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Musk DOGE Team Is Ransacking Our Government, Pulling It Apart

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2025 //
9

What exactly is Elon Musk’s DOGE team doing? Who are they? This article in The New York Times seeks to answer those questions.

The article was written by Theodore Schleifer, Nicholas Nehamas, Kate Conger, and Ryan Mac.

At the end of his third week bulldozing through the federal government, Elon Musk sat down to give Vice President JD Vance a 90-minute briefing on his efforts to dismantle the bureaucracy. Mr. Musk was not alone.

Invited to join him on Thursday morning in Mr. Vance’s stately ceremonial office suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House, were a clutch of young aides whose presence at federal agencies has served as a harbinger of the upheaval that would follow them.

Across the federal government, civil servants have witnessed the sudden intrusion in the last two weeks of these young members of the billionaire’s team, labeled the Department of Government Efficiency. As Mr. Musk traipses through Washington, bent on disruption, these aides have emerged as his enforcers, sweeping into agency headquarters with black backpacks and ambitious marching orders.

While Mr. Musk is flanked by some seasoned operatives, his dizzying blitz on the federal bureaucracy is, in practice, largely being carried out by a group of male engineers, including some recent college graduates and at least one as young as 19.

Unlike their 20-something peers in Washington, who are accustomed to doing the unglamorous work ordered up by senior officials, these aides have been empowered to break the system.

Of the roughly 40 people on the team, just under half of them have some previous ties to the billionaire — but many have little government experience, The New York Times found. This account of their background and activities is based on public records, internal government databases and more than 20 people familiar with their roles, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

Some on the Musk team are former interns at his companies. Others are executives who have served in his employ for as long as two decades. They all appear to have channeled his shoot-first, aim-later approach to reform as they have overwhelmed the bureaucracy.

A 23-year-old who once used artificial intelligence to decode the word “purple” on an Ancient Greek scroll has swiftly gained entree to at least five federal agencies, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, where he has been seeking access to sensitive databases. He was part of a group that helped effectively shutter the United States Agency for International Development, joined by the 19-year-old, a onetime Northeastern student who was fired from a data security firm after an investigation into the leaking of internal information, as Bloomberg first reported.

In the past week, his aides have descended upon the Education, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Transportation and Veterans Affairs Departments, along with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to people familiar with their activities.

Mr. Musk has praised his team as talented and relentless, defending its work as crucial to rooting out what he perceives as wasteful spending and left-wing ideology in the federal government.

“Time to confess,” he wrote on X this week. “Media reports saying that @DOGE has some of world’s best software engineers are in fact true.”

Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

On Friday, Mr. Trump told reporters that he was “very proud of the job that this group of young people, generally young people, but very smart people, they’re doing.

“They’re doing it at my insistence,” he added. “It would be a lot easier not to do it, but we have to take some of these things apart to find the corruption.”

Even as Mr. Musk’s team members upend the government, their identities have been closely held, emerging only piecemeal when the new arrivals press career officials for information and access to agency systems.

The opacity with which they are operating is highly unusual for those working in government. Aside from those conducting classified or intelligence work, the names of public employees are not generally kept secret.

Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said the cost-cutting team has gone through the same vetting as other federal employees, but declined to say what the vetting consisted of or whether Mr. Musk’s aides have security clearances.

The Times identified members of Mr. Musk’s initiative through internal emails identifying their roles and interviews with employees across the government who have interacted with them. None of the Musk aides responded to requests for comment.

The secrecy, Musk allies have said, is necessary so the team members do not become targets.

Several of Mr. Musk’s aides have resisted being listed in government databases out of fear of their names leaking out, according to people familiar with the situation. Others have worked to remove information about themselves from the internet, scrubbing résumés and social media accounts.

When their names have been made public by news organizations such as Wired, they have been scrutinized by online sleuths. Mr. Musk has asserted, falsely, that the exposure of their roles is a “crime,” and X has removed some posts and issued suspensions to those who publicize their identities.

One Musk aide whose name surfaced, Marko Elez, a 25-year-old former employee of X, resigned on Thursday, according to a White House official, after The Wall Street Journal revealed that he had made racist posts on X, writing in one message that “you could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.” Mr. Elez, a former employee at both X and xAI, Mr. Musk’s artificial intelligence company, was one of two staff members affiliated with Mr. Musk’s team who had gained access to the Treasury Department’s closely held payment system.

Mr. Elez was among those who had been invited to attend Mr. Musk’s meeting with the vice president before he resigned, according to documents seen by The Times. On Friday, Mr. Musk called for The Journal reporter to be fired and said he was reinstating Mr. Elez, a move that both the president and the vice president said they supported. “We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people,” Mr. Vance posted on X.

A spokesman for Mr. Vance declined to comment.

Some of Mr. Musk’s top advisers are more seasoned. Senior players include Brad Smith, a health care entrepreneur and an official during President Trump’s first term; Amy Gleason, a former U.S. Digital Service official who has been helping at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; and Chris Young, a top Republican field operative whom Mr. Musk hired as a political adviserlast year. Others bring extensive private sector backgrounds, including from firms like McKinsey and Morgan Stanley.

But Washington is a town where much is run by twentysomethings. And much of Mr. Musk’s handiwork — gutting federal websites, demanding access to internal systems, sending late-night all-staff emails and asking veteran employees to justify their jobs — is being executed by young aides, some of them pulling all-nighters as they burrow into agencies.

Last week, young representatives of Mr. Musk’s team with backpacks stuffed with a half-dozen laptops and phones arrived at the headquarters of U.S.A.I.D., demanding access to financial and personnel records. On Friday, a dozen stayed into the night, powered by a bulk order of coffee. The next day, the agency’s website went dark.

At the Education Department alone, as many as 16 team members are listed in an employee directory, including Jehn Balajadia, who has effectively served as Mr. Musk’s assistant for years.

At the Office of Personnel Management, the nerve center of the federal government’s human resources operation, a small group of coders on Mr. Musk’s team sometimes sleep in the building overnight. They survive on deliveries of pizza, Mountain Dew, Red Bull and Doritos, working what Mr. Musk has described as 120-hour weeks.

At the General Services Administration, another central hub for Mr. Musk’s aides, beds have been installed on the sixth floor, with a security guard keeping people from entering the area.

While most senior employees wear suits, the aides favor jeans, sneakers and T-shirts, sometimes under a blazer, with one sporting a navy-blue baseball cap with white lettering reading “DOGE.”

The culture clash is evident. Perhaps unsurprisingly, career employees who have worked for decades in the government have bristled at taking orders from the young newcomers. One coder has openly referred to federal workers as “dinosaurs.” Some staff members at the personnel office, in turn, derisively call the young men “Muskrats.”

As they assess the workings of the government, Mr. Musk’s aides have been conducting 15-minute video interviews with federal workers. Some of their questions have been pointed, such as querying employees about whom they would choose to fire from their teams if they had to pick one person. At times, the aides have not turned on their cameras or given their last names, feeding suspicion.

In one video interview heard by The Times, a young team representative who introduced himself by his first name said he was an “adviser” to government leadership and a startup founder. He pressed the interviewee to describe their contributions with “highest impact” and to list any technical “superpowers.”

It is not always clear which employees are formally part of the team. Even the putative head of the department, Steve Davis, a decades-long lieutenant of Mr. Musk who has accompanied the billionaire on his meetings in Washington, has not been formally announced.

Many of Mr. Musk’s aides, including Mr. Davis, hold multiple roles simultaneously, working for one of the team’s central hubs — the personnel office or the General Services Administration — while also maintaining email addresses and offices at other agencies.

Luke Farritor, who won the award for using artificial intelligence to decipher an ancient scroll, joined Mr. Musk’s initiative after dropping out of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to pursue a fellowship funded by the billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel. A former SpaceX intern, Mr. Farritor, in preparation to join the team, started learning COBOL, a coding language considered retrograde in Silicon Valley but common in government.

He and Rachel Riley, a former McKinsey consultant who works closely with Mr. Smith, are now both listed as employees in the Office of the Secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services. This week, they requested access to payment systems at the Medicare agency, according to a document seen by The Times.

Mr. Farritor, who also has email accounts at the General Services Administration, the Education Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was at the Energy Department on Wednesday, and has told others that he is getting deployed to additional agencies. He is one of about a half-dozen aides who are holed up in a corner around the G.S.A. administrator’s offices, interviewing tech staff members about their work.

Other figures often on hand include Ethan Shaotran and Edward Coristine, who have been accompanying a top Musk ally, Thomas Shedd, who oversees the agency’s tech division. Mr. Shaotran, a 22-year-old Harvard student, was part of a team that was the runner-up in a hackathon competition run by xAI last year.

Mr. Coristine, 19, graduated from high school in Rye, N.Y., last year, according to a school magazine that noted his outstanding performance on the Advanced Placement exams. Nowadays, he has an email address at the Education Department.

Before joining the government, Mr. Coristine was fired in June 2022 from an internship at Path, an Arizona-based data security company, after “an internal investigation into the leaking of proprietary company information that coincided with his tenure,” the company said in a statement Friday.

One Musk acolyte has leaned into his new status as a Washington celebrity.

Gavin Kliger, a newly minted senior adviser at the personnel office, wrote a Substack post this week titled “Why DOGE: Why I gave up a seven-figure salary to save America” — and asked users to pay a $1,000-per-month subscription fee to read it.

The post behind the paywall appeared to have been left intentionally blank, according to users who saw it.

Mr. Kliger, 25, a software engineer, amplified a message posted on X in December by Nick Fuentes, one of the country’s most prominent young white supremacists, which mocked those who celebrate their interracial families. The post was removed from Mr. Kliger’s page after The Times inquired about it. He did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Kliger and Mr. Farritor were among those who obtained access to U.S.A.I.D. websites and tried to get into a secure area at the agency before being turned away by security last week, according to people familiar with the matter. After midnight on Monday, Mr. Kliger sent an email from a U.S.A.I.D. email account informing thousands of staff members that the agency’s headquarters would be closed.

On X, Mr. Kliger has defended cuts to the agency. He also responded to one person who criticized him as “one of the men carrying out Musk’s coup.”

“A ‘coup’ is when a duly elected president wins a democratic election and delivers on campaign promises,” Mr. Kliger wrote on X on Monday. “Got it.”

Reporting was contributed by Maggie Haberman, Mattathias Schwartz, Edward Wong, Erica L. Green, Madeleine Ngo, Zach Montague, Christopher Flavelle, Andrew Duehren, Brad Plumer, Kellen Browning and Aric Toler. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Musk, Elon, Trump

DOGE Terminates $900 Million in Contracts at Ed Dept’s Research and Data Unit

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2025 //
6

DOGE swept into the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education and, following its advice, the Trump administration canceled $900 million in contracts. Bear in mind, this is the team of 20-somethings who knows a lot about software and coding. It’s unlikely that they know anything about education research.

This is the agency that I ran 30 years ago when I was Assistant Secretary of Education in the first Bush administration. At that time it was called the Office of Education Research and Improvement. I could have suggested some cuts, but certainly not $900 million!

What really bothers me is that this group of kiddies could not possibly know enough to judge the quality of the work they were canceling. Not in a day. Impossible. This was just a slash and burn operation.

ProPublica reported:

The Trump administration has terminated more than $900 million in Education Department contracts, taking away a key source of data on the quality and performance of the nation’s schools.

The cuts were made at the behest of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting crew, the Department of Government Efficiency, and were disclosed on X, the social media platform Musk owns, shortly after ProPublica posed questions to U.S. Department of Education staff about the decision to decimate the agency’s research and statistics arm, the Institute of Education Sciences.

A spokesperson for the department, Madi Biedermann, said that the standardized test known as the nation’s report card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, would not be affected. Neither would the College Scorecard, which allows people to search for and compare information about colleges, she said.

IES is one of the country’s largest funders of education research, and the slashing of contracts could mean a significant loss of public knowledge about schools. The institute maintains a massive database of education statistics and contracts with scientists and education companies to compile and make data public about schools each year, such as information about school crime and safety and high school science course completion.

Its total annual budget is about $815 million, or roughly 1% of the Education Department’s overall budget of $82 billion this fiscal year. The $900 million in contracts the department is canceling includes multiyear agreements.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Corruption, Disruption, Ethics, Fraud, Funding, Musk, Elon, Research, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Budget Cuts Will Stifle Cancer Research

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2025 //
25

Heather Cox Richardson points out that Trump’s desire to cut the federal budgets threatens to undermine cancer research. Cutting cancer research? Yes. Is cancer research a “Marxist radical lunatic” or DEI activity?

Cancer research is important for all of us, regardless of our political views, or lack thereof. Why in the world would Trump want to cut its funding?

Yesterday the National Institutes of Health under the Trump administration announced a new policy that will dramatically change the way the United States funds medical research. Now, when a researcher working at a university receives a federal grant for research, that money includes funds to maintain equipment and facilities and to pay support staff that keep labs functioning. That indirect funding is built into university budgets for funding expensive research labs, and last year reached about 26% of the grant money distributed. Going forward, the administration says it will cap the permitted amount of indirect funding at 15%.

NIH is the nation’s primary agency for research in medicine, health, and behavior. NIH grants are fiercely competitive; only about 20% of applications succeed. When a researcher applies for one, their proposal is evaluated first by a panel of their scholarly peers and then, if it passes that level, an advisory council, which might ask for more information before awarding a grant. Once awarded and accepted, an NIH grant carries strict requirements for reporting and auditing, as well as record retention.

In 2023, NIH distributed about $35 billion through about 50,000 grants to over 300,000 researchers at universities, medical schools, and other research institutions. Every dollar of NIH funding generated about $2.46 in economic activity. For every $100 million of funding, research supported by NIH generates 76 patents, which produce 20% more economic value than other U.S. patents and create opportunities for about $600 million in future research and development.

As Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times explained, the authors of Project 2025 called for the cuts outlined in the new policy, claiming those cuts would “reduce federal taxpayer subsidization of leftist agendas.” Dr. David A. Baltrus of the University of Arizona told Jewett and Stolberg that the new policy is “going to destroy research universities in the short term, and I don’t know after that. They rely on the money. They budget for the money. The universities were making decisions expecting the money to be there.”

Although Baltrus works in agricultural research, focusing on keeping E. coli bacteria out of crops like sprouts and lettuce, cancer research is the top area in which NIH grants are awarded.

Anthropologist Erin Kane figured out what the new NIH policy would mean for states by looking at institutions that received more than $10 million in grants in 2024 and figuring out what percentage of their indirect costs would not be eligible for grant money under the new formula. Six schools in New York won $2.4 billion, including $953 million for indirect costs. The new indirect rate would allow only $220 million for overhead, a loss of $723 million.

States across the country will experience significant losses. Eight Florida schools received about $673 million, $231 million for indirect costs. The new indirect rate would limit that funding to $66 million, a loss of $165 million. Six schools in Ohio received a total of about $700 million; they would lose $194 million. Four schools in Missouri received a total of about $830 million; they would lose $212 million.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Health, Ignorance, Research, Science, Trump

Ezra Klein: Don’t Believe Him

By dianeravitch
February 8, 2025 //
11

Ezra Klein is a columnist for The New York Times. His podcast is wildly popular. He synthesizes events that seem disparate.

This is one of his best.

He explains succinctly the moment we are in.

Categories Budget Cuts, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, Musk, Elon, Trump

Texas: Public Schools Are Imposing Austerity Measures While State Holds Huge Surplus

By dianeravitch
February 7, 2025 //
14

Texas Governor Greg Abbott is holding hostage the more than five million students in public schools while he demands vouchers for kids who are already enrolled in private and religious schools. Abbott has refused to increase funding for the state’s public schools unless the legislature approves vouchers, most of which will subsidize the affluent.

Last year, the legislature refused to approve vouchers. Since then, Abbott engineered the defeat of several anti-voucher Republicans. He’s hoping to win approval in the current session. Vouchers will pass easily in the state senate. We will see what happens in the House, where rural Republicans stood against vouchers in the past, before Abbott’s purge.

Abbott is playing Reverse Robin Hood. He is stealing from the poor to pay for the rich. Billionaires like Jeff Yass, the richest man jnnOennstlvsnia, and Betsy DeVos of Michigan, are funding his intransigence with millions in campaign contributions.

The Texas Monthly reports that school superintendents are increasing class sizes, laying off teachers, eliminating electives, and doing whatever they can to keep their doors open.

The article says:

Two years ago, during the 2023 legislative session, superintendents of Texas schools were optimistic that state lawmakers would boost public-education funding. After all, soaring inflation was straining the already meager finances of districts across the state, and lawmakers had at their disposal a $32.7 billion budget surplus. Spending some of that money on the urgent educational needs of the state’s children might have seemed like an uncontroversial proposal. 

Instead, the unthinkable happened: Legislators left Austin without putting any significant new money into schools or giving teachers a raise. The consequences have been dire.

Texas’s public schools were already among the most poorly resourced in the country: Our per-student funding is about 27 percent less than the national average. The basic allotment—the minimum amount of funding per student that school districts receive from the state—has been stuck at $6,160 since 2019. That would need to be upped by about $1,400 just to keep pace with rising costs. Public education advocates worry that lawmakers will provide only face-saving increases to the basic allotment in 2025 while diverting billions to private schools.

Many school leaders have had to undertake draconian austerity measures. Nearly 80 percent of districts have reported challenges with budget deficits. Given the stakes, 2025 could be a pivotal year for Texas’s public-education system….

Texas Monthly spoke to a group of superintendents to ask about how they were coping. They all spoke about the budget cuts and unfunded mandates (like requiring the hiring of police officers without providing funding). One superintendent, Jennifer Blaine of Spring Branch, said:

JB, Spring Branch: We don’t have anywhere else to cut. We are cut to the bone. I consolidated everything I could, and I cut everything that I could. If we have to cut further, you’re talking about severely impacting academics in the classroom and, quite frankly, safety and security. Five and a half million kids are in Texas public schools, and I don’t understand how our legislators and our governor don’t see this as a crisis. If we don’t educate these kids to the highest levels and prepare them for postsecondary success, we’re going to crumble as a state. I don’t know where the disconnect is. Education is the great equalizer. But nobody is talking about that, and I think it’s a missed opportunity because this is not going to end well. 

The title of the article in the print edition was  “A Legislature That Will Spend at Least as Much Per Pupil as Louisiana.”

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Corruption, Cruelty, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Funding, Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers

Today is the Last Day for Federal Employees to Accept Musk’s “Buyout” Offer

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2025 //
7

As part of the radical overhaul of the federal government, some 2 million employees were asked to resign and accept a leave with pay if they did. But there is no money appropriated to pay for the offer, and there are multiple lawsuits opposing it. Nor was there any consideration of the value of the employee’s work.

When Elon Musk took charge of Twitter, he made a similar offer and fired 80% of the workforce. He got rid of content moderation teams and opened the platform to Nazis and misinformation. The downside was that he lost every major advertiser, and he’s now suing them for conspiring to hurt Twitter.

The New York Times reported on the final day of the offer:

Some federal employees have a new symbol for their resistance to President Trump’s and Elon Musk’s radical overhaul of the U.S. government: a spoon.

Last week, in an email with the subject line “Fork in the Road,” the administration urged federal workers to consider resigning from their posts and said they would be paid through September — a bid to rapidly shrink the size of the work force.

Union leaders have urged employees not to accept the offer, questioning its legality and legitimacy. And on Wednesday, workers at the Technology Transformation Services, the tech-focused arm of the General Services Administration, made their displeasure with the offer known during an organization-wide meeting with their new leader, a former employee at Mr. Musk’s automaker Tesla, by sharing spoon emojis in an online chat, according to people familiar with the response.

In the meeting, Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who was appointed to lead technology efforts at the G.S.A., attempted to assuage worries about the deferred resignation plan and told workers to “read as much as you can” about the offer, according to an audio recording provided to The New York Times. He also urged federal workers to review information posted on the website of the Office of Personnel Management.

“Have that context in mind as you think through the decision you have to make in the next 24 to 30 hours,” Mr. Shedd added. “The deferred resignation is the first step in streamlining the federal work force. In-person work will be the next step.”

His assurances did not appear to work. Employees in the tech division rained down spoon emojis in the chat that accompanied the video meeting, which was watched by more than 600 people, according to photos of the chat screen provided to The Times and three people familiar with the reaction. Some employees also added spoon emojis to their statuses on Slack, a workplace communication app.

“Thomas: Whether you mean to or not, you’re playing a role in destroying TTS,” one worker wrote in the chat.

“The culture is the people,” another employee wrote. “Without the people, TTS is NOTHING.”

After Mr. Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in 2022, he sent an email with the same subject line — “Fork in the Road” — to the company’s employees, offering them a buyout to leave the company if they didn’t want to participate in his “extremely hardcore” vision.

During the Twitter takeover, employees used the salute emoji as a sign of solidarity with their co-workers and as a goodbye during mass layoffs.

After renaming the social media service as X, Mr. Musk has pushed for severe cuts to the federal government. He shared a post that estimated 5 to 10 percent of the federal work force would take the deferred resignation offer, potentially saving the government $100 billion.

The last date to accept the offer is Feb. 6, according to the email to government workers.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Ignorance, Musk, Elon, Propaganda, Trump

Simon Rosenberg: Trump Is Responsible for Chaos, Mayhem, Disruption

By dianeravitch
January 31, 2025 //
6

Simon Rosenberg is a leader of the resistance to Trumpism. He blogs at Substack, where his blog is called Hopium. He wrote today:

Morning/Afternoon all. If Donald Trump has a superpower it has been the evasion of responsibility for the bad things he’s done in his life. Yesterday he blamed Biden, Obama, Pete Buttigieg, DEI for the 67 dead in the Potomac. Deflect, blame others, rinse, repeat. So let’s be clear about a few things today: 

Trump Is Trying To Break The US Government And Owns All The Troubles That Come From It – Trump’s savage attack on the day to day operations of our government will result in many, many bad things to happen. The 67 dead in the Potomac are an example. He has gutted the leadership of our government’s aviation security and has waged a war against rank and file employees of the government including air traffic controllers. When things fail like they did this week outside of Reagan National Airport we must hold the President to account. He is literally trying to break things now and when they break there is one person to blame and it sure isn’t Mr or Mrs DEI. 

It is possible those outside of DC don’t understand the scale and scope of the purges happening at senior levels of every department and agency right now. Incredible knowledge, expertise and operational capacity are being lost. The entire National Security Council career staff, for example, was just sent home last week. They are disabling the ability of the US government to carry out its daily responsibilities. 

Trump’s Economic Agenda Is Causing Prices To Rise For Everyone. Tariffs Will Raise Them Even Further – As we discussed with Rob Shapiro earlier this week the President’s proposed economic policies will raise prices for everyone, re-ignite inflation, raise taxes on middle class Americans, cut benefit programs that will cause costs to rise on a wide variety of services including health care and provide extraordinary tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations. As Rob explained to us the tariffs Trump may implement tomorrow are a national sales tax on an incredible array of goods including food, oil and gas, wood and other construction products. Prices on all these things will rise significantly, immediately, perhaps as early as tomorrow, and further fuel inflation. 

Trump’s inflationary agenda is already re-igniting inflation. From Reuters this morning, Key US inflation measure posts largest monthly gain since April: 

U.S. inflation increased by the most in eight months in December amid a surge in consumer spending, suggesting the Federal Reserve would probably be in no hurry to resume cutting interest rates soon.

Other data on Friday showed labor costs rose in the fourth quarter as wages edged up. Price pressures picked up in the fourth quarter, stalling the progress in lowering inflation.

We all need to be very clear that Trump has no plan to lower prices and costs. Regardless of his rhetoric his plan actually seeks to raise prices and costs, not lower them, and here we are – inflation and costs are rising for every American, already. 

Mass Deportation Will Raise Prices For Americans, Disrupt Our Businesses and Slow Growth – As we discussed with David Leopold last week Trump’s mass deportation plan is going to remove millions of workers from our labor force at a time of historically low employment. This will cause our companies to lose long-time productive employees; make it far harder for all companies to hire and grow; prices will rise for food, health care, day care, restaurants, hotels and many, many other items; families and communities will be shattered. All of this contribute to re-igniting inflation, ensuring the Fed does not lower interest rates, keeping mortgages and borrowing costs for all companies and Americans at elevated levels, slowing growth and worsening the cost of living crisis in America. It will also have this effect, via Hopium community member Catherine G: 

My daughter-in-law is a prosecutor. Victims of crime and witnesses are now not showing up for court dates and/or preparation because they are afraid ICE will seize them at the court house. That means cases can’t be prosecuted and that means criminals stay free to commit more crimes. Party of law and order my sweet Aunt Annie.

The savage treatment of the migrants we are sending back, the bullying of countries to accept them, the levying of tariffs on our closest allies, the threat or actual seizure of land from sovereign nations/allies will turn America into a rogue nation, a pariah state, and make us a far less safe and successful nation. 

Life Saving Aid Programs, Medical Research, Clinical Trials, Public Health Programs Are Still Turned Off – It’s possible that the most dangerous actions Trump has taken so far involve a wide array of programs whose funding remains stolen/frozen. Here is a new NYTimes story today that suggests the cut off of foreign aid programs could result in millions of people dying around the world in the coming months, How The World Is Reeling From Trump’s Aid Freeze: 

In famine-stricken Sudan, soup kitchens that feed hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in a war zone have shut down.

In Thailand, war refugees with life-threatening diseases have been turned away by hospitals and carted off on makeshift stretchers.

In Ukraine, residents on the frontline of the war with Russia may be going without firewood in the middle of winter.

Some of the world’s most vulnerable populations are already feeling President Trump’s sudden cutoff of billions of dollars in American aid that helps fend off starvation, treats diseases and provides shelter for the displaced.

n a matter of days, Mr. Trump’s order to freeze nearly all U.S. foreign aid has intensified humanitarian crises and raised profound questions about America’s reliability and global standing.

“Everyone is freaking out,” Atif Mukhtar of the Emergency Response Rooms, a local volunteer group in the besieged Sudanese capital, Khartoum, said of the aid freeze.

Soon after announcing the cut off, the Trump administration abruptly switched gears. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this weekthat “life-saving humanitarian assistance” could continue, offering a respite for what he called “core” efforts to provide food, medicine, shelter and other emergency needs.

But he stressed that the reprieve was “temporary in nature,” with limited exceptions. Beyond that, hundreds of senior officials and workers who help distribute American aid had already been fired or put on leave, and many aid efforts remain paralyzed around the world.

Most of the soup kitchens in Khartoum, the battle-torn capital of Sudan, have shut down. Until last week, the United States was the largest source of money for the volunteer-run kitchens that fed 816,000 people there.

“For most people, it’s the only meal they get,” said Hajooj Kuka, a spokesman for the Emergency Response Rooms, describing Khartoum as a city “on the edge of starvation.”

After the American money was frozen last week, some of the aid groups that channel those funds to the food kitchens said they were unsure if they were allowed to continue. Others cut off the money completely. Now, 434 of the 634 volunteer kitchens in the capital have shut down, Mr. Kuka said.

“And more are going out of service every day,” he added.

Many of the aid workers, doctors and people in need who rely on American aid are now reckoning with their relationship with the United States and the message the Trump administration is sending: America is focusing on itself.

Most of the soup kitchens that feed 816,000 people in Khartoum have shut down. Patients were told to leave a U.S.-funded refugee hospital on the Myanmar border. Organizations that provide maternal care, vaccinations and firewood were forced to suspend operations.

“It feels like one easy decision by the U.S. president is quietly killing so many lives,” said Saw Nah Pha, a tuberculosis patient who said he was told to leave a U.S.-funded hospital in the Mae La refugee camp, the largest refugee camp on the Thai-Myanmar border.

Across the US a freeze/theft of government funding has crippled medical research, clinical trials and other basic public health care systems.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Disruption, Evil, Funding, Trump

Politifact: Did Governor Newsom Cut the Firefighting Budget?

By dianeravitch
January 27, 2025 //
9

Governor Gavin Newsom has been fighting a two-front war: the devastating fires in Los Angeles and the massive amount of disinformation about the state’s efforts.

One widespread rumor is that Governor Newsom cut the state’s firefighting budget by $100 million in the year before the LA fires.

Politifact reviewed the facts. As usual, it’s complicated. Newsom did cut the fire budget by $100 million at the same time that the overall fire budget increased. If you want to see how this happened, read the report in full.

Here is the conclusion.

Cal Fire’s budget and spending have grown

Cal Fire’s total base wildfire protection budget has nearly tripled over the past 10 years (from $1.1 billion in 2014‑15 to $3 billion in 2023‑24), according to a March analysis by the Legislative Analyst’s Office before the 2024-25 budget was approved.

Cal Fire’s overall budget also has increased, with its combined budget for fire protection, emergency fire suppression, resource management and fire prevention more than doubling over the past 10 years from $1.7 billion in 2014‑15 to $3.7 billion in 2023‑24. (Newsom’s office sent us similar information showing budget increases.)

The number of staff members working in fire prevention have similarly grown during that same decade rising from 5,756 to 10,275.

Another way to look at Cal Fire is through expenditures rather than the budgeted amount because it’s not unusual for the state to dip into other pots of money to spend more than budgeted for addressing fires. 

The legislative analyst’s office estimated total Cal Fire expenditures have risen during Newsom’s tenure:

* The 2024-25 amount does not yet reflect additional costs being incurred for the current Los Angeles-area wildfires.

Source: California Legislative Analyst’s office estimate, not adjusted for inflation, provided to PolitiFact

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, California, Disruption, Extremism, Lies, Los Angeles

Sherrilyn Ifill: The Truth

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2025 //
8

Sherrilyn Ifill is a law professor who holds an endowed chair at Howard University. She is a former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

In this post, she offers sage advice about how to recharge your batteries and re-engage in the struggle for a better society. She wrote this piece soon after the 2024 election. It’s good advice.

….But ours is a subtle strength
Potent with centuries of yearning,

Of being kegged and shut away
In dark forgotten places.
We shall endure
To steal your senses
In that lonely twilight
Of your winter’s grief.


-Pauli Murray, To the Oppressors (1939)            

The truth is that things are going to get very bad. America has gone over the cliff’s edge. How hard we land in the ravine below remains to be seen. But we are one week in, and things are already quite dire. Trump’s first round of cabinet nominees, and his insistence that his picks be installed without a vote of Congress is a defining moment. It demonstrates that there will be no bottom with this Administration.

Donald Trump and his coterie of supporters are firmly in control of the most powerful and wealthy country in the world. And because they are in charge of this country – which perhaps undeservedly,  has stood as an example throughout much of the world as a symbol of freedom, equality, ethics, the rule of law and democracy – other countries will fall in our wake.

I am saying this now because I have always tried to be honest in my writings and analysis about this country. I say all of this because I have been able over the years to encourage my clients, my colleagues, my staff, my family and community to believe that we can fight and win. I have infected other people with my unshakeable optimism about what we can accomplish to transform this country.

I am going to keep fighting. It’s what I do. But I do not want to lead you astray. Because I do think that many of us – especially those of us in communities likely to be targeted by this Administration – need to see this moment as one in which we are focused on surviving this difficult time. I have faced the fact that we will not be able to move much forward in the next few years. In fact, I expect things to become so dire over the next two years, that we will scarcely recognize the country we live in. I expect that fear and cruelty will become part of our daily diet. We will hear the frightening sound of silence, as those who speak out most boldly against the excesses of the incoming administration, against its policies, against Musk and against Russia, find themselves at cross-purposes with a vindictive and cruel administration with almost unimaginable power to control communications, law, and the sense of reality itself.

Perhaps it won’t be that bad. But we are here in some measure, because far too many failed to imagine that the worst could happen. I have written already about “the nadir,” and I believe we must face it.

And so, our goal now must be first and foremost to survive this dark period with as much of our values, dignity, integrity, work, financial stability and physical and mental health intact as possible. We must also work to protect our families and communities, and to hold in place our most trusted and needed institutions, a modicum of the rule of law, our constitutional commitment to equality and to free expression.
As I have said in earlier pieces, this is “planting time.” Planting is work. That work must be aimed at building ideas, theories, paradigms, institutions, skills, practices, and alliances that we can seed now for a future harvest – a fulsome and lush democracy that will reflect the very best of us.

We are not “watching the Trump show” this time. We’ve seen it already. We can dip in every now and then, but we must not become paralyzed watching the train wreck. We will, of course, push back against injustice, and defend our rights and citizenship when necessary in the courts. We will demand that congressional representatives, our Governors and our Mayors, act to protect our democratic rights. Even when we know they will not stand up for what is right, we must not be silent. We must not make it easy for them to be cowards or to take our rights. We must still call, write and email our representatives and show up at town halls and meetings. Remember that those who have fought for us over these past years are tired too. Let them see us in these spaces and hear from us.

But our primary work must be first and foremost to work in our communities – both physical and ideological. To build them up and to share time and ideas with those committed to democracy and justice. We each need a curriculum of local service.

We also need a personal curriculum that will allow us to contribute to the building of the future we dream of for ourselves and our families. That means that our core work must be to commit during this time to do less watching, and more learning and more growing. We need to become better citizens for the democracy we want. That means we must dedicate time to expanding our thinking and our knowledge, and to building up our democratic imagination. That means our work is to imagine, to ally, to experiment, restore, befriend, study, read, write, serve, and create. Every one of us. Even as chaos swirls around us.

I encourage you to show your children and grandchildren real things – nature, animals, how things are built, how to cook from scratch. Teach them cursive writing, so that they have a signature all their own. Take them to live concerts and theater. Go on field trips. Infuse their lives with memories of things that are true and concrete.

If you teach, use primary documents in your teaching, take your students to historic sites, listen to audio of oral arguments and speeches so that they will feel confident in their understanding of history, and know that history was made by human beings not machines.

If you litigate, do it with the expectation that you will win. And act like it. Show out. Be excellent and remain confident. Those who can still feel shame – whether those at your opponents table or those on the bench – will feel it when you hold the standard high. And your clients will never forget it.

If you organize, never stop. Plant those seeds deep in our communities.

If you hold office. Hold it. Do not give up your power. Use your voice. Master every rule. Make a record. I repeat. Make a record–so that the truth might be known.

To protect ourselves and our loved ones, there are also pragmatic things we must do. I’ve thought of a few:

  • Save some cash. And keep enough in the house for gas and food for a week.
  • Let yourself imagine what you would do if you lost your job in terms of finding new employment, paying rent/mortgage for several months, and start building what you need to be able to meet that moment if it comes.
  • Get needed vaccinations in case new HHS policies result in changes or delays in their development or availability. Stock up on COVID tests, and get the most recent COVID booster. Purchase Plan B if it’s available in your area.
  • Think about tightening security on your electronic devices. Be more thoughtful about social media, and even return to making phone calls and writing letters in some instances. I know it’s old school, but actually memorize the phone numbers of at least two loved ones.
  • Gird yourself spiritually, through your faith or other meditative practices, as we are all likely to hear or confront many disturbing and ugly interactions. Experience art, go on walks, dance, play Spades, Dominoes, Scrabble. We need resilience.
  • Walk away when you need to walk away. Challenge when you need to. Try to always have back up.
  • Take the bystander training offered by groups https://righttobe.org/ so that when you see outrages committed against members of your community or against strangers, you will have practice in how you might intervene or respond.
  • Get an online subscription to a news service from another country so that you have a reliable sense of what’s going on in the world, and how this country is being perceived.  
  • Are your taxes paid, or more importantly, filed?
  • Is your passport up-to-date?
  • If you have money to give – then give to your local library, the food pantry, homelessness services. But also give to cultural institutions. Get a library card and a membership to a museum. Give to organizations working to hold back the worst that this administration may dish out – the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU, the National Women’s Law Center, and so many others.
  • I am going to write more in this space. I hope you’ll subscribe and even pay a nominal fee to sustain the writing. I’m right here, going through this with all of you. And for me there is beauty in our shared walk. Let’s do this together.

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Civil Rights, Courage, Creativity, Democracy, Elections, Equity, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, For-Profit, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Will Purge Those Who Are Not Loyal to Him

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2025 //
16

Heather Cox Richardson reports on the preparations for Trump’s return to the White House. At the top of the priority list is removing all those officials who are not loyal to Trump. Forget the fact that those who took an oath of office pledged their loyalty to the Constitution. The higher loyalty in 2025 is to Trump personally.

She writes:

The incoming Trump administration is working to put its agenda into place.

Ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Representative Gerry Connolly (D-VA) warned that the loyalty purge “threatens our national security and our ability to respond quickly and effectively to the ongoing and very real global threats in a dangerous world.”

Although experts on the National Security Council usually carry over from one administration to the next, Aamer Madhani and Zeke Miller of the Associated Press today reported that incoming officials for the Trump administration are interviewing career senior officials on the National Security Council about their political contributions, how they voted in 2024, and whether they are loyal to Trump. Most of them are on loan from the State Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Central Intelligence Agency and, understanding that they are about to be fired, have packed up their desks to head back to their home agencies.

The National Security Council is the main forum for the president to hash out decisions in national security and foreign policy, and the people on it are picked for their expertise. But Trump’s expected pick to become his national security advisor—his primary advisor on all national security issues—Representative Mike Waltz (R-FL) told right-wing Breitbart News that he wants to staff the NSC with people who are “100 percent aligned with the president’s agenda.”

But during Trump’s first term, it was Alexander Vindman, who was detailed to the NSC, and his twin Eugene Vindman, who was serving the NSC as an ethics lawyer, who reported concerns about Trump’s July 2019 call to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to their superiors. This launched the investigation that became Trump’s first impeachment, and Trump appears anxious to make sure future NSC members will be fiercely loyal to him.

With extraordinarily slim majorities in the House and Senate, Republicans are talking about pushing through their entire agenda through Congress as a single bill in the process known as budget reconciliation. Budget reconciliation, which deals with matters related to spending, revenue, and the debt limit, is one of the few things that cannot be filibustered, meaning that Republicans could get a reconciliation bill through the Senate with just 50 votes. If they can hold their conference together, they could get the package through despite Democratic opposition.

House speaker Mike Johnson and Republican leaders have said that the House intends to pass a reconciliation bill that covers border security, defense spending, the extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, spending cuts to social welfare programs, energy deregulation, and an increase in the national debt limit.

But Li Zhou of Vox points out that it’s not quite as simple as it sounds to get everything at once, because budget reconciliation measures are not supposed to include anything that doesn’t relate to the budget, and the Senate parliamentarian will advise stripping those things out. In addition, the budget cuts Republicans are circulating include cuts to popular programs like Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act (more commonly known as Obamacare), the Inflation Reduction Act’s investment in combating climate change, and the supplemental nutrition programs formerly known as food stamps.

Still, a lot can be done under budget reconciliation. Democrats under Biden passed the 2021 American Rescue Plan and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act under reconciliation, and Republicans under Trump passed the 2017 Trump tax cuts the same way.

A wrinkle in those plans is the Republicans’ hope to raise the national debt limit. As soon as they take control of Congress and the White House, Republicans will have to deal immediately with the treasury running up against the debt limit, a holdover from World War I that sets a limit on how much the country can borrow. Although he has complained bitterly about spending under Biden, Trump has demanded that Congress either raise or abandon the debt ceiling because the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the tax cuts he wants to extend will add $4.6 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years, and cost estimates for his deportation plans range from $88 billion to $315 billion a year.

Republicans are backing away from adding a debt increase to the budget reconciliation package out of concern that members of the far-right Freedom Caucus will kill the entire bill if they do. Those members want no part of raising the national debt and have demanded $2 trillion in budget cuts before they will consider it. Tonight, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) told Jordain Carney of Politico that Senate Republicans expect the debt limit to be stripped out of the budget reconciliation measure.

So Republicans are currently exploring the idea of leveraging aid to California for the deadly fires in order to get Democrats to sign on to raising the debt ceiling. Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reported that Trump met with a group of influential House Republicans over dinner Sunday night at Mar-a-Lago to discuss tying aid for the wildfires to raising the debt ceiling. Today, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) confirmed to reporter Hill that this plan is under discussion.

Indeed, Republicans have been in the media suggesting that disaster aid to Democratic states should be tied to their adopting Republican policies. The Los Angeles fires have now claimed at least 24 lives. More than 15,000 firefighters are working to extinguish the wildfires, which have been driven by Santa Ana winds of up to 98 miles (158 km) an hour over ground scorched by high temperatures and low rainfall since last May, conditions caused by climate change.

On the Fox News Channel today, Representative Zach Nunn (R-IA) said: “We will certainly help those thousands of homes and families who have been devastated, but we also expect you to change bad behavior. We should look at the same for these blue states who have run away with a broken tax policy…. Those governors need to change their tune now.” Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) blamed Democrats for the fires and said of federal disaster relief: “I certainly wouldn’t vote for anything unless we see a dramatic change in how they’re gonna be handling these things in the future.”

Aside from the morality of demanding concessions for disaster aid after President Joe Biden responded with full and unconditional support for regions hit by Hurricane Helene (although Tennessee governor Bill Lee is still lying that Biden delayed aid to his state, when in fact he delayed in asking for it, as required by law), there is a financial problem with this argument. As economist Paul Krugman noted today in his Krugman Wonks Out, California “is literally subsidizing the rest of the United States, red states in particular, through the federal budget.”

In 2022, the most recent year for which information is available, California paid $83 billion more to the federal government than it got back. Washington state also subsidized the rest of the country, as did most of the Northeast. That money flowed to Republican-dominated states, which contributed far less to the federal government than they received in return.

Krugman noted that “if West Virginia were a country, it would in effect be receiving foreign aid equal to more than 20 percent of its G[ross] D[omestic] P[roduct].” Krugman refers to the federal government as “an insurance company with an army,” and he notes that there is “nothing either the city or the state could have done to prevent” the wildfires. “If the United States of America doesn’t take care of its own citizens, wherever they live and whatever their politics, we should drop “United” from our name,” he writes. “As it happens, however, California—a major driver of U.S. prosperity and power—definitely has earned the right to receive help during a crisis.”

Today, Biden announced student loan forgiveness for another 150,000 borrowers, bringing the total number of people relieved of student debt to more than 5 million borrowers, who have received $183.6 billion in relief. This has been achieved through making sure existing debt relief programs were followed, as they had not been in the past.

Establishment Republicans continue to fight MAGA Republicans, and MAGA fights among itself: former Trump ally Steve Bannon yesterday called Trump’s sidekick Elon Musk “truly evil” and vowed to “take this guy down.” But even as their enablers in the legacy media are normalizing Republican behavior, a reality-based media is stepping up to counter the disinformation.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Trump
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