Trump Demands $500 Billion in “Rare Earth” Minerals in Exchange for Supporting Ukraine

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2025 //
15

In his interview with Brett Baier on FOX News, Trump revealed that he is making a deal with Ukraine in exchange for our continuing to support their fight against Russian aggression. He demands control and ownership of Ukraine’s natural resources. He says Zelensky agreed.

Imagine Trump as president when World War II begins. Winston Churchill begs him to help stave off Hitler s attacks. Europe is being overrun. Bombs are hitting central London. Churchill calls Trump and pleads for help, for arms and men. Trump says, “What’s in it for us?” Whatever Churchill offers is not enough. Trump says, “We will sit this one out.” Hitler overruns Europe and England, as Trump watches from afar.

We entered the war to protect Ukraine after it was invaded by Russia. Ukraine was striving to join the West, to join the European Union, perhaps even NATO. President Biden thought it was in our national interest to prevent Putin from conquering a country that aspired to be a democracy. Most of the arms shipped to Ukraine were made in America; no American troops were deployed. It made sense to stop Putin’s aggression. It never occurred to Biden or his State Department to demand a price from a nation that was suffering daily from massive bombardments that wiped out schools, hospitals, transportation, the electrical grid, apartment buildings, museums, and whole cities, as well as thousands of innocent civilians.

Politico has the story. No paywall.

American support for Ukraine has a price tag: $500B worth of mineral riches, said U.S. President Donald Trump.

In the second part of an interview with Fox News that aired late Monday, the Republican said the U.S. should get a slice of Ukraine’s vast natural resources as compensation for the hundreds of billions it has spent on helping Kyiv resist Russia’s full-scale invasion.

“I told them [Ukraine] that I want the equivalent like $500B worth of rare earth. And they’ve essentially agreed to do that so at least we don’t feel stupid,” Trump said.

“Otherwise, we’re stupid. I said to them we have to — ‘we have to get something. We can’t continue to pay this money,’” he added.

Ukraine holds huge deposits of critical elements and minerals, from lithium to titanium, which are vital to manufacturing modern technologies. It also has vast coal reserves, as well as oil, gas and uranium, but much of this is in territories under Russian control.

Categories Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, For-Profit, International, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Keeping track of Trump’s Assault on the Rule of Law

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2025 //
9

The far-right forces behind Trump have been planning their assault on democracy and the rule of law for years. Decades even, if you consider ALEC and other rightwing groups, like the Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 was the plan, and one of its author is now director of the powerful Office of Management and Budget.

A central part of their plan was to overwhelm the public and the media with a flurry of executive orders. They call it “flooding the zone.” It’s nearly impossible to react to three or four outrages a day. Who can even catalogue all of them?

Heather Cox Richardson tries to pull it together for her readers. Yesterday there were multiple court orders, more than she has room to report. And multiple executive orders, including one suspending enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits U.S. firms from bribing foreign officials; Trump thinks it puts American businesses at a disadvantage if they can’t bribe foreign officials as their competitors do. There were multiple DOGE assaults on federal agencies. Even HRC has to be selective. But it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

That’s exactly what the Trump enablers want. They want the public to feel as though resistance is futile. It’s not. The courts keep telling them “you can’t do that.” So now, through JD Vance, the Trump team is hinting that they might ignore the courts.

Repeat after me. “We will not give up. We will resist. We will work with others. We will join Indivisible or some other resistance group. We will resist.”

She writes:

As soon as President Donald Trump took office, his administration froze great swaths of government funding, apparently to test the theory popular with Project 2025 authors that the 1974 law forbidding the president from “impounding” money Congress had appropriated was unconstitutional. The loss of funding has hurt Americans across the country. Today, Daniel Wu, Gaya Gupta, and Anumita Kaur of the Washington Post reported that farmers who had signed contracts with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to improve infrastructure and who had paid up front to put in fences, plant different crops, and install renewable energy systems with the promise the government would provide financial assistance are now left holding the bag.

With Republicans in Congress largely mum about this and other power grabs by the administration, the courts are holding the line. Chief Judge John McConnell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island today found that the Trump administration has refused to disburse federal funding despite the court’s “clear and unambiguous” temporary restraining order saying it must do so. McConnell said the administration “must immediately restore frozen funding” and clear any hurdles to that funding until the court hears arguments about the case. This includes the monies withheld from the farmers.

This evening, Massachusetts U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley blocked the Trump appointees at the National Institutes of Health from implementing the rate change they wanted to apply to NIH grants. But, as legal analyst Joyce White Vance notes, the only relief sought is for the twenty-two Democratic-led states that have sued, keeping Republican-dominated states from freeloading on their Democratic counterparts. As Josh Marshall noted today in Talking Points Memo, it appears a pattern is emerging in which Democratic-led states are suing the administration while officials from Republican-led states, which are even harder hit by Trump’s cuts than their Democratic-led counterparts, are asking Trump directly for help or exceptions.

As soon as he took office, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, who was a key author of Project 2025 and who is also acting as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, announced he was shuttering the agency. That closure was a recommendation of Project 2025, which called the consumer protection agency “a shakedown mechanism to provide unaccountable funding to leftist nonprofits.” Immediately, the National Treasury Employees Union sued him, saying that Vought’s directive to employees to stop working “reflects an unlawful attempt to thwart Congress’s decision to create the CFPB to protect American consumers.”

MAGA loyalists, particularly Vice President J.D. Vance, have begun to suggest they will not abide by the rule of law, but before Trump and Vance took office, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts called out Vance’s hints that he would be willing to defy the rulings of federal courts as “dangerous suggestions” that “must be soundly rejected.”

Today the American Bar Association took a stand against the Trump administration’s “wide-scale affronts to the rule of law itself” as it attacks the Constitution and tries to dismantle departments and agencies created by Congress “without seeking the required congressional approval to change the law.”

“The American Bar Association supports the rule of law,” president of the organization William R. Bay said in a statement. “That means holding governments, including our own, accountable.” He cheered on the courts that “are treating these cases with the urgency they require.”

“[R]efusing to spend money appropriated by Congress under the euphemism of a pause is a violation of the rule of law and suggests that the executive branch can overrule the other two co-equal branches of government,” Bay wrote. “This is contrary to the constitutional framework and not the way our democracy works. The money appropriated by Congress must be spent in accordance with what Congress has said. It cannot be changed or paused because a newly elected administration desires it. Our elected representatives know this. The lawyers of this country know this. It must stop.”

He called on “elected representatives to stand with us and to insist upon adherence to the rule of law…. The administration cannot choose which law it will follow or ignore. These are not partisan or political issues. These are rule of law and process issues. We cannot afford to remain silent…. We urge every attorney to join us and insist that our government, a government of the people, follow the law.”

Today, five former Treasury secretaries wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that also reinforced the legal lines of our constitutional system, warning that “our democracy is under siege.” Robert E. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers, who served under President Bill Clinton; Timothy F. Geithner and Jacob J. Lew, who served under President Barack Obama; and Janet L. Yellen, who served under President Joe Biden, spoke up about the violation of the United States Treasury’s nonpartisan payment system by political actors working in Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency.”

That DOGE team “lack training and experience to handle private, personal data,” they note, “like Social Security numbers and bank account information.” Their involvement risks exposing highly sensitive information and even risks the failure of critical infrastructure as they muck around with computer codes. The former Treasury secretaries noted that on Saturday morning, a federal judge had temporarily stopped those DOGE workers from accessing the department’s payment and data systems, warning that that access could cause “irreparable harm.”

“While significant data privacy, cybersecurity and national security threats are gravely concerning,” the former secretaries wrote, “the constitutional issues are perhaps even more alarming.” The executive branch must respect that Congress controls the nation’s money, they wrote, reiterating the key principle outlined in the Constitution: “The legislative branch has the sole authority to pass laws that determine where and how federal dollars should be spent.”

The Treasury Department cannot decide “which promises of federal funding made by Congress it will keep, and which it will not,” the letter read. “The Trump administration may seek to change the law and alter what spending Congress appropriates, as administrations before it have done as well. And should the law change, it will be the role of the executive branch to execute those changes. But it is not for the Treasury Department or the administration to decide which of our congressionally approved commitments to fulfill and which to cast aside.”

That warning appears as Trump indicates that he is willing to undermine the credit of the United States. Yesterday, on Air Force One, he told reporters that the members of the administration trying to find wasteful spending have suggested that they have found fraud in Treasury bonds and that the United States might “have less debt than we thought.” The suggestion that the U.S. might not honor its debt is a direct attack on the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which says that “[t]he validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” That amendment was written under similar circumstances, when former Confederates sought to avoid debt payments and undermine the power of the federal government.

Lauren Thomas, Ben Drummett, and Chip Cutter of the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that “for CEOs and bankers, the Trump euphoria is fading fast.” Consumers are losing confidence in the economy, and observers expect inflation, while business leaders find that trying to navigate Trump’s on-again-off-again tariffs is taking all their attention.

Meanwhile, Trump has continued his purge of government employees he considers insufficiently loyal to him. On Friday he tried to get rid of Ellen Weintraub of the Federal Elections Commission, who contended that her removal was illegal. He also fired Colleen Shogan, the Archivist of the United States, head of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the government agency that handles presidential records. The archivist is the official responsible for receiving and validating the certified electoral ballots for presidential elections—a process Trump’s people tried to corrupt after he lost the 2020 presidential election.

It was NARA that first discovered Trump’s retention of classified documents and demanded their return, although Shogan was not the archivist in charge at the time.

The courts happened to weigh in on the case of the retained classified documents today, when U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ruled that the FBI must search its records in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from journalist Jason Leopold after Leopold learned that Trump had allegedly flushed presidential records down the toilet when he was president, and later brought classified documents to Florida. The judge noted that the Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. United States that the president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official duties and is “at least presumptive[ly] immune from criminal prosecution for…acts within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility” means that there is no reason to hold back information to shield him from prosecution. Indeed, Howell notes, that decision means that the FOIA request is now the only way for the American public to “know what its government is up to.”

Howell highlighted that the three Supreme Court justices who dissented from the Trump v. United States decision described it as “mak[ing] a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.” In a footnote, Howell also called attention to the fact that presumptive immunity for the president does not “extend to those who aid, abet and execute criminal acts on behalf of a criminally immune president. The excuse offered after World War II by enablers of the fascist Nazi regime of ‘just following orders’ has long been rejected in this country’s jurisprudence.”

Today, Trump fired David Huitema, director of the Office of Government Ethics, the department that oversees political appointments and helps nominees avoid conflicts of interest.

On Friday, Trump fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, U.S. Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger. That office enforces federal whistleblower laws as well as the law that prohibits federal employees from engaging in most political activity: the Hatch Act. Congress provided that the special counsel can be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” and today Dellinger sued, calling his removal illegal.

Tonight, Judge Amy Berman Jackson blocked Dellinger’s firing through Thursday as she hears arguments in the case.

—

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, Injustice, Justice, Trump

Musk DOGE Team Is Ransacking Our Government, Pulling It Apart

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2025 //
9

What exactly is Elon Musk’s DOGE team doing? Who are they? This article in The New York Times seeks to answer those questions.

The article was written by Theodore Schleifer, Nicholas Nehamas, Kate Conger, and Ryan Mac.

At the end of his third week bulldozing through the federal government, Elon Musk sat down to give Vice President JD Vance a 90-minute briefing on his efforts to dismantle the bureaucracy. Mr. Musk was not alone.

Invited to join him on Thursday morning in Mr. Vance’s stately ceremonial office suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House, were a clutch of young aides whose presence at federal agencies has served as a harbinger of the upheaval that would follow them.

Across the federal government, civil servants have witnessed the sudden intrusion in the last two weeks of these young members of the billionaire’s team, labeled the Department of Government Efficiency. As Mr. Musk traipses through Washington, bent on disruption, these aides have emerged as his enforcers, sweeping into agency headquarters with black backpacks and ambitious marching orders.

While Mr. Musk is flanked by some seasoned operatives, his dizzying blitz on the federal bureaucracy is, in practice, largely being carried out by a group of male engineers, including some recent college graduates and at least one as young as 19.

Unlike their 20-something peers in Washington, who are accustomed to doing the unglamorous work ordered up by senior officials, these aides have been empowered to break the system.

Of the roughly 40 people on the team, just under half of them have some previous ties to the billionaire — but many have little government experience, The New York Times found. This account of their background and activities is based on public records, internal government databases and more than 20 people familiar with their roles, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

Some on the Musk team are former interns at his companies. Others are executives who have served in his employ for as long as two decades. They all appear to have channeled his shoot-first, aim-later approach to reform as they have overwhelmed the bureaucracy.

A 23-year-old who once used artificial intelligence to decode the word “purple” on an Ancient Greek scroll has swiftly gained entree to at least five federal agencies, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, where he has been seeking access to sensitive databases. He was part of a group that helped effectively shutter the United States Agency for International Development, joined by the 19-year-old, a onetime Northeastern student who was fired from a data security firm after an investigation into the leaking of internal information, as Bloomberg first reported.

In the past week, his aides have descended upon the Education, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Transportation and Veterans Affairs Departments, along with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to people familiar with their activities.

Mr. Musk has praised his team as talented and relentless, defending its work as crucial to rooting out what he perceives as wasteful spending and left-wing ideology in the federal government.

“Time to confess,” he wrote on X this week. “Media reports saying that @DOGE has some of world’s best software engineers are in fact true.”

Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

On Friday, Mr. Trump told reporters that he was “very proud of the job that this group of young people, generally young people, but very smart people, they’re doing.

“They’re doing it at my insistence,” he added. “It would be a lot easier not to do it, but we have to take some of these things apart to find the corruption.”

Even as Mr. Musk’s team members upend the government, their identities have been closely held, emerging only piecemeal when the new arrivals press career officials for information and access to agency systems.

The opacity with which they are operating is highly unusual for those working in government. Aside from those conducting classified or intelligence work, the names of public employees are not generally kept secret.

Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said the cost-cutting team has gone through the same vetting as other federal employees, but declined to say what the vetting consisted of or whether Mr. Musk’s aides have security clearances.

The Times identified members of Mr. Musk’s initiative through internal emails identifying their roles and interviews with employees across the government who have interacted with them. None of the Musk aides responded to requests for comment.

The secrecy, Musk allies have said, is necessary so the team members do not become targets.

Several of Mr. Musk’s aides have resisted being listed in government databases out of fear of their names leaking out, according to people familiar with the situation. Others have worked to remove information about themselves from the internet, scrubbing résumés and social media accounts.

When their names have been made public by news organizations such as Wired, they have been scrutinized by online sleuths. Mr. Musk has asserted, falsely, that the exposure of their roles is a “crime,” and X has removed some posts and issued suspensions to those who publicize their identities.

One Musk aide whose name surfaced, Marko Elez, a 25-year-old former employee of X, resigned on Thursday, according to a White House official, after The Wall Street Journal revealed that he had made racist posts on X, writing in one message that “you could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.” Mr. Elez, a former employee at both X and xAI, Mr. Musk’s artificial intelligence company, was one of two staff members affiliated with Mr. Musk’s team who had gained access to the Treasury Department’s closely held payment system.

Mr. Elez was among those who had been invited to attend Mr. Musk’s meeting with the vice president before he resigned, according to documents seen by The Times. On Friday, Mr. Musk called for The Journal reporter to be fired and said he was reinstating Mr. Elez, a move that both the president and the vice president said they supported. “We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people,” Mr. Vance posted on X.

A spokesman for Mr. Vance declined to comment.

Some of Mr. Musk’s top advisers are more seasoned. Senior players include Brad Smith, a health care entrepreneur and an official during President Trump’s first term; Amy Gleason, a former U.S. Digital Service official who has been helping at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; and Chris Young, a top Republican field operative whom Mr. Musk hired as a political adviserlast year. Others bring extensive private sector backgrounds, including from firms like McKinsey and Morgan Stanley.

But Washington is a town where much is run by twentysomethings. And much of Mr. Musk’s handiwork — gutting federal websites, demanding access to internal systems, sending late-night all-staff emails and asking veteran employees to justify their jobs — is being executed by young aides, some of them pulling all-nighters as they burrow into agencies.

Last week, young representatives of Mr. Musk’s team with backpacks stuffed with a half-dozen laptops and phones arrived at the headquarters of U.S.A.I.D., demanding access to financial and personnel records. On Friday, a dozen stayed into the night, powered by a bulk order of coffee. The next day, the agency’s website went dark.

At the Education Department alone, as many as 16 team members are listed in an employee directory, including Jehn Balajadia, who has effectively served as Mr. Musk’s assistant for years.

At the Office of Personnel Management, the nerve center of the federal government’s human resources operation, a small group of coders on Mr. Musk’s team sometimes sleep in the building overnight. They survive on deliveries of pizza, Mountain Dew, Red Bull and Doritos, working what Mr. Musk has described as 120-hour weeks.

At the General Services Administration, another central hub for Mr. Musk’s aides, beds have been installed on the sixth floor, with a security guard keeping people from entering the area.

While most senior employees wear suits, the aides favor jeans, sneakers and T-shirts, sometimes under a blazer, with one sporting a navy-blue baseball cap with white lettering reading “DOGE.”

The culture clash is evident. Perhaps unsurprisingly, career employees who have worked for decades in the government have bristled at taking orders from the young newcomers. One coder has openly referred to federal workers as “dinosaurs.” Some staff members at the personnel office, in turn, derisively call the young men “Muskrats.”

As they assess the workings of the government, Mr. Musk’s aides have been conducting 15-minute video interviews with federal workers. Some of their questions have been pointed, such as querying employees about whom they would choose to fire from their teams if they had to pick one person. At times, the aides have not turned on their cameras or given their last names, feeding suspicion.

In one video interview heard by The Times, a young team representative who introduced himself by his first name said he was an “adviser” to government leadership and a startup founder. He pressed the interviewee to describe their contributions with “highest impact” and to list any technical “superpowers.”

It is not always clear which employees are formally part of the team. Even the putative head of the department, Steve Davis, a decades-long lieutenant of Mr. Musk who has accompanied the billionaire on his meetings in Washington, has not been formally announced.

Many of Mr. Musk’s aides, including Mr. Davis, hold multiple roles simultaneously, working for one of the team’s central hubs — the personnel office or the General Services Administration — while also maintaining email addresses and offices at other agencies.

Luke Farritor, who won the award for using artificial intelligence to decipher an ancient scroll, joined Mr. Musk’s initiative after dropping out of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to pursue a fellowship funded by the billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel. A former SpaceX intern, Mr. Farritor, in preparation to join the team, started learning COBOL, a coding language considered retrograde in Silicon Valley but common in government.

He and Rachel Riley, a former McKinsey consultant who works closely with Mr. Smith, are now both listed as employees in the Office of the Secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services. This week, they requested access to payment systems at the Medicare agency, according to a document seen by The Times.

Mr. Farritor, who also has email accounts at the General Services Administration, the Education Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was at the Energy Department on Wednesday, and has told others that he is getting deployed to additional agencies. He is one of about a half-dozen aides who are holed up in a corner around the G.S.A. administrator’s offices, interviewing tech staff members about their work.

Other figures often on hand include Ethan Shaotran and Edward Coristine, who have been accompanying a top Musk ally, Thomas Shedd, who oversees the agency’s tech division. Mr. Shaotran, a 22-year-old Harvard student, was part of a team that was the runner-up in a hackathon competition run by xAI last year.

Mr. Coristine, 19, graduated from high school in Rye, N.Y., last year, according to a school magazine that noted his outstanding performance on the Advanced Placement exams. Nowadays, he has an email address at the Education Department.

Before joining the government, Mr. Coristine was fired in June 2022 from an internship at Path, an Arizona-based data security company, after “an internal investigation into the leaking of proprietary company information that coincided with his tenure,” the company said in a statement Friday.

One Musk acolyte has leaned into his new status as a Washington celebrity.

Gavin Kliger, a newly minted senior adviser at the personnel office, wrote a Substack post this week titled “Why DOGE: Why I gave up a seven-figure salary to save America” — and asked users to pay a $1,000-per-month subscription fee to read it.

The post behind the paywall appeared to have been left intentionally blank, according to users who saw it.

Mr. Kliger, 25, a software engineer, amplified a message posted on X in December by Nick Fuentes, one of the country’s most prominent young white supremacists, which mocked those who celebrate their interracial families. The post was removed from Mr. Kliger’s page after The Times inquired about it. He did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Kliger and Mr. Farritor were among those who obtained access to U.S.A.I.D. websites and tried to get into a secure area at the agency before being turned away by security last week, according to people familiar with the matter. After midnight on Monday, Mr. Kliger sent an email from a U.S.A.I.D. email account informing thousands of staff members that the agency’s headquarters would be closed.

On X, Mr. Kliger has defended cuts to the agency. He also responded to one person who criticized him as “one of the men carrying out Musk’s coup.”

“A ‘coup’ is when a duly elected president wins a democratic election and delivers on campaign promises,” Mr. Kliger wrote on X on Monday. “Got it.”

Reporting was contributed by Maggie Haberman, Mattathias Schwartz, Edward Wong, Erica L. Green, Madeleine Ngo, Zach Montague, Christopher Flavelle, Andrew Duehren, Brad Plumer, Kellen Browning and Aric Toler. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Musk, Elon, Trump

Federal Agencies Censor Words Related to DEI

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2025 //
20

Many federal government websites went dark after Trump took office. Medical and scientific professionals were concerned when websites containing research were shut down. One reason for the lights out was the Trump administration’s determination to remove any research that contained language that referred to diversity, equity or inclusion and any research that related to sexuality, especially references to transgender or bisexual or any LGBT issues. The Trump administration has stated that there are only two genders–male and female–and that’s it.

The news was reported by The Washington Post:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention removed or edited references to transgender people, gender identity and equity from its website Friday, racing to meet a late-afternoon deadline imposed by the federal Office of Personnel Management.

Whole pages about HIV testing for transgender people, guidelines for use of HIV medication and information on supporting LGBTQ+ youth health were no longer available late Friday. The page that lists vaccines recommended by the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee was also no longer available. The vaccine to protect against mpox virus is recommended for groups including transgender, nonbinary or gender-diverse people.

By Saturday, the page of vaccine-specific recommendations was back online, with no mention of the mpox vaccine.

The blog Inside Medicine reported on the pall of censorship by the feds across the scientific community. Its report included the words that triggered the DEI censors.

In the order, CDC researchers were instructed to remove references to or mentions of a list of forbidden terms: “Gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female,” according to an email sent to CDC employees (see below).”

A screenshot of a CDC email shared with Inside Medicine of a list of terms that must be removed from any CDC-authored manuscript being seriously considered or “in press” (but not yet online or in print) at any medical or scientific journal.

An expansion of an emerging censorship regime at the CDC. 

The policy goes beyond the previously reported pause of the CDC’s own publications, including Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), which has seen two issues go unreleased since January 16, marking the first publication gap of any kind in approximately 60 years. Emerging infectious Diseases and Preventing Chronic Disease, the CDC’s other major publications, also remain under lock and key, but have not yet been affected because they are monthly releases and both were released as scheduled in January, prior to President Trump’s inauguration. The policy also goes beyond the general communications gag order that already prevents any CDC scientist from submitting any new scientific findings to the public.

The National Science Foundation was directed to screen papers submitted for funding; it uses a list of words to flag papers that might offend the new administration.Being flagged means that the research needs a closer review to be sure that the topic is inoffensive.

Here is the NSF list:

Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby of the blog “Popular Information” reported on censorship at the National Secutity Agency.

They wrote:

A memo distributed by NSA leadership to its staff says that on February 10, all NSA websites and internal network pages that contain banned words will be deleted. This is the list of 27 banned words distributed to NSA staff:

Anti-Racism
Racism
Allyship
Bias
DEI
Diversity
Diverse
Confirmation Bias
Equity
Equitableness
Feminism
Gender
Gender Identity
Inclusion
Inclusive
All-Inclusive
Inclusivity
Injustice
Intersectionality
Prejudice
Privilege
Racial Identity
Sexuality
Stereotypes
Pronouns
Transgender
Equality

The memo acknowledges that the list includes many terms that are used by the NSA in contexts that have nothing to do with DEI. For example, the term “privilege” is used by the NSA in the context of “privilege escalation.” In the intelligence world, privilege escalation refers to “techniques that adversaries use to gain higher-level permissions on a system or network.”

Categories Censorship, Ethics, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Gender, Health, Science, Trump

DOGE Terminates $900 Million in Contracts at Ed Dept’s Research and Data Unit

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2025 //
6

DOGE swept into the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education and, following its advice, the Trump administration canceled $900 million in contracts. Bear in mind, this is the team of 20-somethings who knows a lot about software and coding. It’s unlikely that they know anything about education research.

This is the agency that I ran 30 years ago when I was Assistant Secretary of Education in the first Bush administration. At that time it was called the Office of Education Research and Improvement. I could have suggested some cuts, but certainly not $900 million!

What really bothers me is that this group of kiddies could not possibly know enough to judge the quality of the work they were canceling. Not in a day. Impossible. This was just a slash and burn operation.

ProPublica reported:

The Trump administration has terminated more than $900 million in Education Department contracts, taking away a key source of data on the quality and performance of the nation’s schools.

The cuts were made at the behest of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting crew, the Department of Government Efficiency, and were disclosed on X, the social media platform Musk owns, shortly after ProPublica posed questions to U.S. Department of Education staff about the decision to decimate the agency’s research and statistics arm, the Institute of Education Sciences.

A spokesperson for the department, Madi Biedermann, said that the standardized test known as the nation’s report card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, would not be affected. Neither would the College Scorecard, which allows people to search for and compare information about colleges, she said.

IES is one of the country’s largest funders of education research, and the slashing of contracts could mean a significant loss of public knowledge about schools. The institute maintains a massive database of education statistics and contracts with scientists and education companies to compile and make data public about schools each year, such as information about school crime and safety and high school science course completion.

Its total annual budget is about $815 million, or roughly 1% of the Education Department’s overall budget of $82 billion this fiscal year. The $900 million in contracts the department is canceling includes multiyear agreements.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Corruption, Disruption, Ethics, Fraud, Funding, Musk, Elon, Research, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Trump Reiterates His Plan to “Own” Gaza and Turn It into a Resort

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2025 //
13

According to The Boston Globe, Trump doubled down on his intention to take control of Gaza, expel its inhabitants, and develop the Gaza Strip into a luxurious resort: The Riviera of the Middle East. He said that the Palestinians who live there would not have the right to return.

This statement is making Egypt and Jordan angry, because they have refused to accept the Palestinian Gazans for fear of Hamas terrorists on their soil. It also emboldens Netanyahu and his most extreme supporters, and it threatens to upend the ceasefire and hostage releases.

Where Trump goes, chaos goes with him.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Palestinians in Gaza would not have a right to return under his plan for U.S. “ownership” of the war-torn territory, contradicting other officials in his administration who have sought to argue Trump was only calling for the temporary relocation of its population.

Less than a week after he floated his plan for the U.S. to take control of Gaza and turn it in “the Riviera of the Middle East,” Trump, in an interview with FOX News’ Bret Baier that was set to air on Monday, said “No, they wouldn’t” when asked if Palestinians in Gaza would have a right to return to the territory. It comes as he has ramped up pressure on Arab states, especially U.S. allies Jordan and Egypt, to take in Palestinians from Gaza, who claim the territory as part of a future homeland.

“We’ll build safe communities, a little bit away from where they are, where all of this danger is,” Trump said. “In the meantime, I would own this. Think of it as a real estate development for the future. It would be a beautiful piece of land. No big money spent.”

Categories Disruption, International, Trump

Robert Reich: Plan to Resist Trump’s Tyranny on April 19

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2025 //
21

Robert Reich is a relentless fighter for our democracy. He served in the administrations of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, in whose administration he was secretary of Labor.

He wrote recently to urge people to organize against Trump’s violations of the law.

Friends,

Before I post my Sunday cartoon, I want to share with you some thoughts about the third hellish week of Trump II.

As of Friday, Trump has signed more than 50 executive orders, covering every aspect of American life and much foreign policy. 

It’s not just that this number of executive orders is unprecedented in modern American politics. Many are unlawful, unconstitutional, or both. 

In the age of monarchs, kings issued decrees. The tsars of imperial Russia proclaimed ukases. The dictators of the 20th century made diktats. 

Trump issues executive orders.

Average people in the age of monarchs, tsars, and dictators were largely powerless. Resistance meant almost certain death. 

Many people were resigned to vulnerability. They practiced passivity. They knew no life other than repression. But their deference entrenched and ensured the power of monarchs, tsars, and dictators.

Arbitrary power depends on the acquiescence of everyone subjected to it. 

Right now, after three weeks of Trump’s “flooding the zone” (as Trumpers like to say) some of you may be feeling powerless. 

Trump wants you to feel powerless. He depends on your passivity in the face of his takeover of American democracy. 

He wants to be a strongman who can act unilaterally and arbitrarily — who can issue orders about anything that pops into his head. Purging, firing, prosecuting, or deporting anyone he wants removed. Obliterating, freezing, and pummeling any institution he wants destroyed. Unleashing the richest man in the world to do whatever the hell he wants with the government of the United States. 

If you are dumbfounded into inaction, if you don’t even want to hear the news, if you feel as though you’re living through a nightmare over which you have no control, I get it. Every other day I feel the same.

But hear me out. 

You and I have no real choice but to stand up to Trump, Musk, and their lapdogs. To allow them to bully us into submission invites more bullying, more lawlessness, more gonzo executive orders.

Last week I suggested a number of actions we can take. It wasn’t an exhaustive list, of course, only some possibilities. 

Millions of Americans — including many who have been purged from their positions of responsibility — are standing up to Trump and Musk’s tyranny. 

Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski says the Senate phone system has been receiving around 1,600 calls each minute, compared to the 40 calls per minute it usually gets — thus disrupting the system.

We are beginning to flood Trump and Musk’s zone. 

Let’s flood it out. 

This coming April 19 will mark the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord, which began the American Revolution and our war against monarchical power. 

Anti-royalist militia in Massachusetts refused to disperse when ordered to by British troops. A shot was fired, and the troops kept firing, killing eight of those American resisters. Later that day, the militiamen returned that fire, killing a number of British soldiers. The revolution had begun. 

Please don’t get me wrong. I do not advocate violence. I’m simply reminding you that this nation was founded on resistance to arbitrary authority. We built American democracy in the face of what seemed to be impossible odds. 

And we will never, ever give up that fight. 

My friend Harold Meyerson suggests that on April 19 we stage massive peaceful protests in every city and town — crowds of Americans celebrating the anti-monarchical uprising of 1775 and pledging their allegiance to that heritage by denouncing Trump’s increasingly autocratic rule: Thereby flooding Trump and Musk’s zone still further. 

Sounds like a good idea to me. You?

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Citizenship, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, Racism, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Budget Cuts Will Stifle Cancer Research

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2025 //
25

Heather Cox Richardson points out that Trump’s desire to cut the federal budgets threatens to undermine cancer research. Cutting cancer research? Yes. Is cancer research a “Marxist radical lunatic” or DEI activity?

Cancer research is important for all of us, regardless of our political views, or lack thereof. Why in the world would Trump want to cut its funding?

Yesterday the National Institutes of Health under the Trump administration announced a new policy that will dramatically change the way the United States funds medical research. Now, when a researcher working at a university receives a federal grant for research, that money includes funds to maintain equipment and facilities and to pay support staff that keep labs functioning. That indirect funding is built into university budgets for funding expensive research labs, and last year reached about 26% of the grant money distributed. Going forward, the administration says it will cap the permitted amount of indirect funding at 15%.

NIH is the nation’s primary agency for research in medicine, health, and behavior. NIH grants are fiercely competitive; only about 20% of applications succeed. When a researcher applies for one, their proposal is evaluated first by a panel of their scholarly peers and then, if it passes that level, an advisory council, which might ask for more information before awarding a grant. Once awarded and accepted, an NIH grant carries strict requirements for reporting and auditing, as well as record retention.

In 2023, NIH distributed about $35 billion through about 50,000 grants to over 300,000 researchers at universities, medical schools, and other research institutions. Every dollar of NIH funding generated about $2.46 in economic activity. For every $100 million of funding, research supported by NIH generates 76 patents, which produce 20% more economic value than other U.S. patents and create opportunities for about $600 million in future research and development.

As Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times explained, the authors of Project 2025 called for the cuts outlined in the new policy, claiming those cuts would “reduce federal taxpayer subsidization of leftist agendas.” Dr. David A. Baltrus of the University of Arizona told Jewett and Stolberg that the new policy is “going to destroy research universities in the short term, and I don’t know after that. They rely on the money. They budget for the money. The universities were making decisions expecting the money to be there.”

Although Baltrus works in agricultural research, focusing on keeping E. coli bacteria out of crops like sprouts and lettuce, cancer research is the top area in which NIH grants are awarded.

Anthropologist Erin Kane figured out what the new NIH policy would mean for states by looking at institutions that received more than $10 million in grants in 2024 and figuring out what percentage of their indirect costs would not be eligible for grant money under the new formula. Six schools in New York won $2.4 billion, including $953 million for indirect costs. The new indirect rate would allow only $220 million for overhead, a loss of $723 million.

States across the country will experience significant losses. Eight Florida schools received about $673 million, $231 million for indirect costs. The new indirect rate would limit that funding to $66 million, a loss of $165 million. Six schools in Ohio received a total of about $700 million; they would lose $194 million. Four schools in Missouri received a total of about $830 million; they would lose $212 million.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Health, Ignorance, Research, Science, Trump

Why Elon Musk’s Family Moved from Canada to South Africa in 1950

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2025 //
9

This post appeared originally on October 10, 2023. It explains why Elon Musk’s grandfather Joshua Haldeman left a prosperous life in Canada and moved his family to apartheid South Africa in 1950. He was a successful chiropractor and aviator. He was also involved in politics, but was not successful at winning elections.

Wikipedia describes Haldeman’s racism and anti-Semitism:

Haldeman was a supporter of South Africa’s apartheid policies and the ruling National Party of South Africa, telling a reporter for the extremist Die Transvaler newspaper, a tool of the Nazis in South Africa during World War II: “Instead of the Government’s attitude keeping me out of South Africa, it had precisely the opposite effect—it encouraged me to come and settle here”.[2] In 1951, he wrote an article about South Africa for the Saskatchewan newspaper, the Regina Leader-Post, defending apartheid and writing of Black South Africans: “The natives are very primitive and must not be taken seriously… Some are quite clever in a routine job, but the best of them cannot assume responsibility and will abuse authority. The present government of South Africa knows how to handle the native question.”[2][20]

Weeks after the Sharpeville massacre on 21 March 1960, Haldeman self-published The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa, a 42-page response to the massacre. The United Nations passed Resolution 134, the body’s first official condemnation of apartheid and the beginning of decades of diplomatic isolation. Later Haldeman self-published a second book alleging again international conspiracies: The International Conspiracy in Health, which cast suspicion on fluoridation, vaccinations, and health insurance.[2][21]

Grandfather Haldeman was an energetic private pilot, who traveled the globe. He died in a plane accident in 1974, when Elon was only three years old. Maybe he had no influence on his grandchild.

Too bad Elon Musk didn’t stay there. He could have used his entrepreneurial brain to vitalize the economy of the African continent.

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Elections, Musk, Elon

Robert Hubbell: No Doubt About It: It’s a Coup!

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2025 //
19

Robert Hubbell again eviscerates the efforts underway to make Trump a king or dictator, as Musk continues his raids on government offices while Trump cheers him on.

Hubbell writes:

It’s a coup. The sooner that congressional Democrats and the legacy media acknowledge that fact, the better we will be able to calibrate our response and mount an effective defense. Democrats in Congress are beginning to get the message, largely because they are being flooded with outraged calls from their constituents. See The New Republic, “Disgusted” Democratic Voters Are Blowing Up Congress’s Phones.

To everyone reading this: Keep it up! In fact, redouble your efforts. There is no such thing as contacting your congressional representatives too much!

As noted yesterday, Democrats are starting to fight back in every venue possible. On Friday, Democrats and citizens who value the rule of law continued to make gains in the courts—even though it is not clear that court orders are being honored by Trump and Musk. 

Indeed, the facts suggest that DOJ lawyers are not being candid or forthcoming with federal judges—a practice also known as “lying.” Sooner or later, federal judges will figure out that they are being misled by officers of the court and then there will be hell to pay. But we are getting ahead of ourselves . . . .

On Friday, there was more (mostly) good news on the litigation front. Indeed, the DOJ seems to be strategically retreating so it can get its lies, er, I mean its “story” straight. Let’s take a look at the good news and then examine the evidence of backsliding by the administration.

Before looking at the news, let’s take a quick refresher on the Constitution and the immutable laws of the universe.

A refresher course on the Constitution and the Laws of the Universe

With the above firmly in mind, it is clear that Musk and Trump’s “cutting” spending in various agencies violates Articles I and II of the Constitution, the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, and the founding principle of separation of powers.

The “cuts” that Musk and Trump are imposing through computer hacking relate to funds that Congress has already appropriated—and which must be “duly executed” by the president. If Musk and Trump want to effectuate future cutsto budgets, they must convince Congress to pass an appropriations bill that makes such cuts.

Congressional Republicans have sat on their hands as Musk and Trump have overridden Congress’s Article I powers based on the vague excuse of “fraud,” which has never been specifically identified. Even if fraud exists, the remedy is not to override Congress’s role in the Constitution—it is to report the fraud to the DOJ for criminal prosecution and to Congress for remedial legislation.

Musk and Trump’s unlawful actions go far beyond unauthorized “cuts” accomplished by computer hacking; they extend to the extinguishment of entire agencies and departments created and funded by Congress under the authority of Article I of the Constitution.

So, the “cuts” and “closures” are not merely “controversial,” or “disputed,” or “illegal.” They overthrow the constitutional order and separation of powers by claiming that the president exercises the authority granted to Congress in Article I of the Constitution.

That is a coup. There is no other word for it.

Trump, having seized Congress’s authority under Article I of the Constitution, the open question is whether Trump will also claim the authority of the courts under Article III of the Constitution by asserting the right to decide which court orders, if any, he will obey.

Although the above sounds ominous, I remain confident and optimistic about the eventual outcome of this constitutional test. Why? because of the fourth branch of the government: the people. 

Trump and Musk will get away with their unconstitutional coup up to the point that a critical mass of the people take notice, rise up, and put a stop to the assault on the Constitution. Based on the posts in the Comment section to yesterday’s newsletter, achieving that critical mass may be closer than Trump and Musk believe.

And then there are the Second and Third Laws of the Universe: The “Law of You Broke It, You Own It,” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences.” [Yesterday, I referred to the First Law of the Universe: “It is easier to break things than to fix them.”]

Taken together, the laws of the universe lead to the inevitable outcome in which something bad and unexpected happens, at which point Trump and Musk get 100% of the blame, regardless of whether they had anything to do with the event. 

We are already beginning to see that dynamic as MAGA supporters are complaining that the price of eggs continues to increase (because of avian flu that is decimating stocks of egg-laying chickens). See this (satiric) commentary in Real Clear Politics, Egg Prices Are Totally Donald Trump’s Fault!

It is also in the nature of things that everything in the universe regresses to the mean. Extreme events are rare and anomalous. They happen but then recede into the center regions of the Bell Curve, where we live most of our lives.

I do not suggest adopting a “This too shall pass” attitude. But we should recognize that as we fight to defend the Constitution, the immutable laws of the universe, the rules of probability, and the limits of human tolerance are on our side. We have every reason to be confident that we will prevail over the anti-democratic coup that is unfolding before our eyes. Let’s act like it! Act boldly and without fear!

Developments on Friday

The winning streak of coup opponents continued on Friday, with one exception. In the most significant victory, a federal judge prevented the administration from placing 2,200 USAID workers on paid leave. See press release from Democracy Forward, Breaking: Federal Judge Pauses Parts of USAID Shutdown in Response to Lawsuit.

Democracy Forward partnered with the Public Citizen Litigation Group to represent two groups of federal union employees seeking to prevent the illegal shuttering of USAID.

In the complaint, the core of the plaintiffs’ claim is set forth simply and elegantly:

Not a single one of defendants’ actions to dismantle USAID were taken pursuant to congressional authorization. And pursuant to federal statute, Congress is the only entity that may lawfully dismantle the agency.

The complaint also alleges:

  • The President of the United States has only those powers conferred on him by the Constitution and federal statutes
  • The President does not have the power under the Constitution unilaterally to amend statutes.
  • President Trump’s actions to dissolve USAID exceed presidential authority and usurp legislative authority conferred upon Congress by the Constitution, in violation of the separation of powers.

The logic made plain in the USAID complaint applies to virtually every unlawful action taken by the DOGE vandals to date.

In a second victory, a federal judge barred the FBI and DOJ from disseminating the names of the FBI agents who worked on the January 6 investigations. The judge entered an order on a stipulated consent order—i.e., a voluntary agreement between the plaintiff FBI agents (current and former) and the DOJ. The Consent Order is here: FBI Agents Association v DOJ | ORDER | 2025-02-07.

The consent order remains in effect until the hearing on a motion for preliminary inunction, or on two days’ notice, whichever is sooner.

But, in an action by employees of the Department of Labor, a federal judge denied the employees’ request for an order protecting their private information from DOGE hackers. See The Hill, Judge won’t block DOGE from accessing Labor Department systems. 

The order denying the AFL/CIO’s motion for temporary restraining order is here: AFL / CIO v. Dept of Labor | Order. 

The judge denied the request for a temporary restraining order on the ground that the plaintiffs have not yet suffered injury and, therefore, do not have standing to bring the suit at this time. The judge nonetheless scheduled a hearing on a preliminary injunction. In short, the case isn’t over.

However, even as employee unions are obtaining injunctive relief in court, it appears that Musk and Trump are continuing their march to the sea unabated. In a press availability on Friday, Trump said that he has effectively given DOGE free rein in making cuts—which, as noted above, violates Articles I and II of the Constitution and the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. See The Guardian, Trump hints Musk ‘Doge’ team has free rein with Pentagon next in line for cuts.

At the press conference, Trump said,

Pressed on whether there was anything he has told Musk he cannot touch, Trump offered only a vague reply. “Well, we haven’t discussed that much,” he confessed. “I’ll tell them to go here, go there. He does it. He’s got a very capable group of people. Very, very, very, very capable.

“They know what they’re doing. They’ll ask questions, and they’ll see immediately as somebody gets tongue-tied that they’re either crooked or don’t know what they’re doing. We have very smart people going.”

No reporter asked Trump about the constitutionality or legality of Musk’s actions, asking instead whether anything is “off limits.” In response to that question, Trump said that the Department of Defense and the Department of Education are next:

I’ve instructed him to go check out education, to check out the Pentagon, which is the military. And you know, sadly, you’ll find some things that are pretty bad.

Finally, although a court order restrains Musk and DOGE from obtaining access to the Treasury payments system, Musk has managed to appoint a friend and fellow Silicon Valley venture capitalist to take charge of it. See The New Republic, Elon Musk to Install DOGE Crony Amid Treasury Department Takeover.

There is no indication—yet—that Musk has violated the order prohibiting DOGE from having anything more than “read-only” access to the Treasury payment system. Still, two sources (Talking Points Memo and Wired) suggest that DOGE agents have moved beyond read-only access.

Shutting down USAID is simply unconstitutional. For all intents and purposes, USAID has ceased work and been defunded. How that happened is not clear, but the onus is on Trump to “take care that the laws are faithfully executed.” Instead, plaintiffs and legal advocacy groups are forced to play “twenty questions” and “hide the ball” with DOJ lawyers feigning ignorance of the facts.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Extremism, Fascism, Musk, Elon, Trump
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