Marc Elias is a lawyer who leads a group called Democracy Docket. He and his team regularly sue to block threats to our democracy. He is one of the nation’s most prominent voting rights attorneys.
Elon Musk doesn’t like Elias. He doesn’t like it when Elias gets in his way.
Elon Musk recently posted on his site that another lawyer and I are “undermining civilization.” He goes on to ask if we suffered childhood trauma and concludes by suggesting we are suffering from “generational trauma.” This is my response.
Mr. Musk,
You recently criticized me and another prominent lawyer fighting for the rule of law and democracy in the United States. I am used to being attacked for my work, particularly on the platform you own and dominate.
I used to be a regular on Twitter, where I amassed over 900,000 followers — all organic except for the right-wing bots who seemed to grow in number. Like many others, I stopped regularly posting on the site because, under your stewardship, it became a hellscape of hate and misinformation.
I also used to buy your cars — first a Model X and then a Model S — back when you spoke optimistically about solving the climate crisis. My family no longer owns any of your cars and never will.
But this is not the reason I am writing. You don’t know me. You have no idea whether I have suffered trauma and if I have, how it has manifested. And it’s none of your business.
However, I will address your last point about generational trauma. I am Jewish, though many on your site simply call me “a jew.” Honestly, it’s often worse than that, but I’m sure you get the point. There was a time when Twitter would remove antisemitic posts, but under your leadership, tolerating the world’s oldest hatred now seems to be a permissible part of your “free speech” agenda.
Like many Jewish families, mine came to America because of trauma. They were fleeing persecution in the Pale of Settlement — the only area in the Russian Empire where Jews were legally allowed to reside. Even there, life was difficult — often traumatic. My family, like others, lived in a shtetl and was poor. Worse, pogroms were common — violent riots in which Jews were beaten, killed and expelled from their villages.
By the time my family fled, life in the Pale had become all but impossible for Jews. Tsar Nicholas II’s government spread anti-Jewish propaganda that encouraged Russians to attack and steal from Jews in their communities. My great-grandfather was fortunate to leave when he did. Those who stayed faced even worse circumstances when Hitler’s army later invaded.
That is the generational trauma I carry. The trauma of being treated as “other” by countrymen you once thought were your friends. The trauma of being scapegoated by authoritarian leaders. The trauma of fleeing while millions of others were systematically murdered. The trauma of watching powerful men treat it all as a joke — or worse.
As an immigrant yourself, you can no doubt sympathize with what it means to leave behind your country, extended family, friends and neighbors to come to the United States. Of course, you probably had more than 86 rubles in your pocket. You probably didn’t ride for nine days in the bottom of a ship or have your surname changed by immigration officials. Here is the ship manifest showing that my family did. Aron, age three, was my grandfather.
As new immigrants, life wasn’t easy. My family lived in cramped housing without hot water. They worked menial jobs — the kind immigrants still perform today.
Some may look down on those immigrants — the ones without fancy degrees — but my family was proud to work and grateful that the United States took them in. They found support within their Jewish community and a political home in the Democratic Party.
I became a lawyer to give back to the country that gave my family a chance. I specialize in representing Democratic campaigns because I believe in the party. I litigate voting rights cases because the right to vote is the bedrock of our democracy. I speak out about free and fair elections because they are under threat.
Now let me address the real crux of your post.
You are very rich and very powerful. You have thrown in with Donald Trump. Whether it is because you think you can control him or because you share his authoritarian vision, I do not know. I do not care.
Together, you and he are dismantling our government, undermining the rule of law and harming the most vulnerable in our society. I am just a lawyer. I do not have your wealth or your platform. I do not control the vast power of the federal government, nor do I have millions of adherents at my disposal to harass and intimidate my opponents. I may even carry generational trauma.
But you need to know this about me. I am the great-grandson of a man who led his family out of the shtetl to a strange land in search of a better life. I am the grandson of the three-year-old boy on that journey. As you know, my English name is Marc, but my Hebrew name is Elhanan (אֶלְחָנָן) — after the great warrior in David’s army who slew a powerful giant.
I will use every tool at my disposal to protect this country from Trump. I will litigate to defend voting rights until there are no cases left to bring. I will speak out against authoritarianism until my last breath.
I will not back down. I will not bow or scrape. I will never obey.
Joyce Vance is a former federal prosecutor in Alabama who writes a blog called “Civil Discourse.” In this post, she explains the damage that Elon Musk and his DOGE boys are imposing on NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. By making NOAA less effective, they are setting it up to be privatized and available for a fee, not freely available to the public. Their destruction of NOAA will hurt everyone, red and blue states alike.
She writes:
On March 12, there was reporting that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was preparing to lay off more than 1,000 workers as part of the Trump administration’s “reductions in force” directive to federal agencies. Cuts like that call into question whether NOAA will continue to provide the early warnings and predictive modeling that help people prepare for weather emergencies in advance. People who live in hurricane and tornado country keep their “NOAA weather radios” handy, and they are especially important for events that occur, as they frequently do, when most of us are asleep.
In theory, it sounds like one more bad thing to worry about. In practice, it’s much worse. We’ve just had a demonstration of precisely how effective NOAA is and what we stand to lose without it.
Beginning on Friday, violent, long-track tornadoes with damaging winds of up to 80 mph and large hail materialized across the Midwest and South. This was the news Friday night. NOAA’s early warning system, transmitted on social media, radio, television, and by word of mouth, kept it from being much worse.
Saturday was even worse. Here in Birmingham, the alerts started midday.
At 12:27 pm, I got the first alert through the UA campus system, telling me that in light of what was expected, I should seek shelter now instead of waiting for an actual tornado warning. The system sends alerts after the National Weather Service makes the call about what to expect. The National Weather Service (NWS) is a component of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
We’ve grown accustomed to getting this level of detail. NOAA’s information gets pushed out ahead of these events, causing people to plan in advance. Hard helmets were in short supply here yesterday as people prepared for the storms.
We were relatively lucky in Birmingham. But other places were far less fortunate. By Saturday morning, ABC News reported 36 people were dead in the wake of the storms. This was what the devastation looked like in Tylertown, Mississippi. As I’m writing this, the storm is heading east into Georgia.
How much worse would it have been without the accurate forecasting that let our local news people and local emergency systems warn folks in the storms’ paths sufficiently in advance to get to their safe places? As much as I don’t like to think about it, if Trump and DOGE stay on their current path, we are going to be forced to. Mother Nature doesn’t care who you voted for. If there’s a tornado headed your direction, you need access to early warning systems. Gutting NOAA means you won’t have that.
An example of the tornado warnings issued by National Weather Services offices in Alabama throughout the day Saturday, permitting people to find shelter and take cover in advance.
At 8:52 p.m., local television in central Alabama pushed out a message from the National Weather Service: Talladega, take cover now. It was a tornado on the ground near the famous Superspeedway. Alerts meant people were able to stay safe, which is a good thing—this photo of a bus that ended up on the roof of a nearby high school makes it clear that these early warning systems are critically important. What happens if the National Weather Service is no longer there to do that?
Apparently, the Trump administration is not concerned with that. ABC is reporting that NOAA is down about 2,000 employees since January “as a result of the first round of the Trump administration’s cuts.” California Congressman Jared Huffman, who chairs one of the relevant House subcommittees, said, “There is no way to absorb cuts of this magnitude without cutting into these core missions. This is not about efficiency and it’s certainly not about waste, fraud and abuse. This is taking programs that people depend on to save lives and emasculating them.”
Cuts that sound like a good idea to Elon Musk and Donald Trump have real impacts on the rest of us. That is only just beginning to dawn on people, who I’m sure you’re hearing, like I am, saying, “But I didn’t vote for this.” Trump 2.0, as I’ve written previously, isn’t a pick-your-own-adventure experience. You go to the carnival, you get all of the rides.
We were fortunate last night. Everyone in our house (chickens included) is okay, we just have a little cleanup to do. But so many people weren’t that lucky. They lost houses and lives. They will need support from FEMA and other federal services. If DOGE continues its romp through essential federal work that we, as taxpayers, fund and rely on, it’s only going to get worse.
When will Republicans wake up? Will their Senators and members of Congress protest what DOGE is doing? Will they even fight for their own backyards? If they continue to bend the knee on this, then instead of demanding that government work for their constituents, they are permitting it to work for the financial interests of the powerful.
We know what to do about this. With this piece, and the one Friday night about an Idaho Fair Housing Council that I hope you’ll go back and readif you missed it, we’re putting a face on the people DOGE hurts. It’s not about waste and fraud; it’s about people. People who need their government to work for them. Here’s the phone number for the House switchboard: (202) 224-3121. Here’s that number for the Senate: (202) 224-3121. Make sure your representatives know how you feel.
I have stopped reporting on court orders because there are so many of them, sometimes different judges give conflicting opinions, and sometimes one opinion supersedes another.
But this one was too good to pass up. The issues will ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. But this is the first to challenge directly the authority of Elon Musk and DOGE.
A federal judge in Maryland on Tuesday temporarily blocked billionaire Elon Musk and the U.S. DOGE Service from taking further actions to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and ordered that steps be taken to allow the agency to reoccupy its headquarters inside the Ronald Reagan building in Washington, D.C., should the plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging Musk’s actions win their case.
The judge also ordered DOGE to restore email and other access to thousands of employees who have been cut off from the agency, including those stationed in dangerous areas with their jobs in limbo. He prohibited DOGE from disclosing USAID employees’ personal information outside the agency and said any other action relating to USAID must be made with the “express authorization of a USAID official with legal authority.”
The preliminary injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Theodore D. Chuang in a federal court in Maryland, though it leaves a door open for the Trump administration to continue its elimination of USAID, marks another blow to the administration’s efforts to dramatically reduce the size of the government after other federal court orders to reinstate thousands of fired federal workers. Chuang’s ruling remains in effect until a further court order, which could come at another point in the lawsuit or after a trial.
On Monday, the Trump administration moved to reinstate thousands of probationary workers after another judge in Maryland ruled that those firings had been conducted illegally, a decision that is now before a federal appeals court.
The lawsuit was brought by the State Democracy Defenders Fund on behalf of more than two dozen USAID workers named only as plaintiffs J. Does 1-26. They allege that Musk’s assumption of vast authority over federal agencies is “unprecedented in U.S. history” and, under the Constitution, could be exercised only by someone who has been nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate as an “Officer of the United States.” The lawsuit also asserts that DOGE’s moves to eliminate USAID violate the Constitution, because the agency was created by Congress and only Congress can do away with it.
In a 68-page legal opinion accompanying the injunction, Chuang agreed that the Trump administration has acted to effectively dismantle USAID and concluded that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed in their claim that those actions violate the Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine.
“Where Congress has prescribed the existence of USAID in statute pursuant to its legislative powers under Article I, the President’s Article II power to take care that the laws are faithfully executed does not provide authority for the unilateral, drastic actions taken to dismantle the agency,” Chuang wrote.
The judge’s order, however, applies only to Musk and DOGE — not to USAID officials themselves. Chuang specified that although the dismantling of USAID — even by USAID officials — “likely violates” the Constitution, USAID officials are not parties to the case and not subject to his order. Justice Department lawyers have argued that it is USAID officials, not Musk or DOGE, who have conducted the mass personnel and contract terminations.
Though the lawsuit is not over, the State Democracy Defenders Fund heralded the judge’s ruling while the White House and Musk attacked Chuang.
“Today’s decision is an important victory against Elon Musk and his DOGE attack on USAID, the U.S. government and the Constitution,” said Norm Eisen, executive chair of State Democracy Defenders Fund, in a statement Tuesday. “They are performing surgery with a chainsaw instead of a scalpel, harming not just the people USAID serves but the majority of Americans who count on the stability of our government. This case is a milestone in pushing back on Musk and DOGE’s illegality.”
A White House spokeswoman responded to Chuang’s order by saying he is among “Rogue judges” who are “subverting the will of the American people in their attempts to stop President Trump from carrying out his agenda.” “If these Judges want to force their partisan ideologies across the government, they should run for office themselves,” said Anna Kelly, deputy press secretary for the White House, in a statement. “The Trump Administration will appeal this miscarriage of justice and fight back against all activist judges intruding on the separation of powers.”
The Trump administration seems to believe that federal courts may not overturn Presidential decisions. That matter was resolved in a case called Marbury v. Madison in 1803.
Sherrilyn Ifill is a law professor at Howard University and former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She writes a blog called Sherrilyn’s Newsletter, where this post appeared. Open the link to see her footnotes.
“There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment. The time is always now.”
-James Baldwin
Illustration by Nick Liu
The past week has shown us in stark terms what it means to fight – to actually fight – to protect against the rise of authoritarians. This week we also saw that somehow, despite years of preparation, some of the leaders of our most powerful institutions seem unprepared for the particular nature of this fight. Others appear just…. unwilling to engage.
Last week the Trump Administration took its most bold actions yet. Through the actions of either Trump himself, Elon Musk or members of Trump’s cabinet, this Administration has:
· Unleashed an unprecedented attack on higher education, the centerpiece of which was a targeted attack on Columbia University. In a letter sent to the University, the Administration[i]demanded that university essentially turn over its decision-making to the Trump Administration, insisting that the University close the Middle Eastern Studies Dept, ban mask-wearing, expel students involved in pro-Palestine protests, and announced the withholding of $400 million in federal dollars until the University accedes to Trump’s demands, unless the University took these actions to address “antisemitism on campus.” The Administration underscored its intentions by entering student dormitories and arresting a Palestinian student who is a legal permanent resident of the U.S. As his 8-month-pregnant wife looked on helplessly, ICE officers arrested Mr. Khalil and then disappeared him, moving him from facility to facility, and offering only vague and unsubstantiated justifications for his arrest. His central “crime” appears to be “advancing positions that are contrary to the foreign policy of this Administration,”[ii]– a concept so staggeringly outrageous it can scarcely be absorbed.
· Fired half the staff of the Department of Education[iii] – as a down-payment on the Administration’s vow to close the agency.
· Indicated its intention to “eliminate Social Security;”[iv]
· Continued firing government workers and removing funding from government agencies including NIH[v] and shuttering offices like the Voice of America.
· Intensified tariffs against Canada and rhetoric suggesting that the sovereign nation of Canada should be annexed to the U.S.;[vi] declared that the European Union was created to “screw the U.S.”; declared that the South African Ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome,[vii] continuing the Administration’s Musk-inspired determination to recognize racist white settlers as victims of Black rule.
· Issued Executive Orders targeting law firms who have litigated cases against Trump in the classified documents cases and who provided pro bono counsel to Special Counsel Jack Smith, removing security clearances and blocking government connected work.
· Argued in court that transgender soldiers should be removed from the military.[viii]
· Removed information about Black, Asian American and women military heroes from the Arlington National cemetery website,[ix]disappearing the accomplishments of people of color and women from official recognition.
And that’s just part of it.
But the resistance to Trump’s authoritarian rule has been busy as well:
· Protests across the country have demanded the release of Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian student taken into custody.[x]
· “Tesla Take Down” protests at Tesla dealerships across the country in protest against Elon Musk’s takeover of our government have been so effective in tanking the brand and its stock price,[xi] that President Trump turned the White House into a car lot and personally embodied the used car salesman he was destined to be (if not for his father’s money) in an attempt to gin up Tesla sales.
· Protests nationwide continue to demand an end to government worker firings.
· Voters have shown up at town halls across the country to express anger about proposed plans to cut Medicaid/Medicare and Social Security[xii].
· Lawsuits filed by parents,[xiii] and by a score of states[xiv] have challenged the closing of the Education Department.
· Perkins Coie, the law firm targeted by Trump boldly challenged the Trump administration’s effort to blackball the firm and imperil its business;[xv]
· Federal courts have required Trump to rehire thousands of federal employees fired by DOGE[xvi]
· Federal courts have enjoined Trump’s efforts to freeze spending on governments grants and other funding.[xvii]
· Federal courts enjoined the Administration from removing migrants targeted under Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act – a decision the Trump Administration has defied.[xviii]
But the big stories last week were less about those who have protested and sued, and more about those among the most powerful institutional actors who appear to have lost the plot. Political scientists Steve Levitsky and Ryan Enos offered a blistering and spot-on condemnation of universities that have remained silent in the face of Trump’s authoritarian challenge to the freedom of universities.[xix]Calling out Harvard University specifically (where both scholars teach) for its silence in the face of the hideous attacks on Columbia University, Levitsky and Enos condemned the inaction of universities that have chosen a strategy of “lying low, avoiding public debate (and sometimes cooperating with the administration) in the hope of mitigating the coming assault.”[xx]
Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has faced a wave of outrage and demands for resignation after his decision to vote in favor of cloture to avert a government shutdown. To be sure, the Democrats have few options for stopping the Republicans, who are firmly in the majority in the House and Senate from torching our government. But as many of us have been reminded ad nauseum during the years when Democrats controlled the Senate, the filibuster is one of the few procedural rules the party in the minority in the Senate has to counter being overrun by the majority.
But frustratingly, although Democrats were unwilling to abolish the filibuster in 2022 to advance their agenda, last week they were unwilling to use the filibuster to defy the Republican power grab. Heads the Republicans win. Tails the Democrats lose.
It was hard to understand the point of Democrats affixing their signature to a continuing resolution to fund a government that is being cut to the bone every day by Elon Musk – an unelected billionaire with no official government position – who has been permitted to usurp the appropriation power of Congress. When Trump and Musk lawlessly gut agencies and fire government workers, and Speaker Mike Johnson and his caucus cede the power of Congress to the President, we are in a constitutional crisis.
Trump and Musk’s anti-constitutional usurpation of congressional power with the complicity of the Republicans in Congress is an emergency. It demands an emergency response. Minority Leader Schumer and 7 other Democratic Senators (and I suspect more who were covered by the Leader’s unpopular action) were unprepared to meet the moment in a way that would have upped the stakes. Sometimes when the game is fixed, you have to overturn the tables.
I will concede a serious point Schumer later offered that got lost in the Comms disaster of his Wednesday night statement that suggested there would be a shutdown, and then his Thursday morning announcement that he would vote to avert one. If the government shutdown happened, there would be little chance of obtaining judicial orders enjoining decisions by Trump/Musk to eliminate programs, because legally during a government closure, the President enjoys unfettered power to determine which functions of government are “essential” – standard to which the courts would likely defer. By contrast, with the government open, challenges to DOGE firings and closures continue to do fairly well in the courts and have slowed down the force of Musk’s chainsaw.
In any case, Schumer’s decision and perhaps moreso the clumsy comms that accompanied it have resulted in boiling outrage within the base of the party, including calls for him to step down from leadership.
Of course, none of this compares to the perfidy of the Republican Party. We must never forget the unconscionable and dastardly conduct of Speaker Mike Johnson and the Republicans in the House and Senate – men and women who have abdicated their allegiance to this country and to democracy itself. Their cowardice and complicity in the destruction of this country must never be forgotten or whitewashed. Their betrayal is singular and historic.
But there’s another group that is failing to meet this moment. America’s corporate leadership has been nearly silent during one of the most volatile economic periods in years. Last week the stock market took a nosedive – entering “correction” status as a result of Trump’s manic and unhinged tariff announcements. [xxi] Trump’s erratic tariffs – up one day, down the next, up again two weeks later – are lunacy. Every rational business leader knows that.[xxii] The predictable market response to Trump’s irrationality threatens the retirement plans of older Americans hoping to retire and the American economy. America’s leadership in the world has been compromised by Trump’s saber-rattling, and his insistence on imperialist moves towards Canada, the Panama Canal and Greenland, is destabilizing the integrity of perception of American stability. Combined with the massive government lawyers, Trump’s policies are bad for America and bad for business.
As Trump literally tanks the American economy and the trust of the international business community, where are the voices of America’s business leaders? Are they all hoping that Trump will do a commercial on the White House lawn hawking their products too? Are the leaders of the Business Roundtable (200 CEOs of the nation’s leading corporations) agnostic about the President’s stubborn insistence on policies that are wrecking the U.S. economy and our standing in the world?
These same business leaders enabled the lie that Trump is a “successful businessperson” – knowing full well that Trump does not seem to know what he’s talking about when he wades into economics, knowing of his six bankruptcies, knowing of his refusal to pay contractors, his false representations, and knowing that no responsible Fortune 500 CEO would ever have gone into business with Trump before he was elected President, or even after. Being wealthy is not the same as being a successful businessperson and they all know it.
In an interview on CNBC, even host Maria Bartiromo – a Trump sycophant – felt compelled to remind Trump that successful business leaders need predictability to make coherent decisions about investments, infrastructure, expansion, and product development for markets. She noted that the up-and-down tariff mania undermines predictability. Trump responded, “well they say that. It sounds good to say.” Really? Is that it? Or is it a fundamental tenet of business that even a first year MBA student would know? At other times last week he has repeated with “we’re gonna have so much money from the tariffs” with a desperate insistence that suggested mental instability.
American corporations have either tried to placate Trump by paying tribute,[xxiii] or have “crawled into a protective shell” like the university officials called out by Levitsky and Enos. In either case, it is utterly irresponsible. Their voices and influence – presented collectively and forcefully – are critical to protecting the economic interests of this country, and our democracy. Their failure to act is a betrayal of their responsibility as citizens.
Media owners have shamed themselves – whitewashing their teams,[xxiv] surrendering the independence and diversity of their editorial pages,[xxv] and taking a knee before Trump’s demands rather than standing firm in the face of the challenge to our democracy.[xxvi]
In the week ahead, there will be many additional opportunities for leaders from our most powerful democratic institutions to meet this moment. Already it appears that the Trump Administration has defied a federal court order to turn around planes taking Venezuelan migrants accused of being to El Salvador.[xxvii] The Administration announced that the first 250 migrants arrived in El Salvador.[xxviii] What does that mean? Two hundred-fifty Venezuelan nationals have been disappeared into the one of the world’s most notoriously abusive prisons in El Salvador, without judicially approved trials or due process.
What will judges do as Trump appears to defy judicial orders? This week will test the readiness of our judiciary to defend the rule of law.
Meanwhile ordinary people have been showing tremendous leadership, protesting, launching and participating in boycotts, conducting teach-ins, calling their elected representatives every week, sometimes several times a week, visiting district offices, participating in “die-ins,” writing letters and petitions, and building support for opposition candidates in special elections. A “mass march” has been announced by the organization Hands/Off for April 5th, although information is still spotty [please drop info in the comments]. Black churches have launched a 40-day Lenten boycott of Target for its obsequious abandonment of its DEI commitments.[xxix]
Every day we are called upon to meet the moment. As we see our neighbors seized by plainclothes agents without judicial warrants, and see our workplaces “obey in advance” – removing from websites, official policies and even mission statements expressing their commitment to equality and to inclusion, and as we see law firms crouch before this Administration’s threats, and media outlets silence voices that write the truth about this Administration, we have to decide how we will respond.
All over America ordinary people are looking into their toolboxes of non-violent actions and determining which ones they will use. It’s been beautiful to see.
But we must not absolve the leaders of our most powerful institutions – those who have the money and power, and influence to insulate themselves from the worst consequences of this Administration’s excesses – from their obligation to act and to meet the moment.
To those who are business leaders, captains of industry, university leaders, and media owners, decide who you will be at this moment. If we fully lose democracy in this country, it will be because the most privileged among us refused to accept the responsibility to speak out, to say “no more,” and to lead. History will not kindly remember those who left it to Americans with considerably less power and protection, to do the hard work of saving this country. Your tax cuts will not be large enough to cover your shame. And we will remember.
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.
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.”
The deepest cuts
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.
Jeff Nesbit, who worked at both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, wrote this article for The Contrarian. The question is one that I keep asking about many federal government programs that are being eliminated by Trump and Musk, like USAID.
Why? It makes no sense.
The fact that Trump chose Robert F.Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services should have been an alarm bell; Kennedy is not only unqualified, he is stridently hostile to science.
The only beneficiary of this insane and reckless slashing of our most successful programs would be our international enemies, Russia and China. They want us to fail. Trump and Musk are making their dreams come true.
Nesbit wrote:
A siren call is cascading wildly through the corridors of every major academic center in America right now with a huge question firmly at its epicenter: Why are Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, and President Donald Trump’s White House team hellbent on destroying the National Institutes of Health, the world’s gold standard of biomedical research?
There isn’t an easy answer to the question, unfortunately.
The actions have ground NIH to a halt and sent shockwaves through academia and the biomedical research institutions that have created nearly all our life-saving breakthroughs in the past quarter century. Higher education leaders have halted Ph. D. programs in response. Major research labs are being shuttered or told to stop most of their research.
An American biomedical research enterprise that has been the envy of the world’s science and medical community for decades has been surprised and shocked by the careless destruction of core staff functions and almost mindless efforts to purge NIH of hundreds or thousands of grants for reasons that seem ideological at best and irrational and dangerous at worst.
The question, again, is why? Why are Kennedy, Musk and Trump determined to eviscerate the most successful biomedical research system the world has ever known—a scientific enterprise that produces life-saving medicines and leads to breakthroughs (via basic scientific and medical research) that the private sector would never support?
There was a time, once, that NIH was supported by majorities of Republican and Democratic politicians. NIH’s budget, which supports the entire biomedical research field, has grown year after year with large, non-controversial, bipartisan majorities in Congress.
Until now. Trump and Musk have clearly determined that NIH and the National Science Foundation (NIH’s companion in the world of basic scientific research funding) need to be eviscerated and then reoriented away from life-saving scientific and medical research toward some destination not yet revealed. And while this effort has been racing forward, there has been almost no pushback from politicians—at least not yet.
One reason for this is that scientists are historically apolitical and, to be blunt, quite bad at the political game that dominates Washington, D.C. Scientists aren’t nearly as adept as others at advocating for themselves or their priorities to politicians who make funding decisions…
Trump, Musk and Kennedy don’t trust scientists or academia—and clearly don’t hear or recognize the immense value that the biomedical research enterprise brings to American progress.
The economic impact to states with large bioscience research centers would be enormous. Tennessee, for instance, would be devastated by the NIH cuts. Vanderbilt University Medical Center is one of the top research hospitals in America. It received nearly half a billion dollars in 2024 for medical research, the second most in the country. Its budget would be cut by more than 10 percent. Nearly 50,000 jobs and 4,000 businesses in Tennessee are dependent on the biosciences research enterprise in the state and would be severely impacted by the NIH cuts.
Other states, such as Missouri, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, would be similarly devastated by the cuts. Washington University in St. Louis received $717 million from NIH last year and would lose an estimated $108 million. The University of Michigan received $708 million and stands to see a cut of $119 million. Two Pennsylvania universities – the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pittsburgh – received nearly $1.3 billion and could lose $244 million. All of those add up to massive job losses and devastating impacts to each state’s economies.
But Trump, Musk and Kennedy don’t trust the scientific and medical research enterprise. They don’t hear the entreaties by scientists who merely want to do great work that benefits the greater good. And they don’t listen to those calls of bewilderment from scientific and medical research leaders that are falling on deaf ears. This could be happening because scientists are particularly bad at politics.
But it also could be that Trump, Musk and Kennedy are willing to destroy the most successful biomedical research enterprise the world has ever known simply because it is a direct way to harm elite academic institutions that they believe harbor leaders and academics who are ideologically opposed to their aims and politics.
And that is a dangerous story that every American needs to hear and fully take to heart right now—before the Trump administration capriciously destroys a hundred years of scientific and medical progress in a matter of weeks or months.
Jeff Nesbit was the assistant secretary for public affairs at Health and Human Services (which includes NIH) in the Biden administration, and the director of legislative and public affairs at NSF during the Bush and Obama administrations.
More than 2,000 positions related to global health are being cut from the Johns Hopkins University after the Baltimore institution saw $800 million in federal grants disappear, a spokesperson confirmed Thursday.
Hopkins’ medical school; the Bloomberg School of Public Health, including its Center for Communication Programs; and JHPIEGO, the university’s health initiative that focuses on global public health, will be affected by the cuts. USAID was the main funder for both JHPIEGO and CCP.
“This is a difficult day for our entire community. The termination of more than $800 million in USAID funding is now forcing us to wind down critical work here in Baltimore and internationally,” Hopkins’ spokesperson said in a statement.
The Trump administration, through advisor Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, is slashing federal spending across agencies in an effort to end wasteful spending. Such cuts have an outsized effect on Hopkins, which comes in first of all universities in federally funded research. By extension, those cuts affect Baltimore and Maryland, where Hopkins is the city and state’s largest largest private employer. Hopkins says it accounts for more than $15 billion in economic output in the state.
The funding cuts for research institutions are hurting universities in multiple states.
Who determines that basic research in science and medicine are unimportant?
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?”
ProPublica is an amazing investigative organization. They report on abuses of power, without fear or favor. This story explains why the DOGE cuts of personnel at the IRS will be very costly. People with complex tax returns like Elon Musk and Donald Trump are unlikely to be audited, as if anyone would dare to do so.
Andy Kroll of ProPublica reports:
Dave Nershi was finalizing a report he’d worked on for months when an ominous email appeared in his inbox.
Nershi had worked as a general engineer for the Internal Revenue Service for about nine months. He was one of hundreds of specialists inside the IRS who used their technical expertise — Nershi’s background is in chemical and nuclear engineering — to audit byzantine tax returns filed by large corporations and wealthy individuals. Until recently, the IRS had a shortage of these experts, and many complex tax returns went unscrutinized. With the help of people like Nershi, the IRS could recoup millions and sometimes more than a billion dollars on a single tax return.
But on Feb. 20, three months shy of finishing his probationary period and becoming a full-time employee, the IRS fired him. As a Navy veteran, Nershi loved working in public service and had hoped he might be spared from any mass firings. The unsigned email said he’d been fired for performance, even though he had received high marks from his manager.
As for the report he was finalizing, it would have probably recouped many times more than the low-six-figure salary he earned. The report would now go unfinished.
Nershi agreed that the federal government could be more lean and efficient, but he was befuddled by the decision to fire scores of highly skilled IRS specialists like him who, even by the logic of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, were an asset to the government. “By firing us, you’re going to cut down on how much revenue the country brings in,” Nershi said in an interview. “This was not about saving money.”
Since taking office, President Donald Trump and his billionaire top adviser Musk have launched an all-out blitz to cut costs and shrink the federal government. Trump, Musk and other administration leaders not only say the U.S. government is bloated and inefficient, but they also see it as a bastion of political opposition, calling it the “deep state.”
The strategy used by the Trump administration to reduce the size of government has been indiscriminate and far-reaching, meant to oust civil servants as fast as possible in as many agencies as possible while demoralizing the workers that remain on the job. As Russell Vought, director of the Trump White House’s Office of Management and Budget and an architect of Project 2025, put it in a speech first reported by ProPublica and Documented: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”
One tactic used by the administration is to target probationary workers who are easier to fire because they have fewer civil service protections. Probationary, in this context, means only that the employees are new to their roles, not that they’re newbies or underperformers. ProPublica found that the latest IRS firings swept up highly skilled and experienced probationary workers who had recently joined the government or had moved to a new position from a different agency.
In late February, the Trump administration began firing more than 6,000 IRS employees. The agency has been hit especially hard, current and former employees said, because it spent 2023 preparing to hire thousands of new enforcement and customer service personnel and had only started hiring and training those workers at any scale in 2024, meaning many of those new employees were still in their probationary period. Nershi was hired as part of this wave, in the spring of last year. The boost came after Congress had underfunded the agency for much of the past decade, which led to chronic staffing shortages, dismal customer service and plummeting audit rates, especially for taxpayers who earned $500,000 or more a year.
Unlike with other federal agencies, cutting the IRS means the government collects less money and finds fewer tax abuses. Economic studies have shown that for every dollar spent by the IRS, the agency returns between $5 and $12, depending on how much income the taxpayer declared. A 2024 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the IRS found savings of $13,000 for every additional hour spent auditing the tax returns of very wealthy taxpayers — a return on investment that “would leave Wall Street hedge fund managers drooling,” in the words of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
John Koskinen, who led the IRS from 2013 to 2017, said in an interview that the widespread cuts to the IRS make no sense if Trump and Musk genuinely care about fiscal responsibility and rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. “What I’ve never understood is if you’re interested in the deficit and curbing it, why would you cut back on the revenue side?” Koskinen said.
Neither the IRS nor the White House responded to requests for comment. Last month, Musk asked his followers on X, the platform he owns, whether they would “like @DOGE to audit the IRS,” referring to the U.S. DOGE Service team of lawyers and engineers led by him. DOGE employees have sought to gain access to IRS taxpayer data in an attempt to “shine a light on the fraud,” according to a White House spokesman.
For this story, ProPublica interviewed more than a dozen current and former IRS employees. Most of those people worked in the agency’s Large Business and International (LB&I) division, which audits companies with more than $10 million in assets and high-income individuals. Within the IRS, the LB&I division has the highest return on investment, and the widespread cuts there put in stark relief the human and financial cost of the Trump administration’s approach to slashing government functions in the name of saving money and combating waste and fraud.
According to current and former LB&I employees, the taxpayers they audited included pharmaceutical companies, oil and gas companies, construction firms and major technology corporations, as well as more obscure private corporations and high-net-worth individuals. None of the IRS employees who spoke to ProPublica would disclose specific taxpayer information, citing privacy laws.
With the recent influx in funding, employees said, the leadership of LB&I had pushed to hire not only more revenue agents and appraisers but also specialized employees such as petroleum engineers, computer scientists and experts in corporate partnerships. These employees, usually known internally as general engineers, consulted on complicated tax returns and helped determine whether taxpayers properly claimed certain credits or other tax breaks.
This work happened in cases where major companies claimed a hefty research tax credit, which is a legitimate avenue for seeking tax relief but can also be improperly used. Highly skilled appraisers have also recouped huge savings in cases involving notorious tax schemes, such as what’s known as a syndicated conservation easement — a break abused so often that both congressional Democrats and Republicans have criticized it, while the IRS has included it on its list of the “Dirty Dozen” tax scams.
“These are cases where revenue agents don’t have the technical expertise,” said one IRS engineer who is still employed at the agency and who, like other IRS employees, wasn’t authorized to speak to the media. “That’s what we do. We are working on things where expertise is absolutely necessary.”
Current and former IRS employees told ProPublica that the agency had expended a huge amount of resources to recruit and train new specialists in recent years. Vanessa Rollins, an engineer in the IRS’ Chicago office who was recently fired, said probationary employees in LB&I outnumbered full-time staffers in her office. Much of her team’s work centered on training and mentorship for the waves of new employees — most of whom were recently fired. “The entire office had been oriented around bringing us in and getting us trained,” Rollins said.
These specialists said they earned higher salaries compared with many other IRS employees. But the money these specialists recouped as a result of their work was orders of magnitude greater than what they cost. The current engineer told ProPublica that they estimated their team of less than 10 people had brought in $5 billion in adjusted tax returns over the past four years. (By contrast, a Wall Street Journal analysispublished on Feb. 22 found that DOGE had found savings of $2.6 billion over the next year, far less than the $55 billion claimed by DOGE itself.)
A former LB&I revenue agent added that their work didn’t always lead to the IRS recouping money from a taxpayer; sometimes, they audited a return only to find that the taxpayer was owed more money than they had expected.
“The IRS’ mission is to treat taxpayers fairly so they pay the tax they legally owe, including making sure they’re not paying any more than legally required,” the former revenue agent said.
Notwithstanding its return on investment and the sense of duty espoused by its employees, LB&I was hit especially hard by the most recent wave of firings, employees said. According to the current IRS engineer, the Trump administration appears to have eliminated the jobs of about 120 LB&I engineers out of a total of roughly 260. The person said they had heard more terminations were expected soon. The acting IRS chief and a longtime agency leader, Doug O’Donnell, announced his retirement amid the firings.
Several LB&I employees told ProPublica that the mass layoffs had been ordered from a very high level and that several layers of managers had no idea they were coming or what to expect. The cuts, employees said, did not appear to distinguish between employees with certain specialties or performance levels, but instead focused solely on whether they were on probationary status. “It didn’t matter the skill set. If they were under a year, they got cut,” another current LB&I employee told ProPublica.
The current and former IRS employees said the firings and the administration’s deferred resignation offer led to situations that have wiped out decades of experience and institutional knowledge that can’t easily be replaced. Jack McCumber was an LB&I senior appraiser in Seattle who got fired about six weeks before the end of his probationary status. He said not only did he lose his job, but the veteran appraiser who was his mentor took early retirement. McCumber and his mentor often worked on syndicated conservative easement cases that could recoup tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars. “They’re pushing out the experienced people, and they’re pushing out people like me,” McCumber said. “It’s a double whammy.”
The result, employees and experts said, will mean corporations and wealthy individuals face far less scrutiny when they file their tax returns, leading to more risk-taking and less money flowing into the U.S. treasury.
“Large businesses and higher-wealth individuals are where you have the most sophisticated taxpayers and the most sophisticated tax preparers and lawyers who are attuned to pushing the envelope as much as they can,” said Koskinen, the former IRS commissioner. “When those audits stop because there isn’t anybody to do them, people will say, ‘Hey, I did that last year, I’ll do it again this year.’”
“When you hamstring the IRS,” Koskinen added. “it’s just a tax cut for tax cheats.”
Trump enjoys doing things that no other President has ever done. Most of his “innovations” are efforts to make money. Selling meme coins, Bibles, sneakers, etc. Now he is selling Teslas at the White Hiuse to help his buddy Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. Things have not been going well for Tesla. Its stock price plummeted in recent weeks, after Musk became Trump’s hatchet man. Trump announced that he’s buying a Tesla to support Elon.
That’s right, rather than focus on egg prices or overall grocery prices or any of the things he promised American voters he would do to make their lives better, Trump is coming to the aid of Elon Musk, whose Tesla company has taken a beating in recent weeks. The reason for that beating stems from the fact that Musk – who, again, is the richest man in the world – has become the unelected co-president of the United States and is getting federal workers fired by the tens of thousands.
Turns out people don’t like that, and they don’t like him, and that has naturally led to people to not like Teslas.
Forbes reported Tuesday that “Tesla’s 2025 losses are staggering, as its nearly 45% year-to-date decline makes it the worst-performing company listed on the S&P 500.”
So Trump came to what he thinks is the aid of his biggest benefactor, the man the president put in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.Trump blames Tesla troubles on ‘Radical Left Lunatics,’ ‘illegal’ boycott
Trump posted on social media: “Elon Musk is ‘putting it on the line’ in order to help our Nation, and he is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! But the Radical Left Lunatics, as they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the World’s great automakers, and Elon’s ‘baby,’ in order to attack and do harm to Elon, and everything he stands for.”
If you still believe in capitalism, I’m not quite sure what an “illegal” boycott is, but whatever. Words don’t mean much these days.
Despite the multiple pledges by Trump and Republicans that they would never custodial Security, don’t believe them. Republicans opposed Social Security when it was created by FDR, and many still thinks it’s socialism, even though it’s not a handout. People have paid for it throughout their working like.
Thom Hartmann says they are looking for ways to cut Social Security but to do it quietly, so you hardly notice. Trump’s Chief budget-cutter Elon Musk doesn’t understand why anyone needs Social Security. He was recently interviewed by Joe Rogan and said that Social Security is “a Ponzi scheme.” It certainly is not. It’s not a grifter’s scheme to take people’s money. It pays out to everyone. Without it, very large numbers of older people would be impoverished.
Why would the world’s richest man know or care?
Hartmann warned:
The plan to “demolish” Social Security is underway right before our eyes: who will stop them?
The GOP’s plan to make Americans hate Social Security is well along in its execution. Their scheme — which they’ve been advancing in small increments for 44 years — is brilliantly simple: break the agency’s ability to respond to taxpayers, causing people to have to wait on the phone or travel for hours to stand in line for hours.
As complaints mount, Republicans will then point to the “broken Social Security Administration” and pitch a Medicare Advantage-like alternative: privatized “Social Security Advantage,” run by the big New York banks who are reliable GOP donors. Once a critical mass of seniors have moved from SS to the new privatized program, they’ll then just shut down legacy Social Security, arguing that “the free marketplace has spoken.”
The key to accelerating the process (Social Security’s administrative staff has been far too small for decades since Reagan first started cutting it) is a new demand from Trump’s acting Social Security Commissioner that the agency cut its workforce by fully fifty percent. Once that happens, all bets are off; the agency may not even be able to get checks out in a timely manner or process applications for new benefits, much less help SS recipients sign up or solve problems they may encounter.
As Congressman John Larson noted: “This is nothing more than a backdoor benefit cut and an insult to Americans who have paid into the system and earned their Social Security—all to pay for trillions in new tax cuts for the wealthy.”
Social Security Works president Nancy Altman was blunt: “Field offices around the country will close. Wait times for the 1-800 number will soar.” Larson added: “Let me be clear—laying off half of the workforce at the Social Security Administration and shuttering field offices will mean the delay, disruption, and denial of benefits.”
Meanwhile, Idaho’s Republican Senator Mike Crapo blocked Bernie Sanders’ attempt this week to give all seniors on Social Security a $2400 annual raise. Noting that the raise would be paid for by having people earning more than $250,000 a year start paying Social Security taxes on all their income above that amount (which is currently exempt from Social Security taxes), Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (a co-sponsor of the legislation) said, “The Social Security Expansion Act will protect the national treasure that is Social Security by extending the trust fund’s solvency for 75 years and expanding benefits by $2,400 a year so that everyone in America can retire with the security and dignity they deserve after a lifetime of hard work.”
But big banks and the morbidly rich object, and they own the GOP…
Diane Ravitch's blog 