Wisconsin Public Radio reported that State Superintendent Jill Underly has announced that the state will not comply with a letter from U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in which she directed states to agree with the Trump administration about stamping out diversity, equity, and inclusion. Trump wants to eliminate DEI, which would involve reversing compliance with existing civil rights law. In addition, although McMahon may not know it, she is violating federal law by attempting to influence curriculum and instruction in the schools.
Thank you, Superintendent Underly!
WPR reported:
Wisconsin school districts won’t comply with a directive from the Trump administration to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs until districts have more information.
On Wednesday, state Superintendent Jill Underly asked the U.S. Department of Education for clarification on both the intent and legality of an April 3 directive that schools sign a letter acknowledging they’re following the government’s interpretation of civil rights laws.
This school year, Wisconsin received about $216 million in Title I funds. About $82 million of that money went to Milwaukee Public Schools.
Underly said the request from the Department of Education potentially violates required procedural steps, is unnecessarily redundant and appears designed to intimidate school districts by threatening to withhold critical education funding.
“We cannot stand by while the current administration threatens our schools with unnecessary and potentially unlawful mandates based on political beliefs,” Underly said in a statement. “Our responsibility is to ensure Wisconsin students receive the best education possible, and that means allowing schools to make local decisions based on what is best for their kids and their communities.”
On Feb. 14, the U.S. Department of Education sent a “Dear Colleague” letter giving educational institutions 14 days to eliminate diversity initiatives or risk losing federal funding.
At that time, the state DPI issued guidance to school districts encouraging a “measured and thoughtful approach, rather than immediate or reactionary responses to the federal government’s concerns.”
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has not clearly defined what the administration considers a violation of civil rights law. The February letter said institutions must “cease using race preferences and stereotypes as a factor in their admissions, hiring, promotion, scholarship.”
In a related document addressing frequently asked questions about how the administration would interpret Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the agency said: “Many schools have advanced discriminatory policies and practices under the banner of ‘DEI’ initiatives.”
The document went on to say that schools could engage in historical observances like Black History Month, “so long as they do not engage in racial exclusion or discrimination.”
Trump is following through on his frequent threats to punish anyone who crossed him in the past. He recently ordered his compliant Attorney General to investigate two men who were critical of him during his first term. Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor, wrote about the tyrannical nature of this action and about Pam Bondi’s willingness to do whatever he wants.
Donald Trump’s presidential payback tour rages on, and now it’s personal. It’s one thing to target multi-billion dollar law firms, universities, and media outlets for organizational retribution; those efforts, aimed at stifling and punishing any criticism or dissent, are reprehensible in their own right. But now Trump is going after individual private citizens, using the might of the Executive Branch to potentially throw his detractors in prison.
In a pair of official proclamations – rendered no less unhinged by the use of official fonts and White House letterhead – Trump identifies two targets who worked in the federal government during his first tenure and dared to speak out publicly against him. First: Chris Krebs, who led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency from 2018 to 2020 and made headlines when he publicly contradicted Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. For this act of heretical truth-telling, Trump labels Krebs “a significant bad-faith actor” – whatever the hell that means – who poses grave “risks” to the American public.
And then there’s Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security official who publicly criticized the President in an anonymous book and various media appearances. Taylor, like Krebs, purportedly poses “risks” to the United States, is a “bad-faith actor” (though apparently not a significant one like Krebs) and “stoked dissension” with his public commentary.
Are you scared? Don’t you fear the “risks” posed by these two monsters?
True to the form he has displayed when going after disfavored law firms, Trump hits below the belt. The President orders security clearances stripped not only from Krebs and Taylor but also from everyone who works with them (Krebs at a private cybersecurity firm, Taylor at the University of Pennsylvania). He’s punishing his targets – plus their employers and colleagues, First Amendment freedom of association be darned.
It gets worse. In a separate set of orders, Trump directed the Attorney General to open criminal investigations of Krebs and Taylor. Notably absent from the orders is any plausible notion that either might have committed a federal crime. This hardly needs to be said, but it’s not a federal crime to be a “bad-faith actor,” to “stoke dissension,” or even to be a “wise guy,” as Trump called Krebs from the Oval Office.
The next move is Pam Bondi’s – and we know how this will go.
Any reasonable, ethical attorney general would follow the bedrock principle that a prosecutor must have “predication” – some kernel of fact on which to believe a crime might have been committed – to open a criminal investigation. The bar is low, but it serves the vital purpose of preventing precisely the baseless retributive inquests that Trump has now ordered up. In observance of this foundational precept, even Bill Barr – the subject of sharp criticism in my first book, Hatchet Man – generally ignored Trump’s public pleas for the arrests of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and others. Like the exhausted parent of an unruly toddler, Barr would mostly sit back and let the tantrum pass.
Don’t count on Bondi taking the same course of passive resistance to the President. She has already shown her true colors, and they’re whatever shade Trump pleases. For example, despite the distinct possibility of criminality by top administration officials around the Signal scandal, the AG refused even to investigate. Instead, she decreed – after zero inquiry, with zero evidence – that information about military attack plans was somehow not classified, and that nobody had acted recklessly. Case closed, no inquiry needed.
Bondi no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt. She’s in the bag for Trump. The question now is whether she’ll cross the line that even Barr, her crooked predecessor, would not, and use the Justice Department’s staggering investigative power as an offensive weapon.
Even if DOJ investigates but concludes it cannot bring a criminal charge, the threat to Krebs and Taylor is real. Any criminal inquiry takes an enormous toll on its subject; subpoenas fly, friends and colleagues get pulled into the grand jury, phones get seized and searched, legal costs mount, professional reputations suffer, personal ties fray. Ask anyone who has been investigated by the Justice Department but not indicted. They’ll tell you it’s a nightmare.
If Bondi does somehow convince a grand jury to indict somebody for something, Trump has unwittingly handed both Krebs and Taylor a potent defense: selective prosecution, which applies where an individual has been singled out for improper purposes. Exhibit A (for the defense): Trump’s own grand proclamations, which openly confess to his personal and political motives for ordering a Justice Department inquiry. Selective prosecution defenses rarely succeed, often because prosecutors typically don’t commit their improper motives to paper. But this would be the rare case where the evidence is so plain – it’s on White House letterhead, signed by the President – that a judge could hardly overlook it.
Trump has long made a habit of threatening his opponents with criminal prosecution through social media posts and by spontaneous outbursts from the lectern. Until now, it was mostly bluster, a public form of scream therapy for the capricious commander-in-chief. But now it’s in writing, from the president to the attorney general, who typically jumps to attention to serve whatever suits the boss, prosecutorial standards be darned. Trump’s dark fantasies are coming to life.
Elie Honig served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York for 8.5 years and as the Director of the Division of Criminal Justice at the Office of Attorney General for the State of New Jersey for 5.5 years. He is currently a legal Analyst for CNN and Executive Director at Rutgers Institute for Secure Communities
David Sanger wrote an article in the New York Times about Trump’s “Experiment in Recklessness.” His plan is no plan at all. His approach is no more than “burn-it-down-first,” figure what to do later. His article appeared on Wednesday, before Trump announced a 90-day pause in his incomprehensible plan to tax every nation–even uninhabited islands–but exempt Russia, Belarus, North Korea, and Cuba. Even desperately impoverished Lesotho–where the average pay is $5 a day–was subject to Trump’s tariffs.
Our government is run by a cabal of people who are either evil or stupid or both. Probably both. People will die and are dying now because of their actions. Government agencies are being ripped apart. A generation of scientists has been ousted from important jobs in the government and in universities, where their federal grants have been terminated. All federal efforts to address climate change have been cancelled.
Where Trump goes, chaos , destruction and death go with him.
Sanger writes:
As the breadth of the Trump revolution has spread across Washington in recent weeks, its most defining feature is a burn-it-down-first, figure-out-the-consequences-later recklessness. The costs of that approach are now becoming clear.
Administration officials knew the markets would dive and other nations would retaliate when President Trump announced his long-promised “reciprocal” tariffs. But when pressed, several senior officials conceded that they had spent only a few days considering how the economic earthquake might have second-order effects.
And officials have yet to describe the strategy for managing a global system of astounding complexity after the initial shock wears off, other than endless threats and negotiations between the leader of the world’s largest economy and everyone else.
Take the seemingly unmanaged escalation with China, the world’s second largest economy, and the only superpower capable of challenging the United States economically, technologically and militarily. By American and Chinese accounts, there was no substantive conversation between Mr. Trump and China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, or engagement among their senior aides, before the countries plunged toward a trade war.
Last Wednesday, Mr. Trump’s hastily devised formula for figuring out country-by-country tariffs came up with a 34 percent tax on all Chinese goods, everything from car parts to iPhones to much of what is on the shelves at Walmart and on Amazon’s app.
When Mr. Xi, predictably, matched that figure, Mr. Trump issued an ultimatum for him to reverse the decision in 24 hours — waving a red flag in front of a leader who would never want to appear to be backing down to Washington. On Wednesday, the tariff went to 104 percent, with no visible strategy for de-escalation.
If Mr. Trump does get into a trade war with China, he shouldn’t look for much help from America’s traditional allies — Japan, South Korea or the European Union — who together with the United States account for nearly half of the world economy. All of them were equally shocked, and while each is negotiating with Mr. Trump, they seem in no mood to help him manage China.
“Donald Trump has launched a global economic war without any allies,” the economist Josh Lipsky of the Atlantic Council wrote on Tuesday. “That is why — unlike previous economic crises in this century — there is no one coming to save the global economy if the situation starts to unravel.”
The global trading system is only one example of the Trump administration tearing something apart, only to reveal it has no plan for how to replace it.
State Department officials knew that eliminating the U.S. Agency for International Development, the nation’s premier aid agency, would inevitably cost lives. But when a devastating earthquake struck central Myanmar late last month and took down buildings as far away as Bangkok, officials scrambled to provide even a modicum of help — only to discover that the network of positioned aid, and the people and aircraft to distribute it, had been dismantled.
Having dismantled a system that had responded to major calamities before, they settled on sending a survey team of three employees to examine the wreckage and make recommendations. All three were terminated from their jobs even while they stood amid the ruins in the ancient city of Mandalay, Myanmar, trying to revive an American capability that the Department of Government Efficiency — really no department at all — had crippled.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio was unapologetic about the paltry American response when he talked to reporters on Friday: “There are a lot of other rich countries, they should also pitch in and help,” he said. “We’re going to continue to do our part, but it’s going to be balanced with all of the other interests we have as a country.”
Similarly, there was no plan for retrieving a Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to a notoriously dangerous Salvadoran prison, a move a judge called “wholly lawless” and an issue the Supreme Court is expected to take up in the next few days. A Justice Department lawyer in the case was placed on administrative leave, apparently for conceding that the man never should have been sent to the prison.
Mr. Trump has appeared mostly unmoved as the knock-on effects of his policies take shape. He has shrugged off the loss of $5 trillion in the value of the American markets in recent days. Aboard Air Force One on Sunday night, he said: “Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”
To finish reading the article, click here. It should be a gift article.
Friends, we are in a whole lot of trouble. Trump is not a businessman. He played one on TV. He is a performer. He is in way over his head. He called Elon Musk a “genius.” Musk called Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro “a moron.” Trump allowed Musk to tear almost every federal agency apart, destroying vital programs and firing essential personnel.
We have to push back as hard as we can. Trump and his minions have retreated on some of their stupid actions (like purging Harriet Tubman and the Jnderground Railroad of its role in helping slaves escape). Little victories like this should encourage wider protests against the chaos that Trump has unleashed. Is he doing it for Putin’s benefit? Does he suffer from dementia?
Dr. Azar Nafisi, author of the mega-bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, will speak at Wellesley College on April 15 at Wellesley College at 4 p.m. in the Jewett Arts Center. Admission is free.
Please mark the date on your calendar. She is speaking in a lecture series that I endowed several years ago. The lecture will be available eventually on the archive website of the College.
The book, which was a sensation upon its publication for its depiction of life under the mullahs, has recently been made into a film.
This review of the film was published by The Atlantic and written by Arash Azizi. At present, the film can be seen only at film festivals.
He wrote:
The past few years may well be remembered as the nadir of Iranian-Israeli relations, and the first occasion when the two countries attacked each other directly. But they were also a golden period for Iranian-Israeli collaboration in cinema. In 2023, Tatami was the first-ever film to be co-directed by an Israeli (Guy Nattiv) and an Iranian (Zar Amir). And in 2024 came Reading Lolita in Tehran, directed by Eran Riklis, who is Israeli, and adapted from a book by an Iranian author, with an almost entirely Iranian cast. The film premiered at the Rome Film Fest last year and is now starting to tour the United States.
Anyone old enough to remember cultural life at the beginning of this century will know the book. Azar Nafisi’s memoir came out in 2003, spent 36 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, and quickly developed a cult following. A reviewer for The Nation confessed to missing a dental appointment, a business lunch, and a deadline just because she couldn’t put the book aside.
Literary scholars—Nafisi is an English professor—are not known for their page-turning thrillers. But Nafisi’s story and prose are captivating. She’d gone to Iran shortly after the 1979 revolution in the hope of putting her American education to use by teaching English at a university. Instead, she was hounded out of the classroom by authorities hostile to Western literature. She wound up holding clandestine seminars for young women in her living room, delving into the masterpieces that the Islamic Republic forbade: the Vladimir Nabokov novel that gives the memoir its name, alongside the works of Henry James and Jane Austen, as well as one of Nafisi’s favorites, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Nafisi brings these classics into dialogue with the real-life stories of young Iranians in the heady decades following the 1979 revolution. Her book isn’t just about reading and teaching literature under a repressive regime, but about how literature in and of itself could serve as an antidote to all that the regime stood for.
Despite its global fame and translation into 32 languages, Reading Lolita in Tehran was never turned into a film before now, mostly because Nafisi didn’t like the proposals she’d received. Then, seven years ago, Riklis came around, as he recounted to a New York audience on January 13, after a special screening of the film. The Israeli director managed to convince Nafisi of his vision—and then to secure the funding, assemble a suitable Iranian cast, and settle on Rome as the shooting location, given that Tehran was not an option.
When the book was initially released in 2003, the American zeitgeist, shaped by 9/11 and the Bush administration’s global War on Terror, was rife with debates about the representations of Muslim women and life in the Middle East. Nafisi’s was one of several popular memoirs by Iranian women published during this period, including Firoozeh Dumas’s Funny in Farsi (2003) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis series (2000–03). And perhaps inevitably, given its success, Nafisi’s book became the subject of political scrutiny, much of it bearing little relation to the book’s content. Although Nafisi opposed the Iraq War, some critics lumped her in with neoconservatives because she portrayed the travails of Iranians under an anti-American regime. One scholar even proclaimed that he saw no difference between her and American soldiers convicted of abusing prisoners in Iraq.
More than 20 years later, Riklis’s loyal adaptation has opponents just as the book did, and even more so because of the nationality of its director. In Tehran, the regime media have denounced the film as furnishing a “pretext for attacking Iran” and called its Iranian actors “traitors working with Zionists.” One outlet claimed that the film peddled a “violent, anti-culture, anti-art, and anti-human view of Iran and Iranians.”
The idea that Reading Lolita in Tehran is anti-Iranian because of its portrayal of the Islamic Republic, and of the life of women under its rule, was always patently ridiculous. The claim bears up particularly poorly in 2024, two years after women-centered protests rocked Iran under the slogan “Women, Life, Freedom.” What Nafisi does best, and the reason her work has endured, is precisely to refuse cartoonish portrayals and basic morality plays.
In Riklis, known for his empathetic depiction of Israelis and Palestinians in films such as Lemon Tree and Dancing Arabs, her book finds an able interpreter who has stayed true to its ethos. The film isn’t neutral. It vividly tells the story of how puritanical Islamist goons attacked universities in the early years after 1979, imposed mandatory veiling on women, and banned books they didn’t like. But neither is it a simple story of scary Islamists versus heroic women resisters.
The film captures the atmosphere of Iran in the 1980s and ’90s remarkably well for having been shot in Italy and directed by an Israeli who has never set foot in the country. The dialogue is mostly in Persian, a language Riklis doesn’t speak; he was able to pull this off with the help of a carefully chosen cast of diasporic Iranians. Golshifteh Farahani, perhaps the best-known Iranian actor outside the country, is at her height as Nafisi, whom she plays as confident but humane, by turns brazen and vulnerable.
The young women of the clandestine class include Sanaz (Zar Amir), who has survived imprisonment and torture; Mahshid (Bahar Beihaghi, in one of the film’s most delightful performances), who, unlike most of her classmates, wore the Islamic veil even before the revolution and defends an ideal of modesty as virtue; and Azin (Lara Wolf), whose multiple divorces make her an object of fascination to the less experienced students, but who turns out to be suffering from domestic abuse.
In Nafisi’s apartment, the students are far from the prying eyes of the regime and also of men (even the professor’s husband is barred from their meetings). They construct for themselves, in that all-female room, a little literary republic that survives the years of war and revolution. In one memorable scene, Nafisi has the students practice a Jane Austen–era dance as part of their study of Pride and Prejudice, drawing parallels between the stifling rules of courtship in Victorian England and those of some contemporary families in Iran.
The film also ventures beyond that cloistered space. Bahri (Reza Diako), a devout 1979 revolutionary, is nevertheless an avid student in Nafisi’s class at the university before it is shut down. Despite their diametrically opposed politics, Nafisi and Bahri form a bond. Early in the story, she tells him his essay on Huckleberry Finn is the best she’s ever received from a student, even in America. The two reconnect when Bahri returns from the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–88, having lost an arm. He has used his family connections to the regime to obtain a surprise gift for his old professor: two tickets to The Sacrifice, by Andrei Tarkovsky, showing at the Tehran film festival. The connection between Nafisi and Bahri is presented with complexity and without sentimentality, neither papering over political differences nor caricaturing Bahri as a generic revolutionary.
In this way, both film and book avoid didacticism. And in doing so, they demonstrate exactly the point Nafisi explores with her students, which is the power of literature to stir empathy across seemingly unbridgeable divides. When the group discusses The Great Gatsby, Nafisi insists on understanding the forbidden love that Daisy Buchanan, the married socialite, has for Jay Gatsby as a true human feeling, not a symbol of Western perfidy, as some of her more revolutionary students claim it to be. The latter advocate banning the book. Nafisi organizes a mock trial for the novel in her class, with students divided into teams for and against.
Nafisi calls on students on both sides of the political divide to treat each other with humanity. When she catches some in her class expressing glee at the wartime deaths of pro-regime peers, she enjoins them not to become like their oppressors. And she is no dogmatic opponent of Islam, only of religiously inspired repressive government: At one point Nafisi tells Bahri, “My grandmother was the most devout Muslim I knew. She never missed a prayer. But she wore her scarf because she was devout, not because she was a symbol.” (I am not the only critic with a Muslim background who found this line powerful.)
The point here isn’t just to repeat the liberal platitude that “the problem isn’t with Islam but with its repressive enforcement.” Rather, Nafisi is rejecting the revolutionaries’ tendency to treat all that surrounds them as a field of symbols. People are worth more than that, she tells them and us, as though echoing the Kantian dictum to treat one another “as an end, never merely as a means.”
This message about the humane power of literature makes Reading Lolita in Tehran a work of art rather than an exercise in sloganeering. And the fact that now, more than two decades after the book’s release, and at a time of regional tension, an Israeli filmmaker has worked with Iranians to adapt Nafisi’s book to the screen gives the film a special power.
The audience at the screening I attended, at a Jewish community center on the Upper West Side, included American Jews, Israelis, and Iranians. What we had in common was the experience of being gripped by a story about the capacity of literature to reveal us to one another as ends rather than as means. The setup might sound mawkish. But I recommend avoiding the temptation of cynicism and embracing the film as truly one for these times.
Trump’s tariffs are getting blowback from some of his rightwing allies. Elon Musk called tariff-lover Peter Navarro “a moron.” Several Republican Senators expressed their opposition to tariffs at a Senate hearing. The National Review tore into Trump’s tariffs and his imperial behavior:
It wrote:
If it seems preposterous that a single person could enjoy this much power over the American economy — and, with it, the global economy — rest assured that it is. In Article I, the Constitution vests the “power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” in Congress, not in the president. As a result, the president has no power to impose tariffs that he has not been accorded by an act of the legislature. If it desires, Congress can choose to take back as much of that power as it sees fit. It ought to do so — and do so now.
That the Founders placed the power to tax, tariff, and legislate in the hands of the legislature, instead of the executive, was not an accident. On the contrary: This allocation sat at the very core of the system that they designed. Because legislatures play host to a diverse cast of characters — characters who have different views, are elected by different groups, and come from different regions — they are less prone to dogmatism, caprice, and flightiness than are monarchs, presidents, or emperors. Especially within the United States, where the Senate often checks the passions of the House, the procedural challenges that result from this tend to ensure that only those proposals that enjoy broad purchase among the citizenry’s representatives are able to become law. This arrangement has two chief benefits. First, it guarantees that the ideas under consideration will be subject to serious criticism and debate. Second, it makes it difficult to alter the status quo on a whim — which, in turn, makes it easier for the people to understand the laws under which they live.
This predictability is useful in all areas of civic life. But it is especially beneficial in the financial realm, where stability is imperative. Businesses, investors, workers, and families are all aided enormously by a reliable comprehension of what their tax rates, operating rules, regulatory liabilities, and tariff exposures are likely to be for the foreseeable future. When those variables are determined by Congress, the debates that inform them are transparent and the laws that result are built to endure. When those variables are determined by the president, the debates that inform them are opaque and the law is liable to change radically from day to day. In essence, the case for Congress fulfilling its responsibilities is the same as the case for written law per se: No free man wants to be at the mercy of a king.
In his vendetta against law firms who represented his opponents, universities whose high standards offend him, and anyone who dared to stand up to his lies, Trump has selected two former government employees for retribution. These actions are typical of dictators. Trump is wannabe dictator. He certainly aspires to be a full-fledged fascist. He has a compliant Departnent of Justice. Attorney General Pam Bondi thinks she works for Trump, not the people of the United States.
President Trump on Wednesday signed an executive ordering the Justice Department to investigate two prominent former senior Homeland Security officials, saying they could be guilty of “treason” because of their criticism of him.
Trump also stripped Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs of their security clearances, although it was not clear if they maintained any. The order “also suspends any active security clearance held by individuals at entities associated with Taylor, including the University of Pennsylvania,” where Taylor is an adjunct professor, “pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest.”
Likewise, the order also suspends security clearances held by associates of Krebs at SentinelOne, a California-based cyber security firm, where he is currently employed as the company’s chief intelligence and public policy officer.
Taylor, who served as the chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly during the first Trump administration, drew Trump’s wrath for writing a blistering, New York Times Op-ed, titled, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration“, and later a book, A Warning, both under the pen name “Anonymous,” detailing his concerns about the president’s policies. The Op-ed unleashed a furious media campaign to identify him. After he surfaced in October 2020, he became a prominent TV critic of Trump
“You can’t have that happen,” Trump said as he signed the executive order, adding, “I think he’s guilty of treason if you want to know the truth, but we’ll find out.”
The executive order called Taylor “a bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his government position, prioritizing his own ambition, personal notoriety, and monetary gain over fidelity to his constitutional oath.”
Taylor responded on X (formerly Twitter): “I said this would happen. Dissent isn’t unlawful. It certainly isn’t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path. Never has a man so inelegantly proved another man’s point.”…
It’s almost funny to see Trump criticize anyone for failure to be faithful to their “constitutional oath,” since he has violated his own constitutional oath on a daily basis.
What is Elon Musk’s agenda? His DOGE teams are wreaking havoc across the federal government. His claims of saving “billions” are making government inefficient. Thousands of researchers, scientists, and essential personnel have been fired. Is he working to destroy our government? Or is he settting up a scenario of failure as a prelude to privatization?
Retirees and disabled people are facing chronic website outages and other access problems as they attempt to log in to their online Social Security accounts, even as they are being directed to do more of their business with theagency online.
The website has crashed repeatedly in recent weeks, with outages lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to almost a day, according to six current and former officials with knowledge of the issues. Even when the site is back online, many customers have not been able to sign in to their accounts — or have logged in only to find information missing. For others, access to the system has been slow, requiring repeated tries to get in.
The problems come as the Trump administration’s cost-cutting team, led by Elon Musk, has imposed a downsizing that’s led to7,000 job cuts and is preparing to push out thousands more employees at an agency that serves 73 million Americans. The new demands from Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service include a 50 percent cut to the technology divisionresponsible for the website and other electronic access.
Many of the network outages appear to be caused by an expanded fraud check system imposed by the DOGE team, current and former officials said. The technology staff did not test the new software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, these officials said.
The technology issues have been particularly alarming for some of the most vulnerable Social Security customers. For almost two days last week, for example,many of the 7.4 million adults and children receiving monthly benefits under the anti-poverty program known as Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, confronted a jarring message that claimed they were “currently not receiving payments,” agency officials acknowledged in an internal email to staff.
The error messages set off widespread panic until recipients discovered that their monthly checks had still been deposited in their bank accounts. Another breakdown disabled the SSI system for much of the day on Friday, prompting claims staff to cancel appointments because they could not enter new disability claims in the system and blocking some already receiving benefits from gaining access to their accounts.
“Social Security’s response has been, ‘Oops,’” said Darcy Milburn, director of Social Security and health-care policy at the Arc, a national nonprofit thatadvocates for people with disabilities. The group fielded dozens of calls last week from nervous clients who saw the inaccurate message and assumed their monthly check, usually paid on the first of the month, would not arrive.
“It’s woefully insufficient when we’re talking about a government agency that’s holding someone’s lifeline in their hands,” Milburn said.
The disruptions are occurring as acting commissioner Leland Dudek and the DOGE team move to lay off large swaths of the workforce in a new phase of downsizing. Thousands of employees already have been pushed out — many in customer-facing roles, others with expertise in the agency’s cumbersome technology systems. At least 800 of the 3,000 employees left in the division that manages all of the Social Security databases face layoffs, a senior official said on Friday. The newly named chief information officer, Scott Coulter, a Musk-aligned private equity analyst, has demanded a cut of 50 percent, the official said.
The network outages are one in a cascade of blows to customer service that also have hobbled phone systems and field office operations as the workforce shrinks.
A surge in visitors to the website is overwhelming the computer system as customers — nervous that the rapid changes at the agency will compromise their benefits — download their benefit and earnings statements and attempt to file claims. President Donald Trump has said that his administration will not reduce Social Security benefits.
The chaos could accelerate starting April 14, when new identification measures are set to take effect that will require millions of customers applying for benefits to authenticate their identity online, part of the administration’s campaign to root out allegedly fraudulent claims.
“We’re just spiking like crazy,” said one senior official, who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about agency operations. “It’s people who are terrified that DOGE is messing with our systems. It’s the sheer massive volume of freaked-out people.”
The Social Security press office said in a statement that officials are “actively investigating the root cause” of the incidents, which they called “brief disruptions” averaging about 20 minutes each with the exception of the SSI error message. But on several occasions, including during an outage last Monday, customers were shut out of the website for hours. The system was back online last Monday after two hours, but lingering issues lasted through the afternoon while all backlogged queries were processed, current and former officials said. And a system upgrade on a Saturday in late March took several hours longer than anticipated and knocked out the network.
Three times in a recent 10-day stretch, the online systems the field office staff rely on to serve the public have crashed, said one employee in an Indiana office.
The downed programs included tools employees use to schedule visits, to see who has booked an appointment and to check who has arrived, the employee said. It is unheard-of for the system to fail this often, and each outage has led to chaos, they said.
Suddenly forced offline as they were taking claims, the staff members scribbled down clients’ information, then had to wait until later to load it into the computer, doubling or tripling the amount of time and work involved, the employee said.
In other instances,managers or security guards improvised a solution after the online scheduling system failed, the employee said. They walked out to the reception area, wrote down numbers on paper slips and started handing them out to people waiting in line.
The network crashes appear to be caused by an expansion initiated by the Trump team of an existing contract with a credit-reporting agency that tracks names, addresses and other personal information to verify customers’ identities. The enhanced fraud checks are now done earlier in the claims process and have resulted in a boost to the volume of customers who must pass the checks.
But the technology staff did not test the software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, current and former officials said. Connectivity issues and bugs with the expanded system have caused the portal that manages log-ins and authentication for many Social Security applications to go down, officials said.
At a weekly operations meeting on March 28 that was made public last week, Wayne Lemon, deputy chief information officer for infrastructure and IT operations, acknowledged the network crashes and said, “While they’ve been brief, we prefer no outages.” He said the outages were under investigation and may involve “challenges we’ve experienced with a number of partners.” Part of the problem may be that the outageshave occurred during “high volume use of the network.”
“Is there a spike in demand or something in the environment causing the issues?” Lemon said.
Customers, meanwhile, are growing more frustrated.………..
What readers are saying
The comments express strong concerns about the recent IT staff cuts and website outages at the Social Security Administration, suggesting these actions are deliberate attempts to undermine the system. Many commenters believe this is part of a broader strategy to privatize Social Security.
Vermont, a traditionally liberal state, has a moderate (non-MAGA) Republican governor, Phil Scott, and a Democratic-controlled legislature. Governor Scott appointed Zoie Saunders as Education Secretary. When the U.S. Department of Education recently directed every state to certify that it had banned DEI programs (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs, Saunders asked the state’s districts to comply. Instead, she faced a widespread revolt by the state’s education organizations, and she issued a new directive, revoking her earlier request for compliance.
But just three days later, after initially defending and clarifying the decision in the face of public backlash, Education Secretary Zoie Saunders backtracked late Monday afternoon, informing superintendents the state would instead send a single statewide certification.
“To be clear, the Agency of Education and the Attorney General’s Office continue to support diversity, equity, and inclusion practices in our schools. Our communication on Friday was intended to make you aware of the directive from the U.S. Department of Education regarding Title VI,” Saunders wrote Monday afternoon, “and to reinforce that diversity, equity, and inclusion practices are lawful and supported in Vermont. In no way, did AOE direct schools to ban DEI.”
So why all the confusion?
On Friday, Saunders told school district leaders they had 10 days to submit their certification, but also said the agency believed certification required only that districts “reaffirm … compliance with existing law.”
That communication came in response to President Donald Trump and his administration, who have threatened to withhold funding to public schools that fail to comply with the expansive directive.
A letter dated April 3 from the U.S. Department of Education said noncompliance with the diversity programming ban could result in schools losing a crucial stream of money meant to support economically disadvantaged students, known as Title I, among other sources of federal dollars. The letter cited Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination in schools based on “race, color or national origin,” and also cited a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court Case against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina that restricted affirmative action.
Saunders, in the letter to district leaders, wrote that the federal restriction includes “policies or programs under any name that treat students differently based on race, engage in racial stereotyping, or create hostile environments for students of particular races.”
Programs highlighting specific cultures or heritages “would not in and of themselves” violate federal regulations, the letter said. “We do not view this Certification to be announcing any new interpretation of Title VI,” Saunders wrote, adding that the agency’s “initial legal review” determined the federal letter only required the state to “reaffirm our compliance with existing law.”
But guidance from the federal education department cited by Saunders seems to restrict a variety of practices, arguing that school districts have “veil(ed) discriminatory policies” under initiatives like diversity programming, “social-emotional learning” and “culturally responsive” teaching.
Following news of the agency’s letter to districts, Saunders released an initial public statement around 3 p.m. on Monday saying the federal demands would not require Vermont’s schools to change practices. And in that communication, Vermont’s top education official gave no indication the agency would alter its request for districts to confirm their compliance with Trump’s directive.
“The political rhetoric around this federal directive is designed to create outrage in our communities, confusion in our schools, and self-censorship in our policy making. But we are not going to allow the chaos to control how we feel, or how we respond,” Saunders said in the statement. “Our priority is to protect Vermont’s values, preserve essential federal funding, and support schools in creating positive school environments free from the type of bullying and manipulation we see in our national politics today.”
In the same press release, Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark said Vermont was in compliance with federal law.
“We will continue to protect Vermonters against any unlawful actions by the federal government,” Clark said.
One neighboring state, meanwhile, took a different tack. Soon after the Trump administration sent states last week’s letter, New York announced it would not comply.
Vermont and other states’ responses to the federal government are due April 14, and the state agency said last week that its response was supposed to include school districts’ “compliance issues” and “the Agency’s proposed enforcement plans” for those districts.
Before Saunders, in consultation with Clark, decided to rescind the state’s request for districts’ certifications, the Agency of Education’s actions drew criticism from the public education community.
Representatives from the Vermont School Boards Association, Vermont Principals’ Association, Vermont Superintendents Association and Vermont-NEA, the state teachers’ union, met with state leaders Monday. They later penned a letter to Saunders and Clark calling Vermont’s approach to the federal directive “not workable.”
“Expecting individual superintendents to certify compliance based on a cover letter (that they have not yet seen) that clarifies the legal boundaries of their certification will lead to a patchwork of responses that could put Vermont and local school districts at risk,” the organizations wrote.
The coalition urged Vermont to follow New York’s lead and reject the certification process. That strong approach, they wrote, “would also send a powerful message to students and families across the state.”
Hours later, the Agency of Education appeared to heed their advice. In her late afternoon message to superintendents, Saunders wrote that “AOE has received feedback throughout the day regarding the need for clarity on the intent of the certification and the state’s specific response.”
“We understand that many in the community are concerned because of the political rhetoric surrounding DEI,” she added.
News of Saunders’ initial Friday letter spread quickly on social media over the weekend. Already, plans for a Wednesday protest had circulated online.
At least one district, Winooski, said it wouldn’t comply with the certification.
“I notified the Secretary that I will not be signing anything,” Wilmer Chavarria, the district’s superintendent, wrote in an email to staff shared with VTDigger. “I also requested that the state grow some courage and stop complying so quickly and without hesitation to the politically-driven threats of the executive.”
Winooski’s school board will address the compliance certification at a regularly scheduled board meeting Wednesday, according to Chavarria’s message.
In Vermont, ethnic studies have been a larger part of the education landscape since the passage of Act 1 in 2019. The law, which the Legislature approved unanimously and Gov. Phil Scott signed, required public schools to incorporate ethnic studies into their curricula. The legislation charged a panel with making suggestions for better including the history and contributions of underrepresented groups in Vermont’s classrooms.
Correction: A previous version of this story attributed a quote directly to Charity Clark that was in fact a statement released by the Vermont Agency of Education and Vermont Attorney General’s Office.
Following a federal directive that schools ban “illegal” diversity, equity and inclusion-related programs, the Vermont Agency of Education last Friday asked school districts to submit compliance certifications.
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Jennifer Berkshire has been writing about the politics of education for many years. She has written two books with education historian Jack Schneider, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door and The Education Wars. This is the second installment in her excellent series called “Connecting the Dots.” Her Substack blog is called “The Education Wars.”
She writes:
BAs are out, babies are in
The Trump world’s obsession with the declining birthrate doesn’t quite rank with rooting out “DEI,” tariff-ing, or expelling immigrants but it’s up there. In a recent interview, Elon Musk confessed that a fear of the shrinking number of babies keeps him up at night. What does this have to do with education? Everything. Last year, two of the big education ‘thinkers’ at Heritage released a guide to how changes in education policy could increase “the married birthrate”:
Expensive and misguided government interventions in education are, whether intended or not, pushing young people away from getting married and starting families—to the long-term detriment of American society.
What are those government interventions? Things like subsidizing student loans, thereby encouraging young women to go to college. Or requiring teachers, who are mostly women, to have bachelor degrees, thereby encouraging young women to go to college. Of course there is a voucher angle—there always is with these folks. But the key here is that a chorus of influential Trump thinkers like this guy keep telling us that there are too many women on campus, and that policy shifts could get them back into the home where they belong.
If the administration succeeds in privatizing the government-run Student Loan Program, college will become much more expensive, significantly shrinkign the number of kids who’ll be able to attend. And that seems to be the point, as conservative activist Chris Rufo explained in an interview a few weeks ago.
By spinning off, privatizing and then reforming the student loan programs, I think that you could put the university sector as a whole into a significant recession. And I think that would be a very salutary thing.
So when you hear the rising chorus coming from Trump world that there are too many of the wrong people on the nation’s campuses, recall that an awful lot of these self-styled ‘nationalists’ believe this: “If we want a great nation, we should be preparing young women to become mothers.”
Some people are more equal than others
I’ve been making the case that both the Department of Education and public education more broadly are especially vulnerable because of the equalizing roles that they play. Of course, education is not our only equalizer. Indeed, all of the institutions and policy mechanisms intended to smooth out the vast chasms between rich and poor are on the chopping block right now. While you were clicking on another bad news story, Trump eviscerated collective bargaining rights for thousands of federal workers. While teachers weren’t affected, a number of red states have been rushing to remedy that, including Utah which just banned collective bargaining for public employees.
Writer John Ganz describes the unifying thread that connects so much of Trump world as ‘bosses on top,’ the belief that “the authority and power of certain people is the natural order, unquestionable, good.” We got a vivid demonstration of what this looks like in Florida this week as legislators debated whether to roll back (more) child labor protections, allowing kids as young as 14 to work over night.
Governor Ron DeSantis is busily spinning the bill as about parents rights, but what it’s really about is expanding the power of the boss. The ‘right’ to work overnight while still in school is actually the boss’ right to demand that young employees keep working. Nor is it hard to imagine the long-term consequences of this policy change. Teen workers who labor through the night end up dropping out of school, their futures constrained in every possible way. Here’s how Marilynn Robinson described the rollback of child labor laws in her adopted home state of Iowa: “If these worker-children do not manage to finish high school, they will always be poorer for it in income and status and mobility of every kind.”
Go back one hundred years when the country was in the midst of a fierce debate over child labor, and you’ll hear the same arguments for ‘bosses on top’ that are shaping policy today. At a time when public education was becoming compulsory, conservative industry groups like the National Association of Manufacturers cast their opposition to both child labor laws and universal public education in explicitly bossist terms, as Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway recount in The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market:
“They believed that men were inherently unequal: it was right and just for workers to be paid far less than managers and managers far less than owners. They also believed that in a free society some children would naturally enter the workforce. Child labor laws wer (to their minds) socialistic because they enforced erroneous assumptions of equality—for example, that all children should go to school—rather than accepting that some children should work in factories.”
Back to the states
Did you hear the one about how we’re returning education to the states? Back-to-the-states has become a mantra for the Trump Administration on all kinds of favored policy issues, as the New York Times recently pointed out. Of course, education is already a state ‘thing,’ which means that we can look at the states Trump keeps pointing to as models and see how they’re faring. So how are they faring? Not so well, as the education reform group EdTrust lays out here, reviewing both NAEP scores and the track records of these states in supporting low-income students and students of color.
But there are plenty of warning signs beyond test scores. Ohio seems poised to slash funding for public education, even as the state’s voucher program balloons. (And let’s not even get into the just-enacted Senate Bill 1, which limits class discussions of any ‘controversial’ topic and goes hard at campus unions.) But for a glimpse of the future that awaits us, pay attention to another state in my beloved Heartland, and which Trump has repeatedly showered with praise: Indiana.
Now, Indiana happens to be home to one of my favorite economists, Ball State’s Michael Hicks, who has been warning relentlessly that the state’s decision to essentially stop investing in K-12 and public higher education has been an economic disaster. Hoosiers, he pointed out recently, earn less than the typical Californian or New Yorker did in 2005. As the number of kids going to college in Indiana has plummeted, the state now spends more and more money trying to lure bad employers to the state. Here’s how Hicks describes the economic and education policies that Indiana has embraced:
“If a diabolical Bond villain were to craft a set of policies that ensured long-term economic decline in a developed country, it would come in two parts. First, spend enormous sums of money on business incentives that offer a false narrative of economic vibrancy, then cut education spending.”
As for Indiana’s 25-year-long school choice experiment, Hicks concludes that it has been a failure. Why? Because the expansion of school vouchers and charter schools was used to justify spending less on public schools—precisely the policy course that we’re hurtling towards now. Today, Indiana spend less money per student on both K-12 and public higher education than it did in 2008.
GOP-run states have already begun to petition what’s left of the Department of Education for ‘funding flexibility’—the ability to spend Title 1 dollars, which now go to public schools serving low-income and rural students, on private religious education. We shouldn’t be surprised. This is precisely the vision laid out in Project 2025. (Fun fact: the same Heritage thinker who penned the education section of Project 2025 also co-authored the above referenced guide to getting young married ladies to have more babies.)
And just like in Indiana, school privatization will be used to justify reducing the investment in K-12 public education. So when an economist tells us that school choice “risks being Indiana’s single most damaging economic policy of the 21st century,” we should probably listen.
Last weekend, the Network for Public Education hosted its conference in Columbus, Ohio. Since our first conference in 2013 in Austin, everyone has said “this is the best ever,” and they said it again on April 7.
The attendees included the newly re-elected State Superintendent of Schools in Minnesota, Jill Underly. The Democratic leader of the Texas House Education Committee, Gina Hinojosa. Numerous teachers of the year from many states. Parent leaders from across the nation.
The Phyllis Bush Award for grassroots organizing was won by the Wisconsin Public Education Network, a parent-led group, who have stood firm for their public schools.
The David Award for the individual or group who courageously stands up to powerful forces on behalf of public schools and their students was won by Pastor Charles Johnson of Pastors for Texas Children, whose organization has fought against Governor Greg Abbott and the billionaires who want to impose vouchers, despite their failure everywhere else and the harm they will wreak on rural schools.
The last speaker was Tim Walz, Governor of Minnesota and former Democratic candidate for Vice President in 2024. He was warm, funny, and inspiring.
Nearly 400 educators attended the conference from all across the nation, and everyone stayed to hear Governor Walz, who was wonderful. In time, I will post videos of the main presentations, including his. April 7 was his birthday, and it was too late to get a birthday cake. But two veteran educators left the hotel to find a bakery and returned with a cake.
I introduced Randi Weingarten and reminded the audience that Mike Pompeo had called her “the most dangerous person in the world,” which she should wear as a badge of honor.
Randi gave a rip-roaring speech that brought the audience to its feet. She presented Governor Walz with his birthday cake and everything sang “Happy birthday.”
He was fabulous. He was supposed to slip away at the end of his speech, through a private back door but someone caught up with him and asked for a selfie. Of course, he obliged. Within minutes, it appeared that at least 250 or more people were standing in line for a selfie. He did not leave. He signed autographs and posed for selfies with everyone who wanted one.
He is humble, self-effacing, has a crackling dry wit, and is most definitely a people person.
In the opening session on Friday night, I engaged in a Q & A with Josh Cowen about his recent book: The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers. Again, the room was overflowing. Josh was excellent at explaining the terrible results of vouchers and how they turned into a subsidy for wealthy families. Why do politicians continue to promote them. The billionaire money is irresistible.
The panels were fabulous. I participated in one about the close link between public schools and democracy. The room was packed, and we had people lining the walls. A panel led by Derek Black, law professor at the university of South Carolina, and Yohuru Williams, dean of the University of Saint Thomas in St. Paul, talked about the history of Black education, inspired by Derek’s new book Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy.
Public schools are in the crosshairs of the Trump Administration. The fact that they have failed matters not at all to religious zealots and libertarians. The fact that they bust state budgets doesn’t matter. The fact that they are a subsidy for rich families doesn’t matter. Those rich families will vote for the politicians who gave them a gift.
The urgency of standing up for public schools, defending their teachers, protecting their students, and fighting censorship of books and curriculum has never been more important than now.
The Network for Public Education is committed to stand up for kids, teachers, public schools, and communities. .
Diane Ravitch's blog 