Archives for category: Corruption

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.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Fascism, Freedom, History, International

Heather Cox Richardson: Elon Musk Is Pillaging Our Government

By dianeravitch

March 14, 2025 //

Heather Cox Richardson reports on the depredation of Elon Musk, whom Trump has empowered to destroy government services. This destruction is the prelude to privatization. At the Department of Agriculture, his DOGE boys laid off bird flu experts. At the Departnent of Transportation, they laid off air traffic controllers. The story was repeated across the government. Nothing is off-limits from the DOGE vandals, other than the billions of dollars awarded to Elon Musk every year. One can’t help wondering, at least I can’t, whether this crippling of our government was Putin’s idea.

Richardson wrote:

Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made it clear that the Trump administration’s goal is to slash the federal government and to privatize its current services. As the stock market has dropped and economists have warned of a dramatic slowdown in the economy, he told CNBC “There’s going to be a natural adjustment as we move away from public spending to private spending. The market and the economy have just become hooked, we’ve become addicted to this government spending, and there’s going to be a detox period.”

Bessent’s comments reveal that the White House is beginning to feel the pressure of the unpopularity of its policies. Trump’s rejection of 80 years of U.S. foreign policy in order to prop up Russia’s Vladimir Putin has left many Americans as well as allies aghast. Trump’s claims that Putin wants peace were belied when Russia launched massive strikes at Ukraine as soon as Trump stopped sharing intelligence with Ukrainian forces that enabled them to shoot down incoming fire.

The administration’s dramatic—and likely illegal and unconstitutional—cuts are infuriating Americans who did not expect Trump to reorder the American government so completely. While billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump repeatedly say they are cutting only “waste, fraud, and abuse” from the government, that insistence appears to be rhetorical rather than backed by fact. And yesterday, new cuts appeared to continue the gutting of government services that generally appear to be important to Americans’ health, safety, and economic security.

On Friday night, employees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—about 80,000 of them—received an email offering them a buyout of up to $25,000 if they resign and giving them a deadline of March 14 to respond. Also as of Friday, nearly 230 cases of measles have been confirmed in Texas and New Mexico, and two people have died.

The secretary of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is frustrating even allies with his response to the outbreak. Kennedy, who has long been an anti-vaccine activist, said last week that measles outbreaks were “not unusual,” and then on Sunday he posted pictures of himself hiking above Coachella Valley in California. On Monday the top spokesperson at HHS, a former Kennedy ally, quit in protest. As Adam Cancryn of Politicoreported, Kennedy has said that the measles vaccine protects children and the community, but has said the decision to vaccinate is personal and that parents should talk to healthcare providers about their options. He has also talked a lot about the benefits of nutritional supplements like cod liver oil, which is high in Vitamin A, in treating measles. In fact, vaccines are the key element in preventing people from contracting the disease..

“It’s a serious role, he’s just a couple of weeks in and measles is not a common occurrence, and it should be all hands on deck,” one former Trump official told Adam Cancryn, Sophie Garder, and Chelsea Cirruzzo of Politico. “When you’re taking a selfie out at Coachella, it’s pretty clear that you’re checked out.”

In another blockbuster story that dropped yesterday, the Social Security Administration announced it will begin to withhold 100% of a person’s Social Security benefits if they are overpaid, even if the overpayment is not their fault. Under President Joe Biden the agency had changed the policy to recover overpayments at 10% of monthly benefits or $10, whichever was greater.

Those who can’t afford that level of repayment can contact Social Security, the notice says, but acting commissioner Leland Dudek has said he plans to cut at least 7,000 jobs—more than 12% of the agency—although its staff is already at a 50-year low. He is also closing field offices, and senior staff with the agency have either left or been fired.

Dudek yesterday retracted an order from the day before that required parents of babies born in Maine to go to a Social Security office to register their baby rather than filling out a form in the hospital. Another on Thursday would also have stopped funeral homes from filing death records electronically.

One new father told Joe Lawlor of the Portland Press Herald that he had filled out the form for his son’s social security number and then his wife got a call saying they would have to go to the Social Security office. But when he tried to call Social Security headquarters to figure out what was going on, the wait time was an estimated two hours. So he called a local office, where no one knew what he was talking about. “They keep talking about efficiency,” he said. “This seemed to be something that worked incredibly efficiently, and they broke it overnight.”

The administration did not explain why it had imposed this rule in Maine. Senator Angus King of Maine, an Independent, said he was glad the administration had changed its mind, but added that “this rapid reversal has raised concerns among Maine people and left many unanswered questions about the Social Security Administration’s motivations.”

Trump has said that Social Security “won’t be touched” as his administration slashes through the federal government.

Trump also said there would not be cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, but on Wednesday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which figures the financial cost of legislation, said that Republicans will have to cut either Medicare, Medicaid, or the Children’s Health Insurance Program in order to meet their goal of cutting at least $880 billion from the funding controlled by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Cutting the funding for every other program in the committee’s purview would save a maximum of $135 billion, Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post noted, meaning the committee will have to turn to the biggest ticket items: healthcare programs.

Also yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security said it was getting rid of union protections for the approximately 47,000 employees of the Transportation Security Administration who screen about 2.5 million passengers a day before they can board airplanes. A new agreement in May 2024 raised wages for TSA workers, whose pay has lagged behind that of other government employees. Union leaders say the move is retaliation for its challenges to the actions of the administration toward the 800,000 or so federal workers it represents.

As Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times have reported more detail about the Cabinet meeting Trump convened abruptly on Thursday, we have learned more about Musk’s determination to cut the government. As Musk appeared to take charge of the meeting, he clashed with Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, who complained that Musk’s team at the Department of Government Efficiency is trying to lay off air traffic controllers.

Swan and Haberman report that Duffy asked what he was supposed to do. He continued by saying: I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers? Musk said it was a lie that they were laying off air traffic controllers, and also insisted that there were people hired under diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives working as air traffic controllers. When Duffy pushed back, Musk said Duffy should call him with any concerns, an echo of the message he gave to members of Congress. Like them, Cabinet members are constitutionally part of the government. Musk is not.

What Musk is, according to an interview published today by Aaron Rupar and Thor Benson in Public Notice, is a businessman who believes that there is waste wherever you look and that it is always possible to do something more cheaply. Ryan Mac and Kate Conger, who wrote a book about Musk’s takeover of Twitter, Character Limit, said that creating confusion is part of the point. Musk creates drama, Conger said, to scare away workers he doesn’t want and attract ones he does.

The pain that he is inflicting on the country is not making him popular, though. Protests at Tesla dealerships that handle his cars are growing, as are instances of vandalism against Tesla dealerships and charging stations, which now number more than a dozen, including attacks with bottles filled with gasoline and set on fire. Pranshu Verma and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post report that Tesla’s stock has dropped more than 35% since Trump took office. Tesla sales have dropped 76% in Germany, 48% in Norway and Denmark, and 45% in France.

On Thursday, another of Musk’s SpaceX rockets exploded, raining debris near south Florida and the Bahamas. The Federal Aviation Administration said 240 flights were disrupted by the debris.

The New York Times editorial board today lamented the instability that Musk is creating, noting that the government is not a business, that “[t]here are already signs the chaos is hurting the economy,” and that “Americans can’t afford for the basic functions of government to fail. If Twitter stops working, people can’t tweet. When government services break down, people can die.”

The editorial board did not let Trump hide behind Musk entirely, noting that he has increased instability not only with DOGE, but also “with his flurry of executive orders purporting to rewrite environmental policy, the meaning of the 14th Amendment and more; his on-again-off-again tariffs; and his inversion of American foreign policy, wooing Vladimir Putin while disdaining longtime allies.”

One of the things that the radical extremists in power hated about the modern American state was that it was a nonpartisan machine that functioned pretty well regardless of which party was in charge. Now Musk, who is acting as if he is not bound by the constitution that set up that machine, is taking a sledgehammer to it.

In the Public Notice interview, Thor Benson asked Ryan Mac: “What’s something about Elon’s huge role in the Trump administration that people perhaps aren’t understanding?” Mac answered that Musk is the manifestation of the nation’s extreme wealth inequality. “What happens,” he asked, “when there is unfettered capitalism that allows people to accumulate this much money and this much power?”

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Funding, Health, Ignorance, Musk, Elon, Privatization, Republicans, Trump

Quick: What’s the Purpose of the EPA?

By dianeravitch

March 13, 2025 //

The EPA is the Environmental Protection Agency. It was established in 1970 during the Nixon administration. The creation of EPA was a response to public and scientific concern about pollution of the air, land, and water by chemicals discarded by industry.

Republicans at the time were conservatives, and they prided themselves on championing clean air and clean water.

But in the age of Trump, environmental protection is considered a hindrance to industry. It also is a burden to the coal industry.

Trump appointed one of his most loyal allies to lead EPA. This is how he defines its mission:

“We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a news release.

To drive down the cost of living.
To unleash American energy.
To bring back auto jobs to the U.S.

Notice what’s missing? Any reference to reducing toxic pollution from the air, land, and waters.

Zeldin announced that he intends to eliminate dozens of EPA regulations. More toxic chemicals will be dumped into lakes and streams. More smokestacks will belch smoke into the air. More brownfields of chemicals will poison the land.

A sad day for America.

Categories Corruption, Environment, Evil, Extremism, Health, Science, Trump

ProPublica: DOGE Cuts to the IRS Will Cost the Government Money, Not Save It

By dianeravitch

March 12, 2025 //

ProPublica is an amazing investigative organization. They report on abuses of power, without fear or favor. This story explains why the DOGE cuts of personnel at the IRS will be very costly. People with complex tax returns like Elon Musk and Donald Trump are unlikely to be audited, as if anyone would dare to do so.

Andy Kroll of ProPublica reports:

Dave Nershi was finalizing a report he’d worked on for months when an ominous email appeared in his inbox.

Nershi had worked as a general engineer for the Internal Revenue Service for about nine months. He was one of hundreds of specialists inside the IRS who used their technical expertise — Nershi’s background is in chemical and nuclear engineering — to audit byzantine tax returns filed by large corporations and wealthy individuals. Until recently, the IRS had a shortage of these experts, and many complex tax returns went unscrutinized. With the help of people like Nershi, the IRS could recoup millions and sometimes more than a billion dollars on a single tax return.

But on Feb. 20, three months shy of finishing his probationary period and becoming a full-time employee, the IRS fired him. As a Navy veteran, Nershi loved working in public service and had hoped he might be spared from any mass firings. The unsigned email said he’d been fired for performance, even though he had received high marks from his manager.

As for the report he was finalizing, it would have probably recouped many times more than the low-six-figure salary he earned. The report would now go unfinished.

Nershi agreed that the federal government could be more lean and efficient, but he was befuddled by the decision to fire scores of highly skilled IRS specialists like him who, even by the logic of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, were an asset to the government. “By firing us, you’re going to cut down on how much revenue the country brings in,” Nershi said in an interview. “This was not about saving money.”

Since taking office, President Donald Trump and his billionaire top adviser Musk have launched an all-out blitz to cut costs and shrink the federal government. Trump, Musk and other administration leaders not only say the U.S. government is bloated and inefficient, but they also see it as a bastion of political opposition, calling it the “deep state.”

The strategy used by the Trump administration to reduce the size of government has been indiscriminate and far-reaching, meant to oust civil servants as fast as possible in as many agencies as possible while demoralizing the workers that remain on the job. As Russell Vought, director of the Trump White House’s Office of Management and Budget and an architect of Project 2025, put it in a speech first reported by ProPublica and Documented: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

One tactic used by the administration is to target probationary workers who are easier to fire because they have fewer civil service protections. Probationary, in this context, means only that the employees are new to their roles, not that they’re newbies or underperformers. ProPublica found that the latest IRS firings swept up highly skilled and experienced probationary workers who had recently joined the government or had moved to a new position from a different agency.

In late February, the Trump administration began firing more than 6,000 IRS employees. The agency has been hit especially hard, current and former employees said, because it spent 2023 preparing to hire thousands of new enforcement and customer service personnel and had only started hiring and training those workers at any scale in 2024, meaning many of those new employees were still in their probationary period. Nershi was hired as part of this wave, in the spring of last year. The boost came after Congress had underfunded the agency for much of the past decade, which led to chronic staffing shortages, dismal customer service and plummeting audit rates, especially for taxpayers who earned $500,000 or more a year.

The administration doesn’t appear to want to stop there. It is drafting plans to cut its entire workforce in half, according to reports.

Unlike with other federal agencies, cutting the IRS means the government collects less money and finds fewer tax abuses. Economic studies have shown that for every dollar spent by the IRS, the agency returns between $5 and $12, depending on how much income the taxpayer declared. A 2024 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the IRS found savings of $13,000 for every additional hour spent auditing the tax returns of very wealthy taxpayers — a return on investment that “would leave Wall Street hedge fund managers drooling,” in the words of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

John Koskinen, who led the IRS from 2013 to 2017, said in an interview that the widespread cuts to the IRS make no sense if Trump and Musk genuinely care about fiscal responsibility and rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. “What I’ve never understood is if you’re interested in the deficit and curbing it, why would you cut back on the revenue side?” Koskinen said.

Neither the IRS nor the White House responded to requests for comment. Last month, Musk asked his followers on X, the platform he owns, whether they would “like @DOGE to audit the IRS,” referring to the U.S. DOGE Service team of lawyers and engineers led by him. DOGE employees have sought to gain access to IRS taxpayer data in an attempt to “shine a light on the fraud,” according to a White House spokesman.

For this story, ProPublica interviewed more than a dozen current and former IRS employees. Most of those people worked in the agency’s Large Business and International (LB&I) division, which audits companies with more than $10 million in assets and high-income individuals. Within the IRS, the LB&I division has the highest return on investment, and the widespread cuts there put in stark relief the human and financial cost of the Trump administration’s approach to slashing government functions in the name of saving money and combating waste and fraud.

According to current and former LB&I employees, the taxpayers they audited included pharmaceutical companies, oil and gas companies, construction firms and major technology corporations, as well as more obscure private corporations and high-net-worth individuals. None of the IRS employees who spoke to ProPublica would disclose specific taxpayer information, citing privacy laws.

With the recent influx in funding, employees said, the leadership of LB&I had pushed to hire not only more revenue agents and appraisers but also specialized employees such as petroleum engineers, computer scientists and experts in corporate partnerships. These employees, usually known internally as general engineers, consulted on complicated tax returns and helped determine whether taxpayers properly claimed certain credits or other tax breaks.

This work happened in cases where major companies claimed a hefty research tax credit, which is a legitimate avenue for seeking tax relief but can also be improperly used. Highly skilled appraisers have also recouped huge savings in cases involving notorious tax schemes, such as what’s known as a syndicated conservation easement — a break abused so often that both congressional Democrats and Republicans have criticized it, while the IRS has included it on its list of the “Dirty Dozen” tax scams.

“These are cases where revenue agents don’t have the technical expertise,” said one IRS engineer who is still employed at the agency and who, like other IRS employees, wasn’t authorized to speak to the media. “That’s what we do. We are working on things where expertise is absolutely necessary.”

Current and former IRS employees told ProPublica that the agency had expended a huge amount of resources to recruit and train new specialists in recent years. Vanessa Rollins, an engineer in the IRS’ Chicago office who was recently fired, said probationary employees in LB&I outnumbered full-time staffers in her office. Much of her team’s work centered on training and mentorship for the waves of new employees — most of whom were recently fired. “The entire office had been oriented around bringing us in and getting us trained,” Rollins said.

These specialists said they earned higher salaries compared with many other IRS employees. But the money these specialists recouped as a result of their work was orders of magnitude greater than what they cost. The current engineer told ProPublica that they estimated their team of less than 10 people had brought in $5 billion in adjusted tax returns over the past four years. (By contrast, a Wall Street Journal analysispublished on Feb. 22 found that DOGE had found savings of $2.6 billion over the next year, far less than the $55 billion claimed by DOGE itself.)

A former LB&I revenue agent added that their work didn’t always lead to the IRS recouping money from a taxpayer; sometimes, they audited a return only to find that the taxpayer was owed more money than they had expected.

“The IRS’ mission is to treat taxpayers fairly so they pay the tax they legally owe, including making sure they’re not paying any more than legally required,” the former revenue agent said.

Notwithstanding its return on investment and the sense of duty espoused by its employees, LB&I was hit especially hard by the most recent wave of firings, employees said. According to the current IRS engineer, the Trump administration appears to have eliminated the jobs of about 120 LB&I engineers out of a total of roughly 260. The person said they had heard more terminations were expected soon. The acting IRS chief and a longtime agency leader, Doug O’Donnell, announced his retirement amid the firings.

Several LB&I employees told ProPublica that the mass layoffs had been ordered from a very high level and that several layers of managers had no idea they were coming or what to expect. The cuts, employees said, did not appear to distinguish between employees with certain specialties or performance levels, but instead focused solely on whether they were on probationary status. “It didn’t matter the skill set. If they were under a year, they got cut,” another current LB&I employee told ProPublica.

The current and former IRS employees said the firings and the administration’s deferred resignation offer led to situations that have wiped out decades of experience and institutional knowledge that can’t easily be replaced. Jack McCumber was an LB&I senior appraiser in Seattle who got fired about six weeks before the end of his probationary status. He said not only did he lose his job, but the veteran appraiser who was his mentor took early retirement. McCumber and his mentor often worked on syndicated conservative easement cases that could recoup tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars. “They’re pushing out the experienced people, and they’re pushing out people like me,” McCumber said. “It’s a double whammy.”

The result, employees and experts said, will mean corporations and wealthy individuals face far less scrutiny when they file their tax returns, leading to more risk-taking and less money flowing into the U.S. treasury.

“Large businesses and higher-wealth individuals are where you have the most sophisticated taxpayers and the most sophisticated tax preparers and lawyers who are attuned to pushing the envelope as much as they can,” said Koskinen, the former IRS commissioner. “When those audits stop because there isn’t anybody to do them, people will say, ‘Hey, I did that last year, I’ll do it again this year.’”

“When you hamstring the IRS,” Koskinen added. “it’s just a tax cut for tax cheats.”

Categories Billionaires, Corruption, Economy, Ethics, Evil, Failure, Injustice, Musk, Elon, Stupid, Trump

Trump Removes Human Resource Officers, Will Replace Them with Loyalists

By dianeravitch

March 10, 2025 //

Trump often complained that the Biden administration had “weaponized” the Justice Department to persecute him. He has terminated everyone who had a role in the prosecution of federal charges against him. The boxes of classified documents that he took to Mar-a-Lago were returned to him.

So now he is actively politicizing the HR departments across the government. Most of those jobs were held by nonpartisan civil servants. They will be ousted and replaced with people loyal to Trump. The current occupants of these jobs are being punished for implementing the Biden administration’s DEI policies.

Government Executive reports:

The Trump administration continued its efforts to politicize the upper echelons of the federal civil service Thursday, instructing agencies to reclassify chief human capital officer positions to allow political appointees to fill those roles.

The Office of Personnel Management sent a memo to agency heads Thursday recommending that all agencies where CHCOs are career-reserved positions—meaning only a career member of the Senior Executive Service can fill the post—request to change that designation to “SES general,” which allows either career executives or political appointees to assume the job. The federal government’s HR agency set a deadline of March 24 for agencies to comply.

In the memo, Acting OPM Director Charles Ezell argued that CHCO jobs have “become intensely politicized in recent years,” referring to the Biden administration’s efforts to boost diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.

“It is hard to imagine a more vivid example of advocacy of the ‘major controversial policies of the administration’ than an HR leader and policymaker implementing and embedding DEIA policies throughout their agency and the government more broadly,” Ezell wrote. “By contrast, President Trump campaigned vehemently against government DEI programs.”

Although only a portion of CHCO positions are actually career-reserved, federal agencies have moved toward employing nonpartisan civil servants in those roles over the last two decades because of the technical expertise required. The move to re-politicize the CHCO corps comes just weeks after the Trump administration took similar action regarding chief information officers across government.

The memo’s publication comes just days after Traci DiMartini, human capital officer for the Internal Revenue Service, was put on leave Monday for alleged “ineffective management” of the administration’s implementation of the deferred resignation program and purge of recently hired, transferred or promoted employees, as well as “insubordination” toward DOGE operatives.

“That they’re accusing human capital officers of being partisan because we implemented DEIA under the Biden administration is so counterproductive to their own argument,” DiMartini said. “Our job is to follow the law and help implement the policies and programs of whoever is in charge.”

To DiMartini and other CHCOs, the memo reads as a pretext to getting rid of officials who refuse to circumvent laws governing the civil service.

“They’re trying to politicize human capital,” DiMartini said. “They want to be able to hire only loyalists, ignore Title 5 [of the U.S. Code] and commit flagrant prohibited personnel practices. When you look at the Merit Systems Protections Board and what the civil protections are, we’re supposed to have a nonpartisan civil service, and we have been completely whipsawed.”

“I think I just got a reverse two-week notice,” one currently serving CHCO told Government Executive.

DiMartini said that she believes her impending termination—the agency has indicated that it will not allow her to retire—stems from two incidents. The first was a refusal to call employees, who she said were already putting in “60-70 hour” work weeks—into the office over the weekend to onboard a DOGE operative.

And the second was mentioning that OPM had directed the probationary purge across government in a meeting intended to calm IRS workers. Unbeknownst to her, an employee had recorded the conversation, and her comments appeared in filings of a lawsuit seeking to overturn the probationary firings.

DiMartini said that although she doesn’t plan to return to government, she will challenge her firing. She said she has never been disciplined in her 21 years of service, and wants to preserve her professional reputation.

“As an SES-er, it’s my job to stand up and be the buffer between politicals and career employees, and I’m just trying to do my goddamn job,” she said. “They have no idea who they picked a f***ing fight with.”

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Injustice, Race, Trump

Trump Team Sows Disruption, Fear at NIH

By dianeravitch

March 10, 2025 //

In Trump’s chaotic effort to weaken and shred the federal government, no agency is immune, not even the National Institutes of Health, a world-class scientific research institution.

The Washington Post published an overview of the dizzying changes there. The #2 person in the agency was expected to be chosen as Acting Director, but he was passed over for a little-known staff member, who was known for opposing the views of Dr. Fauci during the pandemic. And that was just the start.

The NIH has 6,200 scientists on staff. It is a huge biomedical grant-making machine that dispenses funding to some 2,500 research organizations across the nation.

Science writers Carolyn Y. Johnson and Joel Achenbach reported:

In just six weeks, the Trump administration overturned NIH’s leadership, slowed its main mission of identifying the best new science to fund and silenced personnel at the biggest sponsor of biomedical research in the world — a nearly $48 billion enterprise that supports the work of some 300,000 external scientists.
“It’s terrible. It’s awful. People are afraid to open their emails,” one NIH senior scientist said….

Even in a climate of fear, NIH employees say they want to protect their institution. They worry this winter of disruption may be causing lasting damage to the way science is conducted in the United States.

“The whole thing could just disappear,” said Phil Murphy, senior investigator and chief of the laboratory of molecular immunology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). “The biomedical research enterprise in the United States depends largely on NIH dollars. You take the dollars away, the labs go away, and you lose the next generation of scientists.”

I wonder if Dr. Phil Murphy might soon be replaced by a graduate student in political science for his remarks. Or a college dropout on the DOGE team.

In normal times, thousands of scientists on the 320-acre campus conduct basic research on problems such as ALS and heart disease. Clinicians at the research hospital care for patients in cutting-edge clinical trials. Much of this work continued.

But then came a hiring freeze, a travel ban, a communications pause and cancellations of routine grant-review meetings. Scientists were even told they could not purchase the basic lab supplies needed to keep experiments going…

Trump’s executive orders to terminate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, as well as programs that support “gender ideology,” forced officials to scan the agency for activities, websites, grants and programs that might need to be modified or pulled down..

In the second week, NIH staff members were told by their new director that they could resume work on clinical trials for new drugs.

But senior officials were grappling with a jaw-dropping memo from Trump’s Office of Management and Budget that called for a pause on federal grant activity — one of NIH’s main reasons to exist.

This order seemed to encompass most activities that spread NIH grants across the country, including making research awards, evaluating the most meritorious scientific proposals and even just continuing the funding of existing projects that needed renewal.

Lawsuits were filed, and NIH employees found themselves whipsawed between administration policies and court orders.

On Jan. 29, Tabak wrote a note to colleagues asking them to prepare a summary of activities related to the executive orders on diversity and on sex as a biological variable, as well as efforts to bring them into compliance.

Did this mean a ban on trials that compared how different groups reacted to experimental drugs?

Meanwhile a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze NIH funding. But they didn’t.

Then came the biggest blow yet: Late that afternoon, NIH officials were caught off guard by a request from HHS chief of staff Heather Flick Melanson and principal deputy chief of staff Stefanie Spear to post a document immediately.

HHS declared that henceforth NIH would cap at 15 percent the indirect cost rates, or “overhead,” in funding it sends to research institutions. As NIH officials read the notice, they realized it was a seismic shift in policy that would threaten the foundation of biomedical research in the United States.

Reforms to the indirect-costs policy had been debated over the years. There had long been an argument that the cost of helping universities and medical centers pay for “facilities and administrative costs” had gotten out of hand. Indirect rates were sometimes 50 percent or higher, meaning that a research grant supporting a $100,000 scientific project would come with another $50,000 in indirect funding.

The notice made several references to an analysis from a Heritage Foundation white paper, titled “Indirect Costs: How Taxpayers Subsidize University Nonsense.”

As NIH officials worked to post the notice, HHS officials grew impatient with every passing minute. Hurry up, they demanded, according to multiple officials familiar with the events. The conflict was first reported by the Atlantic.

“We [NIH] had nothing to do with it, and this was a really totally inappropriate thing that was foisted upon us with no warning,” one official with knowledge of the notice said. A change like this typically would have been carefully reviewed for weeks before it was posted.

It went live on the NIH website in about an hour.

Many universities responded that they would not be able to cover the cost of hosting major scientific research or experiments with only 15% of the overhead covered.

The cap of 15 percent on indirect costs was temporarily halted by a court as well.

An internal memo that same day from the office of general counsel… stated, in bold font: “All payments that are due under existing grants and contracts should be un-paused immediately.”

But a day later, nothing had changed.
“We have (like you all) been struggling with specific issues that would benefit from discussion on Thursday — even if we don’t have firm guidance,” NIAID Director Jeanne Marrazzo wrote in an email to other leaders on Feb. 11. Among the issues: “When can we anticipate being able to issue awards?”

In a leadership meeting that week, officials discussed an alarming new legal concern: The indirect-costs cap NIH had posted on Friday could put staff at risk of violating the Antideficiency Act, according to multiple people present for the discussion. The law prohibits federal agencies from spending federal funds in advance or in excess of an appropriation.

Leaders were concerned that individual grant managers could face criminal charges for doing their jobs…

With veteran leaders… gone, NIH scientists braced for mass firings as the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Agency implemented a plan to terminate probationary employees across the government. On Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day, more than a thousand such employees at NIH awaited their fates. Some received a chilling email:
“You have been identified as an employee on a probationary period and may receive a letter today from HHS informing you that you will be terminated and/or placed on admin leave.”

The wait proved excruciating. The termination notices didn’t arrive until the weekend.

The agency reeled from losing nearly 1,200 NIH staff in the government-wide firing of probationary workers. So rattled were employees that many believed a rumor that all the institute’s leaders were about to be fired, a total decapitation of NIH bosses. That didn’t happen….

Thousands of grant proposals from outside scientists, often representing months of work, were stuck in the pipeline — essentially freezing the future of American science. Through an arcane bureaucratic pause, dozens of meetings that are key parts of the review process were canceled that week.

Then came the Musk email, asking people to list five things they did last week. Then came the email telling people to ignore the previous email. Then came the same Musk email: respond or quit.

Dr. Francis S. Collins, the eminent former director of NIH, announced that he was resigning from the laboratory where he had worked for almost four years.

The Boston Globe reported that NIH had abruptly terminated grants at mid-point in Massachusetts and across the country.

In an unprecedented move, the National Institutes of Health is abruptly terminating millions of dollars in research awards to scientists in Massachusetts and around the country, citing the Trump administration’s new restrictions on funding anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, transgender issues, or research that could potentially benefit universities in China.

The sweeping actions would appear to violate court rulings from federal judges in Rhode Islandand Washington, D.C., that block the Trump administration from freezing or ending billions of dollars in government spending, said David Super, a constitutional law expert at Georgetown Law, who reviewed some of the termination letters at the Globe’s request.

In a related case brought by an association of higher education officials that specifically challenged Trump’s various DEI executive orders, a federal judge in Maryland twice over the past month blocked the administration from terminating funding, saying in his most recent decision the restrictions “punish, or threaten to punish, individuals and institutions based on the content of their speech, and in doing so they specifically target viewpoints the government seems to disfavor.”

Super added that the termination letters are also “unlawful” because the NIH is imposing conditions on funding that did not exist at the time the grants were awarded.

Chaos? Disruption?

It’s fair to say that the masterminds behind this fiasco are either stupid or malevolent or both.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Disruption, Health, Ignorance, Science, Stupid

Robert Hubbell: Never Give Up! Now is the Time to Resist!

By dianeravitch

March 9, 2025 //

Robert Hubbell is a blogger with a huge following. He has that following because he is well-informed, reasonable and optimistic about the power of democracy. In the absence of any coordinated response from the Democratic Party, protests are occurring spontaneously and locally. At Tesla showrooms, where people are picketing. At town hall meetings, which Republicans have suspended. And in other public settings, where people are expressing their anger and frustration about the dismantling of their government.

He wrote recently:

It is a tough time to be an ordinary American who believes in democracy, the rule of law, and the value of good government. From the cheap seats, it appears that all three are under a brutal assault from Trump and Musk designed to weaken America as a global force for good. In a bizarre twist worthy of The Twilight Zone, Trump and Musk’s campaign of destruction seems carefully crafted to benefit the world’s worst dictator and sworn enemy of American democracy, Vladimir Putin, a goal that is warmly embraced by a party that only a decade ago wrapped itself in patriotism and pro-democracy foreign policy.

But America’s political and media classes seem oddly unconcerned and detached from reality. True, Democrats in Congress express concern—but in the same way, they express concern about policy fights over revisions to the tax code. (To be fair, a handful of notable exceptions are out on a limb without the support of their party.) Our Democratic leaders use their minority status in Congress to justify their strange quiescence—an explanation that accepts defeat as the status quo.

The media is a husk of its former self. Firebrands and self-styled crusaders who took Biden to task for every inconsequential verbal slip now report on grotesque lies and unprecedented betrayals by Trump with the ennui of a weatherman predicting increasing darkness in the late afternoon and early evening.

What is wrong with these people?…

Is the failure of Democratic leaders a lack of ability? Of desire? Or the triumph of personal ambition regarding 2028 presidential politics over their willingness to serve as a leader of the loyal opposition in our nation’s hour of need?

The silence is deafening. There is a grand disconnect. I had no answer for Americans abroad wondering why the deep pool of talented politicians in the Democratic Party was missing in action at a moment of crisis for their beloved country. But I was able to assure them that the grassroots movement is responding to the call without waiting for politicians to lead the way.

Organic protests are spreading across the US, including protests targeting Tesla dealerships. See News24, ‘We are taking action’: 9 people arrested at Tesla dealership as anti-Musk protests break out in US. (“Throngs of protesters also descended on the electric vehicle maker’s showrooms in Jacksonville, Florida; Tucson, Arizona, and other cities, blocking traffic, chanting and waving signs . . . .”)

Like the Civil Rights Era in the 20^th Century and the anti-war movement of the 1960s, we are experiencing a moment in our history where the people drag their leaders kicking and screaming into the future—at which point those reluctant leaders will take credit for victory. So be it. We must stop asking, “Where are our leaders?” and start doing the work until they show up to join us on the front lines.

The pattern behind Trump’s embrace of Putin in Friday’s Oval Office meeting

On Friday, Trump ended 80 years of alliance between Western nations by attacking and dishonoring the leader of the European nation on the frontlines of the effort to halt Russian expansionism. As Trump berated President Zelensky, Trump characterized himself and Vladimir Putin as “co-victims” of the US investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

The next day, Elon Musk agreed with a tweet asserting that the US should leave NATO and the UN.

When European leaders met on Sunday in a pre-planned security conference in London, Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev condemned the meeting as an “anti-Trump Russophobic coven [of witches].” Medvedev speaks for Putin.

On Sunday, the NYTimes reported that the US Department of Defense has unilaterally ceased cyber operations against Russia, hobbling the US’s ability to understand Russia’s true intentions at a critical juncture in world politics.

Late last week, The Guardian reported that the US no longer views Russian cyberattacks against the US as a priority. See The Guardian, Trump administration retreats in fight against Russian cyber threats. There is no indication that Russia has stopped cyberattacks against the US or that it has “de-prioritized” American cyberattacks on Russia.

In the span of 72-hours, Trump effectively surrendered to Russia in a cyberwar that has been waged continuously for decades. Trump’s disgraceful actions in the Oval Office on Friday must be viewed in the broader context of Trump’s embrace of Russia.

The media is failing to tell that broader story by trivializing a foreign relations debacle into a “Will he, or won’t he?” story about Trump’s ludicrous demand for Zelensky to “apologize.” See BBCr eport, Laura Kuenssberg, asking Zelensky if he would “express[] some regret to President Trump after your heated confrontation at the White House on Friday.”

At least the BBC reporter didn’t ask Zelensky if he would resign, which has become the new talking point for MAGA politicians in the US: Following Trump’s Lead, His Allies Lash Out At Zelenskyy And Suggest He May Need To Resign | HuffPost Latest News

DOGE hackers shut down key IT unit designed to coordinate US government public-facing computer networks

DOGE has summarily dismantled a key information technology group at the center of the federal government’s public-facing computer systems. See Josh Marshall in Talking Points Memo, In-House Gov Tech Unit for State of the Art Web Portals Disbanded by Doge.

The unit that was disbanded was known as “18F.” Its job was to make public-facing websites of the federal government more user-friendly and functional—things like making it easier to complete and file your tax returns for free on the IRS website.

The now-former employees of 18F published a letter on Sunday that explained what they did and why their dissolution will hurt the American people. See 18F: We are dedicated to the American public and we’re not done yet. The letter reads, in part, as follows:

[The terminations were] a surprise to all 18F staff and our agency partners. Just yesterday we were working on important projects, including improving access to weather data with NOAA, making it easier and faster to get a passport with the Department of State, supporting free tax filing with the IRS, and other critical projects with organizations at the federal and state levels.

All 18F’s support on that work has now abruptly come to a halt. Since the entire staff was also placed on administrative leave, we have been locked out of our computers, and have no chance to assist in an orderly transition in our work. . . .

Before today’s RIF, DOGE members and GSA political appointees demanded and took access to IT systems that hold sensitive information. They ignored security precautions. Some who pushed back on this questionable behavior resigned rather than grant access.

The chaos-termination of the 18F computer group is being repeated across the federal government. Doge has apparently targeted 50% of the Social Security Administration staff—a move that will hurt service levels for seniors who depend on SSA payments to meet basic living expenses.

These cuts are painful and will cause chaos. That chaos and pain will spur a backlash against Republicans that should allow Democrats to take back the House (and possibly the Senate) in 2026 if only the Democratic Party can get its act together—PRONTO! We need a daily news conference with effective messaging by dynamic, charismatic leaders who are not Chuck Schumer!…

Concluding Thoughts

Apologies that this newsletter is more like a rant and less like my usual call to action. But I am reflecting the frustration and anger that I am hearing from readers (both in person and in the Comment section). There seems to be a disconnect that is exacerbating an already mind-boggling situation.

The good news is that everyone seems to “get it”—other than politicians and the media. As I noted, they will be dragged along with the tide of history—a tide whose course we will determine by our actions.

It is up to us to save democracy—a situation that does not distinguish this moment from the thousands of perilous moments that have brought us to this point.

I acknowledge that we are living through an extraordinarily difficult moment. Our most important task is to not quit. If all we do is endure and keep hope alive, that will be enough. That is what Winston Churchill did during the darkest hours of WWII. If we can do the same, we will see victory in 2026 and 2028.

But we can do more—much more. The tide is turning. Republicans are retreating from their constituents. Spontaneous protests are spreading across America. It is happening. Be part of the movement in whatever way you can. No effort is wasted. No gesture is meaningless. No voice is unheard. Everything matters—now more than ever.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Courage, Cruelty, Democracy, Democrats, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Musk, Elon, Republicans, Resistance, Trump, Tyranny

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Cozies Up to Putin, Allows Musk to Take Over Role of Congress

By dianeravitch

March 7, 2025 //

Heather Cox Richardson sums up the dizzying events of the past few days. It’s hard to keep track of the array of court orders, overturned, affirmed, or Elon Musk emails, warning government employees to answer or resign, or tariffs, announced, then paused, then announced, then paused again. Is Trump’s intent to dazzle us with nonstop dung?

Trump has disrupted the Western alliance, having made common cause with Putin in his unprovoked and brutal war on Ukraine. Trump is destabilizing not only our alliances with other nations but our government as well. He has approved of draconian cuts to every department, ordered by Elon Musk or his team of kids. The determination to cut 80,000 jobs at the Veterans Administration, most held by veterans, may be a wake-up call for Republicans.

This country is in desperate trouble. When will Republicans in Congress stand up for the Constitutionand stop the madness?

She writes:

This morning, Ted Hesson and Kristina Cooke of Reuters reported that the Trump administration is preparing to deport the 240,000 Ukrainians who fled Russia’s attacks on Ukraine and have temporary legal status in the United States. Foreign affairs journalist Olga Nesterova reminded Americans that “these people had to be completely financially independent, pay tax, pay all fees (around $2K) and have an affidavit from an American person to even come here.”

“This has nothing to do with strategic necessity or geopolitics,” Russia specialist Tom Nichols posted. “This is just cruelty to show [Russian president Vladimir] Putin he has a new American ally.”

The Trump administration’s turn away from traditional European alliances and toward Russia will have profound effects on U.S. standing in the world. Edward Wong and Mark Mazzetti reported in the New York Times today that senior officials in the State Department are making plans to close a dozen consulates, mostly in Western Europe, including consulates in Florence, Italy; Strasbourg, France; Hamburg, Germany; and Ponta Delgada, Portugal, as well as a consulate in Brazil and another in Turkey.

In late February, Nahal Toosi reported in Politicothat President Donald Trump wants to “radically shrink” the State Department and to change its mission from diplomacy and soft power initiatives that advance democracy and human rights to focusing on transactional agreements with other governments and promoting foreign investment in the U.S.

Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency” have taken on the process of cutting the State Department budget by as much as 20%, and cutting at least some of the department’s 80,000 employees. As part of that project, DOGE’s Edward Coristine, known publicly as “Big Balls,” is embedded at the State Department.

As the U.S. retreats from its engagement with the world, China has been working to forge greater ties. China now has more global diplomatic posts than the U.S. and plays a stronger role in international organizations. Already in 2025, about 700 employees, including 450 career diplomats, have resigned from the State Department, a number that normally would reflect a year’s resignations.

Shutting embassies will hamper not just the process of fostering goodwill, but also U.S. intelligence, as embassies house officers who monitor terrorism, infectious disease, trade, commerce, militaries, and government, including those from the intelligence community. U.S. intelligence has always been formidable, but the administration appears to be weakening it.

As predicted, Trump’s turn of the U.S. toward Russia also means that allies are concerned he or members of his administration will share classified intelligence with Russia, thus exposing the identities of their operatives. They are considering new protocols for sharing information with the United States. The Five Eyes alliance between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the U.S. has been formidable since World War II and has been key to countering first the Soviet Union and then Russia. Allied governments are now considering withholding information about sources or analyses from the U.S.

Their concern is likely heightened by the return to Trump’s personal possession of the boxes of documents containing classified information the FBI recovered in August 2022 from Mar-a-Lago. Trump took those boxes back from the Department of Justice and flew them back to Mar-a-Lago on February 28.

A CBS News/YouGov poll from February 26–28 showed that only 4% of the American people sided with Russia in its ongoing war with Ukraine.

The unpopularity of the new administration’s policies is starting to show. National Republican Congressional Committee chair Richard Hudson (R-NC) told House Republicans on Tuesday to stop holding town halls after several such events have turned raucous as attendees complained about the course of the Trump administration. Trump has blamed paid “troublemakers” for the agitation, and claimed the disruptions are part of the Democrats’ “game.” “[B]ut just like our big LANDSLIDE ELECTION,” he posted on social media, “it’s not going to work for them!”

More Americans voted for someone other than Trump than voted for him.

Even aside from the angry protests, DOGE is running into trouble. In his speech before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, Trump referred to DOGE and said it “is headed by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight.” In a filing in a lawsuit against DOGE and Musk, the White House declared that Musk is neither in charge of DOGE nor an employee of it. When pressed, the White House claimed on February 26 that the acting administrator of DOGE is staffer Amy Gleason. Immediately after Trump’s statement, the plaintiffs in that case asked permission to add Trump’s statement to their lawsuit.

Musk has claimed to have found billions of dollars of waste or fraud in the government, and Trump and the White House have touted those statements. But their claims to have found massive savings have been full of errors, and most of their claims have been disproved. DOGE has already had to retract five of its seven biggest claims. As for “savings,” the government spent about $710 billion in the first month of Trump’s term, compared with about $630 billion during the same timeframe last year.

Instead of showing great savings, DOGE’s claims reveal just how poorly Musk and his team understand the work of the federal government. After forcing employees out of their positions, they have had to hire back individuals who are, in fact, crucial to the nation, including the people guarding the U.S. nuclear stockpile. In his Tuesday speech, Trump claimed that the DOGE team had found “$8 million for making mice transgender,” and added: “This is real.”

Except it’s not. The mice in question were not “transgender”; they were “transgenic,” which means they are genetically altered for use in scientific experiments to learn more about human health. For comparison, S.V. Date noted in HuffPost that in just his first month in office, Trump spent about $10.7 million in taxpayer money playing golf.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo pointed out today that people reporting on the individual cuts to U.S. scientific and health-related grants are missing the larger picture: “DOGE and Donald Trump are trying to shut down advanced medical research, especially cancer research, in the United States…. They’re shutting down medicine/disease research in the federal government and the government-run and funded ecosystem of funding for most research throughout the United States. It’s not hyperbole. That’s happening.”

Republicans are starting to express some concern about Musk and DOGE. As soon as Trump took office, Musk and his DOGE team took over the Office of Personnel Management, and by February 14 they had begun a massive purge of federal workers. As protests of the cuts began, Trump urged Musk on February 22 to be “more aggressive” in cutting the government, prompting Musk to demand that all federal employees explain what they had accomplished in the past week under threat of firing. That request sparked a struggle in the executive branch as cabinet officers told the employees in their departments to ignore Musk. Then, on February 27, U.S. District Judge William Alsup found that the firings were likely illegal and temporarily halted them.

On Tuesday, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) weighed in on the conflict when he told CNN that the power to hire and fire employees properly belongs to Cabinet secretaries.

Yesterday, Musk met with Republican— but no Democratic— members of Congress. Senators reportedly asked Musk—an unelected bureaucrat whose actions are likely illegal—to tell them more about what’s going on. According to Liz Goodwin, Marianna Sotomayor, and Theodoric Meyer of the Washington Post, Musk gave some of the senators his phone number and said he wanted to set up a direct line for them when they have questions, allowing them to get a near-instant response to their concerns.” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told reporters that Musk told the senators he would “create a system where members of Congress can call some central group” to get cuts they dislike reversed.

This whole exchange is bonkers. The Constitution gives Congress alone the power to make appropriations and pass the laws that decide how money is spent. Josh Marshall asks: “How on earth are we in this position where members of Congress, the ones who write the budget, appropriate and assign the money, now have to go hat in hand to beg for changes or even information from the guy who actually seems to be running the government?”

Later, Musk met with House Republicans and offered to set up a similar way for the members of the House Oversight DOGE Subcommittee to reach him. When representatives complained about the random cuts that were so upsetting constituents. Musk defended DOGE’s mistakes by saying that he “can’t bat a thousand all the time.”

This morning, U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. ruled in favor of a group of state attorneys general from 22 Democratic states and the District of Columbia, saying that Trump does not have the authority to freeze funding appropriated by Congress. McConnell wrote that the spending freeze “fundamentally undermines the distinct constitutional roles of each branch of our government.” As Joyce White Vance explained in Civil Discourse, McConnell issued a preliminary injunction that will stay in place until the case, called New York v. Trump, works its way through the courts. The injunction applies only in the states that sued, though, leaving Republican-dominated states out in the cold.

Today, Trump convened his cabinet and, with Musk present, told the secretaries that they, and not Musk, are in charge of their departments. Dasha Burns and Kyle Cheney of Politicoreported that Trump told the secretaries that Musk only has the power to make recommendations, not to make staffing or policy decisions.

Trump is also apparently feeling pressure over his tariffs of 25% on goods from Canada and Mexico and an additional 10% on imports from China that went into effect on Tuesday, which economists warned would create inflation and cut economic growth. Today, Trump first said he would exempt car and truck parts from the tariffs, then expanded exemptions to include goods covered by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement (USMCA) Trump signed in his first term. Administration officials say other tariffs will go into effect at different times in the future.

The stock market has dropped dramatically over the past three days owing to both the tariffs and the uncertainty over their implementation. But Trump denied his abrupt change had anything to do with the stock market.

“I’m not even looking at the market,” Trump said, “because long term, the United States will be very strong with what’s happening.”

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, Health, History, Stupid, Trump

Washington Post Fact-Checker: Trump’s Lexicon of Lies

By dianeravitch

March 7, 2025 //

Jeff Bezos, the multibillionaire owner of The Washington Post, has driven away great reporters and many readers because of his groveling before the Great Trumputin, but the Post still has Glenn Kessler, perhaps the best fact-checker in the business. It was Kessler who counted the public lies of Trumputin in his first term. He had the exact number but I recall only the round number of 30,000. Loyalist KellyAnne Conway called them “alternative facts.” Yes, indeed, Trump’s outright lies were “facts” in an alternative universe, not this one.

Glenn Kessler wrote recently about Trumputin’s latest attack on facts and truth:

The Trump administration is sweeping through the U.S. government, terminating dozens of programs, laying off tens of thousands of workers, even dismantling entire agencies. At the same time, the White House has adopted a unique lexicon to describe its agenda — in some cases, using words that in ordinary contexts mean the opposite.

Here’s a guide to the verbiage, drawn from remarks made by President Donald Trump and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
‘Transparency’

Traditionally, transparency in the federal government has meant access to data, federal contracts and government reports, even if they shed light on problems.

But Trump has fired nearly a score of inspectors general, who root out fraud and malfeasance in federal agencies. (Eight have filed suit, saying they were fired illegally.) One IG, for the U.S. Agency for International Development, was booted as soon as he issued a critical report on the aid stoppage ordered by the president. When reports emerged that a State Department website revealed that Tesla, a company owned by billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s biggest financial backer, received a $400 million contract, the contract document was scrubbed to remove any reference to Tesla. Moreover, websites across the government were deleted — including every page for USAID.

Meanwhile, the Musk-led U.S. DOGE Service — which is targeting agencies for contract terminations and personnel cuts — operates in secret and the people on his team have not been revealed, though reporters have figured out the identity of some key players.

But the White House says the administration is transparent because Trump often answers questions from reporters. (His predecessor, Joe Biden, rarely did so and usually in controlled settings.)

“President Trump has led by example on this front as the leader of the free world, the president of the United States, with his show of access and transparency on a daily basis,” Leavitt told reporters. “The president takes questions from all of you almost every single day and really reveals what he’s thinking and feeling.”

Unfortunately, as we’ve documented, much of what Trump says is inaccurate or misleading. So he’s not an especially accurate source, compared to rigorously vetted reports and databases.

‘Free speech’

The First Amendment enshrines a right to “free speech” — the right to articulate opinions and ideas without interference, retaliation or punishment from the government. There’s always been some tension in this notion — does this give someone the right to yell “fire” in a crowded theater when there is no fire?

Conservatives objected to social media platforms such as Twitter (before Musk bought it and turned it into X) and Facebook downgrading or removing posts that contained inaccurate or false information, especially during the covid pandemic. Trump himself was removed from many platforms after he instigated a riot at the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of Biden’s victory in 2020. But he’s been reinstated and many social media companies have scaled back efforts to police false information circulating on their platforms.

“I stopped government censorship once and for all and we brought back free speech to America,” Trump told House GOP members after taking office.

But the White House in recent days has barred Associated Press reporters from news events because the agency still refers to the Gulf of Mexico, the internationally recognized name for the body of water that has been in use since the mid-17th century. In an executive order, Trump directed federal agencies to change the name to “Gulf of America.” The AP is an international news organization, and the rest of the world does not recognize Trump’s name change. Taylor Budowich, White House deputy chief of staff, said in a statement that the AP’s stance “is not just divisive, but it also exposes the Associated Press’ commitment to misinformation.” He said that as a result of “irresponsible and dishonest reporting” — citing the name used by the rest of the world — the AP could not expect the “privilege of unfettered access to limited spaces, like the Oval Office and Air Force One.”

Similarly, Leavitt told reporters: “I was very up front in my briefing on Day 1, that if we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable. And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America, and I’m not sure why news outlets don’t want to call it that, but that is what it is.”

‘Fraud and abuse’

Fraud generally means deception, often criminal, in pursuit of financial and personal gain. But the Trump administration has upended that definition — broadening it to include programs and policies it disagrees with — while at the same time making it harder to detect fraud.

“We’re finding tremendous fraud and tremendous abuse,” Trump said as Musk stood by his side in Oval Office. But a Fact Checker accounting of the announcements from DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency, of terminated programs found that most concern diversity, transgender and climate change programs. Musk has also led an assault on USAID, the agency that long had bipartisan support to distribute billions of dollars in development aid around the world.

“It’s a scam,” Trump said of USAID. “It’s a fraud. A lot of it, most of it, but it’s a fraud.” Asked for evidence, the White House provided a list that was often wrong or misleading — and in any case amounted only to a pittance of the agency’s $25 billion budget.

In addition to firing IGs, Trump fired top ethics officers and neutered offices that protect workers from retribution. He also suspended enforcement of a nearly half-century-old law that investigates corporate corruption in foreign countries, while his Justice Department ordered the dismissal of bribery charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams (D) for political reasons (Adams supports Trump’s immigration policies).

A Feb. 13 White House news release berated states and localities pushing back against Trump’s executives orders on diversity and immigration. “President Donald J. Trump and his administration have a simple message: follow the law,” the news release was titled.

‘Deficit’

In Washington, the deficit usually means the federal budget deficit. But for Trump, the deficit that matters is the trade deficit. He imposed 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum, threatened tariffs against Canada and Mexico and proposed to upend the current trading system by imposing reciprocal tariffs.

“We have a tremendous deficit with Mexico,” Trump said last week. “We have a tremendous deficit with Canada. We have a tremendous deficit with Europe, the E.U., with China, I don’t even want to tell you what Biden is allowed to happen with China.”

(Actually, under Biden, the trade deficit with China fell to its lowest level in 10 years, according to the Census Bureau.)

In an interview with Bret Baier of Fox News, Trump said: “Why are we paying $200 billion a year essentially in subsidy to Canada? Now, if they’re our 51st state, I don’t mind doing it.”

According to the website of the U.S. Trade Representative, the goods deficit with Canada was $63 billion in 2024. The United States has a services surplus of about $30 billion with Canada, which brings down the overall deficit even more. But since Trump took office, the website does not display trade-in-services numbers.

Unlike a budget deficit — which depends on whether the government spends more than it raises in revenue — a trade deficit is shaped by underlying factors, such as an imbalance between a country’s savings and investment rates. A bigger federal budget deficit — caused by, say, a large tax cut contemplated by Trump — can boost the trade deficit because the country saves less and borrows more from abroad. A booming economy can also be at fault — the more money people have, the more they can spend on goods from overseas. And a strong currency means those foreign goods are cheaper for a particular country and its goods are more expensive for foreign consumers.

In other words, trade deficits may be beyond Trump’s ability to control.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Ethics, Fake News, Lies, Media, Propaganda, Trump

ProPublica: How Many Children Will Die Because Elon Musk “Deleted” USAID?

By dianeravitch

March 6, 2025 //

ProPublica estimated the number of children who will die–of starvation or lack of medical care–because DOGE closed down USAID. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, in addition to their families, are the direct result of the shuttering foreign aid. These lives don’t matter to Trump and Musk; they are not white. Musk is a well-known pro-catalyst; he thinks women must have more babies. He himself now has 14 children, by different mothers. But he seems to care only about white babies.

Here is a portion of their report:

For weeks, some of the federal government’s foremost authorities on global health have repeatedly warned Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other leaders about the coming death toll if they carried out the Trump administration’s plan to end nearly all U.S. foreign aid around the world.

In their clearest accounting yet, top officials have estimated the casualties: One million children will not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. Up to 166,000 people will die from malaria. New cases of tuberculosis will go up by 30%. Two hundred thousand more children will be paralyzed by polio over the next decade.

Instead of acting on the repeated warnings, top administration officials, including the State Department’s director of foreign assistance, Peter Marocco, thwarted their own experts’ efforts to keep the U.S. Agency for International Development’s most vital programs up and running, according to internal memos and estimates compiled by global health leaders at the agency and obtained by ProPublica.

President Donald Trump’s political appointees, along with billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, pressed ahead with their plan to dismantle USAID by ignoring and impeding staff who tried to protect lifesaving operations — even as the administration publicly insisted that those programs remained online — according to the memos and interviews with government officials.

During exchanges outlined in one of the memos, a DOGE engineer emailed staff and said they were not allowed to review the programs they were canceling. At another point, USAID’s then-deputy chief of staff, Joel Borkert, told agency personnel to take a “draconian” approach to approving waivers.

The explosive memos — which include summaries of email exchanges and top-level meetings inside USAID, as well as internal agency research — were sent by Nicholas Enrich, acting assistant administrator for global health. ProPublica also obtained detailed breakdowns of lifesaving programs managed by the bureau and the projected impact of cutting them. Enrich was placed on leave Sunday.

Enrich told The New York Times he released the memos, which multiple other officials contributed to, after learning he was being placed on leave, as thousands of others at the agency have been. The memos were circulated to the staff and obtained by ProPublica.

The documents identify several key senior policymakers behind the scenes while also puncturing the administration’s claims of a careful, deliberative review of USAID programming. The records also represent the government’s most explicit concerns to date memorialized by a senior official from inside Trump’s administration.

The State Department, USAID and Elon Musk did not respond to questions about this story. Rubio and Marocco did not respond to a request for an interview.

Since the inauguration, Rubio, Musk and Marocco have taken dramatic steps to incapacitate USAID, the largest foreign aid donor in the world, by firing its employees and halting operations. The global health bureau was one of the first parts of the agency targeted for mass layoffs.

Then, last week, they abruptly cancelled 10,000 foreign aid projects, which account for 90% of USAID’s humanitarian operations and about half of the State Department’s. Lifesaving programs that were still operating around the world were forced to close down immediately.

How do you sleep at night, when you know that your actions were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children? And their parents?

The New York Times story that was linked in the story gave more details:

The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw foreign aid and dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development is likely to cause enormous human suffering, according to estimates by the agency itself. Among them:

up to 18 million additional cases of malaria per year, and as many as 166,000 additional deaths;
200,000 children paralyzed with polio annually, and hundreds of millions of infections;
one million children not treated for severe acute malnutrition, which is often fatal, each year;
more than 28,000 new cases of such infectious diseases as Ebola and Marburg every year.

Those stark projections were laid out in a series of memos by Nicholas Enrich, acting assistant administrator for global health at U.S.A.I.D., which were obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Enrich was placed on administrative leave on Sunday.

This was the opening of Enrich’s bold memo, as reprinted in the New York Times:

Takeaway: The temporary pause on foreign aid and delays in approving lifesaving humanitarian assistance (LHA) for global health will lead to increased death and disability, accelerate global disease spread, contribute to destabilizing fragile regions, and heightened security risks-directly endangering American national security, economic stability, and public health. If the pause leads to permanent contract terminations, the $7.7B in resources appropriated by Congress are no longer be used to support these lifesaving global health programs, which could potentially result in wasted resources. The impacts on mortality and morbidity are summarized in the tables below. While the Foreign Assistance Review is set to take place in the coming weeks, it is important to recognize that a mechanism-by-mechanism approach may overlook the broader impact of these programs across global health program areas. This includes missed opportunities to enhance efficiency and cost-effectiveness within LHA program areas.

Marco Rubio, how do you feel about the deaths of so many people? Does it trouble you? Can you look in the mirror in the morning without seeing a murderer reflected back to you?

We know that Trump and Musk don’t care. What about you, Mr. Rubio?

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Corruption, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Health, International

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Heather Cox Richardson: Elon Musk Is Pillaging Our Government

Quick: What’s the Purpose of the EPA?

ProPublica: DOGE Cuts to the IRS Will Cost the Government Money, Not Save It

Trump Removes Human Resource Officers, Will Replace Them with Loyalists

Trump Team Sows Disruption, Fear at NIH

Robert Hubbell: Never Give Up! Now is the Time to Resist!

The pattern behind Trump’s embrace of Putin in Friday’s Oval Office meeting

DOGE hackers shut down key IT unit designed to coordinate US government public-facing computer networks

Concluding Thoughts

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Cozies Up to Putin, Allows Musk to Take Over Role of Congress

Washington Post Fact-Checker: Trump’s Lexicon of Lies

ProPublica: How Many Children Will Die Because Elon Musk “Deleted” USAID?

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