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:
Trump signed an executive order declaring all state laws that address climate change to be null and void. He claims that efforts to protect the environment are a hindrance to energy production. So ignoring climate change is important to national security because we need oil and gas more than we need clean air and water.
Remember when Trump said he was eliminating the Departnent of Education because states should manage their own schools and the federal government should get out of the way? Why can’t states make decisions about clean air, clean water, and auto efficiency?
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.
Rex Huppke writes opinion columns for USA Today. In his latest column, he muses about Trump’s on balance as most Americans watch their retirement savings melt away.
He has a way of finding the humor in gut-wrenching events. Recently he has been writing about Trump’s demolition of the global economy. Don’t worry if your life savings is shrinking. Trump isn’t worried. Trump promises a future of plenty, someday. Trust him at your own risk.
It’s important to remember that Trump was never a successful businessman. He filed for bankruptcy six times. American banks would not lend him money because he was not credit-worthy. His “Trump University” was required by the courts to pay former students $25 million for defrauding them. People forget that he played a businessman on TV. If they knew that, they might be reluctant to support his decision to impose tariffs on every nation (except Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and Belarus.) He literally doesn’t know what he’s doing.
He thinks we should not have any deficits. I heard a law professor explain how crazy that idea is. He said, “I shop at my local grocery store and have spent thousands of dollars there. They don’t buy anything from me. I have a large trade deficit with that store.” Nuts.
Huppke writes:
While Americans reeled from watching the economy tank and their retirement accounts get slap-chopped, President Donald Trump – lover of tariffs, destroyer of economies, liar above all – spent the weekend golfing in Florida and hobnobbing with wealthy pals.
He was gracious enough to take a break from the links Saturday to tell Americans, via social media, to “HANG TOUGH.”
Thanks, buddy. As we await whatever fresh hell Monday’s stock market brings and brace for the global response to the ludicrous tariffs you slapped on pretty much everyone, including some random penguins, we’ll do our best to hang tough, comforted by the fact that you and your assorted weirdo billionaires had a lovely weekend.
Look, the let-them-eat-cake vibe of Trump golfing while our economy burns – he even posted a video of himself playing on one of his own stupid golf courses – is enough to put satirists out of work.Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.
And I’d almost be able to swallow the maddening absurdity of it all if Trump and his Republican barnacles would just straight up admit their galactic-level hypocrisy.
What if a Democratic president had done this?
None of what Trump is doing with tariffs is a surprise. He told us over and over that he was going to do this. He has repeatedly demonstrated that he doesn’t care about anyone other than himself.
So, of course, he has ignorantly unleashed tariffs that are upending the world trade order and making everyone hate us. Anyone surprised by this insanity hasn’t been paying attention.
But imagine an America where a Democratic president got fixated on tariffs while clearly not understanding how tariffs work. An America where that Democratic president needlessly triggered a trade war, watched the stock market plummet for two days, then trotted off for a golf weekend during which he profited off people partying at his resort.
Would Fox News preach patience if a Democrat tanked the economy?
And let’s say this Democratic president has a weirdo rich pal he named Treasury secretary, and that guy – who’s worth a cool half-billion at least – went on TV and shrugged off the idea that Americans thinking about retiring are worried about the tariffs fallout.
In this scenario, Republicans would have already impeached the Democratic president – twice. Pitchfork sales among right-leaning Americans would have skyrocketed, and the Treasury secretary would have had to flee the country. Fox News would have wall-to-wall coverage painting this hypothetical president as a literal demon and demanding he step down because he’s insane or a communist or both.
That would bring a third impeachment from Republicans, and Fox News itself, along with the entire right-wing media ecosystem, would explode with enough ferocity to open a portal to another dimension.
Imagine if Biden did even a fraction of the damage Trump has done.
That hypothetical is 1,000% accurate. You know it. I know it. Republicans know it, and Fox News sure as hell knows it.
If Joe Biden, as president, intentionally murdered the stock market, it would have ended his presidency. Period. Biden, instead, made our economy the envy of the world and Republicans still wanted to end his presidency. So don’t tell me any of what Trump is doing would be even momentarily tolerated if Trump were a Democrat.
This point is not debatable.
I’m sick of people shrugging off GOP hypocrisy – they need to own it
So all I ask, as my 401(k) shrivels like a raisin and rich jerks keep telling me to suck it up, is that Trump and his Republican bootlickers and all the little goobers on Fox News and Newsmax and the Illustrious King Trump Mighty Genius Appreciation Network (I might’ve made that last one up) muster the decency to admit they’re giant freakin’ hypocrites.
I’m talking about apex hypocrites. These are unrivaled practitioners of the dark art of hypocrisy.
And they need to own it.
Better to be poor and honest than poor and a liar, right?
C’mon, tough guys. Show a modicum of courage and tell us what we already know.
What do you have to lose? Your guy is in charge. He’s taking a wrecking ball to America, and there’s little people like me can do other than come up with clever opposition slogans for protest signs.
As the markets crash and the imaginary factories Trump keeps babbling about never come and regular Americans start Googling recipes that can stretch a pack of bologna out for a full week, Republicans need to say it loud and say it proud: “We are total hypocrites and we’re only OK with this mess because a Republican created it!”
You may end up as broke as the rest of us, but at least you’ll be able to tell your pauper children that, in the end, you were honest.
Do it, you cowards.
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.
The Washington Post editorial board warned that Robert Kennedy’s deep cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services will damage the economy. They will also damage the nation’s health. Kennedy is not laying off paper-pushing bureaucrats. He is firing scientists and closing divisions working on drugs and cures for dangerous diseases and conditions.
The editorial board wrote:
The market took no time to weigh in on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s mass layoffs at the nation’s health agencies. As Health and Human Services employees arrived to work on Tuesday to discover their badges no longer worked, stock prices for health-care and biotech companies plunged. By the end of the day, the S&P’s index for the pharmaceutical industry had dropped 4 percent.
This should be a warning to the new HHS secretary and President Donald Trump: The employees of these institutions are as essential to the U.S. economy as they are to public health.
HHS officials have defended their planned 25 percent reduction in force (affecting about 20,000 employees) as a means to achieve efficiency. They claim it will save taxpayers about $1.8 billion annually. But this amount — minuscule relative to the multitrillion-dollar federal budget — could be wiped out by the economic damage that comes from discarding broad institutional knowledge.
The Food and Drug Administration, for instance, is slated to shed 3,500 staffers, or about 19 percent of its workforce. Among those who received layoff notices on Tuesday were many experts who assist with reviews at the Office of New Drugs. The director of this office, Peter Stein, resigned after being reassigned to patient affairs. Other top leaders have also been pushed out, including Hilary Marston, the FDA’s chief medical officer, and Peter Marks, its highest-ranking vaccine scientist.
HHS insists these layoffs will not weaken the agency’s core functions, especially drug approvals — but given how many high-level positions now sit vacant, this is hard to believe. Scott Gottlieb, who was FDA commissioner during Trump’s first term, said on X that the “barrage” threatens to bring “frustrating delays for American consumers, particularly affecting rare diseases and areas of significant unmet medical need.”
The National Institutes of Health, a sturdy engine of biomedical innovation, also saw many of its leaders defenestrated. Directors of at least four of the 27 institutes that make up the agency were removed from their posts, including Jeanne Marrazzo, the country’s most senior infectious-diseases official.
Meanwhile, hundreds of other layoffs at the agency’s research centers threaten to diminish its scientific prowess. The National Human Genome Research Institute, for one, which has made countless discoveries about the roles genes play in diseases, lost dozens of staffers as well as its acting chief, Vence L. Bonham Jr., who was installed just last month.
This turmoil comes amid the administration’s attempt to slash funding that NIH provides to outside research institutions. The administration seems not to care about U.S. investments in science that have been essential to building and maintaining a strong economy.
Equally concerning is what these layoffs could mean for public health. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is set to lose 2,400 workers (an 18 percent reduction in staff), HHS cost-cutters have erased entire offices, including those dedicated to curbing HIV, tuberculosis, tobacco use, lead poisoning, substance abuse, birth defects and many other health threats. Kennedy — who also laid off many of the department’s communications staffers — has provided little rationale for any of these cuts. But if his goal is to save money, this is the wrong strategy. By keeping health-care costs down, public health programs often bring substantial returns on investment.
What makes these risky cuts especially baffling is that they’re being made only a few years after the covid-19 pandemic taught Americans about the need for a strong public health system, and amid the worst domestic measles outbreak in years. Bird flu also has begun spreading to humans — yet among those laid off were nearly all of the leading staffers at the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, which is assisting the government with its bird flu response.
It’s true that HHS’s vast bureaucracy has long needed serious — even radical — reforms to eliminate waste and make its agencies more effective. The CDC often acted clumsily during the pandemic and struggled to communicate effectively with the public. And although the FDA was streamlined during the Biden administration, it could use innovative ideas to energize its food division — perhaps by making it a stand-alone agency.
But the job cuts this week do not amount to efficient reform. The Trump administration has shown great skill at “moving fast and breaking things,” to borrow the motto used by chief bureaucracy-smasher Elon Musk. But Trump and Kennedy should remember, too, that when “you break it, you buy it.” The damage they do to the country’s public health and biomedical research infrastructure is their responsibility, and they will bear the political consequences.
Andrew Tobias writes about the stock market, politics, and life in general. In this column, he echoes what I have long believed. Wherever Trump goes, chaos follows. I am undecided about the reason for this phenomenon. On one hand, I think Trump loves chaos because he wants all eyes to be on him all the time. As a malignant narcissist, he demands your full attention so he creates a daily distraction–like renaming the Gulf of Mexico–or a daily disaster–like slapping tariffs on every other nation (except Russia and Belarus) and crashing the global economy. He is an overgrown 3-year-old whose narcissism, bigotry, and ignorance of the Constitution or history are destroying our government, our values, and the world’s respect for our nation.
Condensed from the Winnipeg Free Press:
Chaos follows Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’
. . . Trump claims that the U.S. is being raped and pillaged — his words — by foreign nations, that Americans were subsidizing economies all over the world, because Americans buy more foreign products than foreign nations buy American.
But there’s a clear problem with that analysis. A trade deficit is not a debt or a subsidy.
Let’s say you want a good sandwich. Bob can make it better or more cheaply or more conveniently than you can.
You pay Bob $5. Bob hands you your sandwich.
Yes, Bob gets your money, but you get the sandwich you wanted at the price you were willing to pay. You arguably have a $5 trade deficit with Bob, because Bob didn’t buy anything from you.
Donald Trump would argue that you’re propping Bob up with a $5 subsidy.
But you didn’t subsidize Bob. Bob did not steal anything from you. You didn’t give Bob a gift — you chose to buy his sandwich for your own reasons.
Much the way Americans have chosen to buy products from Canada or any other nation — because the value or quality was worth the money.
Trump has decided to add a tariff, a tax on Bob’s sandwiches.
A host of economists have suggested what’s likely to come next — significant inflation for American consumers, chaos in the global supply chain, and, most likely, layoffs and business closures. Stock markets are already delivering their verdicts.
The irony is that, as president, Trump’s ability to levy tariffs is tangential at best — he has had to manufacture emergencies to justify his actions. And there’s been a gross failure by the legislative branch in the United States to rein him in and represent the interests of their own constituents.
The real question now is whether anyone in America will stand up to him.
The damage to Canada’s relationship is obvious and will be long-lasting — one can only imagine what that damage will be to the reputation of the U.S. globally.
The damage to America — and Americans — may be incalculable.
Tobias continues:
Which is why so many Americans joined more than 1,200 protests throughout the country yesterday, many carrying home-made signs like this one:
Mine said:
NATO NOT PUTIN
on the front and . . .
. . on the back.
There were lots about Social Security and Medicare and Veterans and Fascists and . . .
LEASH YOUR DOGE
One of my favorites summed it up:
WAY TOO MUCH FOR ONE SIGN
Inflation rising, recession looming, stocks plunging, measles spreading, medical research slashed . . . and tariffs slapped on islands from whom we import nothing (including the one with only penguins) . . . but not on Russia (from whom we imported $3.27 billion worth of goods last year).
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.
Yesterday after the stock market closed, Trump held a press conference to announce his much-ballyhooed tariff plan. He used the opportunity to insult other nations, as is his custom. Commentators noted that he slapped tariffs on uninhabited islands. Trump believes that the greatest period in the American economy ended in 1913, when the federal government adopted the income tax. When I was a junior in high school in high school, I learned that the enactment of a federal income tax was progressive because it reduced the vast gap between the very rich and everyone else. I also learned about the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, which set off a global trade war and contributed to the Great Depression. Apparently, these topics were not taught in Trump’s elite military academy. His history classes must have been taught from the perspective of the robber barons.
President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he will impose a new 10 percent tariff on all imported goods along with higher import taxes tailored for each of about 60 countries that his advisers say maintain the largest barriers against U.S. products, in a sharp turn toward the kind of protectionism that the United States abandoned nearly a century ago.
To impose the new tariffs, the president declared a national emergency, citing the annual merchandise trade deficit that the United States has run each year since 1975.
“For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike,” Trump said. “But it is not going to happen anymore.”
The tariff increases that the president announced had little modern precedent and would erect towering impediments to products from dozens of foreign countries, many of them poor nations that embraced exporting as a tool to escape grinding poverty….
Speaking in blunt, sometimes intemperate language, the president assailed the nation’s trading partners, including some of its closest allies, as “foreign cheaters” and “foreign scavengers” who had “ripped off Americans” for 50 years. Trump’s tone echoed the dark portrait of “American carnage” that he had sketched in his first inaugural address in 2017….
“In the short run, the effect is probably a recession. It’s going to raise the price of so many goods that can’t be made in the United States,” said economist Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations. “In the long run, it’s a vision of the U.S. that is very isolated from the world.”
Jay Timmons, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, warned that his members operate on thin profit margins and cannot absorb the tariffs. Small businesses and restaurant owners issued statements decrying their added costs.
“This is catastrophic for American families,” said Matt Priest, president of the Footwear Retailers and Distributers of America.
********************************
Daniel Dale of CNN fact-checked only a few of Trump’s outlandish statements during his press conference about his tariffs. He imposed tariffs on uninhabited islands, populated only by penguins.
President Donald Trump made a series of false claims about tariffs and trade – most of which he has made before – in the Wednesday speech in which he announced a sweeping set of global tariffs.
Here is a fact check of some of Trump’s remarks.
Trump correctly noted that Canada has tariffs exceeding 250% on some US dairy products. However, he falsely claimed that merely “the first little carton of milk” exported to Canada faces a “very low price,” but “then it gets up to 275, 300%.”null
In reality, Canada has guaranteed that tens of thousands of metric tons of imported US milk per year, not merely a single carton, will face zero tariffs at all; Canada conceded a certain guaranteed level of tariff-free US access to its dairy market as part of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) that Trump’s own first administration negotiated.
Trump also didn’t mention something the US dairy industry acknowledges: The US is not hitting its zero-tariff maximum level of exports to Canada in any category of dairy product, so the Canadian tariffs aren’t being applied; with regard to milk in particular, the US isn’t even at half of the tariff-free quota. (There is a vigorous US-Canada debate about why the US is so far from the maximum, with each country blaming the other. Regardless of who’s right, the tariffs aren’t hitting US milk.)
Trump has persistently omitted key facts about Canada’s dairy tariffs. You can read more here from a previous CNN fact check.
Trump, claiming “we subsidize a lot of countries,” falsely said “it’s close to $200 billion a year” with Canada. Trump has repeatedly used this $200 billion figure to describe the US trade deficit with Canada in particular, which is actually far lower than $200 billion; official US statistics show the 2024 deficit with Canada in goods and services trade was $35.7 billion and $70.6 billion in goods trade alone.
Trump didn’t mention the trade deficit in particular this time, but even if he was intending to use the word “subsidize” more broadly, there is no basis for the claim.
Trump repeated his frequent false claim that, because of the tariffs he imposed on China during his first term, the US “took in hundreds of billions of dollars” that “they paid.” In fact, US importers, not foreign exporters like China,make the tariff payments, andstudy after studyhas found that Americans bore the overwhelming majority of the cost of Trump’s first-term tariffs on China; it’s easy to findspecific examplesof companies that passed along the cost of the tariffs to US consumers.
Trump also repeated his frequent false claim that, before his first presidency, China “never paid 10 cents to any other president” from tariffs. Aside from the fact that US importers make the tariff payments, the US was actuallygenerating billions per year in revenuefrom tariffs on Chinese imports before Trump took office; in fact, the US has had tariffs on Chinese imports since1789. Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama,imposed additional tariffson Chinese goods.
Touting the supposed benefits of tariffs, Trump claimed that “the United States was proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been” from 1789 to 1913, when tariffs made up a higher percentage of federal revenue before the passage of a 1913 law reestablishing the federal income tax.
Trump didn’t explain what he meant by “proportionately the wealthiest,” but by standard measures, the US is far wealthier today than it was in the early 20th century and prior. Per capita gross domestic product isnow many times higherthan it was then.
Douglas Irwin, a Dartmouth College economics professor who studies the history of US trade policy, said in February after Trump had made similar claims, that if Trump’s unclear comments are interpreted to be about per capita income, as “economists usually take this,” it is “obviously not true,” since “real per capita income and standards of living are so much higher today than the past. … It is nice to have indoor plumbing, running water, not outhouses, etc.”
This is only part of the article. Open the link to finish reading. Dale reviews inflation, the cost of gasoline, and other issues.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/21/doge-government-efficiency-federal-workers/
A senior aide to President Donald Trump once said the administration hoped to traumatize civil servants, an objective it has handily accomplished through arbitrary layoffs and other indignities. But government workers are not the only victims.
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Taxpayer dollars are being abused, too, as the “Department of Government Efficiency” makes the federal government almost comically inefficient.
I’ve spent the past few weeks interviewing frustrated civil servants, whose remarks typically rotate through panic, rage and black humor. Almost none are willing to speak on the record because of concerns about purges by the U.S. DOGE Service. But their themes are easy to corroborate: Routine tasks take longer to complete, grinding down worker productivity. DOGE is also bogging down employees with meaningless busywork, which sets them up to be punished for neglecting their actual duties.
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For example, many have been diverted away from their usual responsibilities in order to scrub forbidden words from agency documents, as part of Trump’s crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
“All this talk of warfighter ethos, and our ‘priority’ is making sure there are no three-year-old tweets with the word ‘diversity’ in them,” said a Pentagon employee. “Crazy town.”
What counts as DEI wrongthink also changes almost daily, meaning employees must perform the same word-cleansing tasks repeatedly.
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One NASA employee said they were asked multiple times to scour performance plans and contracts for offending terms. The first sanitization came shortly after Trump’s Day 1 executive order regarding DEI, and resulted in deleting references to “diversity” and “equity.” Weeks later, more banned words (“environmental justice,” “socioeconomic”) were identified, and the scrubbing began anew. Mere hours after that, someone in upper management emailed staff again to say those new deletion orders were “not NASA policy and should not be used,” and told workers to simply check the contracts for compliance with the executive order.
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Whatever that means. Meanwhile, NASA’s real work languishes.
Another Kafkaesque executive order requires agency heads to send the White House a list, within 60 days, of their agency’s “unconstitutional regulations” — the ultimate “When did you stop beating your wife?”-style directive.
“Obviously, no agency is going to say, ‘Whoops! You caught me! I wrote that unconstitutional regulation and had it approved through [the Office of Management and Budget] before you asked me. Sorry!’” a Department of Health and Human Services employee told me. Agencies are weighing whether to affirm everything on their books as being constitutional or offer up some token regulations as tribute. Both options could attract further retaliation.
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Meanwhile, some federal payments have stopped. Credit cards used for routine purchases have been canceled or had their limits shrunk to $1. Contracts are being arbitrarily canceled midway through. DOGE officials appear to wrongly believe this saves money.
But there are costs to, say, not feeding the Transportation Security Administration’s bomb-sniffing dogs. And if contracts lapse when they could have been easily extended, projects must restart the time-consuming and expensive bid process. Again, this stops other critical work, costing both the government and the public.
At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, no contracts may be initiated or extended without sign-off from the commerce secretary, creating a bottleneck. One NOAA contract that expires soon is for maintenance and repair of the all-hazards weather radio network, which broadcasts tornado warnings and watches, among other life-and-death alerts. The contract has been stuck in limbo, just as an already-deadly tornado season is getting underway.
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“They’re like a kid in a nuclear power plant running around hitting buttons,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service(which actually focuses on government efficiency), when asked about DOGE’s measures. “They have no sense of the cascade of consequences they’re causing.”
These new directives are not only wasting government manpower and taxpayer dollars. They’re also resulting in worse services for Americans.
The Social Security Administration announced on Tuesday that it will require millions of people to visit their regional office in person to file claims (or use an online system that retirees might have trouble navigating) rather than by phone, as beneficiaries had been able to do. Meanwhile, the agency is laying off workers and closing those field offices. If you’re one of the unlucky Americans whom the agency has prematurely labeled “dead,” good luck getting your benefits reinstated.
The IRS, meanwhile, is deleting all non-English forms and notices, employees were told this week. This will mean less taxpayer compliance and more work for employees. Lose-lose, if you’re trying to keep the government efficiently run.
These days, that’s a big “if.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 