Robert Shepherd is a polymath who frequently comments on this blog. He has worked in almost every aspect of education, on curriculum, assessments, textbooks, and as a classroom teacher. His breadth of knowledge is remarkable.

Shepherd writes:

First, a little about the nature of nature.

There are about 800 known species of fig. Each particular species[1] is pollinated by females of ONE species of tiny wasp. For example, the two known species of fig in the United States, the Florida strangler fig (Ficus aurea) and the shortleaf fig (Ficus citrifolia), are pollinated by the fig wasps Pegoscapus mexicanus and Pegoscapus tonduzi, respectively. When a fig has flowered (the flowers are internal), it emits a specific odor that attracts its ONE specific wasp, which burrows into the fig for a meal. The wasp lays its eggs inside the ovaries of the short seeds of the fig and pollinates, incidentally, the long seeds with pollen from its original host fig, and so the short seeds produce baby fig wasps, and the long seeds produce, eventually, with luck, more figs. The pollinating wasp dies, and its nutrients are absorbed by the fig and turned into luscious fruit. It’s a cycle.

Black Elk explained why his people, the Lakota, built their teepees in circular forms and arranged them in circles. Birds do this, too, he said, “because theirs is the same religion as ours.” It is worth contemplating what might be the guiding principles in such a religion.

So, here’s the key point: If you interfere with the lifecycle of one of these wasps, the corresponding fig dies out. If you interfere with the lifecycle of one of these figs, the corresponding fig wasp dies out. That’s how things work out there beyond the asphalt jungle, folks. It’s all about mutuality and interdependence.

Biologists can tell you how breathtakingly interdependent species are. So can indigenous peoples. Here is Oren Lyons, Haudenosaunee Faith Keeper of the Wolf Clan of both the Onondaga Nation and the Seneca Nation. The Haudenosaunee are the Six Nations of the Grand River, also known as the Iroquois:

“The Seven Generations reminds you that you have responsibility to the generations that are coming, that you indeed are in charge of life as it is at the moment. . . . You have the continuing responsibility to look out for the next seven generations. . . .

In the United States, they have a Bill of Rights that they added onto the Constitution. . . . And I think that should have been a Bill of Responsibility, not a Bill of Rights. People talk about their rights, their rights, but they never talk about their responsibility. And leadership has got to have that above all. They’ve got to have vision. They’ve got to have compassion for the future. They’ve got to make that decision for the seventh generation. That’s not just a casual term. That’s a real instruction for survival. Every animal, every nation, every plant, has its own area to be, and you respect that. You know, as we sit here and look about us, there are these flowers. And no tree grows by itself . . . certain plants will gather around certain trees, and certain medicines will gather around those plants, so if you kill all the trees, if you cut all the trees, then you’re destroying the community. You’re not just destroying a tree. You’re destroying a whole community that surrounds it and thrives on it, and that might be very important medicine for people and for animals, because animals know the same medicine. They use this medicine. That’s where we learned. We learned by watching the animals. They taught us a lot. Where is the medicine? Because they use it themselves. And if you replant the tree, you don’t replant the community. You replant the tree. So, you’ve lost a community. And if you clear cut, which is what’s happening in America and in Canada a great deal these days and I guess around the world, then you’re really a very destructive force, and simply replanting trees is not replanting community. You lost a lot in the process. IF YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND THAT, YOU WILL [Caps mine].”

—From the film Indigenous American Prophecy (Elders Speak)

It is with these matters in mind that I want you to consider the modification of interpretation of the Endangered Species Act posted for comment by the Trump Maladministration’s Department of the Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service on April 17 of this year:

Rescinding the Definition of Harm under the Endangered Species Act

Regulations.gov

What this modification does is redefine harm to a threatened or endangered species as take, that is, as the direct killing of an animal. And the effect is to do away with the established definition of harm as, duh, taking an action that causes harm, such as destroying an animal’s habitat, including the plants and animals and fungi and eukaryotes and prokaryotes upon which the animal in question depends (for example, the network of fungal mycelia by which plants and trees communicate with one another and share essential resources; trees will nurture other sick trees nearby by sharing nutrients via these networks; don’t get me started on that one; you will end up out in the woods with me, boot deep in humus and mud).

This proposed modification of interpretation will be devastating to threatened and endangered species because ALMOST ALL EXTINCTION RESULTS FROM HABITAT LOSS, not take. That’s why, for example, Indian Elephants and Mountain Gorillas are facing extinction. Their habitats have steadily eroded from human encroachment. “The Endangered Species List has become like the Hotel California: Once a species enters, they [sic] never leave,” Trump’s Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, wrote, with typical Trump maladministration semiliteracy. “The only thing we’d like to see go extinct is the need for an endangered species list to exist.” The vandalous Trump maladministration is claiming that the proposed rule change doesn’t matter at all but just clarifies the meaning of the Act. But then, out of the same all-consuming maw, it refers to a dissent by Cro-Magnon Antonin Scalia that defines harm as “take” and take as the direct killing of an animal. And that’s the side of the maw that speaks the actual meaning of its action. 

Real Estate developers (LIKE TRUMP; what a surprise!) have long hated the Endangered Species Act because it prevents them from going into fragile, interdependent, mutualist, codependent habitat and clearing it for building. If you live in the so-called developed world, you are familiar with this phenomenon. Developers name their developments after whatever they ripped out to do their building. They cut down the whispering pines and christen their development Whispering Pines. They cut down the palms and level the rock palisade and name their development Palisade Palms. They bulldoze the plants that produce the flowers the butterflies used to migrate for thousands and thousands of miles to feed upon and name their barren, butterfly-less, soulless McMansions development—you guessed it—Mariposa Acres.  

It is unsurprising that Trump was recently filmed in the now Offal Office saying that, you know, a lot of endangered species ought to go extinct. [Since this amendment was proposed, I have looked in vain for that clip of IQ 47. If anyone can find it, please share in the Comments, below.]

The change will, OF COURSE, be devastating for vulnerable species. But being devastating to the vulnerable so as further to engorge the rich is what the Trump maladministration specializes in, isn’t it? And all the while, as it paves the way for the rapacious wealthy to leave devastation for the next seven generations, it will tell you that what it is doing is a nonissue. Here’s what Shakespeare had to say about that sort of equivocation:

“And be these juggling fiends no more believed, 

That palter with us in a double sense.”

–Macbeth, Act V, Scene xiii.

If you don’t understand that, your grandchildren will.

[1] The redundancy is intentional and for emphasis.

For more work by Bob Shepherd, see Robert Shepherd – YouTube

Imagine that you are a career civil servant , having worked at the same agency for 30 years. Then one day a 25-year-old youngster arrives with instructions to make rapid, sweeping change. He fires you and everyone else who knows how the agency works. This is called reform. Who are these people? It turns out that they hold jobs in multiple federal agencies. Do they receive multiple salaries?

Ethics experts have questioned the practice but Trump has never listened to ethics experts.

Faiz Siddiqui and Jacob Bosage wrote in The Washington Post:

Gavin Kliger, a U.S. DOGE Service software engineer in his mid-20s, arrived at Internal Revenue Service headquarters in February, telling senior agency officials he was there to root out waste, fraud and abuse.

Then, according to three people with direct knowledge of the events, he placed five government-issued laptops on a conference table and requested a sixth computer that would give him access at the IRS.

At the time, court records show, Kliger held two job titles at the Office of Personnel Management, as well as positions at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He was also working on dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Earlier this month, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, Kliger showed up at the Federal Trade Commission, too.

Kliger is not alone. His expanding portfolio — which now includes jobs in as many as seven federal offices — is typical of at least a handful of DOGE staffers. The unorthodox practice affords trusted acolytes of billionaire Elon Musk authority across broad swaths of government, as well as access to an array of confidential information, including tax documents, federal workforce records and consumer data.

Because their jobs are embedded within agencies, the DOGE staffers have far more influence than those who might have worked collaboratively across government before — and their positions raise the possibility that even if Musk leaves government service at the end of May, as he has suggested, his allies will still have power, potentially for years to come.

“Your people are fantastic,” Trump told Musk in a Cabinet meeting on Thursday. “In fact, hopefully they’ll stay around for the long haul. We’d like to keep as many as we can. They’re great — smart, sharp, right? Finding things that nobody would have thought of.”

Government policy and ethics experts say the arrangement is unusual — and unprecedented — for the sweeping amount of access it grants to relatively low-level bureaucrats. Government officials have argued that DOGE and Musk do not have formal authority over decisions but rather advise officials at Cabinet departments on actions to take. But that makes the appointments DOGE liaisons are taking at multiple agencies even more influential.

In addition to Kliger, who worked for Twitter before Musk bought the platform in 2022 and later joined an AI-focused data software firm, numerous DOGE associates have been given extraordinary power to shape government policy at multiple agencies. Among them:

• Software engineer Christopher Stanley, who worked on the White House WiFi system and was serving at the Office of Personnel Management, was appointed as a director on the board of the mortgage financing giant Fannie Mae. The appointment came with an annual salary ranging from at least $160,000, but Stanley quickly resigned. Stanley, who has worked for X and SpaceX, did not respond to a request for comment.
• Former Tesla engineer Thomas Shedd, 28, is running the digital arm of the General Services Administration, known as the Technology Transformation Services division but also has served in the office of the chief information officer at the Department of Labor, according to records reviewed by The Washington Post.
• Luke Farritor, a former SpaceX internin his 20s who won a prestigious prize for decoding a Roman scroll, is detailed to at least five agencies, according to a lawsuit challenging DOGE’s authority.
• And in perhaps the most high-profile case of cross-posting, Edward Coristine, the 19-year-old software engineer who used the online moniker “Big Balls,” was appointed to the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, in addition to his position at DOGE.

Even Amy Gleason, the official administrator of DOGE, is also an “expert/consultant” at the Department of Health and Human Services, a court filing shows. Gleason’s appointment to HHS was reported earlier by Politico.

White House spokesman Harrison Fields did not directly address multiple positions held by DOGE staffers, but he touted DOGE’s work in a statement to The Post.

“President Trump is committed to ending waste, fraud, and abuse, and his entire Cabinet, in coordination with DOGE, is working seamlessly to execute this mission efficiently and effectively,” he said.

In his business empire, Musk has frequently moved staffers and resources across companies, sometimes inviting scrutiny. But such arrangements are unusual in the federal government, where employees traditionally are assigned to one job and one agency at a time.

Staffers in DOGE’s predecessor agency — the U.S. Digital Service — worked collaboratively across government to improve technology, according to a former employee of the office, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Though they might sometimes receive an additional government-issued laptop from an agency they were assigned to work with, they did not typically work with more than one organization at a time, the person said.

Earlier this month, after Politico reported that Trump had told his inner circle Musk would soon depart government service, Trump told reporters that Musk would leave after “a few months.” Before that, Musk said most of DOGE’s work to find $1 trillion in annual spending cuts would be complete by about the end of May, when his status as a special government employee requires him to leave his White House post.

Max Stier, president and CEO of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, which advocates for better government, said that cross-postings might fly at a tech company but that they pose a “huge problem when it’s a governmental entity keeping people safe and providing critical support to millions of Americans.”

“You’ve got people who have been deputized who have no business doing what they’re doing,” Stier said.

State Democracy Defenders Fund, a group that aims to safeguard elections and perceived threats to democracy, has filed a lawsuit on behalf of more than two dozen USAID workers challenging DOGE’s constitutional authority, claiming Musk exercised authority that would typically be unavailable to a person who lacked a presidential nomination and Senate confirmation.

The lawsuit argues that multiple simultaneous postings provide Musk and his allies with extraordinary authority over government functions, as well as backdoor access to agencies that DOGE aims to target for spending reductions.

The suit cites the case of Farritor, a software engineer who, according to court records, was detailed to five agencies at the same time.

“You have to ask yourself: When you have people who are appointed to as many as five agencies at times — a single person — and you have others who are obviously not qualified, are those legally valid appointments or are they sham appointments done with intent to evade the law?” Norm Eisen, executive chair of State Democracy Defenders Fund, said in an interview.

He added: “I have been working for or around the federal government for almost 35 years and I never heard of a detailee with that many different jobs.”