This article was written by William Burns, who retired after serving as CIA Director. It was addressed to other career officers who were abruptly fired by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
The article is titled: “A Letter to America’s Discarded Public Servants: You all deserved better.”
Burns likened the mass dismissals to the McCarthy era when China experts were falsely accused of being Communists and ousted, leaving the U.S. without their years of knowledge and experience. He warned of the dangers of suppressing dissent.
For three and a half decades as a career diplomat, I walked across the lobby of the State Department countless times—inspired by the Stars and Stripes and humbled by the names of patriots etched into our memorial wall. It was heartbreaking to see so many of you crossing that same lobby in tears following the reduction in force in July, carrying cardboard boxes with family photos and the everyday remains of proud careers in public service. After years of hard jobs in hard places—defusing crises, tending alliances, opening markets, and helping Americans in distress—you deserved better.
The same is true for so many other public servants who have been fired or pushed out in recent months: the remarkable intelligence officers I was proud to lead as CIA director, the senior military officers I worked with every day, the development specialists I served alongside overseas, and too many others with whom we’ve served at home and abroad.
The work you all did was unknown to many Americans, rarely well understood or well appreciated. And under the guise of reform, you all got caught in the crossfire of a retribution campaign—of a war on public service and expertise.
Those of us who have served in public institutions understand that serious reforms are overdue. Of course we should remove bureaucratic hurdles that prevent agencies like the State Department from operating efficiently. But there is a smart way and a dumb way to tackle reform, a humane way and an intentionally traumatizing way.
If today’s process were truly about sensible reform, career officers—who typically rotate roles every few years—wouldn’t have been fired simply because their positions have fallen out of political favor…
And if this process were truly about sensible reform, you and your families wouldn’t have been treated with gleeful indignity. One of your colleagues, a career diplomat, was given just six hours to clear out his office. “When I was expelled from Russia,” he said, “at least Putin gave me six days to leave.”
No, this is not about reform. It is about retribution. It is about breaking people and breaking institutions by sowing fear and mistrust throughout our government. It is about paralyzing public servants—making them apprehensive about what they say, how it might be interpreted, and who might report on them. It is about deterring anyone from daring to speak truth to power.
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, points out that the once promising charter school industry is now in decline. Fifteen years ago, promoters of charter schools boasted of charter school miracles, of closing achievement gaps and saving poor kids who were “stuck in failing public schools.”
The charter industry lobby won federal funding for charter school expansion. Bill Gates put millions into charters and subsidized a propaganda film to sell the public on the remarkable success of privately run charter schools.
But the miracle dissolved. Some of the “best” charters were selecting their students carefully and/or dropping students who fell behind. Many charters failed. Others folded. Some closed because of low enrollment. Some closed because their owners were corrupt. it’s not a lack of money. The federal government is now pouring $500 million every year into charter growth.
The movement is in decline because the magic is gone.
Thirty years ago, charter schools stood for possibility. At their inception in the 1990s, they were supposed to be nimble, innovative, community-driven alternatives to traditional public schools—labs of experimentation led by teachers and grounded in equity. But in 2025, the movement finds itself at a turning point, not because it succeeded, but because it strayed too far from its original vision.
The first installment of a new report, titled “Charter School Reckoning: Decline, Disillusionment, and Cost,” by the National Center for Charter School Accountability (NCCSA) lays bare a system in decline. Closures are accelerating. Enrollment is stagnating. And beneath the rhetoric of “choice” and “opportunity,” a harsh reality has emerged: a sector in retreat, propped up by unchecked federal funding and powerful lobbying interests.
In the first six months of 2025 alone, fifty charter schools announced their closures. Some disappeared with less than a week’s warning. These schools join more than 160 others that vanished during the previous year. Between school years 2022-23 and 2023-24, the number of charter schools in the United States increased by only eleven. Last September, North Carolina’s Apprentice Academy closed days after opening for the school year. Ohio’s Victory Charter gave families two weeks’ notice. In Minnesota and Texas, charter schools folded before winter break. And last month, just weeks before the new school year was set to begin, yet another charter school in Colorado closed its doors.
And yet, federal investment in the charter school industry hasn’t skipped a beat. The U.S. Department of Education’s Charter Schools Program (CSP), created in 1994 to provide seed money to start charter schools, began with a modest $4.5 million. It now burns through half a billion taxpayer dollars a year. Much of that money is awarded by private contractors who are paid to review applications who provide minimal vetting. Their decisions are based solely on what’s written in grant applications—inviting exaggerated claims and even fiction. One 2022 federal audit found that nearly half the schools promised by Charter Management Organization grant recipients never materialized.
Even more troubling, many of the charter schools that have opened with the help of CSP funding have collapsed. The NCCSA report notes that of the fifty closures so far in 2025, nearly half had received a combined $102 million in federal start-up and expansion grants, according to a search of U.S. Department of Education and state databases.
So why does the funding from the federal government continue to flow? One reason is a myth that refuses to die: the million-student waitlist to get into charter schools. This talking point, originally peddled in 2013 by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, resurfaced in June 2025 by U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon during a Senate hearing. But the figurewas debunked more than a decade ago.
The stark truth is that demand for charter schools is often overestimated. Low enrollment is the number one reason charters shut down. A 2024 study by NCCSA and the Network for Public Education found that nearly half of all charter school closures between 2022 and 2024 were due to insufficient enrollment. Of the fifty closures in the first half of 2025, twenty-seven cited low enrollment as the primary cause.
Consider Florida’s Village of Excellence Academy, which closed with just one day’s notice in January 2025. Its enrollment had fallen from 230 in 2020 to just seventy-eight students. The school is not an anomaly. In 2023-24, 12 percent of all charter schools enrolled fewer than 100 students.
Meanwhile, at the other extreme, mega-charters such as Commonwealth Charter Academy (CCA) in Pennsylvania have student populations that are ballooning beyond reason. CCA, a virtual charter school with students across Pennsylvania, now enrolls more than 23,000 students—making it the largest K-12 school in the country. It spent nearly $9 million on advertising in the 2022-23 school year alone and $196 million on real estate since 2020—for a cyber school that delivers its instruction without the need for brick-and-mortar buildings. But student outcomes are dismal: just 11 percent proficiency in English, 4.7 percent proficiency in math, and a graduation rate far below the state average.
Then there’s Highlands Community Charter in California, a school that billed itself as a second chance for adults but instead became a case study in fraud. According to a state audit, Highlands took more than $180 million in funding to which it was not eligible and spent the money inappropriately. The school paid $80,000 for staff to attend a conference at a luxury hotel in Hawaii. Teachers were also employed without proper credentials, often because there was only one teacher for every fifty-one students. Graduation rates were between 2 and 3 percent. Following the audit, the entire board has resigned in disgrace and the state has requested a $180 million reimbursement.
This is not innovation. It’s exploitation of taxpayers and at-risk students.
And yet, federal dollars continue to pour into this shrinking, scandal-prone industry. Policymakers invoke waitlists that don’t exist. Authorizers, who are supposed to oversee charter schools, look the other way, incentivized by per-pupil funding kickbacks. Taxpayers are footing the bill for schools that fail to open, fail to serve, or fail to survive.
The question is no longer what charter schools were once meant to be. It’s whether the sector can be reformed at all. As Congress considers the next education budget, we urge lawmakers to ask: Why are we funding growth that isn’t happening? Why are we subsidizing failure? It’s time to stop chasing the ghost of what charter schools might have been—and start holding the system accountable for what it has become.
Free cash!! Free cash!! Open the Church of Satan K-12 Academy and watch the dollars roll in. No one cares how many students are enrolled or even if the list of students is a fake. Governor Abbott trusts you!
Governor Abbott knows that most of the vouchers will be claimed by students who are already enrolled in private schools. He doesn’t care. He knows that kids who leave public schools to attend a private school fall behind. He doesn’t care.
He wants the state to pay the tuition of all children, regardless of whether they attend a snake-charming religious school or the most elite private school in Dallas or Houston.
Governor Abbott wants YOU to step right up and claim your Free cash!!
ProPublica wrote this:
For about eight years, a Houston private school has followed a unique pattern when appointing members to its governing board: It has selected only married couples.
Over 200 miles away, two private schools in Dallas have awarded more than $7 million in combined contracts to their board members.
And at least seven private schools across Texas have issued personal loans, often reaching $100,000 or more, to their school leaders under terms that are often hidden from public view.
Such practices would typically violate laws governing public and charter schools. But private schools operate largely outside those rules because they haven’t historically received direct taxpayer dollars. Now, as the state moves to spend at least $1 billion over the next two years on private education, lawmakers have imposed almost none of the accountability measures required of the public school system.
If held to the same standards, 27 private schools identified by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune through tax filings likely would have violated state law. The news organizations found, and three education law experts confirmed, more than 60 business transactions, board appointments and hiring decisions by those schools that would have run afoul of the state rules meant to prevent self-dealing and conflicts of interest if they were public.
“It’s frankly astonishing to me that anyone would propose the massive sort of spending that we’re talking about in these school voucher programs with, at best, minimal accountability,” said Mark Weber, a public school finance lecturer at New Jersey’s Rutgers University who opposes vouchers. “If I were a taxpayer in Texas, I’d be asking, who’s going to be looking out for me?”
Texas has long stood as a holdout in the national push for voucher programs, even as other conservative states embraced them. Gov. Greg Abbott gave school voucher proponents a major win this year, signing into law one of the largest and costliest programs in the country. In doing so, Abbott’s office has argued that the state has “strict financial requirements,” saying that “Texas taxpayers expect their money to be spent efficiently and effectively on their behalf, both in private and traditional public schools.”
The law, however, imposes no restrictions to prevent the kinds of entanglements that the newsrooms found.
The contrast is sharp. Public or charter school officials who violate these rules could be subject to removal from office, fines or even state jail felony charges.
Private schools face none of those consequences.
Supporters of the voucher program argue that oversight of private schools should come not from the state, but from their boards and the marketplace.
“If you transform the private schools into public schools by applying the same rules and regulations and procedural requirements on them, then you take the private out of the private school,” said Patrick Wolf, an education policy professor at the University of Arkansas. Wolf, who supports vouchers, said that if parents are unhappy with the schools, they will hold them accountable by leaving and taking their tuition dollars with them.
Typically, neither parents nor the state’s taxpayers have access to information that shows precisely how private schools spend money. Only those that are organized as nonprofits are required to file public tax forms that offer limited information. Of the state’s more than 1,000 accredited private schools, many are exempt from submitting such filings because they are religious or for-profit institutions, leaving their business conduct opaque. It is unclear if private schools that participate in Texas’ voucher-like program will have to detail publicly how they use taxpayer dollars.
“The public system is not always perfect, but when it’s not perfect, we see it,” said Joy Baskin, associate executive director for policy and legal services at the Texas Association of School Boards, which represents public districts across the state. “That kind of transparency doesn’t exist in private schools.”
The Chinese Baptist Church in Houston, where Trinity Classical School has a campus (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)
“Just Isn’t Right”
Conflicts of interest in education were on the minds of legislators this spring. At an education committee hearing in March, Texas state Rep. Ryan Guillen, a Republican from Rio Grande City, along the southern border with Mexico, introduced a bill that would bar businesses with close ties to board members from applying for school district contracts. Such deals were previously permitted as long as school leaders publicly disclosed conflicts and abstained from voting.
But Guillen, who did not respond to requests for comment, argued those rules were abused, pointing to recent scandals in two districts that led to state investigationsand, in one case, resulted in federal charges.
He described his bill as a “commonsense” proposal that would ensure “no one in a position of power can exploit the system for financial benefit.” The Legislature passed the bill, which was signed into law by Abbott.
Notably, the measure excluded private schools. In public testimony, no one brought them up, and there was no debate about them even as lawmakers advanced a proposal that would direct state money to them.
The newsrooms found at least six private schools that awarded contracts to companies with ties to their board members.
Cristo Rey Dallas College Prep, a Catholic high school serving primarily low-income students of color, awarded more than $5 million to a construction firm owned by one of its board members for “interior finish” work between 2017 and 2021, tax filings show. The school did not respond to questions about the payments. Raul Estrada, who was on the school board when his firm received the payments, said he recused himself from any votes or decisions related to the contract. He added that the company’s work provided “substantial savings” to the school but did not provide specific figures.
Just 30 miles north, board members at the Shelton School, which specializes in teaching students with learning differences such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia, have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments over the last decade. Tax records show one trustee was awarded over $465,000 for landscaping, and another collected more than $1.2 million for “printed education material.” The board members whose firms received the contracts did not respond to requests for comment. Suzanne Stell, the school’s executive director, said the board members who received contracts were not involved in the decisions. Stell also said that the contract for printed material included training for educators.
Our investigation also found dozens of instances of nepotism or relatives serving on boards together at private schools, some of which were started and are led by families.
Trinity Classical School in Houston, for example, has long maintained a family-led chain of governance on its school board exclusive to married couples, appointing a new pair each time one cycled off. The board deviated from that pattern only once, when it selected Neil Anderson, the school’s leader, according to tax filings. None of the current board members responded to interview requests, nor did Anderson or the school.
Such arrangements have been prohibited since 2012 in charter schools, which are restricted from appointing more than one family member to serve as a trustee at the same time. Anderson’s appointment would also not be allowed in traditional public schools, where employees are barred from serving on their school’s governing board.
At the elite Greenhill School in the Dallas area, where tuition can exceed $40,000 a year, the previous leader, Scott Griggs, hired his son to coach the boys’ volleyball team and teach middle school math. While allowed in private schools, state nepotism laws prevent public and charter schools from hiring close relatives of superintendents and trustees, with few exceptions. Griggs told the newsrooms that he’d already announced his retirement when he asked the board in 2017 to approve hiring his son, who did not respond to requests for comment.
The following year, the college prep academy provided a personal loan of nearly $100,000 to its current head of school, Lee Hark, for a down payment on a home. The school did not disclose the terms of the agreement in its tax filings, including whether it charged interest or what would happen should Hark default. Hark declined to comment.
Private schools are generally free to use money as they choose, but a 150-year-old provision of the Texas Constitution bars public schools from lending taxpayer dollars. The state does not require private schools to publicly disclose whether taxpayer money would be used for such arrangements under the voucher program.
In a written statement, a Greenhill spokesperson said the school operates with “sound financial principles” that meet or exceed “all standards of accountability for independent schools.” She said the school charged interest on the loan and it has since been paid off, but did not provide records.
Many of the private schools examined by the news organizations, including Greenhill, said that they are still deciding whether to participate in the voluntary voucher program.
The lack of accountability for private schools has sparked concern from public school parents like Sarah Powell, a mother of two near Dallas. She was among thousands who urged lawmakers to reject voucher legislation earlier this year.
“You’re either part of the system or you’re not,” Powell later told the newsrooms. “You can’t have the resources and not any of the regulations. It just isn’t right.”
The Greenhill School, where tuition can surpass $40,000 per student, in Addison, just outside of Dallas (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)
Repeating History
State funds flowing to public and charter schools are monitored by the Texas Education Agency, which requires annual independent audits and assigns ratings that gauge each school’s fiscal health. Districts that repeatedly underperform risk sanctions, including forced closure.
“Looking back on it today, I think it was necessary,” Bob Schulman, a longtime education attorney, said about many of the reforms.
Even as oversight of charter schools has been strengthened, gaps remain. Earlier this year, a ProPublica and Tribune investigation found that a charter network with 1,000 students was paying its superintendent nearly $900,000 annually, making him among the highest-paid public school leaders in the nation. Yet the school did not disclose the superintendent’s full compensation to the state and later rebuffed calls to lower his salary from lawmakers and the advocacy group representing charters. The school board defended Cavazos’ salary, saying it was merited because of his duties and experience.
The state, however, will not directly regulate private schools under the new voucher program, which will begin next year. Instead, supervision will largely fall to one of 20 private organizations, which schools must pay to obtain and maintain the accreditation required to receive public funds.
A review by the newsrooms of these organizations’ standards found they are generally far less rigorous than the state’s. Most do not require annual financial audits, which some accreditation organizations say can be too costly and time-consuming, and many do not mandate policies to prevent nepotism and conflicts of interest.
If a private school loses accreditation from one group, it can simply apply to another.
That total, however, is likely an undercount even within the sample of schools the newsrooms reviewed. Reporters identified dozens more conflicts listed in tax forms, for example, but the schools provided sparse information about what they were. Because of that, there is no way to determine if the conduct would have violated state laws if it had occurred at a public or charter school. The newsrooms reached out to each school about the missing information, but none answered questions.ġ
Texas lawmakers laid the groundwork for publicly funded schools with limited state oversight when they authorized charter schools in the 1990s as an alternative to traditional public education. At the time, they exempted charter schools from many regulations, betting that greater flexibility would lead to innovation and stronger academic performance.
But over the past three decades, the state has steadily increased restrictions on charter schools in response to concerns about financial mismanagement and academic performance. Charter schools, for example, were initially exempt from the state’s nepotism and conflict-of-interest laws, but lawmakers gradually changed that after reports exposed leaders enriching themselves and their families. The state implemented another round of stricter rules after newspapers uncovered lavish spending on perks such as Spurs tickets and lucrative land deals.
Schulman, who has represented Texas charter schools for decades, said that some leaders abused the limited state oversight for years, making it more concerning that lawmakers launched a voucher program with even fewer regulations.
“I’m very disturbed,” Schulman said. “But I’m hopeful that it will be a quicker turnaround than it was for the charters.”
How We Reported This Story
For this story, reporters reviewed nonprofit tax filings for 90 of the 200 highest-enrollment private schools listed in the Texas Private Schools Accreditation Commission database. Those filings were not available for the other 110 schools, as for-profit schools or those tied to houses of worship are not typically required to make tax documents public. For the schools that filed these records, reporters reviewed available annual reports dating back to at least 2015.
Reporters identified more than 60 instances involving conflicts of interest, nepotism and financial transactions with related parties at 27 schools. Three education lawyers confirmed our findings.
A Trump-appointed judge overturned the Trump administration’s ban on policies of diversity, equity and inclusion in schools and colleges, according to Collin Binkley of the AP. Will her ruling stand?
WASHINGTON (AP) – A federal judge on Thursday struck down two Trump administration actions aimed at eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs at the nation’s schools and universities.
In her ruling, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher in Maryland found that the Education Department violated the law when it threatened to cut federal funding from educational institutions that continued with DEI initiatives.
The guidance has been on hold since April when three federal judges blocked various portions of the Education Department’s anti-DEI measures.
The ruling Thursday followed a motion for summary judgment from the American Federation of Teachers and the American Sociological Association, which challenged the government’s actions in a February lawsuit.
The case centers on two Education Department memos ordering schools and universities to end all “race-based decision-making” or face penalties up to a total loss of federal funding. It’s part of a campaign to end practices the Trump administration frames as discrimination against white and Asian American students.
The new ruling orders the department to scrap the guidance because it runs afoul of procedural requirements, though Gallagher wrote that she took no view on whether the policies were “good or bad, prudent or foolish, fair or unfair.”
Gallagher, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, rejected the government’s argument that the memos simply served to remind schools that discrimination is illegal.
“It initiated a sea change in how the Department of Education regulates educational practices and classroom conduct, causing millions of educators to reasonably fear that their lawful, and even beneficial, speech might cause them or their schools to be punished,” Gallagher wrote.
Democracy Forward, a legal advocacy firm representing the plaintiffs, called it an important victory over the administration’s attack on DEI.
“Threatening teachers and sowing chaos in schools throughout America is part of the administration’s war on education, and today the people won,” said Skye Perryman, the group’s president and CEO.
The Education Department did not immediately comment on Thursday.
The conflict started with a Feb. 14 memo declaring that any consideration of race in admissions, financial aid, hiring or other aspects of academic and student life would be considered a violation of federal civil rights law.
The memo dramatically expanded the government’s interpretation of a 2023 Supreme Court decision barring colleges from considering race in admissions decisions. The government argued the ruling applied not only to admissions but across all of education, forbidding “race-based preferences” of any kind.
“Educational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’ and advanced discriminatory policies and practices,” wrote Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary of the department’s Office for Civil Rights.
A further memo in April asked state education agencies to certify they were not using “illegal DEI practices.” Violators risked losing federal money and being prosecuted under the False Claims Act, it said.
In total, the guidance amounted to a full-scale reframing of the government’s approach to civil rights in education. It took aim at policies that were created to address longstanding racial disparities, saying those practices were their own form of discrimination.
The memos drew a wave of backlash from states and education groups that called it illegal government censorship.
In its lawsuit, the American Federation of Teachers said the government was imposing “unclear and highly subjective” limits on schools across the country. It said teachers and professors had to “choose between chilling their constitutionally protected speech and association or risk losing federal funds and being subject to prosecution.”
The National Science Foundation was a target for Elon Musk’s DOGE boys. Trump seemed to dislike science, so he went along with deep cuts. We can hope that historians will one day explain Trump’s disdain for science. At the moment, it’s inexplicable.
Only days ago, Trump released an executive order that places political appointees in charge of grantmaking, with the power to ignore peer reviews.
Science magazine reported:
Research advocates are expressing alarm over a White House directive on federal grantmakingreleased yesterday that they say threatens to enhance President Donald Trump’s control over science agency decisions on what to fund. It would, among other changes, require political appointees to sign off on new grant solicitations, allow them to overrule advice from peer reviewers on award decisions, and let them more easily terminate ongoing grants.
Although many changes described in the order are already underway at research agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation (NSF), its existence could strengthen the hand of Trump appointees, says Carrie Wolinetz, a former senior administrator at NIH.
“We’ve already seen this administration take steps to exert its authority that have resulted in delays, freezes, and termination of billions of dollars in grants,” says Wolinetz, now a lobbyist for Lewis-Burke Associates. “This would codify those actions in a way that represents the true politicization of science, which would be a really bad idea.”
149 NSF employees, all members of the American Federation of Government Employees chapter that represents the agency’s workforce, sent a letter to Congress warning staffing cuts and other disruptions to NSF operations were threatening the agency’s mission and independence. Jesus Soriano, president of the chapter, said NSF has lost one-third of its staff—or nearly 600 employees—since January. The agency also began canceling hundreds of its research grants in April and has now scrapped 1,600 active grants, employees said.
Last month, the Trump administration announced it is going to evict NSF from its headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, to make room for the Housing and Urban Development Department, and has yet to unveil a plan detailing where the agency will relocate. President Trump proposed slashing NSF’s budget by 56% in fiscal 2026.
“What’s happening at NSF is unlike anything we’ve faced before,” Soriano said at a press conference held last week by Democrats on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. “Our members—scientists, program officers, and staff—have been targeted for doing their jobs with integrity. They’ve faced retaliation, mass terminations, and the illegal withholding of billions in research funding.”
This is one of Rachel Maddow’s best clips. She says that we worried about what Trump might do if he won re-election. Wonder no more. It is happening. He is a full-fledged authoritarian, intent on smashing the Constitution and our rights. what can we do? She has some ideas.
Thomas Friedman writes a regular column for The New York Times. This one is unusually perspicacious. I was deeply moved by its candor. And I agree with him. Trump and his enablers are turning the Presidency into a monarchy, giving him more power than any President ever had and more power than the Founders imagined. Checks and balances have been wiped out. The Supreme Court’s rightwing majority approves of all his power grabs. He is imposing heavy fines on universities without regard to basic principles of academic freedom. He has made it criminal to support policies that advance diversity, equity, and inclusion. He is waging war on science. He is forcing the news media to pay him tribute. He fires veteran data scientists unless they report good news.
In his first term, his most notable achievement was the funding of “Operation Warp Speed,” which invested in the rapid production of mNRA vaccines. These vaccines dramatically reduced COVID, which killed one million people in the U.S. Yet just days ago, Trump’s Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cancelled $500 million in research grants for mNRA vaccines. RFK killed further development of Trump’s greatest triumph. When asked about it at a press conference, Trump took pride in what RFK was doing. Did he understand the question?
His actions are unprecedented. They are the actions of a dictator.
He writes:
Of all the terrible things Donald Trump has said and done as president, the most dangerous one just happened on Friday. Trump, in effect, ordered our trusted and independent government office of economic statistics to become as big a liar as he is.
He fired Erika McEntarfer, the Senate-confirmed head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for bringing him economic news he did not like, and in the hours immediately following, the second most dangerous thing happened: The senior Trump officials most responsible for running our economy — people who in their private businesses never would have contemplated firing a subordinate who brought them financial data they did not like — all went along for the ride.
What they should have said to Trump is this: “Mr. President, if you don’t reconsider this decision — if you fire the top labor bureau statistician because she brought you bad economic news — how will anyone in the future trust that office when it issues good news?” Instead, they immediately covered for him.
As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer had actually gone on Bloomberg TV early Friday and declared that even though the jobs report that had just been released was revised downward for May and June, “we’ve seen positive job growth.” But as soon as she got the news hours later that Trump had fired the very B.L.S. director who reports to her, she wrote on X: “I agree wholeheartedly with @POTUS that our jobs numbers must be fair, accurate, and never manipulated for political purposes.”
As The Journal asked: “So were the jobs data that were ‘positive’ in the morning rigged by the afternoon?” Of course not.
The moment I heard what Trump had done, I had a flashback. It was January 2021, and it had just been reported that Trump, after losing the 2020 election, had tried to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him enough votes — exactly 11,780, Trump said — to overturn the presidential election and even threatened him with “a criminal offense” if he didn’t. The pressure came during an hourlong telephone call, according to an audio recording of the conversation.
The difference, though, is that back then there was something called a Republican official with integrity. And so Georgia’s secretary of state did not agree to fabricate votes that did not exist. But that species of Republican official seems to have gone completely extinct in Trump’s second term. So Trump’s rotten character is now a problem for our whole economy.
Going forward, how many government bureaucrats are going to dare to pass along bad news when they know that their bosses — people like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; the director of the National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett; Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer; and the U.S. trade representative, Jamieson Greer — will not only fail to defend them but will actually offer them up as a sacrifice to Trump to keep their jobs?
Shame on each and every one of them — particularly on Bessent, a former hedge fund manager, who knows better and did not step in. What a coward. As Bessent’s predecessor, Janet Yellen, the former Treasury secretary and also the former chair of the Federal Reserve — and a person with actual integrity — told my Times colleague Ben Casselman of the B.L.S. firing: “This is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic.”
It is important to know how foreigners are looking at this. Bill Blain, a London-based bond trader who publishes a newsletter popular among market experts called Blain’s Morning Porridge, wrote on Monday: “Friday, Aug. 1 might go down in history as the day the U.S. Treasury market died. There was an art to reading U.S. data. It relied on trust. Now that is broken — if you can’t trust the data, what can you trust?”
He then went on to imagine how his Porridge newsletter will sound in May 2031. It will begin, he wrote, with “a link to a release from Trump’s Ministry of Economic Truth, formerly the U.S. Treasury: ‘Under the leadership of President Trump, the U.S. economy continues to grow at record speed. Payrolls data from the Ministry of Truth, a subsidiary of Truth Social, show full employment across America. Tensions in the inner cities have never been so low. All recent graduates have found highly paid jobs across America’s expanding manufacturing sector, causing many large companies in Trump Inc to report significant labor shortages.’”
If you think this is far-fetched, you clearly have not been following the foreign policy news, because this kind of tactic — the tailoring of information to fit Trump’s political needs — has already been deployed in the intelligence field.
In May the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, fired two top intelligence officials who oversaw an assessment that contradicted Trump’s assertions that the gang Tren de Aragua was operating under the direction of the Venezuelan regime. Their assessment undermined the dubious legal rationale Trump invoked — the rarely used 1798 Alien Enemies Act — to allow the suspected gang members to be thrown out of the country without due process.
And now this trend toward self-blinding is spreading to further corners of the government.
One of America’s premier cyberwarriors, Jen Easterly, who was the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during the Biden administration, had her appointment to a senior teaching position at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point revoked last week by Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll after Laura Loomer, a far-right conspiracy theorist, posted that Easterly was a Biden-era mole.
Read that sentence again very slowly. The Army secretary, acting on the guidance of a loony Trump acolyte, revoked the teaching appointment of — anyone will tell you — one of America’s most skilled nonpartisan cyberwarriors, herself a graduate of West Point.
And when you are done reading that, read Easterly’s response on LinkedIn: “As a lifelong independent, I’ve served our nation in peacetime and combat under Republican and Democratic administrations. I’ve led missions at home and abroad to protect all Americans from vicious terrorists …. I’ve worked my entire career not as a partisan, but as a patriot — not in pursuit of power, but in service to the country I love and in loyalty to the Constitution I swore to protect and defend, against all enemies.”
And then she added this advice to the young West Pointers she will not have the honor of teaching: “Every member of the Long Gray Line knows the Cadet Prayer. It asks that we ‘choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.’ That line — so simple, yet so powerful — has been my North Star for more than three decades. In boardrooms and war rooms. In quiet moments of doubt and in public acts of leadership. The harder right is never easy. That’s the whole point.”
That is the woman Trump did not want teaching our next generation of fighters.
And that ethic — always choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong — is the ethic that Bessent, Hassett, Chavez-DeRemer and Greer know nothing of — not to mention Trump himself.
That is why, dear reader, though I am a congenital optimist, for the first time I believe that if the behavior that this administration has exhibited in just its first six months continues and is amplified for its full four years, the America you know will be gone. And I don’t know how we will get it back.
Laura Meckler of the Washington Post visited Arizona to learn about the effects of an expansive program of charter schools and vouchers. Arizona voted overwhelmingly against vouchers in a state referendum in 2018. Vouchers lost by 65-35%. The rightwing legislature and Governor Douglas Ducey, encouraged by billionaire Charles Koch, ignored the views of the electorate and enacted a large voucher program.
Now the state underwrites the tuition of kids who were already in private schools, many of whom come from affluent families. Voucher schools admit the students they want and exclude those they don’t want.
Arizona’s charter sector includes for-profit charters and charters run by entrepreneurs and grifters. It has experienced numerous scandals.
There’s no accountability for voucher schools and minimal accountability for homeschoolers whose parents spend money on sports equipment, ninja warrior training, toys, LEGO sets, and a wide variety of nonacademic stuff.
Vouchers and charters have not produced academic gains. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Arizona is among the lowest-ranking states.
But the biggest consequence of voucher expansion has been the closing of neighborhood public schools. .
Meckler writes:
PHOENIX — The party at John R. Davis Elementary School was in full swing, but at the snow cone station, the school’s librarian was in tears.
Inthe cafeteria, alumni marveled at old photographs on display and shook their heads. On a wall of the library, visitors posted sticky notes to describe their feelings: “Angry,” read a purple square. “Anxious,” said a pink one. “Annoyed.” “Heart broken.” “Bummed.” And more than any other word: “Sad.”
Ten days later, John R. Davis Elementary School would close — not just for the summer, but for good.
Now, as the new school year begins, the Roosevelt Elementary School District opens with just 13 schools. That’s almost a third fewer than it had last spring, a response to enrollment declines as the state offers unprecedented taxpayer funding for alternatives to public school.
The party gave the community a few hours to celebrate the school’s 43 years — to say goodbye.
“It’s a grieving process for me,” Antionette Nuanez, the librarian, told a pair of Davis graduates who dropped by the party. Everyone at the party, it seemed, was feeling the loss — loss of tradition, of community, of simply having a school in walking distance. Nuanez, in particular, was overcome with the emotion of it all: “It’s like a death,” she said.
Perhaps more than any other state, Arizona has embraced market competition as a central tenet of its K-12 education system, offering parents an extraordinary opportunity to choose and shape their children’s education using tax dollars, and developing a national reputation as the Wild West of schooling.
The state has supported a robustcharter school system, tax money for home schooling and expansive private school vouchers, which are available to all families regardless of income. Nearly 89,000 students receive Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, a form of vouchers, state data show; a second voucher program awarded nearly 62,000 tax-supported private school scholarships in 2024, though some students received more than one. More than 232,000 students attend charter schools.
Together, these programs help explain why just 75 percent of Arizona children attended public schools in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available. That’s one of the lowest rates in the country.
Supporters of school choice say families are turning to alternatives because public schools are not serving their children well. It’s only right, they argue, that tax dollars follow children towhatever educational setting their families choose.
Critics complain that vouchers eat up state funding, benefit families who can afford private school on their own, disrupt communities and send tax dollars to schools that face little accountability. Unlike public schools, private schools don’t have to administer state tests. They can pick and choose their students, while public schools must educate everyone.
The modern school choice movement began in 1990 with a small voucher program in Milwaukee and has grown into a central plank of the Republican education agenda, with programs now operating in more than half the states. In 2022, Arizona created the first universal program — open to all, not just low-income families. Since then, about a dozen conservative states have adopted universal or near-universal programs. And in July, President Donald Trump signed into law the first federal voucher program, which will require states to opt in, at an estimated cost of $26 billion over the next decade.
Some stateprograms have now grown so large that spillover effects on public schools are coming into view. In Ohio, the legislature agreed toincrease voucher spending to $1.3 billion by 2027, up from just over $1 billion in 2025, while traditional public schools, which serve far more children, were given a smaller increase — and less than what public education advocates say had been promised under a multiyear agreement to ramp up school spending. In Florida, which has a $4 billion voucher program, public schools districts are seeing enrollment declines, meaning less money from the state and, in many cases, budget cuts.
The ramifications for public education have been particularly clear in Arizona, offering an early picture of K-12 education under the Republican vision of maximum school choice, or what proponents call education freedom. Here, public schools are starting to close.
The challenge: more competition for the same number of students. For the past 15 years, the state’s school-age population has remained steady, though the overall population has grown, said Rick Brammer, principal manager of Applied Economics, a consulting firm that has analyzed enrollment trends, demographic data and the effects of school choice programs in dozens of Arizona school districts.
“You’re taking the same size pie and cutting it into more pieces,” Brammer said. “As we’ve created and funded alternatives, we’ve just emptied out school after school from the districts. In a tight nutshell, that’s the whole story.”
The New York Times published an article by Dana Goldstein asserting that Democrats are divided about vouchers. Her evidence: Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), the organization created by hedge fund managers to advocate for charter schools, for evaluation of teachers by their students’ test scores, for Teach for America, and for every other failed corporate reform idea, now, unsurprisingly, supports vouchers.
This is no surprise. DFER never represented parents, teachers, or students. They gained notoriety because they raised big dollars on Wall Street to persuade key politicians to join their campaign to undermine public schools. In D.C. and in state capitols, money rules.
Goldstein tells us that the teachers’ unions, the usual suspect, woo Democrats to support public schools, but that’s not entirely true.
Most people don’t want their public schools to be privatized. Most people don’t want public money to subsidize religious schools. The proof is there. Voucher referenda have been on state ballots numerous times since 1967, and the public has voted against them every time.
In the 2024 elections, vouchers were on the ballot in three states, and lost in all three states.
Now that a number of states have voucher programs that are well established, we know three things about them.
Most students who get vouchers are already in private schools. Their parents are already paying private school tuition.
As Josh Cowen demonstrates in his book “The Privateers,” the academic results of children who leave public schools to attend private schools are abysmal.
Vouchers diminish the funding available for public schools, since the state takes on the responsibility of subsidizing tuition for students whose parents currently pay the bills.
DFER still has money but it has no constituency. The Democratic Party is not split. Its leaders know that the vast majority of students attend public schools, and those schools need help, not a diversion of funds to religious schools, private schools, and homeschools.
Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the number of new jobs created in the past month–73,000. The BLS lowered its estimates of new jobs created in the previous two months by 258,000.
Total nonfarm payroll employment changed little in July (+73,000) and has shown little change since April, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported today. The unemployment rate, at 4.2 percent, also changed little in July. Employment continued to trend up in health care and in social assistance. Federal government continued to lose jobs...
Revisions for May and June were larger than normal. The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for May was revised down by 125,000, from +144,000 to +19,000, and the change for June was revised down by 133,000, from +147,000 to +14,000. With these revisions, employment in May and June combined is 258,000 lower than previously reported. (Monthly revisions result from additional reports received from businesses and government agencies since the last published estimates and from the recalculation of seasonal factors.)
Trump was furious. The revisions meant that the labor force grew not by 291,000 new jobs, but by only 33,000 jobs. He insisted that the numbers were “rigged,” and he announced that they had been rigged for political reasons, to make him look bad. He fired the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, accusing her of chicanery. She had worked for the BLS for 20 years.
The message that was sent to all agencies was that Trump wants only good news. Numerous commentators wondered if any government data could be trusted during Trump’s tenure.
Gene Sperling posted this tweet. Sperling was a senior economic advisor to both President Clinton and President Obama.
@GenebSperling:
For anyone who spends even a split second taking even 1% of the Administration’s explanation for firing the BLS commissioner seriously, read the words of Bill Beach, the former Trump-appointed BLS commissioner:
“These numbers are constructed by hundreds of people. They’re finalized by about 40 people. These 40 people are very professional people who have served under Republicans and Democrats.
And the commissioner does not see these numbers until the Wednesday prior to the release on Friday. By that time, the numbers are completely set into the IT system. They have been programmed. They are simply reported to the commissioner, so the commissioner can on Thursday brief the president’s economic team.
The commissioner doesn’t have any hand or any influence or any way of even knowing the data until they’re completely done. That’s true of the unemployment rate. That’s true of the jobs numbers.”
I was going to post this but then I saw this brilliant article in The New York Times by Peter Baker, the Times‘ chief White House correspondent. He put Trump’s latest effort to control the jobs data into a broad perspective. Trump wants to control the news, the arts and culture, and history. He is a deeply insecure man. He wants the world to believe that he’s the most amazing person who ever lived and superior to all past presidents. Deep down he knows he’s in over his head. He has surrounded himself with sycophants and blocks out any news that disrupts his fantasy of greatness.
An old rule in Washington holds that you are entitled to your own opinions but you are not entitled to your own facts. President Trump seems determined to prove that wrong.
Mr. Trump’s war on facts reached new heights on Friday when he angrily fired the Labor Department official in charge of compiling statistics on employment in America because he did not like the latest jobs report showing that the economy isn’t doing as well as he claims it is. Mr. Trump declared that her numbers were “phony.” His proof? It was “my opinion.” And the story he told supposedly proving she was politically biased? It had no basis in fact itself.
The message, however, was unmistakable: Government officials who deal in data now fear they have to toe the line or risk losing their jobs. Career scientists, longtime intelligence analysts and nonpartisan statisticians who serve every president regardless of political party with neutral information on countless matters, such as weather patterns and vaccine efficacy, now face pressure as never before to conform to the alternative reality enforced by the president and his team.
Mr. Trump has never been especially wedded to facts, routinely making up his own numbers, repeating falsehoods and conspiracy theories even after they are debunked and denigrating the very concept of independent fact-checking. But his efforts since reclaiming the White House to make the rest of government adopt his versions of the truth have gone further than in his first term and increasingly remind scholars of the way authoritarian leaders in other countries have sought to control information.
“Democracy can’t realistically exist without reliable epistemic infrastructure,” said Michael Patrick Lynch, author of the recently published “On Truth in Politics” and a professor at the University of Connecticut.
“Anti-democratic, authoritarian leaders know this,” he said. “That is why they will seize every opportunity to control sources of information. As Bacon taught us, knowledge is power. But preventing or controlling access to knowledge is also power.”
The British philosopher Francis Bacon published his meditations on truth and nature more than four centuries before Mr. Trump arrived in Washington, but history is filled with examples of leaders seeking to stifle unwelcome information. The Soviets falsified data to make their economy look stronger than it was. The Chinese have long been suspected of doing the same. Just three years ago, Turkey’s autocratic leader fired his government’s statistics chief after a report documented rocketing inflation.
Mr. Trump’s advisers defended his decision to fire the Labor Department official, saying he was only seeking accuracy, and they released a list of recent job estimates that were later revised. While revisions of job creation estimates are normal, they argued without evidence that recent ones indicated a problem.
The bureau’s “data has been historically inaccurate and led by a totally incompetent individual,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesman, said on Saturday. “President Trump believes businesses, households and policymakers deserve accurate data when making major policy decisions, and he will restore America’s trust in this key data.”
Mr. Trump has spent a lifetime trying to impose his facts on others, whether it be claiming that Trump Tower has 10 more floors than it actually has or insisting that he was richer than he actually was. He went so far as to sue the journalist Timothy L. O’Brien for $5 billion for reporting that Mr. Trump’s net worth was less than he maintained it was. The future president testified in that case that he determined his net worth based in part on “my own feelings.” (The suit was dismissed.)
His fast-and-loose approach to numbers and facts finally caught up with him last year when he was found liable for fraud in a civil case in which a judge found that he used his annual financial statements to defraud lenders and ordered him to pay what has now exceeded $500 million with interest. Mr. Trump has appealed the ruling.
During his first term as president, Mr. Trump chastised the National Park Service for not backing up his off-the-top-of-his-head estimate of the crowd size at his inauguration. He used a Sharpie pen to alter a map to argue that he was right to predict that a hurricane might hit Alabama, and federal weather forecasters were rebuked for saying it would not.
Most explosively, he pressured Justice Department officials to falsely declare that the 2020 election was corrupt and therefore stolen from him even after they told him there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
This second term, however, has seen Mr. Trump go further to force his facts on the government and get rid of those standing in the way. After just six months of his return to office, the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy group, counted 402 of what it called “attacks on federal science,” nearly double its count from the entire first term.
Gretchen T. Goldman, president of the union and a former science adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said federal agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose director was fired by Mr. Trump on Friday, are meant to operate more independently to avoid the politicization of data collection and reporting.
“Firing the top statistical official sends a clear signal to others across the government that you are expected to compromise scientific integrity to appease the president,” she said. “This puts us in dangerous territory far from an accountable and reality-based government.”
Mr. Trump’s team has aggressively sought to steer information emerging from the federal government since January if it contradicted the president. The top aide to Tulsi Gabbard, Mr. Trump’s director of national intelligence, ordered intelligence analysts to rewrite an assessment on the Venezuelan government’s relationship with the gang Tren de Aragua that undermined the president’s claims. Ms. Gabbard later fired two intelligence officialsbecause she said they opposed Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump and his allies assailed the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office for projecting that his tax and spending legislation would add trillions of dollars to the national debt and offered his own numbers instead.
“I predict we will do 3, 4, or even 5 times the amount they purposefully ‘allotted’ to us,” he said, referring to growth expected to be stimulated by tax cuts, which he insisted would “cost us no money.” Mr. Trump called the budget office “Democrat inspired and ‘controlled,’” even though it is nonpartisan and Republicans have majorities in both chambers of Congress.
In recent days, Mr. Trump has sought to rewrite the history of the 2016 election when, according to multiple intelligence reports and investigations, including by Republicans, Russia intervened in the campaign with the goal of helping him beat Hillary Clinton. Ms. Gabbard released documents that she claimed showed that in fact President Barack Obama orchestrated a “yearslong coup and treasonous conspiracy” against Mr. Trump, even though the documents she released did not prove that.
Federal officials have gotten the hint. Throughout the government, officials have sought to remove references to topics like “diversity” that might offend Mr. Trump or his team and to revise presentation of history that might in his view cast the country in a negative light. After Mr. Trump ordered the National Park Service to remove or cover up exhibits at its 433 sites across the country that “inappropriately disparage Americans,” employees have flagged displays on slavery, climate change and Native Americans for possible deletion.
Just last week, the Smithsonian Institution confirmed that it had removed Mr. Trump from an exhibit on impeachment at the National Museum of American History, despite the fact that he is the only president to have been impeached twice. The exhibit was changed to say that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal,” referring to Andrew Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton — with no mention of Mr. Trump.
The Smithsonian, which has been under pressure from Mr. Trump to eliminate “anti-American ideology,” as he put it in an executive order, said in a statement that it had made the change after reviewing the “Limits of Presidential Power” section of the exhibit, which also includes sections on Congress, the Supreme Court and public opinion.
Because the other sections had not been updated since 2008, the Smithsonian said it decided to revert the impeachment section back to its 2008 version, even though it now presents a false account of history. After The Washington Post and other outlets reported about the change, the Smithsonian on Saturday said the exhibit would be “updated in the coming weeks to reflect all impeachment proceedings in our nation’s history.”
The president’s decision to fire Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, came just hours after her office issued its monthly report showing that job growth in July was just half as much as last year’s average. The bureau also revised downward the estimated job creation of the two previous months.
Mr. Trump erupted at the news and ordered her dismissed, claiming on social media that the numbers were “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” He offered no proof but just said it was “my opinion.”
Both Democrats and Republicans criticized the move, including Mr. Trump’s labor statistics chief in his first term, William W. Beach, who wrote on social media that it was “totally groundless” and “sets a dangerous precedent.”
Speaking with reporters before heading to his New Jersey golf club for the weekend, Mr. Trump asserted bias on the part of Dr. McEntarfer, who was appointed by Mr. Biden and confirmed by a large bipartisan vote in the Senate, including Vice President JD Vance, then a senator. The example Mr. Trump offered as evidence was flatly untrue.
“Days before the election, she came out with these beautiful numbers for Kamala,” Mr. Trump said, referring to his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. “Then right after the election — I think on the 15th, Nov. 15 — she had an eight or nine hundred thousand-dollar massive reduction.” What he meant was that the bureau revised downward its estimate of how many jobs had been created by 800,000 or 900,000 only after the election so as not to hurt Ms. Harris’s chances of victory.
Except that it actually happened the exact opposite way. Dr. McEntarfer’s bureau revised the number of jobs created downward by 818,000 in August 2024 — before the election, not after it. And the monthly report her bureau released just days before the election was not helpful to Ms. Harris but instead showed that job creation had stalled. The White House offered no comment when asked about the president’s false account.
“It’s a post-factual world that Trump is looking for, and he’s got these sycophants working for him that don’t challenge him on facts,” said Barbara Comstock, a former Republican congresswoman from Virginia.
But firing the messenger, she said, will not make the economy any better. “The reality is the economy is worse, and he can’t keep saying it’s better,” she said. “Joe Biden learned that; people still experience the experience they have, no matter how much” you tell them otherwise.
Diane Ravitch's blog 