South Carolina Attacked Planned Parenthood. Will SCOTUS Let Patients Fight Back?

Perhaps what was most significant in the debate at the US Supreme Court Wednesday morning, during oral arguments in Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic—a major case over whether a state can unilaterally cut off Planned Parenthood’s access to Medicaid funding—is what wasn’t said.

Nobody in the courtroom argued that the doctors and nurses at Planned Parenthood weren’t medically qualified to care for patients. Nobody said that they did a bad job at prescribing birth control, treating sexually transmitted infections, or screening for cervical and breast cancer. Nobody argued that there was a medical reason to exclude Planned Parenthood from Medicaid reimbursements for the extensive non-abortion services it provides.(Medicaid already doesn’t cover abortion, except in the rarest of cases.)

In fact, everyone seemed to agree that in 2018, when South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, suddenly declared that the state would no longer consider Planned Parenthood South Atlantic a “qualified provider” for Medicaid purposes, it had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with politics. “The payment of taxpayer funds to abortion clinics, for any purpose, results in the subsidy of abortion and the denial of the right to life,” McMaster reasoned in his executive order, as he effectively cut access to birth control and basic health screenings for his state’s poorest residents in an attempt to financially punish Planned Parenthood.

Congress amended the federal Medicaid law in 1967 to ensure that patients would have the “free choice” to see any “qualified” provider who takes Medicaid. The whole point of that provision was to stop states from artificially restricting patients’ options.So, in response to McMaster’s order, Planned Parenthood South Atlantic and one of its Medicaid patients, Julie Edwards, sued the state, arguing that it had violated patients’ right to choose their provider.

“There aren’t that many things that are more important than being able to choose your doctor, the person that you see when you’re at your most vulnerable, facing some of the most significant challenges to your life and your health,” Nicole Saharsky, attorney for Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, argued before the justices on Wednesday. “Congress said a long time ago, this is something we want to protect.”

In opposing the case, the state of South Carolina has argued that Edwards didn’t have a right to sue in federal court. The lower courtssided with Edwards and Planned Parenthood—as have most federal circuit courts that have considered similar cases. So South Carolina appealed, all the way up to the Supreme Court.

Now, the justices will weigh whether patients can sue to enforce the “free choice of provider” provision when a state violates it. If the answer is yes, then patients will continue to have the power to fight back in the courts against governors like McMasters. But if not, states will have broader latitude to decide to which doctors Medicaid recipients can go.

Since Medicaid was passed decades ago, the Supreme Court has taken many cases concerning an individual’s right to sue in order to enforce different parts of the law. Justice Brett Kavanaugh referred to this history as a “45-year odyssey” during Wednesday’s oral argument. But just two years ago, the court reaffirmed the framework it’s told courts to use when deciding if an individual can sue. “Did you need a hit over the head?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked the lawyer for South Carolina.

“It’s clear that attacks on sexual and reproductive health care are only escalating because some people want to impose their own beliefs on everyone else.”

But this time around, the case arriving at the court involves Planned Parenthood—and it’sat a moment when reproductive healthcare providers have never been more vulnerable to government targeting. Their abortion services are no longer shielded by Roe v. Wade. They’re facing just-announced cuts of tens of millions of dollars in federal family planning grants, plus impending massive cuts to Medicaid. Opportunistic prosecutors are filing criminal charges against alleged abortion providers. Add to this Trump’s sweeping pardon of anti-abortion extremists, some of whom have a history of attacking clinics and patients.

The financial stakes for Planned Parenthood and other providers of controversial healthcare loomed over the oral arguments on Wednesday.Medicaid is considered the country’s largest single**–**payer for family planning services, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation—and Planned Parenthood is the largest provider of those services.Half of Planned Parenthood patients are on Medicaid, Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said on a podcast Wednesday. If the justices side with South Carolina, it could lead more states to wipe out Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid funding.

Family planning can include contraception, physical exams, pregnancy testing and counseling, and STI screening and treatment. When those services are provided at specialized reproductive health care clinics, research has found that patients get access to a wider range of contraceptive methods. At Planned Parenthood, those options typically include an extended supply of birth control pills and, often, same-day IUD insertion, the Guttmacher Institute reports. As I’ve previously written,when states attack Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid funding, it has a devastating effect on access to birth control for their residents:

Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, and Texas all tried to impose similar restrictions, according to Jane Perkins, litigation director for the National Health Law Program. Texas was one of the few to succeed, [and] the attacks on Planned Parenthood there forced many reproductive health clinics to close, cut hours, charge patients new fees, or ration IUDs and birth control implants. Ultimately, they could only serve half as many patients. The teen birth rate rose an estimated 3.4 percent.

On top of all that, patients receiving reproductive healthcare want to be able to choose a doctor who makes them feel comfortable. Yet in a Supreme Court brief, South Carolina suggested that Medicaid patients who lost access to care at Planned Parenthood could just go to the “crisis pregnancy centers” promoted by the anti-abortion group Heartbeat International—the vast majority of which offer no birth control options.

John Bursch, thebowtie-wearing lawyer from the powerful religious-right legal nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom—who is representing the state of South Carolina in the case, in a highly unusual arrangement—argued repeatedly that the free-choice-of-provider provision doesn’t technically give patients an individual right. “An obligation is not enough,” Bursch contended. “Telling a state that it has an obligation to do something, or that it must provide something, isn’t the same as saying you have the ability to sue them in federal court.” A federal law should only be considered to create a “right” if it uses words like “right,” “entitlement,” or “privilege”—”or their functional equivalent,” Bursch argued.

“The state has an obligation to ensure that a person—I don’t even know how to say this without saying ‘right’—has a right to choose their doctor,” Justice Elena Kagan objected. “That’s what this provision is. It’s impossible to even say the thing without using the word ‘right.'”

“The state has an obligation to ensure that a person—I don’t even know how to say this without saying ‘right’—has a right to choose their doctor.”

But if the conservative-majority court agrees with Bursch and rules that Medicaid patients don’t have the right to challenge McMaster’s decision, who does have the power to fight back? There appear to be no real options. Bursch suggested that doctors deemed “unqualified” could file an administrative appeal—but Planned Parenthood South Atlantic already tried that, only to be told by the state that it was “futile” given McMaster’s order, according to their brief.

Former Texas Solicitor General Kyle Hawkins, who is representing the Trump administration, which sides with South Carolina, suggested during oral arguments that the federal government could theoretically withhold funding to force a state to follow the free-choice-of-provider provision. But that’s never happened before, and it’s extremely unlikely to happen ever, Sotomayor pointed out. “It does seem awfully odd to think that that is a remedy at all because what you would be doing would be depriving thousands of other Medicaid recipients of coverage,” Sotomayor said. “Is there much sense in that?”

The implications of the case potentially can extend beyond Planned Parenthood. Both South Carolina and the Trump administration want states to be able to cut as much funding as possible for doctors who provide the kind of care they object to: abortion, for example, but also birth control and gender-affirming care for transgender people. If states really thought nobody could stop them from cutting providers out of Medicaid, Kagan said, “We would have every state deciding their various policy justifications. It could be people who do provide abortions, people who don’t provide abortions. People who do provide contraception, people who don’t provide contraception. People who do do gender transition treatment, people who don’t.”

“That does not seem like what this statute is all about, is allowing states to do that and then giving individuals no ability to come back and say, ‘That’s wrong,'” Kagan concluded.

We’ll know by the end of June if the rest of the court agrees andif Medicaid patients have the right to fight back in federal court when governors like McMaster exclude a provider for political objections. “It’s clear that attacks on sexual and reproductive health care are only escalating because some people want to impose their own beliefs on everyone else,” McGill Johnson said in a statement before oral argument. “You should have the freedom to decide what’s best for you.”

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City Projects That Improve Biking and Walking Are on Trump’s Latest Hit List

This story was originally published b_y Grist a_nd is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Department of Transportation has ordered a review of federal funding for bike lanes and plans to target recent projects that “improve the condition for environmental justice communities or actively reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

The move, outlined in a department memo obtained by Grist, is part of the Trump administration’s broader goal of steering federal infrastructure spending toward fossil fuels. The restriction of federal funding comes as health experts warn that pedestrian deaths have surged.

DOT officials did not respond to requests for comment.

The undated memo, reportedly sent March 11 to DOT offices, ordered an immediate freeze on all grants made after January 2021, invoking a series of executive orders aimed at dismantling federal diversity and climate initiatives. It instructs agency employees to identify projects that provide “funding to advance climate, equity, and other priorities counter to the Administration’s executive orders.”

It specifically targets any funds for projects “whose primary purpose is bicycle infrastructure,” one of many steps President Donald Trump has taken to boost the fossil fuel industry.

It also calls for flagging projects that might prioritize benefits to disadvantaged communities or reduce emissions. This likely includes hundreds of grants awarded through Safe Streets and Roads for All, a $5 billion initiative created by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The goal of these efforts is to help communities address roadway safety concerns, said John Tallmadge, the executive director of Bike Durham, a nonprofit group in Durham, North Carolina. The group is supporting a series of infrastructure improvements in Durham that were counting on funding from the agency’s BUILD grants, also expected to be impacted.

“Why are we pulling back grants where local governments choose what they want to do?”

The Durham project would add sidewalks, crosswalks, and bus stops to the city’s busiest transit corridor, which is used by thousands of people each day. “Numerous locations along this corridor have had pedestrian fatalities,” Tallmadge said.

These safety concerns were highlighted in a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which found Americans were 50 percent more likely to die walking in 2022 than in 2013. Its author, Rebecca Naumann, said infrastructure that prioritizes safety over speed—like the improvements Durham hopes to build—are proven solutions that protect everyone.

She notes such designs have helped other high-income countries like Austria, Canada, and the UK, reduce traffic deaths in recent decades. The opposite is true of the United States, which as of 2022, saw more pedestrian deaths than any of the 27 other countries Naumann studied.

One DOT project manager, who requested anonymity to avoid professional retaliation, told Grist the memo and executive orders will make it “terribly difficult to use federal transportation dollars where it’s needed most.” That’s bad news for more than bike lanes: Sustainable transportation not only makes communities safer, it lowers travel costs; improves access to important services like medical care, schools, and work; and helps mitigate climate change. “It’s frustrating to see these solutions stall when so many communities urgently need them,” he said. As Tallmadge noted, delays and revisions to federal grants will increase the cost of any project—the opposite of government efficiency.

Other funding likely to be caught up in these restrictions include projects within the Active Transportation Infrastructure Investment Program, which supports multimodal travel; the BUILD program, which is designed to meet local or multi-jurisdictional needs; and the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program, which helps communities harmed by past transportation decisions. Grants recently awarded under these initiatives range from $22 million for electric buses in Rhode Island to $157 million for green spaces that connect Atlanta neighborhoods currently divided by highways.

“The restriction of funding for projects like the Atlanta BeltLine and its RAISE Grant is an assault on disadvantaged communities,” said US Representative Nikema Williams, the Democrat who represents a wide swath of Atlanta. “These projects improve equity and mobility while spurring economic development.”

The DOT memo follows recommendations outlined in the conservative Project 2025 policy agenda that has shaped much of the Trump administration’s work. It broadly argued that the federal government should not fund local transportation projects. Instead, it suggests “user fees” and enabling “private companies to charge for transportation” through ventures like toll roads, removing air pollution regulations, restricting electric vehicle infrastructure, and eliminating federal funding for bicycle lanes, ferries, and other transportation.

Yet the move to restrict programs like BUILD, which rely on community input, clashes with Project 2025’s emphasis on local decision-making, said Caron Whitaker, the deputy executive director of the League of American Bicyclists. The Atlanta BeltLine project, for example, was supported by private and public entities at almost every level of government in Georgia. “Why are we pulling back grants where local governments choose what they want to do?” Whitaker asked. “If safety is a federal issue, then local fatalities matter,” she added. “If the economy is a federal issue, then local economies matter.”

The League, which is circulating a petition protesting the DOT’s review, recently led meetings with congressional aides to discuss the importance of funding active transportation projects. One former DOT employee who spoke to Grist said the scale of Safe Streets and Roads for All means there will be widespread impacts. “Safety is a bipartisan issue. You see Republican and Democratic representatives and senators touting the announcement whenever they’re awarded,” he said. “I think people just think, ‘Oh, this probably just hurts the coasts and the big cities,’ but there’s definitely rural areas that were trying to improve safety.”

It takes a lot of work for communities to get a federal grant, he said, often alongside finding matching funds. Whitaker agreed. “It puts local governments in a tough position,” she said. Because the Safe Streets program funding was congressionally allocated, explicitly including “bicyclists,” Duffy’s move to cut programs “whose primary purpose is bicycling” may not even be legal. Last week, a coalition of nonprofits and cities sued to reverse the federal freeze on grants, including the March DOT memo. “Since our nation’s founding, the Constitution has made it clear,” wrote the Southern Environmental Law Center, which is litigating the case, that “Congress controls federal spending—not the president.”

These efforts may limit transportation research nationwide. The DOT funds research and technical assistance projects through the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, or NCHRP, which is also subject to review. “If the policy memo is applied broadly to NCHRP, there could be a significant loss in current and future funding,” said Jennifer Dill, director of the Transportation Research and Education Center. “Without more research about countermeasures and solutions to fatalities, it will be hard to reverse that trend.” She worries Duffy’s recent actions will limit states’ ability to effectively use federal money for local priorities.

At headquarters, morale among many of those remaining at the DOT is at new lows. At first, the DOT project manager who spoke to Grist hoped to come up with ways to rephrase grants to avoid triggering words like “equity” and “climate.” But the new restrictions have escalated into an unprecedented level of scrutiny, with the political appointees reviewing every contract.

“It’s gone beyond just switching words to get through the censor,” he said. “It’s not only making people afraid to carry on with good work that was underway, but has a chilling effect on everything we do going forward.”

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Eric Adams Isn’t Corrupt?

After all the public groveling and taxpayer-funded trips to Mar-a-Lago, New York City Mayor Eric Adams appears to have successfully prostrated himself to freedom. A federal judge on Wednesday permanently dismissed the wide-ranging corruption chargesbrought against him.

“We can never allow this to happen to another innocent American,” Adams said shortly after the dismissal was announced, holding a copy of FBI director Kash Patel’s Government Gangsters. “I’m going to encourage every New Yorker to read it,” he added, referring to the conspiracy-addled book.

The remarks, though brief, succinctly captured the presence of a public figure historically incapable of remorse, something of a feat in an era of Trumpian shamelessness. Because one would think that the recipient of such enormous good luck—I mean, what else can we call this outcome?—against the backdrop of egregious levels of government corruption, would force some modesty out of a person even as brazen as Adams. But as the allegations against Adams fully demonstrated, acting in ill-advised ways is simply how he operates.

As my colleague Anna Merlan wrote, the alleged crimes that got him in trouble with the feds in the first place, which ranged from bribery to wire fraud, were grim. But they were also unquestionably comical, carried out with the clowning of a bad slapstick comedy. There was the alleged insistence on putting everything in writing; accepting piles of cash with zero regard for discretion; requiring Turkish Air for travel (the first stop is always Istanbul).

At first blush, the scandal seemed to instantly decimate Adams’ political future. His favorability among New York City residents plummeted and potential jail time was a genuine possibility. But two months after the charges were unsealed, Adams received the ultimate good fortune in PresidentDonald Trump’s victory, kicking off months of ingratiating behavior by Adams. This extended into policy: the selling out of New York City’s long-held status as a sanctuary city and greenlighting Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s return to Rikers. Adams also refused to condemn the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia student who was detained last month over his pro-Palestinian views despite holding a green card.

All the fawning has now landed Adams not just one, but two clear victories: the end of the federal investigation into his alleged corruption, and, perhaps more importantly, protection from the administration should it seek to refile.

In other words, Adams got away with it—handsomely. But in promoting the book of a conspiratorial MAGA head on Wednesday, Adams appeared to signal that he remained willing to go out of his way to boost MAGA’s agenda, even if now technically scot-free.

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New Lawsuit Challenges the Trump Administration’s Devastating Research Cancellations

In 2024, Brittany Charlton achieved what she now calls “one of [her] main career aspirations”: the launch of a research center at Harvard University’s medical school focused on LGBTQ health.

Opening the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence hadbeen a goalfor Charlton, an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, ever since she first stepped onto the Cambridge, Massachusetts campus as a graduate student more than a decade ago. Those aspirations, according to Charlton, required a herculean, years-long campaign to convince the school that such an effort would be worth it.“It took so much advocacy to be able to help the university, and the general public, understand that LGBTQ health and health inequities are a legitimate field of inquiry, that it’s worthwhile, and that it’s fundable,” she told me by phone on Wednesday.

But within the past two months, all that work has been undone. After President Donald Trump’s executive orders seeking to purge diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and transgender people from public life, Charlton was one of the many researchers whose National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants were abruptly canceled. Theorders, which she says affected approximately $6 million worth of her grants, forced her to abandon five projects, including one on how anti-LGBTQ legislation such as “Don’t Say Gay” laws, affect the mental health of young people who identified as LGBTQ,and another on the reproductive health of LGBTQ women. The lost funds have also forced Charlton to close the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence at Harvard, which relied almost entirely on NIH funding—a reality she calls “devastating.”

But Charlton and other researchers are nowfighting back as plaintiffs in a new lawsuit, filed in Massachusetts federal court on Wednesday, alleging that NIH’s sweeping cancellations of billions of dollars worth of research and training grants focused on diversifying science were politically motivated and illegal. The complaint—which names the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as defendants, along with the NIH’snewly sworn-in Director Jay Bhattacharya—allegedthat the cancellations of these grants violate multiple federal laws that regulate agencies’ actions and mandate that the NIH fund research addressing health disparities.

One of those laws isthe Administrative Procedure Act, which says that agencies cannot act arbitrarily or capriciously. The plaintiffs allege the HHS and NIH violated that law by terminating grants with no valid explanation. Indeed, many of the cancellations—which affected hundreds of projects focused on trans people and race and DEI, according to a public database maintained by some researchers—seem to be a product of a fishing expedition aimed at carrying out Trump’s orders to purge the government of DEI and recognition of trans people. Two of Charlton’s grant termination letters from the NIH, for example, state that “this award no longer effectuates agency priorities”—but do not state what the agency’s new priorities actually are. (Kennedy has claimed the HHS will tackle chronic diseases, safer foods and water, and environmental toxins, but staffers have said that the department has already long prioritized those issues—and they don’t know how they’ll continue to with the agency losing nearly 25 percent its workforce, including through Tuesday’s massive purge.)

The termination notices Charlton received appear to say the quiet part out loud about why the grants are actually being pulled. One of them—focused on LGBTQ women’s reproductive health—seems to reflect Trump’s attacks on DEI: “Research programs based primarily on artificial and non-scientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness. Worse, so-called DEI studies are often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics, which harms the health of Americans.” The other termination notice—focused on LGBTQ young people—takes more direct aim at trans people: “Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans. Many such studies ignore, rather than seriously examine, biological realities.”

The complaint also alleges the grant cancellations violate the NIH’s own Grants Policy Statement, which says grants can be pulled “if a recipient has failed to comply with the terms and conditions of the award.” It charges that, in targeting research affecting health disparities affecting minority populations and grants aimed at supporting diversifying the scientific workforce, the NIH also usurped the mandate that Congress gave the NIH decades ago to do exactly that. “To exclude from consideration in human medicine the health outcome disparities between one ethnicity or the other, or one sexual orientation or the other, is to strike at the heart of the scientific enterprise,” said Dr. Peter G. Lurie, president of the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest, who is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

The complaint also contains the accounts of several early-career researchers who lost funding and other research fellowships dedicated to supporting people from underrepresented backgrounds to pursue careers in science—another one-time priority the NIH is now dismantling.

The case is being argued by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Protect Democracy Project, and the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Charlton and the other plaintiffs—including researchers at the University of Michigan, University of New Mexico, and the American Public Health Association, which represents more than 20,000 public health professionals—are asking the court to declare the grant cancellations unconstitutional, forcing the NIH to restore terminated awards, and prevent the agency from canceling. more awards in the future. Spokespeople for HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit from Mother Jones.

Some of the court challenges to Trump’s power trip since returning to office have, indeed, helped stop or reverse some of the most sweeping changes he has tried to enact, such as his attempts to overturn birthright citizenship and fire thousands of probationary federal workers. Charlton is hopeful that this one, too, could also make a difference. “I think we have to trust the courts to uphold the rule of law,” she said. “They’re necessary to safeguard open inquiry and scientific progress.”

But in the meantime, with her LGBTQ Health Center at Harvard shuttering and projects being abandoned, Charlton says she expects LGBTQ people will directly suffer the consequences. The termination of these grants,” she said, “absolutely poses a threat to LGBTQ communities.”

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Trump Is Ramping Up His Lawfare Against Kids at the Border

Last Friday, the Trump administration canceled a contract that funded legal representation for about 26,000 unaccompanied minors who had crossed into the United States. In a memo sent by the Interior Department, dozens of non-profits were told to cease their legal representation work under the contract with the Department of Health and Human Services(HHS), and that they would no longer be receiving the more than $200 million they were relying on to continue providing lawyers to minors for the next year. This move came a little over a month after the administration issued a “stop-work order” on February 18 for these same services before quickly rescinding it amid backlash. It also comes as the administration ramps up its efforts to target unaccompanied youth for deportations.

Gerson, who askedthat his last name be withheld, is one of tens of thousands of minors who had to navigate this complex immigration system. He fled gang violence in El Salvador when he was 16 years old, making the almost month-long journey and arriving at a port of entry in California in 2017.

Gerson was shocked when Border Patrol agents put him in handcuffs: “I remember being a 16-year-old, about to cross the border, the port of entry, and as I made my way through, it seemed like there was something wrong with my papers, and right away I was handcuffed.” He remembers immigration officials initially being suspicious of his age, despite providing evidence. “I was asked if I was part of a gang, I was asked to show them the tattoos, if I had any.” (To this day, he says, he has none.)

“You’ll see massive layoffs, closures of nonprofits, closures of programs… we’re talking a complete systematic collapse.”

He describes cramped conditions in a detention center with people who had also made grueling journeys, and says it was difficult to communicate with immigration officials because he didn’t speak English at the time: “I didn’t even know how to let the officers know that I had a headache or I had [the] flu. I was sleeping right next to a toilet.” After a day in the detention facility, Gerson was moved to a shelter for unaccompanied minors in Southern California.

Shortly after arriving at the shelter, Gerson was part of a group of minors who participated in a “know your rights” presentation put on by that nonprofit legal aid organization. The organization provided him with information about the types of relief he could pursue, including retaining an attorney to handle his case. That basic training is still available to unaccompanied minors, but the direct legal representation Gerson received afterwards is no longer going to be funded by the government—meaning it won’t be available to nearly as many minors.

Gerson describes his time as a teenager in the shelter as extremely stressful: “It was a terrible time. It’s a time [of] a lot of uncertainties.” He says he had a hard time sleeping and began to lose hope, especially after seeing a roommate get transferred to an adult facility after turning 18. After weeks in the shelter, Gerson says, he considered giving up and just accepting deportation—but the same legal support that the president has now gutted for tens of thousands of others helped him keep going.

He says his successful asylum application and subsequent permanent residency would have been far less likely without the support of one of the immigration nonprofits affected by the government’s attack on those services.

Michael Lukens is the executive director of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, one of the nonprofits that was part of the contract cut by the government last Friday. He says that while non-profits will still try their best to support unaccompanied minors with the small amount of funding they get from donations, it won’t be nearly enough to fill in the gap. “You’ll see massive layoffs, closures of nonprofits, closures of programs,” Lukens says, “so we’re talking a complete systematic collapse.”

As reported on Friday by NBC News, many organizations across the country have already been forced to start the process of laying people off. Several filed a lawsuit last week against the Department of Health and Human Services to restore the funding.

In the lawsuit, the organizations argue that the bipartisan William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 mandates that if HHS has “funding they can spend to provide counsel for unaccompanied children, they must spend that funding to provide such counsel.” They also point to the HHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement’s Foundational Rule issued in 2024 that says, “ORR shall fund legal service providers to provide direct immigration legal representation for certain unaccompanied children, subject to ORR’s discretion and available appropriations.”A judge in California granted the non-profits a temporary restraining order on April 1,which should restore the funding for legal representation for unaccompanied minors until at least April 16th—if the government complies—while the case makes its way through the court.

A spokesperson for the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, told City Limits that the Office of Refugee Resettlement “continues to meet the legal obligations” established by the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. When I reached out to HHS to ask about the lawsuit, they told me they do not comment on ongoing litigation.

“Expecting children to face this system alone…strips them of due process and their fundamental human rights.”

Emily Kyle, supervising attorney at the Central American Resource Center of Los Angeles, said in a statement that cutting off legal services for children constitutes “a cruel and unacceptable violation of basic due process that goes against our nation’s core values.” Anna Gallagher, executive director of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, echoed the same sentiments in another statement, calling the cuts “a cruel and unjust decision that puts the lives of vulnerable children at risk,” and adding, “Many of these children have fled violence, trafficking, and persecution, only to face an immigration system that is complex and unforgiving. Expecting children to face this system alone, if they cannot afford private counsel, strips them of due process and their fundamental human rights.”

After a month and a half in the shelter, Gerson moved in with familyand continued fighting his asylum case with the support of the nonprofit organization. About two years later, he was granted asylum and eventually received a green card. He describes the administration’s recent actions against minors—ones going through exactly what he went through in 2017—as heartbreaking. “Targeting children that can’t even understand what’s going on in the outside world, it’s a disgrace…[they are] cutting their wings, cutting their possibilities to get relief.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

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Elon Musk Can’t Take the Heat

Elon Musk has a simple diagnosis of what’s ailing America: It’s being destroyed by empathy. In a long interview with Joe Rogan, in numerous tweets, and possibly even in his sleep, Musk has argued that “empathy” is a “suicidal” trait that is a driving force behind civilizational extinction. It is time, he believes, for “the West” to get tough and make hard choices—to bar its doors to immigrants of a certain type and endure “temporary hardship” so that government can be transformed and “the woke mind virus will die.”

As the de facto head of the Department of Governmental Efficiency, Musk has deployed this brand of tactical callousness to maximal effect. He has boasted about throwing the United States Agency for International Development into a “woodchipper” and stumbled around the stage at CPAC with a chainsaw. He has presided over the dismantling of the administrative state and the harassment and mass-termination of federal workers—all while flaunting his lack of concern for the lives he has upended. Fired government employees, he announced last Thursday, with the laughing/crying emoji that’s become his calling card, will now have to “get a real job.”

Suggesting that George Soros and the founder of LinkedIn should be arrested after an old lady shouted at a car is one of the softest moments in recent American history. This is not the gesture of a man who is impervious to protests. It is the response of an oligarch who is being driven visibly insane by them.

This kind of depravity is a prerequisite for Musk’s new line of work. Dancing on the graves of lifesaving programs for kids is not something you can easily do with a conscience. But there is one set of feelings Musk is uniquely attuned to: his own. On Friday, the same day foreign service officers around the world received notices from a DOGE flunky alerting them that they would soon be out of a job, Musk—sans sunglasses—sat down with Fox News’ Brett Baier to ask for a little sympathy.

“I mean, you have Tim Walz, who is a huge jerk, running on stage with the Tesla stock price, where the stock price has gone in half—and he is overjoyed,” he said. “What an evil thing to do. What a creep, what a jerk. Like, who derives joy from that?”

I want to state this as clearly as I can: Nearly choking up on national TV as you lament your falling stock price is weak shit. And it gets to the core of how Musk operates. In a particularly get-over-yourselves moment in January, Axios described Musk and Trump’s governing style as “masculine maximalism,” embodied by “tough-guy language, macho actions…and often unmoved by emotionalism, empathy or restraint.” But back on Earth, the Tesla boss can be better understood in schoolyard terms. He can dish it but he can’t take it. Far from a projection of strength, Musk’s boastful and threatening public comments show a thin-skinned man who behaves erratically in the face of adversity—a snowflake, to use the preferred nomenclature, who melts down when he begins to feel the heat.

And he is definitely melting down. Just look at some of his other responses to the growing anti-Tesla protests, which have coincided with a sharp decline in vehicle deliveries. On Friday, in the same interview in which he complained about his stock price, Musk promised Baier that the government would attempt to rein in the protests of his car company by “going after” Tesla critics.

“What’s happening it seems to me is they’re being fed propaganda by the far left, and they believe it,” he said. “It’s really unfortunate. The real problem is not—are not the people, it’s not the crazy guy that firebombs the Tesla dealership, it’s the people pushing the propaganda that caused that guy to do it. Those are the real villains here. And we’re gonna go after them. And the president’s made it clear: We’re gonna go after them. The ones providing the money, the ones pushing the lies and propaganda, we’re going after them.”

It’s not really clear what lies are being pushed about Tesla. He does own it, right? But Musk has not responded with the vaunted “masculine maximalism.” He is just sort of waving his arms hysterically, like an emperor beckoning for the guards because his chicken is overdone, while pushing a theory that Democratic mega-donors including Reid Hoffman and George Soros are secretly responsible for funding “the organizations attacking me.” (Hoffman, the more outspoken of the two, has denied funding protestors, and told Musk on Twitter that he would “rather make shit up about me than fix your problems.”) A few days later, after the verified X account “Tesla King” posted a video from a protest in which a woman waved a middle finger at a Cybertruck driver outside a Tesla dealership, Musk shared the footage with a call to action.

“It is time to arrest those funding the attacks,” he wrote, conflating arson at Tesla dealerships with the constitutional right to flip the bird. “Arresting their puppets and paid foot-soldiers won’t stop the violence.”

This is a bit authoritarian, yes, but just as importantly it is pathetic. Suggesting that George Soros and the founder of LinkedIn should be arrested after an old lady shouted at a car is one of the softest moments in recent American history. This is not the gesture of a man who is impervious to protests. It is the response of an oligarch who is being driven visibly insane by them.

For Democrats, Musk’s spiraling is an asset. He is both deeply unpopular and out of control; his response to opposition is to descend deeper into the paranoia that got him there. In Wisconsin, he responded to accusations that he was attempting to buy a state supreme court race by offering seven-figure checks to voters; accusing Soros of planting protestors at his events; and rambling on stage about ending the Federal Reserve. The race, he promised last week, in words that have never before been uttered about a state supreme court race, would “affect the entire destiny of humanity.” Musk made the election a referendum on himself, turnout surged, and the Democrat won in a landslide.

To some extent Musk has always been like this—impetuously lashing out under pressure. He declared that X users who shared the published names of DOGE employees had “committed a crime.” People who publish critical stories find themselves suspended from his platform. He told advertisers who were abandoning X to “go fuck yourself.” He called a British man as “pedo guy” after upstaging Musk during the 2018 Thai cave rescue.

Musk cannot take the heat. He has not just the taste and sensibilities of a boy, but the temperament of one. He throws a fit out when things don’t go his way. He wilts. This is someone who can be beat. In another context you might call this terminal inability to take a punch a “glass jaw.” The term “keyboard warrior” comes to mind. But I can think of another word for something that’s so ostentatious and in-your-face except for when it needs to be—a symbol of decadence and insecurity and deregulation that boasts bulletproof toughness, but which breaks into pieces at the first sign of stress.

Elon’s not unstoppable, Wisconsin voters showed on Tuesday. When the rubber hits the road, he’s nothing but a Cybertruck.

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She Launched “The Daily Show.” Now She’s Fighting Red State Abortion Bans.

For abortion rights advocate Lizz Winstead, her work has never felt more urgent. But her path to advocacy was a curvy one. She started out as a comedian, first as a stand-up and eventually as the co-creator of The Daily Show, which redefined television by deftly combining comedy and politics.

“I kept getting increasingly unnerved and also frustrated that I was just shelling people with information, even though it was funny, and not giving them a way to fight back,” Winstead says.

Today, Winstead produces the Feminist Buzzkills podcast and is founder of Abortion Access Front. Again, she’s weaving together politics and comedy to educate people about abortion laws and provide resources on independent abortion providers. But this time, she’s also giving them the tools to fight.

“I wanted to combine the effectiveness of using humor to expose hypocrisy and bad actors and then combine that with a call to action,” Winstead says.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app.

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Why Some Doctors Are Pushing to End Routine Drug Testing During Childbirth

The request from child welfare authorities seemed harmless enough: Order a newborn drug test. Dr. Sharon Ostfeld-Johns and her hospital colleagues had done it countless times before.

This time, however, the request gave the doctor pause. A patient at Yale New Haven Health in Connecticut, the largest health system in the state, had said that she’d used marijuana to help her eat and sleep during her pregnancy. The hospital had reported her to child welfare authorities. Now, an investigator wanted Ostfeld-Johns to drug test the newborn.

Ostfeld-Johns knew there was no medical reason to test the baby, who was healthy. A drug test would make no difference to the infant’s medical care. Nor did she have concerns that the mother, who had other children at home, was a neglectful parent. The doctor did worry, however, that the drug test could cause other problems for the family. For example, the mother was Black and on Medicaid — race and income bias could influence the investigator’s decision on whether to put the children into foster care.

“Why did I ever order these tests?” Ostfeld-Johns found herself wondering, about past cases. She thought about her own son, then in kindergarten, and how she would feel if she faced an investigation over a positive test. Eventually, she would review her own prenatal records and learn that she had been tested for drugs without her knowledge or consent. “You try to imagine what it would be like if it was you,” she said. “The hurt that we do to people is overwhelming.”

Ostfeld-Johns had encountered this scenario many times before, but this time, she refused the drug test request. Then she began a research process that, in 2022, led to an overhaul of the Yale New Haven Health network’s approach to drug testing newborns. Now, doctors are directed to test only if doing so will inform medical care — a rare occurrence, it turns out. The hospital also created criteria for testing pregnant patients.

“The hurt that we do to people is overwhelming.”

Many doctors and nurses across the country have long assumed that drug testing is both a medical and legal necessity in their care of pregnant patients and newborns — even though most state laws do not require it. Yet drug testing during labor is common in America, with a positive test often triggering a report to child welfare authorities. Ostfeld-Johns and Yale New Haven are among a small but increasing number of doctors and institutions across the country that have started questioning those drug-testing policies. This cadre of doctors is pushing hospitals to become less reliant on tests and to focus instead on communicating directly with patients to assess any risks to babies.

No one seems to be tracking just how many hospitals have revised their testing policies, but over the past three years, changes have come to networks across the country, from California to Colorado to Massachusetts. The institutions vary, from large nonprofit networks and teaching facilities to private, for-profit hospitals.

While doctors pushing for reform argue that legislation is still needed to require hospitals to reduce testing, individual hospital efforts seem to be spreading. In Colorado, doctors worked with a child abuse prevention nonprofit to distribute a voluntary new policy as guidance, prompting several hospitals to change their practices. An educational effort, “Doing Right by Birth,” convened virtual groups of health care professionals across the country in 2023, to teach them their requirements under the law. Some participants were surprised to learn that most state laws do not actually require hospitals to drug test pregnant patients or newborns, and are now questioning the policies of their institutions, suggesting more reforms may come.

At Yale, Ostfeld-Johns said she initially faced resistance to the policy change. Some of her colleagues feared that by ending near-automatic testing, “we were ultimately going to hurt babies,” she said. “We were hurting them by preventing identification of substance exposure that happened during pregnancy.” But Ostfeld-Johns said they found they didn’t need the drug tests to identify babies who might, for example, develop symptoms of opioid withdrawal that would require special care.

At the New Haven hospital, the policy change appears to have curbed unnecessary child welfare reports without harming babies. After the policy went into effect, child welfare referrals from the newborn nursery dropped almost 50%, according to preliminary data provided by Ostfeld-Johns. At the same time, the hospital did not see an uptick in babies coming back in need of new treatment for drug withdrawal, she said. “No babies came in with uncontrolled withdrawal symptoms,” she said. “No safety events were identified.”

The New Haven data is consistent with the anecdotal experiences of providers at other institutions. “I don’t think we’re missing babies” who have been exposed to substances, said Dr. Mark Vining, the director of the newborn nursery at UMass Memorial Medical Center near Boston. The hospital did away with automatic testing of newborns in 2024. At the same time, Vining said, it has reported fewer families to child welfare authorities due to positive tests caused by hospital-administered medications, like morphine. A newborn drug test “rarely adds any information that you didn’t already know,” he said.

The new policies are beginning to upend an approach that has existed in the United States for decades.

Hospitals first began routinely drug testing mothers in labor during the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic. The practice expanded during the opioid epidemic, following the passage of a federal law in 2003 and another in 2016, both of which require hospitals to notify child welfare agencies anytime a baby is born “affected by” substances. Federal law and laws in most states do not require hospitals to drug test new parents or their babies, but hospitals frequently do so anyway — often out of concern that if they don’t, they’ll miss babies who are at risk.

Widespread drug testing has caused a variety of harms. A previous investigation by The Marshall Project found that urine tests, the type used by most hospitals, are easy to misinterpret and have false positive rates as high as 50%. Parents have been reported to child welfare authorities over false positives caused by things ranging from poppy seeds to blood pressure medication. Substances prescribed to patients during a hospital stay, such as the fentanyl in an epidural, can show up on maternal drug tests and also pass quickly from mother to baby, causing infants to test positive for drugs.

Poppy seeds, used in bagels, salads and other foods, can yield positive results for opiates in urine tests.Photo illustration by Andria Lo for The Marshall Project

Race and class bias can also influence drug testing, with multiple studies finding that low-income, Black, Latina and indigenous women are most likely to be tested. Yale New Haven Hospital found that, before the drug testing policy change, Black babies in its care were twice as likely as White babies to be tested at birth. Studies elsewhere have found that racial disparities extend to child welfare cases and removals as well, with Black, Latino and indigenous babies being less likely to be reunited with their parents once removed.

In many hospitals, the tests are not typically used to make medical decisions. Instead, tests have become a cheap, fast way to assess whether a parent might be a danger to their child.

“We should be doing medical tests for medical reasons, not criminal, punitive, prosecutorial reasons,” said Dr. Christine Gold, a pediatrician who works at the University of Colorado Hospital system near Denver. Even for that purpose, Gold noted, drug tests fall short. “It is a really poor-quality test,” she said. It cannot tell doctors how often someone used a substance during pregnancy, if a patient has an addiction or if the drug use impacted their ability to parent. “Toxicology tests are not parenting tests,” Gold said.

“We should be doing medical tests for medical reasons, not criminal, punitive, prosecutorial reasons.”

In 2020, Colorado lawmakers removed positive drug tests at birth from the list of reasons for hospitals to automatically report a family to child welfare authorities. But many hospitals continued to test pregnant patients and newborns, prompting Gold to lead the effort to release guidance in 2023 that encourages hospitals in the state to test only when medically necessary. Now the entire University of Colorado Health system is reforming its policy on testing pregnant patients, and others in the state are reportedly considering changes.

Instead of automatic drug tests, the revised policies use screening questionnaires, which collect certain information from patients, such as their family’s history of drug use, and the patient’s own history and frequency of use. Researchers and leading medical groups say these questionnaires are effective at identifying someone with an addiction or at risk of developing one, which can help doctors steer parents into treatment, or determine whether a baby might need extra medical care. Some hospitals continue to drug test patients under certain circumstances. For example, at UMass Memorial, pregnant patients with diagnosed substance use disorders and new patients without any prenatal care are still drug tested.

The growing movement to limit drug testing is a source of optimism for many doctors. But its success hinges in part on doctors building more meaningful relationships with their patients, so the people they treat feel inclined to confide about substance use and ultimately agree to enter treatment. “That is really the goal here,” said Dr. Katherine Campbell, chief of obstetrics at Yale New Haven Hospital. “We’re trying to reduce substance use disorder in reproductive-age people.”

That may include asking a patient for informed consent to submit to a drug test, and medical personnel being transparent about both the purpose of the test and its potential legal consequences.

But these types of conversations can be challenging. They also require longer appointments, something many medical institutions are unable or unwilling to provide. “The system is set up to make it difficult for us to really develop a knowing and trusted relationship with a family,” said Dr. Lauren Oshman, a family physician at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor.

By comparison, urine tests are fast and often involve little interaction with patients.

“It takes longer to talk to someone and really understand, than it does to place an order and have the person give a urine sample,” Campbell said.

The new policies also don’t solve other problems. After Oshman and colleagues discovered that clinicians at Michigan Medicine ordered drug tests for Black newborns more often than for White newborns, the hospital network changed its policy in 2023 to require testing of babies only in certain circumstances. But early data indicates the new policy had no impact on the racial disparities in testing and reporting.

One reason, in Oshman’s view, is that Michigan law requires the reporting of a patient whom a provider “knows or suspects” has exposed their newborn to “any amount” of a controlled substance, whether legal or illegal. That includes marijuana, which is legal in Michigan. When the health network team dug into the data, it found that for almost half of all low-risk patients whose babies tested positive, the only drug detected was marijuana, and the patients were most likely to be Black. Most marijuana-only cases do not result in findings of abuse or neglect by child welfare authorities, according to the team’s research. But hospitals are still required to report these patients, Oshman said.

“And that won’t change until the state law changes,” she added.

Dr. Lauren Oshman, a family physician and associate professor in the University of Michigan Department of Family Medicine.Sylvia Jarrus for The Marshall Project

Hospitals in most other states face similar challenges. A review by The Marshall Project found that at least 27 states explicitly require hospitals to alert child welfare agencies after a positive screen or potential exposure — though not a single state requires confirmation testing before a report.

Many hospitals that have changed their policies are in states that do not require reporting positive tests to child welfare authorities. In both Colorado and Connecticut, for example, hospitals are required to report a parent only if providers have identified other safety concerns. In Connecticut, providers fill out an anonymized form that allows the state to collect data on substance-exposed newborns without requiring a child welfare report.

But even in states that don’t require reporting positive tests, drug testing remains ubiquitous. For example, the New York Department of Health advised hospitals in 2021 to test labor-and-delivery patients only when “medically indicated” and only with their consent. But women continue to report nonconsensual drug testing at hospitals across the state, which has led to them being reported to child welfare authorities over false positive and erroneous results, The Marshall Project has found.

These challenges show that reducing the consequences of drug testing may require a multipronged approach, from legislative reforms to policy revisions to enforcement, experts say.

“We’re just at the beginning,” Oshman said. “This is the start of creating a system that provides that trustworthy care.”

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook.

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Elon Musk Tried to Buy Wisconsin’s Supreme Court. He Lost.

“Musk has made this a referendum on the idea of an American oligarchy,” Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler told me recently, as he warned about the potential fallout from the $25 million that the world’s wealthiest person spent trying to flip a state Supreme Court seat.

In the first major statewide election since Donald Trump’s 2024victory, oligarchy lost and democracy won. Progressive candidate Susan Crawford handily defeated Musk-backed candidate Brad Schimel to preserve the liberal majority on the Wisconsin high court through at least 2028.

“Today Wisconsinites fended off an unprecedented attack on our democracy, our fair elections and our Supreme Court, and Wisconsin stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price,” Crawford said at her victory party Tuesday night. “Our courts are not for sale.”

It’s a seismic event both inside and outside Wisconsin. On a state level, the court could soon decide the fate of an 1849 abortion ban, a law restricting collective bargaining for public sector unions, and Wisconsin’s gerrymandered congressional maps—the latter of whichcould help determine which party controls the US House in 2027.

But, because of Musk, the race was much bigger than just a judicial election in Wisconsin. Crawford’s victory provides a blueprint for how Democrats and progressives can run against Musk’s plan for oligarchy all across the country—and win.

“The world’s richest man tried to buy Wisconsin’s democracy in order to corrupt Wisconsin’s judiciary, but Wisconsinites demonstrated that our state is not for sale,” Wikler said in a statement Tuesday night. “In a moment of national darkness, Wisconsin voters lit a candle. Let the lesson of Wisconsin’s election ring out across the country: hope is not lost, democracy can yet survive, and the voice of the American people will not be silenced.”

Musk indeed did everything he could to buy the race, investing more money through his political groups than any donor to a judicial race in US history. He paid people $100 to sign a petition against “activist judges” and gave outthree $1 million checks to voters, which drew an unsuccessful legal challenge from Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul.

But, unlike in November, Democrats had an effective plan to counter it.

Wisconsin Democrats launched the People v. Musk campaign in early March, with Wikler calling the race “the first referendum on Musk-ism.”

Crawford, a circuit court judge in Madison, made Musk a central part of her messaging. “I need to talk for just a minute or two about my opponent,” she told a crowd of supporters when I saw her campaign in Kenosha. “Elon Musk.”

Wisconsinites may have been repelled by the idea of a billionaire swooping in to purchase an election. “It’s everything that Wisconsin is not,” Democratic State Rep. Robyn Vining told me. “The Wisconsin work ethic is a big deal. You work hard for what you have, and to have the richest man in the world come in and just to buy a seat for his own advantage, it’s not who we are. As a Wisconsinite, that’s infuriating.”

The race became an outlet for frustrated Democrats to turn their anger—at losing to Trump again, at the rudderless leadership of the national Democratic Party, at Musk’s massive campaign expenditures—into organizing. As Katie Whitecotton, a Democratic volunteer who hosted a get-out-the-vote canvass in suburban Milwaukee put it, “Our sorrow has turned into rage and into action.”

On the Friday before Election Day, the same day Musk announced he’d be travel to Wisconsin to hand out two million-dollar checks, I met up with Wikler at the local Democratic Party headquarters in Kenosha. There were still posters up for Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Tim Walz, a reminder that the November hangover had not yet fully worn off.

But Democrats were eager to flush the memories of November and fight back against the naked concentration of wealth and power that Musk represented.

“We have a gift and I know that’s weird to say because this is a terrifying time in our country,” Wikler said to a room of Crawford supporters. “Here in Wisconsin, by supporting Susan Crawford, we have a chance to fight back in this moment and say we’ve had enough of these attacks.”

After Harris lost it by 6 points, Crawford carried Kenosha County by about6 points on Tuesday.

It’s particularly noteworthy that Musk’s effort to buy Wisconsin’s highest court backfired at the very moment that Musk and Trump are threatening to impeach federal judges who rule against the most extreme and unconstitutional parts of the Trump agenda. Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Dallet emphasized that point when she campaigned in suburban Milwaukee for Crawford.

“We realize now, with everything going on, how important our courts are,” Dallet said. “We are the backstop on democracy.”

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The JFK Assassination Files Didn’t Have a Smoking Gun, But a Very Weird Congressional Hearing Tried to Create One

On Tuesday, MAGA Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna presided over a colorful hearing devoted to one specific goal: speedrunning a revival of 61 years of conspiracy theories about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Jr.

In that goal, Luna, the chairwoman of the brand-new Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, and her witnesses—a bouquet of JFK researchers, including famed director Oliver Stone—succeeded admirably. They excoriated the Warren Commission, whose investigation into Kennedy’s death ended in 1964; denigrated what JFK skeptics call the “magic bullet” from Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle, which they say could not possibly have killed Kennedy; and promoted theories that the CIA or perhaps the Mob were involved in Kennedy’s murder.

One member referenced Trump’s attempted assassins to ask if “you guys on the panel believe we’re seeing history repeat.”

All this is certainly good fun, and at times, the hearing even briefly raised important questions about government transparency regarding the investigation into Kennedy’s death. Inevitably, though, Tuesday’s hearing couldn’t prove that the CIA killed Kennedy or that Oswald didn’t act alone. At times, it was more about Donald Trump than Kennedy, with Republican members of Congress obliquely trying to prove that the Deep State they suggest could have either killed Kennedy or else covered up the true causes of his death is now coming for Trump too. That Deep State, declared Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, at one point, “is here today. They are right before our eyes.”

The JFK assassination remains the ur-conspiracy theory in American life, the event about which most Americans have at least some suspicions: recent polls show the majority of Americans don’t believe Oswald acted alone. That’s not new: conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s death began the instant the president was shot, and have continued right up until the present day.

Upon returning to office, Trump took up the politically popular task of declassifying what he claimed were new JFK files, along with others related to the crimes of billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. While the Epstein release was a poorly-conceived stunt that flopped immediately, containing little except documents that have already been public for years, the JFK release contained some genuinely fascinating archival material. It showed the extent of the CIA’s historic activities in other countries and at home—including what one CIA employee wrote were ways that the agency had “exceeded its mandate”—and provided a new window into U.S. spycraft in general. Among other things, the documents help further reveal the jawdropping extent of joint CIA-FBI collaborations inside the United States, including, as one released file described, “breaking and entering and the removal of documents” from the French embassy.

For Oliver Stone, however, Trump’s release wasn’t enough. The 78-year-old filmmaker, one of the world’s more famous JFK conspiracy theorists, said he believed Congress should reopen their investigation into Kennedy’s death, to force the CIA to reveal what else they may know about it.

“Nothing of importance has been revealed by the CIA in all these years,” Stone testified, “although we know from other records that there are illegal, criminal activities in every facet of our foreign policy in practically every country on earth.”

We “do not know and are not allowed to know anything about the CIA’s true history of the United States,” he added.

In her opening statement, Rep. Luna claimed that the panel was originally set to contain more witnesses. “We had more but for various reasons those individuals did not want to come forward,” she said. The handling of the JFK assassination contributed to the “deep distrust” the American people have towards their government, she added.

Congresswoman Mace didn’t hesitate to make sure the event was viewed through a partisan lens, declaring, “I’m grateful to President Trump for keeping good on his promise of transparency. This is a man who also took a bullet for our country.” It was imperative, she said, to get the truth “out of whatever three letter agency is hiding information.” She also tied a purported Kennedy coverup to modern-day issues closer to her heart, adding, “We saw 51 intelligence leaders sign a letter saying the Hunter Biden laptop was fake… We saw a presidential candidate, Donald Trump, spied on by the political opposition. We saw Biden’s health—the previous administration lied to the American people about the president’s health… We saw the origins of Covid covered up.” The Deep State was, she added, still covering up “the Epstein list, refusing to disclose “who is on that list.” (Journalists who have covered Epstein for years do not believe a concrete “list” of his accomplices exists.)

“Republicans are relitigating whether the CIA agents lied 60 years ago.”

The closest anyone got to attributing blame in Kennedy’s death was Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter who’s written about Kennedy for years. In response to questions from the Congress members, Morley said that the “intellectual author” of JFK’s death was “probably” the CIA and the Pentagon.

Other Republican members wanted to say wild stuff about the CIA, some of it pulled up from the deepest dregs of JFK history. In his remarks, Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona implied that CIA contact Gary Underhill was murdered after telling someone that he believed a “clique” within the CIA was responsible for Kennedy’s death. (Underhill is believed to have died by suicide, although that, like much else related to JFK’s death, is disputed.)

“Do any of you guys on the panel believe we’re seeing history repeat itself” Crane asked, referencing assassination attempts targeting Donald Trump and “how little we know” about the attempted assassins

“I would see similarities here,” Oliver Stone responded.

Democratic members used the hearing to make their own political points. Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois pointed out that JFK established USAID, now in the process of a drawn-out death at DOGE and Donald Trump’s hands, and pointedly asked the panelists how Kennedy would have felt about that. Rep. Summer Lee of Pennsylvania noted how the rushed release had exposed personal information, including Social Security numbers, of people mentioned in the files. “The release didn’t really give us a smoking gun,” she said, “but it did produce plenty of collateral damage.” Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas said that while “Republicans are relitigating whether the CIA agents lied 60 years ago,” they aren’t as eager to discuss modern-day security scandals like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth texting about bombing Yemen in a group chat that mistakenly included the Atlantic‘s editor in chief.

The youngest House Republican, Brandon Gill of Texas, asked the panelists whether the CIA was “in compliance” with Trump’s demand to release all JFK documents. Morley said no, adding that he believes the CIA still has documents “in the hundreds” that have yet to be disclosed.

That would leave plenty more to sift through. While the story of what happened that day in Dallas may never be settled to the unanimous satisfaction of the American people, Tuesday’s odd little hearing proved that JFK’s death can provide lots to argue about in various politically profitable ways for years to come.

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Without USAID, Myanmar Is Struggling to Recover From Its Massive Earthquake

Chris Milligan arrived in Myanmar in 2012 with a mandate: Help repair diplomatic relations with the southeast Asian country by reopening its United States Agency for International Development (USAID) mission.

By that point, Milligan had worked for the USAID for more than two decades—a tenure that included working on reconstruction in Baghdad following the Iraq War and coordinating the recovery response to Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake. His Myanmar assignment posed a similarly significant challenge: After decades spent under brutal military rule, the country was in the midst of trying to transition to democracy.

Reopening the USAID mission in Myanmar, at the American embassy in the city of Yangon, was meant to facilitate that process by helping “reestablish [Myanmar’s] capacity to feed its people and to care for its sick, and educate its children, and build its democratic institutions,” former President Barack Obama said during his 2012 visit to the country—the first by a US president.

According to Milligan, the efforts the mission ultimately pursued in Myanmar—such as providing humanitarian assistance, working with local groups to facilitate peace talks, supporting farmers, and partnering with local health organizations to combat diseases—“were really all designed to strengthen the democratic and economic reforms that were ongoing in the country.”

“By now, we would have a search and rescue team of hundreds of people on the ground in Myanmar, digging people out of rubble. Now all we’re told is, ‘we may be able to send three people there.’”

Fast forward to now, and that progress has been decimated, with USAID missions shuttered around the world after the Trump administration reportedly fired all but 15 legally required positions of the agency’s global staff, throwing it into chaos.

In Myanmar—where a civil war has been raging since 2021, when the country plungedback into military rule—the significance of the cuts to USAID is becoming devastatingly clear, as the country reels from the 7.7-magnitude earthquake that hit Friday, killing at least 2,700 people and leaving more than 3,900 injured, according to Myanmar officials. (The US Geological Survey estimates fatalities are actually north of 10,000, and that the economic losses could exceed the country’s GDP.) There are no US officials currently on the ground, and the New York Times reports that a three-person USAID team is not expected to arrive until Wednesday, citing a source with knowledge of the deployment efforts. Even before the earthquake, there were nearly 20 million people in the country in need of humanitarian assistance, a UN official has said.

People walk through the rubble of a collapsed building in the capital city of Naypyitaw on Tuesday.AP

On Sunday, the US Embassy in Myanmar announced that the American government would provide up to$2 million towards recovery efforts—an amount that Milligan says is paltry compared to prior support for similar natural disasters**,** like the more than $2 billion USAID committed to recovery efforts in the decade after the 2010 quake in Haiti. On Monday, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce told reporters at a press briefing she rejected the notion that USAID cuts were impacting the earthquake response, claiming, “people are on the ground,” and then confusingly adding, “I would reject the premise that the sign of success is that we are physically there.” The State Department did not respond to questions from Mother Jones for this story.

I spoke with Milligan, who retired from USAID in 2021, via Zoom on Tuesday about the inadequacy of the US response to the earthquake recovery and its impacts on citizens of Myanmar; how the absence of American forces on the ground could give China and Russia a geopolitical edge; and how the recovery effort would be different if USAID were still intact.

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

The State Department claims the cuts to USAID have not impacted their ability to assist with recovery efforts on the ground in Myanmar. Is this plausible?

When you dismantle an entire bureau of thousands of people who provide humanitarian assistance, no, it’s not plausible that there’s no impact on the US government’s authority to provide humanitarian assistance. And what we’re seeing is that impact.

At this stage normally, we would have a disaster assistance response team (DART) on the ground. The initial wave of experts would be on the ground within hours, and then the DART would then grow. So, for example, following the 2023 earthquake in Turkey, we had a DART of 200 people on the ground; 160 of them were search and rescue individuals.

“We have the capacity, we have the ability, and we have the assets to save lives, and the choice has been not to use it, and people are dying.”

By now, we would have a search and rescue team of hundreds of people on the ground in Myanmar, digging people out of rubble. Now all we’re told is, ‘we may be able to send three people there.’

USAID still maintains humanitarian assistance advisors, who have a specialty in the overall establishment of humanitarian assistance. But the provision of humanitarian assistance requires highly developed technical skills: You need someone who knows all about potable water and child protection; you need security; you need shelter experts; you need communication experts; you need food security experts. That’s why the DART is full of these experts who have careers in delivering this kind of assistance.

So to say that’s been replaced by three people and $2 million is ludicrous. Meanwhile, China and Russia and others have scrambled with larger teams. They’re actually providing the support that’s required, but it’s not filling the gap of what we would do with a team of 200 people on the ground.

Indian and Myanmar rescuers carry a dead body at U Hla Thein Buddhist monastery, which collapsed in Friday’s earthquake in Mandalay.AP

Help contextualize the $2 million American officials said they will provide to Myanmar for recovery—is it adequate, and how does it compare to how the US previously responded to natural disasters like this, in Myanmar or elsewhere?

This is not adequate. Generally, the US government makes a small pledge, and then builds upon the pledge. So hopefully, the $2 million is seed money, and then there’ll be more funding forthcoming.

“The world is wondering why the country with the most developed expertise, that has the capacity, that has the resources, isn’t stepping up and helping.”

The scale of assistance can vary. On one hand, the response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010—in which we scrambled and provided enormous assistance to the 1.4 million people who were displaced and who needed food and shelter and help—was about a billion dollars within six months. The support we provided following the 2008 Cyclone Nargis—Myanmar’s worst natural disaster in history, which killed more than 80,000 people—was $196 million over the following four years.

So $2 million is not going to have much of an impact at all, and it fails by comparison, because we know that China is already at $14 million. The world is wondering why the country with the most developed expertise, that has the capacity, that has the resources, isn’t stepping up and helping at this time.

I know you worked on the earthquake response in Haiti for USAID. What are the challenges that a place like Haiti, or Myanmar, have in responding to an earthquake, and what role did foreign assistance from USAID typically play in rebuilding?

Although no two disasters are the same, they do follow similar processes. What you want to do initially is save lives. You want to get people out of rubble, you want to provide emergency shelter, water, food, health care. Secondly, you want to avoid a second rate of death that comes from the spread of diseases, cholera, lack of food. You want to avoid conflict over scarce resources. So there is a rhythm to a response: immediate life saving, relief, recovery, and then finally, back to development. It’s a continuum shared between Haiti or Myanmar, even though the context is always different.

Fairfax County Urban Search and Rescue team personnel deployed by USAID loaded their bags bound for Haiti in Sterling, Virginia, in January 2010.Jacquelyn Martin/AP

In Myanmar, you have no central government, really. You have a brutal civil war. It’s more difficult for a national level response. Not only were transportation networks destroyed by the earthquake, they’ve been destroyed by the civil war, and you can’t freely move goods across the country because different territories and land are held by different factions.

It’s very difficult to mobilize international support that’s needed to rebuild and recover because of the lack of a legitimate government to work with.

I wanted to ask you about China and Russia, given reports that they are among the countries that have sent teams of people to Myanmar to help rescue people from the rubble and assist with on-the-ground recovery. What impacts could their assistance have on building their soft power in the region and undermining US interests?

The United States government provides humanitarian assistance based upon need, not on politics. However, there are enormous dividends to doing so. First of all, it showcases American values of generosity and compassion. It links America directly to communities overseas. It creates enormous goodwill. It increases our diplomatic power as well.

China already is the major trading power for 120 countries around the world. It’s one of the largest creditor nations in the world. So it has stronger and deeper economic ties to most countries in the world than the United States does. By getting rid of the economic work that USAID does, we’re strengthening China’s economic ties with the world, and by walking away from the work that we do, we’re creating a political vacuum that China is filling.

Members of China’s national rescue team gathered in Beijing before departing for Myanmar on Saturday.Cai Yang/Xinhua/ZUMA

China needs a world that looks like China. That’s what countries do: they work in their own national interest. The work that we do to build stable, safe, prosperous democracy overseas has all stopped. The support we provide to human rights actors has stopped. The support we provide for free press, free information, has stopped. China will take advantage of this to conform the world for its own benefit at our cost.

The location of the USAID mission is in Yangon, which is the southern part of the country, not in proximity to the earthquake. Certainly they felt the shocks, but the destruction was in the second largest city further north, Mandalay, and then more disruption in the capital Naypyidaw. I’ve been in touch to share my concerns with people there. Very few of them have been able to travel to the earthquake zone. The American staff have all received their termination letters, and the administration has notified Congress that it will be terminating all the local hires as well.

“We are going to turn our backs on those who serve the US government and also serve their own country by trying to bring reforms to it.”

These local hires have spent decades, some of them, working for USAID and the US government, and they’re just going to be let go and dropped—and they will be in a risky situation, because the military government knows who they are and what they’ve been doing. We are going to turn our backs on those who serve the United States government and also serve their own country by trying to bring reforms to it.

How do you think the US response would differ if USAID was still intact? How would things look different on the ground?

If USAID were still intact, we would have a large disaster assistance response team on the ground. We would have mobilized urban search and rescue teams from Los Angeles County and Fairfax County, Virginia; they would be there with the sniffer dogs and the equipment necessary to pull people out of the rubble. We would have experts—in nutrition, food, water, shelter, protection—on the ground; they would be working with the other donors to find out where the needs are, where are the gaps, and how the United States government can best help. We would be supporting the international coordination effort, which would be led by the UN but with our support. And so what you would have is a more robust international effort, and you’d ultimately be saving more lives.

We have the capacity, we have the ability, and we have the assets to save lives, and the choice has been not to use it, and people are dying.

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RFK Jr.’s HHS Just Dismantled a Center Focused on Efficiency

On Tuesday, in a series of emails sent at 5 a.m. Eastern Time, all employees—around 20—of the federal Administration for Community Living’s (ACL) Center for Policy and Evaluation were laid off. This follows the news last week that ACL, a subsidiary of the Department of Health and Human Services responsible for key issues around disability and aging, would essentially be shut down as part of a massive restructuring and firing campaign led by HHS head Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which is expected to involve some 10,000 layoffs overall. Although the Kennedy plan claims that at least some of the Administration for Community Living’s responsibilities will be transferred to other Health and Human Services agencies, the dismantling of units like the Center for Policy and Evaluation suggests that many of ACL’s functions will be lost—or at least severely diminished.

The Center for Policy and Evaluation, according to ACL’s website, analyzes services and evaluates programs that are “designed to ensure older Americans and persons with disabilities are able to fully participate and contribute in an inclusive community life,” including through collaboration with other HHS agencies like the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Vicki Gottlich, the head of the Center for Policy and Evaluation until her retirement in June 2024, believes that HHS’ move makes no sense “if you’re interested in government efficiency.”

“I fear this purge will drain the department of crucial disability subject matter expertise and humanity just when we need it most.”

The center “collects the data on how Older Americans Act money is spent and how many people are served,” Gottlich told me. “It helps states and grantees understand how to run their programs and helps ACL project staff with compliance. In other words, CPE helps make sure federal dollars are well spent.”

Given that the Kennedy-run HHS’ plans for reorganizing “vital” parts (and it’s unclear what “vital” means) of ACL are incredibly vague, it’s still unknown which agency, if any, will take up those responsibilities.

A CPE staffer who received a “Reduction in Staff” notice this morning told me, “I fear this April 1 purge will drain the department of crucial disability subject matter expertise and humanity just when we need it most,” and that “the loss of subject matter expertise may threaten the Department’s ability to meet its statutory and regulatory obligations.”

As I reported last week, ACL also saves federal government funds by supporting programs that help disabled and aging adults remain in their communities, a less costly approach than institutionalization.

While the HHS cuts, and the Trump administration’s wider slashing of federal agencies and services, are nominally about saving money, Jacobs doesn’t believe that eliminating the Administration for Community Living—which helps keep people out of nursing homes—will do so. “Community living costs our taxpayers a third of what it costs for people to live in institutional settings,” [former ACL disability commissioner Jill] Jacobs said. “There are very economically sound reasons for ACL to continue to exist.”

The Department of Health and Human Services has not responded to a request for comment.

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Elon Musk Is Running the Most Brazen Scheme to Buy an Election in Modern US History

On March 17, Elon Musk appeared on Sen. Ted Cruz’s podcast and falsely alleged that Democrats were giving undocumented immigrants fraudulent access to programs like Social Security and Medicare to lure them to the US.

“By using entitlement fraud the Democrats have been able to attract and retain vast numbers of illegal immigrants,” Musk claimed.

“And buy voters,” Cruz added.

“And buy voters, exactly,” Musk said. “They basically bring in 10, 20 million people who are beholden to the Democrats for government handouts and who will vote overwhelmingly Democrat as seen in California.”

“It’s an election strategy,” Cruz said. “It’s power.”

When Musk was heckled during the rally, he blamed it on “Soros operatives,” without any acknowledgment that he was the only billionaire quite literally handing out million dollar checks in the race.

Republicans have been alleging for years that Democrats have been buying elections, usually with the help of liberal billionaires like George Soros. Indeed, election deniers, including Musk, widely promoted a conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was “bought by Mark Zuckerberg” because an organization he funded directed election grants to blue areas to juice Democratic turnout. (In reality, it gave grants to both red and blue areas for routine election administration activities to help offset the Covid-19 pandemic.)

These claims are particularly ironic in light of how Musk has engaged in the most openly brazen scheme to buy an election in modern American history, with groups linked to him spending more than $20 million and aggressively pushing the boundaries of legality to flip the Wisconsin Supreme Court in an election on Tuesday that will decide the court’s ideological majority.

It’s not just how much Musk and his groups have spent—more than any donor to a judicial election in US history—but how he has spent this money that makes Musk’s intervention in Wisconsin so alarming.

In addition to funding two dark money political groups that ran TV ads against liberal Judge Susan Crawford and sought to get out the vote for conservative candidate Brad Schimel, Musk resurrected a controversial scheme from 2024, paying voters $100 for signing a petition from his America PAC opposing “activist judges.” He then awarded Scott Ainsworth, a mechanical engineer from Green Bay, $1 million for signing the petition.

On the Friday before the election, he dramatically escalated this sketchy tactic, saying he would travel to Wisconsin to “personally hand over two checks for a million dollars each in appreciation for you taking the time to vote.” Unlike paying a Wisconsin resident to sign a petition, these million-dollar checks were contingent on someone actually voting. Legal experts quickly pointed out that Musk’s pledge violated the state constitution, which prohibits offering “anything of value…in order to induce any elector to…vote or refrain from voting.”

Musk backtracked, saying the money would only go to people who signed his PAC’s petition, holding a rally in Green Bay on Sunday where he hand-delivered two $1 million checks. The Wisconsin attorney general sued to stop him, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to intervene before the event.

The recipients were allegedly chosen at random, but the winners aroused suspicion on closer inspection. One check went to Nicholas Jacobs, the chair of the state College Republicans. Another went to Ekaterina Diestler, a graphic designer at a packaging company in the Green Bay area that is owned by a Republican donor who has given tens of thousands of dollars to the Trump campaign and other GOP candidates, including $7,500 to Schimel.

Diestler filmed a video for Musk’s America PAC linking her payment to voting—the very thing that is illegal under Wisconsin law. “I did exactly what Elon Musk told everyone to do: sign the petition, refer friends and family, vote, and now I have a million dollars,” she says. (Musk’s PAC has since deleted the post.)

When Musk was heckled at one point during the rally, he blamed it on “Soros operatives,” without any acknowledgment that he was the only billionaire quite literally handing out million dollar checks in the race.

Undeterred by legal challenges, Musk unveiled a new scheme on Sunday to recruit “block captains” for Schimel, paying people $20 a pop to “hold a picture” of Schimel with a thumps up, with a bonus $20 for those who posts pictures of themselves on social media with a polling site in the background (Wisconsin law forbids electioneering within 100 feet of a polling place).

“You could make over $1000 in one day just by getting out the vote in Wisconsin!” Musk wrote in one post on X. “Easiest money you ever made!” he said in another.

The scale of Musk’s spending and the scope of his aggressive pay-to-play tactics has dramatically raised the stakes of Tuesday’s election. “Musk has made this a referendum on the idea of an American oligarchy,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler told me when I visited the state last week.

“Voters casting a ballot for Susan Crawford are not only voting for their own freedom and their own democracy in their own state,” Wikler added, “they’re also sending a national message about whether wealth has unchecked power in this country, or whether the people still rule.”

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DOGE Moves to Gut CDC Work on Gun Injuries, Sexual Assault, Opioid Overdose Data, and More

On Tuesday, thousands of staffers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta received early morning emails asking them to resign. The centers affected included those working on reproductive health, chronic disease, occupational safety, birth defects, smoking, tuberculosis, asthma and air quality, accidental and intentionalinjury, and prevention of violence and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV.

“It’s a blood bath this morning,” one CDC employee messaged me. Several others told me that their entire departments had received the letters. It wasn’t immediately clear whether everyone who had received the notices would ultimately be laid off.

“I regret to inform you that you are being affected by a reduction in force (RIF) action,” the letters stated. “After you receive this notice, you will be placed on administrative leave and will no longer have building access beginning Tuesday, April 1, unless directed otherwise by your leadership.” This action follows the announcement last week, byHealth and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to cut 10,000 employees from the agency. “This overhaul will be a win-win for taxpayers and for those that HHS serves,” Kennedy said in a statement. “That’s the entire American public because our goal is to Make America Healthy Again.”

Yet the staffers I talked to weren’t convinced that the cuts would improve public health or efficiency—on the contrary, they said they worried that government efforts to improve the lives of Americans would be undermined.

An employee I’ll call Amanda (she didn’t want me to use her name for fear of retribution) works in the Web-Based Injury and Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISKARS) a team within the Injury Center that is responsible for processing all the data around injuries, including both fatal and nonfatal injuries caused by guns. Her branch of 40 employees all received RIF notices. “The cost analysis, the return on investment, all of the non-fatal and fatal data processing that goes to our lobbyists, our congressmen, our decision-makers, senators—all of that is gone,” she said. Her team also provides data that determine the leading causes of injury-related deaths.

An employee I’ll call Jen is a health scientist in the Division of Violence Prevention, with a specific focus on sexual and intimate partner violence. Jen and her team “had an inkling” that given the Trump administration’s gutting of other programs that prevent sexual violence,their work might be imperiled. In January, the US Department of Education enacted policies that would protect students accused of sexual harassment and assault. In February, the Department of Defense paused its military sexual assault prevention training. That same month, rape crisis centers reported that their scheduled federal funding payments hadn’t arrived.

“All of the actions, including getting rid of my team, is showing sexual violence prevention isn’t a priority,” Jen said, “and in fact, they don’t think it is needed at all.”

Jen noted that the teams in her center that work on opioid overdose prevention and suicide prevention did not appear to be affected by the cuts yet. The fact that those groups were spared may reflect the Trump administration’s focus on the impact of the opioid epidemic, especially on rural communities—yet it’s not clear whether the teams that support this work would remain intact. Emily, the employee whose data team in the Injury Center all received notices, said that she and her colleagues had been working on machine learning initiatives for opioid overdose and suicide data. That work will cease to exist if her department is laid off.

Another employee, whom I’ll call Emily, told me that her unit, the entire office of public health practice at the Center for Chronic Disease, had also received RIF notices. Many of which, she added, contained factual errors, including misinformation about employees’ previous performance reviews, which are used to calculate their severance pay.

Emily noted that her team’s job is “to work across every programmatic cooperative agreement in the center, across all those staff, and try to create efficiencies in the work that they do, guide them toward measuring the impact and return on investment of our programs.” That mandate seems in line with what the Trump administration through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has identified as their goal. Nonetheless, they all still received the RIF notices.

“It would be great if there was a plan and then some kind of logic to how people are fired. But that’s not the way this administration is functioning.”

In addition to harming their work, staffers reported that the disorganized nature of the cuts had created an atmosphere of widespread confusion and stress. Until last week, they said, even leadership had been uncertain of what was to come. Colleagues “were telling me that at 2 a.m. they can’t stop checking their computer,” said Jen. “They’re afraid to step away from their computer because they’re afraid they [suddenly] won’t have access.” Emily added, “It would be great if there was a plan and then some kind of logic to how people are fired. But that’s not the way this administration is functioning.”

Several centers convened all-staff meetings on Tuesday morning. In some cases, employees reported, their leaders had to negotiate with security simply to let staffers who had received RIF notices back in the building to attend the meetings. Those who did not receive the notice reported that metal detectors had been set up at the entrances to at least one CDC building—a security measure that had not existed previously. CDC spokespeople did not immediately respond to my request for comment.

The employees I talked to said they worried that given the sweeping nature of the cuts, much of the work the agency does will simply cease to exist. “Where’s the plan to replace this work?” asked Jen. “There is no plan. It is just being removed.”

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A Win for Repro Rights: Alabama Can’t Charge Activists Helping Patients Get Out of State Abortions

In the nearly three years since the US Supreme Court overturned the national right to abortion, grassroots abortion funds and advocates have facilitated care for many thousands of patients living in states where abortion is banned, helping them find providers in other parts of the country, organize their travel, and pay some or all of the costs. That’s what Alabama advocates were expecting to do when that state’s near-total abortion ban took effect the day Roe v. Wade fell.

Instead, these advocates found themselves embroiled in an epic legal battle with Alabama’s attorney general, who threatened to use a criminal conspiracy statute from 1896to prosecute anyone who helped pregnant patients obtain an abortion in another state—charges potentially punishable by decades in prison.

Now, in a decision that could have major implications for states’ efforts to regulate abortion help and helpers in the post-Roe era, a federal judge in Montgomery, Alabama,has ruled that Attorney General Steve Marshall’s threats to prosecute abortion advocates violate fundamental protections for free speech and the right to travel.

“Alabama’s criminal jurisdiction does not reach beyond its borders, and it cannot punish what its residents do lawfully in another State,” US District Judge Myron H. Thompson declared in a 131-page ruling issued Monday, adding: “The Attorney General cannot prosecute those who assist people in Alabama to travel out of state to obtain a lawful abortion.”

“It is one thing for Alabama to outlaw by statute what happens in its own backyard,” Thompson wrote. “It is another thing for the state to enforce its values and laws, as chosen by the attorney general, outside its boundaries by punishing its citizens and others who help individuals travel to another state to engage in conduct that is lawful there but the attorney general finds to be contrary to Alabama’s values and laws.”

“It is one thing for Alabama to outlaw by statute what happens in its own backyard. It is another thing for the state to enforce its values and laws, as chosen by the attorney general, outside its boundaries.”

The ruling was immediately hailed by abortion rights advocates. “We won! Our abortion fund is reopened!” Kelsea McClain, health care access director of Alabama’s Yellowhammer Fund, texted in reaction to the ruling Monday evening. “Immediately! We’ve already funded our first abortion!”

A request to Marshall’s office for comment was not immediately answered.

The case consists of lawsuits by Yellowhammer—the state’s only abortion fund—and a trio of former abortion providers, including the West Alabama Women’s Center (now WAWC Healthcare) in Tuscaloosa and Dr. Yashica Robinson, an OB-GYN in Huntsville. Before the Dobbs decision, Yellowhammer and the providers worked together closely to help patients throughout Alabama get abortion care; indeed, for a couple of years before Roe fell, Yellowhammer owned WAWC.

Even when abortion was still legal in Alabama, Yellowhammer and providers often sent patients out of state to avoid restrictions like Alabama’s 48-hour waiting period or those surrounding later-term abortions. In the months leading up to the Supreme Court decision, as it became clear Roe was doomed, advocates began planning to get many more Alabama patients to clinics in states where abortion would remain legal in the post-Roe era. “We were like, we’re okay. We can figure that out. It’ll be fine,” Yellowhammer’s executive director, Jenice Fountain, recently told Mother Jones.

But the day the Dobbs decision was handed down in June 2022, and Alabama’s trigger law, the Human Life Protection Act that banned virtually all abortions, went into effect, a Democratic state lawmaker from Tuscaloosa tweeted a warning: “helping someone either get or even plan to get an abortion in another state is a Felony as well.” WAWC’s director, Robin Marty, says she got a phone call that day alerting her to the threat. “They’re going to come after you for criminal conspiracy, ” she recalled being told. “If you try to get those patients somewhere else, they’re going to come after you.”

The day the Dobbs decision was handed down, and Alabama’s abortion ban took effect, a state lawmaker tweeted a warning: “helping someone either get or even plan to get an abortion in another state is a Felony as well.”

Over the following months, Marshall—who has been attorney general since 2017—repeatedly expressed the view that the state’s conspiracy law could be used to bring charges against groups and individuals who helped patients get abortions out of state. In one interview with conservative talk show host Jeff Poor, Marshall singled out organizations in Tuscaloosa, where Yellowhammer and WAWC were based.

Marshall has never actually charged an abortion helper under the Alabama conspiracy law—but he didn’t have to. Almost immediately, Yellowhammer stopped paying for patients’ out-of-state abortions or offering other direct abortion support, instead focusing on a wide range of non-abortion help, from free emergency contraception to diapers. WAWC—which is now a full-spectrum women’s health clinic—and other providers stopped giving referrals and other specific information about out-of-state abortion care.

Yellowhammer and the providers finally filed suit in July 2023, asking the court to block Marshall from using the criminal conspiracy law against them. Meanwhile, the advocates continue to refrain from providing abortion-related assistance. “The attorney general chilled so much help from all sorts of people, not just Yellowhammer Fund,” says Jamila Johnson, senior counsel with the Lawyering Project, one of the attorneys in the case.

Alabama has long had a reputation for pushing the legal envelope when it comes to reproductive rights—including laws and court decisions enshrining fetal personhood and declaring frozen IVF embryos to be “extrauterine children.” At the time of its passage in 2019, its Human Rights Protection Act—blocked while Roe was the law of the land—was the most restrictive abortion law enacted in the US since the 1970s.

Marshall’s threats against the abortion helpers were especially alarming to reproductive justice activists because they were so broad. Theoretically, Alabama’s criminal conspiracy law could apply to anyone in the state who helps someone do something in another state that would be a crime in Alabama, even if that. conduct is legal in that other state.

Indeed, Judge Thompson wrote in Monday’s decision that, according to Marshall’s logic, “the Alabama Attorney General would have within his reach the authority to prosecute Alabamians planning a Las Vegas bachelor party, complete with casinos and gambling, since casino-style gambling is outlawed in Alabama.” The judge added: “As the adage goes, be careful what you pray for.”

Thompson also ruled that the advocates’ support for people seeking abortions was a form of speech. “The court finds that Yellowhammer Fund’s act of pledging and providing funds on behalf of pregnant Alabamians who seek a legal abortion outside Alabama is expressive conduct, and, therefore, subject to First Amendment protection.”

Monday’s outcome was not unexpected. In a 98-page opinion last May, Thompson—appointed to the bench by President Jimmy Carter—rejected Marshall’s motion to have the case dismissed, saying the attorney general’s threat to prosecute abortion advocates “contravenes history, precedent, and common sense.”

The Alabama case highlights frustration among anti-abortion lawmakers and activists that even in states with total or near-total abortion bans, patients have continued to access abortion care. Indeed, in the two years following the end of Roe, the total number of abortions increased slightly nationwide compared to the pre-Dobbs period. Abortion funds provided financial support to almost 103,000 patients in just the first year after Dobbs, the National Network of Abortion Funds has reported.

Alabama isn’t the only state to target abortion helpers. In Texas, lawmakers have tried to stop out-of-state abortion travel by empowering private citizens—bounty hunters—to sue anyone who aids or abets an abortion for thousands of dollars. In Idaho and Tennessee, lawmakers have passed so-called “abortion trafficking” laws targeting people who help pregnant teenagers leave the state—laws Yellowhammer’s attorneys are also challenging in court. Louisiana has charged a New York doctor for providing telehealth abortion services and abortion pills through the mail, while a Texas judge has ordered the same provider to pay more than $100,000 in fines.

“What we saw in Alabama was something we hadn’t seen in other states, which was an immediate effort to get on the airwaves and tell people that the helpers would be prosecuted,” Johnson told Mother Jones. “In those other states, legislators passed a law, right? But in Alabama, no legislature got together and said, ‘This is what we’re going to do.’ Instead, the attorney general said, we are going to prosecute [abortion helpers] just on his own enforcement authority.”

Johnson said that Thompson’s decision could resonate in ongoing legal challenges to the Tennessee and Idaho abortion travel bans. “While the [Alabama] decision is not precedent in those jurisdictions,” she said, “the reasoning is sound and could be indicative of how other jurisdictions may think about some of these issues in the future.”

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RFK Jr.’s Old Environmental Group Is Extremely Unhappy With Trump’s EPA

This story was originally published b_y the Guardian a_nd is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Donald Trump’s push to repurpose the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) amid funding cuts and staffing losses poses a huge threat to water safety and environmental advances in one of the big environmental success stories in the US in recent decades: the clean-up of the Hudson River.

Once a byword for environmental degradation, the Hudson River is now recovering, in part due to the work of Riverkeeper, a non-profit environmental organization that established a model of legal activism for water protection and inspired more than 300 programs globally. It is also where Robert F Kennedy Jr cut his teeth as an environmental lawyer, before becoming a senior member of Trump’s right-wing cabinet.

The political threat to America’s environment generally and more specifically the work of Riverkeeper has shocked the organization’s president, Tracy Brown, who spoke to the Guardian from its headquarters in the Hudson River commuter town of Ossining.

She was mulling over the impact of EPA administrator Lee Zeldin’s latest salvo: the termination of $14 billion in Biden-initiated grants to three climate groups, now blocked by a federal judge, alongside plans to eliminate 1,155 chemists, biologists, toxicologists, and other scientists from the EPA’s office of research and development.

“No one at the EPA was prepared to be so attacked and cannibalized by their own leadership, and they don’t have a playbook on how to cope. It’s hard to get one’s head around what we’re losing here in terms of resources, momentum, knowledge, and trust. It’s a pandemic-level shock to the system, and the effects could last for decades,” Brown said.

The game of cat-and-mouse between the administration and the courts will take time to play out, but the implication is clear: reliance on federal government environmental research is in jeopardy, and with it the efficacy of groups such as Riverkeeper that rely on EPA data to direct their efforts, including climate change and industrial contamination assessments.

“We’re in a moment where the environment is changing. We’re seeing climate changing the conditions we’re living in and need to be leaning into science to find out what is changing and how we do better to be prepared for the changes,” Brown said, palpably frustrated. “But right at that moment we’re trying to understand what’s changing, we’re losing research.”

For Riverkeeper and other groups, this means building up scientific knowledge to move from Hudson River restoration work toward adaptation work, including the measures to mitigate the impact of flooding from the increased frequency of heavy rain events that cause the loss of habitat and property.

One of those areas is the removal of industrial-era dams from tributary rivers and streams to allow fish to reach spawning grounds they have been cut off from and slow flooding. But removing old paper and textile industry dams also risks releasing PFA pollution in sediment behind the dams.

Dam removal has already proved to be a contentious issue when Trump blamed the removal of dams in northern California on water shortages to fight the Los Angeles wildfires in January.

Brown fears that federal funding for dam removal along the 315-mile (500km) Hudson is now under question, along with that, the hopes of stalling or reversing the loss of freshwater fish stocks.

“You’re starting to hear a general sense of fear and paranoia among people doing this work.”

“The whole program of doing infrastructure-level adaptation projects is in jeopardy,” Brown said. “Those dams weren’t designed for heavy storm events and the kind of pounding they’re taking now, so there is urgency or we could see unplanned dam failures.”

While the proposed rollbacks have hit groups like Riverkeeper, there have been attendant fears of retribution over speaking out among environmentalists. “You’re starting to hear a general sense of fear and paranoia among people doing this work,” Brown said.

In May, Riverkeeper has its big annual river cleanup. “I’m hoping that even if federal support goes down, local community, putting-our-shoulder-to-it support will rise up. People, I think, realize that we’re more on our own and we can’t leave it to the government to do the basics,” Brown said.

“There’s been historically an over-reliance on the hand of God perception, people thinking, ‘Oh well, people are swimming, the beaches must be clean.’ The perception of how much the government was doing was already a little overblown in people’s minds and this is a wake-up call.”

Her organization, she said, will have to spend more time on research, publishing data, and doing watchdog work.

Becoming more aware and active in local environmental responsibilities could at least reduce the sense of powerlessness inherent in divisive national politics and the government’s ability to come to grips with the climate crisis when it is locked in what Brown called a “zero-sum death battle every four years”.

“Broadly the upside to the climate disaster is that we all come back into right relationship with Earth. We think we have dominion over all things, and clearly we don’t, and that delusion is one of the reasons for the trouble we’re in,” Brown said. “When we have disasters brought about by poor governance it brings us back to a hyper-local place.”

If any environmental organization has shown the promise of self-organization, it would be Riverkeeper, an organization founded by commercial fishers and with a significant conservative gun-and-rod membership. Nearly 60 years after its founding, the Hudson River is one of the healthiest estuaries on the Atlantic coast.

Zeldin, the EPA’s administrator, called the extraordinary series of rollbacks the “greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen.” But the characterization of Republicans as all anti-environment is also wrong, Brown said. “It’s corporate manipulation—a false choice between jobs and clean environment, and it’s tearing us apart.”

But the actions of the Trump administration are confounding. “I was holding out hope for Zeldin, who lives on an island, to acknowledge in his confirmation hearings that climate change is real and state his care for water,” Brown said.

But now those hopes have dimmed.

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France Cracked Down on Far-Right Corruption—And Team Trump Is Triggered

After a French court found far-right leader and former presidential frontrunner Marine Le Pen guilty of embezzlement on Monday—a conviction that will bar her from holding political office for five years—some of President Donald Trump’s closest allies are boosting baseless conspiracy theories alleging that Le Pen’s conviction is part of a global scheme to keep right-wing populists from holding office.

Le Pen is reportedly accused of wrongfully diverting $5 million in funds earmarked for the European Parliament to staffers of her nationalist, xenophobic party, the National Rally, over a 12-year period. The verdict makes her ineligible to run in the country’s next presidential election in 2027—and comes after she was polling at 37 percent, more than 10 points ahead of her closest challenger. Le Pen has run for that office three times before, and became more popular as right-wing political parties across Europe rose in prominence in recent years; in the 2022 presidential runoff, Le Pen earned 41.5 percent of votes to President Emmanuel Macron’s 58.6 percent. (Macron is term-limited.)

In addition to being ineligible to hold office as a result of the conviction, Le Pen will also have to serve two years’ house arrest and pay a fine of more than $100,000. The politician has denied wrongdoing and said she intends to appeal the charges, which she dismissed on French television Monday night as “a political decision” intended to prevent her election. “The rule of law has been completely violated by this decision,” Le Pen added. (Sound familiar?)

A variety of right-wing politicos from around the world condemned the verdict. Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán posted on X, “I am Marine!” Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro—who will face a trial on accusations of inciting a 2022 coup attempt seeking to overturn the election he lost, the country’s Supreme Court ruled last week—characterized Le Pen’s conviction to Reuters as “left-wing judicial activism.” And Le Pen’s protégé, National Rally president Jordan Bardella, alleged that “French democracy…is being executed” by the verdict.

You might think Trump’s cronies would abstain from commenting and count themselves lucky that their guy managed to evade criminal conviction himself for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. But you’d be wrong.

Trump allies couldn’t help but characterize Le Pen’s conviction as evidence that the American president, too, had been unfairly targeted in his many court cases. “When the radical left can’t win via democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents. This is their standard playbook throughout the world,” Elon Musk wrote on X in a post Monday morning, which had more than 16 million views by that afternoon. Musk made those comments when he re-shared a post from Mike Benz, a former Trump State Department official who previously posted racist conspiracy theories online and interacted with white nationalists under a pseudonym, according to a 2023 NBC News report. The Benz post that Musk re-shared on Monday grouped Le Pen and Trump with a series of others accused, or convicted, of crimes—”[Jair] Bolsonaro in Brazil, Imran Khan in Pakistan, Matteo Salvini in Italy…Călin Georgescu in Romania”—and alleged, “The criminal prosecution of every populist challenger is a dagger in the heart of the credibility of democracy.”

In response to another post from Benz boosting the conspiracy theory about the Le Pen verdict, Musk wrote: “This will backfire, like the legal attacks against President Trump.” (But Trump has not, in fact, been immune from court rulings: Several court orders have successfully halted or even reversed some of his most outlandish moves since taking office for the second time, such as his attempts to overturn birthright citizenship and fire thousands of probationary federal workers. Trump was also found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the hush-money payments he made to Stormy Daniels, and found liable by a jury of sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll.)

Responding to a post from X user Alex Lorusso—executive producer of the right-wing commentatorBenny Johnson’s Benny Show on YouTube—that alleged, “they’re trying the same playbook they did to Trump in France,” Musk wrote: “Same playbook everywhere.” And in response to a two-minute video posted by Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a right-wing Dutch political commentator characterizing the Le Pen verdict as “lawfare against the European right-wing,” Musk replied: “Unreal.”

Donald Trump Jr. also got in on the baseless paranoia, writing in his own post: “France is sending le Pen [sic] to jail and barring her from running?! Are they just trying to prove JD Vance was right about everything?” (He was presumably referring to the vice president’s well-documented disdain for Europe.) Trump Jr. made that post while re-posting another from Robby Starbuck—a conservative activist who brags about getting corporations to roll back their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts—claiming that “the left in France” was behind the “BS charges” Le Pen was convicted of.

Trump does not appear to have publicly commented on Le Pen’s conviction yet, and spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones about whether the president supports Musk’s and Trump Jr.’s claims.

There is no evidence to support the idea that Le Pen’s conviction was politically motivated; instead, it’s a reminder that despite Trump’s successful evasion of punishment himself, nobody—not even an aspiring president—is above the law in a truly healthy and just democracy. It’s no wonder this concept triggers the Trump crowd.

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Trump Wants to Shutter FEMA. Can States Fill Its Shoes?

This story was originally published b_y Grist a_nd is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

President Donald Trump appears to be serious about getting the federal government out of disaster response. Earlier this week, his secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, said in a Cabinet meeting that she would move to “eliminate” the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the beleaguered agency that handles relief and recovery after extreme weather events, and has reportedly conferred with FEMA’s Trump-appointed interim leader about winding down the agency.

Noem’s announcement was just the latest in a series of Trump administration moves to radically decrease or eliminate the federal government’s role in responding to climate-driven disasters. Just after taking office, the president mused about eliminating FEMA and then convened a council to consider the agency’s future. In recent weeks, he has laid off hundreds of staff who work on resilience and preparedness. And last week, Trump signed an executive order that called for state and local governments to “play a more active and significant role in national resilience and preparedness” and directed agencies to “streamline” their disaster resilience efforts.

Trump’s unprecedented efforts to weaken FEMA come at a time when many disasters are intensifying due to climate change. A study of more than 750 recent heat waves, wildfires, and flood events found that around 75 percent of these events had been made significantly worse by human-caused warming. Though experts say there is merit in the idea of beefing up state and local emergency preparedness, they also caution that the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn approach to remaking the federal government could backfire when it comes to FEMA. While they acknowledge that disaster response needs reform, they also argue that a total withdrawal by the federal government would leave many communities in the lurch, especially those that can’t fund disaster recovery on their own.

For much of American history, a state that suffered a disaster had to plead with Congress for a one-off infusion of money, then figure out how to spend that money on its own. In 1980, the Carter administration created FEMA to speed up the government’s response to worsening disasters. The agency got its own multibillion-dollar pot of money to reimburse states for disaster response, including for disasters that are too small to get a special transfer from Congress. Over the past 45 years, it has distributed billions of dollars in grants to help local areas prepare for future disasters, reduce flood risk, and—more recently—address climate change. The agency also coordinates multistate responses to large disasters, summoning search-and-rescue and cleanup teams from across the country after big hurricanes.

In the decades since FEMA’s botched response to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, the agency has been a frequent target of criticism by politicians and the public. Local officials often complain that federal involvement tends to slow down disaster response, and emergency management experts warn that it disincentivizes state and local authorities from taking action to reduce climate risks. FEMA’s programs to increase disaster resilience come with reams of paperwork, and the agency often pays to rebuild the same areas over and over again without reducing actual risk.

Trump’s recent executive order pushing for a bigger state and local role in disaster response echoes some past criticism of the agency, calling for reforms “to reduce complexity and better protect and serve Americans.”

“A lot of this stuff in the order, I look at it, and it just sounds like Emergency Management 101,” said W. Craig Fugate, who served as FEMA administrator under then-president Barack Obama. He said emergency managers have long maintained that state and local governments should not rely on federal aid to make them whole after disasters, and need to find their own ways to reduce risk over the long run.

However, other experts fear that what Trump is proposing could leave cities and states unable to pay for much-needed resilience projects—and that a rapid shuttering of FEMA would leave most states and local governments unprepared to fill the gap.

“The Trump administration aims to shift most of the responsibility for disaster preparedness to state and local governments, asking them to make more expensive infrastructure investments without outlining what support the federal government will provide,” said Shana Udvardy, senior climate resilience policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental advocacy organization.

Trump’s public statements and executive orders on the issue have been vague — so vague, in fact, that Udvardy called them “baffling.” If Noem and Trump tried to wind down the agency altogether, the move would likely face similar legal challenges as his attempts to destroy the Department of Education—neither agency can lawfully be closed without congressional approval. But in theory, if the administration prevailed in closing FEMA, or moved some of its operations to the Department of Homeland Security, there are a few ways the change could play out.

Then-candidate Donald Trump appears with then-South Dakota governor Kristi Noem during a campaign rally in October 2024. Trump selected Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA.Jim Watson / AFP / Getty via Grist

One scenario would be a return to the situation that existed before FEMA, when states had to seek direct help from Congress or another federal agency every time they suffered a disaster. Congress works differently now than it did in the decades before FEMA existed—it often takes months or years for lawmakers to send out long-term recovery money after a disaster such as the 2023 Maui wildfires, which can make it hard for local governments to find money to develop replacement housing and restore public infrastructure. Congress is also far more polarized than it used to be, even on the issue of disaster aid—Republican leaders have suggested they might impose political “conditions” on wildfire assistance to California, goading the state to change its policies on immigration or water management.

Without a centralized disaster fund like the one FEMA has, the party in control of Congress would control who gets relief money, which could delay or derail rebuilding efforts in states run by the out-party.

Another possibility, whether or not FEMA is abolished, would be for Congress to provide a flat amount of preparedness money to each state and let states decide how to spend it, which is how some other big federal programs work. But this scenario could also be subject to political maneuvering: When the Department of Housing and Urban Development distributed its own disaster recovery block grant to Texas after Hurricane Harvey, the state government allegedly favored white and rural areas over Black and Latino residents in Houston, according to a federal probe.

If FEMA shrank or disappeared, it’s unclear who would coordinate lifesaving aid between states during large disasters. But if states continued to receive robust disaster funds from Congress, and if they distributed this money equitably, it could potentially speed up a spending process that is often described as being slow and bureaucratic.

For instance, in Harris County, Texas, which encompasses the massive Houston metro area, floodplain officials said that removing federal oversight could accelerate the process of acquiring and demolishing so-called “repetitive-loss” homes—those that flood multiple times. Officials would no longer be subject to federal paperwork requirements before they bought out homes.

“Currently, every level of government is involved when utilizing federal grant programs for flood mitigation,” said James Wade, who leads the county’s home buyout program. “Removing one level of government may help expedite the process.” Wade’s program could certainly use some paperwork relief. Thanks in large part to federal grant requirements, it can take as long as five years for the county to purchase and destroy a flooded home, during which time flood victims have no choice but to wait or flip their homes to private buyers.

But if Trump’s reforms led to a reduction in overall federal disaster funding—as seems likely, given his focus on cutting spending—the county might not be able to keep up its current pace of adaptation projects. The county flood control district has applied for no fewer than 14 FEMA grants, for stormwater upgrades as well as buyouts, and a shift away from national funding could make it harder to fund these essential projects.

“The question is who decides how to allocate the funds to the states and how much each is allocated.”

The district “relies heavily on federal programs to leverage the local funds for flood mitigation,” said Wade. Under Trump’s new approach, “The question is who decides how to allocate the funds to the states and how much each is allocated.”

A reduction in federal grant money for resilience projects could force local governments to make harder choices. This wouldn’t always be a bad thing. Fugate pointed to the state of Florida, which rolled out strong building codes after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, forcing developers to build houses that could withstand strong winds. The move led to up-front costs for builders, but reduced damage in the long run.

The problem with this tough-love approach is that many states and local governments aren’t ready to handle disaster resilience on their own—they don’t have the expertise to design new building codes or plan for climate change, and they don’t have the money to build infrastructure that can protect against existing flood and fire risk. Past administrations have rolled out a number of reforms to help these communities design and fund such infrastructure projects: In 2020, FEMA began providing “direct technical assistance” to help rural communities and low-income areas figure out their vulnerabilities and design projects. It also changed its scoring for grant applications to privilege rural and disadvantaged communities more. (The direct technical assistance page is now unavailable on FEMA’s website.)

Udvardy, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that taking FEMA out of the resilience equation would leave smaller and poorer communities in the lurch, without either the money or expertise they needed to reduce their risk. This would cost the government and disaster victims more in the long run.

“Based on the indiscriminate way this administration has laid off staff with deep expertise and upended critical science…I am very concerned that the implications of this order will mean less support for communities to help them prepare for and recover from the disasters to come,” said Udvardy.

The worst-affected places would be rural areas in poor states like West Virginia, where the federal government is the only entity with the resources to finance even basic adaptation projects like flood retention ponds or home elevations. Many of these areas supported Trump last year by wide margins.

A resident of Treasure Island, Florida, cleans up debris from Hurricane Helene in September 2024 as she prepares for incoming Hurricane Milton. Spencer Platt / Getty via Grist

The rural city of Grants Pass, Oregon, is already experiencing the potential consequences of such a federal shift. The city has been working to secure $50 million from a FEMA grant program designed to enhance climate resilience. The city’s water treatment plant is almost 100 old, and it sits right next to the flood-prone Rogue River. In the event of a big storm or earthquake, the plant could flood or collapse, leaving locals without clean drinking water.

Grants Pass has already raised utility rates on its 33,000 customers to fund the construction of a new plant, but it was still falling short of the money it needed for such a large project. In 2023, FEMA advanced the city’s grant application to build a new treatment plant away from the floodplain, which the local public works director called “incredible good fortune.”

But late in February, the state of Oregon informed Grants Pass that FEMA had canceled all coordination meetings around the grant program, and now city officials have no idea if they’ll receive the money they’ve spent years counting on.

“This grant is a critical piece of our funding strategy,” said Jason Canady, the city’s public works director. “We are concerned, but at this point, we are not sure what actions can be taken to ensure an award will be forthcoming.”

Fugate, the former FEMA administrator, said that cuts to federal resilience funding would split the nation into haves and have-nots. States and cities that have the staffing and money to pursue adaptation efforts would do so, and might even be able to complete some projects faster than they can right now. But rural areas would no longer have access to federal money that enables them to even consider reducing climate risk. People living in those places will have less protection from future disasters, exposing them to the risk of death or injury, and will have a harder time recovering after disasters, which could push them into poverty.

“They’ll have more flexibility—with less money,” said Fugate.

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“I’m Not Joking”: Trump Again Floats Running for Anti-Constitutional Third Term

President Donald Trump has repeatedly teased running for a third term in violation of the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, which limits presidents to two terms.

Until now, it has been unclear whether he was making such comments seriously. But in a phone call with Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker of NBC News on Sunday, Trump gave his clearest indication yet that he is indeed serious. “I’m not joking,” he reportedly said. “But I’m not—it is far too early to think about it.”

“There are methods which you could do it,” Trump continued. NBC reports that when Welker asked about the plausibility of Vice President JD Vance running for office and then passing power to Trump (who would try to run as VP in 2028, and then take over when Vance resigns, according to the theory) Trump replied, “That’s one,” adding, “but there are others too.” He declined to provide specific examples, NBC reported.

White House Communications Director Steven Cheung did not respond directly to a question from Mother Jones about what “methods” Trump specifically was referring to; instead Cheung sent a statement claiming: “Americans overwhelmingly approve and support President Trump and his America First policies. As the President said, it’s far too early to think about [a third term] and he is focused on undoing all the hurt Biden has caused and Making America Great Again.” (Polls do not indicate “overwhelming approval” for Trump: The latest CBS/YouGov poll shows Americans split down the middle, and several recentothers others show that majorities of Americans disapprove of him.)

When asked by Welker if he would like to serve a third term, Trump replied, “I like working.”

Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said in a post on X that there may be three ways Trump could attempt to “grab” an illegal 3rd term: 1) Ignore the Constitution and dare anyone to stop him. 2) Have GOP-run states just appoint Trump electors since any state not voting Trump is by definition ‘corrupt’. 3) Military coup and martial law—i.e., a successful January 6.”

NBC reports that Trump also claimed, “A lot of people want me to do it. But, I mean, I basically tell them we have a long way to go, you know, it’s very early in the administration.”

Some public figures have indeed voiced sycophantic support for this idea of an illegal power grab. They include longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who has claimed Trump may be able to get around the 22nd Amendment and told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo that “Trump will run and win again in 2028.” In January, Republican Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee introduced a farfetched resolution proposing to amend the 22nd Amendment so that Trump could serve a third term. Additionally, GOP activists behind an initiative called the Third Term Project are advocating for amending the constitution to allow Trump to run again in 2028, or to have Trump run as VP with the understanding that the presidential candidate on the ticket would resign after being elected, to allow Trump to retake power.

Success in amending the Constitution—especially to set up a possible third term for Trump—would be extremely unlikely, as it would require approval from two-thirds of both chambers of Congress, and then ratification from three-fourths of state legislatures.

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Susie Wiles Finally Goes Public—and Shares Her Strange Goal for a Trump “Legacy”

One of the most powerful people in the White House remained obscure to most Americans since the start of Trump’s second presidency, until Saturday night.

Susie Wiles, the secretive White House chief of staff and former Trump campaign manager, gave what she called her “first and probably only” sit-down television interview to President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, on Fox News. As I wrote when Lara Trump’s weekly show was announced last month, the programming cements the network’s role as a mouthpiece for the Trump White House, and extends a clear pattern of nepotism from an administration claiming to champion merit-based hiring.

The roughly 17-minute segment consisted of Wiles discussing mostly anodyne topics: her long work hours, her “easy” relationship with the president, her penchant for reading and walking, and her office decor. But at the end of the sit-down, Wiles made a curious assertion: She said she hopes her “legacy” will include strengthening the country’s education system—despite the fact that Trump recently signed an executive order seeking to abolish the Department of Education.

The Trump team claims that ending the DOE is about rolling back diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in schools and giving power back to the states.But such a move—also attacking the authority of Congress, which established and funds the DOE—is one that experts say will harm education nationwide, particularly when it comes to under-resourced schools, poor students, and those with disabilities.

“What do you hope your legacy is?” Lara Trump asked Wiles. “What do you hope people remember about your time as White House?”

“That is such a hard question, because I don’t think that way,” Wiles replied. After taking a beat, she continued: “I want a world at peace. I want an America that’s strong. I want a border that’s secure. I want an education system—something we don’t talk about as much, but I’m passionate about—that will position our kids to meet the future, whatever that may be.”

Lara Trump: What do you hope your legacy will is?

Wiles: I want an education system, something we don't talk about as much, but I'm passionate about that we will position our kids to meet the future, whatever that may be.. pic.twitter.com/J8rnCeQ0s1

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 30, 2025

As my colleague Sarah Szilagy reported, Education Secretary and former WWE Executive Linda McMahon has played a key role in Trump’s effort to close the $268 billion agency that administers federal funds to schools and enforces civil rights laws. The policy seems to be motivated in part by right-wing paranoia stoked by groups like Moms for Liberty:

Within hours of her confirmation on March 3, McMahon sent agency employees a memo titled “Our Department’s Final Mission.” In it, she commended Trump’s sweeping actions, including his slate of executive orders that promote school choice programs, seek to root out so-called “gender ideology” and end “radical indoctrination” of children through diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, while also banning trans girls and women from women’s sports.

After Trump signed the March 20 executive order directing McMahon to “facilitate the closure” of the agency to the “maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law,” Robert Kim, executive director of the Education Law Center, told Szilagy, “It’s just moving the country in such a wrong direction,” adding that closing the DOE will “take us back to those generations where education was deprioritized and really only a privilege for a subset of our children.”

In a statement, the National Education Association said that kneecapping the DOE “will hurt all students by sending class sizes soaring, cutting job training programs, making higher education more expensive and out of reach for middle class families, taking away special education services for students with disabilities, and gutting student civil rights protections.” Subsequent reductions in force to the DOE have resulted in roughly half of the agency’s employees being terminated and seven of its dozen regional offices shuttered.

Wiles’ ostensible passion for boosting education nationally does not seem to come from a history of actually working in the field. As my colleague Dan Friedman wrote last November, Wiles made her name working as a lobbyist and helping to shape Florida’s Republican party:

The daughter of late NFL broadcaster Pat Summerall, Wiles is a longtime GOP operative in Florida with a history of working for rich candidates. She ran Sen. Rick Scott’s 2010 campaign for Florida’s governorship, worked as former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign manager in 2012, and ran Trump’s campaign in Florida in 2016 and 2020. She also worked for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis before a falling out with him.

Wiles has also worked as a lobbyist, and held onto a senior lobbying position with the Republican-leaning advocacy firm Mercury Public Affairs during the campaign, according to the New York Times. She was registered as a lobbyist for a tobacco company as recently as this year.

In her sit-down with Lara Trump, Wiles said she had long been “an establishment Republican…and then Donald Trump came along, MAGA came along.” But despite her appearance of being fully MAGA-pilled, Wiles seemed to draw a subtle distinction between her self and her boss when it came to their ability to accept his 2020 election loss.

“Do you remember the toughest thing you’ve ever had to tell him?” Lara Trump asked her.

“Coming to him after the 2020 election, in ’21,” Wiles replied, “and telling him that what he thought was the circumstance, wasn’t.”

Lara Trump: Do you remember the toughest thing you've ever had to tell him?

Wiles: The 2020 election. Coming to him after the 2020 election in 21 telling him what he thought was the circumstance wasn't which is how I got into all this.. pic.twitter.com/1GeaADfqri

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 30, 2025

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Farmers in Trump Country Banked on Clean Energy Grants. Then Things Changed.

This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

The US Department of Agriculture announced late Tuesday it will release previously authorized grant funds to farmers and small rural business owners to build renewable energy projects—but only if they rewrite applications to comply with President Donald Trump’s energy priorities.

The move has left some farmers perplexed—and doubtful that they’ll ever get the grant money they were promised, given the Trump administration’s emphasis on fossil fuels and hostility toward renewable energy.

Some of the roughly 6,000 grant applicants have already completed the solar, wind, or other energy projects and are awaiting promised repayment from the government. Others say they can’t afford to take on the projects they’d been planning unless the grant money comes through.

A Floodlight analysis shows the overwhelming majority of the intended recipients of this money reside in Trump country—congressional districts represented by Republicans.

After hearing of the USDA’s latest announcement Wednesday, Minnesota strawberry farmer Andy Petran said he suspects many previously approved projects won’t be funded. He’d been approved for a $39,625 grant to install solar panels on his farm. But like many other farmers nationally, Petran got word from the USDA earlier this year that his grant money had been put on hold.

“It’s not like any small farmer who is looking to put solar panels on their farms will be able to put a natural gas refinery or a coal refinery on the farm,” Petran said. “I don’t know what they expect me to switch to.”

Petran was counting on the benefits that solar power would bring to his farm.

After getting word in September that the USDA had approved his grant application, he expected the solar panels would not only reduce his electricity bill but allow him to sell power back to the grid. He and his wife figured the extra income would help expand their Twin Cities Berry Co. and pay down their debt more quickly.

Petran’s optimism was soon extinguished. A USDA representative told him earlier this year that the grant had been frozen.

His 15-acre farm about 40 miles north of Minneapolis operates on a razor-thin margin, Petran said, so without the grant money, he can’t afford to build the $80,000 solar project.

Andy Petran, shown here at his Minnesota strawberry farm, had been counting on a USDA grant to help him build a solar array that would have saved the farm money. Now that the grant is frozen, Petran can’t move forward with the project.Photo courtesy of Andy Petran

“Winning these grants was a contract between us and the government,” he said. “There was a level of trust there. That trust has been broken.”

In its announcement, issued Tuesday night, the USDA said grant recipients will have 30 days to review and revise their project plans to align with President Trump’s Unleashing American Energy Executive Order, which prioritizes fossil fuel production and cuts federal support for renewable energy projects.

“This process gives rural electric providers and small businesses the opportunity to refocus their projects on expanding American energy production while eliminating Biden-era DEIA and climate mandates embedded in previous proposals,” the USDA news release said. “This updated guidance reflects a broader shift away from the Green New Deal.”

USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins said in the release that the new directive will give rural energy providers and small businesses a chance to “realign their projects” with Trump’s priorities.

It’s unclear what this will mean for grant recipients who’ve already spent money on renewable energy projects—or those whose planned projects have been stalled by the administration’s funding freeze.

The USDA didn’t directly answer those questions. In an email to Floodlight on Wednesday, a department spokesperson said the agency must approve any proposed changes to plans—but offered no specific guidance on what or whether changes should be made.

“Awardees that do not respond via the website will be considered as not wishing to make changes to their proposals, and disbursements and other actions will resume after 30 days,” the email said. “For awardees who respond via the website to confirm no changes, processing on their projects will resume immediately.”

Thousands of farmers and small rural business owners have been left in limbo because of the Trump administration’s decision to freeze funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for renewable energy projects.(Dee J. Hall / Floodlight)

The grant funding was put on hold after an executive order issued by President Trump on his first day in office. It froze hundreds of billions of dollars for renewable energy under President Joe Biden’s massive climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

The law added more than $1 billion to the USDA’s 17-year-old Rural Energy for America (REAP) program.

About 6,000 REAP grants funded with IRA money have been paused and are being reviewed for compliance with Trump’s executive order, according to a March 5 email from the USDA’s rural development office to the office of Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland).

A lawsuit filed earlier this month challenges the legality of the freeze on IRA funding for REAP projects.

Earthjustice lawyer Hana Vizcarra, one of the attorneys who filed the suit, called the latest USDA announcement a “disingenuous stunt.”

“President Trump and Secretary Rollins can’t change the rules of the game well into the second half,” she said in a statement Wednesday. “This is the definition of an arbitrary and capricious catch-22.”

Under the REAP grant program, farmers pay for renewable and lower carbon energy projects and then submit proof of the completed work to the USDA for reimbursement. The grants were intended to fund solar panels, wind turbines, grain dryers, irrigation upgrades, and other projects, USDA data shows.

At a press conference in Atlanta on March 12, Rollins said, “If our farmers and ranchers, especially, have already spent money under a commitment that was made, the goal is to make sure they are made whole.”

But some contend the administration is unfairly making farmers jump through more hoops.

“This isn’t cutting red tape; it’s adding more,” said Andy Olsen, senior policy advocate with the Environmental Law and Policy Center, a Midwest-based environmental advocacy group. “The USDA claims to deliver on commitments, but these new rules could result in awarded grants being permanently frozen.”

Rep. Chellie Pingree, a longtime farmer and Maine Democrat who sits on the House Agriculture Committee, said she thinks it’s illegal and unconstitutional for the administration to withhold grant money allocated by Congress. Beyond that, she said, it has hurt cash-strapped farmers.

“This is about farmers making ends meet,” she told Floodlight. “It’s not some ideological issue for us.”

Using USDA data, Floodlight identified the top 10 congressional districts that received the most grants. They’re all represented by Republicans who have said little publicly about the funding freezes affecting thousands of their constituents. It’s impossible to tell from the USDA data which REAP grants will get paid out.

The congressional district that received the most REAP grants was Iowa’s 2nd District, in the northeastern part of the state. Farmers and business owners there got more than 300 grants from 2023 through 2025. The district is represented by Rep. Ashley Hinson, who has previously voiced support for “alternative energy strategies.”

“More than half of the energy produced in Iowa is from renewable sources, and that is something for Iowans to be very proud of,” she told the House Appropriations Committee in June 2022.

Hinson’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the matter.

The number 2 spot for REAP grants: Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District, represented by Rep. Brad Finstad. In that district, which spans southern Minnesota, more than 260 farmers and rural businesses were approved for REAP grants.

Finstad’s office did not return multiple emails and calls requesting comment. His constituents have been complaining about his silence on funding freezes. They’ve staged at least two demonstrations at his offices in Minnesota. Finstad said he held a February 26 telephone town hall joined by 3,000 people in his district.

In a Feruary 28 letter to a constituent, Finstad said Rollins has announced that the USDA will honor contracts already signed with farmers and that he looks forward to working with the administration “to support the needs of farm country.”

Finstad is no stranger to the REAP program. Before becoming a congressman, he was the USDA’s state director of rural development for Minnesota. In that role, he was a renewable booster.

“By reducing energy costs, renewable energy helps to create opportunities for improvement elsewhere, like creating jobs,” Finstad said in a 2021 USDA press release. That has since been deleted from the agency’s website.

Rollins, meanwhile, called herself “a massive defender of fossil fuels” at her confirmation hearing, and she has expressed skepticism about the findings of climate scientists. “We know the research of CO2 being a pollutant is just not valid,” Rollins said at the Heartland Institute’s 2018 conference on energy.

She has also said that she welcomes the efforts of Elon Musk and his cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency team at the USDA.

Jake Rabe, a solar installer in Blairstown, Iowa, said he has put up more than 100,000 solar modules in the state since getting into the business in 2015. More than 30 of his customers have completed their installation but are awaiting frozen grant funding, he said. At least 10 more have signed the paperwork but are hesitant to begin construction. Millions of dollars worth of business is frozen, he said.

On top of that, Rabe said, the state’s net metering policies—in which solar users get credits for any excess power they send back to the grid—are set to expire in 2026.

“I kind of feel like it may be the beginning of the end for the solar industry in Iowa with what’s going on,” said Rabe, who owns Rabe Hardware.

Despite it all, he remains a Trump supporter.

“Under the current administration, I think we’re doing things that are necessary for the betterment of the entire United States,” he said.

On March 13, Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law group, filed a federal lawsuit against the USDA on behalf of five farmers and three nonprofits. They’re seeking a court order to compel the Trump administration to honor the government’s grant commitments, saying it violated the Constitution by refusing to disburse funds allocated by Congress.

Vizcarra, the Earthjustice lawyer, said she is disturbed by the lack of concern from Congress, whose powers appear to have been usurped by the administration.

She added, “These are real people, real farmers, and real organizations whose projects have impacts on communities who are left with this horrible situation with no idea of when it will end.”

One of the plaintiffs, Laura Beth Resnick, grows dahlias, zinnias, and other cut flowers on a small farm about 30 miles north of Baltimore.

Florists are her customers, and demand for her flowers blooms during cold-weather holidays like Thanksgiving. Each of her three greenhouses is half the length of a football field, and heating them during those months isn’t cheap, Resnick said. The power bill for Butterbee Farm often exceeds $500 a month.

So a year ago, Resnick applied for a USDA renewable energy grant, hoping to put solar panels on her barn roof—a move that she estimated would save about $5,000 a year. In August, the USDA sent word that her farm had been awarded a grant for $36,450.

The cost of installing solar panels was $72,000, she said. So she paid a solar contractor $36,000 upfront, expecting that she’d pay the rest in January when the federal grant money came in. The solar panels were installed in December.

Laura Beth Resnick, photographed here inside a greenhouse at her Maryland flower farm, spent $36,000 to have solar panels installed at her farm, expecting to get the same amount in grant money from the federal government. But the grant she was set to receive has been put on hold. Now she has joined a lawsuit to fight the Trump administration’s decision to freeze those grants. LA Birdie Photography

But the federal government’s check never arrived. A February 4 email from a USDA representative said her request for reimbursement was rejected due to the Trump administration’s recent executive orders.

Resnick said she sought help from her elected representatives but got “pretty much nowhere.”

After hearing about the USDA’s announcement Wednesday, Resnick said that based on the response she’s previously gotten from the USDA, she’s not confident she will get her grant money.

“I’ve lost my trust in the USDA at this point,” she said. “Our project is complete, so we can’t change the scope of it.”

Van Hollen, the Maryland Democrat, said he supports the legal fight against the funding freeze.

“Donald Trump and Elon Musk are scamming our farmers,” Van Hollen said in a statement to Floodlight. “By illegally withholding these reimbursements for work done under federal grants, they’re breaking a promise to farmers and small businesses in Maryland and across the country.”

Since 2023, when IRA funding became available, the USDA has given or loaned about $21.3 billion through programs to support renewable energy in rural areas, according to a Floodlight analysis of agency data, including the REAP program.

Those grant payments were processed until January 20, when the Trump administration announced its freeze.

Trump’s decision was in line with Project 2025, a conservative blueprint crafted by the Heritage Foundation aimed at reshaping the US government. That document called for repealing the IRA and rescinding “all funds not already spent by these programs.”

Environmental groups have sharply criticized the administration’s move, and several lawsuits are challenging the legality of the freeze of IRA funding.

At a recent public roundtable, Maggie Bruns, CEO of the Prairie Rivers Network which supports Illinois communities’ transition to clean energy, listed REAP grants that have been held up in Illinois, where her multifaceted environmental nonprofit is based. A $390,000 grant for a solar array at the grocery store in Carlinville; $27,000 for solar panels at an auto body shop in Staunton; $51,000 for a solar array for a golf course in Alton.

Since 2023, farmers and businesses in Illinois have been approved for more than 590 REAP grants, making the state the third highest in number of recipients in the United States, Floodlight’s analysis shows. In an interview with Barn Raiser, Bruns said the decision to freeze such grants has caused unneeded stress for farmers. Before the executive order, USDA’s rural development team had worked hard to bring dollars for renewable energy projects to Illinois farmers, she said.

“That’s the thing we should be celebrating right now,” Bruns said, “and instead we have to fight to make sure that money actually does land into the pockets of the people who have gone ahead, jumped through all these hoops, and are attempting to do the right thing for their businesses and their farms.”

In January, Dan Batson’s nursery in Mississippi was approved for a $400,367 REAP grant—money that he planned to use to install four solar arrays. He intended to use that solar energy to power the pumps that irrigate more than 1 million trees, a move that would have saved the company about $25,000 a year in electricity costs.

Seated in a wooded area about 30 miles north of Biloxi, his 42-year-old GreenForest nursery ships potted magnolias, hollies, crepe myrtles, and other trees to southern states. Until a couple of months ago, Batson had been excited about what the grant money would mean for the business.

Daniel Batson’s GreenForest tree nursery, shown here, was approved for a $400,367 grant to install solar panels. The move would have saved the Mississippi nursery $25,000 a year, he said. But now the grant has been frozen and Batson says he can’t afford to move ahead with the project. Photo courtesy of Daniel Batson

But when he saw news about the funding being held up earlier this year, he called a local USDA representative who confirmed the funds had been frozen. Batson had already sent the solar contractor $240,000. Now, his plans are on hold.

“I just can’t do the project if I don’t get the money,” he said.

Tuesday’s announcement from the USDA makes him no more confident he’ll get the money, he said.

Batson said he’s a fiscal conservative so he understands the effort to cut costs. “But,” he said, “the way they’ve gone about it has disrupted a lot of business owners’ lives.”

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Trump Tells SCOTUS There’s a “Rigorous Process” for Deporting Venezuelan Migrants. Yeah, Right.

On Friday, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to lift a lower court ruling blocking the mass deportation of thousands of detained Venezuelan migrants under the controversial Aliens Enemies Act of 1798, claiming in a filing that it has a “rigorous process” for identifying gang members.

However, Mother Jones‘ reporting suggests that the Trump administration is detaining people without due process on the flimsiest evidence, including their tattoos.

Since March, Donald Trump has been using the Alien Enemies Act to give himself the power to send migrants to El Salvador under the loosest of suspicion that they’re connected to Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that the president has designated as a “global terrorist group.” Despite claiming to have a strict vetting process of identifying alleged TdA members, the Trump administration has provided little to no evidence that this is the case. As my colleagues Noah Lanard and Isabela Dias reported,

When pressed on the criteria used for their identification, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt pointed to unspecified “intelligence” deployed to arrest the Venezuelans she has referred to as “heinous monsters.” Trump’s border czar Tom Homan has insisted—without providing specific details—that the public should trust ICE to have correctly targeted the Venezuelans based on “criminal investigations,” social media posts, and surveillance.

The administration’s Supreme Court filing likewise does little to provide evidence of careful vetting, simply describing the process as “weeks of work by President Trump and his cabinet.”

Lanard and Dias spoke with the families, friends, and lawyers of 10 men detained in El Salvador by the Trump administration, all of them contesting that their loved ones were profiled based on their tattoos and have no connection with gang or terrorist activity. As Lanard and Dias report:

The families have substantiated those assertions to Mother Jones, including—in many cases—by providing official documents attesting to their relatives’ lack of criminal histories in Venezuela. Such evidence might have persuaded US judges that the men were not part of any criminal organization had the Trump administration not deliberately deprived them of due process.

One of these men is Frizgeralth de Jesus Cornejo, a baker who has a tattoo of an autism awareness ribbon dedicated to his 15-year-old brother.

“I never imagined being imprisoned just for getting a tattoo,” Cornejo wrote. “I never imagined being separated from my family. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, not even my worst enemy if I had one. It’s horrible, it’s mental torture every day.”

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“Spiraling Deeper and Deeper Into Danger”: RFK Jr. Forces Out Top Vaccine Official

Robert F. Kennedy’s Jr. war on vaccines just landed another major blow as the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services successfully forced one of the nation’s top vaccine officials out of his position.

Dr. Peter Marks, who was given the choice by HHS officials to either be fired or step down as the director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, announced his resignation on Friday.

“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Marks reportedly wrote in his letter of resignation. He added that leaving his position was a “weight lifted from me” as working in this environment “was spiraling deeper and deeper into danger.”

For nearly a decade, Marks led the FDA’s regulation of vaccines, including playing an instrumental role in the development of the COVID-19 vaccine. So it should come as no surprise that his presence would cause conflict with the starkly anti-vaccine head of the HHS.

In response to Marks’ departure, an HHS official said in a statement, “If Peter Marks does not want to get behind restoring science to its golden standard and promoting radical transparency, then he has no place at FDA under the strong leadership of secretary Kennedy.”

This news comes as Kennedy plans to lay off thousands of HHS employees, while hiring his own fleet of anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists. According to several reports, Kennedy recently tapped David Geier, a discredited vaccine skeptic, to look into the long debunked scientific link between vaccines and autism.

As the New York Times reports, experts said appointing Geier to work on a study of vaccine safety is “like having a basketball referee show up in one team’s jersey.”

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Crypto: The Currency of the (Uninhabitable) Future

This story was originally published b_y Slate a_nd is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Once upon a time, not long ago, Elon Musk was worried sick about climate change. Stopping it became an overarching career mission, reflected in both his business decisions and everyday actions. He gave the electric vehicle industry a jolt after taking over Tesla Motors in 2004. He joined President Donald Trump’s first business advisory council in 2017, then resigned in protest when Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement. He directed Tesla to buy up $1 billion worth of Bitcoin in 2021 and accept the cryptocurrency in formal transactions, only to backtrack when he remembered that Bitcoin mining is, by design, a heavily energy-intensive process that requires masses of fossil fuel­–powered computer servers to run at all times. It was such a notorious moment in the crypto world that one speaker led “FUCK ELON” chants during that year’s Bitcoin conference.

What a remarkable thing, then, for Musk to embrace Trump more closely than ever as the reelected president decorates his administration with oil-industry shills and with crypto insiders, whose energy-intensive mining rigs and data centers make them something of a natural complement to the fossil fuel industry’s expansionist goals.

But of course, it tracks with his general shifts in ideology and mission since the COVID era. Scientific nerdery gave way to virus conspiracies; climate change took a back seat to his longtime A.I. fears as his former nonprofit, OpenAI, achieved staggering successes; Tesla’s dangerous self-driving cars and dubious robotics earned priority over the electrification of transport. Musk has been happy to re-embrace Bitcoin because incorporating the currency into Tesla’s assets and accounting has allowed him to artificially boost the company’s profit reports and keep investors happy. The Earth is one thing, but revenue is another.

The core issue can be boiled down to the fact that Bitcoin mining is—to put it lightly—really, really, really bad for the environment. This is primarily due to a system it relies on called “proof of work.” Take the computer servers with access to online blockchain protocols, set them up with high-efficiency chips (like those highly coveted GPUs) that can transmit more computing power at a faster rate, and run those servers 24/7 to solve the cryptographic puzzles required to unlock new Bitcoins. To replicate this operation at scale requires whole data centers’ worth of GPUs, which produce audible noise and require a lot of water to keep cool. A 2024 paper published in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability found that the water usage of US Bitcoin miners alone is as much as the average yearly water consumption of 300,000 US households. On top of that, a single Bitcoin transaction uses enough water to fill a swimming pool.

Much of the power used to keep these things running is sourced from fossil fuels, with all the attendant emissions. It’s been estimated that worldwide Bitcoin mining and transactions have consumed more power than countries like Finland each year. It’s worrying enough that even Republican lawmakers in crypto-friendly red states, like Arkansas, have passed bills to regulate the digital-asset industry’s noise and air pollution. (Those efforts might be undercut should Trump carry through with an ill-advised campaign promise to ensure all Bitcoin is mined within US borders only. Ironically, however, his trade war with China has prevented American Bitcoin miners from securing needed equipment.)

The techno-centric vision for Trump 2.0 was laid out in various written screeds from Musk’s Silicon Valley friends at Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital hydra (and crypto funder) whose namesake founders became enthusiastic Trump converts and staffers this election cycle. Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” insisted upon building out energy “abundance” instead of cutting back on any fossil-fuel use; Ben Horowitz’s “Politics and the Future” blog announcement pledged his support for any political candidate who believed, like he did, that crypto “will create a fairer, more inclusive economy”; the duo’s co-written “Little Tech Agenda” all but declared war against the regulatory state in the wake of Biden administration attempts to impose tighter crypto regulations.

With Andreessen himself having joined Musk in keenly advising Trump throughout the presidential transition, the new administration has gotten to work implementing all facets of the Andreessen Horowitz blueprint—and yes, the crypto and energy policies are not incidental, because top-down climate denial is hardly irrelevant to their goals. The Securities and Exchange Commission, now a far more crypto-friendly agency under Trump, has also scrapped a Biden-era requirement for large companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions in depth. The president has once again withdrawn the US from the Paris Agreement, with no objection from Musk this round. In fact, his already-infamous Department of Governmental Efficiency has been targeting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency for data purges, grant freezes, and mass firings. It’s not a coincidence that Musk is doing this under the aegis of a fake “department” that’s named for the Dogecoin cryptocurrency and was staffed with Marc Andreessen’s help.

(Also not a coincidence: that the primary zero-carbon energy source the new Department of Energy is interested in expanding is nuclear power, a fixation of both Andreessen’s and Horowitz’s. Why is that? Well, it’s a good way to thumb their noses at misguided environmentalists who protested fission plants after the Three Mile Island meltdown. Also, they want more data and mining centers to be powered by nuclear power specifically.)

While purges of NOAA and EPA data are troubling for many reasons, one of the biggest is that they’ve censored key resources for tracking American energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

While purges of NOAA and EPA data are troubling for many reasons, one of the biggest is that they’ve censored key resources for tracking American energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Those have been especially useful markers for independent researchers surveying and tracking how America utilizes its electricity, both dirty and clean. There’s Digiconomist, the much-cited project from Dutch economist Alex de Vries, that keeps a public monitor of Bitcoin mining’s environmental and emissions impacts. There’s also the fact that this data affects the pricing and regulation of agricultural commodities—and since Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will be considered commodities like gold and silver, it will be the agriculture-focused members of Congress who lead legislative oversight. What could go wrong?

Digital-asset evangelists are especially sensitive to the climate critiques, which popped up time and again during the pandemic-era crypto bubble as myriad celebrities—even the nominally environmentalist ones—got in on the grift. Some crypto ventures, like the alternative currency and blockchain Ethereum, shifted to coin-mining methods that were far less energy-intensive.

But Bitcoin truthers and like-minded users are dedicated to their all-systems-go, all-the-time approach. Why should the government make it easier for anyone to scrutinize and call out their electricity needs? And why should banks and other firms express any skepticism over cryptocurrency’s actual value, or take the time to meet their climate and environmental goals, when they could just be forced to mine this stuff instead? Trump himself has been cozying up to the stuff in increasingly concerning ways, from a disastrous meme currency to a coin-hoarding private venture to the establishment of a crypto arm for his Truth Social network, dedicated data centers, and all. No better way to ensure regulatory capture than to grant the president his own funny money.
To that end, why should the government do anything to oppose the “financial innovation” tech in which some powerful VCs just so happen to have staked millions of dollars? If the consequence happens to be a hotter, less-inhabitable Earth, so be it. At least the crypto mavens will have their digital riches to isolate them from the real-world consequences of these decisions.

True believers in crypto have often championed it as the answer to so many of our financial, political, and even cultural woes. It’s decentralized, giving money and power back to the people without having to rely on evil banks or governments. It allows anyone to keep their money safe from inflation and the finicky, unpredictable economy. So what if it takes a few million gallons of water and untold amounts of greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere each year?

This is the currency of the future. It’s just too bad that there might not be a habitable future to spend it in.

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Trump’s Secret Police Are Stalking More and More Students

On Tuesday afternoon, a federal judge in New York’s Northern District heard opening arguments in the case of Momodou Taal v. Trump. Neither party was present in the courtroom—in large part because Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has been trying to find Taal for days, reportedly staking out his home and entering his university’s campus.

Taal, a British-Gambian doctoral student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, sued the administration on February 15 to challenge Trump’s executive orders curtailing free speech and seeking to deport pro-Palestinian activists, which have been paired with a wave of attacks by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers—in some cases masked and hooded—on graduate and undergraduate students.

At 12:52 a.m. on Friday—within five days of Taal’s lawsuit—Taal’s lawyers received an email “inviting” their client to “surrender to ICE custody.” At 7:00 p.m. the following day, Trump’s lawyers filed a brief informing Taal that the State Department had already revoked his visa, without his knowledge, on March 14—the day before Taal filed his lawsuit. Days later, ICE agents arrived on Cornell’s campus attempting to find and seize him.

Over the past two weeks, the Trump administration has targeted at least eight foreign academics in America for deportation, often sending officers to snatch them off the street or in their homes, retroactively changing what they’re charged with, and shipping them halfway across the country, far from their families lawyers—increasingly in apparent defiance of court orders against their rendition. Members of the commentariat like venture capitalist Paul Graham have mused that “the students ICE is disappearing seem such a random selection.”

But experts and people close to the cases say it’s not random at all. The scholars in question are immigrant academics—Gambian, Palestinian, Korean, and Turkish—targeted for pro-Palestinian social media posts, op-eds, and participation in last year’s campus-based opposition to the continuing slaughter in Gaza.

Momodou Taal knew this was coming for months. “Given my public exposure, if he were to deport student protesters, I think I would be at the top of the list as a target,” he told Mother Jones in January. But, Taal said in a recent Intercept podcast appearance, his personal stakes pale in comparison to those of Palestinians in Gaza, where the number of known dead has passed 50,000—as the US continues shipping bombs and warplanes to Israel, and as Israeli officials threaten a full-scale military takeover of the territory, “I know it’s a very frightening moment,” Taal said in that Intercept appearance,“but for me, this is the time to double down.”

Taal’s lawsuit, filed with fellow Cornell doctoral student Sriram Parasuram and Mukoma Wa Ngũgĩ, a Cornell literature professor, asserts that Trump’s late January executive orders cracking down on campus speech violate both Taal’s right to political expression and the rights of those around him to hear it.

“It’s quite calculated and deliberate,” Taal told me on Thursday.

Suing the president “is the only form of redress many of us have, in this moment, as a form of protection.”

ICE agents, usually plainclothed and sometimes masked, are accosting students in the streets, using what even former House Rep. Ron Paul calls “Gestapo” tactics.

Trump’s executive orders conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, Taal said, have “clearly placed a target upon many people’s backs.” Taal recommends that students in his situation “lawyer up”—because the Trump administration, he said, is not acting alone: right-wing groups such as Canary Mission, an online doxxing platform that collects the personal information of anti-Zionist students and professors, have claimed credit for some students’ detentions.

Suing the president, Taal said, “is the only form of redress many of us have, in this moment, as a form of protection.” Yunseo Chung, a Korean undergraduate at Columbia University who has been a legal permanent resident of the US since she was seven years old, filed suit on Monday for a temporary restraining order to prevent her deportation. Her case went to court on the same day as Taal’s, and her order was quickly granted; Taal’s own request for a temporary restraining order was deniedby a New Jersey judge a day after it was filed.

“I think the stakes in all these cases are the same,” said Abed Ayoub, the executive director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), whose lawyers are representing Taal. While each case has its nuances—some students have been detained, others have not; some are on green cards, others on visas—“what we’re seeing is an attack on the First Amendment rights of folks in this country to express themselves,” Ayoub said.

Chung’s suit accuses the Trump administration of a “larger pattern of attempted US government repression of constitutionally protected protest activity and other forms of speech,” and asserts that the federal government aims to “retaliate against and punish noncitizens like Ms. Chung for their participation in protests.” Taal’s asserts that Trump’s executive orders prohibit noncitizens from “engaging in constitutionally protected speech” that the Trump administration “may subjectively interpret as expressing a ‘hostile attitude” to its interests by deploying the threat of deportation.

That threat, Taal says, casts a frighteningly broad net. “It’s important that people recognize that it could be anyone, and that they need to rise up, and escalate, and refuse this to be normalized,” Taal said Thursday.

Chung and Taal are now two of many. Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of Palestinian nationality, and a Columbia graduate student until December of last year, is also suing the president for the right to have his immigration case heard near his home in New York; he was arrested by ICE at his Manhattan residence on March 8 and, after initially being imprisoned in a New Jersey immigration detention facility, was remanded to an ICE “processing center” in Louisiana, where he is still being held. His fellow Columbia graduate student, Ranjani Srinivasan, fled the US for India on March 11 after ICE came knocking at her door. International students and professors Badar Khan Suri of Georgetown University in Washington, DC, Rasha Alawieh of Brown University in Rhode Island, Alireza Doroudi of the University of Alabama (who has not publicly engaged in pro-Palestine activism), and Rumeysa Ozturk of Tufts University in Massachusetts have also been seized in the past two weeks.

Chilling footage of Ozturk’s arrest swept the internet Thursday: six masked individuals in civilian clothes surrounded the graduate student on a sidewalk in Somerville.

“Hey ma’am,” one said, and grabbed Ozturk’s wrists. She screamed as several others surrounded her.

“It’s important that people recognize that it could be anyone, and that they need to rise up, and escalate, and refuse this to be normalized.”

“Can I just call the police?” Ozturk asked in the surveillance video. “We are the police,” one masked, hooded person responded. They handcuffed her and dragged her away.

In a Thursday press conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended Ozturk’s abduction. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa,” he told reporters Thursday. Ozturk’s “lunatic” behavior appears to consist only of co-authoring one student newspaper op-ed, exactly one year before she was detained, asking her university to acknowledge a student government resolution calling for divestment from Israel. She has not been charged with any offense, but was painted by Rubio as “a social activist that tears up our university campuses”—and was forcibly disappeared.

Rubio’s State Department, meanwhile, has issued new guidance calling for extensive screening of student visa applicants’ social media for any posts that “demonstrate a degree of approval” of what it calls “terrorist activity.”

Ayoub, of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, says the recent spate of ICE abductions echoes the Nixon era: In 1972, the Nixon White House deployed an extensive surveillance program against Arab communities in the United States—scrutinizing the visa status of anyone who appeared to have an Arabic last name—ostensibly to screen out terrorists.

In practice, Ayoub said, the policy inevitably led to unjust detainments, deportations, and even disappearances: “A number of our community members just disappeared,” he said. “There was no social media, and nobody walked around with a cell phone. So people just disappeared, and you wouldn’t hear from them until six, seven months later.” More than 150,000 people were investigated.

“Before all of this started,” Ayoub said, “I was warning people that we will see the same: people just picked up and moved to a location where we’re not going to hear from them, because this is the practice of what happened before.”

Then, as now, he said, those in power were “banking on not everybody being upset, on people buying into the ‘threat to national security’ type of language.” But it’s no longer as easy for authorities to move in darkness; this time, people are organizing. The same day that footage of Ozturk’s arrest was released, more than one thousand people rallied on her behalf in Somerville, and protests in support of Mahmoud Khalil have been taking place across the country since his arrest almost three weeks ago.

The Trump administration, Ayoub said, is “betting on the idea that not many are going to come out and defend the students, or support the students, or defend their right to express their opinions in this country. But that, I think, is where they’re mistaken.”

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Marco Rubio Is Quite Chuffed

Amid intense outrage over the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts student who was ambushed and detained by plainclothes federal immigration officers this week, Marco Rubio appeared gratified.

“We revoked her visa, it’s an F-1 visa, I believe,” the secretary of State told reporters at a press conference in Guyana on Thursday when asked about the arrest. “We revoked it and I’ll tell you why.”

“If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student,” Rubio continued with increasing conviction, “and you tell us that the reason you are coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we are not going to give you a visa.”

“Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas,” he added, estimating that as many as 300 people have similarly had their visas revoked as the Trump administration pursues its dramatic crackdown on free speech.

Yet nowhere in his remarks did Rubio provide evidence that Ozturk—who was on her way to break the Ramadan fast when federal agents in face masks arrested her in broad daylight—participated in the types of destructive behavior Rubio outlined as grounds for deportation. Instead, as many have now reported, Ozturk was the co-author of a 2024 opinion piece in a student newspaper criticizing Tufts’ handling of student demands to divest from companies with ties to Israel. A Fox News description of the same op-ed even appeared to acknowledge the scant evidence that Ozturk was the kind of trouble-making activist characterized by Rubio: “While her op-ed never mentioned support for Hamas, the terrorist network, it did call on the university to divest from companies,” the Fox story noted.

In a court filing, Ozturk’s attorneys noted that she has been criticized by Canary Mission, a website documenting individuals it deems as holding hateful views toward Israel. The site, which focuses on students and professors, has been referenced in multiple court cases related to campus protests over Gaza. As Ozturk’s own lawsuit notes:

“In February 2025, the website Canary Mission published a profile on Rumeysa, including her photograph, claiming she “engaged in anti-Israel activism in March 2024….” The profile describes Rumeysa as “a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.” Its sole support for the contention that Rümeysa “engaged in anti-Israel activism” was a link and screenshots of the March 2024 opinion piece.

The lawsuit also cited Rubio’s push as a US senator to punish pro-Palestinian activists protesting Israel’s devastation of Gaza. Here he was in 2023, calling on then-President Joe Biden to revoke visas and initiate deportation proceedings for foreign nationals who were supposedly “supporting Hamas.”

“You are not even American,” he said from the Senate floor. “You’re a foreign national. You’re here because we gave you a visa to be here temporarily, and now you’re out there defending and supporting Hamas, a terrorist organization? You need to go.”

That language eerily echoes the rhetoric Rubio used Thursday, as he once again seemed to imagine himself chastising protesters face-to-face: “Don’t come here. If you’re going to do that, go somewhere else. Don’t come here.”

Now, as Trump’s secretary of State, Rubio is far better positioned to convince the president to embrace his undemocratic approach to the country’s visa process. That access to power doesn’t seem to have convinced him to stop talking about protesters like a puffed-up bully at the playground.

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RFK Jr. Moves to Close Administration For Community Living

On Thursday, the federal Department of Health and Human Services moved, through a department-wide restructuring order, to eliminate the Administration for Community Living (ACL), a subsidiary established in 2012 to support disabled and aging people—part of a broader series of cuts that will see the firing of some 10,000 HHS staff. HHS’ press release on the restructuring claims that ACL’s responsibilities will be redesignated elsewhere within the department, which has yet to issue further details or clarify its plans. An unknown number of the administration’s workers will also be laid off.

Jill Jacobs, a Biden-era commissioner of ACL’s Administration on Disabilities, was shocked to hear the news. “It’s not something that’s been on anyone’s radar, not a conversation that anyone’s been having,” said Jacobs, who is now the executive director of the National Association of Councils on Developmental Disabilities.

“Where exactly are they going to go? Who is going to implement [it]? Is this the first step in cutting further programs?”

Mia Ives-Rublee, senior director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the nonpartisan Center for American Progress, believes that the move “shows that this administration is not committed to community living and the Americans with Disabilities Act.”

The decision by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s HHS is only the latest Trump administration action to bring harm to disabled people. Disability experts I spoke to expressed that the decision reflected a lack of awareness of the Administration for Community Living’s crucial role for disabled and aging Americans. That may not be surprising given the department’s current leadership; Kennedy mainly talks about disability in the context of conspiracy theories that vaccines cause autism in children. Now, disabled people worried about cuts to their Medicaid coverage will also have to worry whether the assistance they receive through independent living centers will continue.

“There’s nothing in here that explains how they are going to continue implementing these programs,” said Alison Barkoff, ACL’s acting administrator and assistant secretary for aging for most of the Biden administration. “Where exactly are they going to go? Who is the staff that’s going to implement them? Is this the first step in cutting further programs?”

A central part of ACL’s purpose has been oversight of state protection and advocacy agencies for disabled people, providing grants for approved independent living centers, support for employment programs for disabled people, and assistance with adult protective services—all with the goal of helping disabled and aging people live successfully within their communities, rather than in institutions.

“The real concern,” Barkoff says, “is that if ACL and its programs are spread across the [HHS] department, we will see more people forced into institutional settings, out of their own homes, out of their own communities.” A letter from the co-chairs of the Disability and Aging Collaborative, which consists of 62 member organizations that focus at least in part on disability and aging, cautions that the changes could result in “homelessness and long-lasting economic impacts.”

The Administration for Community Living was designed for “bringing programs together to make sure that there were efficiencies and synergies between aging and disability networks,” said Barkoff, now director of George Washington University’s health law and policy program. To do so, ACL coordinates with other HHS agencies like the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in areas like Home and Community-Based Services, and externally, with agencies like the Department of Transportation. ACL’s own workforce, Jacobs said, “is comprised of people with disabilities and older Americans.”

The ACL had not been a notable target of the Republicans before Thursday. On Wednesday, Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) even cosponsored a bipartisan bill aiming to require ACL “to provide peer support services for children, grandparents, and caregivers impacted by the opioid crisis.”

There are “very economically sound reasons for ACL to continue to exist.”

Even Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for an arch-conservative remaking of the federal government—which the Trump administration has consistently followed—counted on ACL to remain in place: it proposes distributing funds provided by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act through the agency. Now that President Donald Trump has started hollowing out the federal Department of Education with an eye to its abolition, Ives-Rublee and Jacobs want to know how the federal government will continue to serve disabled students. “How are they going to do that,” Ives-Rublee said, “when they basically destroyed ACL?”

But Ives-Rublee isn’t convinced that the Trump administration can necessarily make good on its plan. “It’s going to be very, very important for community members to come together and start filing lawsuits,” she said, “because this is incredibly illegal—to be reducing staff and reducing the ability for individuals with disabilities to receive services.”

While the HHS cuts, and the Trump administration’s wider slashing of federal agencies and services, are nominally about saving money, Jacobs doesn’t believe that eliminating the Administration for Community Living—which helps keep people out of nursing homes—will do so. “Community living costs our taxpayers a third of what it costs for people to live in institutional settings,” Jacobs said. “There are very economically sound reasons for ACL to continue to exist.”

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Greenland’s Elections This Month Weren’t About Trump. They Were Mostly About Fish.

This story was originally published on the author’s substack, Field Notes with Alexander C Kaufman, to which you can subscribe here.

Last week, Greenlanders trudged through snow and ice to cast ballots in their most closely watched parliamentary elections in modern history—possibly ever.

Just two months earlier, Donald Trump had returned to power, vowing to achieve what American presidents had tried and failed to do before: bring the world’s largest island under Washington’s direct control. Since World War II, the United States has boasted a large security presence in the autonomous Arctic territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. During a speech before Congress a week before the March 11 election, Trump repeated his offer for Greenlanders to join the United States but vowed to take the island “one way or the other.”

Greenlandic voters overwhelmingly rejected the invitation. While virtually all major parties support independence from Denmark, the party that won the most seats in the legislature backs a slow separation from the Nordic nation, which provides the bulk of Greenland’s public funding.

More than anything, however, the election came down to fish.

The incumbent left-wing government placed new rules on who could obtain fishing permits. To better spread the wealth from the biggest industry among the island’s roughly 56,000 people, the government wanted to redistribute quotas to a greater number of fishermen over the next 10 years. The new quota system had yet to come into effect. But regulators pursued a strict methodology that barred members of the same family from obtaining competing permits. If one fisherman loaned money to another for a boat, for example, the two would count as a single unit under the new quota system.

That created problems, according to Christian Keldsen, director of the Greenland Business Association, the largest industry group on the island. “With the money I may have made in the industry, if I wanted to use that to finance others downstream, that would not be possible going forward,” he told me.

That made the political messaging from the pro-business Demokraatit party—whose platform calls for maximizing “personal freedom” and ensuring that the public sectors “never stand in the way of” private enterprise—appealing to voters.

In its manifesto, the center-right party—known as the Democrats—said the fisheries law will make the industry “less efficient.”

“The sad truth is that the new fisheries law will harm the earnings of individual fishermen overall, while the economy will also deteriorate,” the document reads. “This means that there will be less money to improve the healthcare system. Less money to raise the level of primary schools. Less money to ensure better daycare institutions. Less money for the elderly. Less money for sports. In short; less money to run the country in the best possible way.”

The Democrats gained seven seats in Greenland’s single-chamber legislature, the Inatsisartut, seizing roughly one-third of the 31-seat parliament.

Keldsen said the party won a clear mandate to reform the fisheries law. What the new government does besides that depends largely on which party the Democrats form a coalition with.

The centrist party Naleraq, which is more pro-American and advocates the fastest-possible pathway to independence from Denmark, doubled its share of the parliament to eight seats, vaulting the party into second place.

“If you look at the Democrats, they focused on things that are important to people—housing, health care, education and growing the economy,” said Mads Qvist Frederiksen, the executive director of the Arctic Economic Council, a regional business group that includes Greenlandic industry.

“Independence from Denmark and Donald Trump did not take up a lot of the campaign,” he told me by phone. “But for Naleraq, it did.”

The party managed to secure most of the votes in the less populous northern reaches of Greenland, where its populist message played better than in the more populous, cosmopolitan and industrialized south. Given its strength in the new parliament, it’s a natural opposition party.

That makes an alliance between the Democrats and the left-wing Inuit Ataqatigiit party, which controlled the outgoing government, more likely. Another potential coalition partner may be the pro-Denmark Atassut party, which came in fifth place.

But Keldsen warned that the Democrats are “fairly open” to “all scenarios.”

“If you take the Naleraq situation, they’re more aligned on business, but they stand far from each other on sovereignty,” he said. “With the IA, they’re very close on sovereignty, but very far apart on business.”

Siumut—a center-left party that held the junior role in the outgoing governing coalition—fell from second to fourth place this time, likely because once-loyal voters affected by the fisheries law jumped ship to the Democrats this time. That could make a tie-up with the Democrats harder.

The one thing uniting all parties: Opposition to becoming part of the United States.

In a joint statement issued on March 13, two days after the election, the heads of all five parties condemned Trump’s “repeated statements about annexation and control of Greenland.”

“As party chairmen, we find this behavior unacceptable to friends and allies in a defense alliance,” they wrote.

It’s not hard to see why. Survey data on public opinion in Greenland was scarce ahead of the election. But 85 percent of Greenlanders opposed joining the US in a poll taken in January, while just 56 percent backed independence.

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“A Sicker America”: RFK Jr.’s HHS Will Lay Off 10,000 Staff

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s remaking of the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) entered a new phase on Thursday, when officials announced that the department’s workforce would shrink by another 10,000 staff to comply with President Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s orders to drastically shrink the federal government.

HHS announced that the “dramatic restructuring” of the agency will include cuts to offices including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Combined with HHS’s other efforts to reduce its workforce—the buyout offers it recently made to employees and its January “fork in the road email” that offered federal workers eight months’ pay to resign—the department’s overall workforce will go from 82,000 to 62,000 full-time employees, a reduction of nearly 25 percent. In a six-minute video posted to X detailing the plans, Kennedy acknowledged that the cuts will bring about “a painful period for HHS.”

We are streamlining HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective. We will eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments, while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for a Healthy America or AHA. This… pic.twitter.com/BlQWUpK3u7

— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) March 27, 2025

The agency offered some details on the specific offices that will see cuts, including the NIH, which will lose about 1,200 employees; the FDA, which will lose about 3,500 employees, which HHS claims “will not affect drug, medical device, or food reviewers, nor will it impact inspectors”; the CMS, which will lose about 300 employees, which the agency says “will not impact Medicare and Medicaid services”; and the CDC, which will lose about 2,400.

HHS’ 28 divisions will be reduced to 15, to include a new division called the Administration for a Healthy America, which “will centralize core functions such as Human Resources, Information Technology, Procurement, External Affairs, and Policy,” according to the HHS news release; that office will also now include the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), which HHS says “will break down artificial divisions between similar programs.”

The press release from HHS also announced the dismantling of the Administration for Community Living, which oversees vital programs and services for disabled and aging people. It includes independent living centers and protection and advocacy agencies, which were established by Congress and perform important tasks such as investigating claims of abuse in group homes for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities; in 2022, ACL also unveiled a National Strategy to Support Family Caregivers. In a LinkedIn post, former ACL acting administrator and Assistant Secretary for Aging Alison Barkoff said that ACL “has been incredibl[y] effective, with lean staffing and programs with incredible returns on investments.” Its dismantling, Barkoff wrote, was “yet another” move that hurt disabled and older adults, in addition to ongoing attacks on Medicaid and an executive order hollowing out the federal Department of Education as a prelude to abolishing it altogether.

While the press release said that programs under ACL will be reorganized, there will likely be disruptions along the way. “We are deeply concerned that these HHS organizational changes and workforce reductions may undermine the momentum and implementation of our nation’s first-ever National Strategy to Support Family Caregivers,” said Jason Resendez, President and CEO of the National Alliance for Caregiving, in a press release.

HHS will also shutter five of its regional offices, which amount to half of the total.It is not immediately clear how this will affect the agency’s return-to-office mandate, which required employees within 50 miles of an HHS office to begin working in-person five days a week; those who live more than 50 miles from an HHS building have been ordered to report to any federal office building—which, as previously reported, led federal workers to question how offices would manage the influx of in-person employees.

Spokespeople for HHS did not immediately respond to specific questions from Mother Jones about which regional offices would close, the 13 specific divisions that will be consolidated, and how many, if any, employees of the ACL would lose their jobs.

The department claims that, in total, the measures will save the agency $1.8 billion annually. The agency said it would also appoint a new Assistant Secretary for Enforcement “to combat waste, fraud, and abuse in federal health programs.”

“Over time, bureaucracies like HHS become wasteful and inefficient even when most of their staff are dedicated and competent civil servants,” Kennedy said in a statement. “This overhaul will be a win-win for taxpayers and for those that HHS serves.”

Some public health experts, though, believe otherwise.

Dr. Tom Frieden, former CDC director under President Obama, said in a post on X: “CDC has been the flagship of public health for generations, pursuing its core mission of saving lives and protecting people from health threats of all kinds. A weaker CDC means a sicker America.”

Jill Rosenthal, director of public health policy at the nonpartisan Center for American Progress, said in a statement: “This is not ‘streamlining’ work—it’s slashing what Americans across the country rely on to keep them, their families, and their communities healthy. This move to gut HHS will bring to a screeching halt crucial efforts to ensure Americans that our food is safe, drugs and medical devices are up to standards, our family members can access needed health services, and our communities are protected from health emergencies.”

Some also find it hard to believe that the cuts will not affect the work of the targeted offices. “I worry how losing 3,500 people at the FDA will ensure drug, medical devices, and food are still inspected and approved efficiently,” one CDC researcher told us. “Those function areas were already understaffed,” she said, adding that it was also unclear how cuts to the FDA would help achieve HHS’ new stated goals to tackle “chronic illness by focusing on safe, wholesome food, clean water, and the elimination of environmental toxins.”

“I just don’t see how things can operate the way they are now with 10-20,000 less people,” said an employee of the Administration for Children and Families.

An NIH employee said he saw the news as proof that “RFK Jr. is carrying out the marching orders of President Musk with total disregard for how these ‘changes’ will impact public health and the public health system.”

“He’s not a doctor. He’s not a scientist,” the NIH employee said of the HHS head. “In fact, just the opposite. He’s a conspiracy theorist.”

“This Make America Healthy Again nonsense will do just the opposite of what they’re claiming it will do,” he added. “It will make us sicker. Mentally and physically.”

Multiple HHS employees told us on Thursday morning that they had received no internal announcement of, nor further information on, the planned cuts, and had instead learned about them from the news media. Due to the lack of detail on which employees would lose their jobs, according to those staffers, the potential impacts of the cuts on public health and the agency’s mission were still impossible to determine. Several said they expected to receive more information on Friday about how their offices would be affected by the changes.

An NIH scientific review officer said the lack of internal communication was “part of why we have been mired in such uncertainty and chaos.”

“We often learn [about changes] from outside sources,” like the media or former colleagues, she said. She characterized the lack of communication as “yet another move that feels designed to be demoralizing and stressful for the workforce.”

“It’s not clear what our leadership knows, or if they have been consulted,” she added. “Without that, it’s difficult to imagine changes being effective and efficient and in service of our mission.”

Even without knowing whether they will be impacted, employees are bracing for the worst. “The mood is pretty awful,” another ACF worker said. “Supervisors told us we could go home if we needed to.”

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“The Opposite of Efficiency”: DOGE’s Credit Card Crackdown Is Making Research Slower, Harder, and Worse

An employee at one government-run national research lab spent half a day this week cancelling orders for equipment—time that, as a technician, he could have spent running experiments.

That worker is one of many whose “PCard,” or purchasing card, will be revoked at the end of the month—part of an internal order by the Department of Energy to “significantly” reduce the number of such cardholders across the system. Effectively an official credit or debit card, PCards are used by the national laboratories, which conduct research on a wide range of scientific and technical subjects ranging from environmental management to national security, to save valuable time and streamline transactions. But to the Trump administration, the cards are further evidence that there’s an epidemic of overspending on science—so they’re on the DOGE chopping block, whatever the consequences.

The technician’s name and the laboratory employing him have been withheld to ensure his safety. He is passionate about the work he does in the field of research: “things [that] have benefited us so much over the years.” He received notice via email, which Mother Jones has reviewed, citing the upcoming changes.

The email conceded that the decrease in PCard holders is “significant” and listed the remaining employees authorized to use the cards. While the email said more announcements would be coming, there was no acknowledgement of how the changes would disrupt workflows or research.

This is not the first time the administration has targeted government cards. At the end of February, the Trump administration ordered all credit cards frozen by March 26th in his “Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Cost Efficiency Initiative” executive order. The order, which was not cited in the Department of Energy email correspondence reviewed, excludes disaster relief or other critical services as determined by the agency head. The National Park Service and parts of the Pentagon were already hit with $1 PCard limits.

Rather than yielding savings, suspending the cards seems to have already cost both time and efficiency on researchers’ part: Some orders the technician had already made—to purchase materials required for ongoing experiments—wouldn’t have been charged for several weeks, forcing him to cancel them so they wouldn’t charge a card that would be defunct.

That just kicks the can down the road: one of the remaining or new cardholders will have to refile the orders. Some have little to no experience with the process, says the technician: “We may eventually get what we need, but it’s just going to push everything back. There’s going to be a lot of delays.”

That felt, he said, like the “opposite of efficiency.” There are already processes in place—not just in that lab, but everywhere government purchasing cards are used—to ensure that there isn’t fraud or misuse of funds. Every purchase requires a paper trail that is reviewed. “If there’s even something slightly off, the accounting department is going to contact me back,” the technician explains.

To the technician blowing the whistle on the changes, it looks more like a method to limit and throw up hurdles to scientific research, which has been a general goal of the Trump administration. He points out that the research funding has already been allocated—the cards do not, in fact, draw on some kind of unchecked scientific slush fund.

“This attack on science and research is not just going to just hinder us from advancing,” the technician said, “but actually set us back.” In that sense, the administration is achieving its goal: there is “apprehension” in the lab these days, he says, and colleagues he works with are fairly certain their contracts will not be renewed.

The policy is only succeeding in “creating a bottleneck,” the technician laments. “We’re going from a five-lane highway down to a two-lane highway.” He pauses. “I should say, two lanes [as in] one way in each direction.”

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