Trump Just Outlined His Plan to Hand Power to Christian Nationalists

We always knew that Trump’s return to the White House would bring Christian nationalism to the highest levels of government.

There’s Russell Vought, an avowed Christian nationalist and an author of Project 2025, who is Trump’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget—which leads the implementation of the president’s policies, regulations, and funding decisions across the federal government, as my colleague Isabela Dias has written. And there was the pair of Christian podcasters who, at a rally the night before Trump’s inauguration, thanked God for “choosing President Donald Trump as a vessel for your nation,” as my colleague David Corn covered.

The signs, in other words, have been there for a while.

But at the National Prayer Breakfast—a decades-old, purportedly interfaith annual event—in DC on Thursday, President Trump laid out the steps he will take, now that he’s in office, to make thosedreams of Christian nationalist power a reality. “We want to bring religion back—stronger, bigger, better than ever before,” he said. These measures will allegedly include:

• Creating a so-called Presidential Commission on Religious Liberty, which he so eloquently claimed will “be a very big deal”;
• Signing an executive order ordering newly-confirmed Attorney General Pam Bondi to “eradicate anti-Christian bias” inside the federal government and “prosecute anti-Christian violence and vandalism in our society”;
• And creating a new Faith Office in the White House, which will be led by the televangelist and Trump acolyte Rev. Paula White—who, as my colleagues Stephanie Mencimer and Kiera Butler have written, is often associated with an evangelical Christian movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, whose leaders claim that God speaks directly to them and “that Christians are called to wage a spiritual battle for control of the United States.”

The White House did not respond to several questions from Mother Jones seeking more details on the proposals Trump outlined—including whether Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency agrees that these efforts would be a good use of taxpayer dollars and what evidence, if any, Trump has that there is a problem of “anti-Christian bias” within the federal government.

Trump at the National Prayer Breakfast announces that he's signing an order directing AG Pam Bondi to head a task force "to eradicate anti-Christian bias" pic.twitter.com/pa8yoGrsnT

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 6, 2025

On Thursday night, Trump signed the executive order on “eradicating anti-Christian bias.” It directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to chair a task force including several other Cabinet officials—including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—tasked with rooting out “any unlawful anti-Christian policies, practices, or conduct” in federal agencies and making recommendations to the president about how to “rectify past improper anti-Christian conduct” and “protect religious liberty.” Within four months, the task force must produce a report to the president of its initial work, and it must produce another report within a year. The executive order says the task force will dissolve in two years unless the president extends it. Plans for the task force were included in the most recent Republican party platform.

Rachel Laser, CEO of the nonprofit advocacy group Americans United For Separation of Church and State, said in a statement that the task force “will misuse religious freedom to justify bigotry, discrimination, and the subversion of our civil rights laws,” adding, “this task force is not a response to Christian persecution; it’s an attempt to make America into an ultra-conservative Christian Nationalist nation.”

The sole example of so-called “anti-Christian bias” Trump cited at the breakfast was the case of Paulette Harlow, one of the nearly two dozen people he pardoned two weeks ago for blocking the entrances to abortion clinics (some of the more serious violations included breaking into the clinics and stealing fetal tissue). Harlow, a 70-something Massachusetts resident, was sentenced to two years in prison last May for being part of a group that broke into a DC abortion clinic in October 2020 and livestreamed their blockading of the entrance; she was found guilty following a bench trial of federal civil rights conspiracy and violating the FACE Act, a federal law that prevents interfering with access to reproductive health clinics, according to Biden’s Department of Justice. (Trump’s DOJ has said they will limit enforcement of the law, which has abortion clinics bracing for potentially violent protests.)

But in Trump’s rewriting of history on Thursday, he falsely claimed that Harlow “was put in jail because she was praying”—which even Harlow’s former attorney has said is not accurate. In fact, according to court documents, Harlow was not a peaceful protester, but instead body-slammed the clinic manager into a waiting room chair. Once law enforcement arrived, she told them she would not cooperate with arrest and that they would have to “use a power-saw to cut the bike lock she affixed to her neck” to attach herself to other protesters as part of the blockade, the court documents state. Harlow denied the allegations against her at trial, despite video evidence proving otherwise. (Allen Orenberg, the lawyer who previously told Reuters that Harlow was not, in fact, jailed for praying, said when reached by email on Thursday that he is no longer representing Harlow and directed questions to her current lawyer, Carmen Hernandez, who said Harlow did not actually serve any prison time due to delays stemming from health issues, and that she was scheduled to report to prison later this month. Hernandez also pointed to a court record that stated that Harlow “passively resisted arrest by going limp,” and then quoted comments from Martin Luther King, Jr. about “passive resistance.” She did not respond to a question about the allegation that Harlow body-slammed the clinic manager.)

Trump also falsely claimed that the FACE Act was “selectively weaponized against Christians by the previous administration”—but Biden’s DOJ also enforced the law against abortion rights protesters who targeted anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. The White House did not immediately respond to my questions Thursday afternoon about whether Trump would issue corrections for those false statements.

“She got lucky that I won that election,” Trump said of Harlow, who was at the event Thursday. He then addressed her directly: “I want to thank you very much for being here, Paulette. Enjoy your life.” The crowd laughed.

The president also went through his greatest hits of baseless and boastful remarks, some of which—one couldn’t help but notice, given the setting—are decidedly blasphemous.

“I like people that make money,” he said at one point. (God doesn’t.)

“We won by a massive majority,” he said at another. (He won 49.8 percent of the popular vote, to Kamala Harris’ 48.3 percent.)

“As I said at my inaugural address two weeks ago, a light is now shining over the world—the entire world—and I’m hearing it from other leaders,” he said of his second term. (The Bible warns against such pridefulness.)

“The opposite side—they oppose religion, they oppose God,” Trump claimed. (Former President Biden is a practicing Catholic who has been open about his faith, and former Vice President Kamala Harris is a practicing Baptist who said one of her first phone calls after Biden dropped out of the race and asked her to step in last summer was to her pastor.)

Trump also, as he has done several times now, teased potentially running for a third term—which would be in violation of the Constitution. That may be a joke—but the arrival of Christian nationalism at the White House is not.

Update, Feb. 6: This post was updated with more details from court documents of Harlow’s actions; information about and from her former and current lawyers; details of the executive order Trump signed Thursday night; and a statement from the nonprofit advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

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Jeff Bezos’ Earth Fund Cuts Off a Key Nonprofit Monitoring Corporate Climate Efforts

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

Jeff Bezos’s $10 billion climate and biodiversity fund has halted its funding of one of the world’s most important climate certification organizations, amid broader concerns US billionaires are “bowing down to Trump” and his anti-climate action rhetoric.

The Bezos Earth Fund has stopped its support for the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), an international body that assesses if companies are decarbonizing in line with the Paris agreement. Earth Fund had been one of two core funders of the SBTi, with the Ikea Foundation: The two accounted for 61 percent of its total funding last year. Earth Fund’s decision was first reported by the Financial Times.

Spokespeople for Earth Fund and SBTi said the $18 million grant had been a three-year commitment that expired as previously agreed, and Earth Fund had not made a final decision on future support. But researchers familiar with the SBTi, as well as advisers at the organization, raised concerns that the vanishing support was part of a broader trend of wealthy individuals moving away from funding causes that the US president—who has previously called climate change a hoax—did not agree with.

“We’re seeing a huge retreat from a lot of these climate pledges.”

Professor Doreen Stabinsky, who is on the technical council of SBTi, said: “You look at Bezos and the folks he’s hanging out with in the billionaires club, and you realize this is about more than SBTi,” she said. “Bezos is bowing down to Trump in a way a bunch of billionaires are bowing down to Trump.”

Stabinsky said Bezos’s decision was “not surprising at all” given he previously stopped the editorial board of the Washington Post—which he owns—taking an endorsement position on presidential candidates.

It came as scientists described their “stress and fear” at Donald Trump’s executive orders to cut federal grant money. Mentions of the climate crisis have also been removed or downgraded across US government websites. Stabinsky said: “Climate for Trump is just one of those things that is very visible, very on his radar, very part of his messaging—anti-climate action, anti any corporate that is doing something that is visibly about climate change.”

Before Trump’s inauguration last month, the US’s six biggest banks quit the global banking industry’s net zero target-setting group. Kelly Stone, a senior policy analyst at ActionAid USA, said the move to no longer fund SBTi was “really disappointing, but not especially surprising at this point,” describing it as “part of a corporate wave” of abandoning green ambitions. She said: “We’re seeing a huge retreat from a lot of these climate pledges from the biggest corporate and financial actors.”

Peter Riggs, executive director of US nonprofit Pivot Point, said he was concerned “about how this will impact green investment generally, and investments in energy transitions, because obviously the signal from Washington right now is very strong that renewable energies and other kinds of zero-carbon or low-carbon approaches are actively discouraged. It’s not even that they’re being sidelined, they’re being eviscerated.”

In April last year, SBTi announced plans to allow companies to use carbon offsets from the voluntary carbon market for indirect emissions, in a move some believed was influenced by the Bezos Earth Fund. It provoked internal fury from staff, who said they had not been consulted, and warned that it opened the door to greenwashing.

Riggs said: “I think there are two things at play. One is that Bezos, or the Bezos Earth Fund, ultimately decided that they weren’t in the position, or weren’t willing to endorse, the science-based standard because of the challenges in it. And second, the political climate in Washington having changed—they didn’t want to draw a lot of attention to those kinds of commitments.”

An SBTi spokesperson said: “The three-year incubation grant made to the SBTi in 2021 by Bezos Earth Fund was designed to help us scale at the pace needed to meet extraordinary demand for our services. The grant expired in 2024 as originally agreed.”

A spokesperson from Bezos Earth Fund said: _“_In 2021, the Bezos Earth Fund made a three-year grant to SBTi for capacity building, which ended in December 2024 as originally agreed. There has been no change in the relationship between the Earth Fund and SBTi. SBTi has not requested additional funding from the Earth Fund. As a result, the Earth Fund has made no decision with regard to further funding.”

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Watch Republicans Go Out of Their Way to Shield Elon Musk From Accountability

Republicans scrambled on Wednesday to thwart a Democratic effort to subpoena Elon Musk, literally rushing into a hearing to prevent the world’s richest man from providing answers about his dismantling of the federal bureaucracy.

After House Oversight Committee chair Rep. James Comer lauded the work of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and its frontman, calling Musk “one of the most successful entrepreneurs ever,” Democrats tried to subpoena Musk to explain his government overhaul for himself. Due to Republican committee member absences, the Democrats nearly pulled it off.

“Republicans ran to the hearing room to protect Mr. Musk to stop him from having to testify before the American people on his outrageous efforts to eviscerate government programs.”

“Who is this unelected billionaire that he can attempt to dismantle federal agencies, fire people, transfer them, offer them early retirement, and have sweeping changes to agencies without any congressional review, oversight or concurrence?” ranking member Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) asked. “Therefore Mr. Chairman, given his prominence and his importance, I move that the committee subpoena Elon Musk as a witness at the earliest possible moment.”

Republicans control the House chamber and, therefore, its committees. House Oversight Committee chair Comer sought to use this power to table the motion.

“Out of order. Out of order. Out of Order,” Comer shouted.

Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.) responded passionately: “Yes, let’s have order in this country… Elon Musk is out of order.”

Democrats requested a recorded vote on the motion to table the Musk subpoena. At the time, there were several more Democratic committee members present than there were Republicans.

The vote began several minutes after it was requested. The video feed of the hearing shows Republican committee members rushing to enter the hearing room. At least 7 Republicans voted after the initial round of voting had ended. Oversight committee Republicans were ultimately successful in tabling the motion for Musk to be subpoenaed, 20-19. Had the motion to table failed, Democrats would have been able to debate the subpoena and then call for a vote on it.

“Ranking Member Connolly moved to subpoena the unelected billionaire currently rifling through Americans’ private data while attacking our government agency by agency,” a Democratic committee spokesperson said in a statement to Mother Jones. “Republicans ran to the hearing room to protect Mr. Musk to stop him from having to testify before the American people on his outrageous efforts to eviscerate government programs and services and chase out federal workers.”

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Trump White House Moves to Allow for a Musk Takeover of Government IT

It’s a rather wonky position in the US government: chief information officer. Most federal agencies and departments have one. The role of the CIO, according to federal law, is to promote the effective, efficient, and secure use of information technology to accomplish the agency’s mission. Basically, make the IT work. It’s a technical position outside the realm of politics and policy and has been reserved for federal career appointees who are supposed to be impartial.

But the Office of Personnel Management, now being overseen by Elon Musk and his minions, just issued a memo, which was obtained by Mother Jones, to all heads and acting heads of federal agencies asking them to request a change in the status of CIOs from “senior executive service” and “career reserved” to “general.” This means Musk could move to take over the IT of the entire federal government by placing cronies and ideologues into these key posts.

As FedScoop notes, this “move seems to be focused on making it easier for the government to install outsiders—potentially from the tech industry or those associated with Elon Musk—into the CIO role, similar to the ongoing and highly controversial activities led by the Department of Government Efficiency.”

In all the flurry of news about Musk’s effort to seize control of the federal government and depopulate its workforce, this memo hasn’t received much attention yet. But if OPM succeeds in reclassifying the status of CIOs, Musk—or someone else—could gain control of the lifeblood of any modern organization: it’s IT.

Here’s the memo:

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After War, Leftover Bombs Kill. Trump Froze Funding for Cleaning Them Up.

On Saturday, January 25th, the State Department office that funds the clearance of unexploded bombs, land mines, and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) sent an email to their staff announcing funding would be on hold, effective immediately. The freeze on federal funding would last for “90 days” as a review took place.

But there is a problem with suddenly defunding landmine and bomb clearance programs: It means more people could step on unexploded weapons and die.

Most years, the US spends millions of dollars cleaning up the explosives left behind by previous wars. A large portion of those explosives are manufactured in the United States. A recent State Department report claims that the United States spends more than any other country on cleaning up the explosive remnants of war. But, under Trump, that money is now on hold. And it is not clear when, or if, it will be back.

In Gaza, United Nations experts estimate that if the current ceasefire holds it will take 14 years to clear the 140-square-mile strip of explosives.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said soon after the initial freeze that “lifesaving humanitarian aid” would be exempt. But what “lifesaving aid” means is unclear. While preventing people from being killed by bombs might seem definitionally lifesaving to the average person, groups that perform the dangerous work of “demining” say that their funding has not been restored.

Unexploded ordnances (UXO) exists all over the world, said Iain Overton, director of the data-collection and advocacy group Action On Armed Violence. “If there is [an] UXO [somewhere]…every single day that [means] there’s something in a field that a child could go pick up [and], there’s a higher likelihood that child could be blown up,” he said. Overton’s organization has counted hundreds of instances of exactly that in the past decade.

Though governments are often loath to give firm numbers on how often their bombs fail to explode, a Government Accountability Office report issued after the Gulf War found that 1 in 60 American mines failed to self-destruct.

“Often, these weapon systems have ribbons attached to them, or bright colors, because you generally paint your ordnance bright colors if you’re in a military, so people know it’s something you shouldn’t drop,” Overton said. “But children are inherently curious…they see this as a toy.”

Since US bomb fell on Laos 50 years ago over 20,000 have been killed by unexploded ordnances.

The effects of UXOs reverberate for decades.

Roughly one-third of Ukraine’s land is contaminated after only two years of war. At least 170 Ukrainian farmers who have taken ad-hoc demining into their own hands have been killed, according to the Ukrainian defense ministry. And even if these explosives left behind don’t immediately kill anyone, lead and cadmium contamination from munition casings moving into the soil may continue to harm people. In Gaza, United Nations experts estimate that if the current ceasefire holds it will take at least 14 years to clear the 140-square-mile strip of explosives.

“It is a way of contaminating the land to such a degree that if you don’t have the money to rebuild, then the land just remains barren,” Overton said.

Sera Koulabdara, executive director of the demining advocacy group Legacies of War, says the effects of the US funding freeze in her family’s homeland of Laos will be heavy. Since US bomb fell on Laos 50 years ago, over 20,000 Laotians have been killed by unexploded ordnances. Only 10 percent of the bombed land in Laos has been decontaminated, Koulabdara said.

“Laos averages around 30-60 [UXO] accidents per year—the stop work order could mean higher rates of accidents and should one occur, assistance cannot be provided,” Koulabdara said. This month, one 36-year-old Laotian man was reported killed by a 50-year-old explosive. A partner organization of Legacies of War, which provides medical help to people injured in UXO explosions, is already reporting that they’re unable to assist the injured.

And, as Overton explained, even a 90-day freeze means that “smaller projects may end up getting shut down permanently.” At least one Norwegian demining NGO and one Cambodian group have reportedly paused their operations entirely. Such small organizations, Koulabdara said, “run out of money to pay their staff and risk having to re-hire and re-train in the hopeful event that the freeze is lifted.”

In fiscal year 2024, the State Department announced they would fund their Conventional Weapons Destruction Program—through which much of this work is performed—to the tune of $258 million. The State Department’s overall budget this year, by comparison, was around $50 billion; the Department of Defense’s was about 16 times that. Foreign aid makes up far less than 1 percent of the United States’ total budget.

The refusal to fund peacemaking work is “driven by a sort of Second Amendment logic infiltrating American foreign policy when it comes to disarmament,” Overton said. “Why would you care about the legacies of war when it’s all about armament and arms trade and bombing?”

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DOGE Invades NOAA, Sparking Fears of Cuts and Privatization

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

Staffers with Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (DOGE) reportedly entered the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Silver Spring, Maryland, and the Department of Commerce in Washington, DC, today, inciting concerns of downsizing at the agency.

“They apparently just sort of walked past security and said: ‘Get out of my way,’ and they’re looking for access for the IT systems, as they have in other agencies,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a former NOAA official who is now a fellow at the University of New Hampshire. “They will have access to the entire computer system, a lot of which is confidential information.”

Cutting NOAA “will have a ripple effect that sacrifices the communities, jobs, and coastal economies that rely on healthy oceans.”

Project 2025, written by numerous former Trump staffers, has called for the agency to be “broken up and downsized,” claiming the agency is “harmful to US prosperity” for its role in climate science.

Rosenberg noted it had been a longtime goal of corporations that rely on NOAA data to prevent the agency from making the data public, instead of giving it directly to private corporations that create products based on it, such as weather forecasting services.

He also argued there was no legal authority to abolish NOAA or reduce its budget, outside of reducing it through Congress. “There’s no real transparency. They just show up wherever they want, do whatever they want. They’re following through on major budget cuts and major staffing cuts,” Rosenberg added. “I think the strategy here is: ‘Well, we’re just going to do it and dare somebody to stop us, and by the time they stop us, we’ll have destroyed it.’”

In response to the prospect of potential cuts of personnel, budget, or mission at NOAA, Beth Lowell, US vice-president of the ocean conservation nonprofit Oceana, said doing so “will have a ripple effect that sacrifices the communities, jobs, and coastal economies that rely on healthy oceans. And the National Weather Service, part of NOAA, provides daily weather forecasts and lifesaving storm alerts that protect our communities across the country and mariners at sea.”

The organization cited impacts of cuts could include overfishing, increased imports of illegal or unethically sourced seafood, threats to endangered wildlife, and threats to life and property without its weather forecasting and data resources.

“Millions of Americans depend on thriving oceans and productive fisheries for their jobs, businesses, and seafood dinners, and our oceans depend on NOAA,” she said in a statement. “President Trump, his administration, and Congress must safeguard our waters for all who depend on well-managed oceans, and that requires full support of NOAA.”

NOAA deferred comment to the Department of Commerce, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

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Florida Police Appear to Bury Comments About a Botched Rape Investigation

In 2016, a 12-year-old named Taylor Cadle reported to the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, in central Florida, that she had been raped by her adoptive father. The detective investigating the case didn’t believe her, and Taylor was charged with filing a false police report, a first-degree misdemeanor. As part of the terms of her probation, she was required to write an apology letter to her adoptive father. Soon after, he abused Taylor again—and this time, Taylor took photos and video of the incident on her phone. Taylor’s evidence led to her adoptive father ultimately getting sentenced to 17 years in prison.

But, as Rachel de Leon and I detailed in an investigation last fall, the fallout from the case was minimal: Sheriff Grady Judd, a charismatic, tough-on-crime influencer with more than 780,000 TikTok followers, never apologized to Taylor or acknowledged the case publicly—despite his often-repeated phrase, “If you mess up, then dress up, fess up, and fix it up.” When we published our piece, the detective investigating the case, Melissa Turnage, was still on track to become sergeant. (After the story came out, she was required to complete a weeklong online course on interrogation techniques.)

“I thought you guys were supposed to help?” Taylor Cadle wrote to Sheriff Grady Judd in October. “Not silence a victim.”

The Center for Investigative Reporting’s story, which aired on PBS NewsHour and published in Mother Jones, led commenters to flood the sheriff’s office’s TikTok and Instagram pages with comments demanding justice for Taylor. But soon after being posted, many of those comments mysteriously disappeared from view, prompting more anger.

Screenshots from TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram appear to show the sheriff’s office has been routinely filtering out comments criticizing its handling of the case. Recently deleted comments suggest that it is automatically removing comments that include the word “Taylor”from public view.

Noting the disappearing comments back in late October, Taylor decided to send Judd an email directly. She admired his work overall, she wrote, but she was outraged. “I thought you guys were supposed to help? Not silence a victim.”

“I shared my story to bring light to the situation, in hopes for a change within the system,” Taylor said recently. “Yet I’m still being pushed to a dark corner with no acknowledgement whatsoever. [Judd is] choosing to turn a blind eye towards the situation—which feels similar to my 2016 case when I was pushed away.”

The sheriff’s office didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

Katie Fallow, the deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute, where she focuses on threats to free speech on social media, says that the sheriff’s office appears to be engaging in “viewpoint discrimination,” a violation of the First Amendment in which a government entity treats speech differently depending on the opinion it expresses. “They don’t want people to post comments that criticize the police department’s handling of this situation, and they’re using custom keyword blocking, if that’s true, to just always hide those comments,” Fallow says. “I don’t see how they could justify that.”

On November 3, five days after the PBS NewsHour story aired, an Instagram commenter wrote, “When are you going to apologize to Taylor Cadle?” On a separate post, another commenter wrote, “Tell us about Taylor Cadle Sheriff Judd.” Within days, both comments disappeared from public view.

In the images below, the comments in red rectangles are no longer visible:

Instagram screenshots on November 3 (left) and November 4 (right)

Instagram screenshots on November 3 (left) and November 5 (right)

On Facebook, several comments about Taylor’s case—including a comment about the disappearance of other comments (“They will try everything they can do to sweep this under the rug”)—also disappeared.

Facebook comments from November 3 (left) and today (right)

In several cases, those who posted the comments can still see them, but the public cannot. Some commenters took notice. “I’m confused,” wrote one person in early November. “43 comments and the public can access only 2.”

Facebook screenshot from October 30

Facebook screenshot from November 7 of the same post pictured above

One commenter who wished to remain anonymous said after he first heard about the story, on PBS NewsHour, he went to the sheriff’s TikTok page to join the many people who were commenting about the case. “It really was just a crazy story,” he says. “I figured if I post too, it helps with the visibility.” But he was surprised when his comment, about the fact that Taylor was made to apologize to the man who abused her, disappeared. He commented noting that his posts kept disappearing, and that comment, too, soon vanished.

In January, he started experimenting with TikTok comments, and he noticed a pattern: Comments with the word “Taylor” appeared to automatically disappear from public view, though they were still visible to the commenter. His comment reading, “what’s your fave taylor swift song” immediately disappeared, but “what’s your fave t swift song” stayed up. Similarly: “Justice for Taylor” was taken down, but “j u s t i c e f o r t a y l 0 r” (using a zero in her name) stayed up.

TikTok screenshots from January from the commenter’s view (left) and from the public’s view (right)

TikTok screenshots from January from the commenter’s view (left) and from the public’s view (right)

The commenter was taken aback by what appears to be an automatic filtering of Taylor’s name. “It’s one thing if they don’t apologize and pretend it didn’t happen,” he says. “They can’t be forced to apologize. But it’s another thing for them to just be blocking this. There’s so much irony there, it’s crazy.”

The sheriff’s office’s social media guidelines note that it reserves the right to remove comments that are inappropriate or offensive, including “disruptively repetitive content,” or “are off-topic or not related to the content within the post, or any content posted on the platform.”

“I think there’s a version of that [rule] that is legitimate,” says Vera Eidelman, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union. “But I also think that exactly these kinds of off-topic rules are ones that can get abused very easily because they’re incredibly discretionary and they can be used as pretext to shut down conversations that the government doesn’t like.”

Fallow notes that, if the office is removing the word “Taylor” because it’s not on topic, it would have removed other posts as well (such as the “t swift”comment).

The issue at hand is more than simply a matter of a handful of erased comments, says Fallow. “It’s a big deal, because social media accounts run by government entities have become the sort of digital town hall where people can hear from their public officials and talk with each other about how their government is working and criticize the government,” she says. “And those are core principles at the heart of the First Amendment, which is engaging in speech and speaking to other citizens about public policy. It’s on a new medium of communication, but it absolutely has a fundamental impact on free speech and the right to engage in democracy.”

Rachel de Leon contributed reporting to this story.

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A Bill Supporting Critical Services For Victims of Abuse Gets Another Chance In Congress

A bill that would help fund critical services for millions of victims of domestic and sexual violence, including children, is getting a second chance in Congress.

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers is reintroducing the Crime Victims Fund Stabilization Act, the office of Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), one of the bill’sco-sponsors, announced on Wednesday. The legislation aims to help shore up the Crime Victims Fund (CVF)—a pot of federal money established by the 1984 Victims of Crime Act (VOCA)that supports domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, and child advocacy centers nationwide—by temporarily diverting funds collected through the False Claims Act, which penalizes defrauding of the government, into the CVF through 2029.

The news, which Mother Jones is the first to report, follows widespread support for the bill during the last session, with 210 co-sponsors in the House and five in the Senate. But it failed to make it out of committee in both chambers, or into the end-of-year spending bill. This time, advocates are hoping for more success. The reintroduction of the legislation comes as survivors of abuse are in desperate need of support: Rates of domestic violence have soared since the pandemic; a housing crisis—and the Supreme Court decision criminalizing homelessness—has made it even harder for survivors to flee abusers; and the overturning of Roe v. Wade has given abusers another way to threaten pregnant survivors.

“This legislation will prevent the devastating impact of depleting deposits into the fund, enabling victim services organizations to continue helping those who depend on them to heal and move forward,” Dingell said in a statement Wednesday. “Congress must ensure that the CVF receives robust, stable funding that equips victim services with adequate staffing and capacity.” Many organizations that rely on VOCA funding “have been forced to triage their services, and some have had to close their doors entirely,” Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.), the lead Republican sponsor, said in a statement. “They need our help now.”

As I have reported for Mother Jones, the CVF, which is supported by financial penalties levied in corporate criminal cases, has been declining for years as federal prosecutors have pursued more deferred and non-prosecution agreements, which allow defendantsmore time to pay up or avoid charges entirely if they cooperate with the government; the fund’s balance shrunk by more than 60 percent, from $13 billion in fiscal year 2017 to $4.25 billion by the end of last year. (Because of caps set by Congress since 2000 to manage fluctuations in the fund, the amount of money disbursed has been even lower.) The money is distributed to states based on their population size, and then finally to eligible programs.

It’s these programs—the shelters and centers where abused women and children seek support—and the people they serve that have been most severely and directly impacted. As I chronicled in a story I spent months reporting for Mother Jones published back in October, the dwindling money has put multiple statewide hotlines catering to domestic violence survivors at risk of closing and has imperiled legal advocacy services for survivors across the country. Judge Shelley Santry, a family court judge in Louisville, Kentucky who lost domestic violence advocates who helped survivors in her courtroom understand the limits of restraining orders and formulate safety plans, painted a bleak picture of the VOCA funding crisis: “The consequence [of losing those services],” she told me, “may be death.”

As I reported back in December, the funding declines have also devastated child advocacy centers, where children go to testify about abuse they sustained to specially-trained, trauma-informed forensic interviewers and receive mental and physical support: One center in rural northern Wisconsin that served about 50 kids annually for free closed its doors in October due to the funding cuts, and advocates in four other states told me the funding declines forced them to cut personnel or left them unable to fill vacant positions, leading to longer wait times for children and burnout for existing staff.

Advocates greeted the news of the bill’s reintroduction with celebration: “It’s very, very exciting,” Jaime Yahner, executive director of the National Association of VOCA Assistance Administrators, told me Wednesday morning. Stefan Turkheimer, vice president for Public Policy at the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, said in a statement that the bill’s passage could “provide a lifeline to survivors and help safeguard their access to the most essential services.” And Stephanie Love-Patterson, president and CEO of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, said the bill could “give victim assistance programs the support necessary to keep their doors open.” As Love-Patterson also noted, the funds that it would divert into the CVF via the False Claims Act are non-taxpayer dollars, which may make it more appealing to GOP members. A Department of Justice spokesperson previously told me that since fiscal year 2017, $1.7 billion from the False Claims Act has gone into the General Fund of the Treasury—money that, under the new bill, would go into the CVF instead.

But whether the bill actually has a shot at passing remains to be seen. Spokespeople for the White House, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) did not immediately respond to requests for comment about whether or not they support the bill. And it’s unclear if the Senate companion bill will be reintroduced this term. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) introduced the Senate version of the bill in the last session, but their spokespeople did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday morning.

Even if the bill does get some movement among lawmakers, it’s all but certain to face other barriers outside of Congress. Whistleblowers have alleged that by diverting money from the False Claims Act, the legislation would siphon funds from people who report government fraud; advocates of the bill say it would preserve payments for them. And if it ultimately passed, it would not be enough to solve the CVF funding crisis once and for all, given that the diversion of funds from the False Claims Act would end in 2029.

“This stabilization bill is just a band-aid,” Emily Perry, who runs a child advocacy center in Indiana, told me in December. “If there isn’t more of a steady, consistent flow of funds into the Crime Victims Fund, then we’re just going to be revisiting this time and time again.”

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Trump wants America to “Drill, Baby, Drill,” but the Oil Market Is Saturated

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

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and Verite News, a nonprofit news organization with a mission to produce in-depth journalism in underserved communities in the New Orleans area.

Despite President Donald Trump’s calls to “drill, baby, drill,” many oil companies operating in the Gulf of Mexico will likely do what they’ve done for years: sit on hundreds of untapped oil leases across millions of acres.

Trump has repeatedly said eliminating barriers to drilling will unlock vast untapped reserves of “liquid gold” and ignite a new era of national prosperity. But most of the drilling leases already granted to companies in the oil-rich gulf are idle and unused, and they’ll stay that way until the United States’ record-breaking production rates wane and the high costs of drilling offshore drop precipitously.

Of the 2,206 active leases in the gulf, only a fifth are producing oil, according to records from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which regulates offshore drilling. Oil industry executives and analysts say the current number of 448 oil-producing leases is unlikely to grow significantly, even if Trump makes good on promises to expand leasing opportunities and expedite drilling permits.

“I don’t think today that production in the US is constrained,” ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods said in November. “So, I don’t know that there’s an opportunity to unleash a lot of production.”

The market is saturated with oil, making companies reluctant to spend more money drilling because the added product will likely push prices down, cutting into profits. “It’s not the regulations that are getting in the way, it’s the economics,” said Hugh Daigle, a professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Texas in Austin. “It’s true that there are a bunch of undeveloped leases in the Gulf, and it’ll stay that way if we continue to see low or stagnant oil prices.”

Global oil production is expected to grow more than demand over the next two years, likely forcing the price of crude to drop 8 percent in 2025 and another 11 percent next year, according to a January forecast from the US Energy Information Administration, or EIA.

The gulf accounts for 97 percent of all offshore oil and gas production in the US. Nearly 12 million acres are under active leases in the gulf, but only about 2.4 million acres are being used to produce oil and gas, according to BOEM data.

So, what’s the actual benefit of a quicker and easier regulatory process for companies that don’t appear to need more leases? “It’s simple,” said Brett Hartl, the Center for Biological Diversity’s government affairs director. “The companies make more money when they have to spend less time and effort on permits and environmental regulations and mitigation.”

A host of environmental and worker safety rules enacted after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster has made obtaining a lease and drilling permit a multiyear process. Companies must demonstrate their operations are prepared to deal with potential blowouts and worst-case-scenario discharges, and all drilling platform designs and materials must undergo certification by independent engineers.

It’s unclear how the Trump administration will change these and other offshore drilling rules. During Trump’s first term, his administration loosened requirements for offshore well designs, materials, and monitoring technology. Former President Joe Biden reinstated most of these rules.

Oil companies cheered Trump’s recent calls for a more streamlined process and a series of energy-related executive orders he signed this month. The orders declared an “energy emergency,” expanded drilling in the Arctic and repealed Biden’s ban on drilling off the East and West coasts and parts of Alaska.

“More leases may make the companies look good, on paper, to investors…But they won’t necessarily even produce more oil and gas.”

“Directing regulators to expand access to resources [and] streamline permitting processes…will help deliver a stronger, more prosperous energy future for all Americans,” Mike Sommers, president of the American Petroleum Institute, said in a statement last week. “This is a new day for American energy, and we applaud President Trump for moving swiftly to chart a new path where US oil and natural gas are embraced, not restricted.”

But industry leaders have also been clear that these and other policy changes floated by Trump won’t lead to more drilling. The US is already producing more crude oil than any country, ever, according to the EIA. Last year’s production rate of 13 million barrels per day was a new record high, surpassing the previous record set in 2023.

“I don’t think today that production in the US is constrained,” ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods told Semafor in November. “So, I don’t know that there’s an opportunity to unleash a lot of production in the near term, because most operators in the US are [already] optimizing their production today.”

In essence, oil is just too cheap to justify more drilling. If prices do go up, companies are likely to tap into Permian Basin shale in Texas and New Mexico rather than seek offshore reserves, which cost more to drill, according to industry analysts.

But that doesn’t mean companies won’t snap up even more offshore leases if they’re offered, Daigle said. “Some of these (leases) might be drilled in the future, but many are being held just so somebody else doesn’t lease them,” he said. Companies may also stockpile leases to raise funds from investors, or they may simply be playing “mind games” with competitors. Buying up leases in one area of the gulf can sometimes throw rival drillers off the scent of richer deposits elsewhere, Daigle said.

Leases have been sold too quickly and cheaply in recent decades, according to a 2021 report by the US Department of the Interior, which oversees BOEM. This fast and loose approach “shortchanges taxpayers” and encourages “speculators to purchase leases with the intent of waiting for increases in resource prices, adding assets to their balance sheets, or even reselling leases at profit rather than attempting to produce oil or gas,” the report said.

“More leases may make the companies look good, on paper, to investors,” said Tom Pelton, communications director for the Environmental Integrity Project, an environmental watchdog group. “But they won’t necessarily even produce more oil and gas. And they certainly will not be good for the climate or clean water.”

If Trump really wanted to slash energy prices for US consumers, he wouldn’t have banned offshore wind leasing in federal waters or restarted permitting for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals, said Scott Eustis, the community science director for Healthy Gulf, a nonprofit environmental group.

Shipping LNG overseas contributes to higher electricity and natural gas prices in the US, according to a recent US Department of Energy report. “LNG exports make everybody’s energy cost more because we’re giving it to China and not using it domestically,” Eustis said.

Beyond the economics, giving companies an easier route to secure leases and permits does little more than put the gulf at risk of another Deepwater Horizon-scale disaster, Hartl said. “The only result we’ll have is more risky drilling,” he said. “And then the question is not ‘if’ but ‘when’ we’ll have the next catastrophic spill in the Gulf.”

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Trump’s Pick for Counterrorism Called for Arresting BLM Leaders as Terrorists

Joe Kent, a former Green Beret who is Donald Trump’s pick to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, completed 11 combat deployments during the War on Terror. The combat left scars. In 2019, an ISIS suicide bomber killed his wife, a Navy cryptologist and linguist, in Syria. By the time he returned home, his worldview had shifted: Kent came to believe, as I wrote in a 2022 profile, that his early tours in Iraq gave him a “special gift of clarity.” He understood how quickly a society could come undone.

After this, Kent went from apolitical to active. The Black Lives Matter and antifa protests in Portland during the summer of 2020 triggered fears for him that the United States could similarly implode. Everything, he felt, was crumbling. He and his two young boys quickly left the city for rural Washington.

“We need to treat antifa and BLM like terrorist organizations. We need to use the tools of the federal government, the FBI, the US Marshals—go after them like organized criminals and terrorists,” Kent said in a 2021 conversation with the podcaster Tim Pool about the group’s leaders. “So, when we start arresting these guys and charging them with federal terrorism charges, that’s going to take away a lot of the incentive to go out and riot.”

That is part of what makes putting Kent in charge of the National Counterterrorism Center so unsettling. He is a trained counterinsurgent who is now far more attuned to threats from within than those from overseas.

The idea that America could quickly collapse but for the vigilance of people like him could serve to justify any number of abuses of power. It was the origin of the political awakening that led to him launch two unsuccessful runs for Congress in 2022 and 2024 defined by his turn toward hard-right politics.

If confirmed by the Senate, Kent will be a key player in the intelligence apparatus that helped push the United States into the wars he helped fight. The counterterrorism center he is set to lead is itself a response to the 9/11 attacks that shaped so much of his life. As its leader, Kent would work closely with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to share information with state and local law enforcement about potential terrorist threats. He is on track to report to former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, another Iraq-war veteran, who Trump has picked for Director of National Intelligence.

Under the law, the National Counterterrorism Center is not supposed to handle “intelligence pertaining exclusively to domestic terrorism.” But that provision may be less meaningful in an administration that is so obviously willing to violate democratic norms and Congressional intent.

To an unusual extent for an unapologetically MAGA figure, what even a liberal might make of Kent depends on what part of an interview they hear. When talking about Iraq and Afghanistan, he could be mistaken for Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.). Not only were those wars useless in his telling, they were corrupt conspiracies in which former Vice President Dick Cheney and his cronies at Halliburton enriched themselves with the blood of a volunteer army. (He frames the loss of America’s manufacturing base through a similar anti-elite lens.)

Where Kent would lose a liberal or centrist listener is when he describes returning home to his hometown of Portland, Oregon, following the death of his wife in 2019. Kent made clear in the same interviews that he had come to see fellow citizens as akin to the insurgents he had once fought abroad. “We thought our war would just be overseas and that we would all come home and finally relax a little,” he has said. “But that’s just not the case.” As I wrote in 2022:

Kent is the candidate of our not-quite forever war bending back on itself. His campaign did not respond to interview requests, but he has laid out his worldview in hours-long interviews with fellow veterans and right-wing podcasters. The conversations make clear that his enemies are the generals he blames for the deaths of family and friends, the elites waging “hybrid warfare” against middle-class Americans, and groups like antifa and Black Lives Matter that operate as “organized crime syndicates” and “terrorist organizations.”He positions himself as a New Right class warrior. But unlike so many of the New Right’s leaders, who skew rich and Ivy League, Kent is not a campus reactionary now out in the world. He is a soldier radicalized by senseless wars.

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Trans Youth and Their Families Are Suing Trump Over Canceled Healthcare

Seven young transgender patients, providers of LGBTQ healthcare, and the advocacy organization PFLAG sued President Donald Trump and his administration on Tuesday over a pair of anti-trans executive orders that attempted to end gender-affirming medications and surgery for transgender people under age 19.

Trump can’t outlaw the treatments unilaterally, buthis January 28 order threatened to end federal funding to hospitals and medical schools that provide pediatric transgender healthcare. Executive branch agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services, were toldto cut off their research and education grants, and potentially even disqualify these institutions from Medicare and Medicaid. The order also instructed the Justice Department to consider civil and criminal prosecution against providers, using laws that forbid consumer fraud and female genital mutilation.

Since then, a handful of major hospitals have suspended treatments, including NYU Langone Health in New York, Children’s Hospital of Richmond in Virginia, and Children’s National in Washington, DC. “The loss of this funding would critically impair our ability to provide care for the Denver community,” Denver Health, in Colorado, explained in a statement on its website.

Now, it’s becoming painfully clear how trans patients have been immediately affected. The new complaint, filed in a Maryland federal court, tells the stories of patients who have had theirappointments canceled over the last week—including those whose families have already fled from states that outlawed gender-affirming care for minors.

“When the Tennessee legislature passed a law that banned gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, I knew we had to leave the state so that my daughter could continue receiving the care she needs,” Kristen Chapman of Richmond, Virginia, mother to 17-year-old plaintiff Willow, said in a statement. She described the family’s 2023 move to Richmond and struggle to find a provider who would accept their Medicaid insurance, finally opting to pay out-of-pocket. Then they faced the ordeal of trying to get an appointment for their daughter, which they finally managed at Virginia Commonwealth University. “The day before our appointment, President Trump signed the executive order at issue in this case,” she continued. “The next day, just a few hours before our appointment, VCU told us they would not be able to provide Willow with care. I thought Virginia would be a safe place for me and my daughter. Instead, I am heartbroken, tired, and scared.”

Another patient, an 18-year-old known as Dylan Doe in court papers, moved with his family from Tennessee to Massachusetts and has been receiving hormone therapy since he was 14. According to the complaint, Doe got a call from his clinic last week canceling his regular testosterone injection. “Access to health care makes Dylan’s life livable,” the complaint says. “When he thinks about losing it, he becomes too depressed to function.”

“Access to health care makes Dylan’s life livable. When he thinks about losing it, he becomes too depressed to function.”

Trump’s order has also cut off access to medication for trans children on the cusp of puberty, a deprivation that can bring severe mental and emotional distress to people with gender dysphoria. According to the lawsuit, NYU Langone canceled the appointment of non-binary 12-year-old, known as Cameron Coe, to receive a puberty-blocking implant. The Coe family had chosen to pursue a puberty blocker due to “Cameron’s escalating distress, blood testing show[ing] high levels of endogenous testosterone, the imminence of permanent physical changes, consultation with doctors, and the need for more time to consider whether to pursue further medical treatment without worrying about Cameron’s body right now.”

But the appointment was canceled with two days’ notice. Since then, Cameron’s anxiety has spiraled, according to the lawsuit: “Cameron’s parents are worried about immediate severe distress and suicidality.”

While Trump’s executive order puts the wheels in motion for the federal government to cut off funding to trans healthcare providers, it doesn’t amount to a national ban. Hospitals that preemptively comply by canceling care for transgender patients may be running afoul of laws that require them not to discriminate. On Monday, New York State Attorney General Letitia James issued a letter reminding healthcare providers that New York law bans discrimination on the basis of sex as well as gender identity or expression. “Electing to refuse services to a class of individuals based on their protected status, such as withholding the availability of services from transgender individuals based on their gender identity or their diagnosis of gender dysphoria, while offering such services to cisgender individuals, is discrimination under New York law,” James wrote.

The lawsuit, filed by the ACLU, Lambda Legal, and the law firms Hogan Lovells and Jenner & Block, argues that Trump does not have the authority to order agencies to withhold funds from hospitals. “Under our Constitution, it is Congress, not the President, who is vested with the power of the purse,” the complaint states. It argues that the executive orders “infringe on parents’ fundamental rights” by overriding their judgment, together with their children and doctors, about what kind of healthcare their children need. It notes that Trump’s executive order instructing federal agencies to “ensure grant funds do not promote gender ideology” violates the First Amendment’s right to free speech.

“The Executive Orders were issued for the openly discriminatory purpose of preventing transgender people from expressing a gender identity different from their sex designated at birth—and expressing government disapproval of transgender people, who by definition, have a gender identity that does not align with their sex designated at birth,” the lawsuit states.

Like other lawsuits challenging bans on gender-affirming care for minors, which have passed in about half of states, the complaint argues that the executive order denies people healthcare “on the basis of sex”—breaking federal law and violating the Constitution. After all, the same medical treatments remain available to cisgender children—puberty blockers for those who begin puberty too early, for instance, or testosterone or estrogen for those with a hormone deficiency. Meanwhile, only a small fraction of trans children ever receive gender-affirming treatments. One recent, large study of insurance claims found that .017 of people aged 8 to 17 were coded as trans and received puberty blockers, and 0.037 percent received hormone therapy.

“Critically, the Gender Identity and Denial of Care Orders do not seek to prohibit federal funding to entities that provide these treatments for all medical conditions,” the complaint filed Tuesday argues. “Rather, they prohibit federal funding to entities only when the gender-affirming medical care is for the purpose of gender transition—that is, to align a patient’s gender presentation with an identity different from their sex at assigned at birth”

As it turns out, that’s the same argument the Supreme Court is currently reviewing in L.W. v. Skrmetti, a lawsuit challenging Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans minors. If the high court decides that Tennessee’s ban is a kind of sex discrimination, judges will have to closely examine the rationale and evidence behind the restrictions. Every time judges have looked at that evidence in the past, they’ve overturned bans on gender-affirming care.

But if the Supreme Court decides that a gender-affirming care ban is not a version of sex discrimination, courts will consider restrictions on trans healthcare—including, potentially, Trump’s executive orders—under a much looser standard.

A decision in Skrmetti is expected in June, though the timing may be disrupted if the Department of Justice changes its position in the case, as it is expected to do.

“It is clear from the executive orders that the reason for the healthcare restrictionsis because of the government’s belief about how men and women should be,” says Harper Seldin, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project. “That’s not a legitimate government interest, even under a lower bar.”

But as the new complaint makes clear, Trump’s trans healthcare order—and his other anti-trans executive orders—are having immediate and punishing effects on the lives of trans people and their families. “I think the point of these executive orders in this climate is to make people’s lives feel small and isolated and fearful,” Seldin says. “The way to push back against that and resist that is to be in community and to make our lives bigger.”

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Trump’s Claim of Routing Water to Los Angeles Is Hogwash. It All Goes to Central Valley Megafarms.

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

While President Donald Trump has issued a flurry of far-reaching decrees during his first week in office, one relatively niche issue has received a disproportionate share of the president’s ire and attention: California water policy. That might make sense if the remedies he’s pursuing could help stem deadly fires like those that have killed at least 29 people in the Los Angeles area in recent weeks. Indeed, the president has claimed that “firefighters were unable to fight the blaze due to dry hydrants, empty reservoirs, and inadequate water infrastructure.”

But unfortunately for future fire victims, the sole apparent aim of the president’s new policies is to deliver more water to farmers hundreds of miles away from the state’s fire zones.

On his first day as president, Trump issued an executive order that directed his Interior Department to “route more water” to the southern part of the state. Then, on Sunday he issued another order that directed the department to immediately “override” the state’s management of its water, even if it meant overruling California law. The order also suggested Trump could withhold federal wildfire aid if the state failed to comply to his satisfaction.

Trump’s order is “unrecognizable as anything that anybody who knows anything about California water would write.”

But the new measures wouldn’t deliver any more water to Los Angeles at all. Instead, his attempt to relax water restrictions would move more water to large farms in the state’s sparsely populated Central Valley, a longtime pet issue for the president, who attempted a similar maneuver during his first term. This time he’s going further, proposing to gut endangered species rules and overrule state policy to deliver a win for the influential farmers who backed all three of his campaigns.

None of this has any relation to wildfires in Los Angeles. For one thing, the city isn’t experiencing a water shortage. It was ferocious, hurricane-force winds that fanned the Palisades and Eaton Fires—not a lack of water to contain the blazes. While some local water tanks in the neighborhood of Pacific Palisades did run out of water, that was only because the city couldn’t pump new supplies up to the hillside neighborhood fast enough to keep up with skyrocketing demand during the fire, not because there wasn’t enough water available to send there.

Even if Los Angeles were low on water, Trump’s executive orders wouldn’t help with that, because the federal government’s canal system doesn’t actually deliver any water to the Los Angeles area. More than 90 percent of that water goes to farms in the Central Valley, with the rest going to far-away cities around San Francisco and Sacramento. All this water is already spoken for, and during dry years the government can’t even fulfill all its existing contracts. The most it can do is potentially ease environmental rules that limit some of the pumping, which farmers have long opposed.

But even some farm advocates are skeptical of the sweeping scope of Trump’s most recent order, and its specious connection to wildfire.

“I am always appreciative of attempts to create more flexibility for moving water around the state, but [federal] water by and large goes to agricultural contractors,” said Alex Biering, the senior policy advocate at the California Farm Bureau Federation, the state’s leading agricultural lobby. “I don’t believe that any amount of additional water coming from the federal project would be able to be applied to stop that fire. It’s an attempt to tie water supply to a natural disaster, but those connections don’t exist in reality.”

Environmental groups, meanwhile, have blasted Trump’s attempt to strongarm California water policy, saying his most recent order would be devastating for the state’s vulnerable fish species—and the integrity of the federal Endangered Species Act as a whole.

“It’s unrecognizable as anything that anybody who knows anything about California water would write,” said Jon Rosenfield, the science director at San Francisco Baykeeper, an environmental nonprofit in the Golden State. “It’s not from this planet.

California’s water system has been the subject of heated political debate for decades. Over the course of the 20th century, the federal government and the state of California built a complex series of dams and canals designed to move water from the northern parts of the state, which see substantial precipitation and snowmelt, down to the agriculture-rich Central Valley and the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

The federal government operates dams, canals, and pumping stations that push water south through the valley, and then the state operates the canal that extends down to Los Angeles. The system provides water to around 30 million Californians and irrigates around 4 million acres of the nation’s most productive farmland.

The crux of this transport system is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a sensitive marshland region where two of the state’s largest rivers converge and flow out into the San Francisco Bay. This area is also the point where endangered fish species like Chinook salmon enter from the Pacific and swim upstream to spawn.

If the federal and state pumps move too much water out of the Delta for farms and cities, they reverse current flows, pulling fish toward their predators or sucking them into the pumps. This is a violation of the Endangered Species Act. One of these vulnerable fish species, the 2-inch gray baitfish known as the Delta smelt, is particularly sensitive to these current changes, and the government often limits its pumping to protect it.

On Monday night, Trump erroneously claimed in a Truth Social post that he had the military “turn on the water…flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond” by activating the pumps, which had been offline for a few days for maintenance. The pumped water does not come from the Pacific Northwest, and because the federal government already controls the pumps and uses them all the time, such an action does not require the involvement of the military.

It’s California’s own state-run canal system that actually delivers water to Los Angeles and numerous other cities in Southern California—and the federal government has no jurisdiction over this. The state government curtails these water deliveries somewhat during dry years to maintain a robust supply, and it seldom provides all the water that each city requests. However, deliveries to Los Angeles were typical last year, and reservoir levels in the state are above average. (Furthermore, the Los Angeles metro gets a larger share of its water from other sources, like the Colorado River and the Owens Valley.)

Despite his East Coast upbringing, Donald Trump has fixated on Central Valley water issues for years. He chose David Bernhardt, who has lobbied for the influential Westlands Water District, to lead the Department of the Interior during his first administration. He also hosted multiple rallies in the region during his 2020 campaign, during which he frequently foregrounded water policy. During his appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast last year, then-candidate Trump led the host through a diatribe about water, describing dried-out farmland he saw while traveling through the region with Central Valley members of Congress years earlier.

“We’re driving up, and I had never seen it before,” he said. “I said, ‘Do you have a drought? They said, ‘No…in order to protect a tiny little fish, the water gets routed into the Pacific.’ So I see this, and I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’”

During his first term, Trump did draft new rules in an attempt to accelerate water deliveries from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Those rules proposed that pumping should be limited only when smelt-friendly turbid waters are present in the Delta, but they also contained a few provisions that farm groups said led to wasted water during recent wet periods, and failed to prevent salmon death even by their own metrics. After Joe Biden succeeded Trump in office, the Democratic president tweaked those rules in a joint effort with the state of California—and many environmental groups have criticized Biden’s rules as worse for fish than Trump’s.

Trump may go much further this time. His most recent executive order calls for another wholesale rewrite of the pumping rules, proposes building new dams around the state, and even suggests that his administration could declare the Delta smelt functionally extinct. It also proposes to convene the federal committee known colloquially as the “God Squad,” a group of agency heads that can grant exemptions to the Endangered Species Act. This has only happened a few times since the law took effect, but in theory the “God Squad” could allow the government to pump much more water to farms, even if it means jeopardizing the very existence of smelt or salmon runs—or drying out the Delta.

Some of California’s most powerful water districts, which are typically run by large agricultural landowners, have praised the executive order, although they haven’t followed Trump in connecting it to the fires. For instance, the Westlands Water District, which covers more than half a million acres on the west side of the Central Valley, said in a statement that they “welcomed” Trump’s “leadership in addressing the barriers to water delivery.”

But despite the bluster of the White House actions, it’s far from clear that any of these changes will come to pass, at least in the short term. California water is one of the most heavily litigated issues in the United States, and even small tweaks to the state’s pumping system would likely raise legal challenges.

“They can try a lot of this stuff,” said Biering, the California Farm Bureau advocate. “It’s just about: How many times do you want to get sued?”

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It Sure Looks Like Kash Patel Lied to Congress

Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s pick to run the FBI, spent his confirmation hearing Thursday attempting to distance himself from his long record of extremism—mostly by evading questions about past statements. But Patel also appears to have lied to the Judiciary committee about his fundraising for January 6 suspects accused of violence. Confronted with the fact that his congressional testimony directly contradicted his own past statements, he continued to dissemble.

An hour into last week’s hearing, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) asked Patel about his involvement in a recording featuring the so-called “J6 Prison Choir,” which intersperses audio of jailed January 6 defendants singing the national anthem with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. The recording, called “Justice for All,” was often played at Trump campaign rallies.

Patel acknowledged using the recording to raise money for families of “nonviolent offenders” accused of January 6-related crimes. But when Durbin asked him who was singing on the recording, Patel seemed to play dumb. “I don’t know, senator,” he said.

“My understanding is that the performers who were this J6 Choir were the rioters who were in prison,” Durbin said.

Patel then responded with two distinct claims—both directly at odds with his own prior statements.

“I’m not aware of that sir,” Patel said. “I didn’t have anything to do with the recording.”

Patel’s past public comments show he was, in fact, well aware that the recording featured January 6 rioters. And he seemed to have had a great deal to do with it: He claimed to have produced it.

“Some of us know that…the Jan. 6 prisoners themselves sing the national anthem every night,” Patel said in a March 10, 2023, appearance on Steve Bannon’s War Room show, explaining that he was releasing the clip there. “What we thought would be cool is if we captured that audio, and of course had the greatest president, President Donald J. Trump, recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Then we went to a studio and recorded it, mastered it and digitized it, and put it out as song, now releasing exclusively on War Room.”

Patel indicated elsewhere that he knew the song featured alleged January 6 attackers. In a March 10, 2023, post on Trump’s Truth Social promoting the recording, Patel said the choir was composed of “individuals who have been incarcerated as a result of their involvement in the January 6, 2021 protest for election integrity.”

Later during Thursday’s hearing, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) asked Patel about the other key claim Patel made in response to Durbin’s question—his assertion that he “didn’t have anything do with the recording.” Patel attempted to narrow that denial, telling Schiff, “What I said was, I didn’t do the recording.” That’s not what he said.

Schiff reminded Patel that he’d previously boasted to Bannon of having played a key roll in the recording and musical production, using the word “we.” Patel responded by challenging the “definition for the word we.” By “we,” Patel said, he did not mean “I.”

“So you were lying to Steve Bannon and his audience?” Schiff asked.

“No,” Patel said. “I was using the proverbial we.”

“What we thought would be cool is if we captured that audio, and of course had the greatest president, President Donald J. Trump, recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Then we went to a studio and recorded it, mastered it and digitized it, and put it out as song…”

This semantic quibble has no bearing on the fact that Patel ‘s statements to Durbin were apparently false. Patel’s own words make clear that, at the very least, he was involved in producing the song, that he “exclusively” released it on a broadcast with Bannon, and that he promoted it.

In a follow-up exchange, Durbin expressed skepticism about Patel’s efforts to downplay his connection to the recording. “It’s going to be difficult to understand how you can disperse the money and have nothing to do with the recording,” Durbin noted.

Patel and a spokeswoman working for him did not respond to questions about the veracity of his claims.

Patel made other dubious claims during the hearing. He claimed not to know that members of J6 Choir were accused of attacking police officers, though that information was publicly available, including in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report, released last month, which noted that choir members were “January 6 defendants who, because of their dangerousness, are detained at the District of Columbia jail.

Just Security reported shortly after the March 2023 release of the choir’s recording that among 20 January 6 inmates held in the DC jail at the time, 17 were “accused of assaulting law enforcement officers” during the attack. The choir, according to Smith, included Julian Khater, a New Jersey man who pleaded guilty in 2022 to spraying three police officers defending the Capitol with pepper spray on January 6. One of the officers, Brian Sicknick, died the next day. Asked by Sen. Richard Blumenthal about Khater and other violent choir members, Patel said he didn’t know who they were.

Patel also said that a nonprofit he set up used proceeds from the recording only for the families of nonviolent January 6 offenders. The organization’s IRS filing for 2023, when it distributed funds raised from the recording, says it gave $167,821 to 50 recipients, but it does not specify amounts or name specific people who received money. Patel and his spokesperson did not respond to requests to list the recipients. (Patel also used the nonprofit “to promote his media appearances, hawk his books and sell T-shirts with his name on them,” the New York Times reported last week.)

Republicans on the committee do not appear concerned by Patel’s apparent falsehoods. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and other Republicans on the panel used their questions to defend Patel and to fault Democrats for questioning Patel about his past statements. A Grassley spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment Monday.

The FBI director’s honesty is always important, but senators are currently relying on Patel’s assurances that he will not help Trump carry out political reprisals.

Trump has fired DOJ prosecutors who worked for Smith. Trump’s acting US attorney for Washington, DC, Ed Martin, on Friday announced the firing of 30 other federal prosecutors who worked on Capitol riot cases. Also on Friday, the acting deputy attorney general, former Trump lawyer Emil Bove, demanded FBI leaders produce a list of hundreds of rank-and-file agents who worked on January 6 cases, in what appears to be part of a planned purge.

Patel pledged during the hearing that if he’s confirmed, “all FBI employees will be protected against political retribution.” That’s what senators wanted to hear. The problem is, they have no reason to believe him.

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It’s a War. Do Democrats Get That?

The below article is an updated version of a piece that first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land_. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial._

It’s a war.

In the first two weeks of his presidency, Donald Trump and his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk have initiated an all-out battle against the US government, the rule of law, and decency. They have mounted a blitzkrieg, a coup, an assault on the Constitution. It’s a mad power grab designed to steer the nation toward autocracy and full-fledged oligarchy. What’s under way is not merely the implementation of far-right policies but an attack on the American system and a hostile takeover of the nation.

Trump and his minions have rooted out civil servants they deem insufficiently loyal to Dear Leader and taken draconian steps to depopulate federal agencies that do the people’s business, such as safeguarding our food supply, researching cures for diseases, protecting workers and the environment, overseeing our transportation systems, and keeping the financial system secure and stable. They tried through an arguably illegal executive order to freeze funding for health care, education, transportation, and other services.

It’s class warfare, top-down. Feel free to call it fascism.

Musk and his mafia took over the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees hiring across the executive branch, installing their own servers. They also invaded the highly sensitive Treasury Department to gain control of the government’s payment system, presumably to cut off funds to programs Musk and Trump want to defund—a step that risked massive privacy violations, hacks, assorted abuses, and the possible breakdown of what is essentially the government’s circulatory system. Trump’s shock troops suspended foreign aid, a move that caused the closure of soup kitchens in famine-stricken Somalia, the cessation of medical services for war refugees in Thailand, the end to heating assistance for Ukrainians on the frontline of the war with Russia, and other programs—increasing misery, death, and disease around the world. Musk, the richest man in the world, calledthe US Agency for International Development (USAID), which distributes foreign aid that helps millions of low-income and indigent people, “a criminal organization” and tweeted, “Time for it to die.”

This is a revolution of the elite. Trump and Musk aim to gut government. Their intent is to emasculate the one force that can counter the excesses of the powerful and the wealthy. While Trump yearns to be a strongman who commands all corners of the government and demands absolute fealty to his whims and desires, Musk seeks to weaken the one entity that can check corporate power and abuses, including his own. During a Twitter chat with two GOP senators, he urged abolishing all government regulations. He’s pursuing a right-wing libertarian fantasy of unfettered capitalism. The disrupters and technologists shall rule as they see fit, without the pesky interventions of bureaucrats committed to the public good. This is not the typical fight of the well-to-do for tax cuts and deregulation—which, of course, the Republicans and their billionaire underwriters do crave—but an ideological crusade to change the foundation of American society and crush checks and balances that might prevent Trump, Musk, and others in the oligarchy from reigning supreme. It’s class warfare, top-down. Feel free to call it fascism.

Musk isn’t hiding any of this. He sees hardworking and devoted government workers as the enemy to be conquered. On Saturday, he joyously tweeted, “Very few in the bureaucracy actually work the weekend, so it’s like the opposing team just leaves the field for 2 days! Working the weekend is a superpower.” He added a laughing emoji. And Trump is giddily flexing his muscle, hinting the use of military force to expand the American empire and imposing wide-ranging tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China that will raise prices for Americans. (On Monday, he paused the tariffs on Mexico and Canada for a month.) For his greater glory, he tells voters, they will have to go through “some pain”—the opposite of what he promised as a candidate. As any emperor would do, he pursued his purge by firing top FBI officials and federal prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases.

With this war raging, where are the Democrats?

Trump’s administration pulled down websites across the federal government and disappeared thousands of data sets. His new head of the Federal Communications Commission ordered an investigation of NPR and PBS—part of a wider administration effort to undermine the media that Trump has long demonized and schemed to discredit. The Pentagon kicked the New York Times, Politico and NPR out of the working press space, handing over those desks to far-right outlets (and HuffPost). Trump crassly and recklessly blamed the tragic aviation accident in Washington, DC, on DEI to justify his shuttering of diversity programs throughout the federal government. The Environmental Protection Agency and the US Department of Agriculture removed references to and information about climate change from its websites. In true Soviet fashion, Trump is trying to photoshop one of the most pressing problems facing the nation and the world out of existence.

With this war raging, where are the Democrats?

They should have a war room that operates 24/7 to generate and voice loud and smart opposition to the Trump-Musk onslaught. They need to be coordinating messaging and running a nonstop firehose of social media. A never-ending string of fiery speeches on the House and Senate floor, obstructionist tactics, the exploitation of every possible forum and platform. Their best and most media-savvy members—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Chris Murphy, say—should be denouncing and decrying on a daily basis. Instead of licking wounds, Democrats ought to be showing some fight, conveying the perilous reality of the moment, and presenting themselves as a fierce and united bulwark against this treacherous attack. It’s not about moving to the left or to the right. They need to rush to the barricades. All of them.

Yet…this is not yet happening. The recent confirmation hearings for Trump’s most extreme and dangerous appointments—Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Department of Health and Human Services), Kash Patel (FBI), and Tulsi Gabbard (Office of the Director of National Intelligence)—suggested that the Ds may not be up to the task. There were moments when individual Democratic senators harshly grilled these nominees, but they generally were not able to collectively and effectively highlight the radical extremism of these Trump picks and the absurdity of awarding them top positions.

At the Patel hearing, the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee tried to depict him as a Trump loyalist who would abuse power to seek revenge for Trump. Yet Patel managed to get away with smugly insisting he would abide by the rule of law. They never mentioned that he had been a QAnon supporter and lied so much about the Trump-Russia scandal to protect Trump that it would be fair to call him a useful idiot for Vladimir Putin. His irresponsible grifting—he peddled supplements that he claimed without any evidence “reversed” the Covid vaccine—received minimum attention. His promotion of a social media post encouraging violence against Trump’s political enemies came up only briefly.

The Democrats are bringing a teaspoon to a gunfight. This is not how a party battling for its survival and the survival of the nation behaves.

When Tulsi Gabbard appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee, no Democrat dared raise the touchy subject of her life-long connection to a cult that demands complete loyalty to its megalomaniacal founder and that is tied to a Hong Kong company that has been a target of criminal and civil cases alleging fraud and racketeering in at least seven countries. This association certainly raises questions about her judgment and, perhaps, her priorities.

At the two confirmation hearings for Kennedy, Democrats pressed him on his anti-vax opposition but let him slide on the many bizarre and baseless conspiracy theories he has expounded over the years. And when the news broke that Kennedy had settled two cases in which he was accused of “misconduct or inappropriate behavior,” Democrats did not raise a fuss about this or vehemently demand details. (Kennedy claimed the charges were “unfounded” and refused to provide specifics on these cases.)

It’s far from certain that sharper questioning would lead to the defeat of any of these nominees. And the format of these sessions—generally five or so minutes per senator—prevents grilling that goes deep. But the Democrats needed to use these hearings as an opportunity to deliver a single message: Trump is stocking the government with radical and inexperienced extremists who pose tremendous risks to the nation. Some Democratic senators aimed to do this, others stuck to polite policy discussions that did not serve the simple mission of the day: Stop these people. When I asked Democratic aides if they intended to deploy video clips during these hearings to discredit the nominees, they said they did not have the capacity to pull something like that together and, if they could, the Republicans controlling the committees would not permit the display of videos.

I’m not the only one who sees a failure of fierceness among DC Democrats overall. Last week, as the New York Times reported, a gang of six Democrats called Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader in the Senate, and urged him to be more aggressive in challenging Trump, his nominees, and his agenda. Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas, the chair of the Democratic Governors Association, told Schumer the Democrats needed a “down and dirty” online strategy. Schumer replied that Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) was in charge of the Senate Democrats’ social media and praised Booker. The newspaper noted:

Last week, Mr. Booker delivered a PowerPoint presentation to fellow Democrats about how to deliver their message online. In the slides, which were obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Booker offered his colleagues guidance on how often to post on each platform. Instagram: once or twice a day. Facebook: once a day. LinkedIn: three to five times a week. X: two to five times a day. TikTok: one to four times a day.

That paragraph should make any Democrat scream. The Democrats are bringing a teaspoon to a gunfight. This is not how a party battling for its survival and the survival of the nation behaves.

There are signs the Democrats are trying to rev up opposition. On Monday, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries sent a letter to his party colleagues in the House outlining a 10-point plan for confronting Trump. The measures he advocated were reasonable and included proposing legislation—a largely symbolic effort, given the Dems’ minority status—to block Musk’s raid on the Treasury Department and various Trump executive orders of dubious legality.

Trump and MAGA have demanded and prepared for this holy war, and now they are prosecuting it.

That afternoon, Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Don Beyer (D-Va.), and several other Democratic legislators assembled at USAID headquarters to blast what they called “Elon Musk’s illegal shutdown” of the agency. At this event, Murphy proclaimed, “This is a constitutional crisis that we are in today. Let’s call it what it is.” And Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) vowed to place a hold on all of Trump’s State Department nominees—which will not block these appointments but slow down confirmations and clog up the Senate—to protest the Trump-Musk assault on USAID. But why not all Trump appointees? The Democrats only have a chance of success if the entire party can demonstrate consistent boldness.

For years, Trump and MAGA have advertised their plans. Steve Bannon, for one, has declared the ultimate goal is to annihilate what he derisively called the “administrative state.” They have demanded and prepared for this holy war, and now they are prosecuting it. Not all Democrats seem to understand what’s at hand. This is an existential crisis for the party and the nation. While the MAGAists are implementing scorched-earth tactics, some Democrats have talked about working with Trump or Musk when they agree with them. (Rep. Ro Khanna and Sen. Bernie Sanders, who’s not quite a Democrat, are in this category.) This only legitimizes Trump as a normal president who might have some good ideas.

In recent days, there have been a few heroes. Two top security officials at the USAID tried to block Musk operatives from gaining entry to its computer networks. Officials from Musk’s misnamed Department of Government Efficiency wanted access to USAID security systems, personnel files, and classified information available only to those with security clearances. The DOGErs eventually got in, and the two security officials were placed on administrative leave.

At the New York FBI field office, the top agent, James Dennehy, sent out a defiant email to his staff and vowed to “dig in” after the Trump administration fired officials involved in January 6 investigations. He wrote, “Today, we find ourselves in the middle of a battle of our own, as good people are being walked out of the F.B.I. and others are being targeted because they did their jobs in accordance with the law and F.B.I. policy.” As the Times pointed out, this email “came after the Justice Department ordered the FBI on Friday to collect the names of bureau personnel who helped investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, raising the possibility that Mr. Trump’s political appointees plan to purge career bureau officials, including rank-and-file field agents. That number could reach 6,000—or about a sixth of the bureau’s 38,000 employees, according to the FBI.”

How long can Dennehy hold the line?

This is a break-glass moment. A five-alarm fire. The Democrats must tell that story to Americans over and over, every day and in every way. They must make sure the public clearly sees the crisis at hand, understands what’s at stake, and perceives the Democrats as ferocious warriors for the common good. That is indeed a tall order. But one thing is for sure: You cannot win a war you are not fighting.

If you appreciate this sort of kick-ass reporting on the crisis that has been triggered by Trump and Musk, please sign up for David Corn’s Our Land newsletter.

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Elon Musk’s Midnight Takeover

Much like a gremlin fed after midnight, Elon Musk is staying up late and causing mayhem. As Musk-backed cuts and changes continue to spread across federal agencies, employees have found that many of the bizarre communications that they’re receiving, as well as the unusual dictats transforming their workplaces in the name of DOGE, are happening late at night and on weekends.

On Sunday night, for instance, federal workers received another unusual email encouraging them to quit their jobs and take a “deferred resignation” option where they will supposedly be paid through September 30 while not working. The original message, sent out on January 28 and titled “A Fork in the Road,” generated intense backlash from federal workers and warnings from union leaders that the offer’s terms and legality were on shaky ground. The follow-up email, formatted as a Q&A and unsigned like the original, assured workers the offer was legitimate. (“We encourage you to find a job in the private sector as soon as you would like to do so,” one passage read, about whether workers can get second jobs during the deferred resignation period. “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”)

Before Trump’s second term and Musk’s DOGE, it was “very unusual” to receive such important communications outside of normal working hours, one federal employee said, echoing several others. “Avoiding office hours at all costs, it seems.”

On Monday morning, meanwhile, workers discovered that a portion of the General Services Administration (GSA) office in Washington, DC, has suddenly been closed off; federal workers say they suspect it’s being occupied by DOGE personnel. They tell Mother Jones that an administrative suite of the GSA, along with bathrooms and a lunchroom, are now inaccessible to staff who aren’t on an “access list,” and security is keeping others out. (A GSA spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment before publication).

Musk himself reportedly boasted to friends that he’d been sleeping at the DOGE offices in DC, according to Wired, which are based out of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building near the White House. On Sunday night, he held a conversation on X’s Spaces at midnight to answer questions about DOGE, alongside Senators Joni Ernst and Mike Lee and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who was once named as DOGE’s co-chair before being unsubtly phased out. It was a meandering conversation, with Musk holding forth about how he would curb inflation by taking “a trillion dollars out of the deficit” in the next year, a feat he’d carry out by making massive cuts to government programs he deems to be wasteful. (He also predicted that in order to preserve their benefits, unscrupulous operators will claim to be “single mothers” whose benefits are being cut. Instead, Musk said, they actually are fraudsters operating a vast international criminal network. )

Beyond the bizarre hours and unusual communiqués, federal employees also are objecting to the extreme secrecy with which people affiliated with DOGE and OPM have carried out ostensible government functions. At the General Services Administration, as Mother Jones has previously reported, officials affiliated with Musk and DOGE requested that employees submit to “code review”—demonstrating computer code they’ve written and defending its efficiency and usefulness—something that also happened when Musk took over Twitter. GSA employees have been asked to submit to these code reviews without knowing the full names of these individuals. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla employee who’s now directing the GSA’s division of Technology Transformation Services, defended the move in internal communications, while also admitting the people conducting the reviews are not official GSA employees at the moment.

An administrative suite of the GSA, along with bathrooms and a lunchroom, are now inaccessible to staff who aren’t on an “access list,” and security is keeping others out.

“The folks conducting the calls are advisers,” he wrote to employees. “They are in progress [sic] of onboarding to GSA.” When he was pressed by employees about why they were being asked to do code reviews with people who would not divulge their full names, he replied, “Agreed on it being weird and uncomfortable. The key issue is that we’ve already had some media attention on the process I’m using to understand the tech and the team—trying to protect these folks that are taking the time to do this for me.” In other words, back then, Shedd appeared to be trying to shield his effort, and the people involved in it, from media scrutiny by trying to hide their identities, a level of anonymity that government employees are not usually provided.

Despite the attempted secrecy, Wired has identified some of the young engineers working for Musk’s DOGE, who they describe as having little or no experience in government; indeed, some of them appear to be fresh out of college. This crew of Musk acolytes, according to the publication, include Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran. The majority of the men appear to have recently deleted their LinkedIn profiles and locked down other social media.

Musk has suggested that individuals and media outlets who identify the DOGE engineers are, in his words “guilty of a crime.” Ed Martin Jr., the interim US Attorney, has made it clear that he’s aligning himself with Musk, writing in an open letter on X, “[W]e will pursue any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people.” The statement didn’t come with any concrete allegations of criminal behavior and identifying government employees by name would not under normal circumstances be considered a crime.

Other strange after-hours occurrences tread the line between outrage and black comedy, federal employees say. A worker at an intelligence agency says that unidentified outside staffers arrived to sweep the office of anything they felt was related to DEI, a target of a Trump executive order. That included a plaque, confiscated from a supervisor’s desk, which read, “Be kind to everyone.”

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As Elon Musk Warns of Persecution of Whites, Trump Says He Will Block Aid to South Africa

On Sunday, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that the United States would cut aid to South Africa because the country is “confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY” and committing a “massive Human Rights VIOLATION.” The South African-born Elon Musk responded with his own posts endorsing Trump’s claims.

Trump and Musk did not need to say who was allegedly taking whose land. Their far-right followers, who have fixated on the prospect of “white genocide” in South Africa for years, knew the two billionaires were invoking the specter of a race war in which Black citizens “steal” the land of their compatriots. The people who seem most excited by Trump and Musk’s recent defense of South African whites appear to be far-right X users known for posting about race, IQ, and the JQ, an anti-semitic abbreviation for the “Jewish Question.”

When asked to clarify by the press later on Sunday, Trump claimed much the same and said South Africa was “doing things that are “perhaps far worse than “just stealing land.” He repeated that aid would be on hold until a vague investigation was finished.

Musk has kept at it as well by writing “Yes” in response to a post on X that stated: “White South Africans are being persecuted for their race in their home country. Also White South Africans are one of the few population groups that are fiscally positive when immigrating to Europe. We should allow more immigration of White South Africans.” (The Danish man Musk was responding to at 3:36 a.m. is a transparently racist poster who has written that “Non-Western immigration to Northern European countries is morally indefensible.”)

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa did recently sign a controversial law that expands the state’s ability to expropriate land—in some cases without providing compensation. But the law, which was signed by a democratically-elected government and is motivated by a desire to address severe injustices imposed on Blacks by past regimes, is not what Trump and Musk are making it out to be.

President Ramaphosa wrote on social media that the law is not “a confiscation instrument, but a constitutionally mandated legal process that ensures public access to land in an equitable and just manner as guided by the constitution.”

The Democratic Alliance, a more centrist and white-led party in South Africa, has opposed the law and has argued it needs to be amended. Nevertheless, the party strongly objected to Trump’s recent move and said in a statement released on Monday that “it is not true that the Act allows land to be seized by the state arbitrarily.” It added that a funding cuts could have devastating consequences for vulnerable South Africans, explaining that the country is slated to receive $439 million this year for HIV/AIDs treatment and support. “It would be a tragedy if this funding were terminated because of a misunderstanding of the facts,” the party stressed.

More broadly, land reform is a response to the staggering inequity that still plagues South Africa. As of 2018, nearly two-thirds of Black South Africans lived in poverty, compared to just one percent of white South Africans. And as the New York Times has reported:

In 1913, the colonial government passed a law confining Black South Africans to just 7 percent of the country’s territory, essentially dispossessing many Black people from their land. Although the Black population would make slight gains in land ownership in subsequent decades, that uneven distribution remained largely in place.

Since the end of apartheid in 1994, the government has made efforts to redistribute some land to Black people. But white South Africans, who comprise about 7 percent of the population, continue to dominate land ownership. White-owned farms occupy about half of South Africa’s surface area.

Trump’s claims about the law are also at odds with experts who represent major business interests in South Africa. In response to an interview request, Wandile Sihlobo, the Chief Economist of the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa, directed me to an article he recently wrote about whythere was no need to panic about the law. Fasken, a major international law firm, has taken a similar perspective. South African lawyers at the firm concluded that, while they have some reservations about sections of the law, it is generally “doubtful if the Expropriation Act will generally affect private property rights as envisaged” in the country’s constitution. Even the leader of AfriForum, a far-right group that largely advocates on behalf of white Afrikaners and vehemently opposes the Expropriation Act, has expressed concern with Trump’s decision to target South Africa so broadly.

This is not the first time that Musk or Trump have weighed in on the side of right-wing whites in South Africa. In 2018, Trump tweeted that he had ordered then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers.” (Tucker Carlson had recently aired a segment that made those claims.) In 2023, Musk wrote on X that “They are openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa.”

Musk’s comments would likely have made his late maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, proud. Jill Lepore wrote in 2023 about Haldeman in The New Yorker:

Haldeman was born in Minnesota in 1902 but grew up mostly in Saskatchewan, Canada. A daredevil aviator and sometime cowboy, he also trained and worked as a chiropractor. In the nineteen-thirties, he joined the quasi-fascistic Technocracy movement, whose proponents believed that scientists and engineers, rather than the people, should rule. He became a leader of the movement in Canada, and, when it was briefly outlawed, he was jailed, after which he became the national chairman of what was then a notoriously antisemitic party called Social Credit. In the nineteen-forties, he ran for office under its banner, and lost. In 1950, two years after South Africa instituted apartheid, he moved his family to Pretoria, where he became an impassioned defender of the regime.

Musk’s father, who the billionaire is estranged from, has been more blunt about his former in-laws. “They were very fanatical in favor of apartheid,” he once said. “They used to support Hitler and all that sort of stuff.”

Seven decades after they moved to South Africa, their grandson, the richest man in the world, is defending whites in his homeland as he pursues a version of anti-democratic (and perhaps more than quasi-fascistic) rule by engineer in in the United States with his Department of Government Efficiency. The results are predictably bleak.

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I’m a Doctor, and I’m Appalled at the Silence From the American Medical Association

With more than 270,000 members, the American Medical Association is by far the nation’s largest professional organization for physicians. A mighty political force, its lobbying harm helps shape federal policy around healthcare, and the group spends millions of dollars supporting candidates each election cycle. In recent months, some of its physician members have expressed concern with the absence of clear statements from the AMA on proposed actions by the Trump administration that would affect their work—including the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for Secretary of theDepartment of Health and Human Services, which the Senate is voting for on Tuesday.

I spoke to a physician member—who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation—about concerns many physicians share about the silence of their professional organization on proposed changes that would likely violate AMA policies. (The AMA did not respond immediately to a request for comment from Mother Jones.)

On the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for HHS secretary: In November, we had an AMA meeting. We asked our AMA lobbyists if they thought RFK would be nominated, and they said, no, we do not think so, and that he probably would have some kind of advisory role. The whole idea of him being nominated made everybody laugh because he has no qualifications to run HHS.

I watched both of the [confirmation] hearings, and he’s absolutely unqualified to be in charge of HHS, and not only because he has promoted vaccine disinformation and that he’s promoting fluoride disinformation. But when he was asked about Medicare and Medicaid, he showed his incompetence.

RFK Jr. made a statement about [the abortion drug] mifepristone maybe not being safe. In one of the hearings, members showed him a lot of [scientific] articles. It feels like right now is the time to remind everybody that we have policies that physicians voted for, the [AMA’s] House of Delegates voted for, and we stand by those policies.

There are a lot of smaller organizations that have called RFK Jr. unqualified. But they have much less power and many fewer connections. The AMA has an advocacy office in DC with their lobbyists, their advocacy people—they could go to Congress and the Senate and have meetings under this umbrella of a national physicians organization who have the highest representation and the highest number of members.

RFK Jr. has participated in so many activities that are stating a lot of false information. For the AMA being afraid to say something—they say we don’t target personalities, we target policies. But these are his statements, which will become policies.

On AMA’s silence in the face of Trump’s violation of their standards: There is a policy that supports funding to the World Health Organization and a policy that supports participation in WHO. Trump pulled out of WHO, and AMA hasn’t said anything. And now there is this attack on transgender care. We also have policies supportive of transgender care, and the AMA has not said anything. Meanwhile Trump’s administration is trying to cancel those people and cancel physicians who are providing care.

On Trump’s removal of sanctuary status for hospitals: When Trump removed sanctuary status from hospitals, AMA did not come up with any kind of guidance for physicians. What are we supposed to do when ICE is at our door? When ICE is at the bedside? First of all, it’s a violation of physicians’ ethical practice of medicine. We have an AMA Code of Ethics so I don’t know what my patients’ immigration status is. If ICE shows up and starts asking me questions, at what point is there a HIPAA violation? I have a duty to the patient; I don’t have a duty to ICE. I don’t know what to do. I’m going to call my administrator and say I will refuse to speak with ICE. I will tell ICE to go to my administrator and not ask me any questions. That’s the only thing that I came up with for myself.

“The current administration prohibited all communications of the CDC and other agencies with the public. Now, the public and physicians are left with no information on food recalls or disease outbreaks.“

On AMA’s silence around the government’s lack of action on bird flu: We are closely monitoring situations with viral illnesses, and we are particularly concerned over H5N1. As you know, the current administration prohibited all communications of the CDC and other agencies with the public. Now, the public and physicians are left with no information on food recalls or disease outbreaks. Doctors receive some information from state departments of health where they are licensed. However, it only provides information about one state and doesn’t provide a comprehensive picture. Individual physicians are searching through information released by departments of health of different states and post it on substack. But the AMA could have said something about it. While we are not in the pandemic yet, a reckless approach to H5N1 may bring us there. The AMA has a policy about pandemic preparedness that shows the importance of communication and various connections between CDC, NIH, and state departments of health.

On physician burnout: A lot of people feel demoralized. In medicine, for several years, we have discussed that physicians are burned out. There was a new term several years ago—called “moral injury”—when you work for an organization and your values do not align with the values of your organization. That’s when you feel demoralized. In terms of advocacy, this is the same kind of situation. Many physicians feel that our values do not align with the values of our advocacy organization, that the AMA does not necessarily represent us.

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The Big Money Push for “Natural” Birth Control

“While on hormonal birth control I noticed so many changes that I didn’t like mentally or physically,” says an enthusiastic young woman in an Instagram ad for Natural Cycles, which claims to be the world’s first FDA-cleared birth control app. “Ever since switching,” she gushes, “my health has only been on the up & up!”

Natural Cycles uses a proprietary algorithm and daily body temperature readings to track ovulation and identify fertile periods. For around $120 a year, the company aims to help users either achieve or avoid pregnancy—without the hormones present in birth control pills and many IUDs.

That pitch seems to be working: Natural Cycles’ customer base grew to more than 3 million in 2024. It’s one of the premier products in the booming market for “femtech,” app-based software with a focus on fertility and menstrual tracking and, increasingly, sexual satisfaction. (Consider the Lioness orgasm-tracking vibrator: “Don’t just masturbate. Masturbate smarter.”) The femtech industry is already valued at around $50 billion by market researchers and expected to be worth more than $100 billion by 2032.

While these companies’ fertility algorithms and app interfaces might be new, the technique of tracking ovulation to prevent pregnancy isn’t. The Catholic Church, which forbids most birth control, popularized “natural family planning” decades ago, and women have been using their menstrual cycles to inform their reproductive choices long before that.

Femtech’s appeal fits in with a rising tide of right-wing wellness messaging—the kind promoted by the anti-vaccine activist-turned-Trump health czar Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and pundit Candace Owens, who called birth control pills and IUDs “unnatural” in a YouTube video.

For all its promises to help women “naturally” control their fertility, femtech has one big problem: In order for the apps to work well, users must be meticulous in their temperature recordings. Even for the most diligent users, that can be tricky.

Margaret Polaneczky, an OB-GYN in New York, points out that ovulation is hard to predict—weight fluctuations, medications, or even moving to a new place can affect the timing of the menstrual cycle. Femtech apps also need users’ health to be excellent for accurate readings; having a cold can skew users’ body temperature enough to potentially throw off fertility estimations.

Given the many variables that affect the timing of menstruation, it’s not surprising that femtech birth control can be unreliable. One 2018 review study of 73 of the apps found that none accurately predicted ovulation. While Natural Cycles boasts a “perfect use” effectiveness of 98 percent, its “typical use” effectiveness is only 93 percent (IUDs and the Nexplanon implant are 99 percent effective, in comparison). Plus, these efficacy numbers for Natural Cycles are based on clinical studies carried out by the company on self-selecting individuals, rather than from randomized controlled trials.

“We feel like there should be an effective non-hormonal method,” said Elina Berglund Scherwitzl, co-founder of Natural Cycles. No contraceptive method, she argued, is “100 percent effective and there will unfortunately always be pregnancies, even if that’s the tough part of what we do.”

In 2018, the same year that Natural Cycles was approved by the FDA, the United Kingdom’s Advertising Standards Authority concluded that the app misled consumers about being “highly accurate” and a “clinically tested alternative to birth control.” In July 2018 researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine published a study noting “Natural Cycles’ marketing materials ought to be entirely transparent” and more clear “about the limitations of their app and pregnancy risks.” A hospital in Stockholm even filed a complaint with the Swedish Medical Products Agency after 37 women who had been using Natural Cycles sought abortions after they unintentionally became pregnant.

Many femtech companies also don’t mention the health benefits users may be giving up when they ditch pills and IUDs. Hormonal IUDs like the Mirena can be used to treat and prevent endometrial and ovarian cancer. The birth control pill also reduces users’ relative risk of endometrial cancer by some 70 percent, with 12 years of use, and ovarian cancer by 50 percent with 15 years of use.

The privacy concerns are obvious, especially as some states have moved to criminalize abortion. Several femtech companies have faced criticism for allegedly sharing users’ data with third-party researchers and companies. And there’s potential that law enforcement could request data from period-tracking apps as evidence. For its part, Natural Cycles offers an anonymous setting option “if you need an extra layer of protection,” which separates any personal identification from a user’s fertility data—but this setting has to be manually turned on.

Despite the questions around efficacy and privacy, the femtech industry shows little sign of slowing. Last year, Natural Cycles closed a $55 million financing round, and formed a new partnership with J.P. Morgan. Its roster of products has expanded, too. Natural Cycles now offers “NC Follow Pregnancy” and “NC Postpartum,” a suite of subscriptions that could appeal to users for years to come.

Polaneczky, the OB-GYN, acknowledged that fertility apps might help people who can’t use hormonal birth control because of medical conditions or unwanted side effects. Yet, she cautions, you “have to be a certain person, I think, to do this well.” The problem? “My experience is that the majority of women,” she says, “are not that person.”

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A Federal Judge Just Gave the Trump Administration a Sound Spanking

Last week, after the Office of Management and Budget released a memo ordering a vague “temporary pause” on grant and loan spending by federal agencies, pending review to ensure the spending aligned with Donald Trump’s priorities, it didn’t take long for a coalition of nonprofits and health care providers to file a lawsuit claiming the move was illegal and would cause irreparable harm.

OMB had provided less than 24 hours advance notice, creating widespread chaos and confusion. Federal district judge Loren AliKhan quickly put a temporary pause on OMB’s temporary pause to give the parties—and the court—time to respond.

In the meantime, OMB rescinded its memo, and Trump’s Justice Department declared the case moot, only to have White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt muddy the waters by tweeting that, well, actually, the freeze wasn’t rescinded—only the memo.

On January 31, John McConnell, Jr., a federal judge in the Rhode Island district, imposed his own temporary restraining order (TRO) in response to a related lawsuit filed by 23 states (including some red ones). The states claimed Trump’s appointees were violating the Administrative Procedures Act and the Impoundment Control Act—longstanding laws that govern federal budgeting—not to mention the Constitution.

The evidence, McConnell agreed, showed that this was likely—he even quoted from a relevant ruling by Brett Kavanaugh from when he was a judge in the DC circuit. The withdrawal of the OMB memo would not make his ruling moot, McConnell wrote: “The evidence shows that the alleged rescission of the OMB Directive was in name-only and may have been issued simply to defeat the jurisdiction of the courts.”

Judge AliKhan returned late Monday with a strongly worded 30-page ruling, extending her TRO on behalf of the nonprofit coalition. The whole document is worth a read, but I’ve pulled out a few highlights here. This is verbatim, except for the headings—and I removed the legal source citations for readability.

The administration’s motion to dismiss

Defendants [representing the Trump administration] raise two threshold jurisdictional arguments. First, they argue that Plaintiffs [the nonprofits, etc] lack standing because they have not adequately alleged injury in fact, causation, or redressability. Second, they claim that the case is now moot because OMB rescinded memorandum M-25-13 after Plaintiffs filed suit. The court is unpersuaded on both counts.

Injury in fact

Plaintiffs allege that even a temporary pause in funding to their members, such as the American Public Health Association and Main Street Alliance, would destroy their ability to provide medical and low-income childcare services. On top of these economic injuries, Plaintiffs’ members face First Amendment harms because the memorandum targets funds that relate to “DEI [and] woke gender ideology.”

Defendants reply that Plaintiffs “must present more than allegations of a subjective chill” and need to allege “present objective harm or a threat of specific future harm.” At this early stage, Plaintiffs have done exactly that: they claim that Defendants have singled out their funding programs (in other words, their economic lifelines) based on their exercise of speech and association…

Plaintiffs have provided numerous declarations showing that many organizations need weekly injections of federal funds in order to continue operating. One health center pays its employees “biweekly, on Thursdays,” requiring it to “draw down grant funds on the preceding Tuesday” so that they reach the health center’s bank account by Wednesday. Some of those employees “live paycheck to paycheck,” meaning that a single missed payment could prevent them from buying groceries or paying rent.

Separately, a member of a tribal organization was forced to lay off two employees on January 28 because it could not access its grant funds that day. And another nonprofit dedicated to ending homelessness was forced to suspend a birth certificate and identification card program just so that it could keep its employees on payroll…For many, the harms caused by the freeze are non-speculative, impending, and potentially catastrophic.

Redressibility

Prior to the issuance of memorandum M-25-13, Plaintiffs’ members reportedly never had problems drawing down funds or receiving financial assistance. That all changed beginning January 28, immediately after OMB issued memorandum M-25-13. Streams of funds that had steadily flowed for years without issue suddenly ran dry. If the court were to grant Plaintiffs’ requested relief, Defendants would be barred from instructing all federal agencies across the board to temporarily pause (or continue pausing) financial assistance on the basis of the memorandum or its substance.

In other words, agencies would need to behave as if the memorandum were never issued. Defendants act as if any continued freeze is merely a random coincidence that could not possibly have anything to do with their memorandum. In the court’s view, that explanation ignores both logic and fact. Plaintiffs have adequately shown that a ruling in their favor will alleviate their alleged injuries.

Mootness

There is nothing stopping OMB from rewording, repackaging, or reissuing the substance of memorandum M-25-13 if the court were to dismiss this lawsuit…

By rescinding the memorandum that announced the freeze, but “NOT…the federal funding freeze” itself, it appears that OMB sought to overcome a judicially imposed obstacle without actually ceasing the challenged conduct. The court can think of few things more disingenuous…

The rescission, if it can be called that, appears to be nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to prevent this court from granting relief. …

Plaintiffs allege that OMB’s funding freeze lacked any reasonable basis and failed to consider the disastrous effects it would have. Defendants, meanwhile, insist that “there is nothing irrational about a temporary pause in funding” when it is done “to ensure compliance with the President’s priorities.” But furthering the President’s wishes cannot be a blank check for OMB to do as it pleases…

If Defendants intend to conduct an exhaustive review of what programs
should or should not be funded, such a review could be conducted without depriving millions of Americans access to vital resources. As Defendants themselves admit, the memorandum implicated as much as $3 trillion in financial assistance. That is a breathtakingly large sum of money to suspend practically overnight.

Rather than taking a measured approach to identify purportedly wasteful spending, Defendants cut the fuel supply to a vast, complicated, nationwide machine—seemingly without any consideration for the consequences of that decision. To say that OMB “failed to consider an important aspect of the problem” would be putting it mildly.

In summary, Judge Alikhan granted the extended temporary restraining order and denied the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss. She gave the administration’s lawyers until Friday to file a status report “apprising the court of the status of its compliance with this Order”—which you can read in its entirety here.

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Congressional Democrats Step Up Fight Against Elon’s Shadow Presidency

Gathered outside the headquarters of the US Agency for International Development in downtown Washington, DC, on Monday, a fiery group of congressional Democrats debuted what felt like a new—and potent—message: Elon Musk is acting as an unqualified shadow president, and he’s breaking the law along the way.

The unelected South African tech billionaire announced Monday that he and Trump were shutting down USAID, which distributes billions of dollars annually in international humanitarian aid to approximately 130 countries—the top recipient in fiscal year 2023 was Ukraine—and employs more than 10,0o0 people, according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS). Established by an executive order signed by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, the agency “provides assistance to strategically important countries and countries in conflict; leads U.S. efforts to alleviate poverty, disease, and humanitarian need; and assists U.S. commercial interests by supporting developing countries’ economic growth and building countries’ capacity to participate in world trade,” the CRS states. To Musk, though, it’sa “criminal organization” and “radical-left political psy op.“

“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk posted on X early Monday. “Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

Hundreds of USAID staffers were reportedly laid off last week following Trump’s executive order, issued on Inauguration Day, ordering a 90-day freeze on foreign aid. Over the weekend, two top USAID security leaders were reportedly put on administrative leave after trying to stop DOGE staffers from accessing the agency’s secure systems. Ten Democratic senators from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wrote in a letter Sunday to newly confirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio that “security guards present at the facility were threatened when they raised questions” about DOGE staffers trying to gain entry.

Three US officials told CBS News earlier that USAID will be merged into the State Department and will sustain significant cuts to the workforce, but that it will maintain a humanitarian function. ABC News first reported that Rubio is now its acting administrator. In the Oval Office, President Trump claimed of the agency and its workforce: “I love the concept, but they turned out to be radical left lunatics.” Staffers at the agency were reportedly instructed to stay home on Monday, and its website is down.

In response to all this, high-ranking congressional Democrats staged a last-minute news conference to draw attention to the agency’s critical work and what they called Musk’s “crime” in trying to dismantle it. Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) summed up the utter mess of the past several days in his opening remarks: “Musk and his band of unelected acolytes at DOGE have locked out USAID employees from their offices, improperly accessed highly classified information, purged the agency of its nonpartisan leadership and thrown the agency into chaos through a concerted campaign of harassment and intimidation of its employees.” Beyer alleged that Musk and his acolytes’ actions “severely harm our national security”; “put thousands of children around the world at immediate risk of starvation, disease, and death”; and sideline “some of our finest civil servants who work tirelessly every day to make the world a better place.”

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) called closing the agency “an absolute gift to our adversaries—to Russia, to China, to Iran, and others, because AID is an essential instrument of US foreign policy and US national security policy.” He pointed to a post on X from former Russian president and “Putin stooge” Dmitry Medvedev, who called the decision to shutter USAID a “smart move by @elonmusk.”

“Elon Musk may get to be dictator of Tesla, and he may try to play dictator here in Washington, D.C., but he doesn’t get to shut down [USAID],” Van Hollen said, adding that the attempt to shutter the agency was “plain illegal” and that doing so would take an act of Congress.

Sen. @ChrisVanHollen: "Trying to shut down the Agency for International Development by executive order is plain illegal." pic.twitter.com/aXbkrFIGhF

— CSPAN (@cspan) February 3, 2025

“We don’t have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk,” shouted Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), to cheers, “and that’s going to become real clear.”

On the heels of a New York Times report published Sunday that was based on interviews with more than 50 Democratic leaders and alleged that the party was struggling to land on a coherent message, Monday’s news conference seemed remarkably unified in its focus around the dangers of Musk as shadow president and Trump’s isolationist, “America First” ethos. And given that a Quinnipiac University poll released last week showed that most registered voters—53 percent—disapprove of Musk’s role in the Trump administration, and a January Associated Press-National Opinion Research Center poll found that a majority of Americans don’t want Trump relying on billionaires or family members for policy advice, congressional Democrats may be onto something in making Musk a top target.

The lawmakers also made sure to point out the litany of illegal activities Trump and Musk have undertaken in only—checks notes—two weeks in office. (See also: Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, which a federal judge temporarily blocked, as my colleague Isabela Dias reported, as well as his effort to freeze billions of dollars in federal funding, which two other federal judges also temporarily blocked. And if Musk uses the access his team at DOGE was reportedly recently granted to the Treasury’s payments system to control government spending, that would also be illegal, as my colleague Pema Levy covered Sunday.)

The Monday press conference was not the only resistance Democratic lawmakers mounted to Musk’s latest moves. They also tried to enter the USAID headquarters on Monday, only to have federal law enforcement officials block their entry.

.@SenatorAndyKim at USAID: "I talked to the security guard just in there. He said he has been given specific orders to prevent employees of USAID from entering the building today. I just find that to be absolutely ridiculous. This is no way to govern." pic.twitter.com/ixdFDLqGps

— CSPAN (@cspan) February 3, 2025

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) also said to the Wall Street Journal that he would put a “blanket hold” on all of Trump’s Cabinet nominees until the agency is back up and running. “I will do maximal delays until this is resolved,” Schatz told the newspaper.

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Nobody Voted for Elon Musk

Nobody voted for Elon Musk. And nobody wants airplanes to fall out of the sky. But after Musk pushed out the head of the FAA and Donald Trump gutted the agency’s safety board, and Musk attempted to push air traffic controllers to quit, the worst domestic airline disaster since 2001 occurred.

Nobody voted for Elon Musk. And nobody in their right mind wants him and his edgelord flunkies rooting around Treasury Department databases that contain private Social Security and Medicare data for all US citizens.

Nobody voted for Elon Musk. And nobody wants him to use Treasury payment data to potentially gain an advantage over his competitors.

Nobody voted for Elon Musk. And nobody wants him to use his newfound power to coerce South Africa into abandoning laws on Black investment instated after the fall of apartheid—at least when it comes to his company Starlink.

Nobody voted for Elon Musk. And while most Americans don’t understand how little we spend on foreign aid (less than 1 percent of the federal budget,even as oligarch-friendly tax expenditures gobble far more)—few would begrudge that pittance if they knew it not only prevents famine and disease but also curbs the mass migration and terrorism that can result from such plagues. And that axing USAID, as Musk is gleefully doing, hands a soft-power bonanza to China.

Nobody voted for Elon Musk. Nobody.

Indeed, the concept of DOGE was only floated, vaguely,a few weeks before the election. It was met mostly with ridicule—it was named for a meme coin, after all—and that derision did not ebb when it became evident that Musk (and his erstwhile partner, Vivek Ramaswamy) hadn’t the faintest idea how government spending worked. They promised to cut the budget by $2 trillion, an amount that exceeds the government’s total discretionary spending in 2023.

The “waste” on federal grants, subsidies, and loans that Musk decries? Those are the same programs that helped him build Tesla and SpaceX. The federal workers that Musk suspects are woke deep state agents? Most serve either in the military or as nurses and doctors for the Veterans Health Administration; the next biggest cohorts are the workers who administer Social Security payments and the letter carriers who deliver the checks. Cutting jobs like these will result in mass chaos and a political bloodbath that nobody wants—especially vulnerable Republicans.

Elon Musk may have pleasured himself with his ability to slash Twitter’s workforce and turn it into a janky site for fascist fanboys. But America is not a software company. And letting a thin-skinned, Ketamine-fueled, video-game cheating, Nazi apologist billionaire take over the machinery of the United States is not something that anyone voted for. Finally Democrats in Congress are beginning to make this point. But citizens, too, must be full-throated. Because none of us, not a single one of us, voted for Elon Musk.

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The US Foreign Aid Pause Has Already Done “Irreparable Harm”

Shortly after his inauguration, President Donald Trump signed a flurry of executive orders that signaled his intent to remake the federal government—including one that paused all US foreign assistance for 90 days. The order was the first in a series of extraordinary moves that have upended the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and halted crucial, life-saving work around the world. Today, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is on a trip to El Salvador, told reporters that he is now the acting director of USAID and that some of its functions would continue within the State Department—after a review to ensure that these programs are aligned with the Trump administration’s foreign policy priorities.

Foreign assistance has long been a hallmark of America’s role in the world, regardless of which party occupies the White House or controls Congress. The underlying principle is that while feeding the hungry and treating the sick are worthy efforts, doing so is also beneficial to long-term American interests in national security and trade. When USAID shipments of medical supplies arrived in Liberia during the 2014 Ebola epidemic, the boxes read “FROM THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.”

The United States is the world’s single largest provider of foreign assistance, though this accounts for only one percent of the six trillion dollar federal budget. In 2023, Congress allocated $66 billion for foreign aid, which is administered through the State Department and USAID. Through bipartisan negotiations, Congress determines how foreign aid is spent on everything from disaster relief and public health to foreign military assistance and democracy promotion. Humanitarian assistance is primarily distributed by USAID, which funds partner agencies on the ground.

In the two short weeks since Trump took office, his administration has enacted an unprecedented stoppage of foreign aid and a dramatic overhaul of staff at USAID. On January 24, the State Department issued a “stop work” order for existing and new programs, with exceptions for emergency food assistance and military aid to Israel and Egypt. Though Rubio later issued an additional waiver for “life-saving humanitarian assistance,” aid workers said that the exemptions are unclear and vital programs had already been disrupted. There were reports that soup kitchens had shut down in famine-stricken Sudan. In Thailand, hospitals treating refugees fleeing the conflict in Myanmar had suspended care. In South Africa, HIV patients were turned away from US-funded clinics.

Last week, more than fifty career civil servants and foreign service officers at USAID were placed on administrative leave, followed by layoffs of nearly 400 contract employees.

To Jeremy Konyndyk, who served as a high-level political appointee at USAID during both the Biden and second Obama administrations, this was a sign that the Trump administration did not intend to perform a good-faith review of the efficacy of foreign aid programs. “This is a ‘destroy the village in order to save it’ approach,” Konyndyk, now the president of Refugees International, told me on Friday when we spoke about the foreign aid pause and the havoc inside USAID.

The future of USAID remains murky, though the Trump administration’s plans are beginning to erratically take shape. Over the weekend, Elon Musk, who is leading the government efficiency taskforce DOGE, described USAID as a “criminal organization” on X, and suggested it was “time for it to die.” Early on Monday, Musk added that Trump had given him approval to “shut it down.” After some employees were prevented from entering USAID headquarters, a group of Senate and House Democrats held a press conference condemning the administration’s actions. “Musk and his band of unelected acolytes at DOGE have… thrown the agency into chaos through a concerted campaign of harassment and intimidation of its employees,” Don Beyer, a congressman from Virginia, told reporters.

The conversation below was edited for length and clarity.

How has aid and assistance traditionally fit into American foreign policy? Is it typically a priority across party lines?

Leaders of both parties have, at least for the last 20 years, understood that doing good in the world is, in and of itself, an important US national interest. We operate very distinctly from, say, the way China approaches its partnerships with low-income countries. We are not doing this on a transactional basis, though we do derive benefits. But we’re not saying, “We will give you foreign aid only if you do x.”

For example, during Covid 19, which I was directly involved with, the vaccine diplomacy models of the US and China were wildly different. China’s model was they would go and they would charge extremely high prices for vaccines while demanding policy concessions. So a number of countries had to agree to remove recognition of Taiwan in order to get Chinese vaccines. Some did agree because at that time, during the tail end of the first Trump administration, the US was not sharing any vaccines. But once the US started donating our vaccines, they vastly preferred working with us. We provided them free of cost, on a humanitarian basis. It demonstrated that the partnership between those countries and the United States was one based on shared values.

The Trump administration has talked about US foreign aid as a transactional tool, that we will give it to countries who do what we want and not to countries who don’t. That removes a huge strategic comparative advantage that we have vis a vis China. When it is so baldly extractive, it almost feels like extortion.

To come to the executive order that President Trump signed on his first day in office, which temporarily suspended foreign assistance programs for 90 days. Can you contextualize that? Has this ever happened before?

There’s no precedent for that. It’s not uncommon for a new administration to come in and do a review, but it’s not appropriate to stop everything while you’re doing that. It’s akin to deciding that you don’t like the destination of the plane, so you’re just going to turn the engine off and crash it into the ground.

It is going to irreparably harm our foreign assistance capacity and waste enormous amounts of taxpayer resources. The administration has said they don’t like the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs and other so-called “woke” programs. Frankly, I’m not even sure what that means in the context of foreign aid. But those can be rooted out in a much more surgical way, if that’s truly the goal.

The executive order described the foreign aid industry and bureaucracy as “not aligned with American interests, and in many cases, antithetical to American values.” Is there a sense that the administration thinks of the practice of foreign aid at large, as something that has become politicized?

They clearly do. One of the things that was very interesting to me, having served at USAID twice as a political appointee, was that to the career staff, their day-to- day ability to have an impact was often pretty unrelated to which party was in control. There were some who were able to do great things during the Trump administration and then ran into challenges during the Biden administration.

“Frankly, it won’t be possible to reopen many of these programs in three months’ time. Already, many of the organizations that work with the US government, both domestically and internationally, are laying off staff.”

But fundamentally, as career government servants, you are going with the flow of whichever party is in charge. That is an ethos that’s deeply embedded in the career government service, particularly in the foreign affairs agencies, and it’s an ethos that I think the Trump administration has never understood. They could advance their agenda much more effectively if they treated those in the building as professionals rather than as adversaries

On January 24, the State Department put out a “stop work” order for both existing and future aid, with some exceptions for emergency food programs and foreign military aid. What did that look like in the agency and in the countries where aid is being performed?

It prompted mass confusion within the US government about how this should be implemented, because the guidance was unclear, and there was really no template or precedent for how you do something like that. There was mass confusion amongst the partners providing aid on the ground in terms of what this meant for them. It meant pulling critical, life-saving relief out of refugee camps. It meant shutting down clinics—a lot of people will needlessly die from lack of health services.

Frankly, it won’t be possible to reopen many of these programs in three months’ time. Already, many of the organizations that work with the US government, both domestically and internationally, are laying off staff. They cannot keep the lights on.

There has been a dramatic overhaul of staffing at USAID, with some senior staff being placed on leave and hundreds of contract employees being laid off. What is the potential impact of this?

Nothing like this has happened before, and it is debilitating to the US government’s ability to meaningfully oversee and account for foreign assistance. I care deeply about the morale and the well-being of the staff who’ve been let go. But even if you don’t care about that, I would hope you care about the effective oversight of taxpayer money. Contract employers are doing the day-to-day legwork that makes that place run—from grant administration to data analytics.

What I take away from these layoffs, apart from the obvious cruelty and capriciousness of it, is that this is not how you would approach a genuine review of foreign aid. I worked very closely with the Global Health Bureau when I was at USAID, and around 50 percent of their employees are contractors. You would not suddenly halve the workforce if you expected any of this to continue.

On January 27, most of the agency’s senior leadership was put on involuntary administrative leave, including much of the general counsel’s office. That included two ethics attorneys, whose job is to advise political appointees on what they can and can’t legally do. This is exactly what you would do if you were seeking to remove any constraints to the destruction of the agency and any constraints to unlawful behavior. You get rid of all the career officials who are able to stand in your way, and all the lawyers who can tell you that what you’re doing is unlawful.

What do these early moves from the administration around foreign aid herald for the future role of the US in the world?

It becomes a United States that is much diminished. This shows, in practice, what an “America First” approach to foreign policy and national security looks like: pulling back from the world, pulling back from helping people who have long relied on their partnerships with the US government. It is an America that, on the world stage, is smaller, stingier, meaner, and, ultimately, much less respected and much less influential.

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This Late-Breaking Biden Executive Order Could Further Empower the AI Oligarchy

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

On January 14, President Joe Biden issued an executive order directing the departments of Defense and Energy to make land available for private entities to construct gigawatt-scale “frontier” AI data centers. He also instructed the Interior Department to identify sites on public land for developing “clean energy” to power those centers and called for streamlined permitting for the power projects and their associated transmission lines.

That same day, the Biden administration began the process of withdrawing more than 300,000 acres of public land from new mining claims and mineral leases in the Amargosa Valley in Nevada, protecting it from future lithium mining and geothermal energy development.

The two initiatives stand in stark contrast with each other. In one case, Biden offered corporate entities federal land for building energy- and water-intensive data centers as well as solar, wind, geothermal or even nuclear installations. In the other, he sought to protect federal land from similar energy developments.

With the Biden administration now behind us, we can see that this kind of inconsistency was the rule, not the exception, for his term. He nixed the Keystone XL pipeline, heightened drilling restrictions in the Arctic and leased out less land for oil and gas drilling than any president before him—and then turned around and approved Alaska’s Willow “carbon bomb” oil project and tossed out drilling permits in the Permian Basin like candy at a July Fourth parade. By establishing Ave Kwa Ame and Chuckwalla national monuments, he kept clean energy developers from exploiting those parts of the Mojave Desert, even as he green-lit dozens of massive solar and wind projects—not to mention lithium mines—on nearby land inhabited by Joshua trees and endangered desert tortoises.

Disposing of public land like this sets a dangerous precedent, especially given that the Trump administration will now decide who gets to build the projects.

I would argue that this apparent contradiction is deliberate, and that it echoes the strategy of the late Jimmy Carter. Both presidents protected vast swaths of public land and championed environmental initiatives. At the same time, they implicitly designated sacrifice zones by allowing and even encouraging the exploitation of some federal land, as if such a sacrifice was necessary to justify protecting the other places. Both politicians had the public interest at heart when they offered up public lands, with Carter striving for the ever-elusive goal of energy independence, while Biden clung to large-scale renewables as a solution to climate change.

Biden appeared to believe that facilitating data centers would achieve a greater good, pointing to AI’s “rapidly growing relevance to national security.” But tech companies don’t seem to need a “common good” argument to encourage their projects. After all, data centers have been sprouting on private land with minimal resistance for years, even in arid places like Las Vegas and Phoenix, which together host at least 50 water-guzzling computer processor-packed warehouses. The centers are also popping up in the Northwest, where hydropower is plentiful, and in Wyoming, where less water and energy is needed to cool the equipment.

To his credit, Biden has acknowledged the outsized energy needs of these data centers. A single AI query uses about 10 times the power of a Google search, and even the old-school search engines aren’t exactly energy misers. The Electric Power Research Institute found that data centers currently consume more than 150 terawatt-hours of electricity annually—enough to power tens of millions of homes—and by 2030 will gobble about 15 percent of the nation’s electricity supply.

This sudden growth in demand has utilities scrambling to keep up, delaying and even canceling the previously scheduled retirements of some coal and nuclear power plants while still racing to develop other energy sources. Tech giants like Meta and Amazon are buying up the entire generating capacity of utility-scale solar, wind, and geothermal installations, and in some cases partnering with other entities to develop their own fleets of advanced nuclear reactors, all to feed the hungry AI beast.

Biden’s order aimed to put public lands on the menu, as long as the energy sources are “clean,” a category that includes solar, wind, hydropower, geothermal and nuclear—even natural gas and coal, as long as at least 90 percent of their carbon emissions are captured and sequestered. This means that, in theory, a corporation could build a gigawatt-scale data center powered by utility-scale “clean” power plants, or even coal-powered ones with carbon capture equipment, along with transmission lines, on federal lands, without having to go through the typical environmental review process.

Biden’s earlier, somewhat questionable moves—such as approving the Willow project—could be seen as cynical bids to garner oil industry support. The timing of this executive order, however, coming a mere week before he left political life for good, proves that his motives are sincere. AI is a powerful tool that has enormous potential for good, from diagnosing medical conditions to crunching huge datasets. It could also do tremendous harm, depending on who wields it. Biden did his best to at least mitigate the impacts of data centers’ energy use by requiring developers to build their own climate-friendly energy installations.

Yet disposing of public land like this, no matter how noble the cause, sets a dangerous precedent, especially given that the Trump administration will now decide who gets to build these projects and where, without the slightest concern for how “clean” they might be. Regardless of Biden’s good intentions and AI’s possible public benefit, the biggest beneficiaries here will be the corporate tech giants and their human masters, i.e. the Musks, Zuckerbergs, Bezoses, and Altmans of the world.

These are the very same people Biden warned us about in his farewell speech, when he said: “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.” It’s a reminder that our public lands should serve as a buffer against oligarchy, not something to be exploited solely to nourish it.

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“Extraordinarily Dangerous”: Warren Demands Answers Over Elon Musk’s Access to US Treasury

Days after his swearing-in, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave Elon Musk and his team at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (which despite its name, is not an official government department), access to the agency’s federal payments system, which essentially operates as the country’s central bank account.

The move, which could potentially provide Musk a view into the personal information of tens and millions of Americans, prompted instant alarm over the weekend. Now Democrats are demanding answers.

On Monday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sent a letter to Bessent, calling the decision “extraordinarily dangerous,” while hitting at Musk’s DOGE team as “unqualified flunkies.”

“It is extraordinarily dangerous to meddle with the critical systems that process trillions of dollars of transactions each year, are essential to preventing a default on federal debt, and ensure that tens of millions of Americans receive their Social Security checks, tax refunds, and Medicare benefits,” Warren wrote.

She continued: “I am alarmed that as one of your first acts as Secretary, you appear to have handed over a highly sensitive system responsible for millions of Americans’ private data—and a key function of government—to an unelected billionaire and an unknown number of his unqualified flunkies.”

Warren’s concerns are far from hyperbole.As my colleague Pema Levy wrote:

Treasury’s payment system processes more than $5 trillion annually, paying the country’s bills. This includes Social Security checks and tax refunds, which means the system includes sensitive personal information on tens of millions of Americans. A Sunday headline from New York Magazine, “Elon Musk May Have Your Social Security Number,” is not an exaggeration.

In her letter, Warren warned Bessent that by letting Musk have access to such private information, the Trump administration could “unilaterally and illegally” cut off payments for millions of Americans, based on political favoritism” or the whims of Musk.

As my colleague Michael Mechanic wrote, the tech mogul has made it clear that he intends to cut government spending by “gutting the federal workforce, eliminating certain agencies, slashing regulations, ending selected entitlements, and, as a corollary, privatizing as much as possible as quickly as possible.”

It appears that Musk has not publicly addressed Warren’s letter, but he did retweet the following post from Republican influencer, Rogan O’Handley, better known as DC_Draino,who claimed that Musk was indeed elected alongside Trump (not true) and is doing exactly what voters expect from him.

Dems keep saying “No one elected Elon Musk”

Yes we did

Elon was very visible with Trump and we elected Trump to utilize Elon in cleaning out corruption in our government

Same goes for Tulsi, RFK, and Kash

We voted for ALL of these people to do exactly what they’re doing https://t.co/mOx1U5UKq4

— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) February 2, 2025

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RFK Jr. Refuses to Disclose to Senate Details of Two “Misconduct” Cases He Settled

On Friday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., responding to written questions from Senate Democrats, revealed information about his personal history that was not yet part of the public record: He had settled at least one case in which he had been accused of “misconduct or inappropriate behavior.” Kennedy also acknowledged that he had been party to at least one non-disclosure agreement.

But in that reply Kennedy provided no details about these allegations. He only offered a one-word reply when asked if he had ever been accused in such a fashion: “Yes.”

Consequently, Senate Democrats followed up with another written query to Kennedy, the anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist who has been nominated by President Donald Trump to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. This was the request:

Please describe the nature of the financial settlements (including total
amounts) and non-disclosure agreements reached and what these agreements involved. Please also indicate how many of these settlements and non-disclosure agreements you have signed.

On Sunday, Kennedy submitted his response:

Twice, I have been targeted by frivolous, unfounded allegations, which I
strenuously denied at the time and continue to deny. I entered into confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements to prohibit these individuals from continuing to make these allegations.

This was not a full answer. The Senate Democrats had asked for the total amounts of the settlements, and Kennedy did not provide that information. Nor did this response indicate what “misconduct or inappropriate behavior” had been alleged.

In this reply, Kennedy stressed that he denied the allegations, whatever they had been. But how can senators assess his refutation?

During his confirmation hearing on Thursday before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), noting that “character matters,” asked Kennedy about the allegation from Eliza Cooney, who had been a babysitter for Kennedy’s family, that Kennedy had once groped her.

Murray noted that after the allegation became public in July Kennedy said he was “not a church boy… I have so many skeletons in my closet.” (He did not deny Cooney’s accusation.) Murray also pointed out that Kennedy had texted an apology to Cooney claiming he had no memory of the incident.

Kennedy shot back at Murray with a new position: “That story has been debunked.” Murray asked why then had he apologized to Cooney. Kennedy said, “I apologized to her for something else.”

But that was not how the text he sent to Cooney came across. It read, “I have no memory of this incident but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feelings. I never intended you any harm. If I hurt you, it was inadvertent. I feel badly for doing so.”

At the hearing, Kennedy did not specify what the “something else” was for which he had apologized to Cooney.

Kennedy’s exchange with Murray might lead senators to question the validity of his denial of the accusations of inappropriate behavior that he fended off with confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements. What happened in these two cases remains a mystery.

After Kennedy initially disclosed the existence of these agreements, Senate Democrats did not raise a fuss about these accusations. With his nomination heading toward a committee vote and possibly a floor vote this upcoming week, it’s unclear whether the allegations of misconduct that Kennedy smothered will play any role in the fight over his confirmation. Kennedy’s stonewalling may well succeed.

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Elon Musk May Now Have Unique Sway Over the US Treasury

Late Friday, newly sworn-in Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave access to the agency’s payments system to representatives of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, created by President Donald Trump and headed by Elon Musk. A strike force of Musk lackeys appears to be pursuing a takeover of key background systems of the US government—from human resources to physical buildings to software systems to, now, what is essentiallythe country’s central bank account. At this point, Musk’s people reportedly cannot control payments, only view them, but how long that arrangement will last is unclear.

Treasury’s payment system processes more than $5 trillion annually, paying the countries bills. This includes Social Security checks and tax refunds, which means the system includes sensitive personal information on tens of millions of Americans. A Sunday headline from New York Magazine, “Elon Musk May Have Your Social Security Number,” is not an exaggeration.

When Musk, the world’s richest man, took over Twitter, he cut costs by simply refusing to make payments. From rent for the company’s headquarter offices in San Francisco to janitorial services, Musk’s approach was to simply stop paying the bills and see what happens. (Employees were forced to use bathrooms in other buildings.)

A similar approach to the United States government, however, promises to be catastrophic. One scenario is that shutting off payments to federal grantees and nonprofits could cause rapid harm. And this could come at the whims of extremist ideological allies of Trump. For example, his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, a Christian nationalist and purveyor of misinformation (who lied to the FBI and was later pardoned by Trump), posted on X information about federal payments to Lutheran Family Services, which along with its affiliates provides a wide range of services, including counseling. Musk retweeted Flynn’s post promising “The @DOGE team is rapidly shutting down these illegal payments.” The illegal actions would in fact appear to be Musk’s own—Congress appropriates federal funds, but Musk is acting as if the law will never catch up to him.

Musk’s tweet may be getting ahead of the reality of what he and his team are doing at the moment. But imagine if the US government were to stop paying bills because a billionaire saw a social media post from a conspiracy theorist urging him to do so.

“Fitch and everyone else should downgrade US credit,” Dean Baker, and economist at the progressive Center for Economy and Policy Research, posted on Bluesky. “If a bill gets paid only if Elon Musk or Donald Trump feels like it, then the US is not very creditworthy.”

Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, issued a similar warning. “To put it bluntly, these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy,” he said in a statement late Friday. “The federal government is in a financially precarious position, currently utilizing accounting maneuvers to continue paying its bills since it reached the debt limit at the beginning of the year. I am concerned that mismanagement of these payment systems could threaten the full faith and credit of the United States.”

Economists have long warned that should the United States miss a debt payment, it would send shockwaves through the world economy. On the domestic front, the Trump administration this past week attempted to withhold billions in federal aid through an Office of Management and Budget memo instructing agencies to temporarily halt payments. The attempt was “wildly illegal,” according to experts, and two federal judges have halted much of that effort. Now, it may be possible for Musk and his underlings themselves to simply withhold payments they disagree with. Theoretically, rather than asking agencies to cut spending, Musk could move to cut off the funds from Treasury.

“I am deeply concerned that following the federal grant and loan freeze earlier this week, these officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs,” Wyden said in statement.

According to reporting in Politico, the Doge team doesn’t have the capability to withhold or change payments—at least not yet. Instead, access by Doge’s Treasury representative, software executive Tom Krause, is “read-only.” But warning signs of a hostile takeover have been flashing.For example, Musk’s team literally took over Office of Personnel Management computer systems this past week, locking OPM officials out of them. They have been taking down entire government websites and datasets, causing public-facing information and research to disappear before Americans’ eyes in Orwellian fashion. And over the weekend, Doge representatives demanded classified information from USAID that they lacked clearances for, according to CNN, despite that the executive order creating Doge explicitly exempts classified information from its efforts. When USAID security officials refused to comply, they were put on leave.

The power that comes with controlling US government payments is vast. How Musk and Trump might try to leverage that against political or legal opponents—say, against states that file lawsuits they don’t like—is sobering to consider. So far, the GOP-controlled Congress seems willing to let them do whatever they want.

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We May Be Eating Microbes Soon, and That’s a Good Thing

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

As a teenager growing up in Nigeria, Helen Onyeaka was obsessed with microorganisms. The tiny lifeforms, which include bacteria and yeast, can be grown quickly and in huge quantities. Onyeaka wondered if that abundance could be harnessed to feed people in conflict zones where children were suffering from malnutrition, their distended stomachs a clear sign of protein deficiency. “I used to dream microbes as food,” she recently recalled.

Today, Onyeaka is an industrial microbiologist and a deputy director of the Birmingham Institute for Sustainability and Climate Action, at the University of Birmingham in the UK. In her lab, she is testing her decades-old hypothesis, trying to identify microorganisms that could one day serve as an alternative protein source while using a fraction of the land, water, and industrial fertilizer needed to support traditional crops and livestock.

As a teenager, industrial microbiologist Helen Onyeaka dreamed of using microbes as food. She now researches microorganisms that could one day serve as a alternative protein source with a lower environmental footprint than traditional crops and livestock.Courtesy of Helen Onyeaka

She’s not the only person studying what are sometimes called single-cell proteins or edible microorganisms. While human diets have long included relatively small quantities of microbes—think of the live bacteria in yogurt, or the oven-killed yeast in bread—researchers at universities and dozens of startups across the globe are now investigating whether some microbes could serve as a caloric substitute for a wide range of foods and ingredients, including eggs, milk, meat, and flour.

Some products have already been cleared for sale in the US. And, late last year a Finnish company called Solar Foods completed requirements, outlined by the Food and Drug Administration, that allow the company to sell a powdery protein made of pasteurized bacteria.

Edible microbes face considerable hurdles to going mainstream, however. Would-be producers need to ensure that their organisms are safe to eat in large quantities and amenable to mass production. And ideally, any new product should look, feel, and taste as good as the food it replaces—and be able to overcome any skepticism from consumers uncertain about using bacteria in their kitchen.

For now, few edible microbes are ready for primetime, according to Onyeaka and other experts. Still, said Onyeaka, “the potential is there.”

According to a report from the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for alternative proteins, at least 80 companies are focused on producing food from yeast, bacteria, fungi, certain strains of algae, and other microorganisms. Some products are already on the market, wrote Adam Leman, a GFI scientist. In an email to Undark, he pointed to Quorn, a meat substitute made from fungal cells that was launched in 1985.

Over the past decade, a boomlet of new companies has emerged. Among them is Solar Foods. Prior to co-founding the company in 2017, CEO Pasi Vainikka worked for a government-owned research center, where he oversaw the largest renewable energy program in Finland. Agriculture is responsible for a large portion of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, said Vainikka. Cow burps and deforestation are particularly problematic.

CEO of Solar Foods, Pasi Vainikka, poses next to a small fermentation machine — a vessel in which the bacteria that make Solein are grown, also called a bioreactor — at the company’s pilot facility. Solar Foods

One solution, Vainikka continued, is to replace livestock with an organism that doesn’t produce much greenhouse gas or require fertile land. His company selected a bacterium from nature that doesn’t eat sugar or perform photosynthesis. Instead, it gets its energy from hydrogen. At the company’s factory in Finland, carbon dioxide is captured from the surrounding air. Electricity is used to split water molecules, freeing up hydrogen atoms. The microbes multiply in a fermentation machine as they consume the hydrogen, the carbon dioxide, and a few additional nutrients, such as calcium and phosphorous. The microbes multiply as they consume the hydrogen, the carbon dioxide, and a few additional nutrients, such as calcium and phosphorous.

Eventually, the bacteria are removed from the fermenter, pasteurized, and dried. The final product—dubbed Solein—is about 75 percent protein, has a yellow hue, and tastes a bit like mushrooms. Solein has been used in restaurants in Singapore, said Vainikka, including as a milk substitute in ice cream. The company recently filed paperwork with US regulators saying that the ingredients are generally recognized as safe, and according to Vainikka, the goal is to introduce Solein as an ingredient in packaged goods at some point in 2025.

In her UK lab, Onyeaka is growing Chlorella vulgaris, a green single-celled algae about 2 to 10 microns in diameter—roughly the width of a strand of spider silk. She and a graduate student feed the algae different nutrients to influence its protein content. The end goal, said Onyeaka, is to grow nutritious algae in quantities large enough to be used as flour by the baking industry. “At the end of the work, we’re going to be making green bread, green cakes—so watch out,” she said with a laugh.

Onyeaka readily admits her Chlorella has a long way to go. Last November, she co-authored a review article noting the significant challenges along that path—including high production costs and the organism’s capacity to accumulate heavy metals from the surrounding environment. She and her team will eventually have to ensure that the microbe is safe for human consumption by testing it for potential toxins and allergens, among other risks.

Another issue highlighted in the review paper: Chlorella doesn’t taste very good. (The researchers describe “an earthy, strong flavor and smell” that is “quite unpleasant” to some consumers.) The product may need to be blended with other strong-flavored ingredients, the paper suggests, or perhaps researchers might look for new, more mild strains.

Solein didn’t work as an egg substitute in Baxtrom’s carrot crepe. But he did use it to replace the crepe’s butter and milk. Solar Foods

Some people are finding ways to make microbes delicious. Chef Greg Baxtrom was initially approached to see if he’d be interested in serving a meal featuring Solein at his Brooklyn restaurant, Olmsted. He didn’t want to force the new product onto the menu, he said, but was curious to see if he might be able to use the protein-rich powder to create egg- or dairy-free versions of some of the restaurant’s classic dishes.

He couldn’t get the Solein to work as an egg substitute in his carrot crepe. But he could get it to replace the crepe’s butter and milk. And Solein did work as an egg substitute in a beer batter for squash rings. Ultimately, he found it worked particularly well as a milk substitute in spaetzle, a German noodle traditionally made from milk, flour, and eggs.

Chef Greg Baxtrom has used Solein to create egg- or dairy-free versions of his Brooklyn restaurant’s classic dishes.Solar Foods

Baxtrom said he planned to experiment with the product a bit more in January. “I’m not going to try to force it, but if it works, then great,” he said. “I can accommodate more allergies.”

Vainikka said that he frequently consumes Solein in dishes served at the small restaurant located within Solar Foods’ headquarters. In the long run, he said, he sees the business as “an organism company with a selection of different strains for different purposes.” A person might balk at glass of yellow milk made from Solein, he pointed out, but perhaps there’s a white microbe that would be less visually objectionable. The company could also supply microbes with different tastes, textures, and nutritional profiles, said Vainikka.

For her part, Onyeaka is looking beyond academia, communicating with companies that share her interest in Chlorella. Using advanced molecular tools, one Chinese company has learned that the typically green microbe can change colors, depending on what it’s fed, she said.

She added, “Chlorella is just amazing.”

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Trump’s Trade War Is Here and Promises to Get Ugly

As he ran for a second term, President Donald Trump promised to impose sweeping tariffs. On Saturday, he pressed the launch button. In three executive orders, Trump placed 25 percent tariffs onalmost all imports from Canada and Mexico and a 10 percent tariff on goods from China. In response, Canada announced its own 25 percent tariff on more than $100 billion in American goods. Mexico and China similarly promised retaliation.

The trade war that mostdismissed as too economically disastrous to actually undertake is nowhere. In a lesson many analysts and commentators fail to learn over and over, it is wise to take Trump both seriously and literally.

With the economies of the US and its two neighbors tightly intertwined, imposing tariffs will not just raise prices but also disrupt manufacturing. According to economist Paul Krugman, the tariffs represent the end of an integrated North American manufacturing hub that mutually benefited all three nations. “Now we have a US president saying that a duly negotiated and signed trade pact isn’t worth the paper it was printed on—that he can impose high tariffs on the other signatories whenever he feels like it,” Krugman wrote on his Substack. “And even if the tariffs go away, the private sector will know that they can always come back; the credibility of this trade agreement, or any future trade agreement, will be lost. So North American manufacturing will disintegrate—that is, dis-integrate—reverting to inefficient, fragmented national industries.”

Immediate effects loom. The National Homebuilder Association warned Trump that the tariffs will raise building costs, worsening the nation’s housing crisis by slowing construction and pushing home prices upward. Automobile costs, already high, will likely rise, as auto parts cross both the northern and southern border multiple times in the process of manufacturing American cars.

Economically, a trade war seemed like such a bad idea that financial institutions and individuals didn’t really believe it would happen. Less than two weeks ago, Goldman Sachs put the likelihood of Trump’s promised tariffs at 20 percent. The staunchly right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board on Friday called the tariffs “The Dumbest Trade War in History.”

Canada quickly announced a retaliatory 25 percent tariffs on US goods, with an emphasis on products from Republican-controlled states, possibly a savvy way to apply pressure on Trump. Among those goods now taxed at 25 percent are Florida orange juice, Tennessee whiskey, and Kentucky peanut butter, according to the New York Times, as well as clothing, shoes, furniture, appliances. Canada is coordinating its strategy with Mexico, according to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Trump has said he would impose further tariffs if Canada and Mexico retaliate, raising the possibility that these are merely the opening shots in a new trade war.

While Trump long promised tariffs on China, it’s noteworthy thaton Saturday, he saved his highest tariffs for America’s closest trading partners, neighbors, and allies. China facesonly a 10 percent tariff so far. China promised retaliation as well.

Voter discontent over inflation was one of Trump’s biggest political advantages in the 2024 election, but the pain from his tariffs is likely to be passed on to consumers. (Trump admitted in a social media post on Sunday that Americans will feel pain from his tariffs and that it “will be worth the price that must be paid.”) Perhaps most immediately, economists warn, food costs are likely to rise. The price of cars, electronics, including cell phones, and clothing will also go up if the tariffs remain in place.

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Trump’s War on Gender is Accelerating

If you searched “transgender” on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website on January 19—the day before President Donald Trump took office—you’d find helpful information about HIV, gender-affirming resources, and the high rate of diabetes among the LGBTQ+ community.

If you make the same web query on the CDC.gov now, those webpages bring you an error message: “The page you’re looking for was not found.”

Information about trans people, gender identity, and disease prevention was edited or removed from the CDC’s website by Friday, according to the Washington Post. The removals coincided with the CDC and other government agencies—the Departments of Transportation and Energy—instructing employees last week to remove their pronouns from email signatures. An employee of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission also told Mother Jones they were told verbally to remove their pronouns.

Both efforts were spurred by an executive order Trump signed on his first day in office, in which he declared, “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.” The memo included several directives for government agencies, including instructions for them to cease issuing passports with the “X” gender-marker, “to remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology,” and to “take all necessary steps, as permitted by law, to end the Federal funding of gender ideology.”

These changes won’t just make it harder for individuals to seek information they can use in their personal lives, but they may also stifle research that helps identify links between age, race, gender, socioeconomic status and public health risks. For example, data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, a national survey conducted every two years (I personally remember taking it in school) among high school students, is currently not available on the CDC site. Data from that survey previously has been used to understand children’s’ use of weapons and drugs, as well as suicidality.

In the first two weeks of his second presidential term, Trump has also directed his attorney general to investigate teachers who “unlawfully facilitat[e] the social transition of a minor student.” According to the executive order, reported by my colleague Madison Pauly, possible offenses include an educator calling a student by their trans name and pronouns or allowing a student to use the restroom aligned with their gender identity. Yet another executive order instructs federal agencies to start taking steps to eliminate gender-affirming treatments for individuals up to the age of 19.

The Trump Administration’s obsession with this issue is disproportionate to the number of Americans and children who identify as non-binary or seek gender-affirming healthcare. Fewer than 2 percent of adults in the US say their gender is different from their assigned sex at birth, according to Pew Research Center. Moreover, a recent survey of 5.1 million kids in JAMA-pediatrics found that only 0.017 percent of youth were coded as trans and received puberty blockers, while 0.037 percent were trans and accessed hormone therapy.

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This Week’s Episode of Reveal: Immigrants on the Line

Mackenson Remy didn’t plan to bypass security when he drove into the parking lot of a factory in Greeley, Colorado. He’d never been there before. All he knew was this place had jobs…lots of jobs.

Remy is originally from Haiti, and in 2023, he’d been making TikTok videos about job openings in the area for his few followers, mostly other Haitians.

What Remy didn’t know was that he had stumbled onto a meatpacking plant owned by the largest meat producer in the world, JBS. The video he made outside the facility went viral, and hundreds of Haitians moved for jobs at the plant.

But less than a year later, Remy—and JBS—were accused of human trafficking and exploitation by the union representing workers at the plant.

“This is America. I was hoping America to be better than back home,” says Tchelly Moise, a Haitian immigrant and union rep. “Someone needs to be held accountable for this, because this is not okay anywhere.”

This week on Reveal, reporter Ted Genoways with the Food & Environment Reporting Network looks into JBS’ long reliance on immigrant labor for this work—and its track record of not treating those workers well. The difference this time is those same workers are now targets of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

This episode was produced in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a nonprofit news organization.

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