Those of us who have watched the movement to privatize public education over the past 30 years have witnessed a long list of broken promises. Privately-run schools, we were told, would be more effective, more accountable, more transparent, more responsive to students and parents, and would save money!
Now we know that none of those claims were true.
Privatization, in the case of charter schools and vouchers, does not produce better results, except when the privatizers exclude the students with the greatest needs. Privatization does not save money; in fact, it’s more expensive because the business has to turn a profit. Privatization means less accountability and less transparency; lobbyists for the charter chains and voucher entities fight both accountability and transparency. Accountability and testing, it turns out, is only for public schools, not for religious and private schools. Privatization opens the way to graft, corruption, fraud, waste, and abuse.
Mail delivery. Real estate. Foreign aid grants. The Trump administration is moving to privatize a sweeping number of government functions and assets — a long-standing Republican goal that’s being catalyzed by billionaire Elon Musk.
The slash-and-burn approach of Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is paving the way for a new shift to the private sector, reducing the size and power of the federal bureaucracy in a real-world test of the conservative theory — a version of which is also widely popular in Silicon Valley — that companies are better than government at saving money and responding to people’s needs.
Examples are popping up across Washington and in proposals from President Donald Trump’s allies, though the plans are at various stages of development and, in some cases, have already encountered resistance.
At the DOGE-allied General Services Administration, officials are quietly moving ahead with a push to sell hundreds of publicly owned buildings to private companies — which can then lease them back to the government, theoretically saving maintenance and upkeep costs for taxpayers, according to two people briefed on internal deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss them publicly.
At the Postal Service, whose leaders have tussled with DOGE representatives, a plan for full privatization appears to have lost steam after facing pushback and legal hurdles. But private firms are preparing for a piecemeal government effort to outsource mail and package handling and long-haul trucking routes, while off-loading leases for unprofitable post offices, according to six industry executives.
At the Interior Department, Secretary Doug Burgum has proposed allowing private developers to build on federal lands across the West. And in his first public address as treasury secretary, former hedge fund manager Scott Bessent vowed to “reprivatize the economy.” Businesspeople and policymakers close to the administration are stepping up with additional proposals.
A Wall Street investor nominated to run the International Development Finance Corporation, a little-known foreign investment agency that works to align the private sector with U.S. foreign policy goals, has suggested redirecting a large portion of the $40 billion budget of the shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development to investors, start-ups and companies that work in developing countries.
The proposal, which was posted on X by the nominee, Ben Black, and tech investor Joe Lonsdale, is under consideration within the White House, according to a person familiar with it, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private deliberations. Bloomberg first reported that the initiative was under consideration.
The military contractor Erik Prince has pushed to turn over defense and immigration enforcement functions to private security firms, at one point pitching U.S. officials on a plan to execute operations in Africa, according to three people with knowledge of the idea, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private conversations. CNN reported that Prince also has floated the use of private military contractors to carry out operations against Houthi rebels in Yemen…
Traditional Republicans have long argued that private companies can do a better job of managing government services than civil servants. But Musk and his Silicon Valley associates want to push the idea much further than the mainstream GOP. At a Morgan Stanley technology conference this month, Musk said the government should privatize “everything we possibly can.”
The Texas House of Representatives is moving to a vote on vouchers. Governor Greg Abbott has been pushing vouchers for years, but the House legislators have defeated them again and again, even though Republicans have a super-majority in both houses. The votes were provided by a combination of urban Democrats and rural Republicans. The rural Republicans decided that protecting their local public school was more important than pleasing Governor Abbott.
But then a billionaire in Pennsylvania gave Governor Abbott $6 million so he could defeat the recalcitrant Republicans who blocked vouchers.
Abbott managed to knock off several of the Republicans he targeted by lying about their records. In theory, he has the votes to pass voucher legislation.
But will he? There are still rural Republicans who know that vouchers will destroy their hometown school. How will they vote?
Worse, vouchers have failed wherever they have been tried.
Eight Things to Know: State’s Proposed Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) for Private Schools
Governor Abbott’s ongoing promotion of universal school choice through taxpayer funded Education Savings Account’s (ESA) focuses on helping low-income, low-performing, and SPED students obtain a better education. However, this material highlights eight things to know that contradict the state’s promotion of taxpayer funded ESAs for private schools.
1.) Taxpayer Cost: The fiscal note for ESAs is $4.6 billion per year in year 2030. In lieu of funding ESAs for private schools, the state could:
Further reduce property taxes, Stop funding public schools below the national average (Texas students are not “Below Average”), Provide each Texas public-school graduate with $12,100 to obtain college or technical degrees, or Fund public highways versus toll roads.
2.) ESAs Primarily Benefit Students/Families Currently Attending Private Schools: Despite the promotion of providing opportunities for low-income students in public schools, the state estimates that 88% of existing private school students, 9% of home school students, and only 1.8% of current public-school students will receive ESAs (see table below). Source: SB 2 Fiscal Note
2.) Arizona and Universal School Choice: With Arizona being the first state to provide universal school choice, Governor Abbott invited former Governor Ducey to promote the importance of universal school choice at a recent press conference. But no one mentioned that the 2024 NAEP scores of Arizona are among the lowest in the nation and significantly below the NAEP scores of Texas, especially for English Language Learners and Economically Disadvantaged students that ESAs are supposed to benefit. Source: The Nation’s Report Card.
5.) State Currently Funds School Choice With Separate System of Charters and Unproven Results: Over the last 30-years, the State has directed taxpayer funding to provide school choice in local communities through a separate system of privately managed charter schools. Currently, charters: Operate 905 schools, Enroll over 420,000 students, Annually receive taxpayer funding of $4.6 billion, Serve students with lower teacher experience, fewer certified teachers, higher student to teacher ratios, administrative costs, and attrition rates compared to locally governed public schools, and Underperform locally governed school districts (see “2024 STAAR” below). Source: Texas Education Agency and Txreasearchportal.com.
6.) Admission Policies Mitigate Low-Income, Low-Performing and SPED Student Enrollment: Private school admission requirements directly limit of the enrollment of current low-income, low-performing, and SPED public school students. Based upon various Texas private school Student/Parent Handbooks, private schools restrict admissions based upon academic performance, religious persuasion, special needs/learning differences, and/or cost. Academic Performance: Private schools often require students to be “at grade level,” thereby prohibiting the enrollment of low-performing students. Example Student/Parent Handbook – Admissions:
“The student must test at grade level (50 percentile) or above in mathematics and reading on a nationally recognized standardized test…No accommodations are provided for entrance testing.”
“Once students are placed on academic probation (for not achieving a GPA of at least 2.0), they will be given one semester to improve their academic performance to a level of 70%. If not achieved, the student may be required to withdraw from the school
Religious Persuasion: Religious educational institutions are exempt from Civil Rights legislation relating to the enrollment and acceptance of individuals with a particular religious persuasion. For example, a new non-Catholic student is the last enrollment priority at many Catholic schools. Example Student/Parent Handbook – Admissions:
Enrollment Priority – Children of: 1.) Faculty, 2.) Active parishioners with siblings in school, 3.) Active parishioners without siblings in school, 4.) Non-Active parishioners with siblings in school, 5.) Non-active parishioners without siblings in school, 6.) Catholics that are parishioners of other Catholic communities, 7.) Non-Catholics with siblings in school, and 8.) Non-Catholics.
Further enrollment limitations for non—Catholic students may also be higher tuition relative to Catholic students.
2024/25 Tuition: Catholic – $8,160 and Non-Catholic – $10,408
Special Needs/Learning Differences: While there are certainly private schools that focus on serving students with special needs/learning differences, private schools are not required to follow the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and may choose to discriminate against students with disabilities. Example Student/Parent Handbook – Admissions:
“The school does not admit students with more severe learning differences or those requiring extensive special education services… (To be admitted), the family must provide current diagnostic testing that recognizes the student’s performance on recognized aptitude testing is 90 or higher.”
“Private schools are not required to significantly alter their programs, lower, or modify their standards to accommodate a child with special needs.”
ESA Does Not Cover the Cost of Private Schools: SB 2 provides a $10,000 ESA for students to attend a private school. For low-income students, the amount is insufficient to cover the $14,750 estimated average annual private school cost, which is $11,350 for tuition and $3,400 for fees (application, testing, enrollment, computer, sports, club fees, transportation, mandatory parent service hours, and uniforms).
7.) Choice Forces Public-School Closures that Denys the “School Choice” of Public-School Families: It has become common for urban, suburban, and rural school districts to close high-performing campuses due to declining enrollment due to the state’s expansion of charters. In fact, school districts have recently closed over 125 campuses due to the expansion of state-approved charters. As such, providing school choice for certain students is disrupting and denying the school choice for over 50,000 students experiencing closure of their public school. With the state projecting 98,000 existing public-school students will utilize ESAs to attend private schools, additional public-school closures are imminent, and ESAs will further deny choice for families choosing their public school.
8.) Voters Consistently Defeat School Choice: Despite claims the majority of Texans support school choice, voters have defeated school choice initiatives placed ono the ballot in every state. In 2024, voters in Colorado and the conservative states of Kentucky and Nebraska repealed or defeated school choice initiatives for private schools.
When Trump took control of the Smithsonian Institution and its multiple museums yesterday, his executive order pledged to purge the museums of unpatriotic exhibits (WOKE ideology and DEI), the targets of Trump’s rage. Trump gave the job to Vance, who will presumably clean up the nation’s history and make it as inspiring (to white males) as it was before the 1960s.
Remember the halcyon days before the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, and other “blemishes” on our national history? Trump does. That’s the story he wants in The Smithsonian: heroes, accomplishments, triumphs! When men were men, and everyone else was in the background.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order Thursday evening promising to eliminate “divisive narratives” from the Smithsonian Institution’s museums and restore “monuments, memorials, statues, markers” that have been removed over the past five years.
The “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” order directs Vice President JD Vance to eliminate what he finds “improper” from the Smithsonian Institution, including its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo. The White House fact sheet describing the order said it will focus on removing “anti-American ideology.”
The institution, the official keeper of the American story, has operated independently as a public-private partnership created by an act of Congress in 1846. The order is an unprecedented act to edit an institution that has been expanding over many decades to include a wider, richer and more diverse telling of the nation’s history.
“Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” the executive order says. “This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”
Trump’s order calls the museum’s evolving approach a reconstruction of history that is “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”
Historians were immediately dismayed. “Attacking the idea that telling the whole story of the United States is an ideological plot to cast the United States in a negative light testifies to a stunningly brittle insecurity about our nation and its past,” said Chandra Manning, a professor of American history at Georgetown University.
“It seems to suggest that if we allow anyone to hear the whole story of challenges that Americans have overcome, our nation will shatter. The American people are not so fragile as all that,” Manning said.
Trump’s executive order demands an “ideological purity test” and “restores neither truth nor sanity,” said Adam Rothman, an American history professor at Georgetown University. “The president’s proclamation disrespects the thousands of sincere and dedicated researchers, curators, scientists, guides, interpreters, docents and countless other people who work hard every day to preserve and tell the nation’s story truthfully, and in ways that educate and inspire the American public.”
Peter Greene, veteran teacher, master writer, the voice of wisdom and experience, sets the record straight about the purpose of the U.S. Department of Education. Contrary to what wrestling-entrepreneur Linda McMahon (Trump’s Secretary of Education) says, the Department was not created to raise test scores. The Department was created to promote equal access to educational opportunity. That equalization of resources has not yet been achieved, but Trump intends to abolish the goal altogether. In his thinking, everyone should pull themselves up by their bootstraps, unlike him, who was born into wealth and privilege.
Peter Greene writes:
The official assault on the Department of Education has begun.
If it seems like there’s an awful lot more talking around this compared to, say, the gutting of the IRS or USAID, that may be because the regime doesn’t have the legal authority to do the stuff that they are saying they want to do. The executive order is itself pretty weak sauce– “the secretary is to investigate a way to form a way to do stuff provided it’s legal.” And that apparently involves sitting down in front of every camera and microphone and trying to make a case.
A major part of that involves some lies and misdirection. The Trumpian line that we spend more than anyone and get the worst results in the world is a lie. But it is also a misdirection, a misstatement about the department’s actual purpose.
Likewise, it’s a misstatement when the American Federation of Children characterizes the “failed public policy” of “the centralization of American education.” But the Department wasn’t meant–or built–to centralize US education.
The department’s job is not to make sure that American education is great. It is expressly forbidden to exert control over the what and how of education on the state and local level.
The Trump administration is certainly not the first to ignore any of that. One of the legacies of No Child Left Behind is the idea that feds can grab the levers of power to attempt control of education in the states. Common Core was the ultimate pretzel– “Don’t call it a curriculum because we know that would be illegal, but we are going to do our damnedest to standardize the curriculum across every school in every state.” For twenty-some years, various reformsters have tried to use the levers of power in DC to reconfigure US education as a centrally planned and coordinated operation (despite the fact that there is nowhere on the globe to point to that model as a successful one). And even supporters of the department are speaking as if the department is an essential hub for the mighty wheel of US education.
Trump is just working with the tools left lying around by the bipartisan supporters of modern education reform.
So if the department’s mission is not to create central organization and coordination, then what is it?
I’d argue that the roots of the department are not the Carter administration, but the civil rights movement of the sixties and the recognition that some states and communities, left to their own devices, would try to cheat some children out of the promise of public education. Derek Black’s new book Dangerous Learning traces generations of attempts to keep Black children away from education. It was (roughly) the 1960s when the country started to grapple more effectively with the need for federal power to oppose those who would stand between children and their rights.
The programs that now rest with the department came before the department itself, programs meant to level the playing field so that the poor (Title I) and the students with special needs (IDEA) would get full access. The creation of the department stepped up that effort and, importantly, added an education-specific Civil Rights office to the effort.
And it was all created to very carefully not usurp the power of the states. When Trump says he’ll return control of education to the states, he’s speaking bunk, because the control of education has always remained with the states– for better or worse.
The federal mission was to make the field more level, to provide guardrails to keep the states playing fair with all students, to make sure that students had the best possible access to the education they were promised.
Trump has promised that none of the grant programs or college loan programs would be cut (and you can take a Trump promise to the… well, somewhere) but if all the money is still going to keep flowing, then what would the loss of the department really mean?
For one thing, the pieces that aren’t there any more. The Office of Civil Rights is now gutted and repurposed to care only about violations of white christianist rights. The National Center of Education Statistics was the source of any data about how education was working out (much of it junk, some of it not). The threat of turning grants into unregulated block grants, or being withheld from schools that dare to vaccinate or recognize diversity or keep naughty books in the library.
So the money will still flow, but the purpose will no longer be to level the playing field. It will not be about making sure every child gets the education they’re entitled to– or rather, it will rest on the MAGA foundation, the assumption that some people deserve less than others.
That’s what the loss of the department means– a loss of a department that, however imperfectly, is supposed to protect the rights of students to an education, regardless of race, creed, zip code, special needs, or the disinterest and prejudice of a state or community. Has the department itself lost sight of that mission from time to time? Sure has. Have they always done a great job of pursuing that mission? Not at all. But if nobody at all is supposed to be pursuing that goal, what will that get us?
Mujib Mashal wrote in The New York Times about the desperate starvation facing the Rohingya refugees as a result of the shutdown of U.S. foreign aid. They escaped Myanmar’s “ethnic cleansing” and now live in a United Nations camp, where their survival depends on donations of food from benevolent nations. The U.S., thanks to billionaires Trump and Musk. They should take a tour of the camps and see for themselves why foreign aid is impirtant.
Mashal writes:
More than a million people in the world’s largest refugee camp could soon be left with too little food for survival.
In the camp in Bangladesh, United Nations officials said, food rations are set to fall in April to about 18 pounds of rice, two pounds of lentils, a liter of cooking oil and a fistful of salt, per person — for the entire month.
The Trump administration’s freeze on aid has overwhelmed humanitarian response at a time when multiple conflicts rage, with aid agencies working feverishly to fill the void left by the U.S. government, their most generous and reliable donor. Many European nations are also cutting humanitarian aid, as they focus on increasing military spending in the face of an emboldened Russia.
The world is left teetering on “the verge of a deep humanitarian crisis,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres warned on a visit to the Rohingya refugee camp in southeastern Bangladesh on Friday.
“With the announced cuts in financial assistance, we are facing the dramatic risk of having only 40 percent in 2025 of the resources available for humanitarian aid in 2024,” he said, addressing a crowd of tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees. “That would be an unmitigated disaster. People will suffer, and people will die.”
At the refugee camp at Cox’s Bazar, overcrowded warrens of bamboo and tarp huts on mounds of dirt house more than a million Rohingya people driven from their homeland, Myanmar, by a campaign of ethnic cleansing that intensified in 2017.
Fenced off from the rest of Bangladesh, and almost entirely cut off from opportunities to find work or integrate into the country, the Rohingya refugees remain entirely at the mercy of humanitarian aid. The United Nations, with the help of the Bangladeshi government and dozens of aid organizations, looks after the needs of the traumatized people — education, water, sanitation, nutrition, medical care and much more.
The sudden drop in humanitarian aid threatens a wide range of programs and communities around the world, but the plight of the Rohingya is unusual in its scale and severity.
“Cox’s Bazar is ground zero for the impact of budget cuts on people in desperate need,” Mr. Guterres said. “Here it is clear budget reductions are not about numbers on a balance sheet. Funding cuts have dramatic human costs.”
Even at the current food allowance of $12.50 per person, per month, more than 15 percent of the children at the camp are acutely malnourished, according to the United Nations — the highest level recorded since 2017, when hundreds of thousands of refugees arrived after a sharp escalation of violence in Myanmar.
When a funding shortfall slashed the monthly food allowance to $8 in 2023, malnutrition and crime soared. People tried to flee the camp by embarking on dangerous and often fatal boat journeys.
During Mr. Guterres’s visit to the camp, U.N. officials had set up on a table sample food baskets showing what refugees currently get at $12.50 per person, and what that will be slashed to next month if, as they now project, the allotment falls to $6, barring a last-minute rescue.
Pointing to the sparse basket marked “$6,” Dom Scallpelli, the Bangladesh country director for the World Food Program, said, “If you give only this, that is not a survival ration.”
Even the $6 diet expected for the month of April would be made possible only because the United States unfroze its in-kind contribution, agreeing to send shipments of rice, beans, and oil, Mr. Scallpelli said. The cash contributions — the United States provided about $300 million to the Rohingya response last year, a little over half the entire response fund — remain halted.
“If we didn’t even have that, it would have been a total nightmare situation,” Mr. Scallpelli said about the in-kind donations. “At least we are thankful to the U.S. for this.”
Abul Osman, a 23-year-old refugee who arrived at Cox’s Bazar in 2017, said the refugees were already struggling with the bare minimum and the slashing of rations would be devastating for a population with no livelihood options. The Rohingya in Bangladesh are only allowed schooling inside the camp, and are not allowed access to higher education or jobs outside.
Pregnant women and children will suffer the most from dire food shortages, but the resulting mental health crisis will affect everyone, he said.
“It’s a threat to our survival,” he said.
People will die. Many thousands will die. Should we care? Our government claims to be Christian. What is the Christian response to a humanitarian catastrophe?
Nicholas Kristoff tried to estimate how many people will die because of Elon Musk’s frivolous cutting of foreign aid to desperate people? Of course, Musk relied on the authority given to his phony DOGE by Trump. So together, they bear responsibility for the deadly consequences. If either has a conscience, which is questionable, they will go to their graves someday knowing that they caused mass murders.
As the world’s richest men slash American aid for the world’s poorest children, they insist that all is well. “No one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding,” Elon Musk said. “No one.”
That is not true. In South Sudan, one of the world’s poorest countries, the efforts by Musk and President Trump are already leading children to die.
Peter Donde was a 10-year-old infected with H.I.V. from his mother during childbirth. But American aid kept Peter strong even as his parents died from AIDS. A program started by President George W. Bush called PEPFAR saved 26 million lives from AIDS, and one was Peter’s.
Under PEPFAR, an outreach health worker ensured that Peter and other AIDS orphans got their medicines. Then in January, Trump and Musk effectively shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development, perhaps illegally, and that PEPFAR outreach program ended. Orphans were on their own.
Without the help of the community health worker, Peter was unable to get his medicines, so he became sick and died in late February, according to Moses Okeny Labani, a health outreach worker who helped manage care for Peter and 144 other vulnerable children.
The immediate cause of death was an opportunistic pneumonia infection as Peter’s viral load increased and his immunity diminished, said Labani.
“If U.S.A.I.D. would be here, Peter Donde would not have died,” Labani said.
We worked with experts at the Center for Global Development who tried to calculate how many lives are at risk if American humanitarian assistance is frozen or slashed. While these estimates are inexact and depend on how much aid continues, they suggest that a cataclysm may be beginning around the developing world…
An estimated 1,650,000 people could die within a year without American foreign aid for H.I.V. prevention and treatment.
Achol Deng, an 8-year-old girl, was also infected with H.I.V. at birth and likewise remained alive because of American assistance. Then in January, Achol lost her ID card, and there was no longer a case worker to help get her a new card and medicines; she too became sick and died, said Labani.
Yes, this may eventually save money for United States taxpayers. How much? The cost of first-line H.I.V. medications to keep a person alive is less than 12 cents a day.
I asked Labani if he had ever heard of Musk. He had not, so I explained that Musk is the world’s wealthiest man and has said that no one is dying because of U.S.A.I.D. cuts.
“That is wrong,” Labani said, sounding surprised that anyone could be so oblivious. “He should come to grass roots.”
Another household kept alive by American aid was that of Jennifer Inyaa, a 35-year-old single mom, and her 5-year-old son, Evan Anzoo, both of them H.I.V.-positive. Last month, after the aid shutdown, Inyaa became sick and died, and a week later Evan died as well, according to David Iraa Simon, a community health worker who assisted them. Decisions by billionaires in Washington quickly cost the lives of a mother and her son.
“Many more children will die in the coming weeks,” said Margret Amjuma, a health worker who confirmed the deaths of Peter and Achol.
On a nine-day trip through East African villages and slums I heard that refrain repeatedly: While some are already dying because of the decisions in Washington, the toll is likely to soar in the coming months as stockpiles of medicines and food are drawn down and as people become weaker and sicker.
Two women, Martha Juan, 25, and Viola Kiden, 28, a mother of three, have already died because they lived in a remote area of South Sudan and could not get antiretroviral drugs when U.S.A.I.D. shut down supply lines, according to Angelina Doki, a health volunteer who supported them.
Doki told me that her own supply of antiretrovirals is about to run out as well.
“I am going to develop the virus,” Doki said. “My viral load will go high. I will develop TB. I will have pneumonia.” She sighed deeply and added, “We are going to die.”
In South Africa, where more than seven million people are H.I.V.-positive, the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation estimates that ending PEPFAR would lead to more than 600,000 deaths over a decade in that country alone.
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.
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.
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.
Diane Ravitch's blog 