.
They say they want peace. What neither they nor Trump says is that their peace is capitulation, the peace of defeat, the replacement of a de Gaullian Zelensky by a Ukrainian Pétain under Putin’s thumb. The peace of collaborators who, for three years, have refused to support the Ukrainians in any way.
Is this the end of the Atlantic alliance? The risk is great. But in recent days, Zelensky’s public humiliation and all the crazy decisions taken over the past month have finally stirred Americans into action. Poll numbers are plummeting. Republican elected officials are greeted by hostile crowds in their constituencies. Even Fox News is becoming critical.
The Trumpists are no longer at the height of glory. They control the executive branch, Congress, the Supreme Court, and social media. But in American history, the supporters of freedom have always won. They are starting to raise their heads.
The fate of Ukraine will be decided in the trenches, but it also depends on those who defend democracy in the United States, and here, on our ability to unite Europeans and find the means for our common defense, to make Europe the power it once was and hesitates to become again.
Our parents defeated fascism and communism at the cost of great sacrifice. The task of our generation is to defeat the totalitarianisms of the 21st century. Long live free Ukraine, long live democratic Europe.
Heather Cox Richardson reports on the depredation of Elon Musk, whom Trump has empowered to destroy government services. This destruction is the prelude to privatization. At the Department of Agriculture, his DOGE boys laid off bird flu experts. At the Departnent of Transportation, they laid off air traffic controllers. The story was repeated across the government. Nothing is off-limits from the DOGE vandals, other than the billions of dollars awarded to Elon Musk every year. One can’t help wondering, at least I can’t, whether this crippling of our government was Putin’s idea.
Richardson wrote:
Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made it clear that the Trump administration’s goal is to slash the federal government and to privatize its current services. As the stock market has dropped and economists have warned of a dramatic slowdown in the economy, he told CNBC “There’s going to be a natural adjustment as we move away from public spending to private spending. The market and the economy have just become hooked, we’ve become addicted to this government spending, and there’s going to be a detox period.”
Bessent’s comments reveal that the White House is beginning to feel the pressure of the unpopularity of its policies. Trump’s rejection of 80 years of U.S. foreign policy in order to prop up Russia’s Vladimir Putin has left many Americans as well as allies aghast. Trump’s claims that Putin wants peace were belied when Russia launched massive strikes at Ukraine as soon as Trump stopped sharing intelligence with Ukrainian forces that enabled them to shoot down incoming fire.
The administration’s dramatic—and likely illegal and unconstitutional—cuts are infuriating Americans who did not expect Trump to reorder the American government so completely. While billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump repeatedly say they are cutting only “waste, fraud, and abuse” from the government, that insistence appears to be rhetorical rather than backed by fact. And yesterday, new cuts appeared to continue the gutting of government services that generally appear to be important to Americans’ health, safety, and economic security.
On Friday night, employees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—about 80,000 of them—received an email offering them a buyout of up to $25,000 if they resign and giving them a deadline of March 14 to respond. Also as of Friday, nearly 230 cases of measles have been confirmed in Texas and New Mexico, and two people have died.
The secretary of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is frustrating even allies with his response to the outbreak. Kennedy, who has long been an anti-vaccine activist, said last week that measles outbreaks were “not unusual,” and then on Sunday he posted pictures of himself hiking above Coachella Valley in California. On Monday the top spokesperson at HHS, a former Kennedy ally, quit in protest. As Adam Cancryn of Politicoreported, Kennedy has said that the measles vaccine protects children and the community, but has said the decision to vaccinate is personal and that parents should talk to healthcare providers about their options. He has also talked a lot about the benefits of nutritional supplements like cod liver oil, which is high in Vitamin A, in treating measles. In fact, vaccines are the key element in preventing people from contracting the disease..
“It’s a serious role, he’s just a couple of weeks in and measles is not a common occurrence, and it should be all hands on deck,” one former Trump official told Adam Cancryn, Sophie Garder, and Chelsea Cirruzzo of Politico. “When you’re taking a selfie out at Coachella, it’s pretty clear that you’re checked out.”
In another blockbuster story that dropped yesterday, the Social Security Administration announced it will begin to withhold 100% of a person’s Social Security benefits if they are overpaid, even if the overpayment is not their fault. Under President Joe Biden the agency had changed the policy to recover overpayments at 10% of monthly benefits or $10, whichever was greater.
Those who can’t afford that level of repayment can contact Social Security, the notice says, but acting commissioner Leland Dudek has said he plans to cut at least 7,000 jobs—more than 12% of the agency—although its staff is already at a 50-year low. He is also closing field offices, and senior staff with the agency have either left or been fired.
Dudek yesterday retracted an order from the day before that required parents of babies born in Maine to go to a Social Security office to register their baby rather than filling out a form in the hospital. Another on Thursday would also have stopped funeral homes from filing death records electronically.
One new father told Joe Lawlor of the Portland Press Herald that he had filled out the form for his son’s social security number and then his wife got a call saying they would have to go to the Social Security office. But when he tried to call Social Security headquarters to figure out what was going on, the wait time was an estimated two hours. So he called a local office, where no one knew what he was talking about. “They keep talking about efficiency,” he said. “This seemed to be something that worked incredibly efficiently, and they broke it overnight.”
The administration did not explain why it had imposed this rule in Maine. Senator Angus King of Maine, an Independent, said he was glad the administration had changed its mind, but added that “this rapid reversal has raised concerns among Maine people and left many unanswered questions about the Social Security Administration’s motivations.”
Trump has said that Social Security “won’t be touched” as his administration slashes through the federal government.
Trump also said there would not be cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, but on Wednesday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which figures the financial cost of legislation, said that Republicans will have to cut either Medicare, Medicaid, or the Children’s Health Insurance Program in order to meet their goal of cutting at least $880 billion from the funding controlled by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Cutting the funding for every other program in the committee’s purview would save a maximum of $135 billion, Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post noted, meaning the committee will have to turn to the biggest ticket items: healthcare programs.
Also yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security said it was getting rid of union protections for the approximately 47,000 employees of the Transportation Security Administration who screen about 2.5 million passengers a day before they can board airplanes. A new agreement in May 2024 raised wages for TSA workers, whose pay has lagged behind that of other government employees. Union leaders say the move is retaliation for its challenges to the actions of the administration toward the 800,000 or so federal workers it represents.
As Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times have reported more detail about the Cabinet meeting Trump convened abruptly on Thursday, we have learned more about Musk’s determination to cut the government. As Musk appeared to take charge of the meeting, he clashed with Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, who complained that Musk’s team at the Department of Government Efficiency is trying to lay off air traffic controllers.
Swan and Haberman report that Duffy asked what he was supposed to do. He continued by saying: I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers? Musk said it was a lie that they were laying off air traffic controllers, and also insisted that there were people hired under diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives working as air traffic controllers. When Duffy pushed back, Musk said Duffy should call him with any concerns, an echo of the message he gave to members of Congress. Like them, Cabinet members are constitutionally part of the government. Musk is not.
What Musk is, according to an interview published today by Aaron Rupar and Thor Benson in Public Notice, is a businessman who believes that there is waste wherever you look and that it is always possible to do something more cheaply. Ryan Mac and Kate Conger, who wrote a book about Musk’s takeover of Twitter, Character Limit, said that creating confusion is part of the point. Musk creates drama, Conger said, to scare away workers he doesn’t want and attract ones he does.
The pain that he is inflicting on the country is not making him popular, though. Protests at Tesla dealerships that handle his cars are growing, as are instances of vandalism against Tesla dealerships and charging stations, which now number more than a dozen, including attacks with bottles filled with gasoline and set on fire. Pranshu Verma and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post report that Tesla’s stock has dropped more than 35% since Trump took office. Tesla sales have dropped 76% in Germany, 48% in Norway and Denmark, and 45% in France.
On Thursday, another of Musk’s SpaceX rockets exploded, raining debris near south Florida and the Bahamas. The Federal Aviation Administration said 240 flights were disrupted by the debris.
The New York Times editorial board today lamented the instability that Musk is creating, noting that the government is not a business, that “[t]here are already signs the chaos is hurting the economy,” and that “Americans can’t afford for the basic functions of government to fail. If Twitter stops working, people can’t tweet. When government services break down, people can die.”
The editorial board did not let Trump hide behind Musk entirely, noting that he has increased instability not only with DOGE, but also “with his flurry of executive orders purporting to rewrite environmental policy, the meaning of the 14th Amendment and more; his on-again-off-again tariffs; and his inversion of American foreign policy, wooing Vladimir Putin while disdaining longtime allies.”
One of the things that the radical extremists in power hated about the modern American state was that it was a nonpartisan machine that functioned pretty well regardless of which party was in charge. Now Musk, who is acting as if he is not bound by the constitution that set up that machine, is taking a sledgehammer to it.
In the Public Notice interview, Thor Benson asked Ryan Mac: “What’s something about Elon’s huge role in the Trump administration that people perhaps aren’t understanding?” Mac answered that Musk is the manifestation of the nation’s extreme wealth inequality. “What happens,” he asked, “when there is unfettered capitalism that allows people to accumulate this much money and this much power?”
Diane Ravitch's blog 