Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut) is one of the most effective members of Congress. She is pro-labor and pro-public schools.
Watch as she rips into Russ Vought, director of the powerful Office of Management and Budget and primary author of Project 2025.
Archives for category: Fascism
Soon after he was inaugurated, Trump began to inflict punishments on his enemies. That included law firms that had represented his political opponents in the past, such as federal prosecutor Jack Smith and prominent Democrats. He threatened to cancel any contracts those firms held with federal agencies and to bar them from future cases involving the federal government. Several major law firms worried about financial losses and immediately gave in to Trump’s demands. All agreed to provide pro bono services for causes chosen by Trump.
But a few major law firms refused to capitulate to Trump. Instead of agreeing to serve him, they went to court. To date, all the firms that challenged Trump have won in court. It’s a basic principle in American law that every defendant should have access to a lawyer and that lawyers can represent defendants no matter what they are accused of doing.
NPR reported:
Veteran lawyers have reached a curious conclusion about President Trump’s deals with big law firms this year: they do not appear to be legally valid.
Trump since coming to office has punished certain firms for their past clients or causes, stripping them of security clearances and government contracts, while trumpeting deals with others, including titans like Kirkland & Ellis and Latham & Watkins.
The White House said the nine firms it’s settled with agreed to provide about $1 billion in pro bono services in order to curtail investigations into their hiring practices and maintain access to federal buildings. But the details of those agreements remain murky, even after Democratic lawmakers demanded answers.
“The problem with the law firm deals is … they’re not deals at all,” said Harold Hongju Koh, a professor and former dean at Yale Law School. “You know, a contract that you make with a gun to your head is not a contract.”
Oliver Darcy, media journalist, writes about NPR’s decision to fight the Trump administration’s efforts to shut it down.
Trump is directly infringing on freedom of the press, punishing NPR because it is not slavishly devoted to him and his views.
I listen to NPR for straightforward, unbiased news. I appreciate their long-form reports on a wide array of subjects. Many parts of the country are news deserts, where the only media available are the rightwing Sinclair radio stations and FOX News.
The nation needs NPR, just as the world needs Voice of America, which Trump is defunding.
As with so many of his decisions, I wonder who benefits? I have no answer.
Darcy writes:
When Trump signed an order to defund NPR, the network faced a choice over how it would respond—but CEO Katherine Maher made one thing clear from the start: there would be no backroom negotiations.
In the days following Donald Trump’s May 1 executive order to strip NPR of all federal funding, leaders at the public broadcaster began deliberating their options. But even before the network’s legal team got to work on the litigation, one decision had already been made. NPR chief executive Katherine Maher made clear that the outlet would not quietly negotiate with the White House—an approach other media companies have recently taken under immense political pressure.
“As an independent media organization,” Maher told me by phone Tuesday, “we wouldn’t go ahead and have that conversation because that would be negotiating on editorial principle.”
On Tuesday morning, NPR and three of its member stations in Colorado filed a federal lawsuitagainst Trump and his administration, alleging the executive order he signed was not only punitive, but also unconstitutional. In a 43-page complaint, the stations argued that Trump’s directive violated theFirst Amendment, usurped Congress’authority over federal spending, and more broadly, posed a threat to the editorial independence of public media nationwide.
The language of the filing was unambiguous. It framed the executive order not as a routine dispute over funding priorities or media policy, but as a retaliatory strike designed to punish critical coverage and reshape the information environment in Trump’s favor. “The Order’s objectives could not be clearer,” the lawsuit stated. “The Order aims to punish NPR for the content of news and other programming the President dislikes and chill the free exercise of First Amendment rights by NPR and individual public radio stations across the country.”
I asked Maher what it felt like to take a sitting president to court. She didn’t hesitate. “What did it feel like?” she rhetorically asked me. “It felt like recognizing that there are responsibilities that one takes on in running a media organization, and this was one of those.” She emphasized that the case wasn’t just about NPR’s national desk or morning programming—it was about the entire public media system: “We did this on behalf of our newsroom. We did this on behalf of our editorial independence. We did this on behalf of public media at large.”
Maher, who only took the helm of NPR in January 2024, told me that the legal option became increasingly clear as the organization studied the implications of the executive order. “We took a look at [the order] and wanted to be able to make sure that we really analyzed it,” she said. “We got to understand what avenues existed for us to be able to seek relief—and litigation was something that we came to once we realized that fundamentally this was a First Amendment issue.” The legal review moved quickly. “Obviously, it’s only been four weeks,” Maher added, “and so you can imagine it happened on a pretty quick timeline.”
The lawsuit was filed by not just NPR, but also Colorado Public Radio, KSUT Public Radio, and Aspen Public Radio. Together, they asked the court to block enforcement of the order and affirm that federal support for public broadcasting, which Congress has repeatedly approved, cannot be overturned by presidential fiat. For its part, NPR receives just 1% of its annual operating budgetdirectly from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the private nonprofit that distributes federal funding. But local member stations across the country receive a much larger slice of their budgets from the $535 million in taxpayer funds CPB distributes. PBS, facing a similar predicament, said Tuesday it is also actively weighing a legal challenge of its own.
While Trump has long treated NPR as a proxy for elite coastal media (he’s referred to it as a “liberal disinformation machine,” among other insults), Maher declined to say in her own words why he despises the outlet with the white-hot passion of a thousand suns. “I really couldn’t say what the president thinks or doesn’t think,” she told me. “It’s beyond my powers to get inside his mind.” At the same time, she acknowledged the broader context in which public broadcasting has become a partisan target. “I think that we recognize that there has long been pushback about public media,” she said.
In any case, the legal issue, she insisted, is separate from any political debate. When asked whether she worries that suing the president could further cement in the minds of the MAGA faithful that NPR has a bias against him, she pushed back.
“I fundamentally reject the idea that defending the Constitution is partisan,” Maher told me. “We are taking this action on behalf of the First Amendment. We’re taking this action on behalf of the free press. Regardless of your political beliefs, we all benefit from that.” She added that the lawsuit should be viewed as an act of civic duty, not political retaliation: “I would much rather people saw this as an act of patriotic commitment to our Constitution on behalf of citizens rather than saying that this is somehow partisan or political.”
Of course, that’s not how her actions have been portrayed by MAGA Media, which—similarly to Trump–views NPR as a liberal mouthpiece of the so-called “deep state.” Maher seemed to acknowledge that reality, but said she would continue to work to get the outlet’s message out. She even said she would be willing to appear on outlets like Fox News to do so. “I’m always happy to talk to people who are happy to talk to us,” Maher said. “I think that we’d be open to having that conversation.”
What happens if the court doesn’t rule in their favor? Maher didn’t give the possibility of such an outcome any oxygen. “I’m really confident that we will [win],” she said. “I feel that we’re on very, very solid ground, so I’m not concerned about the downside.”
Heather Cox Richardson demonstrates the negative effects of Elon Musk’s DOGS, which protected his interests and saved little, if any, money. With Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax plan, the deficit will increase by $4-5 trillion, so Musk’s chainsaw contributed nothing but demoralization and destruction of the federal workforce. She also summarizes the multiple ways in which Trump is sabotaging the rule of law. She includes footnotes, as usual. Subscribe to her blog to see them.
She writes:
In July 2024, according to an article published today by Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey in the New York Times, billionaire Elon Musk texted privately about his concerns that government investigations into his businesses would “take me down.” “I can’t be president,” he wrote, “but I can help Trump defeat Biden and I will.”
After appearing on stage with Trump on October 5, Musk texted a person close to him: “I’m feeling more optimistic after tonight. Tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix.” About an hour later, he added: “This is not something on the chessboard, so they will be quite surprised. “‘Lasers’ from space.”
Musk invested about $290 million in the 2024 election and, when Trump took office, became a fixture in the White House, heading the “Department of Government Efficiency.” It set out to kill government programs by withholding congressionally approved funds, a practice that courts have ruled unconstitutional and Congress expressly prohibited with the 1974 Impoundment Control Act.
Musk vowed that his “Department of Government Efficiency” would cut $2 trillion from the U.S. budget, but he quickly backed off on those numbers. In the end, DOGE claimed savings of $175 billion, but that claim is unverifiable and CNN’s Casey Tolan says it’s probably wrong: less than half of it is backed up with any documentation.
Instead, as CNN’s Zachary B. Wolf reported today, since DOGE cut staffing at the enforcement wing of the Internal Revenue Service, for example, and cut employees at national parks, which also generate revenue, its cuts may well end up costing money. Max Stier, who heads the Partnership for Public Service, suggests DOGE cuts could cost U.S. taxpayers $135 billion because agencies will need to train and hire replacements for the workers DOGE fired. Stier called DOGE’s actions “arson of a public asset.”
Grind and Twohey reported that Musk’s drug consumption during the campaign—they could not speak to his habits in the White House, although he appeared high today at a White House press conference—was “more intense than previously known.” He was a chronic user of ketamine, took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, and traveled with a box that held about 20 pills for daily use. Those in frequent contact with him worried about his frequent drug use, erratic behavior, and mood swings. As a government contractor, Musk should receive random drug tests, but Grind and Twohey say he received advance warning of those tests.
It was never clear that Musk’s role at DOGE was legal, and the White House has tried to maintain that he was only an advisor, despite Trump’s February 19 statement, “I signed an order creating [DOGE] and put a man named Elon Musk in charge.” On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled that 14 states can proceed with their lawsuit against billionaire Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency,” saying the states had adequately supported their argument that “Musk and DOGE’s conduct is ‘unauthorized by any law.’”
Trump posted today on social media: “This will be his last day, but not really, because he will, always, be with us, helping all the way. Elon is terrific!” In a press conference today, Trump reiterated that Musk “is not really leaving.”
Musk’s time at the helm of DOGE might not have saved taxpayer money, but it has changed the world in other ways. Musk has used his time in the government to end investigations into his companies, score government contracts, and get the government to press countries to accept his Starlink communications network as a condition of tariff negotiations. According to John Hyatt of Forbes, Musk’s association with Trump has made him an estimated $170 billion richer.
The implications of DOGE’s actions for Americans are huge. DOGE operatives are now embedded in the U.S. government, where they are mining Americans’ data to create a master database that can sort and find individuals. Former Ohio Democratic Party chair David Pepper called it “a full-scale redirection of the government’s digital nervous system into the hands of an unelected billionaire.”
Today, Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik of the New York Times reported that Musk put billionaire Peter Thiel’s Palantir data analysis firm into place across the government, where it launched its product Foundry to organize, analyze, and merge data. Thiel provided the money behind Vice President J.D. Vance’s political career. Wired and CNN had previously reported how the administration was using this merged data to target undocumented immigrants, and now employees are detailing their concerns with how the administration could use their newly merged information against Americans more generally.
Internationally, Musk’s destruction of the United States Agency for International Development, slashing about 80% of its grants, is killing about 103 people an hour, most of them children. The total so far is about 300,000 people, according to Boston University infectious disease mathematical modeller Dr. Brooke Nichols. Ryan Cooper of The American Prospect reported today that about 1,500 babies a day are born HIV-positive because Musk’s cuts stopped their mothers’ medication.
In the New York Times today, Michelle Goldberg recalls how Musk appeared uninterested in learning what USAID actually did—prevent starvation and provide basic healthcare—and instead called it a “radical-left political psy-op,” and reposted a smear from right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos calling USAID “the most gigantic global terror organization in history.” Goldberg also recalls Musk’s tendency to call people he disdains “NPCs,” or non-player characters, which are characters in role-playing games whose only role is to advance the storyline for the real players.
Aside from DOGE, the focus of Trump’s administration—other than his own cashing in on the presidency—has been on tariffs and immigration. Like the efforts of DOGE, those show a disdain for the law in favor of concentrating power in the executive branch.
During the campaign, Trump fantasized that constructing a high tariff wall around the U.S. would force other countries to fund the national deficit, enabling a Republican Congress to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. In fact, domestic industries and consumers bear the costs of tariffs. Trump’s high tariffs, many of which he imposed by declaring an economic emergency and then using the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), created such havoc in the stock and bond markets that he backed off.
Yesterday, Sayantani Ghosh, David Gaffen, and Arpan Varghese of Reuters reported that although most of the highest tariffs have yet to go into effect, Trump’s trade war has cost companies more than $34 billion in lost sales and higher costs.
Trump has changed tariff policies at least 50 times since he took office, and traders have figured out they can buy stocks cheaply when markets plummet after a dramatic tariff announcement, and sell when Trump changes his mind. This has recently given rise to Trump’s nickname “TACO,” for “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
This moniker has apparently irritated Trump so much he has taken to social media to defend his abrupt dropping of tariffs on China, saying he did it to “save them” from “grave economic danger,” although in fact, China turned to other trading partners to cushion the blow of U.S. tariffs. Trump went on to suggest China did not live up to what he considered its part of the bargain, and he would no longer be “Mr. NICE GUY!”
On Wednesday a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that President Donald J. Trump’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs based on the IEEPA are illegal. The Constitution gives to Congress, not to the president, the power to levy tariffs. Trump launched a social media rant in which he attacked the judges, insisted that “it is only because of my successful use of Tariffs that many Trillions of Dollars have already begun pouring into the U.S.A. from other Countries,” and said that he could not wait for Congress to handle tariffs because it would take too long—in fact, most of Congress does not approve of the tariffs—and that following the Constitution “would completely destroy Presidential Power.” “The President of the United States must be allowed to protect America against those that are doing it Economic and Financial harm.”
Yesterday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit paused that ruling until at least June 9, when both parties will have submitted legal arguments about whether the stay should remain in place as the government appeals the ruling that the tariffs are illegal. White House senior counsel for trade and manufacturing Peter Navarro, the key proponent of Trump’s trade war, said: “Even if we lose, we’ll do it another way.”
Today Trump said he will double the tariff on steel imports from 25% to 50%.
The other major focus of the administration has been expelling undocumented immigrants from the U.S. During the 2024 campaign, Trump whipped up support by insisting that former President Joe Biden had permitted criminals to walk into the U.S. and terrorize American citizens. Trump vowed to launch the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history” and often talked of deporting the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., although his numbers have ranged as high as 21 million without explanation.
The administration has hammered on immigration to promote the idea that it is keeping Americans safe. But its first target of arresting at least 1,200 individuals a day has fallen far short. In Trump’s first 100 days, Immigration and Customs Enforcement says it arrested an average of about 660 people a day.
On Wednesday, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who along with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem is the face of the administration’s immigration policy, told the Fox News Channel that the administration is now aiming for “a minimum of 3,000 arrests…every day.” Administration officials hope to deport a million people in Trump’s first year in office.
CNN reported yesterday that those officials are putting intense pressure on law enforcement agencies to meet that goal. This means that hundreds of FBI agents have been taken off terror threats and espionage cases involving China and Russia to be reassigned to immigration duties. Some FBI offices are offering overtime pay if agents help with “enforcement and removal operations.” Officers from other agencies, including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) have also been deployed against immigrants in place of their regular duties.
Steven Monacelli of The Barbed Wire noted today that local law enforcement and state troopers have also been diverted to immigration, using a national network of cameras that read license plates. Joseph Cox and Jason Keobler of 404 Media reported yesterday that a Texas sheriff used the same system over the course of a month to look for a woman whom he said had a self-administered abortion, saying her family was worried about her safety.
Their attempt to appear effective has led to very visible arrests and renditions of undocumented migrants to prisons in third countries, especially the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador. The administration has deliberately flouted the right of persons in the United States to due process as guaranteed by the Constitution. The administration has met court orders with delay and obfuscation, as well as by attacking judges and the rule of law.
The administration continues to insist those it has arrested are dangerous criminals who must be deported without delay, but more and more reporting says that many of those expelled from the country had no criminal convictions. Today, ProPublica reported that the Trump administration’s own data shows that officials knew that “the vast majority” of the 238 Venezuelans it sent to CECOT had not been convicted of crimes in the U.S. even as it deported them and called them “rapists,” “savages,” “monsters,” and “the worst of the worst.”
ICE has increasingly met quotas by arresting immigrants outside of immigration check-ins and courtrooms: yesterday Dina Arévalo of My San Antonio reported that ICE arrested five immigrants, including three children, outside of an immigration court after a judge had said they were no longer subject to removal proceedings. The officers used zip ties on all five individuals.
At stake is the turn of the United States away from democracy and toward the international right wing. Yesterday the U.S. State Department notified Congress that it intends to use the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor to promote “Democracy and Western Values.” On Tuesday a senior advisor for that bureau, Samuel Samson, who graduated from college in 2021, explained that the State Department intends to ally with the European far right to protect “Western civilization” from current democratic governments.
It also plans to turn the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, which manages the flow of people into the U.S., into an “Office of Remigration” to “actively facilitate” the “voluntary return of migrants” to other countries and “advance the president’s immigration agenda.”
“Remigration” is a term from the global far right. As Isabela Dias of Mother Jones notes, its proponents call for the “mass expulsion of non–ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of immigration status or citizenship, and an end to multiculturalism.” Of the congressional report, a person who works closely with the State Department told Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket: “All of it is pretty awful with some pieces that definitely violate existing law and treaties. But institutionalizing neo-Nazi theory as an office in the State Department is the most blatantly horrifying.”
This concept is behind not only the expulsion of undocumented immigrants, but also the purge of foreign scholars and lawful residents. The Supreme Court blessed this purge today when, during the period that litigation is underway, it allowed the administration to end immigration paroles for about 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela admitted under a Biden-era program, instantly making them undocumented and subject to deportation.
The court decided the case on the shadow docket, without briefings or explanation. In a dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote: “[S]omehow, the Court has now apparently determined…that it is in the public’s interest to have the lives of half a million migrants unravel all around us before the courts decide their legal claims.”
Jackson added a crucial observation. The court, she wrote, “allows the Government to do what it wants to do regardless [of the consequences], rendering constraints of law irrelevant and unleashing devastation in the process.”
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Jocelyn Kaiser wrote in Science magazine about the chaos inflicted on the National Institutes of Health by Trump appointees and Elon Musk’s DOGS (not a misspelling) wrecking crew. Large numbers of scientists were fired, some were rehired, then fired again. What was the goal? Was it to sow demoralization and fear? If so, it succeeded.
Since World War II, the U.S. has led the world in science, medicine, and technology, which are important components of our economy. It’s by no means clear why Trump selected people who were determined to disrupt and destabilize the core of the federal science program. Kaiser interviewed many insiders to compile this overview of a machine of destruction, unleashed for unknown reasons on some of our most important science agencies.
On a cool, sunny, mid-April day, the cheerful redbuds and other flowering trees amid the sprawling labs on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) main campus belied the pervasive gloom. Nearly 3 months into President Donald Trump’s administration, NIH in-house scientists and other workers were reeling from mass layoffs of colleagues; the removal of leaders; and limits on travel, communication, and purchasing that have shut the agency off from the outside world, hamstrung experiments, and crushed the community’s spirits.
On that spring day in Bethesda, Maryland, one senior scientist lamented that two star colleagues in his institute were heading back to their native China from NIH, abandoning a destination that had always drawn talent from around the world. “I want to cry,” he said. Another pointed to the abrupt retirement the previous day of a noted NIH nutrition scientist who said the agency had censored his publications and interactions with the media.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), billionaire Elon Musk’s quasi-official White House enforcer, “pops in and out” of online meetings of senior leaders, the scientists said. Another researcher, who is not a U.S. citizen, mentioned that he has prepared a “deportation plan,” including a company lined up to ship belongings back to his native country, in case he’s fired and loses his work visa.
The atmosphere is one of “chaos and fear and frustration and anger,” said a senior scientist with NIH’s intramural research program who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity to protect themselves and others from retribution. This scientist added: “It’s this feeling of utter powerlessness and repeated insults.”
A former top NIH official who was forced out believes that’s the intent. “I think the plan is to sow as much chaos as possible. … I think they want a dispirited workforce at NIH so people will just say ‘to hell with it’ and leave.”
It’s working. Hundreds of NIH employees took voluntary buyouts offered by the Trump administration. And at least 25 of the roughly 320 physician-researchers who lead trials of drugs, cell therapies, and vaccines at NIH’s massive Clinical Center are leaving, as are consulting physicians, a researcher there told Science.
In NIH entryways, recently installed portraits of Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and new NIH Director Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya have become a forum for silent protests. A photo of tanks rolling through Tiananmen Square during China’s 1989 student uprising was briefly plastered below one set of visages. On a different wall on another day, flyers appeared for a nationwide protest of Trump’s science cuts along with a Post-it note with the word “Shame.” A staff memo sent out the day a Science reporter visited warned of penalties for “damage or destruction of federal property” including “defacement of portraits.”
A researcher who has spent more than 2 decades with NIH’s intramural research program believes the world’s largest biomedical agency will never be the same. “However bad everyone on the outside thinks it is, it is a million times worse. They’re dismantling and destroying everything.”
Along with firing about 2500 of the agency’s 20,000-strong federal workforce and pushing others to retire, Trump officials have used what some call “bureaucratic sabotage” in ways that likely explain why NIH has disbursed at least $1.8 billion less in funding to outside researchers in this administration’s first 3 months than it did in the same time period in 2024. They have canceled more than 800 grants on topics such as HIV research, transgender health, and vaccine hesitancy. NIH, at HHS’s behest, also tried to impose a crippling cut in the overhead payments made to universities that carry out grant-funded research.
More disruption looms, including HHS-demanded cuts to billions of dollars in contracts that fund key support staff and research centers and a White House proposal due any day now that will likely aim to slash up to 44% from NIH’s $47.4 billion budget and overhaul its structure. An agency that once had strong bipartisan support and was seen as the crown jewel of U.S. science, and the envy of the world, now faces a diminished, uncertain future.
I think the plan is to sow as much chaos as possible. … I think they want a dispirited workforce at NIH so people will just say ‘to hell with it’ and leave.
Some on the NIH campus that April day held out hope for Bhattacharya, who has said he wants to “undo some of the disruptions” and get NIH research back on track. Bhattacharya told Science this week, “It’s been a tough period” at NIH, but “I think things have turned around significantly.”
But others see him as firmly aligned with the Trump administration. In recent remarks to the research community, Bhattacharya said he wants to pivot NIH toward Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda, which focuses on chronic diseases, a shift that could come at the expense of the basic research and infectious disease studies that the agency now funds. “His presentation was distressing on multiple fronts,” says longtime NIH observer Keith Yamamoto, a cell biologist at the University of California (UC) San Francisco.
Others outside the agency share a pessimistic assessment of NIH. “I don’t think there’s any way to sugarcoat the last 100 days. The state of the enterprise is chaotic and it’s in jeopardy,” says Mary Woolley, president of Research!America, a biomedical research advocacy group. “I am terribly worried,” says molecular biologist Shirley Tilghman, former president of Princeton University. “It will take years to undo the damage that is being inflicted right now.”
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S interference with NIH began the day after he took office, when HHS political appointees imposed a “pause” on communications from its 27 institutes and centers. Past administrations had sometimes briefly halted press releases and other communications, but this time, NIH extended the pause to public meeting attendance by scientists who handle grant programs and reviews. That meant meetings were abruptly halted, sometimes minutes before the start time or even midway through. In-house scientists and grants staff were also told to freeze hiring, purchasing, and travel. Days later, on 27 January, the White House froze grant payments from all federal agencies.
That first week, Trump appointed an acting director to replace Monica Bertagnolli, who had stepped down as NIH director days before the presidential transition. But instead of veteran Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak, who had previously held the acting role, he chose Matthew Memoli, a longtime influenza researcher with NIH’s intramural program. Memoli had questioned the need for widespread COVID-19 vaccinations during the pandemic. That put him at odds with Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and a frequent target of conservatives, and may have elevated Memoli in the administration’s eyes.
On Friday of the second week, the director’s office, known as Building 1, received an order to post a notice imposing an immediate 15% cap on indirect costs, the overhead payments the agency includes with each grant, to save $4 billion. Former NIH officials say they were alarmed by the sudden memo, which had multiple errors and directly conflicted with congressional restrictions on the agency’s indirect costs rates. By Monday, universities had won a court order halting the cap, arguing it was illegal.
That same week, the first signs of a widely expected purge of NIH leadership emerged. Tabak was called to a meeting at HHS headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C., and told he was reassigned to a job there and would lose his NIH lab. The 25-year NIH veteran announced his retirement later that day. Deputy Director for Extramural Research Michael Lauer, who oversaw NIH grant policies, abruptly retired later that week amid rumors he, too, would be reassigned. Before he left, Lauer ordered staff to lift the NIH grant freeze after a court ruled it was illegal.
Next came what many dubbed the “Valentine’s Day massacre”—the dismissal of nearly 1200 NIH employees who, along with thousands of other federal workers, had a “probationary” status because they were new to the agency or, in many cases, were veterans but had recently changed positions. Among them were crucial Clinical Center staff along with more than a dozen tenure-track investigators. Illustrating the haphazard nature of the firings, the clinical staff and animal care workers were quickly rehired when it became clear they were essential, and the firings of the tenure-track scientists were also eventually reversed. HHS also abruptly halted routine renewals of the many intramural scientists on term-limited appointments—a policy reversed after an appeal from Memoli but that NIH researchers say has recently resurfaced.
AS FEBRUARY ROLLED into March, a new threat crystallized for the university scientists and other extramural researchers who receive the bulk of NIH funds: HHS ordered NIH to cancel hundreds of grants that allegedly violated Trump executive orders barring funding for topics that touched on diversity, equity, and inclusion and LGBTQ health. The cuts included HIV trials in South Africa, training grants, health equity and environmental studies, as well as work on vaccine hesitancy and COVID-19.
“It was soul sucking every time to see those lists of grants that were vulnerable,” says Emily Erbelding, an NIAID division director who was put on leave this month. NIH letters terminating the grants stated that the work “no longer effectuates agency priorities”—language meant to satisfy recently revised grant policy requirements.
The cuts have made a huge dent in some research fields, such as transgender health, which has lost at least $157 million in unspent NIH funding. Although researchers can appeal terminations, and a few cancellations have been reversedwithout explanation, some scientists have already shut down their programs. After losing $5 million in research and training grants studying ways to improve health care for Alzheimer’s disease in sexual and gender minorities, social scientist Jason Flatt of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas laid off his two full-time staff and is scrambling to find other support for five graduate students. “This has been my life’s work,” says Flatt, who now expects to pivot to less politically fraught Alzheimer’s studies.
It will take years to undo the damage that is being inflicted right now.
At some top research universities all NIH funding, regardless of its focus, has become leverage as the Trump administration pressures the institutions on matters unrelated to science. First the White House killed NIH grants, and other federal funds, to Columbia University in March saying it had not properly combated antisemitism in the wake of campus protests against Israel’s bombing of Gaza. Columbia has been negotiating policy changes, so far without winning back its funding, more of which was frozen. At dozens of other universities NIH funding is threatened. Harvard University, facing the loss of at least $2.2 billion in multiyear grants from NIH and other agencies, has called the demands an attack on academic freedom and on 21 April, filed a lawsuit challenging the cancellations. Bhattacharya told Science he supports the freezes because “these institutions ought to obey the civil rights laws.”
Much of the money flowing from NIH to universities supports early-career researchers. Other changes at the agency also threaten the U.S. pipeline for scientists. Virtually all NIH-funded training programs aimed at attracting underrepresented groups to science are now gone. “I’m concerned that these events are very likely to affect who decides to stay in science and we will lose important and necessary scientific talent,” says cell biologist Needhi Bhalla of UC Santa Cruz, who has mentored several trainees supported by these awards.
THE FIRST DAY OF APRIL, Bhattacharya’s start date, brought another wave of about 1300 job cuts at NIH as part of Kennedy’s plans to downsize and centralize operations at all HHS agencies. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) faced similarly huge reductions in force. That same week, four institute directors and one acting director at NIAID and other NIH institutes were told they had been put on leaveand in most cases offered reassignments to sites with the Indian Health Service far from their current homes. (None has publicly resigned or accepted the reassignment so far.) Other NIH leaders, including the chief of the agency’s well-regarded international center and some close to Fauci, were removed as well.
The HHS-imposed staff cuts, which ignored a plan developed by NIH leadership and submitted by Memoli, wiped out many communications, acquisitions, human resources, and policy offices. They swept up intramural scientists who many thought would be protected, including 10 tenured neuroscientists who Kennedy later said were fired by mistake—one of many acknowledged errors at NIH, CDC, and FDA. (As this story went to press, these scientists were back in the lab but had still not been officially reinstated.)
Even NIH’s biggest supporters acknowledge that some parts of the massive agency could be improved or made more efficient through centralization of necessities such as information technology. But as one senior scientist put it, “There was no planning.” Institute leaders are now scrambling to get functions handled by the disbanded offices operating again.
However bad everyone on the outside thinks it is, it is a million times worse. They’re dismantling and destroying everything.
Some of the internal restrictions have recently been eased. Peer-review meetings to consider grant proposals have resumed, as well as institute council meetings, which do the second level of funding review. Bhattacharya quickly lifted the freeze on travel and purchasing.
Yet the staff shortages are still taking a toll. One intramural scientist had to cancel a talk at a local university because his slides, submitted 30 days earlier, had not yet been approved. The few senior scientists who have rare agency credit cards are swamped with requests to buy lab supplies. “The backlogs are crazy,” a postdoc says—6 months for mice or a microscope part that would normally take 2 weeks. Researchers are getting by with workarounds such as sharing antibodies.
With continuing losses of key technicians, physicians, and administrative staff, the Clinical Center now lags in lab testing and faces difficulty bringing in patients from outside the United States, who are needed for studies of rare diseases. Its patient population has dropped by at least 30% since Trump took over, to below 70 in April compared with more than 100 during the same month in past years, a senior clinical investigator there tells Science. The Clinical Center’s Steven Rosenberg, a pioneer in using a person’s own immune cells to fight their advanced cancer, says the staff cuts and purchasing delays mean up to 2-month delays in treatment for his seriously ill patients and fewer treated overall. “We’re working at a much slower pace,” he says.
WHETHER THINGS WILL get better at NIH now that it has a permanent director is anyone’s guess. Although he has said he backs research on health disparities, which his own work has examined, Bhattacharya supports the Trump administration cuts to diversity programs, which he calls “a political ideology.” And he has brushed off killing HIV grants in South Africa as part of a shift of resources to support Kennedy’s focus on Americans’ health. “I’m concerned that he has little autonomy,” Yamamoto says.
Rosenberg, who has met with the new director, is more optimistic: “He seemed very reasonable and eager to improve things,” he says.
More reshaping of NIH could be coming. Career staffers in Building 1 have been replaced with political appointees with no experience with research agencies. DOGE and HHS are expected to approve new grant solicitations, and the agency this week began to absorb an HHS-mandated $2.6 billion cut in contracts that fund vaccine scientists, equipment maintenance, long-running heart disease studies, and much more.
Kennedy’s influence is a particular worry. The HHS director ordered NIH to launch a study of the causes of autism, which Kennedy has falsely blamed on vaccines, although he says other “environmental” causes could have a role. Another study the White House and Kennedy have told NIH to instigate will explore “regret” among transgender people who undergo hormone treatments. “The conclusions seem predetermined,” says biochemist Jeremy Berg of the University of Pittsburgh, former director of NIH’s basic science institute and former editor-in-chief of Science. “It undermines the credibility of NIH particularly because it seems designed to drive a particular political agenda.”
The Republicans in control of Congress so far have taken no action to protect NIH, although Senator Susan Collins (R–ME) said today at a hearing on the state of the biomedical research enterprise that the cuts to NIH scientists and grants “must be reversed.” Collins chairs the committee that oversees NIH’s budget and held the hearing in partnership with the panel’s senior Democrat, Senator Patty Murray (WA). Murray has protested the many NIH cuts, most recently to NIH’s landmark Women’s Health Initiative, which HHS said it had reversed after an outcry. Congress will also decide whether to go along with Trump’s proposed, radically smaller NIH budget and reorganization plan. Indirect cost payments will almost certainly be revisited and trimmed. “We are undoubtedly at an extremely challenging time for the biomedical research community,” says Jennifer Zeitzer, deputy executive director of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.
For now, the biomedical research community and NIH staff are hoping the resumption of council meetings will allow grants to flow out again—although staff shortages will be an impediment. Disbursing NIH’s full budget before the end of the fiscal year on 30 September “is going to be a near impossible feat for the number of people left,” says a former cancer institute official. If so, hundreds of millions of dollars in congressionally approved funding meant to identify new medical treatments and test them in patients across the U.S. and world will go back to the Department of the Treasury.
Like those on the NIH campus who spoke with Science, many of the agency’s former leaders are also not optimistic about the next 100 days, or the rest of Trump’s term. Geneticist Francis Collins, NIH director from 2009 to 2021 who abruptly retired in late February and closed his NIH lab, is one. “Reckless decisions will disrupt a noble institution with a stunningly positive track record, drive young scientists to leave the country, and damage the future health of the nation.”
With reporting by Sara Reardon.
Update, 2 May, 11:55 a.m.: Additional comments from NIH Director Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya, from an interview after this story was posted, have been added.
Heather Cox Richardson is a national treasure. she is also an exemplar of the value of studying history as a guide to today’s events and their meaning.
Political scientist Adam Bonica noted last Friday that Trump and the administration suffered a 96% loss rate in federal courts in the month of May. Those losses were nonpartisan: 72.2% of Republican-appointed judges and 80.4% of Democratic-appointed judges ruled against the administration.
The administration sustained more losses today.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled that 14 states can proceed with their lawsuit against billionaire Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency.” The administration had tried to dismiss the case, but Chutkan ruled the states had adequately supported their argument that “Musk and DOGE’s conduct is ‘unauthorized by any law.’” “The Constitution does not permit the Executive to commandeer the entire appointments power by unilaterally creating a federal agency…and insulating its principal officer from the Constitution as an ‘advisor’ in name only,” she wrote.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon struck down Trump’s March 27 executive order targeting the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, more commonly known as WilmerHale. This law firm angered Trump by employing Robert Mueller, the Republican-appointed special counsel who oversaw an investigation of the ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives.
Leon, who was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, made his anger obvious. “[T]he First Amendment prohibits government officials from retaliating against individuals for engaging in protected speech,” Leon noted. “WilmerHale alleges that ‘[t]he Order blatantly defies this bedrock principle of constitutional law.’” Leon wrote: “I agree!” He went on to strike down the order as unconstitutional.
Today NPR and three Colorado public radio stations sued the Trump administration over Trump’s executive order that seeks to impound congressionally appropriated funds for NPR and PBS. The executive order said the public media stations do not present “a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.” NPR’s David Folkenflik reported White House spokesperson Harrison Fields’s statement today that public media supports “a particular party on the taxpayers’ dime,” and that Trump and his allies have called it “left-wing propaganda.”
The lawsuit calls Trump’s executive order and attempt to withhold funding Congress has already approved “textbook retaliation.” “[W]e are not choosing to do this out of politics,” NPR chief executive officer Katherine Maher told NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly. “We are choosing to do this as a matter of necessity and principle. All of our rights that we enjoy in this democracy flow from the First Amendment: freedom of speech, association, freedom of the press. When we see those rights infringed upon, we have an obligation to challenge them.”
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis today denied the administration’s motion for a 30-day extension of the deadline for it to answer the complaint in the lawsuit over the rendition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man sent to El Salvador through what the administration said was “administrative error.”
Despite five hearings on the case, the administration’s lawyers didn’t indicate they needed any more time, but today—the day their answer was due—they suddenly asked for 30 more days. Xinis wrote that they “expended no effort in demonstrating good cause. They vaguely complain, in two sentences, to expending ‘significant resources’ engaging in expedited discovery. But these self-described burdens are of their own making. The Court ordered expedited discovery because of [the administration’s] refusal to follow the orders of this court as affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and the United States Supreme Court.”
Trump is well known for using procedural delays to stop the courts from administering justice, and it is notable that administration lawyers have generally not been arguing that they will win cases on the merits. Instead, they are making procedural arguments.
Meanwhile, stringing things out means making time for situations to change on the ground, reducing the effect of court decisions. Brian Barrett of Wired reported today that while Musk claims to have stepped back from the Department of Government Efficiency, his lieutenants are still spread throughout the government, mining Americans’ data. Meanwhile, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought will push to make DOGE cuts to government permanent in a dramatic reworking of the nation’s social contract. “Removing DOGE at this point would be like trying to remove a drop of food coloring from a glass of water,” Barrett writes.
Political scientist Bonica notes that there is a script for rising authoritarians. When the courts rule against the leader, the leader and his loyalists attack judges as biased and dangerous, just as Trump and his cronies have been doing.
The leader also works to delegitimize the judicial system, and that, too, we are seeing as Trump reverses the concepts of not guilty and guilty. On the one hand, the administration is fighting to get rid of the constitutional right of all persons to due process, rendering people who have not been charged with crimes to prisons in third countries. On the other, Trump and his loyalists at the Department of Justice are pardoning individuals who have been convicted of crimes.
On Monday, Trump issued a presidential pardon to former Culpeper County, Virginia, sheriff Scott Jenkins, a longtime Trump supporter whom a jury convicted of conspiracy, mail and wire fraud, and seven counts of bribery. Jared Gans of The Hill explained that Jenkins accepted more than $70,000 in bribes to appoint auxiliary deputy sheriffs, “giving them badges and credentials despite them not being trained or vetted and not offering services to the sheriff’s office.” Jenkins had announced he would “deputize thousands of our law-abiding citizens to protect their constitutional right to own firearms,” if the legislature passed “further unnecessary gun restrictions.” Jenkins was sentenced to ten years in prison.
Although Jenkins was found guilty by a jury of his peers, just as the U.S. justice system calls for, Trump insisted that Jenkins and his wife and their family “have been dragged through HELL by a Corrupt and Weaponized Biden D[epartment] O[f] J[ustice].” Jenkins, Trump wrote on social media, “is a wonderful person, who was persecuted by the Radical Left ‘monsters,’ and ‘left for dead.’ This is why I, as President of the United States, see fit to end his unfair sentence, and grant Sheriff Jenkins a FULL and Unconditional Pardon. He will NOT be going to jail tomorrow, but instead will have a wonderful and productive life.”
Today Trump gave a presidential pardon to Paul Walczak, a former nursing home executive who pleaded guilty to tax crimes in 2024. The pardon arrived after Walczak’s mother donated at least $1 million to Trump. The pardon spares Walczak from 18 months in prison and $4.4 million in restitution. Also today, Trump announced plans to pardon reality TV stars Julie and Todd Chrisley, who were sentenced to 7 and 12 years in prison for conspiracy to defraud banks of $36 million and tax evasion. Their daughter spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention.
Bonica notes that delegitimizing the judicial system creates a permission structure for threats against judges. That, too, we are seeing.
Bonica goes on to illustrate how this pattern of authoritarian attacks on the judiciary looks the same across nations. In 2009, following a ruling that he was not immune from prosecution for fraud, tax evasion, and bribery, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi railed about “communist prosecutors and communist judges.” In 2016, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Türkiye rejected the authority of his country’s highest court and purged more than 4,000 judges. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe pushed judges to stop protests, and the judiciary collapsed. In the Philippines in 2018, Rodrigo Duterte called the chief justice defending judicial independence an “enemy,” and she was removed. In Brazil in 2021, Jair Bolsonaro threatened violence against the judges who were investigating him for corruption.
But, Bonica notes, something different happened in Israel in 2023. When Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition tried to destroy judicial independence, people from all parts of society took to the streets. A broad, nonpartisan group came together to defend democracy and resist authoritarianism.
“Every authoritarian who successfully destroyed judicial independence did so because civil society failed to unite in time,” Bonica writes. “The key difference? Whether people mobilized.”
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Trump is a petty man who is filled with rage, grievance, and a passion for retribution. His current target is Harvard University because the nation’s most prestigious university told him no. Harvard’s President Alan Garber said it would not allow the federal government to control its curriculum, its admissions, and its hiring policies. No.
Every Cabinet department has pulled research grants to Harvard. Now he warns he might turn the billions that were going to medical and scientific research and hand it over to trade schools.
He would rather stop researchers who are trying to find cures for cancer, tuberculosis, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, and other diseases than back down on his efforts to stifle academic freedom and his vendetta against Harvard.
I don’t know about you, but I would rather see the federal government fund the search for a cure for MS than withdraw the funding. If he wants to fund trade schools, why should he do so at the expense of crucial research?
He wrote on Truth Social yesterday:
“I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land,” Trump said in a post on social media. “What a great investment that would be for the USA, and so badly needed!!!”
Meanwhile, Trump dreamed up another way to harass Harvard during the hours when he couldn’t get to sleep. He demanded that Harvard give him a list containing the names and countries of origin of all its foreign students. Harvard has nearly 7,000 foreign students. Why? What will he do with those names? Will he say they are spies and try again to expel them? Funny thing is he already has all their names and countries. They were registered when they applied for a visa. It’s all a campaign of endless vengeance by a petty, bitter man.
That “One Big Beautiful Bill” is supposed to be about the budget and taxes but tucked into it are a variety of dangerous items that Trump partisans hope will go unnoticed.
The most dangerous item of all undercuts the rule of law.
Liz Cheney and Adam Kinziger noticed it. They posted this warning on Twitter:
Our blog contributor called Quickwrit noticed the innocuous but dangerous insertion into the bill.
Quickwrit write here:
DANGER!!! DANGER!!! DANGER!!!
Buried at the bottom of Page 562 in the Republicans’ 1,116-page “Big Beautiful Bill” is a provision that will end all federal court challenges to anything that Trump orders and that will allow Trump to declare null and void all previous rulings against his orders.
It will be the beginning of genuine dictatorial rule.
The provision on Page 562 invokes enforcement of Federal Rules of Civil Procedures Rule 65(c) which says that a federal court can ONLY issue an injunction AFTER a plaintiff has posted a bond to cover the costs of damages that an injunction could have on the party against which the injunction was issued if subsequent appeals overturn the injunction.
Because Trump and his federal agencies could claim billions of dollars in damages if an injunction is overturned by the pro-Trump U.S. Supreme Court, there is NO ONE WHO CAN AFFORD to seek any future injunction against Trump’s orders or those of his agencies.
IN ADDITION: Rule 65(c) will be applied RETROACTIVELY to all the injunctions issued so far against Trump and his agencies, and all those injunctions will be removed because no bond was posted with any of them.
THE EFFECT WILL BE that everything that has been blocked by the federal courts will be unleashed and there will be NO FUTURE INJUNCTIONS issued against ANYTHING that Trump orders to be done.
Even if none of the many other odious things are removed from the Big Beautiful Bill, this provision to invoke Federal Court Rule 65(c) MUST BE ELIMINATED or there will be no future restraints on Trump. He will be free to dictate anything he wants with NO COURT INTERFERENCE. Rule by law will end in America.
William Kristol was a leading figure in the conservative movement. His father Irving Kristol was renowned as the godfather of neoconservatism. Bill was the editor of the Weekly Standard for many years. But because he is a principled conservative, he loathes what Trump is doing to our nation. He writes at The Bulwark, my favorite Never-Trump blog.
What’s happening is not normal, he writes:
If the Trump administration’s sudden assault on thousands of foreign students legally studying at Harvard seems unprecedented, it’s because it is. If the abrupt abrogation of temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans legally living and working in the United States seems unprecedented, it’s because it is. If the sudden arrests and deportations of law-abiding immigrants checking in as ordered at government offices seems unprecedented, it’s because it is. If the deportations of other immigrants without anything like due process and basically in defiance of court orders to prisons in third countries seems unprecedented, it’s because it is.
And if it all seems utterly stupid and terribly cruel and amazingly damaging to this country, it’s because it is.
But it turns out nativism is one hell of a drug. The Trump administration has ingested it in a big way, and it’s driving its dealers and users in the administration into a fanatical frenzy of destructive activity. And the Republican party and much of Conservatism Inc.—and too much of the country as a whole—is just watching it happen.
The United States has many problems. No one seriously thinks that Harvard’s certification to participate in the Student and Exchange Visitor Program is one of them. And the Department of Homeland Security’s announcement of the action against Harvard makes clear this isn’t just about Harvard: “Let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country.” Are our other institutions of higher education suffering from their ability to attract and enroll students from abroad, if they chose to do so? Are the rest of us?
No. And to the degree there are some discrete problems, nothing justifies this kind of action against Harvard. As Andrea Flores, a former DHS official, told the New York Times, “D.H.S. has never tried to reshape the student body of a university by revoking access to its vetting systems, and it is unique to target one institution over hundreds that it certifies every year.”
Similarly, what’s the justification for the Trump administration’s unprecedented sudden and early abrogation of temporary protected status for 350,000 Venezuelans who fled tyranny and are now living peacefully and working productively in this country? There is no broad unhappiness at their presence, no serious case that they are causing more harm than doing good. Nor for that matter is there a real argument that the presence of 20,000 Haitians living and working in Springfield, Ohio, is a problem that required first lies to denigrate them and now attempts to deport them.
And this week, the nominee to head U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said the Trump administration intends to end the well-established Optional Practical Training Program, which is the single largest channel for highly skilled immigrants to stay and work in the United States after finishing their education here. A study by a leading immigration scholar, Michael Clemens of George Mason University, finds that slashing that program would cause permanent losses to U.S. innovation, productivity, economic growth, and even job opportunities for native workers.
But here we are, with an administration where fantasy trumps reality, ideology trumps evidence, and demagoguery trumps decency. As the economist Dani Rodrik puts it, “Three things made the US a rich and powerful nation: the rule of law, its science & innovation system, and openness to foreign talent. Remarkable how Trump has taken a sledgehammer to all three. No enemy of this country could do more.”
Foreigners studying and working here are not damaging the United States. A virulently nativist administration is what’s damaging the United States. It’s doing so in ways from which it will be difficult to recover. Just as important, it’s doing so in ways that will be a permanent stain on this nation’s history.
Diane Ravitch's blog 