Trump is a performer who plays the part of a businessman. In New York City, he was known for his high-flying lifestyle, his frequent appearances at nightclubs, and his escapades with beautiful women. A businessman? He declared bankruptcy six times. His credit rating was so poor that no American bank would lend him money.
MAD magazine published this Trump cartoon in 1992:
What is Elon Musk’s agenda? His DOGE teams are wreaking havoc across the federal government. His claims of saving “billions” are making government inefficient. Thousands of researchers, scientists, and essential personnel have been fired. Is he working to destroy our government? Or is he settting up a scenario of failure as a prelude to privatization?
The Washington Post reported on chaos at the Social Security Administratuin:
Retirees and disabled people are facing chronic website outages and other access problems as they attempt to log in to their online Social Security accounts, even as they are being directed to do more of their business with the agency online.
The website has crashed repeatedly in recent weeks, with outages lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to almost a day, according to six current and former officials with knowledge of the issues. Even when the site is back online, many customers have not been able to sign in to their accounts — or have logged in only to find information missing. For others, access to the system has been slow, requiring repeated tries to get in.
The problems come as the Trump administration’s cost-cutting team, led by Elon Musk, has imposed a downsizing that’s led to7,000 job cuts and is preparing to push out thousands more employees at an agency that serves 73 million Americans. The new demands from Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service include a 50 percent cut to the technology division responsible for the website and other electronic access.
Many of the network outages appear to be caused by an expanded fraud check system imposed by the DOGE team, current and former officials said. The technology staff did not test the new software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, these officials said.
The technology issues have been particularly alarming for some of the most vulnerable Social Security customers. For almost two days last week, for example, many of the 7.4 million adults and children receiving monthly benefits under the anti-poverty program known as Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, confronted a jarring message that claimed they were “currently not receiving payments,” agency officials acknowledged in an internal email to staff.
The error messages set off widespread panic until recipients discovered that their monthly checks had still been deposited in their bank accounts. Another breakdown disabled the SSI system for much of the day on Friday, prompting claims staff to cancel appointments because they could not enter new disability claims in the system and blocking some already receiving benefits from gaining access to their accounts.
“Social Security’s response has been, ‘Oops,’” said Darcy Milburn, director of Social Security and health-care policy at the Arc, a national nonprofit that advocates for people with disabilities. The group fielded dozens of calls last week from nervous clients who saw the inaccurate message and assumed their monthly check, usually paid on the first of the month, would not arrive.
“It’s woefully insufficient when we’re talking about a government agency that’s holding someone’s lifeline in their hands,” Milburn said.
The disruptions are occurring as acting commissioner Leland Dudek and the DOGE team move to lay off large swaths of the workforce in a new phase of downsizing. Thousands of employees already have been pushed out — many in customer-facing roles, others with expertise in the agency’s cumbersome technology systems. At least 800 of the 3,000 employees left in the division that manages all of the Social Security databases face layoffs, a senior official said on Friday. The newly named chief information officer, Scott Coulter, a Musk-aligned private equity analyst, has demanded a cut of 50 percent, the official said.
The network outages are one in a cascade of blows to customer service that also have hobbled phone systems and field office operations as the workforce shrinks.
A surge in visitors to the website is overwhelming the computer system as customers — nervous that the rapid changes at the agency will compromise their benefits — download their benefit and earnings statements and attempt to file claims. President Donald Trump has said that his administration will not reduce Social Security benefits.
The chaos could accelerate starting April 14, when new identification measures are set to take effect that will require millions of customers applying for benefits to authenticate their identity online, part of the administration’s campaign to root out allegedly fraudulent claims.
“We’re just spiking like crazy,” said one senior official, who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about agency operations. “It’s people who are terrified that DOGE is messing with our systems. It’s the sheer massive volume of freaked-out people.”
The Social Security press office said in a statement that officials are “actively investigating the root cause” of the incidents, which they called “brief disruptions” averaging about 20 minutes each with the exception of the SSI error message. But on several occasions, including during an outage last Monday, customers were shut out of the website for hours. The system was back online last Monday after two hours, but lingering issues lasted through the afternoon while all backlogged queries were processed, current and former officials said. And a system upgrade on a Saturday in late March took several hours longer than anticipated and knocked out the network.
Three times in a recent 10-day stretch, the online systems the field office staff rely on to serve the public have crashed, said one employee in an Indiana office.
The downed programs included tools employees use to schedule visits, to see who has booked an appointment and to check who has arrived, the employee said. It is unheard-of for the system to fail this often, and each outage has led to chaos, they said.
Suddenly forced offline as they were taking claims, the staff members scribbled down clients’ information, then had to wait until later to load it into the computer, doubling or tripling the amount of time and work involved, the employee said.
In other instances, managers or security guards improvised a solution after the online scheduling system failed, the employee said. They walked out to the reception area, wrote down numbers on paper slips and started handing them out to people waiting in line.
The network crashes appear to be caused by an expansion initiated by the Trump team of an existing contract with a credit-reporting agency that tracks names, addresses and other personal information to verify customers’ identities. The enhanced fraud checks are now done earlier in the claims process and have resulted in a boost to the volume of customers who must pass the checks.
But the technology staff did not test the software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, current and former officials said. Connectivity issues and bugs with the expanded system have caused the portal that manages log-ins and authentication for many Social Security applications to go down, officials said.
At a weekly operations meeting on March 28 that was made public last week, Wayne Lemon, deputy chief information officer for infrastructure and IT operations, acknowledged the network crashes and said, “While they’ve been brief, we prefer no outages.” He said the outages were under investigation and may involve “challenges we’ve experienced with a number of partners.” Part of the problem may be that the outages have occurred during “high volume use of the network.”
“Is there a spike in demand or something in the environment causing the issues?” Lemon said.
Customers, meanwhile, are growing more frustrated.………..
What readers are saying
The comments express strong concerns about the recent IT staff cuts and website outages at the Social Security Administration, suggesting these actions are deliberate attempts to undermine the system. Many commenters believe this is part of a broader strategy to privatize Social Security.
Social Security is called the third rail of American politics. The third rail is the one you never touch because it will electrocute you. millions of retirees will want your scalp. Many have no other income.
But Elon Musk is fearless. He thinks he knows how to “fix” Social Security. Not only is he sure that billions are wasted on dead people but now he thinks the computer code must be rewritten.
Gary Legum of Wonkette explains how Musk is touching the third rail:
Having already fucked up the Social Security Administration six ways from Sunday with staff cuts and new ID requirements and field office closures, the incels of the ironically named Department of Government Efficiency are reportedly plotting one more big step in their rampage: They are planning to rewrite the SSA’s entire computer codebase in a more modern programming language. And they plan to have this project completed in “a few months.”
Oh guess what, it’s Saturday morning (Gary wrote this post Friday afternoon) and the Social Security website is already down.
It has been a long time since we had a database/computer technology-adjacent job, but we know enough to understand that migrating a huge system with a reported 60 million lines of code is not something that happens that quickly. This is a years-long sort of job, one that will take the efforts of hundreds, if not thousands, of people. It’s a delicate undertaking, and the vampires of DOGE have proven themselves anything but delicate.
Of course, they have also proven that they genuinely don’t give a shit if you wind up sleeping under a railroad trestle after their hacky changes leave you listed as “dead” in Social Security’s databases, so there is one more reason to not trust them if you needed one.
So, we hope you current Social Security recipients enjoyed getting your benefit checks or your benefit direct deposits on time! Hell, we hope you enjoyed getting them, period. Because there is an excellent chance all that is about to be deader than Elon Musk’s soul.
Wired reports on the new plan in a frightening new story with the words “System Collapse” prominently displayed in the title. It all reads as stupid as it sounds. The basic gist is that SSA systems still run on COBOL, a common, business-oriented programming language that has been around since the 1950s. COBOL has lasted this long for a variety of reasons, but a big one is that it still works really well. Programmers at the SSA still actively work with it despite the existence of newer, more modern programming languages for a few reasons, one of which is that it is very robust. So robust, in fact, that quite a few federal government systems still run on it.
The federal government tends to lag way behind in modernizing the technology that bureaucrats use to keep the country running. But as the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
And DOGE has already proven that it is unfamiliar with COBOL conventions, as Wired already explained in an earlier story about why, contra Musk’s band of Nazi virgins, there were not actually millions of Social Security checks going out to 150-year-olds.
This is one system you do not want to screw up until you are absolutely, positively sure any replacement system is up and chugging along. The computers at Social Security are paying benefits to 65 million Americans every month. For many of them, this is their only source of income. Fuck it up, and people, especially the elderly, can’t pay rent or buy food. Their existence is already precarious enough.
Yet that is likely to be the result when the weasels of DOGE (we very much appreciate the Wired locution referring to it as “the so-called Department of Government Efficiency,” as it is anything but that) get through here.
How enormous an undertaking is it to move the SSA off of COBOL? Let Wired tell you:
In order to migrate all COBOL code into a more modern language within a few months, DOGE would likely need to employ some form of generative artificial intelligence to help translate the millions of lines of code, sources tell WIRED. “DOGE thinks if they can say they got rid of all the COBOL in months then their way is the right way and we all just suck for not breaking shit,” says the SSA technologist.
Lot of problems with that, starting with the fact that even generative AI code still has to be checked for errors. And if it’s wrong, someone still has to manually fix it. What do you think the chances are that DOGE will thoroughly test any changes made by either humans or a technology capable of about the same level of thought as a blender? We’re not talking about Jarvis from the Iron Man movies, we’re talking about Large Language Models of code trained on other code written by humans that likely contains plenty of its own errors. The possibilities for disaster are infinite.
DOGE would also need to develop tests to ensure the new system’s outputs match the previous one. It would be difficult to resolve all of the possible edge cases over the course of several years, let alone months, adds the SSA technologist.
This is just basic quality assurance testing. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned about the sorts of dweebs hired by Elon Musk — and by Donald Trump for that matter, he’s still allegedly the president — is that they simply shrug when something breaks before moving along to the last thing. Careless people smashing things up and then leaving the mess in their wakes for others to clean up, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once memorably said of another generation of arrogant, over-moneyed chucklefucks.
Wags online are suggesting that breaking Social Security is the entire point. Conservatives have long wanted to end the program. But too many people rely on it, so cuts are impossible to get through Congress. It’s the infamous third rail of American politics.
If, on the other hand, Social Security broke because a bunch of nerds broke it, and then nobody could get hold of anyone at the agency to help sort out why their measly $2,000 check hasn’t come through this month because DOGE shut down all phone help lines and closed many field offices that people could otherwise have gone to, well, that’s just an act of God that can’t be helped. Shrug and move on to the next thing, the Silicon Valley ethos.
We doubt it is one reason more than another. Sure, ending Social Security through the back door would fulfill a long-term goal of the Right. It could also be that the DOGE guys really are so high on themselves that they look at government programmers and think, What a bunch of dinosaurs! Get out of the way, old people, and let us show you how this shit gets done.
Well, we weren’t going to be able to retire for awhile anyway. Now maybe we’ll just work until we drop dead under that railroad trestle where we’ll spend our dotage.
As you know, Trump took control of The Kennedy Center and named himself chairman of the board. He kicked all Democrats off the board and named Trumpers to replace them.
Some artists cancelled, some continued to perform. Trump’s new director, Richard Grennel, canceled the national tour of a children’s show called “Finn,” because it promoted love, kindness, and tolerance.
A band called Guster was performing at The Kennedy Center on March 29, and the band leader talked about the cancellation of “Finn.” Then he invited the cast of “Finn” to join him onstage and the audience went wild.
I almost cried: tears of joy.
In this essay in The Washington Post, columnist Dana Milbank offers to give Elon Musk private lessons about the Constitution. At no extra fee, he will let Donald Trump join the class. Both men are woefully ignorant of the foundational principles of American law. Musk was raised in South Africa, when apartheid was in force, so his ignorance is understandable. Trump has no excuse.
Milbank writes:
The man President Donald Trump put in charge of taking a chain saw to federal agencies showed once again this week that he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the government he is dismembering.
“This is a judicial coup,” Elon Musk proclaimed, reacting to the growing list of federal judges who have moved to halt the Trump administration’s headfirst plunge into lawlessness. “We need 60 senators to impeach the judges and restore rule of the people.”
How did this guy pass his citizenship test?
As the framers wrote in the Constitution, it is the House, not the Senate, that has “the sole power of impeachment.” And the Senate needs “the concurrence of two thirds of the members present” — 67, assuming full attendance, not 60 — to convict.
More important, the framers wrote that judges hold their offices for life “during good behavior” — which has been understood to mean they can only be impeached for corruption. That is how it has been since the 1805 impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, when Chief Justice John Marshall, himself a Founding Father, persuaded the Senate to abandon the idea that “a judge giving a legal opinion contrary to the will of the legislature is liable to impeachment.”
Musk, growing up in apartheid-era South Africa, probably wasn’t taught to revere constitutional democracy. But what’s the excuse of his colleagues in the Trump administration?
They have issued scores of executive orders that flatly contradict the Constitution and the laws of the land. Apparently, they are hoping a submissive Supreme Court will reimagine the Constitution to suit Trump’s whims — and federal judges have reacted as they should, by slapping down these lawless power grabs. As such, the administration is on a prodigious losing streak in court. Judges, in preliminary rulings, have already blocked the administration more than 50 times. Over the past week alone, judges:
• Ended Musk’s access to the private Social Security data of millions of Americans for a “fishing expedition.”
• Halted Musk’s continued destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
• Blocked enforcement of Trump’s executive order banning transgender people from military service.
• Stopped the administration from terminating $20 billion in grants from a congressionally approved climate program.
• Ordered the Education Department to restore $600 million in grants to place teachers in struggling schools.
• And, most visibly, required the administration to halt the deportation flights of Venezuelan migrants to a Salvadoran prison without any judicial review — an order the administration evidently defied.
There’s an obvious reason Trump is getting swatted down so often: He’s breaking the law. Instead of changing course, the administration is now trying to discredit the courts — and the rule of law. White House adviser Stephen Miller denounced “insane edicts of radical rogue judges” and declared that a judge had “no authority” to stop Trump. Border czar Tom Homan went full-on authoritarian on Fox News: “We’re not stopping,” he said of the deportation flights a judge had temporarily halted. “I don’t care what the judges think.”
Trump called the U.S. district judge in the case, James Boasberg (appointed to the bench by George W. Bush and elevated by Barack Obama) a “radical left lunatic” who, “like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” This drew a quick rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts (in case Musk doesn’t know this, he’s also a Bush appointee), who reminded Trump: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”
Trump later told Fox News that he “can’t” defy a court order — welcome news, except he apparently had done exactly that in more than one case — while arguing that something had to be done “when you have a rogue judge.”
Someone has gone rogue here, but it isn’t the judge. Boasberg’s actions are squarely within the best tradition of the judiciary, for they are in defense of principle, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, that no person in this country, citizen or alien, may be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” This is precisely what the Trump administration denied to those it deported and imprisoned.
Violations of due process have been alleged in dozens of the cases against Trump’s executive actions: terminating workers and programs; eliminating grants; violating union contracts; denying care to transgender people; banning the Associated Press from the White House; abolishing civil rights enforcement and everything else the administration calls “DEI”; harassing law firms; and summarily deporting migrants. All of these things were done without notice, without recourse, without adjudication and without clarity about which laws give the president the power to do them.
“Due process” might sound technical, but it was elemental to our founding and remains at the heart of our legal system. Trump’s flagrant denial of due process is so radical that it isn’t only at odds with 200 years of U.S. law — it’s also contrary to another 600 years of English law before that. For the benefit of Musk (who doesn’t seem to know about such things) and his colleagues (who don’t seem to care), perhaps a refresher is in order.
For this, I called Jeffrey Rosen, who runs the nonpartisan National Constitution Center, which finds consensus between conservative and liberal scholars. The concept of due process, he explained, is in the Magna Carta, which in 1215 asserted that “no free man shall be arrested or imprisoned … except by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” Britain’s 1628 Petition of Right, written during parliament’s struggle against the dictatorial Charles I, holds that “no man … should be put out of his land or tenement nor taken nor imprisoned nor disherited nor put to death without being brought to answer by due process of law.” The king, who imposed forced loans on his subjects and imprisoned people without trials, was beheaded during the English civil war.
“That example completely inspired the American Revolution,” Rosen explained. “They compared the tyranny of George III to the arbitrary rule of Charles I, saying George III was violating due process of law by insisting that patriots are tried in England rather than in local courts, that they can be put in jail without trial, and their liberty is at the whim of the king.” During the revolution, due-process provisions appeared in the constitutions of Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, North Carolina and Vermont. Similar language was included in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, then eventually repeated in the 14th Amendment to apply to all states.
“The very foundation of constitutionalism, which means a government according to law rather than autocratic whim, is the due process of law,” Rosen told me. “What distinguishes a constitutional officeholder from an absolute monarch or a tyrant is that he is bound by the Constitution and by laws.” Without due process, there is no free market, because private property can be taken without justification or explanation. Without due process, there are no civil liberties, for a person’s freedom can be taken for any reason, or none at all.
Without due process, you have what we see today: a leader using a wartime statute in peacetime to declare certain people to be dangerous gang members without providing any evidence, then imprisoning them without charges and finally denying the authority of the courts and defying a court order requiring the leader to obey the laws as written. It is no exaggeration to say that this is the road to despotism.
The Trump administration’s attempt to upend 800 years of settled law is staggering, but it is easily lost in all the other chaos the president is spreading. The Federal Reserve this week said that it expects slower growth and higher inflation than it did before Trump took office, in large part because of his tariffs, while falling confidence among consumers and businesses has raised the danger of recession.
In foreign affairs, Israel has restarted the war in Gaza, and Trump has launched a military campaign to see the Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen “completely annihilated.”
Trump failed to get Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine, despite Trump’s bullying of Kyiv and his termination of efforts to document Russian war crimes — including the kidnapping of Ukrainian children.
Trump silenced the Voice of America, to the benefit and delight of China, Russia and Iran. Even the annual visit of the Irish prime minister to the White House for St. Patrick’s Day became mired in controversy when MMA fighter Conor McGregor, given the podium in the White House briefing room, proclaimed that “Ireland is at the cusp of potentially losing its Irishness” because illegal migrants are “running ravage on the country.” Responded the prime minister: “Conor McGregor’s remarks are wrong, and do not reflect the spirit of St Patrick’s Day, or the views of the people of Ireland.”
The new administration’s bows to white nationalism continue apace. It removed, at least temporarily, thousands of pages from the Pentagon website and others that celebrated the integration of the armed forces and the contributions of people of color: a Native American who helped hoist the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima, the Navajo code talkers of World War II, the Native American who drafted the Confederacy’s terms of surrender, baseball great Jackie Robinson, and a Black Vietnam veteran, on whose page the URL was changed to “deimedal-of-honor.” Trump, meanwhile, reiterated his offer to give “safe refuge” to White South Africans, while at the same time expelling the South African ambassador. The administration has restored the names of Fort Benning and Fort Bragg, which honored Confederates — getting around a law prohibiting this by technically renaming the bases for other people with the surnames “Benning” and “Bragg.”
The Forward, a Jewish newspaper, reported this week that the head of Trump’s antisemitism task force shared a post on X on March 14 from a white-supremacist leader asserting that “Trump has the ability to revoke someone’s Jew card.” (The aide apparently later unshared the post, whose author led a group that called on Trump supporters to become “racially aware and Jew Wise.”)
The sabotage of the federal government continues, as recklessly as before: dramatically cutting Social Security staff, offices and phone support while simultaneously requiring millions more of the elderly and disabled to apply for benefits in person rather than online; slashing the taxpayer help staff at the IRS and calling off audits; scaling back scientific research at the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health. Paul Dans, the former chief of Project 2025, told Politico that there “is almost no difference between Project 2025 and what Trump was planning all along and is now implementing.”
Trump appointed conspiracy theorist Michael Flynn, Sean Spicer, Steve Bannon’s daughter and the former White House valet to boards overseeing the U.S. military academies. He took time to visit the Kennedy Center, where he has fired the leadership — and used the visit to share “personal stories and anecdotes, including about the first time he saw ‘Cats’ and which members of the cast he found attractive,” as The Post’s Travis Andrews reported. The administration ordered the release of files on the John F. Kennedy assassination before bothering to remove the Social Security numbers of some people who are still alive.
Trump and his cronies continue to use the federal government for personal gain. Following last week’s promotional event for Musk’s Tesla at the White House, the commerce secretary recommended people buy Tesla stock, and the White House has installed Musk’s Starlink service despite security concerns. At the same time, Trump’s crypto project released a second crypto coin, raising $250 million to bring its total to $550 million — and 75 percent of the earnings go into the Trump family’s pockets. All of this is about as on the level as Trump’s golf game. “I just won the Golf Club Championship … at Trump International Golf Club,” he announced on Sunday, as storms and tornadoes ravaged a swath of the country. “Such a great honor!”
The most ominous development, though, is Trump’s expanding abuse of power to silence critics and disable political opponents. He went to the Justice Department last week and delivered a speech attacking lawyers who opposed him, such as Jack Smith, Andrew Weissmann, Norman Eisen and Marc Elias, as “scum” and “bad people” — and the administration has revoked the security clearances of many such lawyers. After issuing executive orders seeking to destroy three law firms because of their ties to Trump’s opponents, the administration has gone after 20 more law firms over their supposed DEI programs.
In the case of the alleged Venezuelan gang members, administration officials and allies are celebrating their defiance of the court. President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, which the Trump administration is paying to jail deported migrants at its infamous 40,000-inmate prison, responded on X to Judge Boasberg’s order by saying “Oopsie … too late,” with a laugh-cry emoji. Secretary of State Marco Rubio retweeted it, and Musk added his own laughing emoji. And Attorney General Pam Bondi outrageously claimed “a DC trial judge supported Tren de Aragua terrorists over the safety of Americans” — even though the migrants would not have been released under the court order, which only delayed their deportation.
After a reporter asked the president whether he would cut off Secret Service protection for former president Joe Biden’s children, Trump did exactly that. Trump’s acting head of the Social Security Administration admitted that he had canceled contracts with the state of Maine because he was “upset” at Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, for not being “respectful” of Trump during a public exchange they had. Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, have asked Trump’s FBI to probe the main Democratic fundraising platform, saying it “has advanced the financial interests of terror.”
Trump cut off $175 million of government funds going to the University of Pennsylvania because of its policy on trans athletes, following the White House’s suspension of $400 million of funds to Columbia University over Gaza protests there and its demand that the school change its discipline and admissions policies. More than 50 other universities are under investigation. Trump’s acting U.S. attorney for D.C., Ed Martin, has threatened to punish Georgetown Law School if it doesn’t change its curriculum, calling it “unacceptable” for the school to “teach DEI.”
Trump, in his appearance at DOJ, said negative coverage of him on CNN and MSNBC “has to be illegal.” He proclaimed that Biden’s use of the pardon, a constitutional power, to preemptively protect members of the House Jan. 6 committee from Trump’s harassment was “null and void.”
He fired the two Democratic commissioners from the Federal Trade Commission, his latest defiance of federal statutes protecting independent commissions. His administration fired the board of the independent U.S. Institute of Peace and seized control of its building, physically removing its president and threatening prosecution.
Then there are the summary deportations of people Trump finds undesirable. The administration has arrested and is seeking to deport a Columbia graduate student who is a green-card holder with no criminal record because of his role in Gaza protests. It deported a Brown University doctor even though a judge had issued an order requiring 48 hours’ notice before her deportation.
In the House, Trump’s allies raced to obey his instructions, filing impeachment articles against Boasberg on Tuesday. Freshman Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) submitted the articles, joined by five others. House Republicans have also moved to impeach four other federal judges over disagreements with their rulings.
Thus are Trump and his allies ignoring 215 years of precedent, going back to Samuel Chase, that objections to courts’ opinions are to be resolved through the appeals process, not impeachment.
Thus are Trump and his allies turning their backs on 810 years of precedent, going back to the Magna Carta, in which we protect ourselves from tyranny through the due process of law.
But this is where we are. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, in a delectable Freudian slip, proclaimed in a briefing this week that “we want to restore the Department of Justice to an institution that focuses on fighting law and order.”
If that is the goal, the Trump administration is to be congratulated on a job well done.
President Trump and Vice President Vance berate President Zelensky at the White House, February 28, 2025 (OSV News photo/Brian Snyder, Reuters)
John Connelly is a historian of East Central Europe at the University of California at Berkeley. This essay appeared in Conmonweal. I urge you to subscribe. How I wish someone would read this essay out loud to Donald Trump. Among other things, it demonstrates the importance of learning history and the dangers of historical ignorance.
Connelly writes:
For decades pundits have been urging us to do something about this or that dictator because he was “Hitler.” A quarter century ago, David Brooks was equating Saddam Hussein with the Nazi leader, and a quarter century before that, newspapers portrayed Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro as their day’s equivalent of the Führer. The historical episode these writers had in mind was the 1938 Munich Agreement, when Chamberlain and Daladier surrendered Czechoslovakia’s fortified border areas in return for “peace.” Half a year later, Hitler helped himself to the rest of that undefended country, until then the last surviving democracy east of the Rhine. The lesson was that we must not appease dictators: it only encourages them.
In 2022, history finally produced an actual parallel to the attack on Czechoslovakia when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, a functioning East European democracy. Yet, in contrast to 1938, this time the democracy fought back, and the West stood in united support—that is, until the pusillanimous and unprincipled acts of the Trump administration. The U.S. president has already gone far beyond anything Chamberlain might have dreamed of. Trump has not only appeased a dictator but adopted the dictator’s own language and reasoning, and he seems willing to award Putin vast Ukrainian territories before peace negotiations have even begun. As if all this weren’t strange enough, he also sent Vice President J. D. Vance to a conference in Munich to berate our allies for their allegedly undemocratic behavior. He then met with the leader of a party that has downplayed the importance of Hitler to German and world history and who opposes support of Ukraine.
The explosive exchange between President Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office prompted commentators to look for other historical parallels. Bartosz T. Wieliński, who writes for Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza, recalled that the evening before Hitler sent his armies to seize Prague in March 1939, he summoned Czech president Emil Hácha to Berlin and threatened to lay waste to the Czech capital if Hácha did not accept “peace” on German terms. Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring stood by nodding, nearly causing old Hácha to collapse. By contrast, writes Wieliński, president Zelensky has stood firm.
But an even more apt parallel occurred a few months later, in August 1939, when Hitler and Stalin decided to divide Poland and treat themselves to the spoils, including the country’s grain and oil. Careful historians could list many differences between now and then, but the underlying intention to expropriate a small country’s resources has a familiar ring, as does the imperial attitude behind it. Stalin’s transactional mentality continued after World War II, when he insisted that Poles repay the USSR for having cleared their lands of German troops by awarding it Polish oil and coal.
The United States of that period, led by men committed to defending freedom, behaved very differently. With much of Eastern Europe occupied by the Red Army, it invested huge sums (most in outright aid) to get Western Europe back on its feet and to sustain its democratic governments. The investments served the interests of peace because democratic states seldom go to war with each other.
The current administration relegates such thinking to the past, with Trump likening international affairs to a card game, with some holding stronger “hands” than others. Yet card games at least have rules, while what imperial powers do is help themselves to new cards as they see fit and knock over the card table whenever fair play displeases them. The best-known advocate of such behavior is the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt, who wrote that different rules apply to great powers; he might be the only serious thinker who would justify Trump’s ambitions to seize Greenland or the Panama Canal.
The Trump team’s imperial attitude was on full display in the Oval Office meeting with Zelensky. Vice President Vance badgered Ukraine’s president to express more gratitude to the United States, even though he has done so profusely for years. What Vance seemed to expect was the sort of self-abasement that vassals once rendered to their lords. As long as humans can think and write freely, that fiasco will go down as a special disgrace for the United States, a low point in meanness and absence of compassion. It is we who should be grateful to Ukrainians—the same way we’re grateful to the men who landed in Normandy in June 1944 or to the soldiers of George Washington’s army. Like those heroes of yesteryear, today’s Ukrainians are putting their lives on the line for the sake of freedom.
That sort of argument may mystify the American right, but it also surprises some people on the left. I’ve heard colleagues in Berkeley denigrate the Ukrainian struggle as one driven by “nationalism” fueled by ancient ethnic chauvinism. In the midst of the Bosnian war, even the well-read and well-meaning Bill Clinton expressed frustration with such “Old World” nationalism, saying, “until those people over there get tired of killing one another, bad things will continue to happen.” Trump himself shows some of this impatience, portraying Zelensky as yet another Eastern European closed to reason.
But what’s happening in Ukraine is not difficult to understand. What we have been witnessing, in the years since 2014, is an East European democratic revolution much like our own, if not more dramatic. The colonists who took up arms in the 1770s were responding to everyday colonialism, of living under an empire that left them little voice in their own affairs and blithely exploited their lives and treasures. At some point, those Americans decided freedom was a cause worth dying for.
This was the sentiment an audience in Berkeley heard last September from Taras Dobko, the rector of the Ukrainian Catholic University. A missile had recently struck an apartment house in Lviv, wiping out a whole family, including Daria Bazylevych, a second-year cultural-studies major. For years, students and professors have been going off to fight and sometimes die, and now the hundreds of mourners at Daria’s funeral Mass recognized a consensus that has strengthened over time: human life is precious, but some things are more important than simple survival.
The Trump team’s imperial attitude was on full display in the Oval Office meeting with Zelensky.
The comparisons I have been invoking are approximate. The imperial aggressors Ukrainians face are endlessly more sinister than George III’s forces. But the similarities are nevertheless striking. Recall the early images from three years ago, just after Russian troops had crossed Ukraine’s borders. All kinds of people sought to repel the invaders—the young, the old, the tough, the nerdy, workers, students. The real issue was not territory on a map but how human beings on any territory are allowed to live their lives. These human beings were desperate not to fall under a regime of lawlessness, where human life is for sale and dignity is trampled by tyranny. Today’s Ukrainian patriotism is not about ethnicity. Many of the troops defending Ukraine are Russian-speaking; the religious communities represented among these troops range from Greek Catholic (Uniate) to atheist.
In the summer of 2022, President Zelensky, who is Jewish, demonstrated his acute historical vision by calling his country a “new nation.” Technically, the claim is wrong. Sources referred to a Ukrainian nation back in the seventeenth century. But the nation Zelensky means transcends that past. He is placing Ukraine in the small company of nations that define their identities by looking forward and not backward. The new Ukraine is a place and a people that seeks to create a future free from tyranny.
Here, Ukraine’s democratic revolution has precedents in European history, but they are few. There was 1789, when the French people walked onto the historical stage with the novel insistence that they had a right to self-rule. There was 1848, when peoples across Europe tried to follow the French example, but that movement soon came apart in ethnic bickering. And then there were the revolutions of 1989, when Europeans between France and Russia rose up against the Soviet empire. In world history, the closest parallel is indeed 1776, when North American colonists rebelled regardless of language and creed and dated their nation from the moment they determined to live freely.
But our day’s Americans can have short memories, a fact that frustrated Zelensky when he visited the Oval Office. For Trump and Vance, the indiscriminate torture and killing of hundreds of civilians committed by Putin’s soldiers just three years ago at Bucha are irrelevant to the challenges of “peace making.” Accusing Zelensky of “hating” Putin, as Trump did, is a bit like criticizing the Czechs or Poles for their animosity toward Hitler. Putin belongs to a small group of strongmen—including Pol Pot and Slobodan Milošević—who have presided over genocidal acts. Of course, sometimes one has to engage in diplomacy with such men, but the reports of U.S. diplomats becoming chummy over shared meals with Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, evoke disgust. Neville Chamberlain at least had the decency to appear uncomfortable in the presence of cynical despots.
American ignorance of the past can extend beyond facts to a misunderstanding of what America is about. Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine is, deep down, a betrayal of the United States. Last summer, Vance said that his ancestors are buried in Kentucky, and he hoped that seven generations of his family would find their final resting places there as well: even if they “would die fighting to protect it. That is the source of America’s greatness.” In fact, where our ancestors lie is irrelevant for our identities as Americans; their graves may be anywhere in the world. We are not a community of soil and blood.
But the sentiment Vance expressed is not unknown elsewhere. In 1984, I went on a field trip to eastern Poland with historians from Jagiellonian University in Krakow. My roommate on the trip, a young instructor, explained to me why Poles could not forget the territories that had once belonged to Poland yet now lay in Ukraine: “Remember, our graves are there.” Fortunately, when their country became free in 1989, the better angels in Polish society prevailed. As Timothy Snyder explained in The Reconstruction of Nations, émigré intellectuals determined that Poland needed peace and not more land. Eastern Europeans have suffered from territorial disputes for centuries, and that moment was a time to look forward and consign destructive bickering to history.
Hence the extraordinary incomprehension with which Poles and other Europeans view the Trump regime, which seems more intent on expanding America’s borders than on protecting existing ones in Europe. Washington now joins Moscow in calling Zelensky a “dictator.” That is why Europeans insist upon security guarantees for Ukrainians: as long as pernicious and demonstrably false ideas about Ukraine are taught as dogma to tens of millions of Russians, there can be no return to normal. An expansionist state backed by an aggressive ideology cannot be appeased; it can only be stopped.
Ukraine’s democratic revolution has precedents in European history, but they are few.
Today’s Ukrainian fighters live in trenches. They spend weeks in puddles of cold water, unable to rest properly, subsisting on terrible food. Like the men of D-Day or those who accompanied Washington to fight in wintry Princeton, they face not only death but discomforts that are difficult to imagine and usually forgotten in history books. Soldiers then and now have suffered these things so that their fellow citizens can say what they want in public, so that journalists can report without fear of retribution from civil authorities, so that teachers can speak freely in their classrooms without having to worry about being reported for indoctrinating their students with “Western ideology.” Growing threats to civil liberties under the Trump regime are of a piece with his admiration for Putin and with Vance’s meeting with neo-fascists in Munich. We are letting our freedoms slip away, and it’s not clear why.
Our founders, despite the checks and balances they built into the new republic, had gloomy forebodings. No matter how brilliantly conceived, they knew a constitution alone could not guarantee civic virtue. Perhaps Benjamin Franklin was right that the demos would one day succumb to corruption, but what would he say about voters who abandoned their God-given critical faculties and supported a man who, just four years earlier, had whipped up a mob to storm the Capitol to prevent the peaceful transfer of power? Video images show the attackers beating police with flagpoles.
For decades, I have been teaching students about interwar Germany’s last free elections in 1932, and when class is over we leave the lecture hall with pained incomprehension at those strange people back then. No longer. Germans of that time faced unemployment, destitution, street violence; they had suffered more in a war than we can imagine. Still, that July, far fewer than half of them voted for the radical right (37.2 percent). The numbers went down to 32 percent in November. His party in decline, Hitler was considering suicide when a coterie of conservatives schemed to bring him to power.
In November 2024, the United States was enjoying high employment, steady growth, and decreasing inflation, yet more than half of us voted for our own brand of right-wing populism. Yes, I am aware there are deep problems with housing, health care, and education, but that is no justification for casting a ballot that jeopardizes democracy. There was no reason to think that a second Trump administration would address those basic problems.
Is it not a kind of civic corruption for a nation to be blessed with abundant resources and fortuitous geography and not appreciate it? (Zelensky, ever the keen student of history, gently tried to remind Vance and Trump that Americans were protected by an ocean—a lesson that did not go over well.) Our conspicuously pious vice president might consider thanking the Almighty that we have peace-loving, democratic Canada on our northern border and not, like the Ukrainians, a rapacious, occasionally genocidal empire three times our size.
We are not in the 1930s. Our European allies have drawn lessons that make a return to Munich unlikely if not impossible. Unlike Czechoslovakia, Ukraine is not isolated, but an object of genuine neighborly concern. In Poland, France, and Austria, centrist forces have rallied to keep the far right out of power. The German elections suggest that when Elon Musk and J. D. Vance promote right-wing extremists abroad, it only drives Europe’s democrats closer together. Europeans display a wariness of neo-fascism that we, who have been spared direct experience of totalitarian rule, evidently lack.
Against the background of an Eastern Europe where nationhood has usually been about ethnicity, Ukraine’s brand of civic nationhood is a world-historical miracle. We don’t know what mysterious pool of ingredients permits democracies to arise and thrive, we know only that, unlike so many places where the United States has involved itself militarily, democracy has taken root in Ukraine. Unlike in 1938, when Czechs hoped that the West would sacrifice blood for their democracy, all that Ukrainians ask of other democracies is military aid, which in our case amounts to about four percent of the defense budget.
But even more important than our material support is their own faith: that some things, like freedom, are worth dying for, as Dobko reminded us in Berkeley. That belief can fade, and when it does, the effect can be contagious. In 1938, Czechs witnessed allies unwilling to stand for shared principles, and after World War II, Czechoslovakia—once the lone democracy east of the Rhine—became the sole European country to submit willingly to totalitarianism. Soviet troops left Czechoslovakian territory in December 1945, yet Czechs streamed into the Communist Party and the final seizure of power in 1948 was generated from below. It took democracy decades to recover.
Who would have thought an American president would make Neville Chamberlain look good? In 1938, the British PM sought peace to avert millions of deaths, while Trump seeks peace to advance “U.S. interests,” which he understands in purely material terms. Peace not for the sake of people, but of mineral rights. All talk of values like freedom or solidarity is anathema, and if “democracy” is invoked, it is only to aid its enemies. History writers of the future will pay close attention to what the United States does now. Far less is asked of us than was asked of the Western powers in 1938, and unless we change course, those historians will judge us far more severely than the men who once tried to appease Hitler.
John Connelly teaches the history of East Central Europe at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe(Princeton, 2020).
Oliver Darcy, media journalist, reports that Mark Zuckerberg has followed the lead of Elon Musk by abandoning fact-checking.
The No-Fact Zone: Meta announced Thursday it will launch its forthcoming “community notes” feature next week to replace fact-checkers, once again going to Fox News for the rollout as the Mark Zuckerberg-led social giant runs to the right. Joel Kaplan, Meta’snew global affairs officer, blasted the company’s own longstanding fact-checking program, telling Fox’s Brooke Singman it “proved to be really prone to partisan political bias” and was “essentially a censorship tool,” echoing false claims parroted by right-wing media figures and lawmakers. Unlike the fact-checking program, Meta’s community notes will rely on users who are not bound by ethical guidelines to police content for fairness and accuracy, taking a page straight out of Elon Musk’s X. Kaplan told Singman that posts with a community note applied will not be penalized and will continue to thrive on the platform, setting the stage for viral misinformation. While Zuckerberg and Kaplan are portraying the move as a win for free speech—earning praise from Donald Trump—it will surely serve to muddy the waters on some of the world’s biggest social platforms.
Julie Vassilatos lives in Chicago, where she has been active as a parent in the resistance to privatization. In this post, she explains why Trump insists on closing the U.S. Department of Educatuon.
She writes:
What a difference a year makes.
One minute you’re watching your city absorb tens of thousands of new residents, asylum seekers bussed up unannounced from Texas wearing shorts and flip flops in the dead of winter, watching your city do the best they can to make room, to make a home, to help integrate these new neighbors into our city of immigrants.
Blink, and it’s the next winter. Now you see ICE snatching parents from school drop off, right in front of their kids.
It’s a whole new world. But one, at least, in which deportation chief Tom Homan is really quite far behind in his local quotas because “the people in Chicago are too educated about their rights.” Apparently this makes his work difficult.
Or take another example. A year ago we lived in a country with a Department of Education.
Blink, and that Department is in rubble on the ground, drastically defunded and illegally dismantled.
We’re not quite there yet. But we’re about to be. The right has been hollering about shutting down the Department of Education almost since its modern inception. Now they get everything they have ever wanted with Elon Musk doing the chopping in the interest of cost savings.
But even if it cost nothing, the DoE would have to be extinguished under our current regime. Because it only exists for one reason. It only has ever existed for one reason. It first came into a short-lived existence for only one reason. And that reason is really, really out of style just at the moment.
The only reason for the Department of Education is equity.
The very first time the idea of a national department of education came up was in the aftermath of the Civil War, when Congressman James A. Garfield—very much understanding the leveling capabilities of education—persuaded Congress to create a department whose sole purpose was to support public education for all Americans, particularly for new immigrants and formerly enslaved people. He thought that “improving the education of citizens was the wisest expenditure a government could make” (Goodyear, 171). And, sure enough, right off the bat, Democratic opponents of such a federal authority cranked and complained about Why do we have to support millions of lazy people who already are hogging at the government trough blah blah Why should Congress have to appropriate public funds for “illegal and improper political purposes” blah blah blah blah….ad nauseam (Goodyear, 173).
(Cue the creepy Twilight Zone music as the reader slowly realizes that we may be permanently stuck in some kind of post-Civil War time loop)
In short order, Garfield’s embattled Department was whittled down to a Bureau; educational equity for all Americans went very out of vogue in the decades post-Reconstruction.
Fast forward eighty years and the nation was still, unsurprisingly, mired in educational inequity. Segregated by race, schools for Black Americans were grossly underfunded and inadequate. 1954’s Brown v Board of Education established school desegregation, but after a painful 20 years and with public schools still not serving all Americans remotely equally, the modern Department of Education was created by Congress in 1979.
This is its first stated goal: “to strengthen the Federal commitment to ensuring access to equal educational opportunity for every individual.”
It’s had a rocky life, with folks on the right wanting to kill it immediately upon birth, and ever since. But its goals have always remained the same: to advance educational equity in a nation sorely in need of it.
Anyway you can see why it has to die now, for so many obvious reasons. Take your pick.
Nothing that exists solely to promote equity must be allowed.
That is a bad goal.
Trump doesn’t like it.
We already have it.
The word “equity” makes white people feel bad and sad.
If someone is horning in on my equity it’s not fair.
Some people are more equity than others.
Now we have a newly minted Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, who on her first day sent out a missive concerning her department’s “final mission.” She knows little about its proper work and brings with her to the role, mainly decades of a white-dominant WWE culture that is steeped in racist tropes. Freshly confirmed, McMahon is here to burn it all down, and she is happy to.
But what is this department that’s dying, anyway? What is this beast that needs to be sacrificed? Former IL congressman Adam Kinzinger shared a good, brief explainer last week, “The Grinch Who Stole Education,” about what it does and doesn’t do. It does financially support struggling schools, administer student loans, uphold federal laws supporting disabled students, and enforce civil rights laws in public education. It does not dictate curriculum or teacher standards or exercise local control, despite what Trump says.
A much deeper dive, “Cruel to Your School,” comes from Jennifer Berkshire in The Baffler, for those interested in well-narrated, riveting history. Her conclusion is the same as Kinzinger’s—that the entire point of those who want to kill the DoE is to increase the wealth of the wealthy at the expense of children and the marginalized. Cutting this department, as well as all the others, will pay for a $4.5T tax cut for the wealthiest. “Children in need are in the crosshairs,” says Kinzinger, and the wealthy elites who stand to benefit the most are Trump, Musk, and friends. Berkshire notes that “Musk and his DOGE wrecking crew seek to deepen inequality by dismantling not just the federal Department of Education, but the institution of public education itself.” After all, in the world according to Musk, “a cognitive elite with the highest IQs deserves to rule over the rest of us, all in our natural places” in a “good and natural” hierarchy. “In this fixed economy of spoils, there is little point to an institution whose goal is ‘equalizing.’ It can’t be done.”
Peter Greene of Curmudgucation recently explained that these people hate the notion of equity so much that they have set up a tattle line for school districts. If you spot anything like equity happening at your school, you are to whisper your findings to a special website, promoted by Mom for Liberty Tiffany Justice. (I’ve written about her and her cronies….here.) So in the rubble of the former Department of Education, we will at least still have a federal mechanism to root out every last trace of equity from our public school system—as long as we have one.
In this rather horrifying moment, in this context of the violent bludgeoning of a basic and centuries-long effort to create an equitable public education system, I’m giving the last word to Eve Ewing. When those with power strip everything away, shred every value, crush every intention toward a society of justice and equity, it is not enough merely to be angry about what has been taken away. We must—we MUST—dream a good and right future. There is no other way.
“[I]t’s imperative to understand this nightmarish moment as actually being a reflection of someone else’s dream. Groups like Moms for Liberty and The Heritage Foundation have spent years bringing their most deeply held conjurations across the threshold into reality. Regardless of who prevails in the halls of power, who has more lawmakers and more funding on their side, in this one matter — the matter of imagination — we are equals. So how do we use our dreams as a map forward?
“It’s not enough to be afraid of the laws and rules we don’t want to see in schools. We have to clarify our visions of what, how, where and with whom see we want our beloveds to learn. What are we fighting for? Who are the young people you love most, and what do you dream for them? What are the values you hold dear that you want desperately for them to understand, to inherit? What are the histories, the legacies, the ancestors you need them to know? Where can you and the people you trust build collective power to make space for that teaching, for that learning?”
Beyond using your imagination in powerful ways, what are some things you can do?
There’s the ever-necessary Call Your Congressman.
Go to school board meetings. Go to PTA meetings or Local School Council meetings. Find your allies and band together. Throw in your lot with larger orgs and increase your power.
Use that above-mentioned equity tattle line in ways that seem appropriate to the moment.
Get acquainted with the work of the Journey 4 Justice Alliance and attend their upcoming national virtual town hall, “The Threats of Dismantling the USDOE on Black and Brown School Districts,” Thursday, March 20th, 7 pm EST.
Listen to the outstanding Jennifer Berkshire/Jack Schneider podcast about public education, “Have You Heard?” You’ll learn a lot and it’s painless, even entertaining, and sometimes actually hopeful.
Trump or Musk or a bunch of kids who work for DOGE decided that the U.S. doesn’t need to collect statistics or conduct research about the condition of education. So they wiped out the National Center for Education Statistics at the U.S. Department of Education. This is akin to closing down the Bureau of Labor Statistics. NCES is literally the only reliable, nonpartisan source of information about U.S. education. It is not partisan.
NCES is the heart of the U.S. Department of Education. Its purpose is to study “the progress and condition” of American education. It collects data and statistics about every aspect of American education. A bill was passed in 1867 to create an agency with that mission, and that was the beginning of NCES. At first, it was called the Department of Education, but two years later, it was renamed the Office of Education and placed in the Department of the Interior. In 1939, it was shifted to the Federal Security Agency, and in 1953 it became part of the newly created Departnent of Health Dducation and Welfare. In 1979, President Carter signed legislation creating the U.S. Department of Education, and in 1980, the Department began to function.
NCES has always been nonpartisan. It publishes an annual report called The Condition of Education, which is a valuable compendium of facts and trends that covers almost every aspect of education, from preschool through graduate studies. If you want to know the high school graduation rate over the past century, that’s the source. If you want to compare the graduation rates by gender or race, that’s there too.
NCES also oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the federal testing program known as “the nation’s report card.” NAEP has a bipartisan governing board, which is appointed by the Secretary of Education and serves as a policymaking body.
During my time as Assistant Secretary of Education for the Office of Education Research and Innovation from 1991-93, NCES was in my domain. In 1998, Secretary Richard Riley appointed me to serve on the governing board of NAEP, which I did for seven years. There were parts of my domain that I might have offloaded, but with a scalpel, not a chainsaw.
Musk and his DOGE team just eviscerated not only the Department of Education by firing half its employees, but they laid waste to NCES.
Jill Barshay of The Hechinger Report has the story. The staff of NCES has been reduced from about 100 to 3. Three! I think that’s called a death certificate.
She began:
President Donald Trump promises he’ll make American schools great again. He has fired nearly everyone who might objectively measure whether he succeeds.
This week’s mass layoffs by his secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, of more than 1,300 Department of Education employees delivered a crippling blow to the agency’s ability to tell the public how schools and federal programs are doing through its statistics and research branch. The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is now left with fewer than 20 federal employees, down from more than 175 at the start of the second Trump administration, according to my reporting. It’s not clear how the institute can operate or even fulfill its statutory obligations set by Congress.
IES is modeled after the National Institutes of Health and was established in 2002 during the administration of former President George W. Bush to fund innovations and identify effective teaching practices. Its largest division is a statistical agency that dates back to 1867 and is called the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which collects basic statistics on the number of students and teachers. NCES is perhaps best known for administering the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tracks student achievement across the country. The layoffs “demolished” the statistics agency, as one former official characterized it, from roughly 100 employees to a skeletal staff of just three.
“The idea of having three individuals manage the work that was done by a hundred federal employees supported by thousands of contractors is ludicrous and not humanly possible,” said Stephen Provasnik, a former deputy commissioner of NCES who retired early in January. “There is no way without a significant staff that NCES could keep up even a fraction of its previous workload…”
The mass firings and contract cancellations stunned many. “This is a five-alarm fire, burning statistics that we need to understand and improve education,” said Andrew Ho, a psychometrician at Harvard University and president of the National Council on Measurement in Education, on social media.
Former NCES Commissioner Jack Buckley, who ran the education statistics unit from 2010 to 2015, described the destruction as “surreal.” “I’m just sad,” said Buckley. “Everyone’s entitled to their own policy ideas, but no one’s entitled to their own facts. You have to share the truth in order to make any kind of improvement, no matter what direction you want to go. It does not feel like that is the world we live in now.”
While other units inside the Education Department lost more employees in absolute numbers, IES lost the highest percentage of employees — roughly 90 percent of its workforce. Education researchers questioned why the Trump administration targeted research and statistics. “All of this feels like part of an attack on universities and science,” said an education professor at a major research university, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation.
The future of NAEP is up in the air. The staff to oversee contracts for data collection, testing, and analysis of results is gone.
Please open the article and read it. This is a deliberate death-blow to the most important function of the U.S. Departnent of Education: the collection and dissemination of facts, data, statistics, and trends in the states and the nation.
Heather Cox Richardson reports on the depredation of Elon Musk, whom Trump has empowered to destroy government services. This destruction is the prelude to privatization. At the Department of Agriculture, his DOGE boys laid off bird flu experts. At the Departnent of Transportation, they laid off air traffic controllers. The story was repeated across the government. Nothing is off-limits from the DOGE vandals, other than the billions of dollars awarded to Elon Musk every year. One can’t help wondering, at least I can’t, whether this crippling of our government was Putin’s idea.
Richardson wrote:
Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made it clear that the Trump administration’s goal is to slash the federal government and to privatize its current services. As the stock market has dropped and economists have warned of a dramatic slowdown in the economy, he told CNBC “There’s going to be a natural adjustment as we move away from public spending to private spending. The market and the economy have just become hooked, we’ve become addicted to this government spending, and there’s going to be a detox period.”
Bessent’s comments reveal that the White House is beginning to feel the pressure of the unpopularity of its policies. Trump’s rejection of 80 years of U.S. foreign policy in order to prop up Russia’s Vladimir Putin has left many Americans as well as allies aghast. Trump’s claims that Putin wants peace were belied when Russia launched massive strikes at Ukraine as soon as Trump stopped sharing intelligence with Ukrainian forces that enabled them to shoot down incoming fire.
The administration’s dramatic—and likely illegal and unconstitutional—cuts are infuriating Americans who did not expect Trump to reorder the American government so completely. While billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump repeatedly say they are cutting only “waste, fraud, and abuse” from the government, that insistence appears to be rhetorical rather than backed by fact. And yesterday, new cuts appeared to continue the gutting of government services that generally appear to be important to Americans’ health, safety, and economic security.
On Friday night, employees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—about 80,000 of them—received an email offering them a buyout of up to $25,000 if they resign and giving them a deadline of March 14 to respond. Also as of Friday, nearly 230 cases of measles have been confirmed in Texas and New Mexico, and two people have died.
The secretary of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is frustrating even allies with his response to the outbreak. Kennedy, who has long been an anti-vaccine activist, said last week that measles outbreaks were “not unusual,” and then on Sunday he posted pictures of himself hiking above Coachella Valley in California. On Monday the top spokesperson at HHS, a former Kennedy ally, quit in protest. As Adam Cancryn of Politicoreported, Kennedy has said that the measles vaccine protects children and the community, but has said the decision to vaccinate is personal and that parents should talk to healthcare providers about their options. He has also talked a lot about the benefits of nutritional supplements like cod liver oil, which is high in Vitamin A, in treating measles. In fact, vaccines are the key element in preventing people from contracting the disease..
“It’s a serious role, he’s just a couple of weeks in and measles is not a common occurrence, and it should be all hands on deck,” one former Trump official told Adam Cancryn, Sophie Garder, and Chelsea Cirruzzo of Politico. “When you’re taking a selfie out at Coachella, it’s pretty clear that you’re checked out.”
In another blockbuster story that dropped yesterday, the Social Security Administration announced it will begin to withhold 100% of a person’s Social Security benefits if they are overpaid, even if the overpayment is not their fault. Under President Joe Biden the agency had changed the policy to recover overpayments at 10% of monthly benefits or $10, whichever was greater.
Those who can’t afford that level of repayment can contact Social Security, the notice says, but acting commissioner Leland Dudek has said he plans to cut at least 7,000 jobs—more than 12% of the agency—although its staff is already at a 50-year low. He is also closing field offices, and senior staff with the agency have either left or been fired.
Dudek yesterday retracted an order from the day before that required parents of babies born in Maine to go to a Social Security office to register their baby rather than filling out a form in the hospital. Another on Thursday would also have stopped funeral homes from filing death records electronically.
One new father told Joe Lawlor of the Portland Press Herald that he had filled out the form for his son’s social security number and then his wife got a call saying they would have to go to the Social Security office. But when he tried to call Social Security headquarters to figure out what was going on, the wait time was an estimated two hours. So he called a local office, where no one knew what he was talking about. “They keep talking about efficiency,” he said. “This seemed to be something that worked incredibly efficiently, and they broke it overnight.”
The administration did not explain why it had imposed this rule in Maine. Senator Angus King of Maine, an Independent, said he was glad the administration had changed its mind, but added that “this rapid reversal has raised concerns among Maine people and left many unanswered questions about the Social Security Administration’s motivations.”
Trump has said that Social Security “won’t be touched” as his administration slashes through the federal government.
Trump also said there would not be cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, but on Wednesday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which figures the financial cost of legislation, said that Republicans will have to cut either Medicare, Medicaid, or the Children’s Health Insurance Program in order to meet their goal of cutting at least $880 billion from the funding controlled by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Cutting the funding for every other program in the committee’s purview would save a maximum of $135 billion, Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post noted, meaning the committee will have to turn to the biggest ticket items: healthcare programs.
Also yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security said it was getting rid of union protections for the approximately 47,000 employees of the Transportation Security Administration who screen about 2.5 million passengers a day before they can board airplanes. A new agreement in May 2024 raised wages for TSA workers, whose pay has lagged behind that of other government employees. Union leaders say the move is retaliation for its challenges to the actions of the administration toward the 800,000 or so federal workers it represents.
As Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times have reported more detail about the Cabinet meeting Trump convened abruptly on Thursday, we have learned more about Musk’s determination to cut the government. As Musk appeared to take charge of the meeting, he clashed with Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, who complained that Musk’s team at the Department of Government Efficiency is trying to lay off air traffic controllers.
Swan and Haberman report that Duffy asked what he was supposed to do. He continued by saying: I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers? Musk said it was a lie that they were laying off air traffic controllers, and also insisted that there were people hired under diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives working as air traffic controllers. When Duffy pushed back, Musk said Duffy should call him with any concerns, an echo of the message he gave to members of Congress. Like them, Cabinet members are constitutionally part of the government. Musk is not.
What Musk is, according to an interview published today by Aaron Rupar and Thor Benson in Public Notice, is a businessman who believes that there is waste wherever you look and that it is always possible to do something more cheaply. Ryan Mac and Kate Conger, who wrote a book about Musk’s takeover of Twitter, Character Limit, said that creating confusion is part of the point. Musk creates drama, Conger said, to scare away workers he doesn’t want and attract ones he does.
The pain that he is inflicting on the country is not making him popular, though. Protests at Tesla dealerships that handle his cars are growing, as are instances of vandalism against Tesla dealerships and charging stations, which now number more than a dozen, including attacks with bottles filled with gasoline and set on fire. Pranshu Verma and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post report that Tesla’s stock has dropped more than 35% since Trump took office. Tesla sales have dropped 76% in Germany, 48% in Norway and Denmark, and 45% in France.
On Thursday, another of Musk’s SpaceX rockets exploded, raining debris near south Florida and the Bahamas. The Federal Aviation Administration said 240 flights were disrupted by the debris.
The New York Times editorial board today lamented the instability that Musk is creating, noting that the government is not a business, that “[t]here are already signs the chaos is hurting the economy,” and that “Americans can’t afford for the basic functions of government to fail. If Twitter stops working, people can’t tweet. When government services break down, people can die.”
The editorial board did not let Trump hide behind Musk entirely, noting that he has increased instability not only with DOGE, but also “with his flurry of executive orders purporting to rewrite environmental policy, the meaning of the 14th Amendment and more; his on-again-off-again tariffs; and his inversion of American foreign policy, wooing Vladimir Putin while disdaining longtime allies.”
One of the things that the radical extremists in power hated about the modern American state was that it was a nonpartisan machine that functioned pretty well regardless of which party was in charge. Now Musk, who is acting as if he is not bound by the constitution that set up that machine, is taking a sledgehammer to it.
In the Public Notice interview, Thor Benson asked Ryan Mac: “What’s something about Elon’s huge role in the Trump administration that people perhaps aren’t understanding?” Mac answered that Musk is the manifestation of the nation’s extreme wealth inequality. “What happens,” he asked, “when there is unfettered capitalism that allows people to accumulate this much money and this much power?”
Diane Ravitch's blog 