Foreign Money, Alleged Lies, and Extremism—What GOP Senators Voting for Kash Patel Ignored

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee voted on Thursday morning to approve the nomination of Kash Patel to be FBI director, despite a host of issues that once would have sunk any nominee for this critical national security and law enforcement post. These include Patel’s reported role in a planned political purge of FBI agents and his apparent lies to the committee regarding that and other matters. And there’s much more. Patel has received payments from sources linked to Russia, China, Qatar, and other foreign interests that he has not explained, or, in one case, divested from. He has embraced false and dangerous conspiracy theories, including falsehoods about the 2020 election. He has endorsed using government power to seek revenge against his and Donald Trump’s political enemies. He has even seemingly encouraged violence against Trump critics.

Republicans don’t seem to care about any of this. In fact, they appear eager to confirm Patel before more damaging information about him emerges. Here is a rundown of some of the matters these Republicans are ignoring.

The purge

On January 30, the same day Patel appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearing, news broke that Trump administration officials had ordered the firing of multiple senior FBI executives. The next day, reports emerged that Trump appointees were compiling a list of thousands of FBI agents who had worked on January 6 cases, with the possible aim of firing them.

Patel told the Judiciary Committee—under oath—that he was not involved in personnel issues nor in touch with the White House about any such decisions. He further claimed he would protect FBI officials from political retribution for past work.

But on Tuesday, Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.), the Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, accused Patel of lying about this. In a letter to the Justice Department’s inspector general, Durbin said he had learned from “multiple sources that Kash Patel has been personally directing the ongoing purge of career civil servants” at the FBI. In that letter and during a Senate floor speech, Durbin said whistleblowers told him that Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, a former personal lawyer for Trump, told top FBI officials in a January 29 meeting that Patel wanted the bureau to remove targeted employees quickly. “KP wants movement at FBI,” a person at the meeting wrote in notes that Durbin said he reviewed.

Durbin also said his sources reported that Patel, as he has awaited confirmation, has been receiving information from an advisory team at the FBI and then passing on instructions to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, “who relays it to” Bove.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the chair of the Judiciary Committee, dismissed Durbin’s new charges as “hearsay.” He expressed no interest in gathering more information and rejected Democrats’ call for a second confirmation hearing where they could ask Patel directly about the firings of FBI officials.

Responding to Durbin’s letter and floor speech, a Patel spokesperson said, “The media is relying on anonymous sources and secondhand gossip to push a false narrative.” That was not a clear denial. When Mother Jones asked if Patel communicated with Miller about firing FBI personnel, neither Patel nor his spokesperson responded.

Possible perjury

During Patel’s confirmation hearing, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) asked, “Are you aware of any plans or discussions to punish in any way, including termination, FBI agents or personnel associated with Trump investigations?” Patel said he was “not aware of that” and added: “I don’t know what’s going on right now over there.”

Patel made similar claims in written responses to questions that six Democratic senators sent to him after the hearing. Each of these senators submitted queries regarding whether Patel knew of plans to oust senior FBI officials and whether he was involved in that effort. He repeatedly answered that he could not recall any such conversations and claimed he was not involved in these decisions.

“Did you approve or have any role in the decision to terminate these senior FBI employees?” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) asked. “No,” Patel responded.

Those replies, if Durbin is correct, were lies. But Grassley and other Republicans are unwilling to confront Patel about this possible perjury.

Other possible lies

Asked during his testimony about his promotion of a recording of a song performed by the so-called J6 Prison Choir, which was comprised of inmates at a DC jail who faced assorted charges for their participation in the January 6 insurrection, Patel said he was “not aware” that this group was composed of imprisoned rioters.He also testified that he “didn’t have anything to do with the recording.” In fact, Patel personally released the song on Steve Bannon’s War Room show,and told Bannon that he had overseen the song’s recording and mastering. And he hailed the J6 rioters as “political prisoners.”

Patel has insisted that the money he raised from the recording went to the families of January 6 prisoners who were not convicted of any violent offenses. In his written responses, he claimed “the financial details” on his use of the funds were in his organization’s public disclosures. That’s not true. Patel’s nonprofit, the Kash Foundation, says in an IRS filing that it gave “direct cash assistance” totaling $167,821 to 50 people, but it does not identify them. That leaves Patel’s claim that he did not support families of violent attackers impossible to verify.

Patel also said under oath that he was not familiar with Stew Peters, a far-right and antisemitic podcaster known for spreading false claims about Covid. Patel, however, has appeared at least eight times on Peters’ podcast. Following the hearing, Peters declared: “Clearly Kash Patel is lying.”

Ties to Russian propagandist

As Mother Jones first reported, Patel last year was paid $25,000 to appear in an anti-FBI documentary produced by a Ukrainian-American-Russian filmmaker with Kremlin ties. That filmmaker, Igor Lopatonok, worked on an overt Russian propaganda campaign funded by Vladimir Putin’s office, and in 2019 he produced a pro-Putin film partly financed by an Ukrainian oligarch and pro-Kremlin politician who had been sanctioned by the United States since 2014. Lopatonok also worked with an American who obtained political asylum in Russia and who has mounted extensive disinformation operations against the United States.

Patel declared in the documentary that the Russians had not intervened in the 2016 election—despite multiple investigations confirming they did so to assist Trump—and Patel said that he hoped to “shut down the FBI headquarters building and open it up as a museum of the “Deep State.” Patel later said that remark was “hyperbole.” He has not explained whether he knew of the filmmaker’s background as a Russian propagandist.

Foreign ties

In the financial disclosure form Patel submitted to the Senate, he revealed that he was paid an unspecified amount in 2024 for “consulting services” for Qatar. That raised the question of why Patel did not register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent. Patel has not addressed that subject. But a “source close to Patel’s confirmation” told the far-right Federalist that “his work for Qatar was limited to securing the 2022 FIFA World Cup and other security measures” and that this did not require him to register as foreign agent.

The problem with that explanation is that Patel reported working for Qatar until November 2024. That was two years after the World Cup took place there. And it includes the time Patel spent working as a surrogate for Trump’s most recent presidential campaign. Patel’s disclosure form notes that he was paid by the Qatari embassy in Washington, which runs the Gulf state’s US lobbying efforts, not Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy, which organized the nation’s World Cup effort and related programs. Spokespersons for Patel, the Supreme Committee, and the Qatari embassy did not answer questions regarding the details of Patel’s work for Qatar.

Patel’s financial disclosure report also revealed he worked for the Czechoslovak Group, a Prague-based arms company, as it was buying Vista Outdoor, a US company that owns assorted ammunition brands, including Remington. Senate Republicans previously argued that the Vista Outdoor purchase was a threat to national security. But none have publicly asked Patel to explain what he did for the Czechoslovak firm.

Patel also disclosed that he was given between $1 million and $5 million worth of unvested stock in Elite Depot Ltd. for consulting work he did not explain. Elite Deport is the Cayman Islands-based parent company of Shein, a Chinese fashion company. Patel has declined to divest his stake in the company—even as he prepares to oversee FBI counterintelligence operations against China. After Trump slapped a 10 percent tariff on Chinese imports, including Shein’s, Patel’s stake in the company means he has a personal interest aligned with Chinese business interests.

In a letter sent to Patel on Wednesday, five Democrats on the committee noted Shein has faced “criticism for its use of forced labor in China, including persecuted ethnic minorities and children.”

“Continuing to profit from forced labor by refusing to divest your financial interest in this company,” they wrote, “demonstrates a callous disregard for forced labor victims and calls into question your judgment and ability to impartially lead the FBI’s efforts to combat the scourge of human trafficking and the PRC’s foreign influence activities.”

A few years ago GOP senators aggressively opposed some Biden administration nominees for perceived links to, or past work for, Chinese businesses. But no Republicans have publicly pressed Patel about his plan to retain an interest in a Chinese manufacturer.

QAnon

Patel has pushed far-right conspiracy theories, including the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump; the baseless claim that the January 6 riot was instigated by the FBI; and the false notion that there was no Russian effort to help Trump win the 2016 election. But perhaps his looniest far-right flirtation has been his past support for QAnon, the movement that holds that a cabal of global, Satanic, cannibalistic elitists and pedophiles—which includes Democratic politicians, Hollywood celebrities, and business tycoons—has been operating a child sex trafficking operation as it vies for world domination, with Trump secretly battling against them. And QAnon is not just a kooky theory; it has sparked multiple acts of violence.

Patel repeatedly has hailed QAnoners and promoted their unhinged narrative. On social media, he amplified QAnon messaging. He has been a guest on numerous QAnon-supporting shows to promote Trump’s Truth Social platform. On one show, Patel declared, “Whether it’s the Qs of the world, who I agree with some of what he does and I disagree with some of what he does, if it allows people to gather and focus on the truth and the facts, I’m all for it.” On another occasion, he agreed with a host who said Q had “been so right on so many things.” Patel chimed in: “There’s a lot of good to a lot of it.”

When Democratic senators inquired about those comments, Patel insisted his remarks were “taken out of context.” He asserted, “I do not support or promote QAnon.” His past comments show he did precisely that.

Retribution and violence

Patel has long portrayed himself as an avenging angel for Trump who has battled the supposed Deep State on Trump’s behalf. Appearing on Bannon’s podcast in 2023, he proclaimed, “We will go and find the conspirators—not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens to help Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether its criminally or civilly.”

In his 2023 book Government Gangsters, Patel called for mounting “investigations” to “take on the Deep State.” In an appendix, Patel presented a list of 60 supposed members of the Deep State who were current or former executive branch officials and who presumably would be targeted. Patel listed names that would be the obvious purported cabalists for a MAGA activist, including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Merrick Garland, Hillary Clinton, former CIA chief John Brennan, and former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. This line-up also included a number of Republicans and onetime Trump appointees: Bill Barr, who served as attorney general for Trump; John Bolton, one of Trump’s national security advisers during his first White House stint; and Mark Esper, a secretary of defense under Trump.

This roster has been characterized as Patel’s “enemies list” of people he might target for investigation or prosecution should he become FBI chief. During his confirmation hearing, Patel denied he had any intention of seeking revenge against Trump’s political foes. He referred to this list as merely a “glossary.”

When Senate Democrats challenged him on this characterization in written questions—noting he had told Bannon that “Deep Staters” would “be held accountable and prosecuted, criminal prosecutions” during a second Trump presidency—Patel sidestepped. “This language is taken out of context and does not accurately or fully represent my prior statements or positions,” he wrote. No Republican Senator has publicly expressed concern over Patel’s demonstrated desire to use government power to extract revenge.

One of the most absurd moments of the hearing came when Patel was questioned about a 2022 social media post he had amplified that showed an AI-generated video of him using a chainsaw to attack various Trump critics, including former Rep. Liz Cheney, Sen. Adam Schiff, and Anthony Fauci. He claimed this meme had been taken out of context—it hadn’t—and pointed out that he had not created it, as if that were mitigating. Asked about this meme in the written questions, Patel replied that he had reposted the “meme in question as a private citizen.” He added, “It was clearly intended as humor. A chainsaw as a symbol of government reform is not unusual.” He also stated that “reposting an individual’s perspective on a specific issue does not constitute my endorsement of how their views or other positions may be interpreted.”

Here was a nominee to be FBI director both justifying and downplaying his dissemination of a meme that could be read as encouraging violence against his political enemies, including Schiff, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee overseeing his nomination. It was just one more troubling thing for Senate Republicans to ignore.

Continue Reading…

House Republicans Aim to Gut Spending and Cut Taxes (Mainly for the Rich) by $4.5 Trillion

The budget resolution released Wednesday by the House Republican caucus contains no concrete details, but it codifies a GOP strategy that should surprise absolutely no one.

In parallel with the mayhem playing out in the Executive Branch, the House lawmakers aim to gut agencies Donald Trump disfavors, boost spending for those that align with his agenda, renew and extend the 2017 tax cuts that enriched America’s most affluent—his latest proposals all told, by one estimate, would raise taxes on all but the top 5 percent. They also pay lip service to the deficit even as their proposals will increase it significantly, perhaps as a way to build political consensus for cuts to programs like Social Security and Medicare.

Specifically, the new resolution directs each House committee to submit recommendations, by March 25, to either cut or increase federal spending under its jurisdiction. The figures below cover the 10-year period from 2025 to 2034.

Cuts (“not less than…”)
Agriculture: $230 billion
Education and Workforce: $330 billion
Energy and Commerce: $880 billion
Financial Services: $1 billion
Natural Resources: $1 billion
Oversight and Government Reform: $50 billion
Transportation and Infrastructure: $10 billion

Total cuts: $1.5 trillion

Increases (“not more than…”)
Armed Services: $100 billion
Homeland Security: $90 billion
Judiciary: $110 billion

And the doozy: Ways and Means, the committee responsible for tax policy, “shall submit changes in laws within its jurisdiction that increase the deficit by not more than $4,500,000,000,000.”

That’s an invitation for a net $4.5 trillion in tax cuts.

Total increases: $4.8 trillion

If the total cuts from the group above don’t reach $2 trillion, the document states, the difference will come out of Ways and Means’ $4.5 trillion allowance. That would leave us with almost $3 trillion in deficit spending. But at least the rich will get their tax breaks, right?

The resolution also asks Ways and Means to request a $4 trillion increase in the debt limit.

In the past, House Republicans have talked a good game on balanced budgets. This would be anything but. Tellingly, their resolution makes a show of lamenting the growing federal debt, which “poses a significant risk to the country’s long-term fiscal sustainability, with implications for future generations.” The document points to the mandatory spending that accounts for more than 70 percent of the budget, noting that it has increased by 59 percent since 2019.

And yes, the growing debt is a problem, especially when interest rates are higher, which makes servicing payments expensive,but there are ways to narrow the deficit that the Republicans, along with Elon Musk and his DOGE bros, have largely ignored.

Indeed, the gripes about mandatory federal spending, especially in this context, sound like a pre-justification for cutting from the three biggest areas of mandatory spending: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Republicans have already targeted Medicaid, the national health insurance program for the poor, by proposing work requirements—which evidence shows are little more than a cruel tactic to purge people from the rolls. Going after Social Security and Medicare would be messing with America’s seniors, who are relatively wealthy and politically engaged, driving up their health care costs.

Historically, the latter two have been political third rails, “but with this group, I kind of never know anymore,” says a Democratic aide who works with the House Ways and Means Commitee. “They’re already talking about doing things on Social Security and Medicare in a way that I never would have thought they would be talking about, but it’s definitely in the ether.”

Continue Reading…

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Two-Word Plan to Save the CFPB From Elon Musk

Following the 2008 global financial crisis, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was established by Congress to reign in the subprime lending schemes and other bad practices that spurred the market implosion. Now, President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Russ Vought—who was confirmed as director of the Office of Management and Budget but also appointed by Trump as the acting head of CFPB—are attempting to dismember the financial watchdog.

Wired reported that dozens of CFPB employees were fired with generic emails Tuesday night and that DOGE’s assessment of CFPB’s internal systems is well underway. The remaining employees have been directed to cease all “enforcement actions.”

“RIP CFPB,” Musk posted on X last week, alongside a tombstone emoji.

Even before being elected as senator from Massachusetts, while she was still a Harvard Law School professor, Elizabeth Warren pitched the idea of the financial-protection bureau. Since its inception, the CFPB has enforced the accuracy of credit scores, penalized banks for junk fees, and restricted credit reporting agencies from including medical debt on credit reports, among other things. Warren’s advocacy of the enforcement agency helped her ascend in national politics to the Senate seat in 2012 that she now holds.

Amid a deluge of Wednesday reports about CFPB firings, I reached out to Sen. Warrenabout the stakes of the new administration’s dismantling of CFPB, their motivation, and what can be done to save it.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What prompted you to pitch the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau?

We had plenty of consumer protection laws, but nobody to enforce them, and the consequence was that more lenders figured out how to cheat people. They ultimately triggered a financial crash and a meltdown that cost 10 million families their homes, and millions of people lost their savings and their jobs. The CFPB is the cop on the beat to make sure that giant banks and sleazy fly-by-night lenders
don’t cheat American families.

“The CFPB is the cop on the beat to make sure that giant banks and sleazy fly-by-night lenders
don’t cheat American families.”

Can you tell me about the CFPB’s successes?

This little agency has uncovered more than $21 billion in scams that big banks and other lenders have used to cheat American families, and when it found those scams, it made those banks return the money directly to the people they cheated. That has put $21 billion back into the pockets of American families. In addition to that, it has handled more than 6 million complaints and given consumers who’ve been tricked on a car loan or cheated on by a credit card companysomeone on their side to help them get their money back. This little agency has proven that we can make government work, not just for the rich and powerful, but we can make it work for all people.

Who benefits from DOGE’s attempt to destroy the CFPB?

Giant banks hated this agency from the first time I ever talked about it, and the reason is pretty straightforward: it bites into the profits they would make from cheating people. So getting rid of it looks like another profit opportunity for them. But there’s another reason that Republicans in particular have fought against the CFPB: It’s living proof that we can make government work. They want to make the argument every day that thegovernment is bad, and if it just goes away, the whole country will run better. The CFPB shows we can put thegovernment on the side of people and it can help level the playing field so that people can build some real economic security.

What do you think is motivating Musk and Trump to prioritize dismantling it?

One possibility is that they’re looking for a way to distract Americans from their real plans, which arenot what they promised, [which was] cutting costs for American families. Instead, [they are] trying to ram through a big bill that would cut taxes for billionaires.

Musk has lost money hand over fist on X. So he has this idea of X [becoming] a big money platform where he would get everyone’s personal financial data. He faces one obstacle: the CFPB—the financial cops that make sure that he’s not cheating people and that he’s not sucking up their personal data that he’s not legally entitled to. He is moving to get the CFPB out of the way just before he launches his money platform. It’s a little like a bank robber managing to fire the cops just before he strolls into the lobby of the institution.

What recourse will working-class Americans have if lenders mistreat them and CFPB is gone?

Yesterday, the head of the Federal Reserve said [that] without the CFPB cops on the beat, there is no one making sure these scammers follow the law. That’s pretty scary. What Musk has done is illegal. The CFPB was created by Congress, and Congress—not Elon Musk, not Donald Trump—is the only one that can shut it down.

While running for president in 2020, you were known as the I-have-a-plan-for-that candidate. I’m curious if you have any plans to help save the CFPB now?

Yes, I have a plan, and it’s already the law. The CFPB cannot be shut down by Elon Musk, so we’re in the courts to make sure that Elon Musk and Donald Trump follow the law. The CFPB is still the law. It’s still funded. It’s still ready to go. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are illegally blocking it, and they need to get out of the way. The courts will enforce the law.

Continue Reading…

How Trump and Musk’s War on Government Will Lead to More Abortions

In 2023, during a speech at a Washington, DC, gala for the far-right Faith & Freedom Coalition, Donald Trump declared that he was proud to be “the most pro-life president” in US history. Yet with the war on the federal government that he and his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk are now waging, one probable result will likely not please his conservative Christian allies: an increase in the number of abortions, perhaps by over 1 million.

The first target of the Trump-Musk crusade has been the US Agency for International Development, the federal agency that distributes foreign aid through programs that help millions of people defend against deadly diseases (such as malaria, AIDS, tuberculosis, Covid, and ebola), obtain clean water, gain access to health care, bolster democratic institutions, and build more productive local economies. Of its $23.4 billion budget for 2024, the agency earmarked $2.2 billion for health initiatives. About one-quarter of that was to be spent on clean-water programs. Two-hundred-and-forty-seven million dollars was committed to maternal and child health. Programs for family planning and reproductive health received $191 million. (Including other government programs, Congress in recent years has annually appropriated about $600 million in total for overseas family planning.)

President Trump’s executive order freezing most US foreign aid for 90 days has led to chaos within USAID and around the world, causing the suspension of programs that conduct clinical trials, provide food assistance, and aid war refugees. For some bizarre reason, Musk has venomously attacked USAID, spreading a baseless and vicious conspiracy theory that it is a diabolical and corrupt outfit covertly financing the media, Democrats, academia, and assorted components of the left in the United States. He has, of course, provided no evidence of this bunk, and boasted of “feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper.”

The Trump administration also proclaimed it wants to gut the agency’s staff from about 10,000 to a few hundred. Last week, a federal judge temporarily blocked pieces of the Trump-Musk plan to shutter most of the agency, but the stop-work order regarding its programs and all foreign aid remained.

With everything else, family planning and reproductive health programs were halted. In one instance, a health clinic in Vulindlela, South Africa, called in women who were participating in the testing of a new device to prevent pregnancy and HIV infection. The USAID-funded program had lost its financial support and now had to remove the device, a silicone ring inserted into a vagina, from all the women in the program.

Since the 1973 passage of the Helms Amendment—named after ultra-right Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina—US foreign aid cannot be used to fund abortion. Instead, the United States has focused on supporting contraceptive services overseas that decrease unintended pregnancies, as well as abortions, which are unsafe in many regions.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research outfit that studies reproductive health issues, Trump’s stop-work order will over three months deny 11.7 million women and girls in low- and middle-income countries contraceptive care and lead to a rise in unintended pregnancies and abortions. “Of the estimated 4.2 million unintended pregnancies, there would be 1.3 million unsafe abortions,” the group estimates in a statement provided to Mother Jones. Guttmacher focuses on unsafe abortions—which include those performed using a non-recommended method or by an untrained provider—not all abortions. The total number of abortions will be higher than the 1.3 million figure.

Here’s one example of the freeze’s impact. Ben Bellows, a former researcher at the Population Council, runs a company called Nivi Inc. It had a six-figure contract for a program to help about 300,000 women in India receive reproductive health care information, digital counseling, and referrals to nearby pharmacies and clinics. With the loss of USAID funding, he says, “projects like ours are closing. He adds, “Fewer contraceptive options mean women stay on a method they don’t like but can’t quit or don’t take up any protection against unintended pregnancy. The end of our project and others like it will lead to more unintended pregnancies and more abortions.”

So far, there have been no big howls from the anti-abortion movement about the Trump-Musk assault on USAID and foreign aid and the resulting rise in abortions. This week, the website of the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America has featured multiple posts praising Trump for anti-abortion measures he has taken since returning to the White House. There was no mention of the USAID shutdown. Ditto for the National Right to Life Committee.

Four anti-abortion advocates did write a piece for the New York Times criticizing Trump’s foreign aid freeze for halting the work of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a multibillion-dollar global health initiative known as PEPFAR started under President George W. Bush, which funds HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment in Africa. It has saved an estimated 25 million lives and prevented mother-to-child transmission of the virus, allowing nearly eight million babies to be born free of the disease. They did not address the cut-off in family-planning assistance.

At his recent confirmation hearings, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theory-monger whom Trump has tapped to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, said over and over that Trump considers every abortion “a tragedy.” By this measure, Trump and Musk, with their assault on USAID and foreign aid, will generate more than a million new tragedies.

Continue Reading…

Waste.Gov is Literal Garbage

Amid their energetic vandalism spree across the federal government, the White House and Elon Musk’s DOGE team have focused special and virulent attention on the ideas that “waste” must be curbed, and that diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility efforts must be eliminated.

As Reuters reported earlier this month, on February 4, the White House registered two new .gov websites, dei.gov and waste.gov, likely meant to boast progress in achieving these goals. But now, a full week later, dei.gov only redirects to waste.gov—which displays an empty WordPress template theme advertising a fake architecture firm.

A screenshot of Waste.gov on February 12.

Reuters’ Raphael Satter was the first to report the sites’ registration, which were first spotted by Alexander Urbelis, an attorney who monitors the Domain Name System, a key piece of internet infrastructure. The government’s domain lookup system shows both sites were created on February 4 by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a division of the Department of Homeland Security.

Waste.gov is, per a tagline on the bottom of the page, dedicated to “Tracking government waste.” At the moment, however, Waste.gov is itself total trash. Apart from the tagline, it shows no other signs of having been edited, and still appears at first glance to be a website for an entirely fake “pioneering firm” called Études.

While this might be confusing for Americans looking for information on how tax dollars are purportedly being spent to reduce waste, it’s probably more confusing for companies actually called Études, which include a Belgian architecture firm and a Parisian fashion brand.

Another note at the bottom of the page shows that the site was designed with WordPress, but it’s unclear whether the site complies with federally mandated web design standards, or will in the future. Among other things, those standards are meant to ensure that sites are accessible to people with disabilities, clearly describe the government agency or product they’re representing, and are usable on mobile devices.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did DOGE spokesperson Katie Miller.

On Tuesday, while speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Musk claimed he was working “to be as transparent as possible,” including by posting a record of DOGE’s actions to its website. But the DOGE website also remains almost completely blank, apart from the name of the agency, a note that it is an official government website, and one sentence: “The people voted for major reform.”

Continue Reading…

Elon Musk’s Dystopian Attacks on Federal Workplaces are Also “Incredibly Stupid”

As the United States Agency for International Development remains paralyzed after the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s attempts to murder it, employees cannot access the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington D.C., where the agency was located until earlier this month. The building, a USAID employee tells Mother Jones, is also the only place where they could receive and read classified cables. With their offices now inaccessible, they say, so too are whatever urgent communications that may be piling up behind locked doors and building security.

DOGE’s plans have reportedly been designed to “depress workforce morale and increase attrition.”

“We literally can’t get that info now,” the worker says—let alone get into the building. So, as court battles play out in the wake of a temporary injunction pausing USAID’s dismantling, the agency’s remaining employees have almost nothing they’re physically able to do.

It’s a example of how, in the grander process of trying to reshape the federal government to their liking, Trump, Elon Musk, and his Department of Government Efficiency team have quickly reached a far more achievable goal: making the working lives of federal employees infinitely worse, and thereby suspending crucial functions at their agencies.

At the General Services Administration, where very young DOGE employees installed by Musk have moved in bed pods and taken up long-term residence, an employee dryly tells Mother Jones that “Musk takes on such a new meaning.” (Interestingly, office “sleep pods” are explicitly prohibited under GSA regulations.)

At the same time, GSA employees can no longer access its headquarters by simply presenting their badges, as they have for years. Instead, the employee reports, they are to go through a magnetometer and send possessions through X-rays; with only one lane available, entry will likely be slowed to a crawl, deterring GSA employees from coming in. The GSA employee speculates the change serves two functions: limiting DOGE employees’ direct interactions with staff whose jobs they could help eliminate, while at the same time making it easier to eventually bar workers from the building entirely. “If I were to guess, it’s also to limit access to the building when they lock us out,” the GSA employee says.

At USAID, the worker there said, functions that should have resumed in light of a judicial injunction pausing the agency’s dismantling have not. “The staff are supposed to be reinstated, but some still can’t get into their email,” the worker says. “The rest of us can’t use most of the systems we work in and frankly have no work to do because of the Stop Work Orders. We’re getting paid but just sitting here. Our institutional support contractors are still furloughed. I don’t know if they are getting paid.”

The whole thing, they add, is “incredibly stupid. Every aspect of it.”

Long lines and shut do0rs are’t the only physical change taking place in federal buildings. At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, pride flags were removed along with signs that notified employees they could use whatever bathroom fit their gender identity. The bureau’s email system also removed the ability to display pronouns.

In some places, the transformation of office spaces to fit the Trump administration’s new anti-DEIA directives took on an element of farce. At an IRS office outside of D.C., “all the EEOC posters have been removed,” a worker there says, barring one display locked behind glass. “Apparently no one could find the key,” the worker says, “so the entire case was covered in white butcher paper with a sign saying not to tear or remove.”

While the whirlwind of changes have resulted in immaculately bleak visual metaphors, since sending out their first “Fork in the Road” email encouraging federal workers to quit their jobs Musk and DOGE have made it clear that their ultimate goal has been to inflict pain on federal workers. The Washington Post recently reported that officials familiar with DOGE’s plans say that office closures and bans on telework are meant to make workplaces unpleasant to reach and overcrowded so as “to depress workforce morale and increase attrition.”

While government workers and their unions have been fighting back, many federal employees, who are often motivated by a deep belief in their agencies’ missions, say they’re struggling.

“We’re all here for the impact,” the USAID worker said. “And being paid to sit at a laptop knowing I can’t do anything is worse than being fired.”

Continue Reading…

“I Am Not Leaving My Patients”: What It’s Like to Treat Trans Kids Under Trump

On January 28, President Donald Trump signed an executive order attempting to sharply curtail access to gender-affirming care for transgender minors and 18-year-olds. The order has been decried and challenged by the ACLU and three Democratic state attorneys general; 15 others released a statement opposing Trump’s order. But even with the legality and ethics of the order in question, some hospitals are choosing to comply in advance.

Alex T. Dworak, a family medicine physician in Omaha, Nebraska, was stunned by the sheer scale of misinformation in the order. Dworak spends his days treating a variety of patients, including trans youth and adults—and what the order describes is as far from his everyday experience as it is from the expert consensus that such care is medically necessary and sometimes lifesaving. In addition to his seven years of standard medical training, Dworak opted to pursue more than 100 hours of continuing education from Harvard Medical School to better serve LGBTQ+ patients, and has led numerous panels on the topic.

Dworak emphasized how extensive the process to start gender-affirming care is—involving written consent by all of a young person’s legal guardians, and a letter of support by a therapist who has confirmed their diagnosis and ability to give informed assent, as well as the family’s.

Dworak explains that working with trans patients has made him a better doctor across the board. “My experience caring for trans youth has taught me a great deal about personalizing my care and not making assumptions,” he says, “It makes me even better at taking care of each patient as an individual.”

“When queer kids are involved, suddenly my professionalism, training, and dedication count for nothing.”

As a doctor who never skipped a day of work during COVID, and received praise for it, Dworak laments that “it remains extremely offensive to me that I am good enough to risk my life and save many lives” in his work on the front lines of the pandemic, “and yet when queer kids are involved, suddenly my professionalism, training, and dedication count for nothing.”

In an email conversation, Dworak set the record straight on some of the falsehoods in Trump’s executive order—and what it’s like to be a doctor for trans folks in the current climate.

This executive order is dense, so I’d like to unpack itphrase-by-phrase. Let’s start with “chemical and surgical mutilation.”

The terms used by the executive order are false. Transgender medical care uses the exact same medications used for non-trans adults and youth—and indeed, children. As far as surgeries, genital surgeries do not happen to trans children in my experience and would be outside the [previously existing] guidelines as well. The only surgery done on trans boys—which is still very rare—is top surgery or chest masculinization. The exact same surgery is done for cis boys—also rarely—with gynecomastia. There is no mention of these terms being applied to any children who are not trans for the exact same care; it is objectively discriminatory as well as sensationalist.

What does gender-affirming care actually involve?

Gender affirming care is personal, individualized and holistic care and actually happens for cis and trans people. For cis people, it involves health and nutrition counseling, defining and supporting individual health goals with the patient being in charge, hormone therapy with the hormone that suits and supports their gender identity (testosterone or estrogen) and lab monitoring, overall medical care in the case of deficiencies that can occur for a variety of reasons, as well as elective surgeries done with full informed consent for adults. These have beneficial physical and mental health effects.

It also involves treating people respectfully. It involves keeping an accurate anatomical inventory for age and body-part-appropriate cancer screening per expert consensus guidelines. It involves reproductive health and family planning as desired by each individual patient. It is interdisciplinary management with specialists and other health professionals as individually appropriate for the patient. Gender affirming care for trans people is exactly the same except that trans women also often choose testosterone suppression.

The order defines children as “individuals under 19 years of age.” Can you think of any medical reason for grouping 18-year-olds in with minors? Does that happen with any other care?

It is not clear to me why the order targets people under 19. My state of Nebraska treats 19 as the age of majority, but to my knowledge only four other states do so. Voting, military service, and other rights are nationally conferred at 18. If a person is mature enough to volunteer or be drafted for potentially deadly combat exposure, I do not know why medical care would be any different.

The order frequently uses the term “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” a hypothesis that some adolescents experience gender dysphoria and identify as transgender due to social influences. As I understand, the research on this has been retracted. Is this correct? What else is there to understand about it?

Lead study author Lisa Littman conducted her research in a way so egregious that her paper was summarily retracted. Her assertions are not supported by more robust literature and do not comport with my clinical experience either. Her study was a questionnaire posted on anti-trans sites, soliciting the perceptions of parents who frequented those sites. This is both a selection bias and a basic error in that no input from the study population in question was obtained. Her site lists her as serving on the advisory board of Genspect, which is an SPLC-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group. For these reasons, I do not view her as a clinically neutral or trustworthy source of information.

The order also asserts that “Countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated.” In your own practice, have you seen many children experiencing such a feeling? What are the risks of detransition, and who detransitions?

Retransitions are uncommon in the literature in pediatric age groups specifically, and most often occurred before age 10 when they did happen, according to this study, which would be well before even reversible hormonal blockade would be indicated—and thus there would be zero bodily changes, making regret about one’s body from medical intervention impossible. The use of extreme, incorrect and misleading language associated with farm and industrial machinery accidents is again noted, and I believe it is intentional fearmongering.

The order also speaks several times about risks to fertility. What is the real risk to fertility for youth receiving gender-affirming care? How do clinicians work with youth and their families to preserve young people’s options to have children?

The focus on fertility treats people as valuable only insofar as they produce babies. This is a feature of right-wing European populist parties and also touted by American leaders on the right wing—and linked to efforts to ban abortion. In the care of transgender people, I always ask what each individual’s fertility and family goals are as I get to know them. I advise every patient considering gender-affirming hormone therapy of the effects on fertility and offer a trans-friendly expert OB-GYN and reproductive endocrinologist to them and their families by name. For youth presenting at the onset of puberty, I do additional counseling to highlight that not experiencing extensive natal puberty may impair future fertility compared to someone who starts gender-affirming hormone treatment later in puberty or adulthood, and have a nuanced discussion with the patient and their parents and/or guardians.

The order directs federal agencies to rescind guidance that relies on the World Professional Association of Transgender Healthcare‘s Standards of Care, which it characterizes as “junk science.”

The WPATH Standards are part of the extensive literature and guidelines I use in this care. WPATH standards are not “junk science.” They were carefully designed, refined from previous editions going back decades to the mid-20th century, and had interdisciplinary input from doctors, researchers, stakeholders and trans community members with an extensive revision process that is honest, community focused and intellectually sound.

The order directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services to publish a review on “existing literature on best practices for promoting the health of children who assert gender dysphoria, rapid-onset gender dysphoria, or other identity-based confusion.” A similar process happened in your state of Nebraska. What was the outcome? Do you have any concerns about this on a federal level?

I am extremely concerned about this process, given the overly partisan and hate-filled rhetoric of this administration. In Nebraska, a FOIA request led to my learning that problematic and overtly transphobic figures like Kenneth Zucker and Andre Van Mol were included on equal footing [in conducting the review] with trans people and clinicians that have earned and retained the trust of trans patients. [The Nebraska regulations] have a requirement for 40 hours of therapy prior to youth treatment—which has no foundation in the literature—and requires a seven-day waiting period. Otherwise, the [state] guidelines reflect my practice fairly closely, which I attribute to my speaking at length with the [state’s chief medical officer] about my clinic’s existing practices in the lead-up to Nebraska’s laws, and him listening to me.

Still, I believe we have great reason to be concerned, because the Trump administration has made extremely overtly hateful and erasing statements and picked uniquely unqualified individuals to nominate for positions of great public authority. The hand-picked authors of any “scientific review” that this administration publishes are extremely likely to be ultra-partisan and hateful.

The order directs “institutions receiving Federal research or education grants,” including medical schools and hospitals, to no longer perform gender-affirming care. A lot of folks don’t realize how much federal funding goes into the medical world. How widespread will the effect be?

Banning any federal funding going to any institution which provides pediatric gender-affirming care would have catastrophic nationwide effects. Teaching hospitals and university clinics, as well as federally qualified health centers and military health institutions would all be affected. If Medicare and Medicaid were also included, that would impact private clinics too. This would dramatically narrow options to receive care, and is already having a chilling effect in other states even before the order, where governors can intimidate institutions that receive state funds, essentially blackmailing them into abandoning trans people publicly by not advertising services or joining pride events. This would be catastrophic for youth and adults, and constitute an extreme government overreach into some of the most personal and private details of people’s medical care, in addition to violating parental rights.

Gender-affirming care for youth has already been restricted by legislation in your home state of Nebraska. What has that experience taught you?

In Nebraska, it has shown me that there are surprising amounts of compassion, understanding and a desire to learn with kindness in areas one might not expect. Of late, as certain Nebraska politicians have caught the nationwide transphobic fever—which is now pathognomonic of being part of the Republican majority—it has also given me endless opportunities to express my values and stand up for and with my patients.

I grew up in Nebraska as the son of a doctor and a nurse and the grandson of World War II veterans. I have done all my training and practice here, and have hundreds upon hundreds of other healthcare professionals across the state and elsewhere in the US whose careers it has been my privilege to assist.

“There is…abundant evidence that denial of medically necessary care is harmful and promotes suicidal ideation.”

When politicians with no medical training or expertise of any kind assert that they know better than me, and they control me, it has felt like I was in an abusive relationship with the great state that has been my only home, and where I hoped to eventually retire and live out my life. But there is still great kindness in Nebraska, and I decided to stay because of that, to be near my extended family, and because I got tired of ceding control in my mind and decided to say, “No. I am the doctor, and I am not leaving my patients and my community.”

Now, with this nationwide chaos and fear-based assault on trans rights and medical professionals like me who dare to buck the patriarchy by caring for trans people as actual human beings, I feel even more convinced that staying was the right move. This is where my roots and my connections are. This is my home and where I can make the biggest difference, And there is no safety anywhere, and so this is as good a place as any to stand and fight for my rights and my sincerely held beliefs and my patients.

Trump has issued an executive order attacking “social transitioning” in schools, which he equates to “unlawfully practicing medicine by offering diagnoses and treatment without the requisite license.” Is social transition medical care?

Social transition is an important part of gender care, but only insofar as accepting and being kind to and not bullying any child is important. If social transition is characterized as medical care, the absurdities quickly become apparent: Is calling a child by a nickname or by their middle name practicing medicine without a license? I have had long hair for most of my life; is that “radical left indoctrination and gender ideology”? Such nonsense.

There is no medicine or surgery involved and it is completely reversible. It is plainly clear that “gender ideology” really means “we hate all queer people and erroneously think that we can bully children into not being queer,” even though there is abundant evidence of harm in forcing people of any age to be inauthentic in important areas of their lives.

The journalist Mira Lazine has reported that hospitals are withdrawing access to gender-affirming care, but ~~leaving~~ retaining access to mental healthcare. Is there evidence that psychotherapy alone is effective in treating gender dysphoria?

There is no evidence that psychotherapy alone is effective in treating gender dysphoria, and abundant evidence that denial of medically necessary care is harmful and promotes suicidal ideation.

Anything else to add?

This care is some of the most careful and nuanced that I provide. It is done for fully assenting and consenting families. It is an important aspect of my care for the underserved, which along with teaching, have been the defining features of my career and which I hope will be my legacy. All of this I have done because I love learning—and my patients needed that service, so I became skilled to provide it.

Continue Reading…

Scores of Local Leaders Urge Congress to Protect Biden’s Clean Energy Tax Credits

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

A letter signed by mayors and local leaders across 39 states is calling on Congress to protect all clean energy tax credits made available to state and local governments, which had been responsible for creating thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in investments before President Donald Trump froze the funds.

Those tax credits and the bill that enabled them—the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate policy—helped launch 750 clean energy projects credited with creating 400,000 new jobs and more than $422 billion in investments. But it drew the ire of the Trump administration. One of Trump’s first acts was signing an executive order pausing further use of the tax credits.

Republican-led states have benefited the most from the credits, and freezing them will hurt communities across the country, the letter sent to congressional leaders in the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees late Friday warns.

Repealing the credits would raise Americans’ electric bills by about $489 a year, the letter stated.

“Repeal, rollback, or adjustment of any clean energy incentives will upend countless energy projects and jobs across our country, endangering millions of American jobs, increasing costs for everyday Americans, costing billions in taxpayer dollars, and potentially forcing American jobs overseas,” reads the letter, signed by 133 local leaders representing 25 million Americans across jurisdictions led by both Democrats and Republicans.

The IRA is the nation’s largest single investment in addressing climate change, allocating billions of dollars via grants, loans, and tax incentives to promote the energy transition away from fossil fuels. The bill passed without a single Republican voting for it and has continued to face partisan attacks, though some Republican members of Congress have come to support it as money began flowing into their communities. According to the letter from local leaders, 85 percent of announced investments and 53 percent of new clean energy jobs stemming from the IRA are in districts represented by Republicans.

The 13 tax credits the IRA created for state and local governments have led to the creation of charging stations for electric vehicles, solar installations on government buildings, and more. In just the first year of the tax credits being available, more than 500 local governments have taken advantage of them.

Kate Gallego, Phoenix’s mayor, said the pause in tax credits has created uncertainty for local governments and businesses regarding the status of funding for various projects. In many cases, the credits come in the form of reimbursements for cities, she said. Phoenix has already placed orders for hybrid-electric buses thanks to the incentives and received a $15 million grant for expanding its EV charging network and addressing the city’s air quality problems. The city is trying to find out if that funding will still be available as city leaders work on the budget for the upcoming fiscal year, she said.

Without certainty that the funding will be there, many of the projects can’t move forward. And if the IRA’s tax credits are repealed, it would raise electric bills for Americans across the country by roughly $489 a year as well as cutting jobs, the letter stated.

“Whether you care about helping people manage their energy consumption, or American innovation or energy independence for the United States, the clean energy tax credits and direct pay have advanced those agendas,” said Gallego, who is also chair of Climate Mayors, a network of mayors focused on climate action. Many of the letter’s signees are members.

The tax credits’ uncertain future is one consequence of the Trump administration’s funding freeze across the government, touching off court battles and warnings from experts that the country is in a full-blown constitutional crisis. Federal judges have ruled that the Trump administration cannot pause congressionally approved funds to state and local governments, but agencies are still holding money back.

That led a coalition of 22 Democratic state attorneys general to file a motion to enforce the judges’ rulings and a motion for a preliminary injunction in one of the court cases to stop the funding freeze. On Monday, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration must immediately restore all frozen federal funding, a win for the states.

“This funding is owed by law to the people of Arizona,” said Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes in a statement announcing the legal filing. “Trump can try every trick he has up his sleeve to evade the Constitution but I will be there to stop him.”

Continue Reading…

Please Don’t Use Nancy Mace’s So-Called Victim Hotline, Advocates Say

On the House floor Monday night—in a speech that was jarring, graphic, and nearly an hour long—Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) made disturbing allegations of sexual abuse against four men from her home state, one of whom is her ex-fiancé.

Mace was emotional throughout: She prayed at the start, and paused to take deep breaths a few times. Mace’s formerfiancé and another accused man denied the allegations, and the other men do not appear to have spoken out.The allegations have not been independently corroborated and the men have not been charged. South Carolina’s Law Enforcement Division (SLED), the state police agency, said in a statement that it had opened an investigation into Mace’s ex-fiancé in December 2023 after being contacted by Capitol Police about allegations of “assault, harassment, and voyeurism,” and that the investigation remains ongoing and will be sent to a prosecutor for review upon completion.

Mace also alleged in the speech that South Carolina’s Republican Attorney General Alan Wilson—whom she would likely face in a primary for governor, a race she has said she is “seriously considering” entering—failed to properly investigate the allegations after she brought forth evidence, which allegedly included nonconsensual sexualimages of her and others. In a lengthy statement, Wilson’s office rejected Mace’s claims that it did not properly respond.

All of this has, unsurprisingly, attracted ample news coverage. But one aspect of the explosive speech has gone unexamined: A so-called hotline that Mace said she set up to encourage victims to come forward—which nobody actually answers, and which leading domestic and sexual violence advocates in Mace’s home state of South Carolina say they don’t want victims to call. Mother Jones is the first to report these details.

Mace began her speech on the House floor standing next to a giant pink poster with a South Carolina phone number advertising a “victim hotline.” The purpose of the number—whether it was for any victims of domestic or sexual violence, or only meant for people to share information related to her allegations—was unclear, and Mace’s spokesperson didn’t clarify when I asked. Nonetheless, Mace has continued to promote the number, sharing it across her social media channels and urging people to call (some of her posts suggest that many of the callers are from her district, and that they’re sharing information related to her case).

Some of Mace’s followers on social media joked about calling the number to report President Trump, who, in 2023, was found liable by a jury in a civil case for sexual abuse of writer E. Jean Carroll (Mace has since defended him); Trump has also famously bragged on tape about committing sexual assault. But others on social media seemed to earnestly praise Mace for setting up the phone line and said they had already used it to report allegations of abuse; one even offered to “field calls” as a volunteer in another state. (I reached out to multiple people who said on social media that they reached out to the hotline, seemingly to report allegations of abuse, but did not hear back.)

But when I called Mace’s hotline three different times—each time at least one hour apart—on Tuesday afternoon, it seemed to essentially be a glorified voicemail. Every time, the line rang repeatedly before ending with an automated message from Mace herself: “Hi, this is Congresswoman Nancy Mace, and you’ve reached our office victim hotline. Please note your information is confidential. Please leave a detailed message and we will contact you as soon as possible. You may also text us at this number.” Beep. (I did not leave a message, instead corresponding with her spokesperson through email.)

My text to the number—”Hi is this Nancy Mace’s victim hotline?”—went unanswered for 45 minutes. When they finally did respond, it was with little effort: “Yes, it is.”

Deborah Freel, executive director of Tri-County S.P.E.A.K.S., a sexual assault center in Charleston—part of Mace’s district—that operates its own 24/7 hotline, said her staff spent Tuesday testing out the number only to reach the voicemail whenever they called; they also fielded calls from community members concerned that Mace’s numberwas going unanswered, she said.

“It isn’t a hotline,” Freel told me. “It’s not connecting a survivor or someone with a concern to the resources that they need in that moment, which is really challenging. If the intention was to get them those resources, then it would be better for them to be directed to either a local or national resource.”

Just before I spoke to Freel by phone late Tuesday afternoon, Freel said she spoke to Mace’s staff by phone and advised them to remove the word “hotline” from the description and to direct people to local and national trauma-informed victim services organizations instead.(Mace’s office did publish some resources, including information about Freel’s organization—two minutes after I reached out via email with details of the local advocates’ allegations, according to the web page’s metadata.) Freel said her impression was that they had received an “enormous” number of calls in the less than 24 hours the number has existed, and that they were overwhelmed.

Laura Hudson, executive director of the nonprofit South Carolina Victim Assistance Network, said she felt that Mace “set us back about 25 years” by not directing survivors of abuse to proper resources—whether it be law enforcement or hotlines with specially-trained, trauma-informed staff. Victim service providers who answer domestic and sexual violence hotlines, whether paid staff or volunteers, go through hours of professional training and often get certified through their states; Hudson’s staff who answer calls, she said, are all certified by a program for victim service providers at the South Carolina attorney general’s office—the same office Mace lambasted in her speech on the House floor.

Hudson—who last year was honored in the state legislature for several years of work in supporting victims and lobbying to pass legislation on their behalf—described Mace’s effort as “giving false hope to a very vulnerable population, instead of publishing national and, most importantly, state resources.” Some of those resources include nearly two dozen hotlines throughout Mace’s state, included on a directory maintained by the South Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault; the National Domestic Violence Hotline, which can also be reached via text or online chat; and RAINN, the national sexual assault hotline, which is also available via phone or online chat.

Freel’s paid staff are certified by the same program as Hudson’s—the one administered by the attorney general’s office—and her organization’s 25 hotline volunteers have to go through 25 hours of training and a day of in-person training, and spend time shadowing staff, before they can start taking calls, she said.

“If you’re working on our hotline, not only are you receiving calls, but you have to be ready to go to the emergency room at our local hospital and accompany a survivor through sexual assault forensic evidence collection exam,” Freel said. “So you really have to know your stuff and be very experienced.” Last year, she said, the Tri-County S.P.E.AK.S.hotline received 1,400 calls.

Asking people to potentially disclose abuse or private information on a voicemail message, as Mace’s line does, “seems risky,” Hudson said. Mace’s office says that the information people leave on the voicemail would be “confidential,” and a spokesperson told me earlier Tuesday that outreach was monitored by staffers in the office. The spokesperson added that “per federal congressional office policy, we will get consent from constituents to provide their information to law enforcement as needed.”

Despite these assurances, Mace’s office is not bound by the same federal confidentiality requirements the Violence Against Women Act imposes on domestic and sexual violence treatment and prevention organizations that receive federal funding, as Sara Barber, executive director of the South Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, which oversees the state’s 22 member organizations, pointed out.

Besides the confidentiality concerns, having specially-trained advocates available to answer phones on the spot is important because survivors may not call back again, or may need immediate emotional support, the advocates pointed out. “There is potential harm,” Freel said, “in a survivor calling with an expectation that they will be connected to someone who gets it and who is a trauma-informed individual.”

“When they call and get an answering machine,” she added, “that can immediately be disheartening and hurtful and can create a barrier for them to even want to even want to take another step forward in a process.”

So why did Mace introduce the so-called hotline in the first place? I asked her office and didn’t immediately hear back—on that question, or on the local advocates’ criticisms of the hotline. But it does align with Mace’s attempts to portray herself as a protector of women and girls (though, as she has made clear, that doesn’t include trans women).

Mace’s spokesperson told me earlier Tuesday that the line will stay active “as long as necessary.”

When I asked Hudson whether Mace’s office had reached out to her or the South Carolina Victim Assistance Network to ask for assistance or guidance in setting up the hotline, Hudson replied, “No. But I would be delighted to help her in any way.”

Continue Reading…

Project 2025 Is Gutting Medical Funding That Helped Russell Vought’s Own Kid

The National Institutes of Health, the federal government’s leading medical research agency, came under attack by Project 2025 well before its architect, Russell Vought, was confirmed to Donald Trump’s second-term cabinet as head of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought’s pet project—the playbook for the Trump presidency—asserts that “funding for scientific research should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid and unaccountable insiders” and encourages “more modest federal funding through” NIH.

Last Friday, NIH announced that it would cap grants for “indirect” research costs—such as building-related and equipment expenses—at 15 percent, from a current average of around 30 percent. It’s far from the only health-related harm the Trump administration has brought about in less than a month: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., poised to take over the Department of Health and Human Services, is, of course, infamous for spreading vaccine disinformation, and cuts to the US Agency for International Development led to abrupt, damaging pauses in both HIV/AIDS research and medication distribution.

But some of the so-called insiders funding research that helped scientists better understand cystic fibrosis—research which led to Vertex Pharmaceuticals developing a cutting-edge treatment that Vought’s daughter Porter benefited from. In a 2021 Instagram post, Vought’s then-wife shared that the couple’s daughter had started Trikafta, a drug that has shown great promise in managing pulmonary issues associated with cystic fibrosis, which affects some 40,000 Americans.

Cystic fibrosis can lead to respiratory issues, including worsening lung function, even with the best non-experimental care. Trikafta is currently the focus of a study—backed by a $2.9 million grant from NIH—which seeks to understand what makes the drug so effective in some patients. NIH also funds other cystic fibrosis-related research, laying out $84 million annually to support research related to the disease. “We’re extremely grateful to live in a nation that leads the way on medical innovation,” Mary Vought wrote in her 2021 post.

Screenshot by Julia Métraux

“We sympathize greatly with those that can’t afford or struggle to pay for basic medical needs,” Vought and his wife wrote for an anti-abortion website after their daughter was born. “Our hearts break for sick children and their families in a new way.”

But Vought appears to be shutting that door firmly behind him, helping to mount a dizzying range of attacks on lifesaving medical research at (and beyond) NIH. Funding cuts to NIH across 28 states—such cuts are temporarily blocked in 22 others that sued over the move—means that research into rare diseases, already inadequate, may slow down. 95 percent of rare diseases, unlike cystic fibrosis, have no treatment, according to the National Organization for Rare Disorders, and most organizations lack the budget to fund drug research in partnership with pharmaceutical companies.

Neena Nizar, executive director and founder of Jansen’s Foundation, which pushes for treatment of Jansen’s metaphyseal chondrodysplasia, sees the Trump administration’s new cap on indirect costs “as a double-edged sword.” More money should go directly into research, Nizar said; but “indirect costs,” she continued, “are essential for keeping research labs running.”

For families of children with ultra-rare conditions, such as Jansen’s disease—which fewer than 30 people live with worldwide—NIH-led research could be the only path to care. One such project is the NIH-funded Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network, which has studied over 200 rare diseases since it was founded in 2003. Its exact impact is difficult to measure, but the network has clinical research sites in states where the Trump administration’s overhead budget cuts have not been blocked.

“As a community, we need to push for a system that sustains research, protects under-resourced institutions,” Nizar said, “and ensures that groundbreaking work—especially in rare diseases—continues without disruption.”

Continue Reading…

Trump Won’t Enforce Law That Bars US Firms From Bribing Foreign Officials

The Trump administration won’t enforce one of the country’s strongest anti-bribery and corruption laws for at least the next six months, a radical departure that could devastate the international fight against corruption. Trump claimed the move would bring an immediate boost to US trade, but experts on the law say that it could actually undermine America’s competitiveness—and that it will certainly embolden corrupt foreign officials.

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) has been on the books since 1977. Essentially, it prohibits American companies and their employees from paying bribes to do business in foreign countries. An amended version also allows US prosecutors to charge foreign firms for any acts of bribery that involve America’s financial system.

Proponents say the law—developed in the wake of a series of bribery scandals involving major US companies paying hundreds of millions of bribes to corrupt officials—protects corporate America from being targeted in corruption and extortion schemes.

Trump, whose own foreign real-estate dealings raise potentially serious conflicts of interest, has long objected to the law. As far back as 2012, he was on the record saying “the world is laughing at us” over the measure, and he took steps to relax its enforcement during his first term as president. On Monday night, he issued an executive order halting enforcement altogether.

The order says that the Department of Justice’s use of the law has been “stretched beyond proper bounds and abused in a manner that harms the interests of the United States.” Specifically, it claims, the statute has hindered American firms seeking access to minerals, deep water ports, and other key assets overseas.

The law itself remains in place—Trump is simply pausing enforcement for 180 days, although the order’s language suggests the pause could be extended.

For this reason, Jessica Tillipman, the dean of government procurement law at George Washington University, says she doesn’t think the enforcement respite will be of use to most major US companies. Paying bribes is still illegal, she notes, and companies will hesitate let their employees deploy such tactics, knowing enforcement could resume in the near future under Trump or the next administration—the law’s statute of limitations is five years.

“I don’t see many companies demanding this,” Tillipman says. “There are [some] companies out there that have no problem with this, and they are probably going to be overjoyed, but there are a lot of companies that have really robust internal compliance and ethics programs, and they’re not going to change.”

What will change, she says, is that US companies will have a harder time credibly invoking the FCPA to rebuff foreign officials soliciting bribes. “I think in many of these cases, bribery happens because the corrupt official demands it, not because you have household name companies wandering around the world with bags of cash,” Tillipman says.

In other words, when the law is vigorously enforced, companies have a solid rationale for rejecting extortionate demands—billions of excuses, given the enormous penalties some US firms have paid for FCPA violations in recent years.

Without the threat of legal enforcement to fend off bribe-seekers, some American executives will struggle to say no. “It’s a really good time to be a corrupt official in Russia or Asia,” Tillipman says.

Despite various amendments to the law, and healthy debate over how tightly it should be enforced (punitive actions have become more common in recent years) there has never been widespread pushback. Since 2010, in fact, more and more foreign countries have adopted complementary laws, effectively spreading the standard set by the FCPA, Tillipman says.

Trump has never clearly explained his dislike of the law, but his own business experiences may offer some hints. In 2008, for example, he began exploring plans to build a hotel project in Baku, Azerbaijan—a country that ranks 154th out of 180 on Transparency International’s corruption perception index.

His company wound up working with a firm run by family members of the country’s then-transportation minister, Ziya Mammadov. Leaked US diplomatic cables described Mammadov as “notoriously corrupt even for Azerbaijan,” and he was noted for his ties to companies controlled by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

The project was never completed. The hotel was built, but it sat empty and was never opened as a Trump property, despite the Trumps’ earning several million dollars in licensing fees. A 2017 New Yorker article raised the specter that the Trump Organization could bear some legal liability under the FCPA, as American companies can be charged if they profit from a relationship with corrupt officials.

Neither Trump nor his company were accused of wrongdoing related to the Baku deal and the company also denied any wrongdoing.

That deal fell apart before Trump took office in 2017, but now he’s back in the White House with his business operating in even more nations—including Brazil, India, and Turkey—where bribery is a concern. During Trump’s first term, his company vowed not to pursue foreign deals, but it has made no such promise for Trump 2.0. Now, at least for the next six months, the anti-bribery law won’t be part of the conversation.

Continue Reading…

No Jail for Bannon After Fraud Plea Deal

Steve Bannon pleaded guilty Tuesday in a New York court to defrauding donors in a border wall scheme. But Bannon, a key Trump ally and former White House adviser, will avoid any jail time after striking a deal with prosecutors.

Bannon pleaded guilty to one count of a scheme to defraud, and prosecutors under Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg agreed to drop five other charges against him, including money laundering and conspiracy allegations. New York Judge April Newbauer sentenced Bannon to a three-year conditional discharge. He could be imprisoned if he commits a crime during that period.

The seemingly lenient deal comes about a week after US Attorney General Pam Bondi launched a “Weaponization Working Group,” which she said would examine “federal cooperation with the weaponization” by Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James “to target President Trump, his family, and his businesses.” In remarks to reporters after his plea Tuesday, Bannon urged Bondi to launch criminal investigations into Bragg and James.

Bannon last year served four months in federal prison in Connecticut for contempt of Congress; he had refused to comply with a subpoena from the House January 6 committee. Bannon was also named last year as co-conspirator in a federal racketeering and fraud cases against Bannon’s former patron, exiled Chinese mogul Guo Wengui. Bannon was not charged in that case. Guo and another codefendant were convicted and remain imprisoned.

Federal prosecutors in 2020 charged Bannon and three other men with defrauding “hundreds of thousands of donors” to a crowdfunding campaign called “We Build the Wall,” which raised more than $25 million in private money to support Donald Trump’s promised border wall. Brian Kolfage, the founder and effort, had assured donors he would not take a salary, but prosecutors said that the defendants arranged to secretly pay Kolfage more than $350,000, in part with funds routed through a separate non-profit Bannon ran. Federal prosecutors alleged that Bannon—who was famously arrested aboard Guo’s $28 million yacht—also used We Build the Wall to pay his own personal expenses.

Hours before leaving office in 2021, Trump pardoned Bannon, who was a vocal supporter of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. The other three defendants, who Trump did not pardon, received prison sentences of three to five years.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office hit Bannon with similar charges in 2022, in a case Bannon has claimed was politically motivated. In a hearing in November, prosecutors in the case revealed that Bannon was initially wary of the wall fundraising effort.

“Isn’t this a scam?” Bannon wrote in an email read in court by Manhattan prosecutor Jeffrey Levinson. “You can’t build the wall for this much money.” Bannon, according to Levinson, later added: “Poor Americans shouldn’t be using hard-earned money to chase something not doable.”

Bannon changed his mind, Levinson said, after realizing that he could use the effort to make money for his own nonprofit group.

Continue Reading…

Everything Elon Musk Touches Is a Conflict of Interest

In early February, President Donald Trump threatened to cut off “all future funding” to South Africa, alleging that the government was “treating certain classes of people very badly” by passing a law allowing for the expropriation of privately-owned land in certain cases. Right-wingers in both countries have framed the law as a discriminatory attack on white citizens, who comprise seven percent of the population but hold 70 percent of privately-owned land. When President Cyril Ramaphosa defended the policy on X, Elon Musk, the Pretoria-born tech billionaire who is currently leading the White House’s efforts to eliminate most forms of foreign aid, shot back.

“Why do you have openly racist ownership laws?” he asked.

Musk, who also spoke by phone with Ramaphosa last week, is not just a critic of South African ownership laws. One of his companies is actively working to get around them. Starlink, a subsidiary of SpaceX that provides phone and internet service via low-Earth-orbit satellites, has been trying for years to expand to Musk’s birth country. But he has been stymied by a post-apartheid law that requires telecom providers to be at least 30-percent owned by “historically disadvantaged groups”—namely, Black South Africans. Musk’s company, suffice it to say, is not. Starlink and Musk have reportedly lobbied for Ramaphosa’s government to change the requirement or consider a workaround—for instance, by granting an exemption as part of a deal for a Tesla battery plant. According to Bloomberg, Musk personally discussed Starlink with Ramaphosa at a meeting in New York last fall.

Would he be so interested in funding the UK Reform Party if the ruling Labour party hadn’t snubbed him from an investment conference? Is he feuding with half of Europe right now because their leaders have caught the “woke mind virus” or because the European Union has been investigating X since 2023 over violations of its Digital Services Act?

A top government official backing punitive measures against a foreign country he’s simultaneously negotiating a business deal with represents a major conflict of interest. For Musk, it is only one of many. With a net worth of around $400 billion, Musk brings to Washington the wealth of a nation-state, and the geopolitical entanglements of one too. He provides internet access to more than 100 countries. His cars are available across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. He gets raw materials from four continents; feuds with sovereign wealth funds; backchannels with heads of state; sends their satellites into space; censors communications at their request; and, increasingly, throws his support behind those who share his interests and attempts to remove from office the ones who don’t.

Civil servants and elected officials are often bound by tight disclosure requirements and ethics guidelines designed to curb conflicts of interest and prevent bureaucrats from profiting from their work. Michael Punke, the author of the book that was adapted into the Oscar-winning motion picture, The Revenant, was famously prohibited from even promoting the book while serving as US ambassador to the World Trade Organization.

Musk, who is operating as a “special government employee,” has not divested from his vast holdings. He has not stepped down from his companies. On Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Musk’s conflicts would be handled on something like an honor system: “If Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with the contracts and the funding that DOGE is overseeing…Elon will excuse himself from those contracts.” The sheer scope of Musk’s interests, though, means that everything that happens, anywhere in the world, is a potential conflict.

Take Starlink, a product so ubiquitous that according to a New York Times analysis, it accounts for more than half the satellites in the sky. Although South Africa’s ownership law is a unique product of the country’s Black Economic Empowerment program, Musk has frequently been stymied by local ownership requirements and licensing processes—particularly in Africa and Asia. In Vietnam, for instance, 2023 negotiations with Starlink fell apart over a law requiring telecom providers to have majority domestic ownership.

When Starlink users have circumvented national bans by taking advantage of roaming plans, governments have responded by seizing devices and ordering the company to cease and desist its service. In some cases, they have even argued that the service threatens their own national security interests. The Sudanese government, for instance, complained in 2024 that a militia group accused of crimes against humanity was able to bypass a government internet blackout by using Starlink roaming plans to conduct its operations. Meanwhile, many Sudanese citizens rely on food and medical programs from USAID —an agency that Musk has promised to send “into the woodchipper.”

Fights over telecom regulations slowed the company’s growth. Now things are looking up. Musk’s new role in the White House has made it “harder for some governments to resist Starlink,” Bloomberg recently reported. After three years of discussions, Chad granted approval one week after the November election. The effort in South Africa began picking up steam. Musk recently spoke with the president of Nepal about relaxing that country’s ownership laws. Everyone wants to meet with him now.

Part of what makes Starlink such a minefield of conflict of interests is that it’s so difficult to tell where Musk’s private interests end and his policy-making ambitions begin. The extra-special government employee who joined Trump on a post-election call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy owns the satellite network that country is counting on to fight Russia. (Incidentally, some of the funding for those satellites came from USAID.) Musk has also held private phone calls with Russian president Vladimir Putin—who, according to the Wall Street Journal, discussed blocking Starlink in Taiwan as a favor to China. Taiwan, for its part, so distrusts Musk that it has already banned Starlink and is building its own network. In a post-election talk with an Iranian government official, Musk reportedly discussed the possibility of investing in the country. He has previously promised on X that he would seek an exemption from Treasury Department sanctions to bring Starlink to Tehran. Now he effectively controls the Treasury Department.

Tesla is another area where Musk’s interests are too vast to disentangle from his government work. He has sourced materials and parts for his cars from China, Indonesia, Mozambique, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, New Caledonia, Australia, Canada, the US, and Japan, among other places. He builds them in China, the US, Canada, the Netherlands, and Germany. The list of places where he has looked into getting lithium or nickel, at setting up a plant, or at distributing Teslas is vast. Musk’s business depends on a lot of things happening a certain way across the world. A SpaceX supplier recently shifted operations from Taiwan to Thailand because of the geopolitical pressure on the former nation. Musk was forced to find a new source of aluminum after sanctions forced him to cut ties with a company controlled by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

If Musk has a stake in the rest of the world, the rest of the world also has a stake in Musk. Investors in X have included Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and Saudia Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Al Saud, as well as the prince’s investment house Kingdom Holding, which is partially owned by the country’s sovereign wealth fund. Kingdom Holding and Qatar—along with the sovereign wealth fund of Oman—are also backers of Musk’s AI startup, xAI. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund holds a 1-percent stake in Tesla. (Musk cancelled a visit to Oslo last year after the fund manager voted against a $56 billion compensation package for Musk twice; Musk then complained that the fund manager had leaked his angry texts, although they were in fact disclosed under public records laws.)

Then there’s China, which has banned X and does not permit Starlink to operate, but where Tesla has thrived with the blessing of the authoritarian state. Musk makes cars and sells cars there and has benefited enormously from a rule Tesla pushed for that allows the company to sell emissions credits, just as it does in California. Musk, meanwhile, has parroted the government’s talking points on Taiwan and defended its treatment of the Uyghurs. This has been a lucrative relationship for Musk, but also a very fragile one, as Tesla is increasingly caught between American protectionism and the growth of a rival electric-vehicle industry in China. You don’t have to imagine a scenario in which Musk pressures Trump and Congress to tank legislation that would hurt his interests in the country; he already did that last year.

With his hands-on control of X, Musk has demonstrated a willingness to throttle political speech when censorship benefits friendly leaders—Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, Narendra Modi of India, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel—while using his platform to foment a global right-wing movement. Over the last two years, Musk has backed right-wing leaders in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, El Salvador, Germany, Israel, and Italy. Musk has been demanding the release of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a far-right fraudster and stalker who goes by the pseudonym Tommy Robinson, and who was jailed for contempt of court last year after repeating claims about a Syrian refugee that had already been found to be defamatory. Musk’s platform provided fuel for anti-immigrant riots in the UK. He encouraged UFC fighter Conor McGregor to run for president of Ireland. And in recent weeks, Musk has aggressively promote the far-right German AfD party, whose membership he implored to set aside their “guilt” about the nation’s past.

Perhaps no one in American history has combined this many conflicts of interest across the globe with this much state power—legally authorized or not. Dick Cheney was chairman and CEO of Halliburton and later vice president of the United States, but he was not both at the same time. And these are merely his foreign entanglements; the inherent conflict in a major government contractor taking control of the federal government’s contracting process is almost too obvious to note.

For every Musk political stance, there’s a personal interest not far away. Would he be so interested in funding the UK Reform Party if the ruling Labour party hadn’t snubbed him from an investment conference? Is he feuding with half of Europe right now because their leaders have caught the “woke mind virus” or because the European Union has been investigating X over alleged violations of its Digital Services Act? Is he inserting himself into German politics because of his admiration for “German tribes” in the days of Julius Caesar, or because he makes a ton of cars there and is tired of fighting with his workers? Does he want USAID to to “die” because he thinks it’s wasteful or because its programs are a bulwark against the overseas autocracies he works with?

For that matter, does Musk want the government to replace its workers with artificial intelligence because it will improve service or because he’s in the AI business? Does he think that “regulations, basically, should be gone” because of some fine-tuned understanding of bureaucratic machinery or because regulators have penalized him and his companies for improperly transporting hazardous materials; improperly managing hazardous waste; violating the Clean Air Act; failing to control erosion; illegal dumping; pumping wastewater into wetlands; exaggerating the range estimates on his cars; refusing to cooperate with an anti-child-abuse law; securities fraud; failing to comply with safety regulations on a rocket launch (which SpaceX has appealed); improperly operating a conveyor belt, leading to a worker getting pinned to a car (which Tesla has appealed); forcing workers to walk through muck filled with chemical accelerants (which the Boring Company has appealed); and securities fraud (which Musk and Tesla settled with no admission of wrongdoing in 2018).

For years, Musk has paired an extraordinary degree of international influence with a defiance bordering on arrogance in the face of civil authorities. He once said that regulators who complain about Starlink operating in their country “can shake their fist at the sky.” These days, anyone who’s upset with Washington can shake their fist at him. When Trump briefly imposed tariffs on Canada last week, Ontario premier Doug Ford added his own addendum to the national government’s retaliatory actions. The province would be “ripping up” its $100 million deal with Starlink, Ford announced, if the Trump and Musk administration went through with its threat. If operating from outer space gave him a sense of being untouchable, operating from inside the White House, as a shadow secretary-of-state and everything-czar, has heightened both his power and his exposure: Musk is the state now, and L’État, c’est Musk.

Continue Reading…

“Beyond Terrifying”—Being the Parent of a Trans Child with Trump in Office

Trump promised retribution in his second term. For our March+April issue, we spoke with those targeted about lessons from the first term, fears of a second, and plans to fight back. Read the whole package here.

Five years ago Minna Zelch and her then-15-year-old daughter, a transgender student, were elated when the state of Ohio granted her permission to play on her high school softball team. Just weeks later, legislation banning transgender athletes from participating in school sports was introduced in the statehouse. As the only transgender athlete who fit this category, Zelch says, her daughter overnight, “became the face of trans athletes in Ohio.” Now a 20-year-old college student out of state,her daughter, “spent more time her senior year of high school testifying at the state house than she did visiting colleges.” With the barrage of anti-trans legislation passed last year, her experience in Ohio foreshadowed the grim reality that young trans people and their families all over the country are experiencing as the Trump administration passes one executive order after another attacking trans rights.

Her story has been edited and condensed for clarity.

It’s just gotten steadily worse. Now we have an entire party whose members have basically said they want to eradicate a certain group of people. That’s beyond terrifying when your child is part of that group.

The main thing is to get your documents in order. And fortunately, for our daughter, as soon as soon as she turned 18, we had all the paperwork ready to go for everything. Her license was changed, her passport was changed, and so was her birth certificate.

We’re sending her back to college with her passport, in case she has to make a quick escape. I’ve talked to people about recommendations for immigration lawyers. Part of our fear is that her name is out there. She was actually doxxed at school last spring. If there’s a list, we’re on it. She does lots of things to be safe. She stays in groups, she doesn’t use public restrooms by herself. She finds places where she feels nobody here is gonna take her into the alley and beat her up. And she is fortunate. I hate to use this term, but she passes pretty well. If you didn’t know, you probably wouldn’t know. It’s still terrifying. People could easily find her, even though we’ve done as many things that we can to try and keep her identity somewhat secret.

I asked my daughter what she was worried most about the Trump administration. Her biggest fear is that, and I quote, “My identity will not be no longer be recognized, and that according to the government, trans people will cease to exist.”

“My identity will not be no longer be recognized, and that according to the government, trans people will cease to exist.”

Her safety is of the utmost importance to me and her father. Physical safety is obviously a big component, but also her mental health and emotional well-being. She’s been out of Ohio for a year and a half, and I’m just now understanding how much she was impacted by all the advocacy work she had to do as a teenager.

She sat in hearing rooms and stood in front of legislators when they called her, and people she knew, and her friends, the most horrible things. They told children that they were groomers and sexual perverts and shouldn’t be allowed near other people. And that’s just the things I can say to you over the phone and that you can put in print.

I don’t know if she will ever fully recover. Her personality has been completely changed because of what she had to do. And she’s not the only one. Children should not have to beg for basic human rights.

Part of me seeks some comfort in the fact that there’s a lot of us who are not going to stay quiet, we’re not going to let them do this to our children. They’re not going to get away without lots of people shedding light on their hatred and bigotry.

Continue Reading…

Trump’s Pause on Cross-Border Collaboration Threatens Weather Forecasting and Fisheries Research

This story was originally published b_y the Canada’s National Observer a_nd is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Canadian climate and fisheries experts are reeling after the Trump administration ordered researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—the US government agency in charge of weather forecasting, climate research, and fisheries—to temporarily stop communicating with “foreign nationals.”

The move, which was first reported Wednesday by Wired, could devastate weather and oceanic forecasting, climate change research, and Canada’s ability to manage and study key fish stocks like Pacific salmon and halibut, experts and advocates say.

“This is not a small blow for climate research—it is a body blow,” said Tzeporah Berman, a long-time Canadian climate advocate and expert. If implemented permanently, the move would hamstring some of the world’s most important climate monitoring data and modeling, making it hard to assess the scale of the crisis and craft effective responses.

“Neither Trump nor Musk have the power to secure the US’s borders against climate change,” Berman said. “The fires and floods know no borders and it is absolutely critical that the world share data and solutions on shared global threats. Trump and Musk constraining NOAA from collaborating threatens us all, including us citizens. It’s a dangerous, closed minded, knee jerk ideological policy that could literally cost lives.”

An internal email shared with Wired shows that employees at the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) were told to “PAUSE ALL INTERNATIONAL ENGAGEMENT” (sic), including international commissions and emails with “foreign national colleagues.”

The ban extends to the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service, which works extensively with international partners to collect climate and weather data that is vital to protect air, shipping and railways from extreme weather, in addition to its value for climate research. Both organizations are contained within NOAA.

The move could hide measurements from the Mauna Loa Observatory carbon dioxide monitoring program, widely considered the world’s benchmark measures. It could also eliminate a key global temperature record used by climate researchers worldwide, global monitoring for rising sea levels and ocean temperatures and lead to weaker climate modeling and forecasting. The move will also disrupt countries’ ability to meet their global climate commitments; and limit developing nations’ ability to prepare for climate disasters, Berman said.

While other organizations in Europe, Japan and the UK could help fill the hole, the loss of NOAA data would be a “major setback” for global climate science, Berman warned.

“Those data sets are not only of the US,” said Tianjia (Tina) Liu, a University of British Columbia geography professor who specializes in wildfire. “Having them is really beneficial for the entire region, and really helpful for managing natural disasters.”

In a statement, Environment and Climate Change Canada confirmed it has a “longstanding relationship” with NOAA in weather, climate, satellite, and water monitoring. It has “not officially been informed of any changes to its collaboration with NOAA.”

Villy Christensen, a professor at the University of British Columbia and founder of a decades-long approach to managing fisheries that focuses on ecosystem health long used by the NMFS emphasized that blocking collaborative efforts will harm research and management decisions in the US, Canada and other countries.

American isolationism could curtail some of the decades-old committees that manage key species in both Canada and the US. Take Pacific salmon and Pacific Halibut: The fish species migrate between the countries and sustain important fisheries on either side of the border. For years, they’ve been managed through a collaborative US-Canada process that relies heavily on US data.

“These are really important joint efforts between the US and Canada to manage, assess and manage and allocate fish stocks or catches,” said John Driscoll, a fisheries scientist and policy analyst with the David Suzuki Foundation. Even if the temporary pause is lifted, the disruption could have “disproportionate effects” on both countries’ ability to manage the fish.

Still, Christensen said that ultimately, if necessary Canada and global researchers can make do without the US. Last year, the country joined most of Horizon Europe, the world’s largest research and innovation funding scheme, which allows Canadian researchers to access funding and collaborate more closely with Europe.

But he was clear that’s not the goal of science. “[Scientists] depend on collaboration,” Christensen said. ” We stand on the shoulders of giants, they walk with us—and cooperation is absolutely a requirement.”

Continue Reading…

Why a Renewable Energy Investor Thinks It Will Be Hard to Kill the IRA

Trump promised retribution in his second term. For our March+April issue, we spoke with those targeted about lessons from the first term, fears of a second, and plans to fight back. Read the whole package here.

Under President Donald Trump, Republicans have promised to cut key components of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature green legislation. The bill pledged $370 billion in funding for clean energy investments. About a third of that money has been invested in the last two years. A majority of it went to Republican districts—about 85 percent of project investments. Yet, Trump still has vowed to “rescind all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.”

Mother Jones spoke with Carl Weatherley-White, Head of Capital Markets for Greenbacker, in January, before the beginning of the second term, about the potential impacts of the next administration repealing the IRA. Greenbacker is a renewable energy investing company with over 450 projects around the US.

This interview has been edited for clarity and condensed.

Do you think existing renewable energy projects will be hit by a new Trump administration repealing the IRA?

In the unlikely event that the IRA is repealed, then you have a lot of turmoil. A lot of projects that are under development will have to either renegotiate their power purchase agreements to get higher pricing. If they cannot do that, they would have to kill the projects.

How do you prepare for a full repeal?

We’ve accelerated some of our development so that we can grandfather projects. We have a pipeline of projects under development and under construction that work under the current tax law. I think if the change did happen, then we would revisit our development pipeline, and prioritize projects. We’d have to really rerun the numbers on all our projects and decide which ones still are still financeable and which ones aren’t.

How would the repeal trickle down to the public?

It basically gets at the cost of electricity. You have utilities that are delivering electricity, and they set rates at a level that create a return on their investment that is established by regulators. If a tax credit goes away, then they would have to increase rates to cover their costs. And so given the amount of electricity predicted to come from renewable energy, without a tax credit I think you’d likely see significant pressure to increase electricity prices.

And honestly, that would create another political problem for any administration.

Is there anticipation of some of these projects that have been funded by IRA facing increased scrutiny or auditing?

I don’t think so. The rules are very detailed. There’s already a lot of scrutiny, not only by the Internal Revenue Service, but also by all of the market participants: lawyers, accounts, bankers, investors. They’re all very careful to make sure that the products are well structured and they’re safe. It already is a pretty robust ecosystem.

Continue Reading…

How Elon Musk and His DOGE Goons Are Following the Private Equity Playbook

For some, the chaos wrought by Elon Musk and his ironically-named Department of Government Efficiency feels strangely familiar.

Mysterious outside consultants roaming the halls? The kind who appear to know nothing about the business they’re supposedly auditing for efficiency? Who push cuts into what they presume is fat, but is actually muscle, connective tissue, and Medicaid?

The whole thing smells a lot like private equity.

“They don’t know anything but are acting like they know everything.”

Several DOGE figures have experience doing this kind of thing before: Tom Krause, a Silicon Valley executive linked to the project, presided over a brutal round of private-equity backed cuts at Citrix, a cloud computing company. And while Musk and DOGE mostly aren’t directly representative of the industry that looted Americ, a lot of their tactics are deeply familiar to anyone whose workplace has been devoured by a private equity firm. Even the stated goals are the same: at their core, private equity firms buy supposedly failing businesses and promise to flip them for a profit. But many of the businesses they buy, from toy stores to hospitals to real estate companies, end up going bankrupt; some sources estimate that businesses that are part of a private equity portfolio are ten times as likely to file for bankruptcy protection as those who aren’t.

Having worked at Gizmodo Media Group when it was bought by the private equity firm Great Hill Partners, I recognize some of the dynamics and tactics now playing out across the federal workforce. To explain it all, I reached out to another GMG alum, Megan Greenwell, whose forthcoming book, Bad Company, explores how private equity has reshaped American industry. Greenwell and I talked about how DOGE tactics resemble those of private equity firms, and what federal workers and the American public can learn from how the stories of PE-owned companies have played out.

Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

This feeling right now, of things falling apart in weird ways, is very familiar to those of us who have had private equity buy our workplaces. What tends to happen when private equity comes in? Are there stages or a pattern?

It depends a lot from industry to industry. One early sign that feels very familiar to me in the federal government, is random people you have never seen before just start walking around your office and asking the dumbest questions possible. In most offices, they’re not like 17-to-20 year olds, like they seem to be in the federal government, but that feeling of “What are all these strangers doing? How come they don’t know anything but are acting like they know everything?” is a very common first step.

Another one is that things just tend to stop working. When we worked together at the former Gizmodo Media Group, they pretty quickly stopped quality assurance measures, like technical stuff to make sure that the website worked. So the website started breaking all the time. That also feels very familiar here. A lot of stuff is breaking because they’re really breaking it out of malice. But some stuff they’re like, ‘Oh shit, we probably shouldn’t have broken that one,’ right?

There is no systemic thinking. There is no larger plan. They’re just randomly punching buttons to find out what does what and then only realizing the ramifications once things break. So those are two very early ones. That’s day one stuff. Welcome, federal government employees.

What do workers at private equity-bought companies tend to experience?

Budget cuts are the biggest thing. The idea that someone like Elon Musk knows better than people who have worked in this world for decades and decades about what you should be spending money on and what you shouldn’t, that is so common. It’s very common to see severe budget cuts including serious, serious layoffs immediately. If there are not huge layoffs immediately, they’re probably coming later. The budget cuts that do go through are the types of things that are, again, going to break systems and make things work a lot less well.

A classic example is Toys R Us, which I write about in the book. They actually didn’t have that many layoffs for the first few years. They closed some underperforming stores, but it wasn’t a huge focus. But they didn’t have enough money to spend on upgrades, because they had taken out so many loans that all of the company’s earnings were going to debt payments. These things were actively making the company worse because they weren’t spending money on them.

For example, Toys R Us had had this vaunted money back warranty program which they replaced that with something much, much worse. Obviously customers are furious, and when customers are furious, they call the stores to complain. They don’t know how to reach the private equity executives in charge. The only people to complain to are these workers, so the workers’ satisfaction is going way down. The in-store experience was getting worse and worse and worse, which meant that they were selling less, which was ostensibly the goal of the company.

Budget cuts are sometimes necessary. But in a lot of cases, they really are just shooting you in the foot because they’re undermining your ability to do the basics of the job. Budget cutting that feels nonsensical and is not based in research and not based in what’s actually making you money is super common.

What have you learned from your research that could be helpful for folks going through this on a worker level?

Had I known what I know now, I would have quit working for Gizmodo Media Group on day one. So part of me is tempted to say, you just gotta quit. On the other hand, many people who work in the federal government are so mission-driven, right? I really loved my job, but it was not the only thing I could ever see myself doing—whereas a lot of career federal government employees, they’re really coming at it from a perspective of, ‘I have bought into this work at a deep level, and I never want to do anything else.’ For those kinds of people, it does feel kind of glib to say quit day one—and listen, as a citizen of this country, I would strongly prefer some reasonable people stuck around. It’s gonna suck a lot, but if you have it in you to fight, great! Please fight. Do what you can to undermine and obfuscate and allow the good work to keep going on.

One of the things I’ve really admired about several of the characters in my book is that they fought. I would not say in any of the primary cases they won—it’s not like they single-handedly took down their private equity company. These folks in the federal government are probably not going to single-handedly take down Elon Musk. But we’ve seen judges say, ‘No, actually you can’t do this,’ and that’s going to keep happening.

Some of these people might have legal protections as civil servants that we certainly didn’t have as bloggers.

Totally. And more investment too, right? We were small in the grand scheme of things. The federal government is not small, and so even individual stories tell a much larger tale and matter in a way that like Deadspin dying didn’t—as much as I loved them.

It didn’t have the same impact on the entire world like the EPA ceasing to function will.

Right. You know, one thing about private equity is they do really operate in the shadows. That is what they like. That is how they get away with so much. You can’t do that when you’re the federal government, as we’ve seen. There’s going to be a spotlight on absolutely everything. I think anybody who’s worked for a private equity-owned company would tell you if there had been a spotlight, a lot of things would have felt very different.

Why does this feel so familiar? Why does this feel so much like private equity?

One of the big things is being unable to tease out what is malice and what is just sheer incompetence. This woman I’m writing about at Toys R Us, she was a normal store worker. She was like, ‘OK, the only things you have to do to keep this store running are like X, Y, and Z. So why are you breaking X, Y and Z? It really makes you feel crazy. You feel like, ‘Am I an idiot? The things I know that work, they don’t actually work?’

That feels really familiar—these 19 year olds walking around ruining everything and you can’t exactly figure out why. Like, yes, of course they’re shutting off AIDS medications in Africa because they have determined those lives are not worthy or whatever.

But there are other things where it’s like, you can’t kill all of the things that affect all of your voters, right? Medicaid is really, really, really popular. In that case, it does feel like they’re breaking it because they’re too stupid not to rather than because they’re trying to alienate everybody in the country.

That feeling of what is up and what is down, and what is malice and what is incompetence, is super, super haunting to me.

What is the terminal stage of a private equity owned company?

Unfortunately, in a disproportionate number of the cases, the company does no longer exist but the private equity fund makes a ton of money. Hopefully that will not be true with the US government. Although, let’s see.

Let’s see!

It also just results in a lot of people having measurably worse lives, and that is clearly going to be an outcome here. There’s a character in my book whose private equity landlord evicted her purely out of spite, because they did not like the way she was speaking to them when they were being real assholes. There’s another story in my book about this rural hospital where services were stripped and you can’t get basic medical treatment—you’re looking at going 30 or 40 miles in any sort of emergency. Almost always, everything gets worse up to the point of shutting down.

Well, Megan, in my opinion, that shouldn’t be legal. What do you think?

Right. I don’t think it should be legal. With the federal government stuff, it seems like at least some of it certainly isn’t legal, and we just have to wait for the court system to catch up with the 19 year olds.

They’re very spry.

Yeah, they have endless energy, I guess, with all the Red Bulls.

Something like that.

You know, the reason it’s legal in private equity is because the industry has spent so much money in Washington making sure it’s so. Do you want to know the number of senators and Congress members that get no private equity money?

No.

It’s 12 percent. So 88 percent of people on the Hill in both parties took some private equity industry money in the last cycle. This is a pretty universal problem. I got some questions when Trump was first elected about how much worse is it gonna be now—and honestly I’m not sure it’s actually gonna be much worse. Everything else is, but I didn’t see a lot of prospect for more private equity regulation under a Kamala Harris administration either, frankly.

There are certainly attempts to make maybe not the entire industry illegal, but the worst parts of it illegal. Elizabeth Warren has valiantly proposed this Stop Wall Street Looting Act several times and it just never goes anywhere.

So yeah, that’s why it’s legal. Will it ever be illegal? I certainly hope so, but it is going to take a pretty dramatic change in who is representing us.

Bad Company is set to be released on June 10.

Continue Reading…

Elon Musk Keeps Boosting White Nationalists on X

In the three weeks since Donald Trump took office, Elon Musk has posted on X at the pace of an iPad-addicted child. During a roughly two-hour stretch on Friday morning, Musk tweeted more than 40 times—about once every three minutes—on X, the social media platform he bought for $44 billion in 2022.

When looked at as a whole Musk’s posts since Inauguration Day tell a clear story: The richest man in the world—who has now installed unqualified loyalists throughout the US government—is getting much of his information from far-right sources who present a world in which “Western Civilization” is in an existential struggle against Black and brown invaders. These views fit neatly within his work, too. As the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has put USAID into the “wood chipper” and supported blocking assistance to his native South Africa in defense of fellow whites.

To fully understand what Musk is seeing and sharing, it helps to focus on the accounts he has interacted with. Some of the people the billionaire is responding to—Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Vice President JD Vance, and Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán—are more or less household names for those who pay attention to politics in the United States.

Others are far-right trolls and anonymous posters that only the most nauseatingly online of Americans would ever know. They are the source of some of the most extreme information Musk is taking in and sharing with his more than 216 million followers.

This is a look at a few of the posters who Musk is sharing information from, and interacting with, on X and what they have written in the past.

A Racist and Anti-Semite “Impressed” by the Holocaust

On Monday morning, the anonymous account iamyesyouareno, which has more than 430,000 followers on X, called the Anti-Defamation League a “disgusting anti-white organization” for cataloging “The Racist Obsession with South African ‘White Genocide.'” Ten minutes later, Musk, who has been fixated on false claims about the plight of white South Africans, replied to iamyesyouareno. He wanted to know if the ADL still held this position on white South Africans.

The iamyesyouareno account’s attack against the ADL fits with its deep antisemitism. In August, the account responded to a post asking if “jews [will] ever be satisfied with not fully enslaving the world” by declaring, “They will not.” Another post from the account reads, “The Holocaust happened. I’m very impressed by the numbers though.”

It is hard to convey the racism of many posts from iamyesyouareno. On dozens of occasions, the account has captioned videos or images of Black people doing something bad, such as defecating in public, with some version of the conclusion: “There’s no fixing this” or “There’s no fixing this mentality.” Another regular bit is to describe something done by a Black person as evidence of them having a “Room temp IQ.” The poster has also written: “Black men did not abolish slavery, White people did. Be thankful.”

Musk recently shared a post from the account iamyesyouareno featuring a news article from December 2023 about how a Black man had reportedly been awarded rights to a vacant home that belonged to a white pensioner in the United Kingdom after squatting in it.

An Irish Anti-Immigrant Troll

Musk recently replied to two videos posted by Michael O’Keeffe, an anti-immigrant troll whose bio on X site states, “Banned by Twitter regime. Restored by Elon and X.” In one of the videos, which Musk shared with the caption “Wow,” an Irish woman complained about being surrounded by immigrants and said that she rarely leaves home due to fears of being attacked by foreigners.

Musk responded with exclamation points to a post by O’Keeffe calling on “all European men to stand together and remember what our ancestors fought for.” (The video in O’Keeffe’s post was about the Crusades.)

!!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 30, 2025

Some of the posts from O’Keefe last week that Musk did not share claimed: “Ireland fought the British for 800 years just to give the country away to Islam”; “Mass immigration from the 3rd world is making Ireland unrecognisable”; and “Dublin is about to get 10 new migrant plantations!”

An Anonymous Poster Obsessed With Race and IQ

Musk has replied to at least two posts this month from an X user who goes by Crémieux. The account has more than 200,000 followers and is known for writing about purported genetic differences between racial groups. A typical post from the account claims that Black NFL players have lower IQs than white NFL players; other posts strongly imply that Black people are genetically inferior to whites. As my former colleague Ali Breland noted in The Atlantic, Crémieux has been praised on the far-right for tracing “the genetic pathways of crime” and “explaining why poverty is not a good causal explanation.” Referring to Medicare payments, Musk wrote in response to Crémieux on Wednesday that “this is where the big money fraud is happening.”

The Man Who Helped Lies About Haitians in Springfield Go Viral

On Wednesday, Musk replied “Yes” when the anonymous account named Captive Dreamer asked: “So USAID has been propping up the global left via US taxpayer dollars? Even in Poland?” Captive Dreamer, who has said his past accounts were banned numerous times for violating Twitter’s terms of use, is perhaps best known for digging up anything he could find to support the lie that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets.

Other posts from him about Black people aren’t much different. One satirical example denigrating Black fathers reads: “my black father helped me learn a lot about the legal system, correctional visits and how to navigate child support. Invaluable lessons.” He has also written positively on multiple occasions about “HBD,” an abbreviation for “human biodiversity,” a moniker used by racists who focus on alleged genetic differences across populations.

Captive Dreamer also appeared on a podcast with Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP, whose ideology the writer John Ganz has described as “perhaps not even fascism, but Nazism.” On the podcast, Captive Dreamer told BAP that he’d spent formative years of his life in places like Springfield and that, as a result, attacking the Haitians there was personal for him.

Far-Right Danish, Dutch, German, and Swedish Posters

Musk wrote earlier in February that the AfD, a hard-right German political party whose leaders have a history of using Nazi slogans and downplaying the Holocaust, is the country’s “only hope.” Musk was responding to Naomi Seibt, an X user with roughly 400,000 followers who frequently promotes AfD politicians.

On Thursday, Seibt shared a chart that showed people from Arab nations commit crimes at far higher rates than people of European descent. “Wow,” Musk replied. The billionaire has also been sharing content from far-right white posters from the Netherlands and Sweden.

As I previously reported, Musk has also been attacking land reform efforts in South Africa. He endorsed a post calling for “more immigration of White South Africans” on the grounds that they are “one of the few population groups that are fiscally positive when immigrating to Europe.” (The Danish man Musk was responding to in the middle of the night has written that “Non-Western immigration to Northern European countries is morally indefensible.”)

Yes https://t.co/9JCkwqXdav

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2025

A Western Chauvinist Troll

Musk has frequently shared posts from an account called Inevitable West with an X bio that calls on people to “Follow [it] to uphold the legacy of the West!” Aside from its obvious biases, the account’s posts are notably dumb, even by the standards of right-wing engagement farming. One of the posts Musk shared this week claimed that the “legacy media” had been “silent” about the mass shooting in Sweden that left at least 10 people dead. The shooting was covered by essentially every major news outlet.

The BBC has reported that the Inevitable West account, which now has more than 200,000 followers, did not exist until late last year. The only thing the account owner would tell the BBC about their identity was that they were “Gen Z” and “not Russian.”

A DOGE staffer

On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Marko Elez, a 25-year-old DOGE staffer, had resigned after the paper linked him to racist posts from an anonymous account. “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” the account posted in July. “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” it added in September. “Normalize Indian hate.”

On Friday morning, Musk launched a survey on X asking whether the DOGE staffer who made “inappropriate statements via a now-deleted pseudonym” should be reinstated. Vice President JD Vance responded on X that he didn’t think “stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.” In reality, Elez was well into his twenties when he made those statements.

Nevertheless, Vance, who is married to the daughter of Indian immigrants, added, “I say bring him back.” Later on Friday, Musk responded to Vance by declaring Elez would indeed be “brought back.”

Continue Reading…

“A Real Estate Development for the Future”: Trump Doubles Down on Plan to Take Over Gaza

President Donald Trump is doubling down—in strikingly transactional and inhumane terms—on his stated plan to take over Gaza, force out Palestinians, and block them from returning after the devastating war with Israel.

In a new clip previewing a forthcoming interview with Fox News host Bret Baier, Trump described his widely panned plan to “own” and develop the Gaza Strip while forcibly relocating two million Palestinians to Egypt or Jordan.

“I would own this,” he said. “Think of it as a real estate development for the future. It would be a beautiful piece of land, no big money spent.”

Trump claimed that the eventual goal would be to build “safe communities”—but did not specify who they would be for, where they would be located, or if Palestinians would be welcome there.

“We’ll build beautiful communities for the 1.9 million people. We’ll build beautiful communities, safe communities. Could be five, six. Could be two. But we’ll build safe communities—a little bit away from where they are, where all of this danger is,” Trump told Baier, without offering further specifics.

“Would the Palestinians have the right to return?” Baier interrupted to ask.

BAIER: Would the Palestinians have the right to return to Gaza?

TRUMP: No, they wouldn't pic.twitter.com/kL8ZhWXMPa

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 10, 2025

“No, they wouldn’t,” Trump replied bluntly, “because they’re going to have much better—in other words, I’m talking about building a permanent place for them. Because if they have to return now, it’ll be years before you could have a—it’s not habitable. It would be years before it could happen. I’m talking about starting to build. I think I could make a deal with Jordan, I think I could make a deal with Egypt—we give them billions and billions of dollars a year.”

Thousands of displaced Palestinians began returning to northern Gaza last month.Naaman Omar/APA/ZUMA

Trump made similar comments on Air Force One on Sunday, en route to the Super Bowl in New Orleans: “I’m committed to buying and owning Gaza,” he said. “The place is a demolition site. The remainder will be demolished…we’ll make it into a very good site for future development by somebody. We’ll let other countries develop parts of it, it’ll be beautiful. People can come from all over the world and live there. But we’re going to take care of the Palestinians,” he claimed, without elaborating on where they would live. He went on to passively describe Gaza as “the most dangerous site anywhere in the world to live in,” without acknowledging Israel’s role in the war—prompted by the Oct. 7, 2o23 Hamas attack that killed approximately 1,200 Israelis and took 250 hostages—that has reportedly killed more than 62,000 Palestinians, including more than 17,000 children, as my colleague Noah Lanard pointed out last week.

President Trump committed to “buying and owning Gaza” in Air Force One comments#trump #gaza #military pic.twitter.com/2WiC0660QL

— Military Times (@MilitaryTimes) February 10, 2025

The latest comments amount to Trump’s doubling down on a plan that the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres described as “ethnic cleansing” after Trump first floated it last week at a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to the White House. Trump’s comments then—that the US would “take over” the Gaza Strip and turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East”—caused such alarm that administration officials quickly appeared to walk them back. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a subsequent press briefing: “The president has not committed to putting boots on the ground in Gaza” and that the US wouldn’t pay for the rebuilding of Gaza. Eventually, she conceded that Trump’s proposal was “an out-of-the-box idea.”

In northern Gaza, returning Palestinian encountered scenes of rubble and destruction.Habboub Ramez/Abaca/Zuma

Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested that if Palestinians were relocated, it would be temporary—but Trump’s latest comments, to Baier, suggest he envisions the Palestinians’ potential expulsion from the land as permanent. (While a reporter asked at last week’s press conference whether or not Trump would support Palestinians returning, he did not answer directly.) Several congressional Republicans, including Trump allies, also raised concerns about the feasibility of the plan—which Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, and Jordan have all rejected.

The White House did not immediately respond to questions Monday seeking clarification.

The doubling down on such a controversial plan makes clear that, as Noah wrote last week:

Trump sees the world through the lens of real estate deals, not morality or international law. That was obvious in the press conference. “We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal,” he explained about his Gaza proposal. “And I don’t want to be cute. I don’t want to be a wise guy. But the riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so—this could be so magnificent.” His rhetoric was in line with that of his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has gushed about how Gaza’s “waterfront property could be very valuable.”

While Trump ponders violating international law, thousands of internally displaced Palestinians have been returning to northern Gaza. Mohammed al-Faran, 40, told the Washington Post last month that he and his wife, three kids, mother, and nephew walked seven hours in a draining journey from Deir al-Balah to Gaza City.

The scene he returned to, he told the newspaper, was “devastating — worse than I had imagined.” Even so, “we were determined to return from the very first day,” al-Farhan said, “unsure of what the future holds.”

Continue Reading…

Canada’s Trump Card in a Tariff War: Turning Off the Oil Taps

This story was originally published b_y the Canada’s National Observer a_nd is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

US tariffs on Canada are on hold for at least 30 days, but the threat of economic war is a Damoclean sword that continues to dangle over Canadians.

Canadian officials are attempting to convince the White House to abandon its tariff threat, but a bruising trade war is still on the table and experts say Ottawa must thoughtfully consider its options. Restricting or taxing oil and gas exports into the United States is a major point of leverage Canada could use that its federal officials have not ruled out, despite calls to do so from the oilpatch and Alberta government.

Using fossil fuels as leverage could inflict pressure on the American economy, though it’s controversial—and some say could backfire.

The US needs Canada’s oil because their refineries aren’t tooled to refine anything else, said Stuart Trew, trade researcher with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in an interview with Canada’s National Observer. “It’s an absolute dependency at this point, and we should be leveraging that.”

“The goal, first and foremost, is financial pressure on these importing companies, which will put financial pressure on the entire economy and Trump administration.”

Unlike tariffs, which tax imports, an export tax is paid to the government by the company that wants to export its goods. By putting export taxes on oil exports, the Canadian government could increase its revenue and make it more expensive for US refineries to purchase Canadian crude.

The argument for an export tax is that US refineries, particularly in the Midwest, have few other options. If refineries could purchase heavy crude from elsewhere, an export tax would only incentivize them to do so—but most can’t. Canadian crude makes up virtually 100 percent of Midwest oil imports, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Underscoring the point, in August the EIA noted Canadian oil imports have become increasingly important to US refineries across the country. “In 2023, 60 percent of US crude oil imports originated in Canada, up from 33 percent in 2013,” the agency found.

Because the Americans are a captive consumer for Canadian crude, one option for Canada in a trade war would be to put export taxes on oil and gas to ratchet the price for US refineries to the point where it’s no longer profitable. In that scenario, the US would be staring down the barrel of fuel shortages or companies forced to operate at a loss, creating enormous economic pressure on President Trump.

Lisa Young, a political science professor with the University of Calgary, said she understands the appeal of an export tax given it’s quick and impactful, but warned there could be significant blowback. For her, the two issues are how Americans would respond, and whether Canadian national unity could withstand the stress.

Young said Canada’s approach to the tariff threat to date has involved pointing out to Americans—whether through official channels like government officials meeting their counterparts in Washington or talking to US media to speak more directly to the public—that tariffs are damaging to US consumers as well.

“It’s one thing to be able to point to something really immediate like an increase in the price of gas in the Midwest to say ‘this is a consequence of a decision the American government made, and Canada has nothing to do with this,’” she said. “But if it’s an export tax, then I worry it feeds into the notion that Canada is trying to take advantage of Americans…and you might see a rallying of American public opinion against Canada, in the way that Canadian public opinion has rallied against the United States over the past week.”

The US might very well retaliate by ramping up tariffs in response, as Trump has threatened. Another potential risk of export taxes is that Canada (particularly, Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick) also reimport crude oil from the United States to refine, potentially pushing up the cost for Canadian consumers.

“Canada would need some kind of plan for keeping costs down in Canada for this kind of move,” Trew said.

Canadian labor leaders support increasing pressure on the United States if a trade war breaks out. The Canadian Labour Congress said in a statement the US must feel immediate consequences for targeting the Canadian economy and called for a “full-scale” response including dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs, support for impacted workers, and cutting the US off from Canadian resources including electricity, lumber, critical minerals, oil, and gas.

Similarly, Lana Payne, national president of Unifor, the country’s largest private sector union, and a member of the Prime Minister’s Council on Canada-US relations, called Trump’s tariff announcement a “turning point for our country.”

Not everyone favors the use of fossil fuel exports as leverage. Following the pause on tariff implementation, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who previously warned of a national unity crisis if the federal government restricted oil and gas exports, said she was once again calling on federal officials and other premiers to “de-escalate rhetoric, abandon any non-tariff measures for the time being, and turn our efforts entirely to advocacy and good-faith negotiation.”

Her position was echoed by the Pathways Alliance, whose member companies (Suncor Energy, Canadian Natural Resources, Cenovus Energy, Imperial Oil, MEG Energy and ConocoPhillips Canada) represent 95 percent of oil sands production. In a statement ahead of expected tariffs, the alliance’s president Kendall Dilling urged the federal government to “avoid worsening the situation by restricting energy trade or imposing export tariffs on Canadian energy to the US.”

In Alberta there is a sense of suspicion and frustration at the federal government built over many years that could be exacerbated if Ottawa uses oil and gas as leverage, Young said.

Using oil “to win this fight, to protect Ontario manufacturing, is going to press so many buttons in Alberta and parts of Western Canada around national unity that it’s going to spark something that looks like a crisis at a time when unity is a strategic advantage,” she said.

Asa McKercher, research chair in Canada-US relations at St. Francis Xavier University, told Canada’s National Observer that Ottawa would likely consider an export tax on oil if not for the domestic political struggle.

“The nastiness of Danielle Smith when it comes to asserting Alberta independence within the federation is the thing preventing that lever from being pulled,” he said. “But if the tariffs go through, and there’s no negotiation, or negotiations go nowhere, or Trump says the only thing I’ll accept is if you become the 51st state, pulling that lever will be more and more attractive to a Liberal government.”

McKercher said the language used by Trump in his tariff directive “gives the game away.” Essentially, by proposing 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods, except energy which was set at 10 per cent, Trump is revealing the country’s dependency on cheap Canadian energy and a concern about prices rising too high for Americans.

“Oil is the trump card, to use a terrible term,” he said.

This week the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) published a list of a dozen strong responses Canada could adopt, including export taxes on energy products of at least 15 per cent, taking over US-owned assets, implementing an aggressive green industrial strategy, and targeting US oligarchs and Trump allies—like blocking, freezing, or punitively taxing Elon Musk-owned companies including X, Starlink, and Tesla.

President Trump has given a plethora of reasons for the tariffs, ranging from fentanyl and immigrants crossing the border to a desire to annex Canada to a lowering of the trade deficit. Regardless of what reasons Trump publicly uses to threaten economic war, McKercher said it’s clear the real reason is to disrupt the country’s major trading partners to the US’s economic advantage. This is leading to a paradigm shift in the relationship between the two countries, he said.

“The fentanyl issue is just a smokescreen for what is a long term goal of reshoring American jobs and reshoring American investment, and stirring up the shitstorm of uncertainty for investors, ” McKercher said.

If Trump’s goal is indeed to bring investment back to the US by deterring investment in Canada by making cross-border trade more expensive using tariffs, or simply sowing uncertainty for investors, Canadians will be in for a rough economic ride with no clear short term path out, McKercher said. That’s because if Trump wants to bring industries back to the United States, Canadian industries could be hit hard, and there is no incentive on either side to give in during negotiations.

“I think we should be looking seriously at decoupling as much as possible to lessen our susceptibility to future grunts by the beast,” he said. “Canadian governments have talked a lot about trade diversification, have talked a lot about internal trade barriers, and I think we’re literally staring down the barrel of economic ruin, so I think this is a good time to be doing that and thinking about those things.”

For McKercher, delaying tariffs for a month, like both Canada and Mexico have now secured, doesn’t achieve much in the grand scheme of things because the tariff threat remains.

Monday afternoon, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada would commit $1.5 billion ($200 million more than what he announced in December) for border security to deal with fentanyl and illegal border crossings. McKercher characterized it as a “largely symbolic gesture to give Trump an off-ramp,” given most of the measures were ones Canada had already announced.

“I’d like to think that the tough Canadian response gave Trump pause,” he said. “In his tariff announcement Trump stated that he would increase the tariffs if Canada retaliated and instead he put this pause in place. So, he blinked.”

Continue Reading…

Polls Keep Showing Americans Want Elon Musk and DOGE Out of Government

Yet more evidence shows Elon Musk and his cronies at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are unpopular with many Americans.

Nearly half of people who responded to a new CBS/YouGov poll out today said they want Musk to have less influence over government spending and operations, including nearly a third who think they should have none at all. The poll found that 18 percent of respondents said that Musk and his DOGE acolytes should have “not much” influence on government operations and spending, while 31 percent said they should have none at all. Predictably, the support differed along partisan lines: Nearly three-quarters of Republicans surveyed said Musk and DOGE should have “a lot” or “some” influence, whereas more than two-thirds of Democrats said they should have “not much” or “none.”

This comes as the latest bit of mounting evidence showing many Americans don’t want Musk running the government: Just this week, a poll from the Economist/YouGov also showed that 51 percent of Americans believe Musk has a lot of influence in the government, while only 13 percent want him to have that much influence; 46 percent, on the other hand, don’t want him to have any influence. Another poll released this week from progressive advocacy groups Groundwork Collaborative and Public Citizen in partnership with Hart Research found 54 percent of voters have an unfavorable opinion of him, with a majority also saying he has too much influence and involvement in the government and that they have less favorable opinions after learning about the lack of oversight regulating potential conflicts of interest with his companies as well as the ability of DOGE to access unclassified information.

Last month, a Quinnipiac University poll found 53 percent of respondents disapprove of Musk’s prominent role in the Trump administration, and another January poll, from the Associated Press-National Opinion Research Center, found that a majority of Americans don’t want Trump relying on billionaires or family members for policy advice and have an unfavorable opinion of Musk.

All in all, this is not surprising, given that, as Mother Jones editor-in-chief Clara Jeffery wrote earlier this week, nobody voted for Musk, an unelected tech billionaire.The latest data offers a clear rebuke to the hurricane of chaos that Musk and his cronies at DOGE and across the federal government have unleashed since President Trump’s inauguration.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, that chaos has included trying to pay federal workers to quit their jobs; attempting to gain access to US Treasury data; threatening to shutter USAID, a federal agency tasked with supporting critical humanitarian and development work around the world; taking over the Education Department, which Musk claimed on X the other day “doesn’t exist”; and threatening reporters who report critically on DOGE. (And given that the department is reportedly staffed by Gen Z fanboys and former staffers of Musk—one of whom, Marko Elez, resigned on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal unearthed openly racist posts on an account linked to him, before Musk promptly rehired him the next day—there has been plenty to cover.)

The CBS/YouGov poll released Sunday showed other Trump policies that are also unpopular: 52 percent of respondents said they oppose building large detention centers to house people awaiting decisions on whether or not they’ll be deported; only 13 percent said the US trying to take over Gaza, as Trump proposed this week, would be a good idea (47 percent called it a bad idea, and 40 percent said they’re unsure); 66 percent said Trump is not focused enough on lowering prices; and large majorities said they oppose new US tariffs on goods from Mexico, Europe, and Canada (economists have said those tariffs will likely raise prices for American consumers).

But in a news release from the White House Sunday, responses to those data points were invisible. “Americans Are Loving the New Golden Age,” the press release claimed, touting Trump’s 53 percent approval rating, the 70 percent of poll respondents who said Trump is doing what he promised on the campaign trail, and the majority approval for his mass deportation plan and his handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict. (Never mind that those assertions would seem to be in conflict with some of the other findings mentioned above—such as the limited support for his floated plan to take over Gaza.)

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt shared the headline from CBS on X: “Trump has positive approval amid ‘energetic’ opening weeks; seen as doing what he promised,” it read. Leavitt’s enthusiastic promotion of it was curious given that, just a few days ago, her boss said in a post on Truth Social that CBS should “lose its license” over a 60 Minutes interview the network did with former Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. (Trump filed a lawsuit against the network, alleging that the 60 Minutes interview was deceptively edited to make Harris look better; CBS denies those allegations and this week released the raw footage and transcript of the entire interview, which it also provided to the Federal Communications Commission upon request.)

The White House’s promotion of the latest CBS poll—and its refusal to seriously engage with public criticisms of Musk, along with other points of contention—offers a clear example of its hypocrisy regarding its attacks on journalism and truth: What Trump’s acolytes see as favorable to him get labeled as legitimate, whereas anything more critical gets branded “fake news”—or simply ignored.

When it comes to Musk, they’ve continued to defend him—and showed how unseriously they seem to be taking his position in the highest levels of government. At a press briefing this week, Leavitt said that Trump was clear on the campaign trail about the role Musk would play in his administration. Separately, when a CNN reporter asked Leavitt what kind of security clearance Musk has, if he passed a background check, or if the DOGE team members raiding the Treasury Department or USAID had security clearances, she said she didn’t know and would have to check. The White House does not appear to have clarified those points yet.

But if Democrats continue attacking Musk and the role of oligarchy in the Trump administration, as they did this week, the White House may have no choice but to confront the discontent around Musk and DOGE head-on.

Correction, Feb. 9: This story originally misstated the proportion of Democrats in the CBS poll who said Musk and DOGE should have not much or no influence in government.

Continue Reading…

Report: Elon’s Cybertrucks Are Deadlier Than Infamous Ford Pintos

Elon Musk’s Cybertrucks may look indestructible: hulking blocks of aluminum and steel that appear to be better suited for a space station than a parking spot on a narrow city street. But a new report suggests that they’re actually deadlier than one of the most infamous—and flawed—American cars ever made: the Ford Pinto.

An analysis published Thursday by the auto news website FuelArc found that, in their one year of existence, the approximately 34,000 Cybertrucks on the roads had five fire fatalities, giving them a fatality rate of 14.5 per 100,000 units. That’s 17 times the fatality rate of the Ford Pintos, whose famously flawed gas tank design on the car’s rear end led to 27 reported fire fatalities in its nine years on the road, resulting in a fatality rate of 0.85 per 100,000 units, according to FuelArc.

The authors of the Cybertruck analysis openly acknowledge caveats in their methodology. First off, Tesla—the car’s manufacturer and one of Musk’s companies—has not confirmed how many Cybertrucks it has sold. FuelArc puts its best guess at 34,438, based on “a variety of means, including piecing together public reporting.” Secondly, the five Cybertruck fatalities include the one that occurred in Las Vegas last month outside Trump International Hotel, when an Army soldier fatally shot himself before the car, packed with fireworks, exploded. Musk claimed in a post on X that the explosion was “unrelated to the vehicle itself.” Thus, the FuelArc analysis acknowledges that this fatality is “controversial” since the driver’s cause of death was reportedly a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and the burns occurred after his death.

Officials investigated the Tesla Cybertruck explosion outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas last month.Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department/ZUMA

The other Cybertruck fatalities included in the analysis were the ones that took place in December in Piedmont, California, which killed three college students and left one injured, and in Texas last August, which reportedly—at least initially—left the victim unidentifiable due to severe burns. (The Texas Department of Public Safety did not immediately respond to an email Sunday seeking updated information on the victim’s identity.) The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) previously said it was seeking information from Tesla in both incidents; a spokesperson for the agency did not immediately respond to questions on Sunday.

A spokesperson for Tesla also did not immediately respond to questions.

The point of comparison in the analysis, though—the Ford Pinto fatalities—is a strong, and telling, one. In a classic Mother Jones cover story from 1977, reporter Mark Dowie spent six months investigating the deadly Ford Pintos and found that the company rushed to create and distribute the cars to beat the competition—despite the fact that testing showed that the Pinto was unsafe as designed, due to the flawed placement of the gas tank:

Mother Jones has studied hundreds of reports and documents on rear-end collisions involving Pintos. These reports conclusively reveal that if you ran into that Pinto you were following at over 30 miles per hour, the rear end of the car would buckle like an accordion, right up to the back seat. The tube leading to the gas-tank cap would be ripped away from the tank itself, and gas would immediately begin sloshing onto the road around the car. The buckled gas tank would be jammed up against the differential housing (that big bulge in the middle of your rear axle), which contains four sharp, protruding bolts likely to gash holes in the tank and spill still more gas. Now all you need is a spark from a cigarette, ignition, or scraping metal, and both cars would be engulfed in flames. If you gave that Pinto a really good whack—say, at 40 mph—chances are excellent that its doors would jam and you would have to stand by and watch its trapped passengers burn to death.

This scenario is no news to Ford. Internal company documents in our possession show that Ford has crash-tested the Pinto at a top-secret site more than 40 times and that every test made at over 25 mph without special structural alteration of the car has resulted in a ruptured fuel tank. Despite this, Ford officials denied under oath having crash-tested the Pinto.

That Mother Jones report prompted the NHTSA to undertake an investigation. Ford recalled more than 1.5 million of the cars the following year, and stopped producing the cars entirely by 1980. The company was also accused of reckless homicide over the safety concerns, but a jury acquitted them.

Still, all in all, it’s not a favorable comparison for the Cybertruck.

There are other reasons, beyond the latest analysis, to be skeptical of the car’s safety, though: It has reportedly not been crash-tested by the NHTSA or the nonprofit Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, nor has Tesla released its own safety data on the Cybertruck. Experts have also said its sharp stainless steel design could hurt pedestrians and cyclists and increase the potential for damaging other cars on the road.

Musk bragged around the time of its release that it would “be much safer per mile than other trucks.” But his claims of superiority were quickly disproven, given that Tesla recalled the truck seven times last year alone—an astonishingly high amount—including once over a trapped accelerator pedal that could increase the risk of a crash, estimated to affect more than 3,800 units, according to the NHTSA.

Correction, Feb. 9: An earlier version of this story mistakenly characterized the fatality rate of Cybertrucks as a percentage rather than as a rate per 100,000 units.

Continue Reading…

These States Won’t Let Utilities Charge Customers for Their Lobbying and Marketing

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

People across the US receiving rising utility bills aren’t just paying for the costs of gas and electricity: They could also be paying for corporate lobbying and advertising.

Electric and gas utilities routinely charge ratepayers for costs related to political advocacy, ads to burnish their brand, and even luxury perks for executives and employees, according to a recent report by the utility watchdog group Energy and Policy Institute (EPI). Such expenses add up to millions of dollars paid by customers toward utilities’ efforts to raise prices and stall climate progress. While charging customers for lobbying is banned in federal and state laws, consumer advocates say that existing policies are nowhere near rigorous enough to hold utilities accountable.

In some states, that’s starting to change. In 2023, Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine passed the first comprehensive laws to prevent utilities from charging customers for lobbying, advertising, and other political influence activities. Customers in those states have already saved hundreds of thousands of dollars after regulators began enforcing the laws last year.

Consumer advocates say that as the impacts of these policies become clearer—and as utility bills continue to hike—more laws will be on the way. Last year, eight states introduced bills to rein in utility cost recovery. Last month, five more states followed suit, according to EPI. “The momentum behind utility accountability legislation continues to grow,” said Karlee Weinmann, a researcher at EPI and co-author of the group’s latest report. “As we put numbers on the savings generated by these bills, we’re going to hear more and more ratepayers asking, ‘How do I get this done in my state?’”

DTE Energy’s attempt to charge ratepayers for private jet trips was “downright insulting to customers.”

The laws in Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine broadened and clarified the range of political activities utilities are banned from charging to ratepayers compared to existing federal and state rules. Costs that utilities are prohibited from passing on to customers in these states include membership dues to trade associations that engage in lobbying, donations to political advocacy groups, and public relations campaigns.

The three states’ laws also introduced limits or bans on invoicing customers for fees for consultants or lawyers hired to argue for rate increases, and required utilities to provide detailed annual reports on political spending to ensure that shareholders—rather than consumers—foot the bill.

It’s still too early to assess the full impact of these laws since they apply primarily during rate cases, proceedings where utilities seek approval from regulators to adjust their prices. As part of the process, utilities tally up their investments and expenses, and state officials decide which costs can be reasonably passed on to the utility’s customers. Only a few rate cases have taken place since the laws took effect, and Maine just approved rules this week on how to implement its law. But judging from recent proceedings in Colorado and Connecticut, “we’re seeing very, very positive signs” in terms of what kinds of savings utility customers can expect from these laws, said Itai Vardi, co-author of the EPI report.

In Colorado, state regulators rejected more than $775,000 in lobbying fees, trade association dues, and investor relations costs sought by the utility Xcel Energy in a gas rate case last year, noting that those expenses are forbidden under the state’s utility accountability law. Total savings could end up even higher: Commissioners also ordered Xcel Energy to resubmit lobbying disclosures and remove all investor relations costs from its rates.

In Connecticut, state officials nixed $555,000 in industry dues, travel and meal expenses, and investor relations costs that the utility Avangrid attempted to stick customers with during a gas rate case last year, according to EPI’s review of rate case filings. Regulators also cited the new utility accountability law for their reasoning.

Early enforcement in these states proves how effective these guardrails are. It’s also a troubling sign that utilities repeatedly attempt to recover lobbying and political costs even in states where it’s illegal, said Weinmann. “When we see these savings, we’re also seeing the degree to which expenses that are not associated with the provision of utility service and perhaps not beneficial to customers are included in rates.”

In every state in the US, the regulators who hear rate cases—known as public service commissions or public utility commissions—are supposed to keep inappropriate charges out of prices. Without rigorous legislation, they’re not always successful: The burden falls on commissioners and consumer advocacy groups to comb through thousands of pages submitted by utilities for rate proposals and pick out and dispute charges. But some utility requests are too egregious to make it past public utility commissions, even in the absence of comprehensive ratepayer protection laws.

In Virginia, state regulators have flagged and removed millions of dollars in lobbying charges by Dominion Energy in rate cases in 2021 and 2023. In California, an investigation by state regulators found that the utility SoCalGas improperly charged customers for lobbying to promote the use of natural gas. And in a particularly flagrant example, subsidiaries of the Ohio-based electric utility FirstEnergy agreed to refund tens of millions of dollars to customers across multiple states after charging them for lobbying costs and expenses related to FirstEnergy’s bribery of Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder between 2017 and 2020.

“If we don’t have transparency, we can’t know to what extent ratepayers are being ripped off.”

Utilities are also spending vast sums on advertising to boost their company image. According to the EPI report, 15 of the largest electric utilities in the US spent a combined $1.1 billion on brand advertising between 2014 and 2023. It’s unclear if any of those expenses were passed on to customers, but some utilities have made attempts to do so: Last year, Chesapeake Utilities in Maryland asked regulators for permission to charge ratepayers for its “Natural Gas Does More” campaign, which used puppies and other cuddly images to promote the fossil fuel. Maryland state officials deemed the request inappropriate and not in the public interest.

Utilities have even tried to pass on the costs of lavish corporate perks like private jets. In a rate case last year, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel called a request by Detroit-based utility DTE Energy to charge ratepayers for private jet trips “downright insulting to customers.” Michigan regulators later refused the request. In Indiana, Duke Energy Indiana admitted that it had charged consumers more than $5 million between 2021 and 2023 in private jet costs, according to testimony filed last year by the consumer advocacy group Citizens Action Coalition. Commissioners in Indiana recently denied another request from Duke Energy Indiana to pass on $1.9 million in private aircraft expenses to customers.

National utility trade associations strongly disputed the EPI report’s findings and emphasized their commitment to reducing emissions and providing affordable energy. “The natural gas industry has long committed to collaboration with policymakers and regulators to help achieve our nation’s ambitious climate and energy goals,” said Karen Harbert, president and CEO of the American Gas Association, which represents gas utilities.

A spokesperson for Edison Electric Institute, a trade organization for investor-owned electric utilities, argued there’s no need for more state-level ratepayer protection laws. “Electric companies already are subject to strict federal and state laws that ensure lobbying activities are always funded by shareholders and not customers,” said spokesperson Brian Reil. “In instances of inadvertent expenses being approved, mechanisms already exist for state commissions to ensure that accounting changes are made, and, if needed, customer refunds granted.”

But in the absence of laws like the ones in Colorado, Connecticut, and Maine, it’s impossible to know exactly how much utilities are improperly charging customers, said Adria Tinnin, director of race equity and legislative policy at The Utility Reform Network, a consumer advocacy group in California. Under existing California rules, utilities can classify spending in even prohibited categories like promotional advertising or lobbying in vague or misleading ways, Tinnin said.

Meanwhile, during rate cases, utility regulators and advocates are often working with limited information, because “utilities do not provide any information that they’re not legally required to,” said Tinnin. “If we don’t have transparency, we can’t know to what extent ratepayers are being ripped off.”

More and more lawmakers are catching on to the issue. In January, legislators in Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Utah introduced bills to prevent utilities from recovering costs for lobbying and other political activities. In California, Tinnin’s group is partnering with other advocacy organizations to develop language for a similar bill to be introduced later this year. A previous utility accountability bill introduced last year in the state failed to move out of committee.

Consumer advocates say the laws could help address a growing energy affordability crisis as households struggle with mounting prices. Household utility bill debt has risen 8.4 percent since December 2023, according to one estimate, while power shutoffs for nonpayment have soared across the country. President Donald Trump’s threat to introduce tariffs on fossil fuels from Canada will likely raise energy prices even more while his other tariffs will make all kinds of products more expensive.

“It all adds up,” said Weinmann. “At a time when we’re seeing folks across the country struggling with rising cost of living and higher utility bills, the impact of any bill savings is significant.”

Continue Reading…

Trump Finally Found His Kind of Refugee

You may remember, in the flurry of Inauguration Day executive orders, that President Donald Trump suspended the US Refugee Admissions Program, which in fiscal year 2024 admitted about 100,000 refugees—the most in decades. The decision was one that Trump had teased for months, and it hearkened back to his first term, when his restrictive policies led to a sharp decline in the number of refugees admitted to the United States.

But Trump’s executive order did leave the door open for future admissions “on a case-by-case basis…so long as they determine that the entry of such aliens as refugees is in the national interest and does not pose a threat to the security or welfare of the United States.”

On Friday, we found out one group that might qualify for this special treatment: South Africa’s white Afrikaners.

In a new executive order, Trump cited a recent South African law that he claimed allows its Black-led government “to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation” as reason to cut off foreign aid to South Africa and “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.”

Trump and his favorite “special government employee,” the South African-born billionaire Elon Musk, have long used their bully pulpit to complain of what they see as the persecution of white South Africans—and have found a sympathetic audience among some of their most extreme followers. As my colleague Noah Lanard wrote earlier this week:

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 white people 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.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, Trump and Musk’s accounts don’t quite jibe with what people are experiencing in South Africa. The South African government repeatedly has denied that land has been confiscated, arguing that the law targets parcels that are not serving the public interest or not being used. Here’s more from Noah:

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 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.
…

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.

To be clear, then: Trump and Musk are prioritizing not-really-persecuted Afrikaners—Afrikaners!—over potential refugees from any number of dangerous situation around the world, including the more than 10,000 Afghan allies fleeing the Taliban who were already approved to relocate to the United States.

Meanwhile, it remains to be seen how many Afrikaners would actually take Trump up on his offer. On Saturday, the chief executive of the Afrikaner trade union Solidarity, which represents about 2 million people, told the Associated Press: “Our members work here, and want to stay here, and they are going to stay here. We are committed to build a future here. We are not going anywhere.”

Continue Reading…

A Federal Judge Blocked DOGE’s Access to Treasury Systems—for Now

A federal judge on Saturday temporarily blocked Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from looking at the Treasury Department’s payment and data systems, citing a risk of “irreparable harm” because the systems contain some of the federal government’s most sensitive information, including bank account details.

In an emergency order, US District Judge Paul Engelmayer instructed Musk and his team to “destroy any and all copies of material” downloaded from the Treasury systems after the Trump administration gave them access last weekend. Musk was not elected, and DOGE is now staffed by many young male software engineers; the judge said they could put the Treasury data at risk of hacking and leaks.

“President Trump does not have the power to give away Americans’ private information to anyone he chooses, and he cannot cut federal payments approved by Congress,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Engelmayer’s order came after New York Attorney General Letitia James and 18 other attorneys general sued the Trump administration on Friday. They argued President DonaldTrump violated the Constitution and “failed to faithfully execute the laws enacted by Congress” when he gave Musk’s team “virtually unfettered access” to the Treasury data and payment systems, which are used to disburse Social Security benefits, veterans’ benefits, and federal employee wages—which means they contain personal information for millions of Americans.

The “world’s richest man has been stopped from stealing your data,” New Jersey’s attorney general, Matthew Platkin, said in a social media post Saturday. New York’s James added in a statement that “President Trump does not have the power to give away Americans’ private information to anyone he chooses, and he cannot cut federal payments approved by Congress.”

On Thursday, responding to the threat of the lawsuit, the Trump administration said Musk and his team had not violated the law by combing through Treasury information. “Slashing waste, fraud and abuse, and becoming better stewards of the American taxpayer’s hard-earned dollars might be a crime to Democrats, but it’s not a crime in a court of law,” said Harrison Fields, a Trump spokesperson.

It remains to be seen whether Trump, who has a history of ignoring court orders and the Constitution, respects the judge’s temporary injunction in this case. “If the administration fails to comply with the emergency order, it is unclear how it might be enforced,” New York Times reporters wrote on Saturday.

“I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again,” James wrote in a social media post, urging Musk and his squad to respect the injunction. “No one is above the law.”

Read the full emergency order here.

Continue Reading…

Oklahoma Moms Locked Up for Their Abusers’ Violence Might Finally Get a Break

One mom was sentenced to 30 years in an Oklahoma prison because her abusive boyfriend broke her kids’ legs, and she wasn’t able to stop him. (He got two years in jail.) Another mom got 30 years in prison because her abuser beat her daughter. (He got 18 years.) And a jury recommended that a third mom go to prison for life because her boyfriend killed her toddler while she was away at work.

All these moms were accused of “failure to protect.” Under Oklahoma law, parents must shield their kids from physical harm if they’re aware or “reasonably” should have known that another adult might abuse the children. Most state have similar laws. The goal is to stop violence against vulnerable minors, but as I reported in an award-winning 2022 investigation and short documentary (which you can watch below), the law is often applied in a racist and sexist way: About 90 percent of Oklahoma parents incarcerated for failure to protect are mothers—disproportionately mothers of color—and many are experiencing abuse themselves, making it harder for them to intervene. At the time of our investigation, at least 55 women were locked up for this offense.

“If a caregiver has some protection knowing that they can go make this complaint to the DA or the police department, then we think we have a better chance to protect more of our children.”

Now, Oklahoma lawmakers have a chance to amend the law. Last month, Republican state Sen. Dave Rader introduced a bill that would create an exception in the “failure to protect” statute for domestic violence survivors whose abusers harm their kids. Under SB 594, the maximum punishment for failure to protect would also change for all parents—to 10 years in prison, down from a life sentence currently. The bill would apply retroactively, allowing people who are currently serving time for failure to protect to apply for resentencing.

In the past, efforts to reform Oklahoma’s “failure to protect” law struggled to gain traction because lawmakers worried about appearing soft on child abuse. But Radar argues that his bill would actually keep more kids safe: Threatening moms with life in prison, he says, deters them from going to police after their kids are harmed. “If a caregiver has some protection knowing that they can go make this complaint to the DA or the police department, then we think we have a better chance to protect more of our children,” Rader told the ABC affiliate in Tulsa.

The bill is now in committee. Rader drafted it with support from the state’s ACLU and the Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, which has done extensive work advocating on behalf of abused women. “There is a clear pathway to getting it across the finish line,” says Colleen McCarty, who leads the center, adding that she hopes to use Mother Jones‘ investigation to convince more lawmakers to support these reforms.

Continue Reading…

After Years of Feasting on EV Subsidies, Elon Musk Is Now Content to Watch Them Die

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

Donald Trump’s attempts to slash incentives for electric cars would cause sales of the vehicles to plummet, with this effort cheered on by a seemingly confounding supporter—Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of Tesla and erstwhile champion for action on the climate crisis.

Trump has said that he “will revoke the electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American auto workers.”

The president, who previously suggested supporters of EVs “rot in hell” before somewhat tempering his rhetoric, has already ditched an aspirational goal for half of all car sales to be electric by the end of the decade, halted some funding for EV chargers, and began reversing vehicle pollution standards that prod auto companies to shift away from gasoline models.

A key tax credit for Americans buying an EV, worth up to $7,500, is also a major target for elimination, although to overturn this Trump will require Republicans in Congress. Should he succeed, though, the impact would be significant, with a recent study finding that electric car sales could fall by 27 percent without the incentive.

“It just shows he’s an opportunist, really.”

“Turning off the credits would affect a meaningful share of the EV market,” said Joseph Shapiro, a University of California, Berkeley, economist and co-author of the study, who added that while a growing number of people would still go electric, the total number of cars sold would shrink by more than 300,000 a year than if the incentives stayed in place.

“You could say that it would be a speed bump in the road but if the US goes all electric in 2090 rather than 2050, say, that matters a lot for the planet,” he said. “A lot of carbon would be emitted in that time.”

Trump’s agenda has been enthusiastically backed by Musk, despite the world’s richest person heading Tesla, the market-leading EV company that also relies upon some parts made in China that may be targeted by tariffs imposed by Trump.

Musk has said, though, that removal of EV subsidies will hurt rivals such as Ford and General Motors more than Tesla. “Take away the subsidies,” Musk wrote on X, another of his companies, in July. “It will only help Tesla.”

There is some logic to this, Shapiro said. Tesla is comfortably the largest EV brand in the US, accounting for nearly half of all sales, and makes more profit per car than its rivals, meaning the removal of incentives would be disproportionately felt by other manufacturers.

“If the tax credit is removed Tesla could survive and have less competition, they have more headroom to withstand a decrease in the market size,” Shapiro said. Stock in Tesla surged following Trump’s election win.

However, Tesla will still be affected. Weakening federal pollution rules, for example, could see a reduction in the amount of carbon credits Tesla sells to other car companies—amounting to $2.7 billion just last year—to offset their emissions and avoid fines. Tesla’s sales dipped slightly for the first time in 2024, amid concern among some of its traditionally liberal customer base about Musk’s rightward political turn.

“Tesla isn’t immune to sales being impacted, they have some brand loyalty although we don’t know what the impact Elon Musk has had on polarizing consumers yet, that’s still a bit of an unknown,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox Automotive, which estimates EVs will have a 10 percent share of US car sales this year, up from 8 percent in 2024.

Regardless, Musk’s focus has now seemingly shifted away from EVs to other areas such as robotics, artificial intelligence and his SpaceX venture, Valdez Streaty said. He has also embraced rightwing fixations shared by Trump. In a speech after the president was inaugurated, Musk made no mention of cars but said that the “future of civilization is assured” with “safe cities, secure borders, sensible spending, basic stuff.”

He added: “We’re going to take DOGE to Mars,” in reference to the “department of government efficiency” he heads in an effort to curb spending. “Can you imagine how awesome it will be to have American astronauts plant the flag on another planet for the first time? Bam. Bam. Yeah. How inspiring would that be?”

Concern over the climate crisis is seemingly no longer one of Musk’s priorities, despite previously saying he is “super pro-climate” and in 2016 calling for a “popular uprising” against the fossil fuel industry because the world was “unavoidably headed toward some level of harm and the sooner we can take action, the less harm will result.”

“This desire for eternal glory for doing great deeds has motivated his primary accomplishments…But it also has a dark side.”

When Trump removed the US from the Paris climate agreement in 2017, Musk said he was quitting a presidential advisory body in protest. “Climate change is real,” he tweeted at the time. “Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”

But Musk has had little to say after Trump, who memorably called climate change “a giant hoax,” once again pulled the US from the Paris deal and issued a flurry of orders to ramp up oil and gas drilling and stymie renewable energy production. In January, Musk said: “Climate change risk is real, just much slower than alarmists claim.”

Critics say it is unlikely Musk will reflect the growing alarm voiced by scientists, and the American public, over the impacts of dangerous global heating within the Trump administration.

“It just shows he’s an opportunist, really,” said Paul Bledsoe, who was a climate adviser to Bill Clinton’s White House. “He now downplays the dangers of climate change, but I think in the back of his mind he’s thinking about using government contracts for geoengineering as the costs of climate change become so undeniably expensive.”

Those who know Musk say that he soured on Democrats in part after not being invited to a major summit on electric cars held by the White House in 2021, after Joe Biden became president.

“That was an unforced error by Biden,” said Robert Zubrin, a leading advocate for human exploration of Mars who said he helped introduce Musk to the idea of Martian expansion. “And in the past two years, Elon Musk has redefined himself from the white knight of environmentalists to a Bond villain.”

Zubrin said that Musk’s “central motivation is the desire for eternal glory for doing great deeds. He wants to save civilization because he wants to be famous for saving civilization. “This desire for eternal glory for doing great deeds has motivated his primary accomplishments, Tesla and SpaceX,” he added. “But it also has a dark side to it, and this has been exploited.”

Tesla was contacted about its stance towards the EV tax credits but did not respond.

Continue Reading…

Why Are Institutions Bowing to Trump’s Illegal Anti-Trans Orders?

President Donald Trump’s barrage of executive orders targeting transgender people have resulted in an immediate catastrophe for trans people, their families, and those who seek to work with them. Federal agencies have scrambled to scrub so-called “gender ideology” from websites and agency guidances, removing valuable information about HIV prevention, research into health disparities, and webpages about sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination. Meanwhile, federal employees are orderedto remove pronouns in their email signatures and agencies have banned Pride events.

Trump signed his first anti-trans executive order within hours of taking office and has only continued the onslaught. The speed and scope of the orders are “all- encompassing and terrifyingly breathtaking,” as Lambda Legal senior attorney Carl Charles tells me—which is the point. The orders will run up against significant constraints, like established legal precedent and administrative procedures, but by instilling fear in trans people and the institutions that support them, the Trump administration is banking on preemptive obedience.

“They’re hoping that they can scare people into compliance and therefore not have to actually account for—and do the things—that potentially require compliance.”

“They’re hoping that they can scare people into compliance and therefore not have to actually account for—and do the things—that potentially require compliance,” Charles says.

So far, Trump’s suite of anti-trans executive orders compel schools to ban trans women from women’s sports, redefine “sex,” threaten hospitals’ funding if they offer gender-affirming care to patients under age 19, ban trans people from the military, and direct the Department of Justice to investigate teachers who “socially transition” trans and nonbinary students by respecting their names and pronouns. Hospital systems from Washington, DC, to Los Angeles, have decided to obey Trump in advance, voluntarily canceling gender-affirming medical care appointments for children to avoid the drastic removal of essential federal funds, even as state attorneys general have argued the Trump order is illegal. The overarching goal of the orders, says Gillian Branstetter, a spokespersonwith the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, is to establish as law the Trump administration’s completely unscientific version of gender as binary and established at conception.

“This is an administration whose principal priority is driving transgender people from public life,” Branstetter says, “and doing everything in its power to try and control our bodies and our lives.”

Nonetheless, trans people and their allies are fighting back. Trans federal prisoners are challenging expected transfers and the end of their gender-affirming care. On Tuesday, parents of trans youth sued the Trump administration, arguing his effort to ban gender-affirming care by executive fiat encroaches on Congress’s spending power, infringes on parental rights, and violates the First Amendment. A group of 15 attorneys general, representing states with some of the strongest protections for trans people, have declared their intent to ignore Trump’s gender-affirming care executive order and have promised to take the federal government to court should it attempt enforcement. New York and other states have their own anti-discrimination laws protecting access to such care.

“They are wielding trans people against these hospital systems as a weapon, as a cudgel to say, ‘Don’t do this, or you won’t be able to serve anybody,’” Charles says. “That is so incredibly shameful. It is shameful and it’s disgusting.”

Whether Trump’s executive orders have any teeth—and the ACLU and Lambda Legal, among other civil rights organizations, argue they don’t—the mere threat of enforcing those orders has been enough to overturn what havebecome norms. Instead of waiting for agencies to go through formal rulemaking, a process that requires public input and takes years, or for courts to weigh in on whether the executive orders are legal, major institutions are capitulating.

“They are wielding trans people against these hospital systems as a weapon, as a cudgel to say, ‘Don’t do this, or you won’t be able to serve anybody.'”

Consider Trump’s trans sports ban that completely rewrites Title IX policy, even though the Department of Education is responsible for such regulation changes. Some institutions have already responded as if the order was an enforceable legal mandate. Harvard University’s athletics department removed its transgender inclusion policy from its website hours after Trump signed the order. On Thursday, the National Collegiate Athletic Association banned trans women from women’s sports competitions across its 1,100 member colleges and universities, with its president saying Trump’s order “provides a clear, national standard.” The same day, the Department of Education (the agency created by Congress that Trump suggests he would eliminate via executive order) announced it was investigating San Jose State University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association for their trans athlete policies.

Schools receive a significant amount of money from the federal government; the Department of Education disbursed more than $73 billion across K-12 schools and higher education in fiscal year 2021 (the most recent data available). Institutions of higher education rely far more on federal funds than K-12 schools; public two-year colleges, for example, have received more than a quarter of their funding from the federal government, while 18 percent of public four-year colleges’ revenue comes from federal sources. Institutions found in violation of Title IX risk losing all of their federal funds. Since the law was passed in 1972, the federal government has never delivered on that threat, but the Trump administration’s unprecedented moves thus far don’t inspire confidence in norms to continue. “I don’t think anyone in the education world wants the administration using them as an example of something that is wrong,” Sarah Abernathy, the executive director of the Committee for Education Funding, told Chalkbeat.

Similarly, major hospital systems, including Children’s Hospital LA in California and NYU Langone Health in New York, have stopped providing gender-affirming medications and surgery to trans youth under 19—much to the glee of the White House. In this case, the threat was explicit so hospitals and medical schools that offer gender-affirming medical care to minors would lose federal funding.The order also mischaracterized puberty blockers and hormone treatments as “chemical mutilation.” Federal agencies were directed to begin a review process of research grants offered to medical institutions and the Department of Justice was instructedto pursue civil and criminal prosecutions against providers under consumer fraud and female genital mutilation laws.

The 2020 Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County recognized that workplace discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation is, inherently, sex discrimination. Despite the actions of the Trump administration, this is still the law of the land. But they have made efforts to simply erase the ruling. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that reviews workplace discrimination complaints, has removed its webpage on sexual orientation and gender-identity discrimination—a webpage that, until late January, outlined the Bostock ruling.

On January 28, EEOC Acting Chair Andrea Lucas—a Republican holdover from Trump’s first term and one of two remaining commissioners after he fired two Democrats—announced that one of her top priorities is to “defend the biological and binary reality of sex.” As part of that, she directed the EEOC to remove the “X” gender marker and “Mx.” honorific on complaint intake forms and mentioned her disdain for prior EEOC guidance suggesting that the repeated misgendering of an employee could amount to discrimination. Former and current EEOC employees confirmed to Mother Jonesthat the commission has temporarily halted all investigations into complaints of discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation.

The EEOC’s move to foreclose queer people from raising sex discrimination claims upends its own longstanding practice and puts LGBTQ workers at risk, Charles says. “We’re talking half a century, nearly, of anti-discrimination systems that exist to protect people in the workplace, to ensure their complaints are heard,” he tells me. “There’s a lot of mischief and mayhem that can be caused just by delaying people the opportunity to be heard, and delaying their day in court.”

The Supreme Court has not extended its ruling in Bostock to otherfederal anti-discrimination laws—like Title IX, which applies to education, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. But the Biden administration and federal courtsdidexpand myriad protections for trans people, from prohibiting anti-trans discrimination in schools to allowing intersex and nonbinary people to select the gender marker “X” on their passports.

“This is an administration whose principal priority is driving transgender people from public life .”

Now, in the aftermath of Trump’s executive orders, the State Department has stopped processing all requests to update passport gender markers. Branstetter says the ACLU has heard from trans and nonbinary people across the US whose identification documents—including former passports, photo IDs, and court orders for name changes—are being held by the State Department, with no timeline given for their return.

In his order seeking the elimination of “gender ideology” from the federal government, Trump also directed federal prisons to rehouse trans women in men’s facilities and forcibly de-transition incarcerated people. That order, which incarcerated trans women have already challenged, flies in the face of federal court decisions that classify the blanket denial of gender-affirming care as cruel and unusual punishment, Charles says.

The Biden administration further protected trans people by applying Bostock to other anti-discrimination laws through administrative rulemaking. Last May, for example,the Department of Health and Human Services released a final rule specifying that gender dysphoria could be considered a disability. And the Biden Department of Education’s Title IX regulations affirmed that the education law protected trans and nonbinary students from gender identity discrimination. As I previously reported, this was one of Biden’s rules that was vacated by a judge shortly before Trump took office.

None of the Trump administration’s moves come as a surprise, Branstetter says. Trump’s directives are the culmination of a yearslong, coordinated conservative movement to restrict trans rights, elevating what had been a mostly state-level effort to cover every aspect of the federal government, and fulfilling Trump’s anti-trans campaign promises. Nonetheless, what she finds most startling is the rhetoric contained in the mandate to eradicate trans people from the military—likely the largest single employer of trans people in the United States. The order says that identifying as trans “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”

“That order basically suggests that, by virtue of being trans, we are inherently less trustworthy and deceitful by nature,” Branstetter says, “basically echoing the way that the government used to describe homosexuals in the 1940s and ’50s and before purging thousands of them from the federal government.”

Continue Reading…

Kash Patel Took $25,000 From Russia-Linked Firm to Appear on an Anti-FBI TV Series

Last year, Kash Patel, the MAGA provocateur whom Donald Trump has nominated to head the FBI, received $25,000 from a Russia-linked production company to participate in a documentary in which he assailed the FBI and called for closing its headquarters.

In November, Tucker Carlson’s online network released a six-part series called All the President’s Men: The Conspiracy Against Trump that purported to chronicle the familiar MAGA conspiracy theory that a Deep State plotted against Donald Trump while he was a presidential candidate in 2016 and when he was president. The fourth episode focused on Patel and his years-long crusade to depict the Trump-Russia scandal—Moscow’s attack on the 2016 election and Donald Trump’s efforts to cover up its existence—as nothing but a total hoax orchestrated by nefarious Democrats and rogue government operatives.

In this film—which credits Patel as an executive producer—he offers a blistering attack on the FBI. He calls it a “corrupt” enterprise and claims it has been on the Democratic Party’s “payroll.” He says, “I’m the guy that’s going to tell you they need major reforms. I’m going to tell you to shut down the FBI headquarters building and open it up as a museum of the Deep State the next day. Seriously, you need 50 guys in Washington running the FBI.” He pushes the false claim that the FBI launched its Russia investigation in 2016 on the basis of the infamous and unconfirmed Steele memos. And he insists that the FBI and the rest of the US intelligence community that investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election “knew it didn’t exist.” He also asserts that “globalists” have been working with Al Qaeda to make a profit.

The series was produced for Carlson, who is featured in the final episode, by Global Tree Pictures, a Los Angeles-based firm run by Ukrainian-American-Russian filmmaker Igor Lopatonok. He and Russian-born film director Vera Tomilova, the chief financial officer of Global Tree Pictures, who holds a US green card, are listed in the film’s credits as its producers. Global Tree raised the financing for the series, according to a contract filed in Rudy Giuliani’s bankruptcy proceedings. (Giuliani also starred in the documentary.)

Lopatonok has ties to Russian propaganda and disinformation efforts.

In recent years, he has helped lead a Kremlin-financed effort to persuade Westerners to move to Russia. In 2023, he chaired a competition dubbed “To Russia With Love” that invited bloggers to produce content that would show the “most appealing side of Russia” and encourage people to emigrate there. This project was funded by the Presidential Foundation for Cultural Initiatives, a state entity that Putin created in 2021 to “support projects in the field of culture, art and the creative industries.”

One of Lopatonok’s colleagues in this project was John Mark Dougan, a former deputy sheriff in Palm Beach County, Florida, who received political asylum in Russia and who has been a key player in Russia’s disinformation operations against the West. In May, the New York Times reported, “Dougan has built an ever-growing network of more than 160 fake websites that mimic news outlets in the United States, Britain and France.” Dougan was listed on material as a member of the “Expert Council” of the “To Russia with Love” project and as a “mentor” for the winners.

Lopatonok has worked with famed director Oliver Stone on two documentaries on Ukraine that were widely described as pro-Kremlin, One of these films, titled Revealing Ukraine and released in 2019, was apparently financed in part by Ukrainian oligarch and pro-Kremlin politician Viktor Medvedchuk, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and Vlast.kz, an independent media outlet in Kazakhstan. The film prominently featured Medvedchuk, a long-time ally of Vladimir Putin who was sanctioned by the United States in 2014 in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. (Medvedchuk was arrested in Ukraine in 2021 and charged with treason; he was later traded to Russia in a prisoner swap.)

So, according to Patel’s own financial disclosure statement, he pocketed $25,000 from a production company operated by a filmmaker associated with a Kremlin-subsidized propaganda project, a pro-Putin oligarch, and a pro-Kremlin disinformation agent.

Lopatonok also appears to have been doing business—or trying to do business— in Russia. Last year, he and Tomilova set up a company there called Global 3 Pictures, according to Russian corporate records. This is the same name as a corporation they established in California in 2011. The Russian firm, according to the records, intended to produce films and television shows. The corporate listings note that the firm maintained a bank account at state-owned VTB, a bank subject to US sanctions. The records also note that Global 3 Pictures failed to submit a tax return.

Mother Jones sent Lopatonok and Patel each a list of questions and a request for comment. Neither responded.

The All The President’s Men series was loaded with Russian connections. Its director, Sean Stone, a son of Oliver Stone, hosted a show on RT America, the Russian state-funded network until it was shut down in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For this docuseries, Stone conducted the on-air interviews with Simona Mangiante, the wife of George Papadopoulos, a Trump foreign policy adviser who pleaded guilty to making false statements to FBI agents during the Russia investigation and served 12 days in federal prison.

In another Global Tree Picture film released last year, Hunter’s Laptop—Requiem for Ukraine, a documentary about alleged Biden corruption in Ukraine, Mangiante interviewed Andrii Derkach, whom the US Treasury Department sanctioned in 2020 for serving as a “Russian agent” and spreading disinformation to influence the American election that year—that is, disseminating false stories about then-candidate Joe Biden. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence later noted that Putin “had purview over” Derkach’s activities, meaning Moscow was running an operation to discredit Biden and help Trump. With this film, Lopatonok and Mangiante amplified the phony assertions peddled by an identified Russian agent.

The scriptwriting team for All the President’s Men included Lopatonok, Tomilova, and George Eliason, an editor at a website called Intelligencer that posts conservative and Putin-friendly material. Lopatonok and Tomilova are on its editorial board.

All the President’s Men featured the usual assortment of Trump champions who have for years pushed the Deep-State-is-after-Trump conspiracy tale, including Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and Papadopoulos. It’s full of paranoia and debunked claims.

Despite Carlson’s backing, Lopatonok and Tomilova’s series didn’t register much on the media landscape. But it has one intriguing piece of information: Patel’s financial relationship with a production company tied to Russian propaganda and disinformation activity. That is hardly a reassuring credential for an FBI chief.

Continue Reading…

Scientists’ Mad Scramble to Save Critical Climate Data From Trump’s War on DEI

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

When the White House took down a critical environmental justice tool just three days into President Trump’s administration, a team of data scientists and academics sprang into action.

They had prepared for this exact moment, having created a list of 250 online resources widely expected to be taken down during Trump’s second term. The Climate & Economic Justice Screening Tool, a platform created to help federal agencies, states, and community organizations identify neighborhoods heavily burdened by pollution, topped the list. The team worked quickly to re-create the tool using previously archived data and host it on a new website. Two days later, the webpage was up and running.

In the two weeks since Trump’s inauguration, his administration moved swiftly to scrub government websites of information it objects to. Federal agencies have taken down critical environmental and public health datasets. The US Global Change Research Program ended the National Nature Assessment, a sweeping review of the nation’s flora and fauna and its benefits to humanity. Departments throughout the executive branch have altered websites to eliminate any reference to the inequities women, people of color, and other marginalized communities face.

“Policymakers and the public and communities need good information to make the best policy decision, whatever that is.”

Researchers and advocates whose work revolves around addressing these inequities and mitigating the impacts of climate change told Grist they find these changes troubling.

“One of the things that’s worrisome is when you start to take down resources like this, you start to construct a knowledge sphere that doesn’t acknowledge that environmental or climate injustices exist,” said Eric Nost, a geographer and assistant professor at the University of Guelph. Nost, who studies the role of data technology in environmental policymaking, is part of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, one of several organizations tracking the Trump administration’s changes to federal websites and resources.

Many of these changes are a direct response to executive orders the president issued within hours of taking office to end “Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” and defend “Women From Gender Ideology Extremism.” Many of them dovetail with his rescinding a Clinton-era executive order requiring federal agencies to consider the impact of their policies on areas with high poverty rates and large minority populations.

Trump also revoked Justice40, President Biden’s policy of ensuring so-called “disadvantaged” communities receive 40 percent of the benefits of climate and energy spending. Some of the resources dismantled in the past two weeks, including the Climate & Economic Justice Screening Tool, were created to help achieve these goals.

The Environmental Protection Agency deleted pages showcasing the work of African American employees. It also removed an equity action plan, the “Diversity and Inclusion” section on its careers page, and scrubbed “Environmental Justice” and “Climate Change” from its homepage menu.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took down data and resources related to trans people, HIV, and environmental justice. The Department of Energy eliminated online resources for anyone struggling with energy bills. The webpage previously listed government assistance programs like the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps low-income households pay for electricity. The agency also killed its own version of the environmental justice screening tool.

Beyond making it harder for taxpayers to access information that could reduce their bills and navigate some of the effects of climate change, these steps make it harder to govern effectively. “Policymakers and the public and communities need good information to make the best policy decision, whatever that is,” said Carrie Jenks, the executive director of the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Harvard University. “To the extent that any administration is not using data or not giving access to data, that will always be of concern to us.”

The law program has been tracking the Trump administration’s rollback of environmental rules and environmental justice policies since his first term. A handful of other groups consisting of academics, archivists, students, and environmental organizations are pursuing similar efforts and have launched an initiative called the Public Environmental Data Project. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative is part of the effort, as is the Internet Archive, a nonprofit that has since 1996 been archiving webpages, and End of Term, a group that has since 2008 archived federal websites at the end of each presidential administration.

“I almost see a resurgence in pride in this work and willingness to get it done.”

Other environmental groups are archiving taxpayer-funded datasets at a smaller scale. For instance, the Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank that helps coastal communities design climate and ocean policy, began collating research and data on climate change in a dedicated section of its website last summer. The group started a “Resource Hub” to help cities easily identify the best available climate science. When Trump won the election in November, it realized that dozens of datasets and research hosted on government websites could disappear and began archiving additional policy papers and data. Those resources were especially relevant because the lab found many cities use outdated information to make planning decisions.

“We remember what had happened during the last Trump administration, where a huge amount of relevant environmental information was taken down or altered, and we wanted to make sure that the resources that we had posted to our own website would continue to live on,” said Alex Miller, an analyst there.

What’s happening now is in many ways a repetition of the efforts the Trump administration made during his first term, when as much as 20 percent of the EPA’s website became inaccessible to the public. The use of the term “climate change” decreased by more than a third. The first Trump administration also tried to derail work on the National Climate Assessment, an important synthesis of the state of climate science that shapes federal policy.

This time around, Trump officials are attempting to more tightly control how the assessment is compiled and want to lower the scientific standards it employs, according to reporting by E&E News. While the document is likely to be published in some form within two years, the administration did axe another environmental review.

Last year, the Biden administration announced the National Nature Assessment, a comprehensive literature review of the state of nature in the United States. It was modeled after the climate assessment and enlisted dozens of researchers to calculate all the ways nature is valuable. Last week, the administration told researchers who had spent nearly a year working on the report that it was shutting down the effort.

Alessandro Rigolon, an architect and planner who teaches at the University of Utah and studies the benefits of green spaces, was working with other researchers to outline the effects of nature on physical and mental well-being. Rigolon said he was informed about the administration’s decision just a few days after a meeting in Vermont with those colleagues.

Because those working on the report were volunteers, Rigolon said they trying to find a way to continue their work. “We are committed to writing this one way or another,” said Rigolon. “I almost see a resurgence in pride in this work and willingness to get it done after the work was terminated without explanation.”

Continue Reading…