Greg Toppo: Education Researchers “Stunned” by Sudden Cancelled Contracts

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2025 //
16

Greg Toppo was the chief education journalist for USA Today. He is now a senior correspondent for The 74, where this story appeared.

The DOGE team visited the Institte for Education Sciencesand canceled scores of contracts for education research. It was widely assumed that the studies had some relation to diversity, equity, or inclusion, which Trump has vowed to stamp out. But Toppo says a far broader range of subjects was canceled.

Never before has any administration censored which topics could be studied. Trump’s prejudices now define what is NOT a proper object of study.

The DOGE agents who canceled the contracts did not have the time to read them, nor is any of them knowledgeable about education research. Either they looked for trigger words or they decided to cancel all education research.

Toppo wrote:

When the director of a small regional science nonprofit sat down last week to pay a few bills, she got a shock. 

In the fall, the group won a National Science Foundation grant of nearly $1.5 million to teach elementary and middle-schoolers about climate-related issues in the U.S. Gulf Coast. The eagerly anticipated award came through NSF’s Racial Equity in STEM Education program.

But when she checked her NSF funding dashboard, the balance was $1.

Educators and researchers nationwide have been suffering similar shocks as the Trump administration raises a microscope — and in some cases an ax — to billions of dollars in federal research grants and contracts. On Monday, it said it had canceled dozens of Institute of Education Sciences contracts, worth an estimated $881 million and covering nearly the institute’s entire research portfolio, according to several sources. 

Last week, the NSF began combing through billions of dollars in already-awarded grants in search of keywords that imply the researchers address gender ideology, diversity, equity and inclusion — all themes opposed by the administration….

Interviews with more than a dozen key stakeholders found that researchers with studies already in the field are being forced to suddenly pause their research, not knowing if or when it will resume. Nearly all spoke only on condition of anonymity, fearing that speaking out publicly could jeopardize future funding.

While the administration has said the moves are an attempt to rein in federal spending that doesn’t comport with its priorities and values, it has offered no explanation for cuts to bedrock, non-political research around topics like math, literacy, school attendance, school quality and student mental health.

Categories Education Reform

Florida: Vouchers Are Helping Affluent Families Pay Private School Tuition

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2025 //
6

Annie Martin and Leslie Postal of the Orlando Sentinel have repeatedly exposed the fraud baked into Florida’s voucher program. It began in 1999 with the modest ambition of offering choice to low-income students in “failing schools.” It expanded to provide vouchers for students with disabilities. In past articles, they surveyed voucher schools and identified academic deficiencies, such as uncertified teachers and principals, and Bible-based textbooks. Now, they report on what happened after the state removed all income limits in 2023. Florida now offers money for all students, regardless of family income.

Most of the students getting the voucher money are not low-income, do not have disabilities, and are not escaping bad public schools.

The students getting vouchers are already enrolled in private schools. They don’t need the extra money but they are happy to take it.

They write:

A block from Winter Park’s tony Park Avenue sits St. Margaret Mary Catholic School, where tuition can top $14,000 a year for a K-8 education.

But at this school in the heart of one of Central Florida’s wealthiest communities, about 98 percent of students used taxpayer-funded scholarships worth roughly $8,000 to help pay tuition last year.

Only three percent of St. Margaret Mary’s students got that state financial aid just one year earlier.

The change – repeated at schools around the state – is one powerful measure of how a 2023 Florida law has supercharged a school voucher initiative that was already the nation’s largest.

Once reserved for low-income students and those with disabilities, state scholarships, often called vouchers, are now available to all – and they’re fueling an unprecedented pipeline of public money, estimated at $3.4 billion this year, into private, mostly religious schools across the Sunshine State.

All that money is doing more than just expanding Florida’s voucher program. The new rules are transforming it.

Since their emergence as a conservative educational talking point four decades ago, vouchers have been pitched as a way to provide “school choice” – the opportunity for families who couldn’t otherwise afford private education to escape a substandard neighborhood public school.

But when lawmakers dropped the income limits on Florida’s programs, the key element of the 2023 law, the system became something else:

Choice for lower-income families plus a wide-open taxpayer subsidy for the better off.
More than 122,000 new students started using vouchers for the first time in the 2023-24 school year, and nearly 70 percent were already in private school, many in some of Florida’s priciest institutions, according to data from Step Up For Students, the nonprofit that administers most of the state’s scholarships. About 40 percent came from families too wealthy to have qualified previously.

So in many cases the new law did not expand these new families’ options. Instead, it provided state subsidies for the choices they had previously made and were able to afford on their own.

The implications of that shift are vast, an Orlando Sentinel analysis has found.

• Voucher use has jumped by 67% since the new law was approved.
• Individual private schools are seeing even bigger surges, creating new reliance on taxpayer funding. The Sentinel found nearly 250 schools where the number of students using vouchers jumped by at least 100 children in the first year after the law changed. At St. Margaret Mary, the growth pushed total annual voucher funding from $65,000 to $3.5 million – in just one example of the multi-million dollar windfalls.
• A significant amount of the money is flowing to Florida’s most expensive private schools, many of which served few voucher students in the past: Campuses that advertise annual tuition of $15,000 or more added more than 30,000 voucher students last year.
• The proportion of private school students with state scholarships has topped 70% this school year. Ten years ago it was less than a third.
• More Florida students use vouchers — a total of 352,860 — to attend private campuses than are enrolled in public schools in Osceola, Orange and Seminole counties combined.

Program critics say Florida is now spending an inordinate amount of its education resources on the wrong people – rather than focusing on system improvements that would be good for all students.


“This is just a subsidy for wealthier people — people who already have the advantage,” said state Rep. Kelly Skidmore, a Democrat from Boca Raton who voted against the expansion.


Skidmore is among those who fear the impact of the voucher explosion on public schools – which are losing money as students shift to private education – and the implications of handing millions in taxpayer dollars to private schools over which the state has little control.


These schools are free, as the Sentinel has reported previously, to hire teachers without college degrees, teach history and science lessons outside mainstream academics and discriminate against LGBTQ students and staff. They do not face the same accountability requirements as their public counterparts, whose students’ test scores and graduation rates are publicly reported. Without such numbers for private schools, it’s difficult to assess the impact of Florida’s voucher program on the quality of education students receive.

Nevertheless, the voucher push shows no signs of abating, with more than 10% of all K-12 students in Florida now receiving the subsidy.

On Jan. 10, Gov. Ron DeSantis celebrated Florida’s “choice revolution” at Trinity Christian Academy in Jacksonville, which now enrolls more than 1,200 voucher students.

“The debate about school choice I think is over. Clearly you’re better offering choice than not offering choice,” DeSantis said.

An Orlando mother of four sent them to The First Academy, affiliated with First Baptist Church of Orlando, where high school tuition is more than $24,000 a year. Nearly 90% of the students use vouchers now, up from about 20% two years ago. She paid the full cost for her two oldest, who graduated, and can afford to pay for her two youngest, but is delighted to take the state subsidy.

Florida is spending $3.4 billion annually to subsidize the state’s most affluent families.

Is it surprising that Florida’s NAEP scores fell to their lowest point in 20 years? The state is not investing in its public schools, which enroll the overwhelming majority of its students.

Categories DeSantis, Education Industry, Ethics, Florida, Funding, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Segregation, Vouchers

NYC: Top Federal Prosecutors Quit to Protest Trump Demand to Drop Charges Against Mayor Adams

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2025 //
8

Facing multiple criminal charges for corrupt activities, Mayor Eric Adams flew to Mar-A-Lago to discuss his problems with Trump. Adams agreed not to impede ICE roundups. Trump ordered the federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York to drop the charges and not to investigate Adams any more. This office–the SDNY– has a sterling reputation for its independence from politics.

The top prosecutors resigned, rather than follow Trump’s order. Among the resignations was that of Danielle Sassoon, whom Trump had appointed as the acting U.S. Attorney on January 21, the day after his inauguration. Sassoon is a 38-year-old conservative Republican, a member of the Federalist Society. She clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia. Her devotion to the law was stronger than her loyalty to Trump, so she tendered her resignation.

The Wall Street Journal reported:

NEW YORK—The Justice Department’s order to dismiss charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams triggered a series of resignations Thursday and ignited a feud between top Trump appointees and career prosecutors.

The departures started with Danielle Sassoon, a longtime federal prosecutor who refused to comply with the demand to drop the Adams case. President Trump had elevated Sassoon to be the acting Manhattan U.S. attorney after he took office. 

Others followed suit, including Kevin Driscoll, the senior-most career official in the Justice Department’s criminal division, and John Keller, head of the department’s public-integrity section. They left when it became clear they would be ordered to dismiss the case after Sassoon refused, people familiar with the matter said. Three other supervisors in the Justice Department’s public-integrity unit also resigned Thursday, one of the people said.

Sassoon wrote in a letter Wednesday to Emil Bove, the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department: “Because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged, I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations.”

Bove shot back in a letter Thursday saying he had stripped the Adams case from the New York office and criticizing her for disobeying orders. He said he was putting two main Adams prosecutors on leave and opening an investigation into their conduct—and Sassoon’s.

“Under your leadership, the office has demonstrated itself to be incapable of fairly and impartially reviewing the circumstances of this prosecution,” Bove wrote.

“The Justice Department will not tolerate the insubordination and apparent misconduct reflected in the approach that you and your office have taken in this matter,” he wrote. Both letters were viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Sassoon is a profile in courage.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Ethics, Justice, New York City, Politics, Trump

Diseases Eliminated by Science or RFK Jr. or Prayer

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2025 //
15

I borrowed this from Andrea Junker at BlueSky:

DISEASES ERADICATED OR DECIMATED BY SCIENCE:

  1. Chickenpox
  2. Diphtheria
  3. Measles
  4. Pertussis
  5. Pneumococcal Infection
  6. Polio
  7. Tetanus
  8. Typhoid
  9. Yellow Fever
  10. Smallpox

DISEASES ERADICATED OR DECIMATED BY RFK JR. OR PRAYER:
1.


    1. 4.
      5.
      6.
      7.
      8.
      9.
Categories Health, Religion, Science

Senate Confirms Dangerous Zealot RFK Jr. to Lead HHS

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2025 //
21

Of all of Trump’s choices for his Cabinet, the most dangerous by far is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy has a long and well-established record as a vaccine opponent. The media usually refer to him as a vaccine “skeptic,” but he is far more than a skeptic. He has claimed that vaccines cause autism and that vaccines cause the very diseases they are supposed to prevent.

He opposes fluoridating the water, despite established evidence that fluoridated water dramatically improves dental health.

He has been quick to reject science, although he is neither a doctor nor a scientist.

He promised the senators that he would not oppose vaccines, but promises mean nothing as compared to decades of anti-vaccine advocacy.

Did he have a conversion experience? Did he wake up on the morning of his Senate hearings and decide that he had been wrong for 30 years?

After the lies about abortion told to the Senate by Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett, you would think the Senators would refuse to be fooled again. Not so.

If Kennedy resumes his hatred of vaccines, if he cancels clinical trials and research, people will die.

He was the worst possible choice for secretary of Health and Human Services.

Eating healthy foods is great.

Taking on the political power of Big Pharma is great.

Denying access to vaccines is madness.

“It will be a disaster for public health,” said Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious disease physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “He has fixed, immutable, science-resistant beliefs. This country will suffer under his leadership.”

Mitch McConnell, a polio survivor, was the only Republican to vote against RFK.

McConnell said polio vaccines have saved millions of lives and their proven value shouldn’t be relitigated. 

HHS “deserves a leader who is willing to acknowledge without qualification the efficacy of lifesaving vaccines and who can demonstrate an understanding of basic elements of the U.S. healthcare system,” McConnell said.

Kennedy has blamed autism on vaccines, though many studies have found there isn’t a link. He has said the Covid-19 vaccines were the deadliest ever made. 

After it emerged he could hold a prominent health role in a Trump administration, Kennedy moderated his statements about the shots, saying he didn’t want to take them away. 

Of course he wouldn’t take them away, but he might make them voluntary, which would not halt the spread of epidemics.

He told many senators during meetings that he isn’t antivaccine but simply wants good data to support shots.

He “wants good data” means that he is not yet persuaded, despite decades of evidence, that vaccines protect children against many communicable diseases. The data is good enough for doctors who know far more than Kennedy. What will it take to persuade him?

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R., La.), a medical doctor, said he agreed to vote for Kennedy in exchange for a commitment to keep current federal vaccine recommendations, among other pledges.

The senators have learned nothing. They believe that a leopard can change its spots. They have been fooled again and again.

Categories Extremism, Health, Trump

Trump Takes Charge of the Kennedy Center

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2025 //
19

Trump doesn’t understand the arts. There is no evidence that he has ever been interested in the arts. He doesn’t understand that the arts by their nature are cutting-edge. They take us to imaginative worlds we knew nothing about. They expand our horizons. We can see and love Beethoven, Bach, and Shakespeare, but artists today are living in the 21st century and they express what they think and feel now. They introduce us to new worlds.

Trump took control of the Kennedy Center in D.C., one of the greatest venues for the arts in the world. He had to because every year at the awards ceremony, the artists laughed at him. They ridiculed him. They treated him as an enemy, which indeed he was.

Now that Trump appointed himself as chair of the board, he changed the composition of the board. What was once a bipartisan board, divided equally among Democrats and Republicans, is now 100% all-Trump.

The only way he could stifle those annoying artists was to make himself the chair of the board! No more laughing at Trump! With Trump in charge, no drag shows! Nothing about race or gender! Nothing transgressive! Trump has a track record of destroying whatever he touches. He may destroy the Kennedy Cenrer. Just for spite.

Trump is a vulgarian. He despises artistic freedom. He hates drag shows. He despises WOKE culture. Art is often woke. Ibsen was woke. Most artists are woke.

The President of the Kennedy Center, Deborah Rutter, saw the handwriting on the wall. She resigned, as of December 31, 2025. She will leave sooner now that Trump runs her agency.

She did not understand the tsunami about to hit the Kennedy Center.

Playbill (the Broadway publication) tells the story. If you care about artistic freedom, it’s horrifying.

President Donald Trump has been elected as chairman of the board at the Kennedy Center, after replacing board members appointed by former President Joe Biden with his own loyalists. The board members took a vote and named Trump chair in a meeting held Wednesday afternoon. In response, Kennedy Center President Deborah Rutter has announced that she is stepping down from the organization effective immediately. Rutter announced two weeks ago that she would stay in her position until the end of the year, but it seems the recent turmoil at the Washington, D.C. arts organization led to her early departure.

Trump has named loyalist Richard Grenell as interim Kennedy Center President. Grenell, currently the special presidential envoy for special missions, does not appear to have any background in the arts or arts administration. The role of president is typically tasked with the institution’s programming choices, while the chair and the board usually acts in an advisory capacity (though that will likely no longer be the case considering Trump’s strong language for what he plans for the organization).

Rutter, who had held her position since 2014, released a statement before she departed, about the importance of artistic freedom: “Much like our democracy itself, artistic expression must be nurtured, fostered, prioritized, and protected. It is not a passive endeavor; indeed, there is no clearer sign of American democracy at work than our artists, the work they produce, and audiences’ unalienable right to actively participate.”

Trump, who in previous statements vowed to ban drag shows from the venue, wrote on Wednesday on Truth Social: “It is a great honor to be chairman of The Kennedy Center, especially with this amazing Board of Trustees. We will make The Kennedy Center a very special and exciting place!” Historically, the Kennedy Center’s board had been made up of an equal number of Democrats and Republicans. The new board is made up entirely of Trump appointees—including Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles and Usha Vance, the wife of Vice President JD Vance. There are 14 new members, with 31 total members.

According to CBS news, Trump also plans to ban “woke culture” from the Kennedy Center.

“Throughout our history, the Kennedy Center has enjoyed strong support from members of congress and their staffs—Republicans, Democrats, and Independents,” reads a statement from The Kennedy Center released on news of the board members’ termination last week. “Since our doors opened in 1971, we have had a collaborative relationship with every presidential administration. Since that time, the Kennedy Center has had a bi-partisan board of trustees that has supported the arts in a non-partisan fashion.”

Though it is a non-profit institution, only a small portion of the Kennedy Center’s budget comes from the federal government. As the venue’s previous statement shares, the institution “is supported by federal annual appropriations for upkeep and maintenance of the building as a federal memorial, or approximately 16% of the total operating budget.” Its artistic programming, on the other hand, is maintained through “ticket sales, donations, rental income, and other revenue sources.” 

Since his return to the White House, Trump has taken a more controlling approach to the arts. He has also eliminated the Presidential Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, a Reagan-era advisory body that had been disbanded during Trump’s first term and then restarted in 2022 by the Biden administration. Executive orders targeting the trans community and DEI efforts have also thrown federal arts funding into chaos, following updated guidelines from the NEA.

Playbill will continue to follow this story.

Deborah Rutter

Categories Art, Creativity, District of Columbia, Trump

Orlando Sentinel on Trump’s Gaza Fantasy: Is He Unhinged or Has He Gone Mad?”

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2025 //
10

The Orlando Sentinel editorial board published a scathing editorial about Trump’s ridiculous idea of evicting the people of Gaza and turning their land into a luxury resort.

It said:

No president ever proposed anything so unhinged as Donald Trump’s brutal fantasy of evicting some 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza and turning it into a massive real estate deal.
Trump’s “Riviera of the Middle East” is so drastic, wrong and delusional as to make people wonder whether he was serious or had just gone mad. It was obvious he hadn’t thought it through.

His apologists scrambled unconvincingly to make sense of it. National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, the former Florida congressman, suggested that it was a negotiating gambit.

Trump, he said, was simply challenging Arab nations “to come with their own solutions” if they don’t like his. We appreciate that Waltz — a generally rational man with deep experience in Middle East politics — has to shoulder the burden of trying to make Trump’s erratic proclamations seem rational. (He was also the person shoved out front after Trump made the outlandish claim that a deadly plane crash was somehow caused by DEI.)

But to fulfill his role as a trusted vizier to the Oval Office, Waltz should give Trump the unvarnished truth: This kind of bizarre behavior — sincere or not — is not helping.

It’s more likely to encourage Israel to make life in Gaza even more hellish and desperate, further destabilizing Israel’s own security at a time when the current administration is likely to see U.S. equivocation as a go-ahead for more aggression.

Vintage Trump

Trump surprised Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who ventured that the displacement would be only temporary. But that’s not what Trump said.
It was, of course, vintage Trump in one respect. His entire life has been transactional, so it would be in character for him to see the tragedy, fear and hopelessness in Gaza as just another opportunity for Trump-branded hotels and casinos.

Even if it ends up as just a pipe dream, however, it’s hardly harmless.

It has subverted the already distant prospect of a Mideast peace. It caters to the current Israeli government’s worst instincts. It repudiates decades of U.S. policy and world opinion favoring a two-state solution with a Palestinian state alongside Israel. There is no other road to peace.

It has put the lives of the remaining hostages in Gaza at greater risk by giving Hamas a potential pretext to renounce the ceasefire.

Stoking antisemitism

And it is certain to further inflame antisemitism in the United States and elsewhere.

Trump has mortified the nation and our government by exposing his gross ignorance of what a president should know about international law and the tangled history of the Middle East.

He should have known that it would be unthinkable for Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia ever to agree to it.

He should have known that it would be regarded everywhere as ethnic cleansing, a form of genocide comparable to what happened to the Armenians during World War I.

He should have known, but didn’t care, that Gaza’s civilians, as one said, “would rather live in tents next to their destroyed homes rather than relocate to another place.”
Worldwide condemnation

Criticism was swift and worldwide. Even Russia, right for once, called it “out of the question.”
In the U.S. Congress, most reaction ranged from speechlessness to consternation, especially over the inevitable involvement of U.S. troops.

Trump’s plan delighted the Israeli right wing at the cost of additionally compromising the Jewish state. He validated the suspicion that ethnic cleansing was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intent from the outset.

Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition partners, such as the racist Knesset member Itmar Ben-Gvir, have been open about purging Gaza of Palestinians.

“The only solution to Gaza is to encourage the migration of Gazans,” Ben-Gvir said.

White House optics


It was no coincidence that Trump sprung the scheme at the White House with Netanyahu by his side, or that the Israeli wore a red tie — Trump’s signature color — while Trump wore blue, which is symbolic of Israel.


Many believe that what Ben-Gvir said has been the strategy all along behind the excessive bombing that took thousands of civilian lives and damaged or destroyed some 60% of Gaza’s buildings, waterworks and other essential infrastructure, along with more than two-thirds of its farmland.

But Israel would never be able to deport more than 2 million people without U.S. support. That’s what makes Trump’s remarks so reckless.
The head of the Zionist Organization of America endorsed Trump’s repugnant scheme. Jewish groups that are more broad-minded and sensible reacted with concern over the fate of the hostages and revulsion at the entire idea.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the liberal lobby J Street, said “there aren’t adequate words to express our disgust at the forcible displacement of Palestinians with the assistance of the United States of America. … We call on leaders around the world, political leaders in this country, and, of course, Jewish communal leaders in this country to express in no uncertain terms that these proposals are absolutely unacceptable — legally and morally.”

It took less than three weeks back in the Oval Office for Trump to commit a monumental foreign policy blunder. He probably won’t admit it, but he desperately needs the advice that cooler heads like Rubio, and wiser, more grounded experts like Waltz, can impart. It’s their duty, by the very nature of their roles and their duty to the American people as well as the cause of global peace, to figure out a way to get him to listen.

And if that fails, it’s past time for Congress to do something about him, starting with a resolution of disapproval. It bears remembering: Silence is consent.


The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board includes Executive  Editor Roger Simmons, Opinion Editor Krys Fluker and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant, Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney and editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman. Send letters to insight@orlandosentinel.com.
© 2025 Orlando Sentinel

Categories Ignorance, Insane, International, Shame, Stupid, Trump

17 States Are Suing to Abolish Section 504 for People with Disabilities

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2025 //
15

The Attorneys General in 17 states have sued in federal court to eliminate Section 504, which guarantees the rights of people with disabilities.

If you are a parent of a child with disabilities, you should become active to inform others and to contact your elected representatives.

Here are the states that are involved in this lawsuit:

Here is a fact sheet that should be helpful.

Section 504 assures that every institution that receives federal funds includes people with disabilities.

This is what the Office of Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education said about Section 504.

I should warn you, however, that the Office of Civil Rights may not exist anymore. It will probably be transferred to the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. The person nominated to lead that office is hostile to many of the civil rights protections that have been law for many years.

Here is a plain language explanation of the lawsuit, prepared by the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund.

If the suit is successful, it would affect students and everyone else in every state, not just those where the suit was launched.

Wherever you live, join with other parents to protest. Contact all organizations that defend disability rights. Call your local officials.

Don’t let them get away with this attack on the disability rights of your child, which have been the law since 1973.

Categories Justice, Parent Groups, Special Education, Students

Heather Cox Richardson: Which Matters More: Voting Rights or Gun Rights?

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2025 //
19

Heather Cox Richardson brilliantly identifies the signal flaw of the MAGA movement. Trump described the Second Amendment right to bear arms as “foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.” (Of course, Trump’s lawyers–not Trump himself– wrote those words as raw meat for his base.)

Richardson replied that “it is the right to vote for the lawmakers who make up our government that is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.”

On Friday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “protecting Second Amendment rights.” The order calls for Attorney General Pam Bondi to examine all gun regulations in the U.S. to make sure they don’t infringe on any citizen’s right to bear arms. The executive order says that the Second Amendment “is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.”

In fact, it is the right to vote for the lawmakers who make up our government that is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.

The United States Constitution that establishes the framework for our democratic government sets out how the American people will write the laws that govern us. We elect members to a Congress, which consists of the House of Representatives and the Senate. That congress of our representatives holds “all legislative powers”; that is, Congress alone has the right to make laws. It alone has the power to levy taxes on the American people, borrow money, regulate commerce, coin money, declare war, “to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper.”

After Congress writes, debates, and passes a measure, the Constitution establishes that it goes to the president, who is also elected, through “electors,” by the people. The president can either sign a measure into law or veto it, returning it to Congress where members can either repass it over his veto or rewrite it. But once a law is on the books, the president must enforce it. The men who framed the Constitution wrote that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” When President Richard Nixon tried to alter laws passed by Congress by withholding the funding Congress had appropriated to put them into effect, Congress shut that down quickly, passing a law explicitly making such “The impoundment” illegal.

Since the Supreme Court’s 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision, the federal courts have taken on the duty of “judicial review,” the process of determining whether a law falls within the rules of the Constitution.

Right now, the Republicans hold control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. They have the power to change any laws they want to change according to the formula Americans have used since 1789 when the Constitution went into effect.

But they are not doing that. Instead, officials in the Trump administration, as well as billionaire Elon Musk— who put $290 million into electing Trump and Republicans, and whose actual role in the governmentu remains unclear— are making unilateral changes to programs established by Congress. Through executive orders and announcements from Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” they have sidelined Congress, and Republicans are largely mum about the seizure of their power.

Now MAGA Republicans are trying to neuter the judiciary.

After yet another federal judge stopped the Musk/Trump onslaught by temporarily blocking Musk and his team from accessing Americans’ records from Treasury Department computers, MAGA Republicans attacked judges. “Outrageous,” Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) posted, spreading the lie that the judge barred the Secretary of the Treasury from accessing the information, although in fact he temporarily barred Treasury Secretary Bessent from granting access to others. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) said the decision had “the feel of…a judicial” coup. Right-wing legal scholar Adrian Vermeule called it “[j]udicial interference with legitimate acts of state.”

Vice President J.D. Vance, who would take over the office of the presidency if the 78-year-old Trump can no longer perform the duties of the office, posted: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

As legal scholar Steve Vladeck noted: “Just to say the quiet part out loud, the point of having unelected judges in a democracy is so that *whether* acts of state are ‘legitimate’ can be decided by someone other than the people who are undertaking them. Vermeule knows this, of course. So does Vance.” Of Vance’s statement, Aaron Rupar of Public Notice added: “this is the sort of thing you post when you’re ramping up to defying lawful court orders.”

The Republicans have the power to make the changes they want through the exercise of their constitutional power, but they are not doing so. This seems in part because Trump and his MAGA supporters want to establish the idea that the president cannot be checked. And this dovetails with the fact they are fully aware that most Americans oppose their plans. Voters were so opposed to the plan outlined in Project 2025—the plan now in operation—that Trump ran from it during the campaign. Popular support for Musk’s participation in the government has plummeted as well. A poll from The Economist/YouGov released February 5 says that only 13% of adult Americans want him to have “a lot” of influence, while 96% of respondents said that jobs and the economy were important to them and 41% said they thought the economy was getting worse.

Trump’s MAGA Republicans know they cannot get the extreme changes they wanted through Congress, so they are, instead, dictating them. And Musk began his focus at the Treasury, establishing control over the payment system that manages the money American taxpayers pay to our government.

Musk and MAGA officials claim they are combating waste and fraud, but in fact, when Judge Carl Nichols stopped Trump from shutting down USAID, he specifically said that government lawyers had offered no support for that argument in court. Indeed, the U.S. government already has the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an independent, nonpartisan agency that audits, evaluates and investigates government programs for Congress. In 2023 the GAO returned about $84 for every $1 invested in it, in addition to suggesting improvements across the government.

According to Musk’s own Grok artificial intelligence tool on X, the investigative departments of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), as well as USAID, have all launched investigations into the practices and violations of Elon Musk’s companies.

The vision they are enacting rips predictability, as well as economic security, away from farmers, who are already protesting the loss of their markets with the attempted destruction of USAID. It hurts the states—especially Republican-dominated states—that depend on funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Education. Their vision excludes consumers, who are set to lose the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as well as protections put in place by President Joe Biden. Their vision takes away protections for racial, ethnic, religious, and gender minorities, as well as from women, and kills funding for the programs that protect all of us, such as cancer research and hospitals.

Musk and Trump appear to be concentrating the extraordinary wealth of the American people, along with the power that wealth brings, into their own hands, for their own ends. Trump has championed further tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, while Musk seems to want to make sure his companies, especially SpaceX, win as many government contracts as possible to fund his plan to colonize Mars.

But the mission of the United States of America is not, and has never been, to return huge profits to a few leaders.

The mission of the United States of America is stated in the Constitution. It is a government designed by “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Far from being designed to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a single man, it was formed to do the opposite: spread wealth and power throughout the country’s citizenry and enable them to protect their rights by voting for those who would represent them in Congress and the presidency, then holding them accountable at the ballot box.

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Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Guns, Justice, Safety

The Teenage DOGE “Expert” with a Checkered Past

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2025 //
10

The youngest member of Elon Musk’s team of “expert” evaluators is Edward Coristine whose online moniker is “Big Balls.”

Young Mr, Coristine is a 19-year-old high school graduate. He has key roles at the State Department, DHS, FEMA, and USAID, despite being unvetted.

The Washington Post wrote about the young man’s large portfolio:

He is a “senior adviser at the State Department and at the Department of Homeland Security, raising concerns among some diplomats and others about his potential access to sensitive information and the growing reach of his tech billionaire boss into America’s diplomatic apparatus, said U.S. officials familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.

Edward Coristine, who briefly worked for Musk’s brain chip start-up Neuralink, was recently posted to the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology, a critical hub for data both sensitive and nonsensitive, officials said. Coristine, who also holds positions at the U.S. DOGE Service and the Office of Personnel Management, has attracted significant attention across Washington for his edgy online persona and the relative lack of experience he brings to his new federal roles.

But his new position — and similar roles at DHS and other agencies — could give him visibility into far more than just tech.

Some U.S. officials expressed alarm about Coristine’s new perch at the bureau, which serves as the IT department for Washington’s diplomatic apparatus. All of the department’s IT and data management functions were centralized at the bureau during an overhaul before President Donald Trump returned to office, making it a treasure trove of information.

“This is dangerous,” said one of the U.S. officials, noting Coristine’s age and a report by Bloomberg News that he was fired for leaking a data security firm’s information to a competitor.

A State Department official said Coristine’s position probably would not be confined to the Bureau of Diplomatic Technology.

Eddie is 19. He worked briefly for Musk’s Neuralink. He is a “senior advisor” to multiple departments. He has access to highly confidential at the State Department and the Office of Personnel Management. He was fired for leaking data from a data security firm to a competitor. He apparently was never vetted.

What could possibly go wrong?

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Ethics, Musk, Elon, Trump
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