The Forgotten—and Incredibly Important—History of the Abortion Pill

At his Senate confirmation hearings to head the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. surprised no one by admitting that he planned to order a new review of the safety of abortion pills. While Kennedy claimed that President Donald Trump has not taken a position—yet—on medication abortion, “he’s made it clear to me that he wants me to look at the safety issues,” Kennedy said. “And I’ll ask [agencies] to do that.” This, of course, is exactly what anti-abortion groups have been pushing for. Since 2022, when the US Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in the Dobbs decision, abortion opponents have been ramping up unfounded claims that mifepristone and misoprostol are dangerous. Their efforts have included a flurry of letters to the new administration, explicit directives in the far-right’s Project 2025 blueprint for the second Trump term, and a barrage of ever-more-extreme lawsuits and state bills.

Never mind that medication abortion has an exemplary safety record stretching back decades. “It really is safer than Tylenol,” says Carrie N. Baker, a Smith College professor and Ms. contributing editor who has been writing about the abortion pill for years. The unexpected problem for conservatives is that, despite the overturn of Roe v. Wade, medication abortions have contributed to a rise in pregnancy terminations since 2022 and now account for nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the US. A fact which, Baker says, explains “why they’re now laser-focused on removing mifepristone and misoprostol from the market.”

Only in late 2022, did many Americans notice that there was a sweeping new strategy to gut access to abortion pills. That’s when a group of medical providers calling themselves the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine sued the Food and Drug Administration in Texas over its regulation of mifepristone going back to 2000, when the drug was first approved for use in the US. “I read the brief,” says Baker, “and they completely misrepresented both the safety of abortion pills and the history of how they had originally been approved. It was really frustrating to me.” But when she went to do her own research in hopes of correcting the record, she discovered that the true history of abortion pills was largely unwritten. So she decided to write it herself.

That book, Abortion Pills: US History and Politics—also available on an open-source platform to make it more accessible—could not be more timely. Based on interviews with more than 80 people, including many of the key figures in scientific and political battles going back decades, the book takes readers back to the earliest days of mifepristone, when it was still known as RU 486. It also delves into the lesser-known controversies over misoprostol, which is used in tandem with mifepristone under the FDA-approved protocol.

The biggest surprise for Baker? “How unnecessarily long it took for the drug to gain FDA approval and how unnecessarily restrictive the FDA was.” RU 486, she notes, was invented by French researchers in the 1970s, patented in France in 1980, and approved by the French government in 1988. But it wasn’t approved in the United States for another 12 years. “In their lawsuit, the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine frames the narrative as: the Clinton administration rushed through approval of mifepristone very quickly,” Baker says. “In fact, it took much longer to approve mifepristone than it did to approve most drugs at the time.”

I spoke with Baker recently from her office on the Smith campus, where she heads the Program on the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mifepristone was controversial from its inception, but not because it was unsafe.

By the time the drug started going up for review by the French government in the 1980s, its effectiveness and safety were pretty well established. But the Catholic Church and Catholic groups very quickly opposed it on moral grounds, and when word got to the United States, anti-abortion groups began to organize to prevent it from coming here.

“In France, opponents firebombed one movie theater and tear-gassed another. They harassed company executives and their families. They called the Jewish scientist who developed RU 486 a Nazi and accused him of turning wombs into crematoriums.”

From the very beginning, the resistance to RU 486 was characterized by terroristic threats and violence. In France, opponents firebombed one movie theater and tear-gassed another. They harassed Roussel Uclaf executives and their families. They called the Jewish scientist who developed RU 486 a Nazi and accused him of turning wombs into crematoriums—things like that.

In the US, this was when extremists began threatening abortion doctors and people who worked at abortion clinics. Operation Rescue was blocking clinic entrances and terrorizing staff and patients. So the whole environment around abortion was one of fear.

The FDA used highly unusual security protocols throughout the whole review process because they were worried about bombs, threats, and terroristic acts. They didn’t reveal the names of the people involved in approving the drug, which normally they would have. All of that set the tone and contributed to why the FDA was so deliberate and conservative about how they dealt with this medication.

And now, decades later, anti-abortion groups are using the FDA’s caution to argue that this drug is unsafe.

Ironically, back in the 1980s, some of the loudest concerns about the safety of RU 486 came from feminists.

When mifepristone first arrived on the scene, it was not a given that the feminist movement was going to support this new medication. There was a widespread feeling in feminist circles that the medical systemwas paternalistic. It had a history of betraying women—for example, with the birth control pill. When the Pill was first put on the market, the dosage of hormones was really high—10 times higher than what we have today—which was causing strokes and other medical problems. The researchers had tested it in Puerto Rico but were so eager to get this medication approved they didn’t take the women’s feedback seriously.

There were problems with other drugs and devices, too, like the Dalkon Shield [an early IUD that could cause severe injuries, infertility**,** and even death]. And so when mifepristone came around, lots of women were very mistrustful.

“There was a widespread feeling in feminist circles that the medical systemwas paternalistic. It had a history of betraying women.”

What changed feminists’ minds?

Women’s health advocates in Washington, DC, convened what became known as the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, as a way to learn about this new drug: Is this something we want to get behind? Do we believe it will be good for women? Is it safe? One of the skeptics was Carol Downer, who recently died. She was a very influential figure in the natural feminist movement and had taught women how to use manual vacuum aspiration to do at-home abortions. She called the process “menstrual extraction” and saw it as a way for women to take control of their health. In the late ’80s, Downer traveled to France to do research on behalf of the skeptics. She talked to women who had used mifepristone, she talked to medical professionals, and came away convinced that actually, RU 486 was a safe and good technology—a “momentous discovery,” she told me.

The Reproductive Health Technologies Project was also very intentional about consulting women of color, who had been treated especially poorly by birth control researchers. That helped get the women’s movement on board as well.

Meanwhile, the French company behind the drug was having second and third thoughts, though not for safety reasons. They feared the political and economic ramifications of being associated with abortion.

Roussel Uclaf was majority-owned by a German company, Hoechst AG, whose CEO was Catholic. In the wake of the protests and violence, just a month after RU 486’s approval by the French government in 1988, Roussel’s board of directors actually voted to withdraw it from the French market. Then it quickly backtracked after the French health minister threatened to transfer the RU 486 patent to another company in order to serve the public good, calling the medication “the moral property of women.” But that same year, under pressure from Hoechst and fearing further backlash, Roussel did suspend all other plans to market the drug themselves in other countries, including the United States.

What was the US response among abortion supporters in the US?

The Feminist Majority Foundation—they were heroic. They collected over 700,000 petitions from people across the United States, then took them in huge boxes to Roussel Uclaf’s headquarters in Paris and said, We in the United States want this drug. Please bring it to market in the United States.

The patent ended up with a New York-based NGO, Population Council, which supports research on contraceptives. Population Council conducted clinical trials and sought a company to distribute the medication. A new privately funded company, Danco Laboratories, was formed for this purpose, but they still had to find a manufacturer. That took a while. At one point, a Hungarian drug manufacturer agreed to do it, then it withdrew because of anti-abortion pressure. They eventually found a Chinese pharmaceutical company, Shanghai Hua Lian Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., to supply the medication

Mifepristone was finally approved in the US at the very end of the Clinton administration. But the terms were really strict—and two decades later, that has come back to haunt its supporters.

The FDA is, by its nature, a cautious, rigorous scientific organization. They move slowly, they move incrementally, and they’re careful. That’s especially true when they’re facing cuts in funding, which anti-abortion members of Congress were threatening to do if mifepristone was approved. The agency was under a lot of political pressure.

They approved it under a very restrictive protocol, and then later it was put in the Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy, or REMS, program, which is supposed to apply to the most dangerous drugs. The FDA didn’t allow pharmacies to dispense the drug—only registered doctors could dispense it in person in clinics or hospitals. Patients had to have three different appointments. The medication could only be used in early pregnancy—through the first seven weeks.

This wasn’t because mifepristone was unsafe. By 2000, there was an enormous amount of research showing that it was safe, including widespread clinical trials. The FDA was worried if something went wrong, the drug would lose approval and go away forever. The restrictions were a way of closely monitoring the abortion pill, not because it was dangerous, but because they wanted to have a good, solid safety record so that they could then justify expanding access. The theory was that they would loosen that protocol after a couple of years of evidence showing how safe it was.

“The restrictions were a way of closely monitoring the abortion pill, not because it was dangerous, but because they wanted to have a good, solid safety record so that they could then justify expanding access. “

But then George W. Bush was elected president in November 2000. Republicans took over the FDA, and they weren’t going to loosen the abortion protocol at all. And so the abortion pill remained under these very strict rules for 16 years before the FDA began to loosen them.

This seems to happen over and over. People will try to act responsibly to get a policy passed: They go slowly and make compromises that don’t seem especially significant at the time. Then, years later, those well-meaning efforts are used against them.

We’ve seen this in the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine lawsuit. They’re pointing to the REMS protocol and saying, See, the FDA put all these restrictions on mifepristone. That means they didn’t think it was safe.

Mifepristone is not the only drug used in medication abortions. The standard protocol also includes misoprostol. How it came to be used in abortions is a fascinating story.

When the FDA approved mifepristone in 2000, it actually approved a two-drug regimen. Mifepristone blocks the absorption of progesterone, so the lining of the uterus begins to shed. Then 24 hours later, you take misoprostol, which causes the uterus to contract and the pregnancy to be expelled. Misoprostol is an ulcer medication that has other important uses, too—for example, to induce labor and stop postpartum hemorrhaging. In most states, any doctor can prescribe it. Veterinarians, too—dogs take it for ulcers.

But, misoprostol can also be used alone for abortion. In the 1980s, Brazilian women looked at the misoprostol label and saw a warning: Do not use if you’re pregnant, may cause miscarriage. Abortion was illegal in Brazil. And misoprostol was widely available—you could just go to a pharmacy and get it. So women started using it. Public health authorities noticed that abortion-related deaths were dropping precipitously, and they wondered why. They discovered that women were using misoprostol, which is very effective and very safe. And so, of course, they pulled it off the shelves and the death rate went back up. But at this point, women knew.

In 1990, feminist advocates from across South America met in Argentina and shared this knowledge among themselves. And so an underground network developed that spread across the world. Now, post-Dobbs, this knowledge is flowing north into the United States.

As a side note, Searle—the drug company that developed misoprostol—was afraid that having their medication in the abortion medication protocol would subject them to protests and boycotts by the anti-abortion movement. So Searle was like, No, don’t, don’t associate us with abortion in any way. But by the time mifepristone was approved in the US, misoprostol had gone generic, which was less of a problem for Searle.

The Obama administration finally loosened the FDA rules in 2016 to allow medication abortion up to 10 weeks of pregnancy and a wider array of health care providers to dispense abortion pills. Then the first Trump administration, which was packed with anti-abortion appointees, didn’t target mifepristone the way pro-choicers might have expected—in fact, they actually OKed a generic version that made it much more affordable!

You know, the abortion pill really wasn’t a high priority for Donald Trump’s allies because they were having so much success in other ways. Capturing the Supreme Court and queuing up cases in the states that could be used to overturn Roe v. Wade—that was really their focus. The FDA’s approval of generic mifepristone in 2019 slipped under the radar.

When the Trump administration really cracked down on abortion pills was during the pandemic. As part of the Covid emergency, the president lifted the REMS for many restricted drugs—including fentanyl and OxyContin—so that they could be dispensed through the mail. But not mifepristone. Doctors and advocates sued, and in July 2020, a Maryland federal judge ruled that the Trump administration had imposed a substantial burden on abortion by not lifting that restriction and by forcing women to expose themselves to Covid to get this medication. And all of a sudden, that opened the door to telemedicine abortion, which was groundbreaking.

The door was only open for about six months before the Supreme Court reversed the lower court. But data that was collected during that period about the safety of telemedicine abortion ended up being submitted to the Biden administration’s FDA, which permanently removed the in-person dispensing requirement in December 2021. Telehealth abortions exploded. Today, 20 percent of all abortions in the US are done by telemedicine.

So you could argue that Covid, followed by Dobbs, revolutionized abortion care by facilitating telemedicine and then encouraging states to pass shield laws protecting telehealth providers.

Today there are more abortions in Mississippi than there were before Dobbs. There are more abortions overall in the US. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the lowest point was 850,000 in 2017, at the start of before the first Trump administration. Now we’re over a million a year, and it’s going up.

In eight states with shield laws, telehealth clinics are now serving more than 10,000 people a month living in states with abortion bans. That probably wouldn’t have happened without Covid and Dobbs.

And that’s why the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine filed suit in 2022 challenging the FDA’s regulation of mifepristone. That’s why states like Louisiana are reclassifying mifepristone and misoprostol as dangerous controlled substances and trying to remove them from the market. It’s why anti-abortion groups are seeking to enforce a 19th-century anti-obscenity law, the Comstock Act, to prohibit the mailing of abortion pills—a de facto federal abortion ban.

Even the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine lawsuit—which the Supreme Court rejected last term though several states have moved to revive it—has had unintended benefits for the abortion rights cause.

Obviously, it was a terrible lawsuit. But it did a lot of work to raise public awareness of abortion pills. Today many more people understand: Oh, you can just take a pill for an abortion. Oh, that pill is safer than Tylenol.

How does all this make you feel as Donald Trump and his allies once again take power?

Trump intends to do a lot of harmful stuff. But how can we use this terrible turn of events to motivate people? How can we create something surprising, something revolutionary, out of this moment? We have everybody’s attention. Let’s use it.

I mean, yes, we have to defend our rights, but let’s not only think defensively. That’s been our problem all these years. We’ve always just thought, Oh, we need to defend Roe_._ We haven’t been thinking, Wait a minute, Roe_’s not enough. How do we go further?_ And I feel like this is an opportunity to do that.

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Will Congress Ever “Liberate” Methadone?

Every morning, Nick Voyles jumps in his car and hustles to a methadone clinic in a nearby strip mall. As he walks up to the glass partition that separates him from the nurse—and his daily dose of America’s most regulated drug—his mind starts racing: What if this takes forever and I’m late for work? What if I can’t pee while I’m being watched? “I’m scared the entire time,” he says. “I’m called to the window and I’m just waiting to see what will happen.”

For Voyles, the executive director of the Indiana Recovery Alliance, a harm-reduction organization based in Bloomington, methadone has been a lifesaver and a stabilizer. “I bought a house. I married the woman I love,” Voyles told me on a rainy day as we sat on mismatched couches in the group’s office. “I raised a child. I’ve got a career.”

Despite well-established benefits—it reduces overdose deaths by as much as 59 percent—and low risks, methadone is the only prescription drug that doctors cannot call into a pharmacy and is solely available through segregated clinics. Unless they’re granted the “privilege” of take-home doses, people have to travel to the clinic every day or risk going into withdrawal. In the 30 years Voyles has been on methadone, he’s missed many Christmases with his family in Texas. Since he couldn’t get take-homes, he wasn’t at his mother’s bedside when she was diagnosed with cancer. He’s driven to clinics an hour away and shown up two minutes after dosing hours have ended to be turned away at the door.

The crisis gave new life to a movement of drug user organizers, providers, and researchers pushing to “liberate methadone” from clinics.

The immense difference methadone makes in people’s lives, and the humiliating and punitive way in which it’s administered, have made the clinics a longtime target of the National Survivors Union, a group of current and former drug users pushing to change a system they say has failed them. Voyles got involved with the NSU around 2019, after he heard a member speak at a conference. “I didn’t know that there was a group of people that was willing to go out in public and say, ‘We’re drug users, and we want our rights back,’” he says.

The NSU long hoped to push regulatory changes for methadone, but standing in the way was the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which hadn’t substantively modified its rules governing opioid treatment since they were first imposed in the early 1970s. As soon as Covid hit, that changed. When social distancing rules were put in place in March 2020, SAMHSA released emergency guidelines to ease take-home access. But at many clinics, take-homes continued to be few and far between. “It was a radicalizing moment,” says NSU member Caty Simon. “We thought that so many of the people in our communities would be spared the risk of transmission inside clinics—and were quickly and devastatingly proved wrong.”

At the same time—partly as the result of Covid-related supply chain interruptions—North America’s illicit drug supply was increasingly tainted by fentanyl. According to the CDC, opioid overdose deaths increased by 38 percent in 2020. To activists like Voyles and Simon, it was clear their friends and loved ones were dying because it was harder to access methadone than the lethal drug supply. The crisis gave new life to a movement of drug user organizers, providers, and researchers pushing to “liberate methadone” from clinics. In February 2024, NSU organizers secured a major victory when SAMHSA made its emergency rules from Covid permanent.

But to the activists, the pandemic exposed how even those reforms fell short. To achieve the broader changes they want—to abolish the clinic system, they say, and not just reduce its cruelty—they will have to overcome a lobbying push from clinic owners. Twenty years ago, most clinics were operated by nonprofits or state and tribal governments. Today, about 65 percent are for-profit, with almost a third backed by private equity. The shift has surprising roots: By requiring insurers to cover treatment for addiction services, legislative reforms like the Affordable Care Act expanded the pool of people able to access treatment. Private equity firms “saw a lot of growth opportunity,” says Eileen O’Grady, a researcher at the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. Six PE-backed chains now each own 50 or more clinics, and two firms own 100 or more, according to a recent investigation by Stat.

Med Mark Treatment Center in Bloomington, IndianaKaiti Sullivan

Voyles’ clinic is operated by BayMark Health Services, which is owned by two PE firms. Since his clinic was taken over by the chain, he’s noticed significant cuts to administrative and janitorial workers, increasing the burden on a dwindling staff. BayMark insists cuts are not “standard practice” and argues private equity investment has allowed the company to “expand access and improve care” across its 113 clinics. But sprawling and opaque clinic networks make it difficult for activists and researchers to definitively say how private equity has affected patient care—for example, whether these clinics are more likely to “fee-tox,” or forcibly discharge patients who cannot pay.

At the same time, a growing body of research shows that when private equity and health care collide, patient outcomes get worse. A December 2023 study published in jama found that after hospitals were acquired by private equity, patient falls, infections, and other postprocedure complications increased. Private equity–backed companies “must have outsized profits, and if they don’t, they’ll lose their investors,” says Laura Olson, a Lehigh University political science professor who has studied the industry’s effect on health care. “The only way to get outsized profits is to cut services.”

Rep. Donald Norcross (D-N.J.) remembers looking out the window of his Camden apartment during a snowstorm to see people still forced to trek to a nearby methadone clinic. “Everybody else’s sheltering in place. And these people are coming out in horrible conditions,” Norcross recalls. He started asking questions and was shocked to discover the monopolistic control leveraged by the clinic chains.

In 2021, Norcross started drafting a bill to expand methadone access—and challenge the industry’s status quo, in which operators make money by requiring frequent on-site visits. At first, he told me, he attempted to include clinics and industry representatives in the process. But “they kept moving the goal posts,” he said. “It was clear they didn’t want any changes because it would hurt their business.”

A Narcan dispenser in the parking lot of Med Mark Treatment CenterKaiti Sullivan

The trade industry group representing methadone clinics, the American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence, as well as several private equity–backed clinics, retained lobbying services for the first time in 2022, according to Stat. The same year, AATOD—alongside BayMark and other private equity–backed providers—launched its “Program, not a Pill” PR effort to make the case that clinics provide valuable wraparound services beyond methadone itself.
In March 2023, Norcross and a bipartisan group in Congress introduced the Modernizing Opioid Treatment Access bill, which would allow pharmacies to dispense methadone and board-certified addiction physicians to prescribe it. For many activists, it’s an important step, even as they push to make the drug available through primary care providers. “It’s the most achievable incrementable change that we can aspire to,” Simon says.

In an interview, AATOD President Mark Parrino said the existing clinic system keeps patients safe. “While methadone maintenance is a very good medication in treating opiate use disorder, it’s an unforgiving medication,” he said. “If you don’t have experience using it, people will overdose.”

While overdosing on methadone is possible, several studies conducted during the pandemic found that greater access to take-homes did not increase overdoses or lead patients to drop out of treatment. Many countries, including Canada and the United Kingdom, allow physicians to prescribe methadone and pharmacies to dispense it, while reporting few safety risks and a far lower rate of overdose.

A version of Norcross’ bill passed the Senate health committee in late 2023, but went no further in the last Congress. In March 2024, Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) opened a bipartisan investigation with several of the bill’s co-sponsors into whether private equity was hampering methadone access. “It’s clear that private equity investors want to keep methadone locked in methadone clinics to make money instead of save lives,” he told me in an email.

Nick Voyles in front of the Indiana Recovery Alliance truck in Bloomington, IndianaKaiti Sullivan

While the bipartisan attention and broad impact of the opioid crisis could transcend political gravity, advocates are not optimistic about Norcross’ bill under President Donald Trump, who is fixated on blaming Mexico for the overdose crisis.

Meanwhile, Voyles continues to drive to his clinic each day, familiar questions racing through his head. “You have no control over anything,” he says, “and anything could happen.”

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Trump’s “Puppet Master,” Russ Vought, Confirmed to Lead OMB

On Thursday evening, the US Senate voted to confirm Russell Vought to lead the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a key arm of the executive branch in charge of the federal budget and agency regulations. Vought will officially return to his old job, which—as I wrote in a profile of him published last year—he sees as being the “keeper of ‘commander’s intent’” in a war to upend the federal bureaucracy.

The 53-47 vote to confirm Vought came after Democrats held the Senate floor in an overnight marathon to protest the nomination. One after another, they excoriated Trump’s pick to be head of OMB, perhaps more than any other controversial appointee.

“Of all the harmful nominees, of all the extremists that Donald Trump has elevated, of all the hard-right ideologies who have come before the Senate,” Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York said, “none of them hold a candle to Russell Vought. He is far and away the most dangerous to the American people.”

He added: “Most people have never heard of Russell Vought before, but make no mistake about it, my fellow Americans: he is the most important piece of the puzzle in Donald Trump’s second term. He will be the quarterback of White House policy.”

Describing Vought as the “godfather of the ultra-right,” Schumer called him “Project 2025 incarnate.”

Vought’s goals are not secret, nor are they subtle—we do not have to decipher anything here. He's going to break laws, cut programs that help Americans, and funnel all that money to billionaires. I'm voting NO. pic.twitter.com/nlQ0A9PV1B

— Senator Patty Murray (@PattyMurray) February 6, 2025

A self-avowed Christian Nationalist, Vought is a wonky bureaucrat and Washington insider committed to Trump’s obsession with “draining the swamp.” During Trump’s first term, he tested the boundaries of the law to advance the president’s radical goals. Founder of the conservative think-tank Center for Renewing America, he is also one of the architects behind the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 mandate for Trump’s comeback, advocating for expanding presidential powers and subjugating the federal government.

As I wrote in a profile of Vought, if confirmed, he would be the man best positioned to realize Trump’s visions—and push the religious right’s agenda:

For Vought, politics is downstream from religion. He sees a strong presidency as a way to bring forth a Christian nation. Vought opposes abortion and has referred to transgender identity as a “contagion.” He has suggested migration policy should be rooted in Judeo-Christian principles, with immigrants tested on their readiness to “assimilate.” If Trump wins, Vought wants to infuse the next conservative administration with the values of Christian nationalism—the conviction that the United States is bound to the teachings of Christ, from which all else follows.

During a January confirmation hearing, Vought was pressed on his anti-abortion stance and support of cuts to federal programs like Medicaid. He also reaffirmed his belief that the Impoundment Control Act (ICA), which limits the president’s authority to withhold funds appropriated by Congress, is unconstitutional. “My view of the [OMB director] position is that you come into an administration and you do what the president ran on, what the president’s viewpoints are,” Vought testified. “You take the viewpoint and you dispense it throughout the agency.”

“This is like, everybody’s watched Game of Thrones,” Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii said on the Senate floor this week “he wants to be the king’s hand.” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren called Vought the “puppet master” behind the Trump administration’s brief but chaotic funding freeze of all federal grants and loans. “We don’t know how far Russ Vought’s extremism will go,” she said. “But we can’t afford to wait and find out.”

While in charge of OMB, Vought spearheaded the effort to implement Schedule F, an executive order meant to strip thousands of career civil servants from job protections and replace them with handpicked MAGA loyalists. Vought has talked about putting federal workers ‘in trauma” and make them “not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

“In addition to Vought’s intention to dismantle the civil service,” a statement submitted by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) opposing his nomination reads “the Senate cannot ignore his willingness and intentions to misuse his own authority and craft plans for the president to subvert the law and, in the process, American democracy.”

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Elon Musk’s Use of AI to Slash Education Spending Could Put Disabled Students at Risk

On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that Elon Musk’s DOGE fed sensitive data into artificial intelligence software as a way to help decide which of the Department of Education’s programs were wasteful, to try and slash its budget.

President Donald Trump is expected to soon release an executive order that would reduce education spending as much as possible while recognizing that he cannot get rid of the department itself. That can only be done by an act of Congress—Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) recently reintroduced such a bill in the House.

As I previously reported, the Department of Education plays a crucial role in making sure disabled kids receive the same access to education across states, and distributes funding for the needed accommodations. Disabled people are used to being told that those accommodations are too expensive, which is one cause for concern with DOGE’s use of AI for this purpose.

Ariana H. Aboulafia, who leads disability rights efforts for the DC-based nonprofit Center for Democracy & Technology, says it’s important to remember that federal funding for students with disabilities is crucial in ensuring they have fair access to learning. “Any efforts to use unproven, AI-driven technology to make funding cuts could lead to excessive harm to this community,” she told me. “In this instance, it is unclear whether the AI model in question even works for this purpose, but it does appear to raise serious security questions given the sensitivity of the data that is being shared.”

AI is not a neutral source, and research has indicated that it has ableist biases. For instance, a 2024 study found that ChatGPT gave a lower score to resumes that indicated a disability. “Many cuts to the Department of Education, whether they are determined through the use of AI models or human decision-making,” Aboulafia says, “will have a disproportionate and significant impact on students with disabilities.”

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Trampling Congress, Trump Attacks Immigration Legal Services

Following a flurry of anti-immigrant executive orders by Donald Trump on his first day in office, the Department of Justice sent emails last Wednesday ordering legal service providers in immigration courts to “stop work immediately.” The order was sent to organizations working within four federally funded programs designed to help people navigate the complex immigration court system, through assistance outside the courtroom—like going over legal paperwork and court date requirements—and inside the courtroom, through direct legal representation.

The day after the stop-work order was issued, members of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights showed up at a detention facility in Virginia, hoping to provide services at their own expense despite the funding pause. “Our team went to the facility in Virginia and then was escorted out about an hour into their work,” says the organization’s executive director, Michael Lukens, calling it “a real blow, because our mission is to help people and we were being told that the government would not allow us to do that.”

On Sunday, 11 days after the stop-work email went out, the DOJ restored funding for the programs after the Amica Center and eight other immigration rights organizations filed a lawsuit. But even though the programs are back, chaos and confusion spread—like with many of the administration’s recent actions that courts have stepped in to temporarily halt—and there’s no reason to believe Trump won’t attempt something similar in the future.

Lukens says being shut out of the facilities made the detention centers “de facto black sites” with no transparency or accountability. I heard similar stories of disruption from another advocate speaking on condition of anonymity, who told me about one lawyer who was panicking about the fact that his client would age out of being able to apply for special immigrant juvenile status—which provides an opportunity for permanent residency to young people who suffer abuse or neglect by guardians—if he was unable to help him file his paperwork within a week.

People facing deportation have no right to a public defender—immigration proceedings are considered a civil, rather than a criminal matter—which makes these legal support programs indispensable. It is estimated that nearly 70 percent of people facing deportation lack legal counsel, and as of the end of fiscal year 2024, there was a backlog of 3.6 million immigration cases in the United States.

Congress has repeatedly increased funding for two programs affected by the “stop-work” order—a Legal Orientation Program and Immigration Court Helpdesk—with congressional appropriations committees arguing that the programs benefit taxpayers by making immigration proceedings more efficient. The Legal Orientation Program, which offers legal education and refers people to free or affordable counsel, has assisted hundreds of thousands since it was founded in 2003.

In 2018, during Trump’s first term, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions froze funding for both programs, leading to public objections from Democratic members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, which not only emphasized how the programs saved the government millions but also how Sessions’ actions defied “clear and unambiguous Congressional intent” and ignored “the will of Congress.” Sessions eventually backtracked and restored funding after the congressional pushback.

When Richard Nixon’s administration attempted to withhold funds appropriated by Congress, as both Trump administrations now have, lower courts repeatedly struck down the attempts, and the Supreme Court eventually ruled 9-0 against him in a case, decided in 1975, involving the Nixon White House’s effort to defund a program for mitigating water pollution.

Bettina Rodriguez Schlegel, chief of staff at immigrant rights organization Acacia Center for Justice, said via email that “members of Congress from both sides of the aisle” in both Republican and Democratic administrations “have agreed that these vital programs help individuals better understand their rights and obligations while they are in immigration proceedings.” She adds, “Particularly as the administration announces plans to ramp up detention and enforcement operations around the country, it is more vital than ever that people have access to due process protections, afforded to everyone in the U.S – regardless of immigration status – under the Constitution.”

Lukens sees the recent executive action to defund and ban immigration support as another clear violation of the constitutional “power of the purse,” a key plank of the Constitution which gives Congress power over how federal funds are spent. “The executive branch is obligated to spend funds that have been appropriated,” Lukens says. “That’s just basic constitutional law.” His organization is moving forward with the lawsuit; he hopes for a verdict that will make those obligations even clearer, and prevent future attempts to bar immigrants from receiving legal services.

The White House and Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.

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The Hidden History of Trans Health Care

As of Saturday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website has scrubbed allmention of LGBTQ folks. The State Department has removed the “TQ” in LGBTQ from its guidance page for LGBTQ international travelers. The White House removed pages honoring Nex Benedict and Matthew Shepard. The CDC also issued an order to rescind and rewrite unpublished research papers by their scientists that include the word “transgender.” (Not to mention curtailing information on climate and vaccines.)

The scrubbing effort has been equated by journalists and internet commentators to a virtual book-burning reminiscent of the Nazi era, specifically the world’s first trans clinic, The Institute for Sexual Research. “A generation of knowledge is being trashed at lightning speed,” wrote Dan Samorodnitsky for Sequencer.

That lightning-speed flurry of executive orders evokes history even as Trump attempts to erase it. In his recent order banning gender-affirming care for minors and 18-year-olds, Trump calls transgender medical care a “dangerous trend” and a “stain on our Nation’s history.”

There is acommon, ironic, and false justification for restricting transgender health care for youth: that it is “new” and “experimental.” Jules Gill-Peterson, historian of transgender medical care and an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, spoke with Mother Jones about how old gender-affirming medical care is—more than a century—and how that history informs the attacks we see today.

How far back in history does medical transition actually go?

Medical transition has a surprisingly long-lived history. It begins with surgical practices that, in different places of the world, historians have actually traced back centuries, if not thousands of years—in some cases where you find people obtaining historically appropriate forms of surgery that very obviously had a kind of transition importance, or a gender-affirming importance. But the modern gender-affirming care, transgender health care, that we’re most familiar with really has an early-20th-century history. It comes into being in the 1910s, 1920s, and 30s, around 100 years ago.

How did medical transition become part of the health system in the United States?

The United States was a little slow to build out a larger system. It’s really in the 1950s that we start to see the development of a standard medical protocol for the diagnosis at the time of what was called transsexuality. It was the formation of a procedure. It’s in 1960s that we see the emergence of what was called a gender clinic system at university medical schools all over the country, most famously at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

“Transgender medicine is probably one of the most conservative and deeply regulated fields of health care practice.”

These clinics had multidisciplinary staff, psychiatrists, endocrinologists, social workers, plastic surgeons, all working together as a team that really established not just the medical protocol, but the diagnostic assessments and the standards of care—what went on to be codified as the the World Professional Association for Transgender Health Standards of Care. [That]very quickly gave way, as you might imagine in the United States, to a much broader private market. By the end of the 1960s, into the 1970s, there were clinics all over the country providing transgender health care. By the ’70s, it’s completely nationwide.

Americans, of course, were quite familiar with the idea of medical transition as far back as 1952, when Christine Jorgensen, became a worldwide celebrity.

Christine Jorgensen became the first American transgender woman to attain fame for having sex reassignment surgery. The WWII veteran is pictured on the S. S. United States in 1954.Fred Morgan/NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images

Even though the health system has provided care for trans people, it hasn’t always been an ally. You’ve said that transgender medicine was designed to allow as few people as possible to transition—can you speak more on that?

I think this is a really important point, in part because one of today’s primary political accusations justifying restrictions on medical transition is that doctors are somehow too liberal and freewheeling. There is an idea that anything goes and anyone can access any kind of hormones or surgical procedures, basically on a whim, and there’s almost no assessment or roadblocks preventing people from accessing them. That is such an ironic statement, because transgender medicine is probably one of the most conservative and deeply regulated fields of health care practice. That was true at its founding, and in many ways, it has actually only gotten more restrictive and more difficult to access over the decades.

“It was really the role of psychiatrists and psychologists to run interference.”

This university gender clinic system was really designed to make access to surgery, especially, as difficult as possible to obtain. Psychiatrists were enlisted to basically coerce patients into fulfilling what used to be called the “real life test.” The test was supposed to prove that you were really the person you said you were, a man or a woman. You would have to go out and live full time as your gender: dressing that way, getting a gender-stereotyped job, being able to prove you could pass in public and in your personal life. These tests lasted for often one to two, or sometimes even as long as five, years before doctors would actually provide any basic medical interventions.

Sometimes people would have to wait years just to start hormone replacement therapy. Certainly obtaining surgery could take easily as long as four or five years, if people could even then afford it. This really complex series of roadblocks or gatekeeping forced trans people to alter almost every aspect of their everyday lives to prove that they deserved access to medical transition before any clinician would grant it. It was really the role of psychiatrists and psychologists to run interference.

Some of those roadblocks have [since] been relaxed. Most notably, it’s now possible to access hormones through informed consent, like every other medication prescription. But that doesn’t mean people are able to just decide to start hormones—it still requires diagnosis and a doctor who agrees and is willing to prescribe. For most people, it also involves insurance reimbursement, and that brings its full host of evaluations and qualifications and criteria that have to be met. So in fact, it’s actually quite difficult and that’s all before we talk about questions of state bans.

So, in reality, even though medical transition has been legal in the United States for quite some time, it is actually one of the most difficult-to-access forms of health care maybe apart from abortion.

You got into this a little, but why would people delay transition or pursue it outside the medical system?

Most people’s transition practices have been dictated by income, by their relative class, and also by where they live—whether there are state programs that could help them gain access to medical transition or subsidize parts of the cost. Most of the decisions people make are based on whether they live near competent providers who actually provide gender-affirming care, and whether or not they [can] afford it. And that has so much more to do with where you’re born, what class you’re born into, how much money you make and what your family resources are, rather than whether you want to transition or not.

“The history of medical transition is mostly a history of lack of access, regardless of what the law says.”

Most people have been forced to delay medical transition for a very long time. People have lost access to hormones for years at a time. One of the biggest and least talked-about truths of the history of medical transition is that many people have just not been able to obtain surgery, even in recent years when there has been increased coverage under some state Medicaid programs.

In the past, we’ve also seen a scarcity problem. There’s just not enough surgeons performing these kinds of surgeries. They often get deprioritized in terms of operating room access, and they’re read as elective in the broader medical administrative processing system at hospitals. People have been subject to incredibly long wait lists for years on end.

The history of medical transition is mostly a history of lack of access, regardless of what the law says. Of course, people have been forced to figure out how to manage in their own lives. But when it comes to certain things, like surgery in particular, there’s just no way to replicate that. You want professionals to be involved, and you want people who have gone to medical school. So that lack of access, lack of investment, and lack of recognition of the importance has caused a lot of harm for many decades.

View of, from left, transgender rights activists Reverend Moshay Moses, Chelsea Goodwin, and Sylvia Rivera (1951 – 2002) as they talk on West 14th Street (at 6th Avenue), New York, New York, 2002. Rivera’s partner, fellow activist Julia Murray (facing camera) is also visible at right. Mariette Pathy Allen/Getty Images

You wrote a book on transgender children and how they’re not new. Could you talk about that book and the research that went into it?

I was reading some published medical research from a particular gender clinic and saw, in the footnotes, references to a bunch of teenage patients who were on hormone therapy after a long period of assessment. I had never heard of that. This was in the 1960s. I didn’t realize there were trans children who had medically transitioned many decades ago, and actually at some of the same clinics where adults had been going in that time period. It became my research obsession, and led to this book that found that trans youth were actually quite important to the development of transgender medicine overall.

Doctors from a variety of fields were very interested in asking the question: what makes people into men and women? They were interested in studying trans youth and trans children, whether they were young and not yet going to be medically transitioning, or at an age where it was appropriate. For that reason, there were more trans youth than I expected who got access to medical transition. It was still extremely difficult. They are subject to even more roadblocks than adults, because minors are unable to consent to medical care.

“It is actually one of the most difficult-to-access forms of health care, maybe apart from abortion. ”

The kinds of trans children who were able to get access to medical care were ones with supportive parents and families. That might be something that surprises people to learn—that there were families, long before the internet, long before there was ever a single journalistic story about youth transition, even before having encountered that kind of concept before—who accepted their children as trans and were willing to support them, love them, take care of them, and help them gain access to both hormones and surgeries at an appropriate time, usually in adolescence. Obviously, prior to that, many parents supported their children changing their clothes and hair and pronouns and names and helping facilitate that at school.

Trans youth have a very long history. They’re all the way back in terms of medical transition, right there alongside adults. They actually just fit, in a really kind of uncontroversial way, into the larger history of medical transition, particularly in the United States.

There’s been a slew of executive orders targeting youth and 18-year-olds. Is there a historical precedent for targeting transgender health care in the way we’re seeing now and have seen over the past couple of years?

A lot of the anti-trans policy that we’re seeing being made kind of on the fly, particularly from the executive branch, is completely unprecedented. There’s never in the history of the United States been a concerted effort to ban or criminalize transgender health care or medical transition. Most of the ways that the state and the law have negatively affected medical transition, and transgender people more broadly, have been administrative. There’s a system of sex classification that has made it really hard to change your sex marker on documents. There’s really been political interest in terms of medical transition.

Some of these questions are bound up in larger political struggles underway right now. There’s a lot of uncertainty. The main contrast I would draw with the past is that these are much vaster attempts at restriction and explicit targeting of medical transition, and that’s not something that we have ever seen in US history. Even in moments where the federal government said Medicaid can’t spend money on this, or you can’t bring claims under the Disability Act, it completely left intact the possibility for people to pursue medical transition privately, which is the way most people obtain health care in the United States anyway. There was nothing made illegal at that time, even if it meant private insurers weren’t covering medical transition. In the ’80s and ’90s, people could still pay out of pocket for it. Right now, the attempt is to say that you can’t even do that. That is the stated policy goal or outcome that the Trump presidency desires.

“Female impersonators” Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton. This 1869photograph, taken less than a year before their arrest by England’s Metropolitan Police for “conspiring and inciting persons to commit an unnatural offense.”Frederick Spalding

Another executive order targets “social transition” in schools. Is there a historical precedent for this targeting of dress and appearance? For children?

There is a very, very long history of anti-crossdressing ordinances in the United States. They emerged in the second half of the 19th century, mostly at the municipal level. The federal state has never specifically targeted so-called crossdressing, or drag. These anti-crossdressing laws were not originally created to target transgender people. They were sometimes utilized to arrest transgender people, but they were designed more broadly to provide police with wide discretionary power. Over time, they did get applied to trans people, particularly to trans women. And those laws had a remarkable staying power. They still exist on the books in some places.

“Their goal is to intimidate and harass providers…and push hospitals to capitulate in advance.”

When it comes to education, the targeting of social transition, it’s very unclear to me how this is going to work. The entire concept of social transition is absurd. People get haircuts, people buy new clothes. Are they really doing something medical when they do that? I don’t think so. I think there’s a reason that schools are actually the target here, because it’s a well established fact in US law that children do not have full civil rights, particularly when they’re at school. When children are at school, they do not have the right to express themselves in the same way they would the moment they step off school grounds at the end of the day. That means that children’s dress can be heavily restricted. That’s why school uniforms are not unconstitutional. That’s why students can be punished for wearing a shirt that has swear words on it, or something that’s deemed to be explicit or obscene. That’s the pretext that’s being utilized here to target trans children in particular.

Social transition is impermissible because in school they just don’t have the First Amendment rights that they would have elsewhere, so it’s a little different in terms of mechanism than the anti-cross dressing ordinances, but you can definitely see that same attempt to target people’s clothing as a way to apprehend them and make them more vulnerable.

As Erin Reed reports and as the White House has bragged, hospitals are already complying with the executive order targeting trans health care despite its legal ambiguity. Does that surprise you?

It doesn’t surprise me. I think one of the big problems we face is a foundational vulnerability that trans youth and [adults] have when it comes to medical transition. It’s that they’re reliant on this system of gatekeeping and regulation that retains all the power in decision-making over people’s bodies. Time and time again, we have seen hospitals, pharmacies, comply in advance to avoid litigation, to avoid being targeted or harassed, to capitulate in advance, before it’s even clear what they’re actually being compelled to do. They just take the most conservative position possible in order to avoid facing any hardship. They absolutely will not under any circumstances stick their necks out for trans people.

That’s not at all surprising to me. It’s heartbreaking. I think the consequences are very extreme and devastating for people. We are talking about not just taking away things that people have been working hard to get, but forcibly detransitioning people against their will, which is a torturous experience at best. It will result not only in lives ruined, but in lives lost as well.

I think their goal is to intimidate and harass medical providers, and therefore push the upper administration and legal teams at hospitals to capitulate in advance and get the outcome they want without even having to have the battle in the courts or the broader political battle. For instance, it’s unclear whether a national ban on youth medical transition could pass this Congress. We don’t know that for a fact, right? In the meantime, these executive orders are trying to produce the same effect by just basically scaring and goading.

American gay liberation activist Marsha P. Johnson (center left, in dark outfit and black hair) in Manhattan’s Pride March (later the LGBT Pride March), June 27, 1982.Photo by Barbara Alper/Getty Images

There has been a flurry of deletions of LGBTQ information on government websites, alongside orders against and cuts to funding around research regarding LBGTQ people. How does that fit into the historical record?

The deletion of LGBTQ information from government websites is something that has happened before in a few cases, I believe, but never on this scale. It’s also true, though, that there just wasn’t LGBT-specific information on very many government websites until the last decade—or even the previous administration. In that sense, it’s clear that the scrubbing to comply with executive and agency orders is also part of the [Trump] administration’s desire to “undo” Biden administration actions.

“We are talking about…forcibly detransitioning people against their will.”

Similarly, there has been relatively little federally funded research, particularly in the sciences, on LGBT people or related subjects, outside of HIV/AIDS-related work, until very recently. So in that sense, these kinds of orders to halt research or disqualify future funding on LGBT research are new—but extremely significant in that they represent a direct political takeover of scientific practice. Given how reliant scientists and medical researchers are on federal funds, including at universities, the effects of these orders are profound.

Finally, what does this history of trans healthcare tell us about its future, as it comes under attack from all sides?

History tells us that, unfortunately, the vulnerability that’s been taken advantage of right now by politicians is [one] that medicine itself created by deciding that medical transition is not something people are free to choose but something that has to be subject to incredibly strict, conservative investigation and assessment—and in which doctors, clinicians, and insurers always retain the final decision-making authority over transgender people’s bodies.

The future is very uncertain. We don’t know what Congress intends to do. We don’t know how state legislatures will continue to pass laws. We’re entering uncharted territory.

Ultimately, for me, this just becomes a moment of clarity. It’s a moment to ask for anyone who’s worried about being able to make basic decisions over [their] own physical body whether they’re comfortable with trans people’s access to medical transition being taken away, which will probably become a pretext for taking away all sorts of other forms of basic bodily autonomy.

It’s also very concerning for the future of health care in general. If politicized misinformation and distortion can be used as a pretext to remove all sorts of forms of medical care, then everyone is in danger of having important, life-saving health care taken away.

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Like Most Tech-Bro Schemes, DOGE Is a Rip-Off of Something Older and Better

Like most things Elon Musk brags are new and revolutionary, DOGE is neither new nor revolutionary—in fact, a similar agencyhas existed for more than 100 years.

“All of these people acting like, ‘Oh, we’re going to set up an agency to identify waste,’” highlighted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.) on a recent Instagram livestream. “As though that’s never been an idea before.” Like, you know, take a number, people.””

This is precisely what stuck out to me: We live in a world where billionaires like Elon Musk slap a new name like “DOGE” on an old idea and then go on and on, bragging about changing the status quo. So, inspired by AOC’s stream, I wanted to demystify, and try my best to cut through, a narrative that is quite actively harming the American people.

Some of you may already be familiar with this, but if not, let me introduce you to the US Government Accountability Office or the GAO.

The GAO is an independent, nonpartisan federalwatchdog that provides Congress with thorough, fact-based reports on how taxpayer dollars are spent. It has thousands of career civil servants—experts in everything from health care, computer science, auditing, public policy, AI, and infectious disease—working to, yes, improve government efficiency.

Their results? According to the GAO, over the last six years, they averaged a staggering return on investment of $123 in savings for every $1 in their budget. Now, I’m no businessman, but that sounds like some excellent business.

But then there’s DOGE. While the GAO operates with institutional expertise, transparency, and nonpartisan directives, Musk’s nongovernmental organization brings a chainsaw to heart surgery. It then gives teenage to young 20-something engineers the authority to do that surgery. Unlike the GAO, which audits everything from pandemic relief fraud to Ukraine aid spending, DOGE seems to be more about controlling a narrative than actual oversight.

That narrative? That only Musk alone can save the government from inefficiency, that all we need is his magic touch. It all conveniently ignores that real, nonpartisan watchdog agencies already exist—and do their jobs quite well.

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The Gleeful Profiteers of Trump’s Police State

On a call with investors earlier this week, Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp—fresh off a week of stock surges—was euphoric. “We’re doin’ it!” he yelled, arms spread wide. “And I’m sure you’re enjoying this as much as I am!”

The “it” in question? It seemed to be a reference to enabling President Donald Trump’s administration to carry out mass deportation and police surveillance domestically, while aiding the “West” globally—actions that, “on occasion,” Karp said on the call, may involve the need to “kill.”

“I’m very happy to have you along for the journey,” the CEO said. “We are crushing it. We are dedicating our company to the service of the West and the United States of America, and we’re super-proud of the role we play, especially in places we can’t talk about.”

“Palantir is here to disrupt,” he continued. “And, when it’s necessary, to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them.” (Palantir did not respond to a request for comment.)

Google Finance

This type of rhetoric isn’t new for Karp. In 2020, he made headlines doing the same thing: announcing that Palantir was used “on occasion to kill people.”

Founded in 2003 by Karp and Trump donor Peter Thiel, Palantir supplies data analysis software—called “spy tech” by its critics—to governments and companies. That software has reportedly been used to help generate “kill lists” for the Israeli Defense Forces, target immigrant families for deportation from the United States, and enable rogue employees to spy on co-workers.

Karp made Palantir’s relationship to violence more forcefully evident in his latest letter to shareholders, released Monday. In the document, he quotes political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, who famously wrote that Hispanics cannot assimilate into American society. “The rise of the West was not made possible ‘by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion,’” Karp says in the letter, “‘but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.’”

Karp is not the only one cashing in on Trump’s plans for territorial expansion and mass deportation. Stocks for the GEO Group and CoreCivic, two of the nation’s biggest private prison firms, jumped after Trump was elected and again after he was sworn in. While the Federal Bureau of Prisons has lessened its reliance on private prison companies in recent years, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has recently extended contracts with both companies.

A GEO Group spokesperson said in an email that the company is investing $70 million to increase “housing, transportation, and monitoring capabilities” in anticipation of the new administration’s “immigration law enforcement priorities.”

“This is, to us, an unprecedented opportunity to assist the federal government and the incoming Trump administration towards achieving a much more aggressive immigration policy,” GEO Group founder George Zoley said on a November earnings call.

CoreCivic told Mother Jones that the company “does not enforce immigration laws, arrest anyone who may be in violation of immigration laws, or have any say whatsoever in an individual’s deportation or release.”

Since initial bumps in stock prices, as Axios reported, there has been some fluctuation—in part because Trump has talked up outsourcing incarceration. The president has discussed plans to use Guantanamo Bay and jails in El Salvador to house deportees, including American citizens.

Google Finance

Google Finance

Elon Musk’s DOGEalsomay be creating enrichment opportunities for those who make money from helping the US deport immigrants. Karp said Musk’s slash-and-burn effort to reshape the federal government would be “very good” for his company, which generates about two-thirds of its US revenue from government contracts, according to the Financial Times.

“I think DOGE is going to bring meritocracy and transparency to government, and that’s exactly what our commercial business is,” said Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar.

“There’s a revolution. Some people get their heads cut off,” Karp said. “We’re expecting to see really unexpected things, and to win.”

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I Paid the Price for Speaking Out About “Sharpiegate.” Scientists Can’t Be Silent Now, Either.

Remember “Sharpiegate”? Back in September 2019, then-President Trump appeared to alter the path of Hurricane Dorian—at least on paper, with a marker. Craig McLean, who had been at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for nearly 40 years, was the acting chief scientist and head of NOAA Research. Objecting to the controversy led to serious professional repercussions.

This week, Donald Trump nominated Neil Jacobs, the former NOAA head involved in “Sharpiegate,” to lead the agency. Below, McLean explains what he anticipates for what’s next in Trump’s second term.

His story has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dorian was a nasty hurricane. It took lives in the Caribbean and the Bahamas and was making a move toward the Florida Panhandle. Days out, there was a small chance of tropical storm–force winds in Alabama. The National Weather Service forecasted, correctly, that the storm was going to make a hard right turn and certainly not impact the people of Alabama. But Trump tweets something like, Look out people in Alabama, here comes the storm. It’s going to be bad.

The communities of Alabama, from the governor’s office to local mayors and citizens, were asking our Weather Service forecasters, What’s happening here? And they replied, You have no risk. The storm is going up the coast, it’s going to miss you. They didn’t realize what the president had tweeted. It became national news. The president doesn’t have the dignity to either leave it alone or say, “Hey, sorry. I was relying on misinformation.”

I’m up on Cape Cod, and I get a message from one of my staff saying, “You don’t want to see this, but you better read it.” It’s a press release from “NOAA”—no person associated with the remarks—chastising Weather Service forecasters, saying they were incorrect, and the president was correct as a technical matter. I really had to contain myself.

Project 2025 plans to break up and reduce the components of NOAA. But the services NOAA provides, every citizen uses every day.

I wrote a one-page memorandum that called this out as political. Later, after an independent investigation, I asked political appointees at NOAA to sign an affirmation that they read and fully understood their obligations under the agency’s scientific integrity policy. That was probably just too much.

Soon after, I had a response back from the acting NOAA chief of staff asking about my authority to ask for this affirmation. I said I was the acting chief scientist, the assistant administrator for research, and a NOAA employee. The acting NOAA chief of staff says something like, Thank you very much for your response. You’re no longer the acting chief scientist. You’re being replaced. Thank you for your service.

Political manipulation wasn’t unique to the Trump administration, but the collapsed ethics were profound. That the law may say what one must do, and—Don’t worry about the law. This is what I want you to do instead.

Early on, I was told I should find people from different communities of the science world to speak for climate. They wouldn’t say, “People who don’t believe your current climate conclusions.” But it was pretty clear.

When you have lunacy in the control tower, you have to fly the airplane yourself. And the best way to fly that airplane yourself is to go back to the rules of the road—the law. When crazy people give you instructions to do unlawful, damaging things, you go to the first level of defense. The law requires NOAA to produce, analyze, verify, present, and explain what data means. And so we did.

In elections, you elect policy. You don’t elect science.

Coming into government, the first Trump administration was not planned out. They didn’t have a real transition team in place, as many other elected administrations do. But this time around, they’re hitting the ground running. But what are they going to run into? Are they going to run into federal senior executives who tell them, “No, you can’t do that, because the law won’t allow you”?

This Trump administration is going farther than I thought it would. They’re not even going at the substance. They’re looking at the long game, going after the size of the staff. Just by cutting the number of people, they’ll defeat the mission of the agency.

Project 2025 plans to break up and reduce the components of NOAA. But the services NOAA provides, every citizen uses every day. They just don’t realize what and how.

NOAA answers four God-level questions: How many fish are in the sea? NOAA has to answer that every year, in order to manage the fisheries and so we have food security. What will the weather be like tomorrow? The Weather Service exists in law as the provider of weather forecasts for the nation. What’s the weather going to be 50, 100, or 10 years from now? That’s climate. And lastly, can we make the coasts resilient to the increased ferocity of storms? That’s what NOAA is delivering.

Fifty to 100 years from now, we’ll be living on a Mad Max movie set. And that really bothers me because my grandkids will be on that movie set. Without NOAA, you’re not going to be able to tell how bad it’s happening, or how fast.

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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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