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An opinion piece by Justin Fox at Bloomberg seeks to explain what the real purpose of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) actually is.
With six theories explored, Fox sets out a case for each purpose, but he really boils down self interest and cronyism.
Trump’s entire purpose in the White House seems to be to shock the senses and numb us to his corruption.
During an appearance on NBC’s Meet The Press, President Trump said he didn’t know if he was required to uphold the Constitution of the United States.
I think maybe that isn’t the only thing he doesn’t know.
On April 23, the President signed an executive order ending the enforcement of many civil rights laws and eliminating disparate-impact liability.
Legal experts and civil rights advocates say disparate-impact liability is a crucial tool for uncovering systemic discrimination. While that policy may not have meant to discriminate against a protected class, it can unintentionally affect workers and communities in negative ways. They say it that this order risks exacerbating disparities.
In some good news, Federal District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr., a Trump appointee, ruled that the Trump Administration cannot use the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) to deport Venezuelan migrants.
In his ruling, Judge Rodriguez wrote, “The question that this lawsuit presents is whether the President can utilize a specific statute, the AEA, to detain and remove Venezuelan aliens who are members of TdA. As to that question, the historical record renders clear that the President’s invocation of the AEA through the Proclamation exceeds the scope of the statute and is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms. As a result, the Court concludes that as a matter of law, the Executive Branch cannot rely on the AEA, based on the Proclamation, to detain the Named Petitioners and the certified class, or to remove them from the country.”
A Texas lawyer has shared his experience with “Federal Agents” after he offered counsel to an immigrant family.
Following up on an executive order to fire three members of the board of directors at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, President Trump is trying to end funding for National Public Radio(NPR) and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS).
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created over five decades ago, with the intent to provide funding for high quality news and educational content for the American public free of charge.
Under the law that created CPB, the president has the authority to appoint members of its board, in consultation with Senate leaders of both parties.
The law does not include the clause common to US government agencies that its board members "serve at the pleasure of the President”.
The Trump Administration has denied disaster assistance for damage from windstorms in Washington, tornadoes in Arkansas, and flooding in West Virginia.
Meanwhile, The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has said it will no longer match 100% of North Carolina’s spending to recover from September’s Hurricane Helene. Gov. Josh Stein (D-NC) said the cost share was crucial to the state’s efforts to rebuild.
FEMA at the direction of DOGE and the Trump Administration has also ended Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grants to rural communities that are meant to fix long-standing infrastructure problems.
Scientists across the country are grappling with cuts to Federal programs and research grants. Stories abound about the what the stalled research means to the American public and their health and safety. Everything from cancer, to eco systems, to flu vaccines are feeling the pinch.
In a shockingly lawless move, President Donald Trump signed an executive order authorizing the Secretary of Defense to “unleash” military personnel in the United States.
In the name of fighting crime, which is has been declining sine the 1990s, the administration intends to use National Security assets and military personnel to police America’s streets. Seems more likely that they are teeing up an excuse to declare martial law.
Planned cuts to budgets and personnel at Federal agencies will be devastating for the future of this country. Researchers and scientists are looking for opportunities outside the United States signaling a brain drain like none the country has ever seen.
A detailed and thoughtful look at what cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was shared on Substack by retired National Weather Service Meteorologist Alan Gerard.
Fifteen researchers shared with Inside Higher Ed how cuts to their projects will effect Americans health and safety.
These cuts are stopping research now and killing the future of research in the US, by destroying graduate programs that develop the scientists of tomorrow.
Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) arrested a Wisconsin Circuit Court Judge for impeding the operations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Milwaukee courthouse.
In a criminal complaint, the US Justice Department said Hannah Dugan, a Milwaukee County circuit judge, hindered the immigration agents who showed up to arrest the man without a judicial warrant outside her courtroom on April 18.
The complaint alleges that she tried to help him evade arrest by allowing him to exit through a jury door. Agents arrested the man, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, outside the courthouse after he left with his lawyer.
A Trump-nominated federal judge in Louisiana said that a 2-year-old American citizen appears to have been deported "with no meaningful process."
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty wrote that the toddler, identified as VML, had been sent to Honduras on Friday, alongside her mother and sister, even as the court had sought to clarify the girl's status. He set a hearing on the case for May 16 "in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
The ACLU of Louisiana says that there is another case where a 4- and 7-year-old, US citizen were also deported without access to legal representation.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents have held US citizens without allowing contact with family members looking for the individuals in at least two cases in April.
The most recent case in Arizona, 19-year-old Jose Hermosillo of Albuquerque, NM was detained outside a Border Patrol office in Tucson after asking an agent for directions.
Court records say that the agent arrested him in Nogales, but he told Arizona Public Media he had never been to the border town. He was held for 10 days before a court ordered his release.
Earlier in April, a Georgia man was detained in Florida on his commute to work.
I was away for a few days visiting my mother. It has been an eventful week for anyone watching the legal battles surrounding the Trump administration, but they seem to be continuing full bore against the orders that have been issued.
The Associated Press reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had an internet connection that bypassed the Pentagon’s security protocols set up in his office to use the Signal messaging app on a personal computer.
The existence of the unsecured internet connection is the latest revelation about Hegseth’s use of the unclassified app and raises the possibility that sensitive defense information could have been put at risk of potential hacking or surveillance.
Republicans remain silent as President Donald Trump continues to order the US Department of Justice to investigate perceived enemies and political rivals.
From law firms who worked for causes he opposes, to individuals who worked in his last administration, Trump has issued several orders in a remarkable breach of the traditional wall of separation between the White House and the Justice Department.
The newest order issued Thursday directs an investigation into ActBlue, a Democratic fundraising group.
Elon Musk's DOGE cuts to the the Federal workforce will cost the government $135 billion this fiscal year, according to a report in the New York Times.
This comes as estimated savings from DOGE cuts so far have been reduced to less that $150 billion. Experts believe the real number is closer to $5 billion.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday evening directing the United States Department of Education to overhaul the federal higher education accreditation system, with a specific mandate to eliminate the consideration of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in any accreditation process.
The order empowers US Secretary of Education Linda M. McMahon to investigate accrediting agencies and, where warranted, deny, suspend, or revoke their federal recognition. It also directs US Attorney General Pam J. Bondi and McMahon to examine the use of DEI criteria by accrediting agencies and federally funded law and medical schools.
Federal judges continue to issue orders that the Trump administration circumvents and ignores.
An 8-page order issued Tuesday by US District Judge Paula Xinis is extremely critical of how the Justice Department has been navigating discovery process to determine whether the administration is complying with her order that it “facilitate” Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s return from El Salvador, where he was mistakenly deported last month.
“For weeks, Defendants (Trump administration) have sought refuge behind vague and unsubstantiated assertions of privilege, using them as a shield to obstruct discovery and evade compliance with this Court’s orders,” Xinis wrote. “Defendants have known, at least since last week, that this Court requires specific legal and factual showings to support any claim of privilege. Yet they have continued to rely on boilerplate assertions. That ends now.”
Then Wednesday, Judge Xinis ordered the discovery process halted for a week, after receiving non-public, sealed motions from the government.
In a separate disappearance case, the government was ordered to facilitate the return of members of a class of migrants who were in the US pending determinations of their asylum claims, under a settlement agreement.
US District Judge Stephanie Gallagher, a Trump appointee, noted that “both parties agree that this is just a breach of contract case. It is not a habeas case, or a case assessing the propriety of the government’s recent invocation of the Alien Enemies Act.”
She wrote that “under the plain terms of the Settlement Agreement and fundamental tenets of contract law, removal from the United States of a Class Member, including but not limited to Cristian, without a final determination on the merits by USCIS on the Class Member’s pending asylum application violates the Settlement Agreement.”
Judge William K. Sessions III denies the government’s request to keep Rümeysa Öztürk in Louisiana as it appeals the court’s jurisdiction and reiterates that Immigration and Customs Enforcement must transfer her to Vermont by May 1.
Öztürk, 30, is a PhD student of Tufts University, who’s student visa was cancelled after she coauthored an op-ed in the The Tufts Daily, in which she called for the university to acknowledge "Palestinian genocide" and move away from companies with ties to Israel because of the conflict in Gaza.
A federal judge in Washington, DC, has paused a key section of President Trump's March 25 executive order that makes sweeping changes to voting and elections.
"Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the States, not the President, with the authority to regulate federal elections," wrote Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in a 120-page opinion, while noting that Congress is currently debating legislation, the SAVE Act, that would require showing proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.
In California, Federal Judge William Orrick delivered another blow: Trump’s attempt to cut federal funding to so-called sanctuary cities was unconstitutional. San Francisco and 13 other cities had filed suit.
Orrick recalled that Trump had already suffered a similar defeat in 2017. Then, as now, the president sought to punish municipalities that refused to cooperate in deportation efforts. But just as before, the president lacked the legal foundation for such punitive measures.
In New Hampshire, Federal Judge Landya McCafferty pushed back against the Education Department’s anti-diversity campaign.
Her ruling: The guidance aimed at dismantling DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) programs in schools was constitutionally vague and infringed on the free speech of educators. If a professor is punished for teaching that structural racism exists, but not punished for denying its existence, she wrote, that is “textbook viewpoint discrimination.” It doesn’t get much clearer than that.
In the early morning hours, 7 Justices of the US Supreme court issued a terse order telling the Trump administration that it “is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this Court. See 28 U. S. C. §1651(a).”
The order stems from ongoing deportations the government is attempting under the Alien Enemies Act.
The New York Times reports that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth used the texting app Signal to share attack plans against the Houthi in Yemen with 13 people, including his wife, brother, and personal attorney.
The reports come as at least three top officials working at the Department of Defense were fired late last week for allegedly leaking information to reporters.
The Trump administration brushed off the reports as sour grapes and old news, but it brings into question Secretary Hegseth’s use of non secure channels on his personal phone to share information that could compromise military personnel during operational activity.
It has been reported that Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem had her bag stolen while having dinner in a downtown Washington, DC restaurant.
The bag contained the keys to her apartment, her Department of Homeland Security access badge, and many other personal items.
The Secret Service, which provides Noem's security detail, is investigating.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the Trump administration's request of a stay of testimony of officials in its ongoing fight to keep Kilmar Abrego Garcia in a prison in El Salvador.
Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who was nominated by Republican President Ronald Reagan, wrote that he and his two colleagues “cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos.”
The panel said the government is “asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.”
“Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear,” Wilkinson wrote.
Federal employees exhausted by the rip shot approach to cuts used by the Trump administration are taking offers to leave their jobs.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/doge-manufactured-chaos-government/682470/
The administration’s approach to streamlining government services will be to contract it out to his cronies, and allow them to get rich off the American taxpayer, while providing fewer services.
Contractors Decide Who Has Rights
TechDirt reports that contractors with little supervision from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials are making determinations about which migrants are members of trans-national gangs that the Trump administration has designated as terrorists.
To make matters worse, these contractors are hiring former cops who were fired for malfeasance, or resigned to avoid being fired.
If these allegations were credible, then a judge should make that determination. We already know that ICE and their contractors are prone to “administrative errors.”
The Grift Continues For Musk
Shadow President Elon Musk’s Starlink is the reportedly the lead for Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense shield.
Sources told Reuters that Musk is pitching a “subscription model” for the project. Do you have to watch a commercial to stop that nuclear missile?
No Evidence Of Waste, Fraud, Abuse
In a ruling from non-profits seeking grant funding awarded to them by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a federal court ruled that the administration had presented no evidence of malfeasance.
“Here we are, weeks in, and you’re still unable to proffer me any evidence with regard to malfeasance,” Judge Tanya Chutkan told DOJ attorneys at the hearing, adding that the government had shifted its reasoning for cutting off grants to the eight large nonprofits — from citing evidence of wrongdoing to citing a change in administration policy.
Chutkan also scrutinized the EPA’s procedure for abruptly terminating the $20 billion grant program in March, specifically its failure to give awardees advance notice before announcing the cancellation.
“If EPA had concerns about oversight and the funding, the way to do it is either get a court order — which you didn’t do — or go through the procedures for termination,” Chutkan told DOJ attorneys. “You haven’t done that. You’re putting the cart before the horse.”
A reminder that the Trump administration continues to violate the Impoundment Act of 1974.
E. coli Outbreak Covered Up?
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released no report of an investigation into an E.coli outbreak in 15 states that resulted in at least one death.
The FDA indicated in February that it had closed the investigation linked to romaine lettuce without publicly detailing what had happened, or which companies were responsible for growing and processing the contaminated lettuce.
Credit Union Watchdogs Fired
Two members of the National Credit Union Administration (NACU) board were fired by President Trump.
The NACU is an independent organization that provides oversight to the nation's $2.3 trillion credit union sector.
Reuters reports that the firing leaves the board with just one member, Republican Chairman Kyle Hauptman.
Second Acting IRS Commissioner Steps Down
A second acting IRS Commissioner has retired, rather than authorize the sharing of income tax records with immigration officials.
TechDirt reports that Acting commissioner Melanie Krause has chosen to walk, rather than be a part of this horrific mass vanishing of migrants, despite initially showing some willingness to cooperate with the Trump administration’s demands.
“Melanie Krause, who had served as acting head since February, will step down over the new data-sharing document signed Monday by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The agreement will allow ICE to submit names and addresses of immigrants inside the U.S. illegally to the IRS for cross-verification against tax records.”
Not only have two consecutive acting commissioners resigned over this single, focused effort to turn normally confidential tax records into just another way for the government to inflict pain on migrants who not only have jobs but pay taxes, but the administration’s desire to stock its cabinet shelves with loyalists has resulted in the dismissal of IRS lawyers who expressed their concerns about the legality of this request.
MD Senator Going To El Salvador
US Senato Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) announced that he will travel to El Salvador today to push for the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man who the US Justice Department said in court it mistakenly deported.
“My hope is to visit Kilmar and check on his wellbeing and to hold constructive conversations with government officials around his release. We must urgently continue working to return Kilmar safely home to Maryland,” Van Hollen, D-Md., said in a statement Tuesday night, calling Abrego Garcia’s deportation “unlawful” and an “abduction.”
Government Likely In Contempt Of Court
US District Judge James Boasberg ruled today that “probable cause exists” to hold Trump administration officials in criminal contempt for violating his orders in mid-March halting the use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members.
The situation has been a major political and legal flashpoint for the Trump Administration in its efforts to carry out a historic deportation campaign, especially in mid-March when it sent three planes of migrants to a prison in El Salvador.
“The Court ultimately determines that the Government’s actions on that day demonstrate a willful disregard for its Order, sufficient for the Court to conclude that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt,” Boasberg wrote in his decision.
“The Court does not reach such conclusion lightly or hastily; indeed, it has given Defendants ample opportunity to rectify or explain their actions,” he continued. “None of their responses has been satisfactory.”
Russian IP Attempts Access NLRB Records
A user with a Russian IP address tried to log into National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) systems just minutes after Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) moved to access and extract troves of sensitive data from inside the agency, according to an extensive whistleblower disclosure released Tuesday.
NextGov reports that a user with a Russian IP address attempted to log in on a newly created DOGE email account and the attempts were “near real-time” in conjunction with DOGE gaining accessing the NLRB systems.
“The whistleblower claims DOGE engineers also used secretive and suspicious methods to pull sensitive information from the NLRB’s systems. They shut off security tools that track activity, deleted evidence of what they accessed and used software that made their work nearly invisible.”
(More details from Ars Technica)
No word from the unanimous court that ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return of a Maryland father who had been wrongly deported.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson has a great summary of the situation.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia has been painted as is a terrorist, and gang member by Trump administration officials, without providing evidence.
Abrego Garcia, an El Salvadoran national, was in the United States under a protection order issued by an immigration judge. He was disappeared to El Salvador without due process.
The Trump administration paints this as a foreign policy situation. It believes no judge can order them to seek Abrego Garcia's return.
Today in the Oval Office, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that facilitating his return is just providing the aircraft, they cannot make El Salvador release a prisoner.
Meanwhile, El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele said that he was not inclined to release Abrego Garcia. He said, "The question is preposterous: how can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?"
Trump administration has defied a court order for information about its efforts so far to locate and return Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Reuters reports that U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis told Department of Justice lawyers, "I'm not sure what to take from the fact that the Supreme Court has spoken quite clearly and yet I can't get an answer today about what you've done, if anything, in the past."
On Thursday the Supreme Court said the administration must take steps to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador and detail the steps it has taken and will take to return him to the United States.
Drew Ensign, an attorney with the Department of Justice, repeated what the administration had said in court filings, that it would provide that information by the end of Tuesday, once it evaluated the Supreme Court ruling.
The US Dollar has long been the reserve currency, with many nations using our Treasury Bonds as investment vehicles for their wealth. It has allowed the US to run deficits with lower borrowing costs, but Trump's tariff game this week had investors fleeing the US bond markets.
"The US, almost overnight, it seems to have lost its safe-haven attributes," said Ray Attrill, head of FX strategy at National Australia Bank.
"There is ... a loss of confidence to some extent ... you're overlaying that with the loss of exceptionalism and the view that in the short-term, at least, it's the U.S. economy that's going to be suffering more than any other from what's happening on the tariff front."
The dollar, already on course for its worst year since 2017 (the last time Trump was in office), on Friday plunged to a decade-low against the Swiss franc and dropped to its weakest level against the euro in more than three years.
Economists see a danger in the administrations policies regarding trade and the financial system, since foreigners owned $33 Trillion in US debt at the end of 2024.
"The Trump administration's ambitious agenda to reform the international financial system seems almost oblivious to the reality of America's extreme dependence on foreign capital as reflected in its net international investment position," said Chris Wood, global head of equity strategy at Jefferies, in a note.
In an exclusive, Politico is reporting that the State Department has asked employees to report each other for “anti-Christian” bias.
“The cable was sent out to embassies around the world under Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s name. The instructions also were released in a department-wide notice.
It encourages State Department employees to report on one another through a tip form that can be anonymous.
The cable requests that, “Reports should be as detailed as possible, including names, dates, locations (e.g. post or domestic office where the incident occurred.”
Court Orders Return Of Abrego Garcia
The Supreme Court ordered in an unsigned opinion that the Trump Administration must work to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
The unsigned order with no noted dissents, says that the lower court’s “order properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.”
Charm Offensive For Greenland
The New York Times reports that the Trump administration is planning a charm offensive on the people of Greenland to convince them to become part of the United States.
They are even considering “the possibility of replacing the $600 million in subsidies that Denmark gives the island with an annual payment of about $10,000 per Greenlander.”
Insider Trading?
Members of Congress are pointing out the stock trades of members of the administration, political donors, and congressional supporters of the Trump administration, after the President’s “good time to buy” post on his social media website hours before he paused his reciprocal tariffs an every country but China Wednesday.
Foreign Students Losing Student Visas
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been cancelling visas for foreign students across the country without notice, or cause in some cases. The Wall Street Journal reports that more than 300 student have been targeted.
This move comes as the administration has been disappearing people from the country without due process, and as it formulates plans to do the same to US citizens.
Tariff’s Paused
The administration paused the implementation of sweeping reciprocal tariffs 90 days just as they were about to go into effect. Markets rebounded on the news.
It is almost like they crashed the markets to get bargain stocks?
Judge Restores AP Access
Federal District Judge Trevor McFadden ordered the White House to restore the Associated Press’ access to the Oval Office, Air Force One, and events open to the press corps.
"The court simply holds that under the First Amendment, if the government opens its doors to some journalists — be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere — it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints. The Constitution requires no less," McFadden wrote in his 41-page opinion.
Roberts Allows Illegal Firings
Chief Justice John Roberts issued an another administrative stay granting the Trump administration relief in its ability to fire members of independent boards.
Current federal laws governing independent boards and commissions currently limit the grounds for their removal to neglect of duty or malfeasance.
The Supreme Court ruled in two emergency cases that the Trump Administration can shred the rights of federal employees and Venezuelan migrants.
While narrow, and from the court’s “shadow docket,” the first ruling said that the plaintiffs in the California case, that reinstated thousands of probationary employees illegally fired in government agency at the direction of the Office of Personnel Management, may have lacked standing to bring a complaint.
The affected agencies in the California case are the departments of Veterans Affairs, Defense, Energy, Interior, Agriculture and Treasury.
Further complicating matters, a judge in Maryland issued a similar ruling that applies to the same agencies at issue in the California case as well as others. That decision, which requires affected employees in 19 states and the District of Columbia to be kept on paid administrative leave while litigation continues, remains in place.
In a separate ruling on deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of 1789, the court ruled 5-4 that the administration could deport Venezuelan migrants suspected of being gang members, as long as they are given due process.
The court also told the plaintiffs that they should have sought recourse in a Federal Court in Texas, where the people were detained.
In dissent, the three liberal justices said the administration has sought to avoid judicial review in this case and the court “now rewards the government for its behavior.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined portions of the dissent.
According to reports, 137 people were deported under the US immigration officials have said the detainees were "carefully vetted" and verified as gang members before being flown to El Salvador, under an agreement with that country.
But many of the deportees do not have US criminal records, a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official acknowledged in court documents.
Some relatives of the deported migrants have told the BBC the men have been wrongly swept up in the immigration crackdown, and that they are innocent.
Reuters is reporting that Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is using his proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) program, GrokAI, to spy on communications among government employees.
The article states, "At the Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, some EPA managers were told by Trump appointees that Musk’s team is rolling out AI to monitor workers, including looking for language in communications considered hostile to Trump or Musk, the two people said."
Musk is taking his access to government data as a chance to train his AI program, likely for personal gain. As a special government employee, Musk is prohibited under ethics laws from involving himself in government activities that would benefit him or his companies.
The Trump administration is raising tariffs on Chinese goods to 104% after it raised tariffs in response to Trump's Liberation Day trade war.
U.S. Markets dropped for the fourth consecutive day today.
Supreme Court Delays Return Order
Chief Justice John Roberts issued an administrative stay to give the Supreme Court more time to consider the arguments presented by both sides. He gave the parties a 5pm Tuesday, April 8, deadline.
The administration has appealed the decision by US District Judge Paula Xinis ordering the government to return Abrego Garcia by 11:59 p.m. on Monday to the Supreme Court, after an appeals court ruled unanimously that he should be returned and given due process.
Tariffs And Markets
The first paragraph from a March 3 article in The Economist describing Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement, as “Ruination Day.”
“If you failed to spot America being 'looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far’ or it being cruelly denied a ‘turn to prosper’, then congratulations: you have a firmer grip on reality than the president of the United States.”
Losses in the markets have come close to bear territory, with the S&P Index trading 20% off its recent peak briefly today.
After a roller coaster day, the Dow closed lower by 349 points, or 0.91%. The broader S&P 500 fell 0.23%. The Nasdaq Composite was 0.1% higher after fluctuating between gains and losses.
Officials at the Department of Justice dispatched U.S. Marshalls to deliver a letter threatening a former pardon attorney about planned testimony to congressional democrats.
Hands Off Protests
Thousands of Americans across the country rallied to protest the Trump administration’s dismantling of the administrative state.
Photos from the protests show large crowds across the country. Including a large protest in an area where Trump is popular.
Politicizing Truth
The Justice Department attorney tasked with defending the Trump Administration’s “administrative error” has been placed on administrative leave, along with his supervisor.
Tasked by the government to lie to the court, the attorney answered the judge honestly when asked why the government could not just ask for the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was deported against the orders of an immigration court.
Attorney General Pamela Bondi told CNN, “At my direction, every Department of Justice attorney is required to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States. Any attorney who fails to abide by this direction will face consequences.”
The move comes as career Justice Department officials are feeling squeezed between duty to the court, and following orders.
MSPB Chair Reinstated
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has ruled that the attempted removal of Cathy A. Harris, Chair of the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), was unlawful.
District Judge Rudolph Contreras granted Harris’s motion for summary judgment, finding that her removal by the Trump administration violated federal law. The ruling reaffirms the independence of the MSPB and upholds critical protections for federal whistleblowers.
Stock Markets Fall
The president announced from a golf cart that things were going great, as investors drove the markets down in reaction to his increased tariffs. All told, the U.S. market was “liberated” of more than $6 trillion in value over the past two days, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Investment bank JPMorgan on Thursday warned that the tariffs are likely to push the U.S. and the world into a recession.
Shock and anger is how businesses of all sizes reacted as they processed the sweeping costs that they, and American consumers, will now have to pay to continue doing business.
Consumer spending is already slowing down, while consumer confidence has plummeted. And even a reassuring jobs report on Friday morning, with employers adding more jobs than expected last month, couldn't quiet widespread market fears about the outlook for the post-tariffs economy.
The tax increase is set to go into effect tomorrow. Larger reciprocal tariffs will go into effect April 9.
Administrative Error Correction?
A federal judge in Maryland ordered the government to return a man the government disappeared to El Salvador.
"This was an illegal act," U.S. Federal District Judge Paula Xinis told Justice Department lawyers at a hearing in Greenbelt, Maryland about the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who lived in the U.S. legally and had a work permit. Abrego Garcia was arrested and deported last month — despite having been granted protection by an immigration judge in 2019, that should have prevented his deportation.
The Justice Department admits that Abrego Garcia was deported because of an administrative error. But DOJ lawyers argued in court papers that he is a member of the criminal gang MS-13 and that the judge lacks the authority to order his return since Abrego Garcia is no longer in the U.S.
Judge Xinis ordered the government to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. by 11:59 pm on Monday, April 7. She told the government that keeping him in El Salvador constitutes irreparable harm.
"From the moment he was seized, it was unconstitutional," Judge Xinis said during the hearing. "If there isn't a document, a warrant, a statement of probable cause, then there is no basis to have seized him in the first place. That's how I'm looking at it," the judge said.
DOGE Guts NEH
A report on NPR says that staff at the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) were told by email late Thursday night that they were being placed on paid administrative leave effective immediately.
“A senior NEH official, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press, says a team from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been visiting NEH offices over the past couple of weeks "and then ratcheted up the pressure.”
DOGE also targeted the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), where employees were also put on administrative leave this week.
Erin Harkey, CEO of American's for the Arts (AFTA) calls the actions against the IMLS and the NEH "an unprecedented threat to culture in America."
Harkey cited a recent study by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), that found that the "arts and cultural sector grew at more than twice the rate of the total economy between 2022 and 2023."
"Recent economic figures from the NEA highlight the significance of these institutions, which contribute $1.2 trillion to the U.S. economy and support 5.4 million jobs," writes Harkey. "Eliminating federal support for arts and humanities agencies will harm American families, weaken local economies, and undermine our nation's competitive edge."
Loomer’s In Charge?
The New York Times reports that far-right political activist, conspiracy theorist, and internet personality Laura Loomer met with Donald Trump in the Oval Office this morning to expose the disloyal members of National Security Advisor Michael Waltz team.
Following the meeting three people were fired. Other members of his staff were reassigned back to their home agencies.
Congress Waking Up?
As markets tank following Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement, Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA), and Maria Cantwell announced a bipartisan effort for Congress to retake control of trade policy, as the constitution mandates.
The bill would require congressional approval for tariffs to continue for over 60 days, and for the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of announcing them.
Little hope that Speaker Mike Johnson would consider the bill, since he only plays by his rules in the House of Representatives.
Trade War
Since we are talking about the largest tax-increase in history, the Trump tariffs will target just about every square inch of land mass on the planet, including those free-loading penguins in the Heard and McDonald Islands.
According to data from the World Bank, the US imported $1,4 million worth of machinery and electrical products from the Heard Island and McDonald Islands, where the only inhabitants are penguins, and there are no buildings or human habitation.
They have even attacked Christmas, Island that is. Along with the other “external territories” of Australia that the administration believes set their own trade policy, even though they are not self-governing.
As Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, said today: “Nowhere on Earth is safe.” Except for maybe Russia and North Korea, who aren’t on the list of countries in the “Liberation Day” announcements. Maybe that is because Russia’s special representative for economic cooperation is in Washington, DC meeting with Trump officials the next day.
Education Department Targets DEI
The Trump administration is giving states 10 days to comply with his executive order ending diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in public schools.
In a letter to state leaders across the country, the U.S. Education Department said Title I funding, which is targeted to schools with a high proportion of low income students, would be threatened if schools failed to follow its interpretation of civil rights laws.
Any violation of civil rights law, it says, "including the use of DEI programs to advantage one's race over another—is impermissible."
Mike Masnick makes a great point at TechDirt about the administration's replacement of due process with "authoritarian expediency."
Loose Lips
Reports surfaced yesterday that National Security Advisor Michael Waltz and members of his staff have used their personal Gmail accounts to conduct government business.
According to the Washington Post, Waltz himself had “potentially exploitable information” on his account, while a member of his staff had sent more sensitive material, such as discussing military positions and weapons systems with colleagues in other agencies who used their government-issued accounts.
Meanwhile, the administration decided there was no harm, no foul in the case where Waltz shared a Signal chat thread with the editor of the Atlantic.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth revealed details in the chat including the times of strikes on Iran-backed Huthi rebels and the type of aircraft, missiles and drones used, before the attacks actually happened.
Trade War
Trump announced a 10% minimum tariff on all imports into the United States and reciprocal tariffs on trading partners to penalize trade barriers that may be in place already.
The administration said it would impose 34% tariffs on China, 20% on the European Union and 24% on Japan, among an array of other trading partners.
Most economists see these tariffs as price increases that will be passed on to the American consumer.
The 10% tariffs will go into effect on April 5, and the higher reciprocal rates will go into effect on April 9, according to senior administration officials who briefed reporters today.
One reporter has a theory about how the administration came up with those higher reciprocal tariffs.
In a bright spot, Senators voted 51-49 to end Trump’s emergency declaration on fentanyl that underpins tariffs on Canada. There is little hope that Speaker Mike Johnson will bring the measure up in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Retribution
The acting head of the Social Security Administration admitted in emails that actions it was taking in an effort to chastise the Governor of Maine would result in more fraud, waste, and abuse, according to reports at The New Republic.
Leland Dudek asked staff to cancel contracts his agency had with the state after an exchange between Gov. Janet Mills and President Trump over his ban of transgender athletes in women’s sports.
Dudek wrote, “while our improper payments will go up, and fraudsters may compromise identities, no money will go from the public trust to a petulant child” referring to the governor.
Nothing this administration is doing is a joke, and this is no time to be April Fools about their actions.
Politicization of the Justice Department
White House officials directed the firing of over 50 U.S. Attorneys and deputies across the country for their perceived disloyalty to the President.
Pardoning Corporations?
A case won against BitMEX in an effort to battle money laundering and sanction avoidance has been wiped from the record following Trump’s historic pardoning of the company.
“BitMEX solicits and takes orders for trades in derivatives tied to the value of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin. Last summer, BitMEX entered a guilty plea in a Manhattan federal court for violating the Bank Secrecy Act for having operated without a legitimate anti-money laundering program. Prior to August 2020, customers could register to trade with BitMEX anonymously, providing only verified email addresses.”
Union Busting
In a blow to workers rights, and by executive fiat, the Trump administration has removed some Federal employees from collective bargaining agreements negotiated with their unions.
The order would eliminate collective bargaining rights from roughly 67 percent of the entire federal workforce and for 75 percent of workers who are already in a union, according to a report by Government Executive, a publication that covers the business of government.
The Justice Department has judge shopped to the Western District of Texas in an effort to keep the union busting on track.
Fired By DOGE
Former government employees are speaking out about their experiences being fired by the Trump administration in their slash and burn efforts.
Many are Veterans who wanted to continue to serve their country. One of those Veterans says she was fired over a limerick.
Some have had luck in court, with judges finding that their firings were illegal.
Now the administration is attempting to show it is following the rules for reductions in force within the Federal workforce.
Destruction of the Centers for Disease Control
Thousands of employees working at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were notified that their positions were subject to a reduction in force in response to the administrations continued efforts to destroy parts of the government it sees as wasteful.
The cuts come as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., along with Elon Musk’s DOGE, attempt to “Make America Healthy Again” by gutting disease prevention programs, along with occupational health and safety units.
Reports indicate that the effected employees have been placed on administrative leave and not offered positions that are open in other programs, in violation of civil service protections.
Disappearances Continued
Reports show that one of the people that the Trump administration says it removed to a prison in El Salvador was taken following an “administrative error”.
He was moved there on flights tracked by a former CFO, turned activist, that are at the center of the administration’s refusal to comply with a verbal order spoken in a DC courtroom on March 15.
A professor of computer science at Indiana University is among those who have disappeared under the Trump administration.
Wired reports that Xiaofeng Wang and his wife have been wiped from the University’s website and their home raided by the FBI. No one will say why.
In an effort to keep new parents from being able to do their jobs as members of congress, the House of Representatives will not vote on any legislation this week.
Nine Republicans, joined all Democrats to vote down a procedural rule that would have allowed the Republican leadership to kill a bi-partisan effort to allow new parents to vote by proxy in the House for up to 12 weeks after the birth of their child.
Senator Cory Booker, D-NJ began speaking yesterday in the Senate chamber on the disastrous policy decisions being made by the Trump Administration.
While he is not filibustering a particular piece of legislation, he is calling attention to the destruction of the institutions that govern our nation, and provide data and research capabilities to ensure fact-based discourse.
Back after a hiatus to detox from the news cycle, but here we go with the attacks on the First, Fifth, and 22nd Amendments.
Legal permanent residents (Green Card holders) and students in the country on Visas are being removed without due process. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have detained students and educators in New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Alabama, and Washington, DC.
Some of these people have been detained for protesting, or writing opinion pieces calling out Isreal’s treatment of Palestinians in the Gaza and the West Bank.
On March 13, The National Immigrant Justice Center and ACLU of Illinois filed a motion to enforce the Castañon Nava settlement in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
The lawsuit follows extreme actions taken by the Trump Administration since January 2025 to deport immigrants suspected of being in the country without authorization. Raids and sweeps conducted by ICE without warrants, have resulted in the detention of U.S. citizens in Chicago, Virginia, and Missouri.
ICE detainees often end up in isolated detention centers, far from where they have made their homes and have connections in the United States.
If all of that weren’t bad enough, the administration is keeping a man from donating a kidney to his brother in Chicago, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Steve Bannon, former Trump advisor and convicted felon, told Chris Cuomo in an interview that Trump would seek a third term in 2028.
“We’re working on it. I think we’ll have, I think we’ll have a couple of alternatives,” he said Tuesday. “Let’s say that. We’ll see, we’ll see, we’ll see what the definition of term limit is.”
The 22nd Amendment defines the limit this way: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”
Trump even told NBC News he wasn’t joking when talking about a third term as President.
Many attribute these plans to maintain power despite Constitutional limits as a distraction from the the Signal Chat debacle, and other unpopular moves by the administration.
The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the dismantling of USAID but Elon Musk’s DOGE can continue.
Meanwhile, U.S. District Judge Amy German Jackson barred the administration from stopping work and firing employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and ordered the reinstatement of previously terminated workers. She also blocked the destruction of any CFPB records and ordered the recission of any “wholesale” contract cancellations issued on or after Feb. 11.
Musk’s DOGE made the CFPB an early target for destruction, even though it is funded by fees at the Federal Reserve.
“While the President is free to propose legislation to Congress to accomplish this aim, the defendants are not free to eliminate an agency created by statute on their own, and certainly not before the Court has had an opportunity to rule on the merits of the plaintiffs’ challenge,” Jackson said.
Enforcement actions at the CFPB have saved American consumers approximately $19.7 billion since its founding.
Newly appointed members of the board at the US Institute of Peace (USIP) laid off all the U.S. based employees of the autonomous, congressionally-funded think tank Sunday. DOGE officials seized control of the organization with police March 17.
USIP is a private nonprofit, and as such, its staffers were not federal employees.
It also has a nearly $80 million endowment, which includes its Washington office building, built using funds raised from private donors including Boeing, and thus not government-owned. The land the building sits on was authorized for USIP's use by Congress. It is unclear what will happen to these assets if USIP is closed.
The president of the U.S. is allowed to appoint and remove USIP board members, but must do so with the consent of a majority of the board or with approval from multiple Senate subcommittees. The new board was not appointed under either of these scenarios.
DOGE was granted access to the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Federal Personnel Payroll System, against the advice of senior career staff.
According the a report in the New York Times, “such elevated access to critical high-value asset systems is rare with respect to individual systems and no single [Department of Interior] official presently has access to all HR, payroll, and credentialing systems.”
The senior employees reportedly warned that granting DOGE employees this level of access would allow them to be able to view highly sensitive personal information that is subject to controls under the Privacy Act.
The payroll system processes salaries for about 276,000 federal employees across various government agencies, including the Supreme Court.
On Friday, the federal employees reportedly asked the Doge workers to deliver the memo to Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior, for his signature, thereby assuming the legal responsibility for the associated risks. Burgum reportedly never signed the memo.
But on Saturday, interior department officials reportedly granted at least two Doge employees, Stephanie Holmes, and Katrine Trampe, the access they had requested.
The two officials, who warned against allowing unfettered access to Musk’s DOGE, were placed on administrative leave by Tyler Hassan, former DOGE employee and acting assistant secretary of policy management and budget at the Department of the Interior.
Members of the administration continue to downplay the use of the Signal App by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National security adviser Mike Waltz, Vice President JD Vance, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, White House envoy Steve Witkoff and Alex Wong, Waltz's deputy.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, identified as "TG" in the chat, refused to confirm her participation in the chat at a Senate hearing Tuesday. At a House hearing today, she attempted to say only that she could not recall the information contained in the chat, and may have misspoken in her Senate testimony.
Meanwhile, the administration is continuing to cancel visas and green cards for anyone in the United States critical of its foreign policy.
Information published by The Independent confirms that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested a Tufts University doctoral student who co-authored an op-ed supporting Palestine.
Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen, was disappeared in front of her off-campus apartment. According to the publication, "Surveillance footage of the arrest shows plainclothes agents approaching her from the street. One officer, whose head is covered by sweatshirt hood, appears to approach her without identifying himself and then grabs her arm. Another officer approaches and takes her phone while she is placed in handcuffs. Three officers cover their faces with neck gaiters."
A federal appeals court in Washington, DC, upheld a lower court ruling stopping deportations of migrants the administration says it suspects are members of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua.
Elon Musk's DOGE will mark millions more people in the Social Security database as deceased. The move is billed as cost savings by DOGE, even though none of the people listed in the database as over 120 years of age are receiving benefits.
At least one man in Seattle is still trying to prove to the his bank, and the government, that he is in fact, not dead.
As per the Associated Press, a July 2024 report from Social Security’s inspector general states that from fiscal years 2015 through 2022, the agency paid out almost $8.6 trillion in benefits, including $71.8 billion — or less than 1% — in improper payments. Most of the erroneous payments were overpayments to living people.
"Part of the confusion comes from Social Security’s software system based on the COBOL programming language, which has a lack of date type. This means that some entries ..
Trump has signed an executive order attempting to seize control of elections across the country.
Under the order, the Department of Justice must go after states that count absentee or mail-in ballots received for federal elections after Election Day. Any state that allows those ballots to be counted would lose access to federal grants to improve their election systems.
It would also give federal entities, including DOGE, access to voter rolls and the Social Security Administration's database to attempt to confirm a citizen's eligibility to vote.
An editor at The Atlantic was included in a group thread on the supposedly secure messaging app Signal, where top Trump Administration officials Trump Administration officials shared plans to attact Houthi rebels in Yemen.
"I have never seen a breach quite like this. It is not uncommon for national-security officials to communicate on Signal. But the app is used primarily for meeting planning and other logistical matters—not for detailed and highly confidential discussions of a pending military action. And, of course, I’ve never heard of an instance in which a journalist has been invited to such a discussion."
It is possible that the group text thread violated The Espionage Act. The messages also likely violated federal record keeping laws.
Constitutional crisis? Try Constitutional Crises according to Michael Tomasky of The New Republic.
"One involves Elon Musk and DOGE, barging their way into the United States Institute for Peace, created by Congress under Ronald Reagan, with DOGE staffers apparently ripping the organization’s logo off the wall..."
He lists the revocation of birthright citizenship. attempted federal spending freeze (impoundment), firings of agency heads, ordered removal of federal employees with civil service protections, as other constitutional crises we already face.
"But shocking as all that has been, nothing touches what Trump is trying to do to Judge James Boasberg over those three planes full of alleged Venezuelan gang members. The administration’s latest legal gambit, to invoke the state secrets privilege in an attempt not to have to disclose any information about the detainees or the flights, amounts to an effort by Trump to say that he can take any action against anyone he deems a danger to the state. That’s an attempt at dictatorship."
Corrupution The New York Times reported that Elon Musk was meeting with the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon to review the governments plans should the country go to war with China. Government officials, including the President have denied the reports.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0mw7wr0gp9o
If the reports are true, it would have granted unprecedented access to Musk about plans that could impact his business dealings in China and with the Chinese government.
Meanwhile, Members of Congress have requested the Department of Justice investigate Musk for actions taken at the the Federal Aviation Administration to create funding for a contract with Starlink.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/17/democrats-elon-musk-investigation
In a ceremony filled with lies, the President signed an order instructing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” of the US Department of education.
“After 45 years, the United States spends more money in education by far than any other country and spends, likewise, by far, more money per pupil than any country, and it’s not even close, but yet we rank near the bottom of the list in terms of success,” he said at the brief ceremony.
Data shows the US spent less than 6% of gross domestic product (GDP) on education in 2021, and $15,500 per year per student in 2019. Luxembourg spent $25,600 per student, 4.7% of their 2022 GDP. A number of countries in the South Pacific spend over 10% of their GDP on education funding.
Without instruction from Congress, who created the Department of Education in 1979, executive fiat is destroying the agency that enforces civil rights laws in educational environments and funds the Federal Student Loan Program, Special Education, and schools in rural areas.
In the United States, most funding for public schools comes from revenue generated by state and local taxes. Smaller, rural districts with a tax base that cannot support a robust education have been getting funding from the Department of Education to help them achieve educational offerings that can compete with larger, richer schools.
The destruction of this department will have wide ranging effects across all aspects of education in the US.
They have begun moving oversite of special education programs out of the Department and the Student Loan Program to the Small Business Administration.
Congress has abdicated its responsibility to direct and fund agencies in and outside the executive branch. It is allowing the executive to gut systems it has established to maintain the American values of freedom and democracy.
Officials from Elon Musk’s DOGE used police force to enter the United States Institute of Peace, an independent agency created by congress in 1984, and remove staff from the building Monday evening.
As part of an executive order, the administration wants to deconstruct the Institute of Peace and defund its work outside the budget process, and without the advice and consent required from the United States Senate.
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/18/g-s1-54569/us-institute-of-peace-trump-doge
A federal judge in Maryland has ruled that DOGE’s shut down and dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development likely violated the constitution in multiple ways, “because they deprived the public's elected representatives in Congress of their constitutional authority to decide whether, when, and how to close down an agency created by Congress.”
In a 68-page opinion, the judge ordered DOGE team members “to reinstate access to email, payments, security notifications, and other electronic systems, including restoring deleted emails, for current USAID employees” and contractors.
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/18/nx-s1-5332274/judge-ruling-usaid-shutdown
Over the weekend the administration ordered an acceleration of deportations for some migrants accused of having connections to the Venezuelan gang Tren De Aragua. That law allows the removal of persons who are from a country that is at war with the United States. Since Congress is the only body that can declare war, I am not certain that the law allows what the administration seems to be attempting to do.
A U.S. District Court Judge agreed that is is likely not legal and instructed from the bench that the government return flights that were in the air and halt any deportations being conducted under the Alien Enemies Act.
It appears that officials did nothing to stop the flights, and even allowed one to take off after the judge’s written order was entered. Although, attorneys for the government have argued that the judge cannot even ask for record from flights that were in the air before his order was issued in writing.
Chief Justice John Roberts, without naming the president, rebuked him for calling for a judge’s impeachment and attempting to undermine the rule of law.
Extra-judicial deportations have begun. Despite court orders, the administration has begun deporting people for alleged ties to terrorism without due process.
Dr. Rasha Alawieh, who specialized in kidney disease and held an H1-B Visa, worked at Brown Medicine in Rhode Island. She was deported in defiance of a court order requiring 48 hours notice before her removal from the country.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/17/brown-university-rasha-alawieh-deported-lebanon
In a separate case, migrants that are accused by the administration of being members of Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, were deported to El Salvador in defiance of a court order.
Customs and Boarder Enforcement agents have detained a German-born Green-Card holder at Boston Logan Airport as he was returning home to his partner and son in the U.S. It is unclear what reasoning they had for his detention. Reports state that he was strip-searched, and tortured, while agents encouraged him to surrender his Green-Card. His family only learned of his detention after he was taken to the hospital after collapsing from dehydration in custody.
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detained Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia graduate student with a Green Card who was a leader of Pro-Palestinian protests in 2024, for deportation.
Also targeted by immigration authorities was, Ranjani Srinivasan, a graduate student at Columbia from India. Her student visa was revoked after being questioned by authorities in early March, March despite having no ties to the protests. Srinivasan fled to Canada, which US officials have described as a “self-deportation”, according to the New York Times.
Salon has a piece explaining why the administration wants to pick this fight about an obscure wartime power extended the presidency by Congress, and create a constitutional crisis.
As the courts deliver a series of setbacks to his dramatic attempt to change the federal government without congressional approval, President Donald Trump’s supporters are echoing some of the rhetoric and actions that elsewhere have preceded attacks on the judiciary.
Trump’s supporters in Congress have raised the specter of impeaching judges who have ruled against the administration. Elon Musk, the billionaire Trump backer whose Department of Government Efficiency has ended up in the crosshairs of much of the litigation, has regularly called for removing judges on his social media site, X.
“If this is the approach the executive wants to take, it’s going to provoke a fight. Not everybody is going to be content to be a doormat the way Congress is.”
“Threats against judges are threats against constitutional government. Everyone should be taking this seriously,” said Judge Richard Sullivan, whom Trump in his first term appointed to the federal appeals court in New York.
“This is a basic authoritarian instinct,” said Steven Levitsky, coauthor of “How Democracies Die” and a Harvard political scientist. “You cannot have a democracy where the elected government can do whatever it wants.”
On March 15, three planes touched down in El Salvador. They carried 261 men deported from the United States. Most were Venezuelans—people who fled one nightmare only to be thrust into another. They were designated as “gang members” by the current administration and deported with little or no due process. No trials. No evidence presented. Just labeled, processed, and removed.
These men—human beings with names, histories, dreams—were marched through a gauntlet of armed guards, beaten, stripped naked, shaved, and thrown into overcrowded cells. A photojournalist on the scene described watching men age a decade in two hours. He watched as one young man sobbed, “I'm not a gang member. I'm gay. I'm a barber.” This man was slapped for his tears, beaten for his vulnerability.
And all of this—every slap, every sob, every stolen dignity—stamped with American approval. Coordinated with American officials. Executed with American efficiency.
I just don't know what kind of morals people have, that they seek to be feared. That's not manly. That's not something to be proud of. It's crude. It's barbarism.
Being feared isn't strength. True strength lies in being just when it would be easier to be cruel. In maintaining our principles when they're inconvenient. In seeing the humanity in others even when it would be politically expedient to deny it.
This is the true test of what being an American means: not what we proclaim when standing tall at a ballgame or wrapping ourselves in patriotic symbols, but what we permit to be done to the vulnerable when we think no one is watching.
What we're witnessing isn't merely tension between allies; it's the deliberate replacement of institutional relationships with the personal whims of a sovereign executive.
This isn't just bad foreign policy—it's the international manifestation of a domestic project to replace institutional governance with personal rule.
Just as DOGE is systematically replacing career civil servants with personal loyalists domestically, our foreign policy is replacing institutional partnerships with personalized relationships of domination and submission.
This transformation isn't accidental—it's the international application of Curtis Yarvin's neoreactionary vision, where governance isn't about institutions but about direct personal control. In this framework, there are no allies, only vassals. There are no partnerships, only hierarchies of submission. There are no treaties, only temporary arrangements subject to sovereign whim.
Because that's the choice we face: not between tough or gentle diplomacy, but between an international order based on mutual respect and one based on submission to the sovereign.
"I didn’t think they would take this bold of a leap into deeply unconstitutional waters, but they have."
“I want to stress how far off the rails this is in terms of not just our norms and our expectations but our laws,” Kruse said. “There’s a lot that’s deeply unconstitutional here. I get that they’re trying to flood the zone and overwhelm the opposition, but the opposition shouldn’t let itself be overwhelmed. It shouldn’t accept this as the new normal, which is what the administration wants us to do.”
Trump seems much more checked out and less interested in maintaining even a pretense that he’s in charge. He keeps saying things like, “I guess those workers were fired.” He doesn’t even know what’s going on.
He ran so hard to stay out of prison. I don’t think we can underestimate the fact that all of the looming prosecutions against him were really a prime motivating factor, and once he got into office and had presidential immunity again, thanks to the Supreme Court, the fire kind of went out.
He likes the ceremonial role. He likes to be on screen. He likes to be seen signing executive orders and looking like he’s in charge, but in terms of policy, I don’t think he cares deeply about issues. He’s happy to let the true believers — whether it’s Elon Musk or Russell Vought — take the lead and get whatever they want done.
Musk is contending that hordes of dead people are listed as alive in the Social Security databases, and are fraudulently still drawing benefits (which the Social Security director disputes).
Johnson is 82 and still kicking. Yet sometime last month, someone or something led Social Security to both tag him as dead and start clawing back his benefits.
“We received a request from Social Security Administration to return benefits paid to LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s account after their passing.”
“There’s nothing you need to do — we’ve deducted the funds from LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s account.”
It itemized how $5,201 had been stricken from their bank account, on the grounds that Ned wasn’t justified to get those benefits — because he was dead. That was for payments he’d received in December and January.
Ned found that his February Social Security check hadn’t been paid, and he’s yet to receive his March check, either. His Medicare insurance had been canceled. He also learned that when you die, your credit score gets marked as “deceased, do not issue credit".
President Trump was bribed $75 million by a jurisdiction-hopping Chinese crypto entrepreneur known for his many brushes with illicit activity, after which the SEC dropped its fraud case into him. We know this because it happened in the open.
Justin Sun, the Tron founder whose blockchain is a linchpin in the money-laundering networks for global cybercrime, bought $30 million worth of $WLFI tokens, the governance token from the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial crypto company
The $WLFI tokens are useless except as a potential influence vehicle for President Trump and his inner circle. Right now you can't move the $WLFI token off the company’s platform. You can't sell or trade it. It’s not listed on exchanges. Buying it is essentially a donation to Donald Trump
On February 27, 2025, the SEC paused its fraud case against Sun.
It doesn't get more explicit or brazen than this. The president received a $75 million payment for a political favor, and we all saw it happen. It worked so well that the deal is now considered a proof-of-concept for others seeking influence and favors to get into Trump’s good graces, including the world’s most corrupt cryptocurrency exchange — a criminal organization that received severe penalties under the last administration.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) now exists in name only. Not only did Trump’s band of Musk-led pillagers dismantle the infrastructure side of the agency by disbanding the CISA group investigating a massive China-based hack of US phone systems, but the administration terminated ongoing election security and disinformation-thwarting efforts by the agency roughly a month later, putting CISA in charge of… practically nothing.
the culling of CISA and the burial of this report are their own form of transparency. They indicate Donald Trump doesn’t care about election security or integrity. All he cares about is whether or not he wins.
It’s a long con but not a particularly subtle scheme. By removing CISA from the playing field, the next election that’s lost can be blamed on insecure voting tech, providing a basis for more “stolen election” assertions. But it might be more than that. It might be an early effort in service of a loftier goal: greater leeway to engage in the sort of election-rigging Trump and his supporters have falsely claimed for years resulted in the election of Joe Biden.
the first few months of Trump’s second term have made it clear he’s willing to destroy what’s left of the Republic if it means retaining control of the federal government.
In recent weeks, as Trump and his top donor and advisor Elon Musk have torn through the federal government in a reckless, unilateral manner, some federal judges have stepped in to try to put a halt to their destruction. The administration’s response hasn’t been to accept the rulings and orders, or scale back its assault on the balance of power that has held the government together for centuries — but rather to repeatedly demand the conservative Supreme Court’s assistance, and relentlessly attack the judges while claiming Trump should be able to decree whatever he wishes without oversight.
The NIH—an agency that has long prided itself on its mission of science funded by scientists—spends most of its $47 billion annual budget on driving biomedical innovation: developing new drugs and vaccines, containing epidemics, treating cancer, mitigating the harms of heart disease.
“they’re just going in and picking random grants to terminate.”
If anything, the grant cancellations have become a game of whack-a-mole, in which political appointees take a mallet to any seemingly relevant research projects that pop into view—without regard to the damage they might do.
the decisions about which grants to cancel and why are primarily being made outside the agency
Several letter recipients told me that their grants had received perfect or near-perfect scores in early reviews; others told me that their results were well on their way to publication, proof of some return on the agency’s investment.
Many studies, once terminated, would be difficult, if not outright impossible, to restart, Sean Arayasirikul, a medical sociologist at UC Irvine, told me. Medical interventions in clinical trials, for instance, can’t simply be paused and picked back up; many studies also rely heavily on collecting data at small and regular intervals, so interruptions are equivalent to massive data holes.
They have now spent weeks watching colleagues resign, get fired, or be abruptly put on administrative leave. The environment at the agency has become suffocatingly toxic. “People are being screamed at, bullied, harassed.”
In a political maneuver that would make Kafka blush, House Republican leaders have just declared that the rest of 2025 is, legally speaking, one single calendar day. This isn't metaphorical or hyperbolic—they have literally redefined time itself through legislative sleight-of-hand.
The purpose? To shield themselves from having to vote on President Trump's tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China.
The contortion is as brazen as it is revealing. Under the National Emergencies Act, Congress has the power to terminate presidential emergency declarations—like the one Trump used to impose these tariffs. The law requires committee consideration within 15 calendar days after a resolution is introduced and a floor vote within three days after that.
Republican leaders, however, inserted language into a procedural measure declaring that “Each day for the remainder of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day” for the purposes of this emergency. In other words, time has legally stopped flowing, creating a perpetual today where tomorrow never comes.
What we're witnessing is nothing less than the willful abdication of legislative power. The Republican-controlled Congress is voluntarily surrendering its constitutional authority to the executive branch, undoing the very separation of powers that defines our system of government.
At the outset of Elon Musk’s work for the White House, a reasonable person would have predicted a certain amount of graft. But even the most skeptical observers may not have pictured President Donald Trump selling Teslas on the White House lawn, which is exactly what took place on Tuesday afternoon.
Our democracy is hanging by a thread.
Trump, Musk, and minions have chased out or fired conscientious attorneys at the Department of “Justice.” And they have openly displayed the sort of financial corruption and cringeworthy cronyism usually reserved for tin pot dictatorships.
judges appointed by presidents of both parties are holding the line, pushing back and warning the public that authoritarianism must not be allowed to stand.
“To the extent that this executive order appears to be an instance of President Trump using taxpayer dollars in government resources to pursue what is a wholly personal vendetta, advancing such political payback is not something which the government has a cognizable interest.”
“The President does not have the authority to terminate members of the National Labor Relations Board at will, and his attempt to fire plaintiff from her position on the Board was a blatant violation of the law.”
"...the President’s excuse for his illegal act cannot be sustained.”
Zeldin said on Wednesday he planned to roll back 31 key environmental rules on everything from clean air to clean water and climate change.
The former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy called Zeldin’s announcement “the most disastrous day in EPA history”.
“What this administration is doing is endangering all of our lives – ours, our children, our grandchildren,” added Christine Todd Whitman, who led the EPA under George W Bush. “We all deserve to have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink."
The EPA also will take aim at rules restricting industrial pollution of mercury and other air toxins, soot pollution and a “good neighbor” rule intended to restrict smokestack emissions that burden downwind areas with smog.
In the days and weeks that followed, DOGE hit one part of the federal government after another. The Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, and Veterans Affairs; the Federal Aviation, General Services, Social Security, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric administrations; the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service; the US Agency for International Development and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; the National Park Service and the National Science Foundation—all fell under Musk’s control. An estimated tens of thousands of federal employees were effectively fired or resigned. “This is a digital coup,” one USAID source told WIRED at the time.
Along the way, DOGE also gained access to untold terabytes of data. Trump had given Musk and his operatives carte blanche to tap any unclassified system they pleased. One of their first stops: a database previously breached more than a decade ago by alleged Chinese cyberspies that contained investigative files on tens of millions of US government employees. Other storehouses thrown open to DOGE may have included federal workers’ tax records, biometric data, and private medical histories, such as treatment for drug and alcohol abuse; the cryptographic keys for restricted areas at federal facilities across the country; the personal testimonies of low-income-housing recipients; and granular detail on the locations of particularly vulnerable children.
What did DOGE want with this kind of information? None of it seemed relevant to Musk’s stated aim of identifying waste and fraud, multiple government finance, IT, and security specialists told WIRED. But in treating the US government itself as a giant dataset, the experts said, DOGE could help the Trump administration accomplish another goal: to gather much of what the government knows about a given individual, whether a civil servant or an undocumented immigrant, in one easily searchable place.
From what she had seen of DOGE, she says, they showed a “blatant lack of regard for the American people’s private data.” ... “I was put in a position where, whether I chose to engage or not engage, I might have to cross ethical lines. I would have to breach the oath to the Constitution that I swore. I would have to breach my morals,” she says. “It was clear I was going to be asked to join in on one of their tirades and work on a complete dismantlement of government systems.”
we remain in the midst of a supercharged constitutional crisis
On February 11, 2025, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), an agency housed in the Department of Homeland Security, removed $80.5 million from New York City’s main bank account, which is an account with Citibank. Well, that’s not exactly accurate. They “debited,” the financial way of referring to “subtracting,” New York City’s “central treasury account” for $80.5 million. According to public statements by Brad Lander, New York City’s comptroller, this could only be covered by a line of credit facility to the tune of $79.5 million. In short they, in essence, sent New York City’s main bank account to negative $79.5 million to rescind routine funding appropriated by Congress to house refugees. Citibank kindly agreed to forgive the overdraft fee.
This is not simply about FEMA’s actions toward New York City’s bank accounts or even about large-scale payments system level impoundment. This story is about the truly electrifying and terrifying question: Can the Trump administration arbitrarily take money from anyone for any reason using control of the payments system?
the Trump administration’s actions have violated a multitude of laws and generated a gigantic constitutional crisis over the seizure of Congress’ power of the purse by the presidency. Yet, this crisis remains unresolved, because court injunctions move far slower than a fast moving and imperial presidency. Courts can’t “unspill” spilled milk. Injunctive relief is OK at stopping things, it’s far, far worse at stopping things before they happen. Using the Treasury’s intragovernmental payments system to do impoundment creates an extremely dangerous crisis and opens up the possibility of using the payments system to subordinate the Judiciary.
We are entering waters beyond the scale of constitutional crises and nearly every expert in this shallow pool feels ill-equipped to speak about it publicly for a variety of reasons. I’m having trouble imagining circumstances more dangerous.
A more technical version at Notes on the Crises | Nathan Tankus (subscribe to support Nathan)
Generally speaking, if a judge says this to you, your client is unlikely to succeed in their case:
“This may be amusing in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ where the Queen of Hearts yells ‘Off with their heads!’ at annoying subjects… but this cannot be the reality we are living under.”
The judge’s literary reference captured perfectly why this unprecedented attempt to destroy a law firm for representing political opponents represents such a dangerous assault on constitutional principles.
The sheer volume of constitutional violations flowing from this administration has created a kind of normalization of lawlessness — where even the most brazen attacks on democratic institutions get treated as mere boundary-pushing rather than the authoritarian power grabs they are.
This case represents more than just another example of the administration’s willingness to fabricate justifications for punishing its perceived enemies. It’s a stark reminder that the judiciary remains one of the few institutions still willing to call out raw authoritarianism for what it is. The question is: how long can courts hold the line when the attacks on constitutional principles grow more brazen by the day?
Mass layoffs and weak leadership are taking a severe toll on the US government’s cyber defense agency, undermining its ability to protect America from foreign adversaries bent on crippling infrastructure and ransomware gangs that are bleeding small businesses dry.
CISA’s turmoil could have underappreciated consequences for national security and economic prospects. The agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, has steadily built a reputation as a nonpartisan source of funding, guidance, and even direct defensive support for cities, businesses, and nonprofits reeling from cyberattacks.
A federal judge has ruled that tens of thousands of employees summarily fired by the Trump administration must be rehired
Judge William Alsup ruled that the federal government had illegally fired thousands of probationary employees across six federal agencies in a “sham” operation to circumvent employment laws.
“It is a sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that is a lie.”
“Mr Russo seemed completely focused on questions … based on the general myth of supposed widespread social security fraud, rather than facts,” Flick said, adding that Russo was unwilling to understand SSA’s complex systems and instead seemed fixated on conspiracy theories about fraud within the system, such as Musk’s claim that millions of 150-year-olds were receiving benefit payments.
“Ignoring those safeguards and haphazardly putting systems at multiple agencies under the thumb of a single engineer obliterates those protections. They’re hotwiring the federal government with a total disregard for privacy and data security.”
Dudek, the SSA’s acting commissioner, told staff that the “DOGE people” were effectively in charge of day-to-day operations at the agency and “were going to make mistakes.”
”I need to do what the president tells me to do. I’ve had to make some tough choices, choices I didn’t agree with, but the president wanted it, and I did it.”
Martin O’Malley, a former SSA commissioner, warned last week, following DOGE’s incursion, that within months the SSA system could ”collapse” and recipients would see “an interruption of benefits." This warning was repeated by Flick, who wrote in her affidavit that DOGE’s lack of knowledge of the SSA systems, “combined with the significant loss of expertise as more and more agency personnel leave, have me seriously concerned that SSA programs will continue to function and operate without disruption.”
The Internal Revenue Service’s acting chief counsel, William Paul, has been removed from his role at the agency and replaced by Andrew De Mello, an attorney in the chief counsel’s office who is deemed supportive of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency
Paul was demoted from his position because he clashed with the DOGE’s alleged push to share tax information with multiple agencies
Government officials across the Treasury Department, the Social Security Administration and other agencies have seen a wave of retirements, resignations and demotions for voicing concern about DOGE access to sensitive systems and taxpayer data.
Representatives of President Trump’s family have held talks to take a financial stake in the U.S. arm of crypto exchange Binance
U.S. officials said the exchange facilitated transactions with sanctioned groups, including Hamas and Islamic State
Binance’s billionaire founder, Changpeng Zhao has been pushing for the Trump administration to grant him a pardon
The talks began after Binance reached out to allies of Trump last year offering to strike a business deal with the family as part of a plan to return the exiled company to the U.S.
The Trump family has been profiting from his election victory, with first lady Melania Trump signing a $40 million documentary deal and Trump seeking tens of millions in financial settlements from companies he had sued years earlier
pursuing a business deal involving a felon seeking a pardon from his administration would be an unprecedented overlap of his business and the government.
Binance executives saw a potential legal playbook in the saga of Justin Sun, a China-born crypto entrepreneur who invested in a Trump crypto venture last fall as he faced civil charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
Sun, founder of the Tron blockchain, had invested $30 million in November in World Liberty Financial, the Trump-backed crypto venture, becoming its largest investor. Last month, the SEC asked a court to pause its fraud lawsuit against Sun and three of his businesses.
After Sun’s investment, Binance executives debated following the same route: a cash infusion into World Liberty Financial in exchange for a pardon for Zhao
The two most powerful men in America have gone stark raving mad.
I don’t see how you can look at recent statements by Donald Trump and Elon Musk without concluding that both men have lost their grip on reality.
So here's Trump, ranting against Canada:
Based on Ontario, Canada, placing a 25% Tariff on "Electricity" coming into the United States, I have instructed my Secretary of Commerce to ad an ADDITIONAL 25% Tariff, to 50%, on all STEEL and ALUMINUM COMING INTO THE UNITED STATES FROM CANADA, ... The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State. This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear. Canadians taxes will be very substantially reduced, they will be more secure, militarily and otherwise, than ever before, there would no longer be a Northern Border problem, and the greatest and most powerful nation in the World will be bigger, better and stronger than ever - And Canada will be a big part of that. The artificial line of separation drawn many years ago will finally disappear, and we will have the safest and most beautiful Nation anywhere in the World - And your brilliant anthem, "O Canada," will continue to play, but now representing a GREAT and POWERFUL STATE within the greatest Nation that the World has ever seen! Mar 11, 2025, 10:01 AM
When Trump first began talking about turning Canada into the 51st state, many people treated it as a joke. But Trump doesn’t appear to be in on the joke.
Then there’s Elon Musk. Surely almost everyone except Trump realizes that DOGE has been a bust; despite unprecedented and often illegal access to government agencies, it has yet to come up with any credible major examples of waste or fraud. Even Musk, I suspect, knows at some level that he’s failing. But like Trump on Canada, he just keeps doubling down.
How did the highest levels of U.S. government become infected by madness? Well, this is what you get when you give flawed people — people prone to grandiosity, vindictiveness and paranoia — so much power that nobody dares tell them when they’re going too far. Cowed Republicans and timid Democrats have effectively given Trump and Musk the freedom to become the worst versions of themselves.
“Chilling the lawyers who represent those people hurts the rule of law because when the government can’t be legally opposed, the law provides no protections to anyone and you start to live in an autocracy.”
The total Verifiable Canceled Funding, as calculated by the Musk Watch DOGE Tracker, is currently $8.6 billion. This means the top line claim of savings by DOGE, $105 billion, overstates the verified savings by 92%.
Even within that number, all savings claimed by DOGE for canceled contracts may be "illusory" because the agency is still "required to spend the money" appropriated by Congress for the same statutorily authorized purpose. Absent action by Congress rescinding the funds, refusing to spend the money constitutes impoundment by the executive, which is illegal.
it’s laughably corrupt for the head of state to use his office to advertise his top adviser’s business. Laughable corruption is priced in with Trump.
Frankly, it’s hard to fault for him assuming that the electorate gave him permission to get crazy, period. Americans didn’t sign up for the resurrection of William McKinley but they did sign up for placing an unstable, conspiratorial coup-plotting criminal atop the executive branch. Government by whim, relentless policy chaos, gleeful norm-breaking, and Trump as the daily “main character” in all facets of public life: That’s what Americans signed up for, undeniably. Everyone old enough to vote last November 5 was also old enough to remember January 6.
It’s the endgame of his brand of politics, placing the leader at the center of everything and expecting sacrifice in the name of whichever goals he, in his paternal wisdom, sets. You may not have envisioned Teslas being hawked on the White House lawn but don’t you dare claim you’re surprised.
The Maryland judge found Trump’s diversity-related orders likely violate First and Fifth Amendment rights.
“They are just pretending it didn’t happen, it seems.”
The episode is part of a broader pattern in which the second Trump administration has operated under the impression that judges’ orders and rulings don’t much matter.
Trump admitted he thinks he can break any law he wants to — so long as he can loosely define doing so as part of his mission to “save” the country.
“The Trump administration is daring the courts in the United States to do something about this, and thus far, I don’t think most people in America understand that what’s at risk is the fundamental basis that there is fairness and justice and rule of law in the United States"
"...we should all agree that running the government based on the rule of law is a requirement. The playbook that is being used in the U.S. is not new; we’ve seen it in country after country where there’s been an increase in authoritarianism. To see it in the modern United States itself is what’s new and disturbing.”
DOGE has turned this dangerously flawed view into a philosophy of government. Last week, Elon Musk’s makeshift agency fired one of the main scientists responsible for providing advance warning when the next tsunami hits Alaska, Hawaii, or the Pacific Coast.
More than 800 workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have lost their job in recent weeks, including many who helped mitigate climate disasters, track hurricanes, predict ever-stronger storms, and notify potential victims. Meanwhile, cuts to volcano monitoring are crippling the government’s ability to measure eruption risk. DOGE is also reportedly preparing to cancel the lease on the government’s “nerve center” for national weather forecasts.
Musk has categorized as superfluous a good deal of spending that actually makes the country more resilient, at a time when catastrophic risk is on the rise. We never see the crises that the government averts, only the ones it fails to prevent. Preparing for them may seem wasteful—until suddenly, tragically, it doesn’t.
A basic democratic norm is that laws are implemented as they are written. Another norm is that the implementation of the law be even-handed, applied equally to all groups. The idea that some groups would become less eligible for public support or fired from their job simply because of their presumed partisan affiliation feels obviously undemocratic.
In short: Trump and Musk are engaged in a broad-based downsizing of government, using that downsizing to selectively target their enemies, while expanding their political power by trading exceptions to the downsizing.
Congress has essentially surrendered its power of the purse to an unelected co-president who has seized control of much of the federal bureaucracy.
The actual president has asserted a unilateral executive authority so powerful and far-reaching that it threatens the republican character of the American political system.
that president has taken actions — such as an attempt to unravel birthright citizenship — that blatantly and flagrantly violate the Constitution.
A crisis occurs, to put it a little differently, when a constitution fails to achieve its primary task, which is to channel political disagreement into ordinary politics.
When a president uses executive power to not just blacklist but effectively destroy a major law firm, solely for representing political opponents, it means he’s given up any pretense that he’s not an authoritarian hellbent on destroying anyone who opposes him through any means necessary.
The order explicitly attacks Perkins Coie for challenging laws in court. Think about that: the White House is using executive power to punish lawyers for filing legitimate court challenges to potentially unconstitutional laws. That’s not just an attack on free speech — it’s an attack on the very concept of constitutional checks and balances.
It’s a move straight out of an authoritarian playbook — using government contracts as leverage to force private companies to blacklist political enemies.
while it’s easy to get numb to the daily assaults on democratic norms, this attack on the legal profession represents something fundamentally different and more dangerous.
Even those who supported Trump’s previous attacks on those he hates should recognize this for what it is: a blueprint for using government power to silence any effective opposition to authoritarianism.
As usual, one has to ask: Are they ignorant or are they lying? And as usual, the answer is: Why not both?
I actually hope that he’s deliberately trying to bamboozle his audience. For the alternative is that the nation’s top economic official doesn’t understand basic economics, which will be a problem when — not if — something goes wrong.
A federal judge ruled Monday that President Donald Trump’s extensive freeze to foreign aid spending through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) usurped Congress’s constitutional authority to decide how money can be spent by the government.
Ali criticized the defendants “unbridled view” of executive power, saying it “flouts multiple statutes whose constitutionality is not in question” and the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how federal agencies develop and issue regulations.
“Asserting this ‘vast and generally unreviewable’ executive power and diminution of Congressional power, Defendants do not cite any provision of Article I or Article II of the Constitution,” the judge wrote.
Tariffs generate chaos that allows Trump to “save” individual businesses from the very chaos he creates. They keep him at the center of not only politics but also economics. They incentivize businesses to make placating, pleasing or rewarding Trump crucial to their bottom lines.
This sort of incentive for corruption — in both the literal sense and in terms of policymaking — is one of the main reasons we have an income tax in the first place. So many industries sought special treatment or vigorous enforcement against competition when tariffs funded the government that Congress — traditionally the designer of trade policy — became a hive of corruption. The IRS, then, was in part an antifraud invention.
Musk had confidently announced that the platform suffered “a massive cyber attack” with “IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area”—a geopolitically charged attribution that immediately raised technical red flags.
The technical reality that Doocy and Fox's “Tech Guy” Kurt Knutsson highlighted is familiar to anyone with basic cybersecurity knowledge: IP addresses are easily spoofed, and attribution in cyberattacks is notoriously difficult. “These guys, they have ways of making it look like it's coming from Ukraine, even though they're not in Ukraine,” Doocy explained, suggesting Russia as a possible alternative source. Knutsson reinforced this point, noting that “it's very easy for hackers and cyber criminals to make it appear as though their IP address or an attack is coming from one particular region or another.”
In healthier information ecosystems, such corrections would be commonplace, the natural immune response to premature conclusions. But our media landscape increasingly optimizes for alignment rather than accuracy, making moments like this stand out precisely because of their rarity.
We've normalized a state where allegiance to narrative frameworks often trumps commitment to methodical investigation, where even technical matters become immediately sorted into political valences.
spurring the nation’s top spender on research and development to plan layoffs and cancel health projects
The cuts are in addition to threatened trims to National Institutes of Health grants
“Johns Hopkins has bet very heavily on a century and a quarter of partnership with the federal government,” said Dr. Theodore Iwashyna, a critical-care physician at Johns Hopkins who is currently overseeing an NIH grant to study how best to send pneumonia patients home so they don’t end up re-hospitalized. “If the federal government decides it doesn’t want to know things anymore, that would be bad for Johns Hopkins and devastating for Maryland.”
The local impact would reach far and wide: In 2022, Johns Hopkins affiliates accounted for over 93,600 jobs and over $15 billion in economic output in Maryland, according to the figures in the institution’s latest economic impact report.
Cuts to research “would be devastating for the commercial ecosystem and the innovation ecosystem in Baltimore,” said Mike Rosenbaum, founder and CEO of Arena Analytics, a company based in Baltimore that applies AI to the healthcare job market.
“The kind of work that other companies like us in Baltimore do are heavily reliant on the kinds of innovation that comes out of universities like Hopkins, and the relationship between Hopkins and the federal government.”
… Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) responded to Musk calling him a traitor: “I served in the US Navy for 25 years. I spent 15 years at NASA, risking my life flying the space shuttle. And the only oath I can think of that maybe Elon Musk has sworn is an oath to his own checking account, to his pocketbook—an oath, maybe, to ruining the lives of veterans. I had veterans in my office last week who, after really good performance reports, found out that Musk fired them for poor performance. He has ruined these peoples’ lives. They were serving our country again in very valuable roles, and they did not deserve to get fired by an email from an unelected billionaire.”
We’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. It’s been coming and coming, and not everybody is prepared to read it that way. The characters regarded as people to emulate, like Orban and Putin and so on, all indicate that the strategy is to create an illiberal democracy or an authoritarian democracy or a strongman democracy. That’s what we’re experiencing. Our problem in part is a failure of imagination. We cannot get ourselves to see how this is going to unfold in its most frightening versions. You neutralize the branches of government; you neutralize the media; you neutralize universities, and you’re on your way.
Musk Seeks to Put $100 Million Directly Into Trump Political Operation
Trump performs in Tesla ad on White House driveway to show support for Elon Musk
As Trump, Musk, and VA Secretary Doug Collins get ready to fire 80,000 VA employees this summer, veterans wonder what’s next
Now, a new class of billionaires, and soon-to-be trillionaires, are callously robbing America and its veterans of a second golden age. Chief among them is Elon Musk, who is on a path to becoming the world’s first known trillionaire by gutting the federal workforce, making life hell for veterans, and betraying American taxpayers by dismantling the benefits and services they fund. In their place, he seeks to impose an unprecedented system — one controlled by an oligarch, propped up by elected leaders, and built at the expense of those who served.
Yes, this is how our government now works. Musk’s wrecking crew destroys stuff, and a select few Republican officials get to call him and plead with him to try to put broken things back together again, even as many of them are not easily restored.
When the President directly contradicts his own DOJ’s court filing on national television, it’s more than just embarrassing – it’s a sign of how completely the constitutional structure of our government has broken down. The DOJ is supposed to represent the executive branch’s legal positions truthfully to the courts. Instead, we have the department filing demonstrably false statements while the President openly admits the truth.
This is crazy on multiple levels. First, the Constitution explicitly gives Congress, not an unelected tech billionaire, the power over government spending and agency oversight. Having senators beg Musk to reverse his decisions doesn’t just invert the Constitution, it makes a mockery of it.
A member of Congress — a co-equal branch of government with explicit constitutional authority over spending — is reduced to begging an unelected billionaire for the courtesy of advance notice before he dismantles government agencies and terminates federal employees. This isn’t just a problem — it’s a blaring constitutional crisis.
But it’s a solvable one if Congress just does its job.
The complete abdication of responsibility by Republican elected officials is particularly striking. These are legislators who routinely trumpet their constitutional authority and rail against unelected bureaucrats. Yet when faced with an unelected billionaire dismantling government agencies, they’re reduced to begging for advance notice of his decisions.
Social Security Administration (SSA) insiders and its former commissioner, Martin O’Malley, warn Rolling Stone and American Doom that the cuts being carried out inside the agency by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will result in widespread failures, including checks not being distributed to some of the 73 million Americans who receive Social Security benefits.
The ongoing dismantling of the agency — particularly the gutting of employees and offices who deal directly with the public — will also prevent Americans from quickly and easily applying for benefits and delay processing of disability claims.
So far, DOGE has closed Social Security field offices, shut down internal departments that deal with technology and online interfaces that Americans navigate to access and apply for benefits, and are reorganizing the agency office that is largely responsible for rooting out and troubleshooting inefficiencies like improper payments and overpayments.
All of this is being done to an agency that is at a 50-year low in staffing, and at a time when the number of new applicants for benefits are skyrocketing as baby boomers reach retirement age.
They aren’t rethinking their policies; they aren’t even making major efforts to justify their policies to an increasingly skeptical public. Instead, they’ve instantly descended into a pit of insane conspiracy theories.
If all of this sounds crazy, that’s because it is. What we’re hearing from the Musk-Trump Administration sounds, if I can use the term, distinctly un-American. It’s the kind of rhetoric you expect from an authoritarian regime that attributes every setback to sabotage by rootless cosmopolitan enemies of the state.
While rule by crazy conspiracy theorists is an unquestionably bad state of affairs, let me lay out two specific reasons it’s bad.
First, it means that the people in charge won’t learn from failure. When things go wrong it will be because sinister globalists are plotting against America.
Second, there will be a search for scapegoats. Purges will intensify and broaden, increasingly extending to the private sector, as the administration proves itself incapable of governing effectively.
It’s a scary prospect. I only hope that enough people get scared and angry enough, soon enough, to save America as we knew it.
deputies for Elon Musk forced their way into the agency, formed a clandestine unit, and gained access to its most sensitive databases
As for Bobba, Russo demanded that he be given “full access to SSA data in the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW),” according to Flick. The EDW contains sensitive information on every individual assigned a Social Security number, including employment history, marital status, a list of dependents, and banking and financial information. Gaining full access to the system would provide users with the ability to export and edit data. “Russo repeatedly stated that Mr. Bobba needed access to ‘everything, including source code,’” wrote Flick, who described such an arrangement as unprecedented even for the agency’s most adept technologists. There were also concerns within the SSA about Bobba accessing the data remotely from a U.S. Office of Personnel Management workplace.
In Nazi Germany, it took between 30–52 days for Hitler to fully “synchronize” or Gleichschaltung the German state. Project 2025 is Trump and Musk’s Gleichschaltung, and they expected to have full control by now. They failed. They are growing increasingly frustrated as they find themselves in a quagmire.
During the Gleichschaltung, all media kissed the ring. Trump and Musk succeeded in building regime media with X (formerly Twitter), Fox, and the right-wing podcast ecosystem. Trump got corporate media to kiss the ring, with their execs taking shameful pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago to do the walk of shame.
It’s proper to blame President Trump for the “incident, display, fiasco, debacle, monstrosity” in the Oval Office. But Trump’s our president. It’s our Oval Office. If Americans in both parties don’t do their utmost to check and overturn the president’s actions, we will all have been part of the betrayal of Ukraine. We will all have been part of a betrayal of America.
It is instead reminiscent of the corruption and subversion of legal systems typical in authoritarian regimes. Political loyalty and the cult of personality, not competence or ethics, now govern hiring, firing, and disciplining of lawyers.
“Together, these efforts threaten effective law enforcement, undermine public confidence in the rule of law, and foster networks of corruption and lawlessness that ultimately make our communities less safe. Under President Trump, the DOJ has become an agency charged with ensuring that the President’s most loyal supporters can break the law with impunity.”
“He then essentially explained to me that Mel Gibson has a personal relationship with President Trump and that should be sufficient basis for me to make a recommendation and that I would be wise to make the recommendation"
Hours later, she was sitting in an unrelated meeting when she got a frantic call from a member of her staff, saying she had to come back to her office right away.
When she got there, two building security officers were waiting to hand her a letter from Mr. Blanche firing her. They watched as she packed up some of her belongings into boxes and escorted her out of the building.
"experienced professionals throughout the Department are afraid to voice their opinions because dissent is being punished. Decisions are being made based on relationships and loyalty, not based on facts or expertise or sound analysis, which is very alarming given that what is at stake is our public safety. This is dangerous. This isn’t political - this is a safety issue.”
recent events—beginning with the crash and the pressure to take early retirement—have sunk the agency into “complete chaos.”
The FAA oversees an industry that supports $1.8 trillion in economic activity and about 4 percent of American GDP. It keeps millions of people safe.
“This isn’t Twitter, where the worst that happens is people losing access to their accounts,” the former senior executive said. “People die when FAA workers are distracted and processes are broken.”
“What I’m seeing is an FAA workforce that is completely distracted and off its game. Almost all interactions I have with federal staff begin with catching up on the amount of time they’re spending on personnel issues instead of their normal jobs. To say they’re not focused on the mission at the moment would be an understatement.”
Khalil and his wife – who is eight months pregnant – had just unlocked the door to their building when two plainclothes DHS agents pushed inside behind them. The agents allegedly did not identify themselves at first, instead asking for Khalil’s identity before detaining him.
The agents claimed that the State Department had revoked Khalil’s student visa, with one agent presenting what he claimed was a warrant on his cell phone. But Khalil, according to advocates, has a green card. Khalil’s wife went to their apartment to get the green card.
“He has a green card,” an agent apparently said on the phone, confused by the matter. But then after a moment, the agent claimed that the State Department had “revoked that too.”
Meanwhile, Khalil had been on the phone with his attorney, Amy Greer, who was trying to intervene, asking why he was being detained, if they had a warrant, and explaining that Khalil was a green card holder. The attorney had circled back to demanding to see a warrant when the agents apparently instead hung up the phone.
We are witnessing an extraordinarily broad chilling effect in American society. It is not just what you want to say, but what you are allowed to ask. It is about both formal government actions and informal threats, with threats of professional ruin or even violence from the President’s supporters. It is about both censorship and self-censorship. It is about a sense of collective fear.
ask yourself, what country does it describe? The America you thought you knew is gone, its undoing germinating for years, and culminating in a matter of weeks.
It's a pretty good program, and we can afford it
A Trump administration freeze on purchase cards that agencies use to cover everything from dumpster pickups at national parks to liquid nitrogen for lifesaving military research is upending work across the government
government scientists who study food safety say they are running out of cleaning fluid for their labs
federal aviation workers report cuts to travel for urgent work
contractors who help identify U.S. soldiers killed in combat were told to pause their efforts
A Defense Department memo announcing the freeze, which was reviewed by The Post, stunned researchers who work on developing lifesaving protective equipment, including helmets, medical supplies, flame-resistant uniforms and cold-weather gear
immediate disruption across the region as the limit radically altered daily operations, grinding shipping to a halt and preventing the delivery of entry passes scheduled to arrive at various parks ahead of the summer season. Staffers could not buy medicine and supplies needed to care for visitors and the horses ridden by some park rangers
the card reduction means workers cannot place orders for lab supplies, including personal protective equipment and ethanol used to disinfect surfaces
FAA employees said the clampdown interrupted travel for an on-site meeting needed to keep a key runway project on schedule. “The FAA’s investment is in the hundreds of millions of dollars” into the runway, an employee said. “This delay is to avoid spending around $20,000 on a trip.”
… Another scam has come into focus behind these DOGE cuts - Trump and Musk want members of Congress to come to them and beg for funds for their districts to be reinstated.
Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) disclosed the quiet part out loud to his constituents: “After working closely with DOGE and the Admin, I am thrilled to announce that common sense has prevailed, as the Nat Weather Center in Norman, the Soc Security Admin Ofc in Lawton, and the Indian Health Services Ofc in OK City will remain operational. All 3 of these places provide vital and valuable services to OK and I am so proud to have advocated for them. As the Rep for OK’s 4th District, I will always fight for Oklahomans and my constituents!”
… Sickening. This is what an autocracy of oligarchs looks like, and in no way how our democratic republic was set up to function under the Constitution. We are moving towards a Russian style of government under Putin. Republican members of Congress are bragging to their constituents that they saved them from Trump while praising Trump at the same time.
… The US government is being set up as a mafia organization, where everyone is being extorted to benefit a handful of billionaires
The Department of Homeland Security has begun polygraphing its own employees, hunting for those who dare speak truth about operations that may violate law, conscience, or basic human dignity. The machinery of state turns inward, seeking to root out not espionage or corruption, but the mere act of revealing uncomfortable facts to the public.
Let us name what this is: the instrumentalization of government against itself. The weaponization of secrecy not to protect national security, but to shield political actors from accountability. The criminalization of conscience.
And let us see it clearly for what it represents: a threshold crossed. A boundary transgressed. A normalization of practices once reserved for authoritarian regimes.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk are blindly purging the government, ignoring the law, and cashing in like America has never seen
The meme coin was a blatant cash grab, to the point that one of Trump’s former White House communications directors denounced it as “Idi Amin-level corruption.”
At the end of February, Trump’s SEC moved to throw out its prosecution of Justin Sun — who had been charged with marketing unregistered crypto securities and manipulating the market for a crypto token — after Sun’s investments in World Liberty Financial reportedly netted the Trump family $56 million in fees.
The crypto caper is a perfect encapsulation of the bold-faced graft at the heart of the new Trump presidency: Uber-wealthy elites are poised to cash in, while ordinary people get hosed. And public policy will be designed to encourage this exact outcome.
It’s a volatile, highly speculative asset with little proven real-world application that regular old U.S. dollars can’t already account for. It’s hard to think of anything that would be less useful for America to stockpile.
Investing in something that is overvalued or intrinsically worthless might be the smart thing to do, if you can eventually find someone on whom to pawn it off at a higher price (“greater-fool theory”). A crypto reserve effectively turns the U.S. government into the next greater fool.
Crypto holders had the chance to make a tidy profit selling off some of their coins—despite the fact that the stockpile in the end simply included bitcoin and all other crypto assets seized by the government.
Driving the prices higher will require a steady stream of positive news. But the good news is already drying up. The price of bitcoin plummeted immediately after the order was announced.
At a certain point, even good news isn’t quite good enough. Buy the rumor; sell the news, as the old saying goes. Eventually, the U.S. government will be stuck with a bunch of crypto, searching for ways to drive the price higher and having no one to sell it to. If Trump keeps feeding the crypto hype machine, he may benefit—and the rest of us may be stuck with the bill.
And the biggest rug-pull yet is underway: Donald Trump’s plan for a “strategic crypto reserve.”
Washington’s attorney general asked a federal judge Thursday to hold the Trump administration in contempt...
In the motion filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle, the state says the National Institutes of Health revoked the grant despite a court order...
A second letter on Tuesday said the agency was stripping Seattle Children’s of more than $200,000, potentially forcing the hospital to pay back grant money already spent.
McGinty says the Seattle Children’s grant is one of hundreds similarly defunded.
Two of the prosecutors -- Andrew Rohrbach and Celia Cohen -- worked on the prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
Rohrbach also worked on the successful prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, former crypto executive Sam Bankman-Fried and lawyer Michael Avenatti.
Transgender women incarcerated in the US prison system have been transferred to men's facilities under Donald Trump's executive order, despite multiple court rulings blocking the president's policy
“18F was the people’s tech shop,” one fired 18F worker tells WIRED. “There’s a giant hole left by the closure of 18F. Requests from across the country for help far outpaced 18F’s capacity before the closure.”
massive new errors have emerged. Last week was no different. DOGE claimed credit for saving $53.7 million by cancelling U.S. Coast Guard contracts that were fulfilled in 2006 and 2011 and a Treasury Department contract that was axed when former President Joe Biden
The scramble to respond to Musk’s email has led to inefficiencies for federal workers, including at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).
Musk’s ability to simultaneously email all federal workers was described as “illegal” by a federal judge last week in a lawsuit brought by the American Federation of Government Employees. The same judge ruled that OPM has no authority to layoff federal workers.
The Washington Post reported on Monday that DOGE is working to access personal tax records held by the IRS
the Trump administration is exploring other ways to award federal funds to Starlink as it reexamines a $42.5 billion program to provide internet access to rural communities.
The weaponization of DOJ remains a fundamental threat to the rule of law and our country’s fair administration of justice.
But the intelligence community is different from every other part of the U.S. government. It doesn’t just cover one sector; it covers everything. Economic shifts, leadership changes, military threats, technological advances, social instability, climate risks, and geopolitics. It isn’t just an advisory body—it produces daily reports that are consumed at the highest levels of government.
Every day, senior leaders across the federal government read intelligence reports. And every day, those same leaders can compare what they just read with whatever Trump is saying publicly.
• The PDB might warn that Russia is deepening its efforts to manipulate U.S. elections. That same morning, Trump might be on TV calling it a hoax.
• An intelligence report might outline how fentanyl traffickers are adapting to his border policies. That same day, Trump might claim his approach is working perfectly.
• A classified briefing might highlight how China is countering U.S. influence in Africa. That afternoon, Trump might dismiss Africa as unimportant.
Everyone in government can see the gap between what is true and what Trump is saying. There’s an almost a daily reminder.
And that cannot stand.
the order is a clear attack on organizations attempting to sue the Trump administration
Importantly, while its goal to stifle lawsuits against the administration is clear, in reality, Trump’s order doesn’t have much teeth
The above terms appeared in government memos, in official and unofficial agency guidance and in other documents viewed by The New York Times. Some ordered the removal of these words from public-facing websites, or ordered the elimination of other materials (including school curricula) in which they might be included.
That shift is already apparent on hundreds of federal government websites.
The constitutional order is disintegrating. These are not separate truths but aspects of the same reality. When a society can no longer maintain agreement on the most basic facts, the machinery of self-governance seizes. The gears strip. The engine stalls.
The illusion of stability persists even as the foundations crumble. Markets climb while institutions collapse. Social media buzzes with trivial outrage while fundamental rights dissolve. Techno-optimists celebrate new AI capabilities while the cognitive infrastructure of democracy burns.
The reactionaries understand this moment better than the liberals. They've studied the mechanics of democratic collapse, analyzed its rhythms and patterns. They know that in this suspended animation between constitutional order and autocratic capture lies their opportunity—the chance to rewire the machinery of governance while everyone else marvels at the strange sensation of weightlessness. They work frantically during this pause, laying the groundwork for what comes after the fall, while institutional defenders stand frozen, still believing in the permanence of systems that are already failing.
It will be easy to get mad at your neighbors who voted for this. But the truth is, nobody voted for this. They voted for things to get better. They just didn't understand how.
The great tragedy of democratic collapse isn't that people choose tyranny—it's that they choose something else entirely and receive tyranny as an unexpected dividend.
Representatives of the U.S. DOGE Service have sought access to a powerful database of nearly all U.S. workers’ earnings kept by the health department’s child support office
“This is private, confidential data, including Social Security numbers and earnings, of virtually all people in the country … I don’t think you want your data to go to DOGE or to anyone else who isn’t authorized.”
“The Executive has not pointed to any constitutional or statutory authority that would allow them to impose this type of categorical freeze,” the judge noted.
Martin’s refusal to sign off on an arrest warrant for hardcore MAGA Florida Rep. Cory Mills manages to be both breathtakingly corrupt and downright disgusting, a scandal that would’ve dominated news cycles during any previous administration.
Last month, the Metropolitan DC Police responded to a call at Mills’s residence. A 27-year-old woman who is not Mills’s wife, Sarah Raviani, reported that the congressman had “grabbed her, shoved her, and pushed her out of the door” and showed the officers fresh bruises. She also let the police officers hear a recorded call between her and Mills where he instructed her to lie about how she got the bruises. Eventually, when Mills talked to the police, he admitted that “the situation escalated from verbal to physical, but it was severe enough to create bruising.”
The GSA’s effort to sell hundreds of US government properties is part of a blunt reshaping of the federal government and its workforce led by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Staffed in part by young engineers with no prior experience in government, DOGE’s efforts have resulted in mass reductions in force, the effective shuttering of entirely independent agencies, and a flurry of lawsuits that seek to mitigate DOGE’s razing of the government over the past six weeks.
A shadowy group of unelected figures reshaping the federal government to their own benefit from the inside? Sounds familiar!
Look no further than DOGE’s deep freeze of the legally mandated Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the unilateral canceling of around 10,000 humanitarian aid contracts apportioned by Congress, or the firing of thousands of probationary workers and others—without apparent cause—for evidence that it is executing an agenda outside of any legislative framework.
A federal judge ruled Trump violated federal law last month in dismissing the chair of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which safeguards employees’ rights to organize unions and prevents unfair labor practices.
“An American President is not a king — not even an ‘elected’ one — and his power to remove federal officers and honest civil servants like plaintiff is not absolute, but may be constrained in appropriate circumstances, as are present here,” Howell wrote.
“The President’s interpretation of the scope of his constitutional power— or, more aptly, his aspiration—is flat wrong,” the judge added.
The silence grows louder every day.
Fired federal workers who are worried about losing their homes
University presidents fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear
Chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses
Even longtime Republican hawks on Capitol Hill, stunned by President Trump’s revisionist history that Ukraine is to blame for its invasion by Russia, and his Oval Office blowup at President Volodymyr Zelensky, have either muzzled themselves, tiptoed up to criticism without naming Mr. Trump or completely reversed their positions.
“When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and the co-author of the influential 2018 book “How Democracies Die.”
“This is the greatest pressure put on intellectual life since the McCarthy era,” Mr. Roth said in an interview. “And I think it’ll be seen in the future, as that time was seen, as a time when people either stood up for their values or ran in fear of the federal government.”
"It is often said: When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. If that is true, then only weeks into Donald Trump’s four-year term, we are approaching tyranny." Democracy Docket members-only newsletter
Federal marshals on Thursday escorted officials from the Department of Government Efficiency into the U.S. African Development Foundation
Once inside, security officials were directed to change the federal agency’s locks
He added that many veterans of the war in Afghanistan who had voted for Mr. Trump now felt fury as word of a possible travel ban has spread. “They’re saying, ‘This isn’t what I voted for,’” he said. “The deal was you need to bring our wartime allies home. And they’re just betraying these folks.”
Second-term Trump has opened his administration with a round of actions likely to prove drastically unpopular: tariffs that raise prices; budget cuts that will reduce services for veterans, at national parks, for anyone who depends on weather services. Prices are rising, measles is spreading, airplanes are falling out of the sky. His effective co-president and chief policy maker, Elon Musk, is widely distrusted and disliked.
He talks of the Democrats as remorseless enemies. At the same time, he is making political choices that would normally seem certain to deliver those enemies a big majority in the House after the midterms.
Had Trump lost the 2024 election, he would right now be facing sentencing for his criminal convictions in the state of New York. He would be facing criminal and civil trials in other states. He was rescued from legal troubles by political success. Now Trump’s acting in ways that seem certain to throw power away in the next round of elections—if those elections proceed as usual.
Trump is keenly alert to his legal danger, deeply committed to keeping power by any means necessary. He also seems to be sleepwalking toward a stinging political loss that will expose him to all kinds of personal risk. He’s not trying to expand his coalition, to win any votes he does not already have. So what is his plan to preserve his immunity and his impunity?
More than 5,000 employees who were fired from the U.S. Department of Agriculture are getting their jobs back, at least for now, after a government employee oversight board decided Wednesday they were illegally terminated.
The decision means thousands of USDA workers who were unlawfully fired can return to their jobs. It also strengthens the case being made by legal groups like Democracy Forward, which brought this request before the board, that none of the mass firings being carried out by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency have been legal.
"This is a wildly dangerous sign — the idea that there are only five SCOTUS votes for paying congressionally mandated invoices for work already done!? This should be as basic a test of Article I as you can get. And that does not bode well for decisions to come." Garrett M. Graff (vermontgmg.bsky.social)
The cable, which was shared with The Bulwark and whose authenticity was confirmed by a second source, argues that the hollowing out of USAID is both strategically and morally wrong and in violation of federal workplace protections.
The State Department program soon became a source for data that challenged the official air quality reports released by the Chinese government. “It allowed the Chinese public to view a comparison between the outside observers and the official statistics,” Webster says. “I think it’s an example of how good, quality data that people trust can make things difficult for a political regime where information is tightly controlled.”
The State Department’s air quality program eventually became an example of a smart, efficient diplomacy that boosted American soft power while bringing about real-world changes. “I’ve never seen an initiative of the US government have such an immediate, dramatic impact in a country,” Gary Locke, a former US ambassador to China, told the Washington Post back in 2013. The project was so successful that it was featured on the website of the National Museum of American Diplomacy.
We are one Supreme Court vote away from complete constitutional collapse. Literally one justice, switching their ideological stance away. That's it. That's the margin between the American experiment continuing and its final dissolution.
Today's Supreme Court ruling should have been unanimous. Congress has the power of the purse. This isn't complicated constitutional theory—it's explicitly stated in the Constitution, understood by the Founders, and practiced for over two centuries. The executive cannot simply ignore congressional appropriations. This is a basic truth, as fundamental as two plus two equals four.
What those of us not cocooned in our corner offices see is that Musk let a bunch of Dunning-Kruger kids — too incompetent to realize that they’re incompetent — loose on federal agencies, where they began firing workers without trying to understand what these workers do or why it might be important.
Sooner or later, and probably sooner rather than later, important things are going to break.
large parts of the U.S. economy and government appear to be on the verge of self-immolation. And given the combination of arrogance and ignorance shared by Musk and Trump, it’s hard to see how we get out.
But centrism is not the same as meekness. America does not need a “resistance,” or stale slogans, or people putting those slogans on little paddles. It needs an opposition party that boldly defends the nation’s virtues, the rule of law, and the rights of its people.
He was one of hundreds of specialists inside the IRS who used their technical expertise — Nershi’s background is in chemical and nuclear engineering — to audit byzantine tax returns filed by large corporations and wealthy individuals. Until recently, the IRS had a shortage of these experts, and many complex tax returns went unscrutinized. With the help of people like Nershi, the IRS could recoup millions and sometimes more than a billion dollars on a single tax return.
But on Feb. 20, three months shy of finishing his probationary period and becoming a full-time employee, the IRS fired him. As a Navy veteran, Nershi loved working in public service and had hoped he might be spared from any mass firings. The unsigned email said he’d been fired for performance, even though he had received high marks from his manager.
As for the report he was finalizing, it would have probably recouped many times more than the low-six-figure salary he earned. The report would now go unfinished.
“By firing us, you’re going to cut down on how much revenue the country brings in,” Nershi said in an interview. “This was not about saving money.”
Unlike with other federal agencies, cutting the IRS means the government collects less money and finds fewer tax abuses. Economic studies have shown that for every dollar spent by the IRS, the agency returns between $5 and $12, depending on how much income the taxpayer declared. A 2024 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the IRS found savings of $13,000 for every additional hour spent auditing the tax returns of very wealthy taxpayers — a return on investment that “would leave Wall Street hedge fund managers drooling,” in the words of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
A bitcoin reserve would be a government-backed grift
Filling a crypto reserve would effectively represent a huge transfer of wealth from taxpayers to crypto holders.
the government has no strategic reason to own crypto assets. They have no use value either to the U.S. government or to the American economy.
Corruption doesn't get much more blatant than this.
Yet for the White House, the purpose is obvious. Trump’s commerce secretary, his AI and crypto czar, and several of his most influential policy advisers are crypto investors, and the president launched his own memecoin. Establishing a reserve would boost prices, enriching these public officials and the crypto magnates donating tens of millions of dollars to Republican campaigns. It would not be a public investment, but a private giveaway—one of a mounting number in the Trump era.
... the notion that a court could not intervene to stop the Office of Personnel Management or the White House Presidential Personnel Office from carrying out firings threatened to undermine the power that courts have exercised since the foundational 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison.
“If that were true, judicial review would be over,” he said.
Donald Trump’s administration continues to hogtie the federal agency responsible for refunding more than $20 billion to defrauded consumers from greedy corporate malefactors.
Shutting down the CFPB has been a joint obsession of Trump’s de facto head of government, Elon Musk, and Russ Vought, an architect of the reactionary policy playbook known as Project 2025, who is now a member of Trump’s Cabinet.
Vought has dropped significant lawsuits, letting Capital One off the hook after CFPB had alleged the company cheated consumers out of nearly $2 billion in interest payments, as well as a suit against a subsidiary of Berkshire-Hathaway that CFPB had accused of trapping consumers in unfavorable mortgages. On Tuesday, he spiked another suit against three of the nation’s biggest banks for allowing fraud to flourish on their peer-to-peer payment system, Zelle.
Norris falls squarely on the side of law enforcement officials who appear ready to ignore their oaths and duties in order to carry out Trump’s wishes, regardless of their legality or consequences.
After DOGE rampaged through the VA, agency leadership put out statements saying laid-off employees were “non-mission critical” and “probationary” (some were even in DEI!). Meanwhile, press reports trickled out detailing who had actually been fired: hospital staff, veteran outreach workers, employees manning a Veterans Crisis Line.
Last week, VA Secretary Doug Collins announced that the agency would cut $2 billion in current contracts: “No more paying consultants to do things like make Power Point slides and write meeting minutes!” he boasted.
The reality was starkly different. The AP, which obtained the list of affected contracts, reported the cuts “would affect everything from cancer care to the ability to assess toxic exposure.” A day of frantic interventions from lawmakers and veterans’ groups later, Collins backtracked, announcing the contract cancellations would be paused until they could be individually assessed.
Elon Musk, DOGE, and the White House Office of Management and Budget issued a directive to, within 24 hours, pause all federal government payments to nonprofits
Here’s just a sampling of what they report:
In Pocatello, Idaho, the Bannock Youth Foundation would need to halt its rapid rehousing program for homeless youth due to the federal funding ban.
The Council on Aging in Henderson County, North Carolina, which has been helping senior citizens as the area recovers from Hurricane Helene, expects it will need to reduce the number of elderly residents receiving food from Meals on Wheels at a time when the program’s waitlist is growing.
Without federal funding, the Advocacy Center of Tompkins County, New York, would need to shut down its 24-hour domestic violence hotline and the ability to provide a safe dwelling for those who are escaping abusive situations.
The Fluvanna-Louisa Housing Foundation, located roughly an hour outside Richmond, Virginia, would not be able to build more low-income housing or provide access to handicapped residents to obtain ramps that give them access to their houses.
Rhode Island’s Jane Addams Resource Corporation, in Providence, would have to shut down its job training program.
Each of these nonprofits — and more than a million more across the country — provide vital support to Americans
Trump will appoint a Cabinet of lunatics
Trump will engage in grotesque corruption
Trump will let grudges and vendettas drive his policies
Trump will govern chaotically and malevolently
Trump will destroy NATO and the American-led international order
The historical pattern is unmistakable for those willing to see it. Every pathway to autocracy begins with the deliberate erosion of the idea that power must explain and justify itself. Viktor Orbán didn't announce his intention to dismantle Hungarian democracy—he simply treated democratic constraints as optional, selectively ignoring them while maintaining their outward forms. Vladimir Putin didn't openly declare his rejection of legal limits—he simply acted as if they didn't apply to him, daring anyone to stop him. The playbook isn't complicated: treat constraints as suggestions, norms as obsolete traditions, and accountability as an unnecessary courtesy.
That's not efficient. It's cruel, it's wrong, and it's unAmerican.
These cuts are having a significant impact on veterans employed by the federal government, both at VA and other agencies. Veterans who rely on the VA are already being impacted and more and more will be harmed over time, as DOGE cuts continue and the VA is left without the resources it needs to provide quality care and benefits that veterans need—and earned through their service.
Many veterans, including a disabled veteran who served for 18 years in the Army and a 10-year Marine veteran, were among the 1,000 VA employees recently fired by DOGE. A disabled Army veteran who served for 20 years, including two deployments to Iraq and one to Afghanistan, was five weeks from completing his probationary year when he was fired from his job at a VA hospital. Veterans have been fired from other agencies as well, including a disabled Navy veteran who served for 11 years and was told she was being fired for poor performance despite receiving only positive evaluations.
Veterans Crisis Line employees have been fired, and suicide prevention training sessions have been postponed or canceled. Veterans’ health care appointments have been cancelled and postponed for months because of staffing shortages.
President Donald Trump may soon attempt to absorb the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), an independent agency, into his administration by issuing an executive order that reportedly would dissolve the service’s leadership.
The order could allow the Trump administration to make mail voting — which was used by tens of millions of voters last year — more difficult. Trump has repeatedly said he’d like to end the practice, falsely claiming it allows for widespread fraud.
The experience of 18F echoes a pattern of chaos in DOGE’s actions across the federal government—at USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Human Health and Services, and elsewhere. DOGE has exposed potentially sensitive data on its website, and fired and then tried to rehire nuclear-security, bird-flu, food-safety, and medical-device experts. As my colleagues and I have reported, DOGE has flouted cybersecurity protocol to access data and IT systems at a number of federal agencies—potentially including sensitive information on U.S. citizens, defense technologies, and infectious diseases.
It was a cost-recoverable org, charging agencies for their expertise, using a consulting model. Its cost to government was negligible, its benefits huge. My team there once saved DoD $500 million [note the original post has typo showing billion instead of million]
18F is precisely what Musk and team claim should exist within government. But when his team found it, they destroyed it, because it is evidence that government works well (can't have that!), and because like Zelensky, 18F didn't bend the knee.
Trump and Musk are eliminating any part of government that works well, because that undermines their thesis that government doesn't work.
GSA (which houses 18F) turns a profit as an agency. Naturally it has to be destroyed. 18F's healthy revenue stream also means it must go.
Business leaders can secure a one-on-one meeting with the president at Mar-a-Lago for $5 million, according to sources with direct knowledge of the meetings. At a so-called candlelight dinner held as recently as this past Saturday, prospective Mar-a-Lago guests were asked to spend $1 million to reserve a seat, according to an invitation obtained by WIRED.
The event occurred at 7 pm on March 1 and was listed on the president’s official schedule as the “MAGA INC. Candlelight Finance Dinner.”
“I can’t recall a sitting president in the first weeks of his administration asking for millions of dollars in fundraising,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan.
“Part of what is worrying,” Moynihan adds, “is the lack of ethical guardrails in the current Trump administration, where there doesn’t seem to be a clear line between Trump’s businesses and the presidency.”
Across his career, Musk’s companies have reportedly benefitted from nearly $40 billion in government contracts, subsidies, and tax credits.
But even as Musk sends entire agencies that he has feuded with to the “woodchipper,” he is continuing to reap new and lucrative government contracts, while deploying minions from his various companies to probe some of the most sensitive data at agencies in government.
Not surprisingly, Trump 2.0 is going to slather their favorite fake engineer billionaire manbaby with cash at every conceivable opportunity
That apparently starts with giving Musk and Starlink a lucrative new FAA contract as Musk and his 4chan tween DOGE minions set about pretending to fix government by throwing it into chaos. Musk appears to be trying to elbow out Verizon, which has an existing 15 year, $2 billion contract with the agency to upgrade its infrastructure that was obtained through traditional transparent bidding processes.
The length and price tag of Starlink’s new FAA contract were, unsurprisingly, not publicly disclosed.
Musk stealing Verizon’s FAA contract is just one of countless conflicts of interest that arise with having an unelected bureaucrat illegally declaring how government should or shouldn’t function and illegally bypassing bidding processes. Not to mention the numerous privacy and national intelligence issues.
Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency shuttered at least 10 Social Security field offices in as many states. Now, DOGE has eliminated the SSA’s Office of Transformation, a department whose work included making it easier for Americans to apply for and access benefits online — the exact service many people will need now that offices are being closed across the country.
It’s all part of the Trump administration plans to reduce the agency’s workforce by half, including more closures of some of the 1,200 local Social Security offices where Americans receive their benefits
This isn't governance. This isn't policy. This is vandalism on a national scale, dressed up in the language of populism and “America First.” It's a fire sale of our democratic institutions, our international credibility, and our future, all to satisfy the egos and line the pockets of a few.
And yet, we have people—intelligent, educated people—who continue to rationalize this behavior. They couch their complicity in terms of “both sides” arguments or whataboutism, as if the flaws of previous administrations somehow justify the wholesale dismantling of our democracy.
To those sitting on the sidelines, I say this: Your principles are worthless if they prevent you from acting in defense of democracy, decency, and the rule of law. Your moral purity is an illusion if it allows you to watch injustice unfold without raising your voice.
I don't know how to tell you this, but you are not above the fray. You are not an atomic unit unto yourself. You are a product of a society, a culture, a system. Even the language you speak was inherited. You do not exist outside of the contingencies of society.
You're a bag of meat and water like the rest of us, and the only reason you are where you are is because you worked with other people to help get you there. Your family. Your friends. Your colleagues. The customers who bought your product. The investors who took a risk on you.
You are part of a system. And you owe something to that system. Whether you realize that or not, you do.
We are witnessing the unraveling of decades of progress towards global stability, fueled by a toxic mix of ignorance, arrogance, and a dangerous misunderstanding of the complexities of our interconnected world.
The instruments of state power are being wielded by individuals guided not by wisdom or a sense of historical responsibility, but by petty grudges, empty narratives, and cynical alliances against the very foundations of democratic governance.
Visiting Fort Knox is a publicity stunt to get Congress to back an accounting gimmick that will fund the Bitcoin reserve. It is, as the title of this piece says, A scam built atop an accounting gimmick wrapped in bullshit. Now let me explain how.
Musk and his DOGE boys now have access to the business and technology ideas of America’s best and brightest. They are thumbing through tens of millions of new business applications at the Small Business Administration. We can only assume the United States Patent and Trademark Office will be their next stop, if they are not there already. Musk has also ransacked the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau where he’ll find detailed information on the future competitors of his new digital payment platform collaboration with Visa, X Money. Over at the Food and Drug Administration he’ll find immensely valuable information from clinical trials evaluating the safety and efficacy of medical devices, like those of the competitors to his new brain chip company, Neuralink
Meanwhile, Musk is after larger and more lucrative federal contracts for his companies, Starlink, Space X, and Tesla. The fruits of his labor are already bearing: The Federal Aviation Administration announced this week that they’ll use Starlink to upgrade its IT systems. Further, he can axe the regulators tasked with keeping an eye on companies. To date, Musk has shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and helped Trump fire labor law enforcers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board, both of which have investigated Musk’s companies for illegal hostility and harassment of their workers.
The move follows the firings of nearly 1,000 probationary employees Feb. 14, some of which were walked back later when they were determined to be essential employees.
Veterans make up more than 28% of the VA workforce and account for the same share of the federal workforce.
VFW National Commander Al Lipphardt said fired veterans weren't "brand-new, off-the-street employees," but were those who had served the country for decades in uniform and civil service.
"There are bigger ramifications in firing veterans than just faceless workers being let go. The American people are losing technical expertise, training and security clearances already bought and paid for by taxpayers. We're losing people who are genuinely committed to the mission and find a continued sense of purpose in what they do."
The VA has almost 450,000 employees, nearly 92% of whom work in health care and health administration and support services.
savings in salaries and benefits -- an estimated $83 million a year / VA's budget was nearly $304 billion in 2023
more than 2,300 veterans are expected to lose their jobs this week at the Defense Department
"This move should outrage anyone who respects our veterans and service members and believes our promises to them should be upheld."
Internal documents reviewed by WIRED show that three of these employees are employed in the department that controls the NIH’s central electronic business system, which includes finance, budget, procurement, a property-management system, and a grant-tracking system.
In issuing the temporary restraining order, the judge said DOGE’s access to the data breached federal privacy laws and posed irreparable harm to plaintiffs.
She noted that people affiliated with DOGE have been granted access to systems that contain Social Security numbers, dates of birth, home addresses, income and assets, citizenship status and disability status.
Boardman said the plaintiffs showed that the Education Department and OPM likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act by giving DOGE access to the sensitive data in defiance of the Privacy Act.
fired—for no apparent cause— the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of Naval Operations, and the vice chief of staff of the Air Force.
Less noticed is the similarly historic firing of the senior lawyers in the U.S. military, known as the Judge Advocate General of the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
the removal of senior military lawyers from across the Department of Defense calls into question the willingness to follow the rule of law. The gratuitous firing of all three senior lawyers sends a chilling message about the precariousness of what protection under the law now means.
Farmers nationwide who recently modernized their equipment and turned to green energy, but are now foundering financially. Grants they were promised under President Joe Biden have been rescinded, leaving farmers stuck with unfathomable bills and loans they can’t repay.
farmers were also victims of the Trump administration’s abrupt and illegal disbandment of the U.S. Agency for International Aid (USAID). U.S. farmers provided about $6 billion worth of crops to the agency to help feed the world’s poor. Now, America’s farmers will have to either find new markets, selling at a loss, or let crops rot in fields.
The Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) is a federal data collection system, run out of CDC, “designed to identify groups of women and infants at high risk for health problems, to monitor changes in health status, and to measure progress towards goals in improving the health of mothers and infants".
The Trump CDC has shuttered the program as part of its general clampdown on medical research and public health information.
On Saturday, employees throughout the federal government received an email from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), demanding a reply with “approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week.” On X, Elon Musk posted that failure to respond “will be taken as a resignation.”
The email appears to have been sent even to federal judges. “We understand that some judges and judiciary staff have received an email from HR@opm.gov,” read an email from the director’s office of the Department of Administrative Services for US Federal Courts. “Please be advised that this email did not originate from the Judiciary or the Administrative Office and we suggest that no action be taken.”
At least some military personnel also received the email and have been told to await guidance from the Department of Defense. That holding pattern appears to be the response at most agencies, where workers say they have not heard from senior leadership
“National security staff are getting notified of OPM’s request, which is taking them from the important work of ensuring national security interests. These are essential employees who keep us safe.”
“It’s such a pointless bloodbath,” says the second source, who like others was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “Every time we try to figure out why this or that was done, the answers you get from the Trump and Musk guys usually amount to: Because we can. We’ve never seen anything like this.”
“It’s a bunch of bullshit,” one current FAA worker tells Rolling Stone. “The definition of ‘critical’ can be fucked around with as much as they’d like. We were already an underfunded and understaffed agency.”
President Donald Trump tonight began a purge of the senior ranks of the United States armed forces in an apparent effort to intimidate the military and create an officer corps personally loyal to him.
Getting rid of the military’s top lawyers is not exactly a sign that the Trump administration wants to follow the law.
Trump doesn’t want a military with a conscience. He wants a pliant military that does what he commands rather than what the law requires.
The House of Representatives will soon consider a budget resolution for Fiscal Year (FY) 2025, which was reported favorably out of the House Budget Committee on February 13. The budget’s reconciliation instructions pave the way for a bill that could add at least $2.8 trillion to deficits through FY 2034, or $3.4 to $4 trillion of debt including interest costs.
This month, Andrew Bernier, a US Army Corps of Engineers researcher and a union leader, says that he has received a barrage of menacing messages from the same anonymous email account. Unfolding like short chapters in a dystopian novel, they have spoken of the genius of Elon Musk, referenced the power of the billionaire’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and foretold the downfall of “corrupt” union bosses.
But the most eerie thing about the emails, which Bernier says began arriving after he filed an official charge accusing the Trump administration of violating his union’s collective bargaining agreement, is that they included personal details about his life—some of which he believes might have come from surveillance of his work laptop. The author referenced Bernier’s union activities, nickname, job, travel details, and even the green notebook he regularly uses. The most recent email implied that his computer was loaded with spyware.
Grasping the scale of President Donald Trump’s assault on American governance is no small matter. The administration is challenging laws, claiming the right to reinterpret the Constitution, questioning judges’ powers, and arrogating new powers to itself.
The better alternative is to describe exactly what’s happening: The president is taking actions he doesn’t have the power to take, disrespecting the rule of law, and attempting to revoke long-established rights. He is portraying himself as a king. Soon, he may openly defy an order from a duly appointed and confirmed federal judge. That would be a step closer to the end of American democracy than anything since January 6. Call that a catastrophe, call it lawlessness, call it a threat—just don’t call it a constitutional crisis.
During the meeting, Begich was confronted by constituents laid off from federal jobs, a major source of employment for the state. "I was fired," one said. "Now I have no choice but to leave that community and probably leave Alaska, and so I just don't understand how these budget cuts are helpful to any Alaskans or their communities. And I'm just wondering what you plan to do about this."
Begich said he was "not in a position to approve or deny the cuts."
It was a remarkable statement from the freshman Congressman, sworn into office in January. The Constitution vests the "power of the purse" with Congress — not an unelected billionaire appointed to a position in the executive branch.
The indiscriminate budget cuts could hit Alaska especially hard because the state has a high concentration of federal workers. There are about 15,000 federal employees in Alaska, and about 1,200 are "probationary," which generally means they have less than one year of service in their current position. If all probationary employees were fired, it would cost the state about $88 million in lost wages. Many federal workers are located in rural areas where there are few opportunities for alternative employment.
Alaskans cut from the National Park Service include "biologists, field technicians, logistics specialists, a superintendent, an archeologist and a pilot." Alaska is home to many Federal Aviation Administration employees, some of whom have lost their jobs. At least 30 Alaskans who work for the U.S. Forest Service, which plays a critical role in preventing wildfires, were also let go.
So many of Mr. Trump’s actions have defied apparent legal limits that some scholars say the country is approaching a constitutional crisis.
Here are 38 of the Trump administration’s biggest moves so far. (Feb 20)
employees who review the safety of food ingredients, medical devices and other products were fired
Nearly half of the FDA’s $6.9bn budget comes from fees paid by companies the agency regulates, including drug and medical device makers, which allows the agency to hire extra scientists to swiftly review products. Eliminating those positions will not reduce government spending
The FAA has frequently tangled with Musk’s SpaceX, as the rocket company and others fight to operate their own interests in crowded American airspace.
In September, the FAA proposed $633,000 in fines following two 2023 incidents in which SpaceX allegedly did not follow its license requirements, violating regulations.
The FAA did not respond to further questions about whether the presence of SpaceX engineers at the agency would constitute a conflict of interest.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture said Tuesday that it is moving to correct the accidental firing of several people working on the federal government’s response to an outbreak of avian influenza, commonly known as bird flu.
Federal workers told The Washington Post that basic functions are slowing at several agencies and could collapse as crucial staff members are pushed out.
The Afghan brothers worked closely with the American military for years, fighting the Taliban alongside U.S. troops, including the Special Forces, and facing gunfire and near misses from roadside bombs while watching their friends die.
They escaped Afghanistan in 2021 when the Taliban seized control of the country. One brother is now an elite U.S. Army paratrooper at Fort Liberty in North Carolina. The other serves in the Army Reserve in Houston. Their eldest sister and her husband, however, were stranded in Afghanistan, forced into hiding as they waited for the U.S. government to green-light their refugee applications. Finally, after three years, they received those approvals in December and, according to the family, were slated to reunite with their brothers this month.
But weeks before the couple was due to arrive, President Donald Trump issued an executive order indefinitely suspending the admission of refugees.
The order was the first in a series of sweeping actions that blocked the arrival of more than 10,000 refugees who already had flights booked for the U.S.
another 100,000 refugees who had already been vetted by the Department of Homeland Security have also been blocked from entering the country.
“There were a number of employees who commented that they had nothing but exemplary performance reviews and director awards for meritorious services, so this notion that they were being let go [for poor performance] was ludicrous,” they said. “The answer was that they were simply copying the verbiage from OPM and that their value to the nation is no longer required.”
First came the pharmaceutical executives. Then the insurance companies and the hospital leaders. During two months that shattered records for presidential transitions, healthcare executives wrote among the largest checks, paying millions of dollars to attend at least six different dinners with now-President Trump before he took office.
In his gold-covered, chandeliered dining room just off the lobby at his Mar-a-Lago club, Trump discovered one of the most lucrative moneymaking ventures of his career
Altogether, Trump has told associates he raised about $500 million
Even a 15-minute meeting with Trump would cost millions, Meredith O’Rourke, Trump’s top fundraiser, told others, though the price varied.
“DOGE going into all these agencies with largely unfettered access with a wrecking ball and no understanding of the business logic and structure behind the code, database, and configured business logic, related payment systems, and integrated decision trees, poses real risks to the privacy and personal data of millions of people across all of those records”
About 325 NNSA workers initially received notices late last week that they had been laid off, according to Reuters.
"To order the firing of employees without knowing that NNSA is responsible for maintaining a safe, secure, and reliable nuclear weapons stockpile while also preventing, countering, and responding to a terrorist or other adversary with a nuclear or radiological device is utterly callous and dangerous,"
the NNSA struggled to notify some of the agency's originally fired employees that their terminations were rescinded because they lost access to their government email accounts.
“The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel"
Donald Trump has been back in office for less than one month, and he, Elon Musk, and his senior administration officials have already plunged the nation into an ongoing constitutional crisis and openly performed various brazen acts of lawlessness and gleeful corruption, while threatening to “look at” judges who object to his onslaught against the U.S. Constitution and legal limits on his power.
Trump’s statement bears obvious resemblance to disgraced President Richard Nixon’s infamous line about how “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Like Nixon, Trump has now explicitly stated that he believes he is simply above the law, as any Mad King or debauched emperor should be.
And though it may be objectively shocking that a modern American president would repeatedly admit to this, without fear of significant pushback, on a random Saturday, it is regrettably unsurprising for this particular president.
they had been terminated without notice and a substantial reason, which are required by federal law. These are nonpartisan public servants, confirmed by the Senate.
IGs—who regularly remain in office across multiple presidential administrations—serve as independent watchdogs, playing a vital role in ensuring the effective and efficient operation of government. They do so by auditing and investigating their agencies’ operations and personnel in order to detect and prevent waste, fraud, and abuse, and by making recommendations for improved agency operations.
These people are professionals at rooting out obstacles to good government; unlike Musk they have no personal interest in government contracts.
Now we know for a fact that DOJ has ordered SDNY to drop the Adams case, and we can say with certainty that DOJ’s actions are corrupt. What used to be DOJ’s independence from political interference is now just a pile of ashes.
The firings are affecting a wide swath of federal workers and include employees responsible for education, small business grants, and the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile
Mass terminations of probationary workers also swept through the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semiautonomous agency within the Energy Department that oversees the nation's nuclear weapons. The small organization is responsible for maintaining and upgrading America's arsenal of nuclear weapons, combating nuclear terrorism and preventing proliferation around the world.
"This administration has abused the probationary period to conduct a politically driven mass firing spree, targeting employees not because of performance, but because they were hired before Trump took office"
"Agencies have spent years recruiting and developing the next generation of public servants. By firing them en masse, this administration is throwing away the very talent that agencies need to function effectively in the years ahead"
The resulting notices were missing personal details, reading: "MEMORANDUM FOR [EmployeeFirstName] [EmployeeLastName], [Job Title], [Division]".
The thing about the takeover of key US government institutions by the world’s richest man and his strike force of former interns is that it’s happening so fast.
It’s been three weeks since Elon Musk’s agents took over the government’s IT and HR departments. Since then, the movements of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency have had the cartography of a horror movie, DOGE picking off agencies one by one based on slasher logic, feeding an unslakeable thirst for cost-cutting and data.
Three weeks ago the United States believed in humanitarian aid. It helped people who had been ripped off by big corporations. It funded the infrastructure necessary to make America a beacon of scientific innovation. Now the United States Agency for International Development is gutted, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is on ice, and National Institutes of Health grants are handcuffed. So much for all that.
This is how you get an executive order declaring that “each agency hire no more than one employee for every four employees that depart,” an arbitrary ratio with no regard for actual staffing needs. It’s how you get hundreds of federal government buildings on the auction block no matter how fully occupied they are. It’s both extreme and ill-considered, a race to empty the town’s only well.
Trump and Elon Musk plan to dismantle the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and strip military veterans and their families overseas of the generous federal hiring incentives they rely on.
This executive order seeks to impose severe hiring restrictions and would disproportionately harm veterans, who make up one-third of the federal workforce.
Many of these programs help veterans adjust to civilian life, with federal employment serving as a stable career path for thousands. Active-duty military members stationed overseas also rely on these programs for critical support, from child care to helping their spouses secure employment in foreign countries where they may lack language skills or legal work status.
The VA is already grappling with severe workforce shortages, particularly in medical and benefits processing roles. This new hiring bottleneck guarantees growing backlogs, delayed care, and increased suffering for veterans. But that may be the goal. ... they achieve two objectives at once — denying care to veterans while making the VA so dysfunctional that veterans either forgo medical treatment or are forced into the private sector.
For years, politicians have promised to fix the VA and take care of veterans. But this Trump executive order does the opposite — it throws veterans under the bus and a few other fast moving objects.
Employees at the General Services Administration (GSA) have been told to sell off 500-plus federal government buildings across the US, some of which house government agencies and the offices of US senators.
Many of the federal buildings on the list of non-core real estate are fully occupied, sources tell WIRED. This includes buildings like the Senator Paul Simon Federal Building in Carbondale, Illinois, which houses offices for the Federal Aviation Administration, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Social Security Administration; as well as the Patrick V. McNamara Federal Building in Detroit, Michigan, which also houses numerous agencies. -
The Trump administration has also touted a return-to-office requirement as a key part of its plan—something made more difficult if government employees don’t have an office to return to.
Workers were informed that they had been fired with a frenetic email delivered around 9 pm ET on Tuesday. An evidently failed mail merge meant that some affected employees were addressed as [EmployeeFirstName][EmployeeLastName], [Job Title], [Division].
“This is to provide notification that I am removing you from your position of [Job Title] and federal service consistent with the above references,” the email from acting chief human capital officer Adam Martinez says. “Unfortunately, the Agency finds that that [sic] you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and skills do not fit the Agency’s current needs.”
Bypassing the content management system, they unpublished the homepage file, causing a portion of the CFPB homepage to display a “404: Page not found” notice typical of a website that has been deleted or is otherwise missing. Around 11 pm on Friday, the CFPB’s X account disappeared, and shortly after, according to a CFPB staffer, DOGE left the building.
Musk wrote “RIP CFPB” with a gravestone emoji in an X post Friday afternoon. In November, he posted “Delete CFPB.” There are around 1,700 employees in total at the agency.
the agency claims to be responsible for $19.7 billion in consumer relief since its inception, as well as $5 billion in civil penalties. Some of those wins have come against payment processors including Block, which last month was ordered to pay $175 million in penalties for allegedly failing to sufficiently protect users of its Cash App from fraud. Elon Musk will soon be in the peer-to-peer payments business as well, after X entered a partnership with Visa in late January.
Multiple children’s safety groups—including those fighting online child sexual abuse and exploitation—say their efforts have been severely hamstrung.
Mulop says her organization had just started helping around 25 newly identified victims of human trafficking—all of them aged under 17. The group was taken to a support shelter run by another organization. “When we bring them there, USAID was ready to help. A few hours later they cancel,” Mulop says. “There’s no food, no nothing that we can provide to them,” she adds.
Within the country, the organization’s projects have 147 victims of trafficking in its care, the person says. “The ongoing pause and potentially the cessation of funding would have significant and negative impact on our capacity and ability to provide essential services to these victims
The person with links to work in a European country says their organization has 74 investigations into traffickers ongoing, plus 66 prosecutions that are underway. They say that the funding changes will have a “significant and negative impact on these criminal trials” and the safety of people who may give evidence in the cases.
"I realized today that Trump, Musk, DOGE, Vance, Miller, Vought and their many collaborators have broken so many laws already that they know they have to destroy our government and entire way of life to stay out of jail. This is all or nothing. We should respond accordingly." Fred Wellman (fpwellman.bsky.social)
“The unelected Musk recently announced plans for a new payments platform run jointly by Visa and 'X’ (formerly Twitter),” a press release issued by the CFPB’s union said Friday morning. “Now, he’s moved his power grab to the CFPB, in a clear attempt to attack union workers and defang the only agency that checks the greed of payment providers, as well as auto lenders like Tesla.”
“CFPB Union members welcome our newest colleagues and look forward to the smell of Axe Body Spray in our elevators,” the union press release continued.
Members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team have had access to the US Treasury Department’s payment systems for over a week. On Thursday, the threat intelligence team at one of the department's agencies recommended that DOGE members be monitored as an “insider threat.”
Already, the change has stymied anti-human-trafficking work, including projects that help people escape from labor compounds where they are enslaved and forced to commit digital fraud, WIRED reported on Wednesday.
Although the administration subsequently clarified that “lifesaving” work would be allowed to continue under an emergency waiver program, the chaotic takeover of the agency has made this impossible in practice.
How are journalists supposed to cover Trump’s rampant corruption when their employers participate in it?
In the case of CBS, for example, it’s been widely reported that the network is considering settling in hopes the Trump administration will look favorably upon its parent company’s merger plans. That’s despite the obviously frivolous nature of Trump’s legal theory that CBS violated consumer protection law by editing an interview for time.
Since when do multibillion-dollar corporations settle cases when the only relevant piece of evidence exonerates them?
Meta’s $25 million settlement makes no sense as anything but a protection racket, given that the Supreme Court upheld social media platforms’ First Amendment rights to moderate content just last year.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that Trump had made clear to Zuckerberg that he needs to pay up if he wants to be brought into the tent.
Even though the case was very defensible as a matter of defamation law, ABC’s characterization of the sexual abuse verdict against Trump as “rape” was arguably not entirely accurate. But $15 million? On what planet does one lose that much money because people believed they were a rapist as opposed to just a regular ho-hum sexual abuser? Not to mention that the money went to a potential slush fund, not necessarily a presidential library as many reported.
The Bureau of the Fiscal Service is a sleepy part of the Treasury Department. It’s also where, sources say, a 25-year-old engineer tied to Elon Musk has admin privileges over the code that controls Social Security payments, tax returns, and more.
"If you would have asked me a week ago, I'd have told you that this kind of thing would never in a million years happen. But now, who the fuck knows."
An attorney representing two federal workers—Jane Does 1 and 2—filed a motion this morning arguing that the server’s continued operation not only violates federal law but is potentially exposing vast quantities of government staffers’ personal information to hostile foreign adversaries through unencrypted email.
McClanahan’s lawsuit highlights the government’s response to the OPM hack of 2015, which compromised personnel records on more than 22 million people, including some who’d undergone background checks to obtain security clearances. A congressional report authored by House Republicans following the breach pinned the incident on a “breakdown in communications” between OPM’s chief information officer and its inspector general: “The future effectiveness of the agency’s information technology and security efforts,” it says, “will depend on a strong relationship between these two entities moving forward.”
OPM’s inspector general, Krista Boyd, was fired by President Donald Trump in the midst of the “Friday night purge” on January 24—one day after the first HR@opm.gov email was sent.
They estimated that the $Trump token had generated between $86 million and $100 million in trading fees
some 200,000 crypto wallets, most with small holdings, lost money on $Trump on the exchange
Patel worked to entice the QAnon community to join Truth Social. “We try to incorporate it into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences because whoever that person is has certainly captured a widespread breath of the MAGA and the America First movement,” said Patel
Patel’s response to committee chairman Senator Chuck Grassley was unequivocal: “I have publicly rejected outright QAnon baseless conspiracy theories or any other baseless conspiracy theories.”
This isn’t true. Patel’s claim that he was not a promoter of QAnon is undermined by years of his very public and overt promotion of the QAnon community.
Clinical trials may have to be scrapped, research applications will be pushed back, and unpaid researchers will quickly leave the sector—even if the Trump administration’s funding pause is only temporary.
Trump hasn’t even been back in the White House for two weeks yet, and he and his lieutenants are in the middle of a wide-ranging blitz on his enemies and on the federal bureaucracy, featuring multiple “blatantly illegal” or wildly unconstitutional personnel and policy moves.
Now that he is back in power, the Trump administration appears to be operating based on one specific legal principle, towering above all others. “What are you gonna do about it?”
Many of his early orders and actions have drawn directly from the right-wing playbook detailed in Project 2025 — making a sucker out of anyone who took Trump’s campaign disavowals of the Heritage Foundation-crafted agenda seriously.
If you’ve been unable to take it all in — or felt like you needed to look away — know that that’s by design.
See article for long list on the worst of what you may have missed. And this is only January 29th.
Sources within the federal government tell WIRED that the highest ranks of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—essentially the human resources function for the entire federal government—are now controlled by people with connections to Musk and to the tech industry
part of a broader pattern of the traditionally apolitical OPM being converted to use as a political tool
“This reminded me,” says Kelman, “of the Soviet Stalinism of turning in your friends to the government.”
the “Fork in the Road” email: an offer of questionable legality — accompanied by thinly-veiled threats about what things will be like if you don’t leave — under a coercively-short timeline.
In addition to an oddly short timeline for making a decision — an age-old tactic of high-pressure sales environments, used car dealerships, and unsavory characters who operate outside the law — there were veiled threats of layoffs, loyalty tests, and more. But what’s worse is that many of those threats were based on bad facts or ignored legal realities. And some were just… untrue.
These aren’t just numbers or statistics. These are real people who served their country — some for decades — now being told that their service, their sacrifice, means nothing to the Trump administration.
The hiring freeze doesn’t just hurt veterans looking for jobs; it also threatens the quality of care they receive. The VA is already understaffed, facing a $6.6 billion budget shortfall by the end of fiscal year 2025. Medical professionals, crisis hotline responders, and claims processors are desperately needed to keep the VA running. Now, with hiring frozen, those vacancies will remain unfilled.
That means doctors, nurses, and mental health professionals — already stretched thin — will be unable to keep up with demand.
The consequences will be catastrophic. Veterans will wait longer for care, disability claims will pile up, and crisis lines — lifelines for veterans on the brink — will be understaffed. For veterans battling PTSD, depression, or suicidal thoughts, delays in care aren’t just an inconvenience — they’re a death sentence.
For disabled veterans, the hiring freeze is an even deeper betrayal. Many depend on federal employment opportunities because their disabilities make it difficult to work in the private sector. Programs like the Schedule A hiring authority and the Veterans’ Preference system have historically provided a pathway to meaningful employment that accommodates their medical needs. By freezing hiring, Trump is cutting off a vital source of stability for those who need it most. These veterans — many already struggling with chronic pain, PTSD, and mobility impairments — now face even greater uncertainty. The very system designed to support them is instead shutting them out of employment and the economic security it provides.
Under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, committees of the sort DOGE seemed to be shaping up to be have several legal requirements, including making all meetings publicly accessible and requiring a diversity of perspectives on the committee itself. By repurposing the USDS, which was already part of the Office of Management and Budget, Trump managed to skirt both the requirements of a formal advisory committee and the congressional oversight required when creating a new federal agency. In short, it meant DOGE would get more access to sensitive data than an advisory committee would likely have, while offering less transparency.
“The Proud Boys are not terrorist masterminds. These are not the brightest neofascists out there,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. “But they are committed to the cause. They are single-minded in this mission now: for revenge, for retribution. And as we’ve seen before, they are willing to go across state lines and use violence in furtherance of their goals.”
A nurse and dedicated Trump supporter had recently been hired by the VA, packed up her family's Fort Worth home, and secured housing in Waco. Then, two weeks before her start date, the job offer was rescinded.
her husband—a disabled veteran himself—shared the devastating impact of the rescinded job offer on social media.
"[We] have spent thousands to move our family," John Basham shared on X, formerly Twitter. "Now our family is lost with no clear path."
"My wife is in tears and inconsolable," he wrote, explaining that working with disabled veterans had long been her dream. "My family is devastated!"
Just days before he took office, Trump launched a memecoin called $TRUMP to “celebrate our win and have fun," warning that it was “not intended to be … an investment opportunity.” Trump announced the launch on X and Truth Social, with many wondering if the president’s accounts had been hacked.
The response from the neo-Nazi community across the globe was instant and unanimous.
“WE ARE FUCKING BACK,” the administrator of a Nazi meme channel on Telegram wrote under a clip of Musk giving the salute. Members of the group responded with the lightning bolt emoji, a well-known neo-Nazi reference to the SS.
Evan Kilgore, a right-wing political commentator, wrote on X: “Holy crap … did Elon Musk just Heil Hitler at the Trump Inauguration Rally in Washington DC … This is incredible.” Kilgore later wrote: “We are so back.”
Four years ago, on January 6, 2021, thousands of Trump’s supporters galvanized by conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, came to DC and besieged the Capitol with the goal of preventing the peaceful transfer of power. The ugly scenes culminated in the deaths of five people and left more than 140 police officers injured, and Trump left Washington in disgrace.
The FBI classified the Capitol riot as an act of domestic terrorism, and the DOJ has spent the years since trying to hold those involved in the riot to account, a massive and costly undertaking. Nearly 1,600 defendants have been hit with federal charges in connection to the riot.
Trump would have surely faced criminal charges for his efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election had he not won the presidential election in 2024. ... directing “an angry mob to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election and then leverage rioters’ violence to further delay it.”
At 12:01 p.m. on Jan. 20, as Donald Trump was being sworn in as president for the second time, programmers linked to Elon Musk’s nascent government-efficiency project wanted to access computer systems within the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
By roughly 12:30 p.m., the programmers had gained entry to a vast trove of information about the entire federal workforce.
The lightning-fast incursion at OPM took place hours before Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, was officially created by an executive order.
On Jan. 20, President Donald Trump began his term with presidential actions including 26 executive orders, with more expected to follow. Just Security is covering key developments, including in concise "What Just Happened" expert explainers, legal and policy analysis, and more.
Politicization and Weaponization of Justice Department
What follows is a timeline of actions that highlight the alarming level of politicization and weaponization of the Department of Justice under the second Trump administration. Politicization includes the misuse of the Department’s powers for political purposes rather than the independent and impartial enforcement of the laws. Weaponization includes a deliberate and systematic misuse of the Department’s powers for political or personal purposes and in defiance of the rule of law.
A list of the legal challenges to the executive actions taken by the Trump Administration.