The Tiny Texas Reptile Testing the “Drill, Baby, Drill” Agenda

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

While President Donald Trump has caused chaos and confusion in his first few weeks in office, he’s made one thing very clear: His administration will do everything in its power to supercharge oil and gas production.

That agenda is unwelcome news for a small lizard in West Texas.

The dunes sagebrush lizard—a tan, scaly reptile measuring just a few inches long—lives in the Permian Basin, the largest oil producing region in the country. It’s found nowhere else on Earth. The basin stretches across West Texas and southeastern New Mexico and produces, by some estimates, as much as 40 percent of US oil. It’s likely that you’ve traveled in a car or plane using fuel derived from oil in the Permian Basin.

Drilling for oil and gas, and the infrastructure that supports it, harms the dunes sagebrush lizard, according to more than two decades of research. Roads and well pads damage and fragment the reptile’s habitat, as does the process of mining sand for fracking. These activities are threatening to extinguish the lizard, which is now unable to survive across nearly half of its historic range, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, a government agency.

To stave off extinction, the Fish and Wildlife Service listed the lizard as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act last spring. The ESA is the nation’s strongest law for protecting wildlife. Under the law, it’s illegal to kill endangered animals and plants (with some exceptions) and the government is required to devise and implement a plan to revive their populations.

Now, however, environmental advocates fear that federal protections for this lizard—which were decades in the making—are at risk. Donald Trump’s agenda for energy dominance has allied his administration with the oil industry, which has long viewed regulations to protect rare animals as a barrier to drilling. Especially when they live in oil country.

That puts this humble lizard in a tough spot. Like several other species, it has become a political wedge used to criticize and dismantle environmental regulations that most Americans support, according to environmental advocates. And over the next four years it will serve as a test—of the ESA, and how far the Trump administration is willing to go to undermine the protections it affords.

To an untrained eye, dunes sagebrush lizards look pretty generic. They’ve got prickly scales, snakelike heads, and long, spindly feet, much like other lizards.

It’s their home—and adaptations to it—that make them so unique. The lizards live in “neighborhoods” within a rare habitat comprising sand dunes and woody shrubs, where they’re known to dive, or swim, under the sand to stay cool. To breed and find food, these animals move between neighborhoods, said Lee Fitzgerald, a researcher and professor at Texas A&M University who’s been studying these lizards for more than 30 years. Oil and gas infrastructure, such as access roads and well pads, disrupts this flow by fragmenting the landscape, Fitzgerald said. “When they’re isolated, they go extinct locally,” he told Vox. Studies dating back to the ’90s have shown that there are fewer lizards where you have a higher density of well pads and more fragmentation.

Trump has instructed agencies to “suspend, revise, or rescind” actions that are “unduly burdensome” to energy exploration and development.

Fitzgerald loves these lizards. They’re an important piece of a rare duneland ecosystem, he said. Other people in Texas oil country, however, see them as a nuisance—as only an impediment to development. A decade ago, when the Fish and Wildlife Service first proposed listing the lizard as endangered, Sen. Ted Cruz claimed that the government was using the lizard to shut down oil and gas production. “You know my view of lizards? They make dern fine boots,” Cruz told the crowd, which laughed and applauded.

And these attitudes have persisted. Shortly after the lizard was listed as endangered, Wayne Christian, commissioner of the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the state’s oil and gas industry, repeated Cruz’s joke, laughing. “This doesn’t have a thing to do with ‘saving lizards.’ It’s about shutting down US oil and gas production to win political brownie points,” Christian said in a statement after the listing.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s a lizard, a chicken, a whale, or a unicorn. Radical environmentalists won’t be satisfied until we all get out [sic] energy from firewood and are living in a cave again.”

Yet protecting the lizard isn’t the barrier to oil drilling that companies would have you believe, Fitzgerald said. The area they live in is small, making up about 4 percent of the Permian Basin. Plus, techniques like horizontal drilling allow companies to extract oil and gas under lizard habitat without disturbing the surface. In fact dozens of oil and gas firms are already enrolled in voluntary plans to conserve the lizard that are approved by the Fish and Wildlife Service. “The habitat is easy to avoid,” Fitzgerald said. “It’s easy to achieve conservation of this lizard.”

The idea that listing it as endangered would upend the oil and gas industry is not rooted in reality, said Jason Rylander, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, an advocacy group that’s been working for decades to conserve the lizard. Instead, Rylander says, conservative leaders in states like Texas are weaponizing the lizard and other endangered species to push a specific narrative: that environmental regulations like the Endangered Species Act are bad for industries like oil and gas and should be made less stringent or dismantled altogether. The lesser prairie chicken, which was listed in 2023, is similarly a thorn in the side of many Republicans lawmakers.

“The lizard is in a position for being used as a rationale that the Endangered Species Act is bad, even though conserving the lizard is relatively easy,” Fitzgerald told me.

Ben Shepperd, president of the Permian Basin Petroleum Association, a trade group that represents the oil and gas industry, said, “We have no problem working with regulations to protect species.” He disagreed with the suggestion that the Texas oil industry opposes regulations to protect the dunes sagebrush lizard. “We strongly believe that conservation and development can work hand in hand,” he told Vox.

Shepperd did not respond to follow-up questions asking how those comments align with statements by the PBPA that called the proposal to list the lizard an “attack” against “American independence” and the Permian Basin. Shepperd previously said he doesn’t think the lizard is in danger of extinction.

Lizard habitat in West Texas. Lee Fitzgerald

Shepperd told Vox the petroleum industry has been at the “forefront of conservation efforts for multiple species,” spending tens of millions of dollars on efforts to improve habitat and “support species throughout the ranges.” Those efforts have significantly improved both the habitat and populations of the dunes sagebrush lizard, he said. He did not respond to a follow-up question asking for evidence of improved habitat and population. A 2020 report from the American Conservation Foundation on voluntary efforts by the oil and gas industry to conserve the lizard says some companies have changed their operations to avoid impacting the animal’s habitat.

President Trump has not made specific comments about the dunes sagebrush lizard (he has degraded other tiny, endangered animals, such as the delta smelt), but he aims to make it easier to exploit important wildlife habitat for oil and gas. On his first day in office, the president signaled that his government may use what he spuriously called a “national energy emergency” to bypass the standard protocols to protect wildlife under the Endangered Species Act.

Trump has also called on each government agency to “suspend, revise, or rescind” actions that are “unduly burdensome” to energy exploration and development. Doug Burgum, Trump’s secretary of the Interior Department — which oversees the Fish and Wildlife Service — has already signed secretarial orders that aim to boost fossil fuel extraction over endangered species protections.

“The lesser prairie chicken and dunes lizard are our test cases,” said Rylander, who is also the legal director of the Center’s Climate Law Institute. “They’re both recently listed species in the oil country, and both have been delayed in their listings for decades, and now they’re finally on the list. What is the Trump administration going to do about that?”

The Endangered Species Act is considered the strongest wildlife law in the US, and among the strongest in the world. And it explicitly prohibits the government from considering economic factors when it determines whether or not a species is endangered.

Yet the protections it affords aren’t bulletproof.

Last fall, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Interior Department and the Fish and Wildlife Service over the dunes sagebrush lizard. The suit—which asks the court to vacate the endangered listing—alleges, among other things, that the government didn’t rely on the best available data to evaluate the lizard’s extinction risk. To determine that risk, the Fish and Wildlife Service looked at how much healthy habitat the lizard has left, not at the total number of lizards and how it’s changed over time. Making the determination based on habitat availability instead of population size is inadequate, the suit alleges.

Fitzgerald, the nation’s leading expert on the lizard, disagrees. You don’t need to know the exact number of lizards to figure out that they’re in decline, he said, especially because they depend on a very specific type of habitat. The lizard is endangered, he said.

Paxton’s suit also alleges that the federal government did not fully consider existing voluntary agreements by companies to conserve the animal, such as through horizontal drilling. Rylander of the Center for Biological Diversity says that such agreements to protect the lizard population are voluntary, untested, and lack oversight. The Fish and Wildlife Service, meanwhile, asserts that the risk of extinction for the lizard is high even with these efforts in place. “I don’t think the Texas arguments are particularly strong,” Rylander said of the lawsuit.

Paxton’s office did not respond to a request for comment. The Fish and Wildlife Service declined to comment.

There are a few ways this could play out, Rylander said. One is that the district court, where this was filed, rules in favor of Texas and moves to throw out the listing; the proceedings would likely take years and it would be fought by groups like the Center for Biological Diversity. Another is that the Texas judge rules in favor of the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the listing stays.

The Fish and Wildlife Service, under the Trump administration, could alternatively try to settle the lawsuit with Texas by agreeing to reconsider its decision to list the lizard as endangered. That could lead to delisting, if the government could somehow prove the species isn’t at risk of extinction. “The Trump administration would have to justify a change of position in a new rulemaking process—which could take a year or more,” Rylander said.

The agency could also simply admit a legal error in making the decision to list the lizard, vacating the listing while it reconsiders the ruling.

It’s likely that the federal government will reconsider the listing, said Gabriel Eckstein, a law professor at Texas A&M University. “They’re going to be pressured to either undo it, reverse it, reconsider—I’m not sure which,” Eckstein said.

Another possible outcome, though more unusual, would involve Congress. Lawmakers could pass a bill that includes a rider to delist the lizard or the prairie chicken. This is how a population of gray wolves in the Rocky Mountains was delisted in 2011: A congressional spending bill included a rider calling on Idaho and Montana to delist the gray wolf.

Andrew Bowman, the president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife, a nonprofit advocacy group, said that he anticipates such legislative riders as one tool used in the broader threats to wildlife in the next few years. Bowman also fears a more wholesale dismantling of the Fish and Wildlife Service that would have far greater impacts on wildlife in the US. “It takes a lot of money and time to do listings, to do recovery plans, to designate critical habitat,” he said. “Will they just find a way to hollow out the agency so that the law basically becomes ineffective?”

How Trump and his agencies ultimately approach this small lizard, if at all, will reveal how far his agencies will go to undermine the Endangered Species Act. Will this reptile be sacrificed in the name of Trump’s energy dominance agenda—opening other endangered species to threats—or will the letter and spirit of the law, as it exists now, prevail? In all likelihood, this reptile will remain the subject of litigation for years to come, all the while inching closer and closer to extinction.

“The lizard is a phenomenal example of the way that politics affects endangered species protection,” Rylander said. “The intent of Congress and the Act to list species based solely on the best scientific and commercial evidence available is continually thwarted by political and policy decisions across administrations.”

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Trump Is Gutting Efforts to Combat Foreign Election Interference

The Trump Administration is gutting the federal agency in charge of combatting foreign election interference, increasing the likelihood that foreign actors could successfully meddle in US elections.

Bridget Bean, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, announced on Friday in a memo obtained by WIRED that she was ordering “a review and assessment” of all positions at the agency focused on election security and countering disinformation and misinformation. Bean, a former Trump official at FEMA, said that CISA would “pause all elections security activities” until the review is completed in early March.

The administration has already placed 17 staffers at CISA who work with local election officials to prevent cyber-attacks and other forms of foreign and domestic election interference on administrative leave. Separately, Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded an FBI task force charged with combatting foreign election interference by the likes of Russia, China and other countries.

Taken together, election security experts warn these moves will put US elections dangerously at risk of foreign interference.

“Every cut made to our election security and foreign malign influence operations is like handing a gift on a silver platter to our foreign adversaries such as Russia, China and Iran,” Kathy Boockvar, the former secretary of state for Pennsylvania and co-chair of the Elections Committee of the National Association of Secretaries of State during the 2020 election, told NPR this week. “It directly strengthens their ability to invade our national security and interfere in our elections, leaving every American citizen more vulnerable.”

CISA coordinates cybersecurity efforts across the US government and helps election administrators secure voting machines from hackers and prevent other threats to US elections while countering the increasing spread of disinformation and misinformation from foreign and domestic actors. In December, it revealed that Chinese hackers were targeting US telecom records and trying to steal information from high-ranking politicians and government officials.

Kentucky Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams told the Associated Press recently that the agency’s work with local election officials was particularly important. “The most value that we’ve got from CISA has been the people that they have on the ground in our state that build direct relationships, not just with us but with the individual county clerks,” he said. “They’re teaching them and helping them check their physical security and their cyber hygiene, and that’s been extremely popular.”

After Russian actors interfered in the 2016 election, Congress passed a bipartisan bill creating CISA in 2018, designating election security as critical infrastructure. Trump signed it despite calling evidence of Russian interference in the election “a hoax.” But he turned on the agency after it combatted his false claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 election. He fired CISA’s first director, Chris Krebs, after he called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”

House Republicans subsequently accused CISA of being “the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media.” The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 report called for gutting the agency, a blueprint the administration appears to be following.

The effort to dismantle the federal government’s role in combatting foreign election interference comes at a time when such threats are increasing. Foreign adversaries are “more active now than they ever have been” in election interference and disinformation efforts, Jen Easterly, CISA’s director under the Biden Administration, warned in advance of the 2024 election.

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How a Black Utopia For Formerly Enslaved People Became a Wealthy White Enclave

The mostly white residents that call Skidaway Island, Georgia home today consider it a paradise: waterfront views, live oaks and marsh grass alongside golf courses, swimming pools, and other amenities.

Rewind to 1865: The island was a thriving Black community, where freedmen farmed, created a system of government, and turned former cotton plantations into a Black American success story. It began when the government gave them land under Field Order No. 15, also known as the 40 acres program. But it wouldn’t last.

Within two years, the government had taken that land back from the freedmen and returned it to the former enslavers.

Over a two-and-a-half-year investigation, journalists at the Center for Public Integrity unearthed records that prove that dozens of freed people had, and lost, titles to tracts at what’s now The Landings. Today, 40 acres in The Landings development are worth at least $20 million.

“You could feel chills to know that they had it and then they just pulled the rug from under them, so to speak,” said Linda Brown, one of the few Black residents at The Landings.

This week on Reveal, with the Center for Public Integrity and in honor of Black History Month, we also show a descendant her ancestor’s title for a plot of land that is now becoming another exclusive gated community. And we look at how buried documents like these Reconstruction-era land titles are part of the long game toward reparations.

Listen in the player above, or follow Reveal on your favorite podcast app:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Pandora

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Democrats Have a Plan to Counter Trump at the State Level

At a time when Republicans control all levers of power in Washington and national Democrats are struggling to respond to Donald Trump’s increasingly extreme agenda, Democrats at the state legislative level are targeting ten states in an effort to resist Trump and protect key rights and freedoms.

The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) announced this week that its top targets for the 2025-2026 election cycle include defending its one-seat majorities in the state Houses of Virginia and Pennsylvania, and both chambers of the legislature in Alaska, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

“Five of our battleground chambers were each decided in the last election cycle by a single seat, directly impacting the lives of 40 million Americans,” the DLCC wrote in a recent strategy memo. “Majorities in many states will likely come down to just a few districts and hundreds of votes.”

Democrats are also hoping to chip away at GOP state legislative majorities in Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, and North Carolina.

Such races are often overlooked at the national level, but state legislatures have a tremendous amount of power to decide weighty matters on the economy, healthcare, voting laws, abortion rights, gun control, and much more. The complete absence of Democratic power in Washington magnifies the importance of the states; Democratic attorneys general, for example, are leading the way on challenging Trump’s king-like assertion of executive power on issues like immigration and cuts to federal funding.

“As Trump throws one chaos bomb after another, there’s never been a more important time to watch what’s happening in the states,” DLCC President Heather Williams said in a press call on Friday. “State legislatures are the only ballot level with the power to fight back against Project 2025 and the Republicans’ takeover of Washington. This is also the only place where Democrats are in majorities and can pass any kind of proactive agenda.”

Democratic state legislative candidates outperformed the party’s dismal performance at the top of the ticket in 2024. Though Trump won 312 Electoral College votes, Republicans gained only 57 seats out of the roughly 6,000 races on the ballot across the country, according to an analysis by Bolts. While Democrats lost control of legislative chambers in Michigan and Minnesota, they held closely contested chambers like the Pennsylvania House and picked up 14 seats in the Wisconsin legislature after previously gerrymandered maps were struck down, rare bright spots for the party in swing states Trump won.

Still, following the 2024 election, Republicans have one-party control of 23 states compared to 15 for Democrats. Democrats want to not only pick up seats in 2026, but continue making gains through 2030, when new redistricting maps will be drawn following the decennial census.

The unpopularity of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris no doubt hurt Democrats down-ballot in 2024. In 2026, Democrats could benefit from an anti-Trump backlash at the polls, like they did during the first midterm election under Trump in 2018, when the party flipped more than 300 state legislative seats. Some of Trump’s initial actions in his second term, like a freeze on federal grants that states rely on, could be a particularly salient issue for voters. At the same time, local candidates may be better positioned to emphasize bread-and-butter issues like the cost of living that the national party too often ignored in 2024.

“I think by and large Democrats are focused on affordability,” said DLCC political director Jeremy Jansen. “One of the clear lessons learned from the electorate in 2024 is that affordability is a big issue right now. Democrats are doing what they can at the state level to impact the lives of everyday folks and help address issues of affordability and economic opportunity.”

The Republican advantage at the state level had a major impact on the balance of power in Washington. Republicans in North Carolina drew an aggressive gerrymander of U.S House districts in advance of the 2024 election, which allowed the GOP to pick up three new House seats—just enough to maintain control of the chamber and ensure one-party rule in DC, removing any checks and balances to Trump in Congress.

As Williams put it, “The future of the country hinges on the balance of power in the states.”

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Israel’s Destruction of Gaza Has Created an Environmental Nightmare

_This story was originally published b_y Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The natural environment took an unprecedented pounding during the war in Gaza. And as the territory’s inhabitants have returned home since the ceasefire, the extent of the environmental devastation is becoming clear, raising crucial questions about how to reconstruct Gaza in the face of severe and potentially irreversible damage to the environment.

The war has knocked out water supplies and disabled sewage treatment facilities, causing raw effluent to flow across the land, polluting the Mediterranean and underground water reserves essential for irrigating crops. More than two-thirds of Gaza’s farmland, including wells and greenhouses, has been damaged or destroyed by bombardment and military earthworks.

Detailed satellite images taken since the ceasefire began on January 19 show 80 percent of Gaza’s trees lost. In addition, vital wetlands, sand dunes, coastal waters, and the only significant river, the Wadi Gaza, have all suffered extensively. The UN Environment Programme warns that the stripping of trees, shrubs, and crops has so badly damaged the soils of the once-fertile, biodiverse, and well-watered territory that it faces long-term desertification.

Nature is the “silent victim of Israel’s war on Gaza,” says Saeed Bagheri, a lecturer in international law at the University of Reading in the U.K.

Scientist Ahmed Hilles, head of the National Institute for Environment and Development, a leading Palestinian think tank, last week called for an international fact-finding committee “to assess the damage and lay the basis for environmental restoration and long-term recovery.” He said it should “prioritize the rehabilitation of water sources, soil remediation, and the restoration of agricultural lands.”

The Palestinian territory of Gaza extends for 24 miles along the shore of the eastern Mediterranean. Though small, it is a biodiversity hotspot where wildlife from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa meet. It has boasted more than 250 bird species and 100 mammal species, from wild cats and wolves to mongooses and mole rats, according to research conducted over the past two decades by the foremost expert on the territory’s fauna and flora, Abdel Fattah Abd Rabou of the Islamic University of Gaza in Gaza City.

Both wildlife and the human population have been sustained by its abundant underground water reserves. “The shallow sand wells provided an ample supply of the sweet life-giving water,” says Mark Zeitoun, director general of the Geneva Water Hub, which advocates for peace through diplomacy on water. This water, overlain by fertile soils, was why so many Palestinians fled to Gaza after being expelled from their homes by militias following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

But Gaza’s population has since soared to more than 2 million inhabitants, making it one of the most densely populated places on Earth—it vies with Singapore, but without the high-rises. That has put immense pressure on the underground water. Extraction prior to the war was more than three times greater than recharge from rainfall and seepage from the Wadi Gaza, which had dwindled due to dams upstream in Israel.

As water tables fall, salty seawater has infiltrated the aquifer. By 2023, more than 97 percent of Gaza’s once-sweet underground water was unfit for drinking, according to the World Health Organization. Increasingly, well water has been restricted to irrigating crops. Public water supplies have come largely from seawater desalination plants built with international aid, augmented by water delivered from Israel through three cross-border pipelines.

The UN estimates the war has left more than 40 million tons of rubble that includes human remains, asbestos, and unexploded ordnance.

But since the start of the war on October 7, 2023, public supplies have dramatically diminished. Last October, the Palestine Water Authority reported that 85 percent of water facilities were at least partially out of action. Output from water-supply wells had fallen by more than a half, and desalination plants lacked power, while Israel had reduced deliveries down the pipelines.

A survey found that only 14 percent of households still relied on public supplies. Most were taking water from potentially contaminated open wells or unregulated private tankers. In September, Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, the UN special rapporteur on human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation, charged that limiting access to clean water “is clearly employed as a weapon in Gaza against [the] Palestinian civil population.”

Israel denies this. “The IDF does not aim to inflict excessive damage to civilian infrastructure,” an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson said, “and strikes exclusively on the grounds of military necessity and in strict accordance with international law.” It cites cases where it says Hamas has stored weapons and launched attacks from such water infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the fate of the once-abundant underground water—the lifeline for both human and natural life—hangs by a thread. With most wells currently out of use for irrigated agriculture, withdrawals from the aquifer may have been reduced. But the war has increased contamination of what water remains.

The threats are various. UNEP warns that Israeli efforts to use seawater to flood the estimated 300 miles of underground tunnels Hamas has dug beneath Gaza could be contaminating the groundwaters beneath. (The IDF has said on social media that it “takes into consideration the soil and water systems in the area” before flooding tunnels.) Meanwhile, sewage treatment has all but ceased, with facilities either destroyed by military action or disabled by lack of power. Even the solar panels installed at some treatment works have reportedly been destroyed.

Raw sewage and wastewater spills across the land and into water courses or the Mediterranean—up to 3.5 million cubic feet every day, according to UNEP. The porous soils in most of Gaza mean sewage discharged onto the land readily seeps into underground water reserves. “The crisis threatens long-term environmental damage as contaminants seep into groundwater,” says the UN Development Programme (UNDP).

The marine environment is also choking in sewage. In 2022 Israeli environmentalist Gidon Bromberg, who heads EcoPeace Middle East, a transnational NGO, persuaded Israeli security authorities to allow Gaza to import cement to build new three sewage treatment plants along the shoreline. The work was completed, and the following summer both Palestinians and Israelis could, for the first time in many years, swim safely from their respective Mediterranean beaches without encountering Gaza’s raw sewage. Fish returned and a Mediterranean monk seal was recorded for the first time ever off Gaza. But by the start of 2024, a few months after the war began, the plants were all out of action and satellite images showed plumes of sewage spewing into the sea.

The destruction of the built environment in Gaza is also a threat to the natural environment. UN agencies estimate the war has created more than 40 million tons of rubble, containing human remains, asbestos and other hazardous materials, and unexploded ordnance. Meanwhile, the collapse of waste collection services has resulted in a proliferation of makeshift dumps—141, according to a UNDP count in October—while open-air waste burning regularly sends black smoke and hazardous pollutants through densely populated areas.

Some international lawyers argue that Israel is guilty of war crimes against the natural environment in Gaza as much as against its people. The Geneva Convention prohibits warfare that may cause “widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment.” All three terms provoke debate about their precise meaning. The IDF said its actions are proportionate and are justified by military needs and within international law. But Bagheri said, “The destruction of the natural environment in Gaza is now very well documented. It is not collateral or incidental, but deliberate.”

Before the conflict, cultivation covered more than a third of Gaza. But by September, the UN Food and Agriculture Organizaton assessed that two-thirds of farmland had been badly damaged. Analyses of satellite imagery by Forensic Architecture, an interdisciplinary group of researchers at Goldsmiths’ College, part of the University of London, dedicated to exposing “state and corporate violence,” found that more than 2,000 farms, greenhouses, and other agricultural sites had been destroyed, “often to be replaced with Israeli military earthworks.”

The IDF said it “does not intentionally harm agricultural land and seeks to mitigate environmental impact,” but that “Hamas often operates from within orchards, fields, and agricultural land”. Yet there are growing concerns that the damage—in particular from the removal of trees—could prove permanent.

Tree loss has been examined in detail by He Yin, a geographer who heads the remote sensing and land science laboratory at Kent State University. He shared with Yale Environment 360 his latest assessment of satellite images.

Before the war, trees covered around a third of the cultivated area, he says. By late September, 67 percent of them had been damaged. But by January 21, two days after the ceasefire came into effect, that figure had risen to 80 percent, with losses exceeding 90 percent in northern Gaza. Prior to the conflict there were some natural trees, says Yin. “But I would say they are pretty much all gone now.”

There are two likely causes of tree loss: displaced residents cutting down trees for firewood, and the Israeli military bombarding and uprooting trees to eliminate cover for Hamas fighters and clear security buffer zones around the edge of Gaza.

With most farms covering less than two acres, “the loss of a single tree can be devastating” for farmers’ future fruit harvests, says Yin. But the environmental implications of tree loss could also prove permanent and devastating for future generations. UNEP says that uprooting by military equipment “has moved, mixed and thinned the topsoil cover over large areas.” This, it says, “will impact future cultivation [and] make the land vulnerable to desertification.”

All this is bad news not just for people, but for wildlife. The space for nature to flourish in Gaza is very limited. Still, long-term research by Abd Rabou found that, despite human population pressures, some species have revived in recent years. After the abandonment of a series of Israeli settlements in the territory in 2005, “dozens of Arabian wolf [sic] and other carnivores crept intermittently through gaps in the border to the east of the Gaza Strip.”

Yin’s images of the area reveal an almost total loss of trees since May, sometimes replaced by bombardment craters.

Animals dug burrows beneath Israel’s security fences to reach domestic livestock and poultry, as well as small prey living in waste dumps and sewage treatment plants.

But there are natural attractions for wildlife too. The Wadi Gaza, which bisects the territory, is an important stopover for migrating water birds, including herons, storks, flamingos, and raptors, as well as home to the Palestine sunbird, the territory’s national bird. The wadi’s attraction continues even though it has suffered badly in recent decades from both upstream water diversions and sewage discharged from refugee camps.

Still, in 2000, the Palestinian Authority made the wadi the territory’s only nature reserve, and in 2022, work began on a $50 million UN project to reduce pollution and restore its ecology.

The start of the war halted that work. And over the past 15 months, the wadi has again become a running sewer and dumping ground. “Top of my concerns for Wadi Gaza are pollution from debris, wastewater, corpses, ammunition, and explosives,” says Nada Majdalani, the Palestine director of EcoPeace Middle East.

Another ill-fated Gazan ecological treasure is Al-Mawasi, a narrow fertile strip of sand dunes near the border with Egypt. Once, Al-Mawasi was thinly populated and rich in wildlife attracted by miniature wetlands that form amid the dunes where the underground water surfaces. Abd Rabou has recorded 135 bird species there, including many Palestine sunbirds, as well as 14 species of mammals and 20 of reptiles.

But early in the war, the IDF designated Al-Mawasi a “safe zone” for people fleeing its bombardment of nearby towns. Hundreds of thousands sought shelter amid the dunes. Then, last July, the IDF began bombing the enclave, in pursuit of Hamas fighters. This redoubled the damage to the fragile ecosystem. Yin’s images of the area reveal an almost total loss of trees since May, sometimes replaced by bombardment craters.

Currently, most information about the state of Gaza’s natural environment comes from such remote sensing imagery. Detailed ground observations are rare. It has been unsafe, and even with a ceasefire, NGOs have other priorities. Meanwhile, academic life has been shattered by the war. Much of the Islamic University of Gaza, including Abd Rabou’s biology department, was destroyed in the first days of the conflict.

With or without a restored campus, it may be a while before peer-reviewed literature on the state of nature in Gaza resumes. When I contacted Abd Rabou by email in January to discuss his work, he sent a swift reply. “Now I am not able to communicate at all,” he wrote, “because five of my children were lost during the Israeli war on Gaza and my house was completely destroyed.”

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National Archives Head Resigns as Trump Takes Control of Records

The acting head of the National Archives announced his resignation on Friday, paving the way for Donald Trump to continue his takeover of the government’s records and the agency that serves as custodian of the nation’s history.

Deputy Archivist William Bosanko informed staff in an email Friday that he will step down on Tuesday. Bosanko, who has worked at the agency since 1993, has been the acting head of the National Archives and Records Administration for just a week, after Trump fired Archivist of the United States Colleen Shogan.

Under federal law, a president can fire the archivist but must also “communicate the reasons for any such removal to each House of the Congress.” Trump did not do that. Over a week ago, the Trump White House moved to make Secretary of State Marco Rubio the acting archivist, despite standing law that the deputy archivist assumes those responsibilities if the position is vacant.

Bosanko’s exit is part of a Trump putsch at the agency, which was deeply involved in the case of the top-secret documents Trump removed from the White House when he left office in 2021. According to two sources familiar with the situation, Bosanko was pushed out by Jim Byron, a 31-year old who was recently president of the Richard Nixon Foundation. Byron delivered Bosanko an ultimatum: Resign now or be fired next week.

Reached by phone Friday evening, Byron declined to comment.

Byron has been working out of the Archives’ offices as a political appointee representing the White House. Byron has often described himself as a mentee of Hugh Hewitt, an ardent pro-Trump commentator who preceded Bryon as head of the Nixon Foundation and who now sits on its board. (The Nixon Foundation and the Archives have occasionally been in conflict with each other, which often happens with presidential foundations and the government agency that oversees presidential libraries, according to an Archives source.)

Speculation at the Archives regarding the next head archivist has focused on Hewitt and two other candidates: John Solomon, a far-right journalist known for reporting and promoting false claims about Joe Biden’s connections to Ukraine in 2019, and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a former senior director of intelligence at the National Security Council in the early days of the Trump administration, who was hired by then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn (before Flynn was fired) and later ousted by H.R. McMaster, Flynn’s successor.

Trump clashed with the National Archives after leaving office in 2021 with a slew of government documents, many highly classified. Trump refused efforts by the Archives to retrieve the material, prompting the Justice Department to subpoena for the missing documents. Trump allegedly then had staffers at his Mar-a-Lago residence hide boxes of classified documents from FBI investigators. And he allegedly ordered an aide to delete security camera footage of boxes being moved in a bid to hide evidence from a grand jury. Trump was also charged with violating the Espionage Act by showing classified material to visitors who lacked security clearances.

Trump, who has maintained without evidence that he declassified all the material he removed from the White House, avoided trial after Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, threw out the case based on the claim that Special Counsel Jack Smith, who brought the charges, had not been properly appointed.

This makes the Archives a target for the revenge-a-thon Trump’s administration is mounting.

Under federal law, the chief archivist must “be appointed without regard to political affiliations and solely on the basis of the professional qualifications required to perform the duties and responsibilities of the office.” Trump, though, may have other qualifications in mind. With the archivist appointment, he not only will be able to extract payback; he will be able to control the government agency that helps shape American history.

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Trump Administration Moves to Protect Businesses Accused of Anti-Trans Discrimination

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has begun filing motions to dismiss court cases the agency brought against businesses accused of discriminating against transgender and nonbinary employees.

Federal court records show the EEOC filed to dismiss four cases related to gender identity late this week. Multiple EEOC workers, who spoke to Mother Jones on the condition of anonymity, say agency staff have been instructed not to investigate current or future complaints regarding gender identity.

There are at least seven EEOC cases about gender identity and sexual orientation discrimination pending in the federal court system. The EEOC received more than 3,000 charges alleging discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity in fiscal year 2023, the most recent year for which data is available.

On Friday, the EEOC asked a judge in the Western District of New York to dismiss a case in which a claimant said they were described as an “it” and called a “transformer” by their manager at a Holiday Inn Express. The employee reported the alleged harassment, but were told by hotel management they weren’t a “good fit” for the housekeeping role, and subsequently received notice that their employment was terminated, the original complaint said. The motion to dismiss indicates “recent Administration policy changes” as reasoning.

The EEOC also sought dismissal on Friday of a lawsuit in which a group of transgender Wendy’s employees claimed they were on the receiving end of “pervasive sexual harassment including repeatedly subjecting the transgender employees to misgendering, graphic sexual comments, unequal access to bathrooms, intrusive questions, and degrading conduct based on gender identity.” Subsequently, some of the transgender employees reported seeing their hours reduced or were terminated.

In a third case—regarding a Lush cosmetics store manager allegedly telling a transgender employee he wanted to have sex with a trans person, and texting a nonbinary employee about sexual acts—the EEOC filed a stipulation to dismiss on Friday. Lush had failed to adequately investigate the harassment, the original EEOC complaint said, causing at least two employees to quit.

On Thursday, the EEOC asked a judge in Alabama to dismiss a discrimination case in which a nonbinary individual alleged they were fired from a Home2 Suites hotelfor not conforming to male gender stereotypes. After seeing the employee with pink nail polish and capri pants, a manager wanted the employee “hidden” due to their appearance, the complaint said. Shortly after, the employee was terminated. The motion cites President Donald Trump’s executive order on “Gender Ideology Extremism” as a basis.

A remaining case, in which a motion to dismiss has not yet been filed, regards a transgender employee at a Culver’s restaurant in Michigan who alleged he was purposely misgendered, dead-named, and asked whether he had undergone gender-reassignment surgery. After the employee reported the harassment, he was fired.

While in alignment with President Donald Trump’s executive order on “gender ideology extremism,” the motions to dismiss are at odds with a recent Supreme Court decision authored by Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee. In the 2020 case, Bostock v. Clayton County, a 6-3 majority concluded that firing an employee based on their sexuality or gender identity was a violation of existing sex-based discrimination protections in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

“If someone says, ‘I’m not going to hire you because you’re gay,’ or ‘I’m not going to hire you because you’re a transgender individual’—that’s unlawful now and the Supreme Court held it,” says Brian Wolfman, a Georgetown University Law Center professor who won a sex-based employment discrimination case in front of the Supreme Court last year.

But even if a court eventually overrules Trump’s executive order on “gender ideology,” the individuals who filed EEOC complaints based on claims related to their gender identity may not be able to seek future recourse: Dismissals with prejudice are final judgements. Theoretically, a judge could refuse to grant the motions to dismiss, or personal attorneys for the plaintiffs may be able to intervene and represent clients in the EEOC’s absence. But the former scenario isn’t regularly seen, and the latter is likely unfeasible for vulnerable claimants who lack funds to hire private counsel.

“To go through with what was likely a multi-year investigation, and then to finally feel safe that the EEOC is going to file the case, and vindicate your rights, and then to just get the rug pulled out of you—it’s fucking awful,” says an EEOC staffer who asked to remain anonymous to avoid career repercussions.

The motions to dismiss follow earlier instructions from the commission, now led by Trump-appointed Acting Chair Andrea Lucas, to pause investigations into new and existing complaints based on charges of discrimination involvingsexual orientation and gender identity.

Employees are scared of what the administration will change next at EEOC. “As a federal employee, this has definitely caused me a lot of sleepless nights,” one EEOC staffer says. “I wake up every morning, and think, ‘What the fuck is it gonna be today?'”

“We’re here trying to help people who have been discriminated against and disadvantaged,” affirms another EEOC employee. The new administration’s guidance to dismiss litigations based on a claimant’s transgender status “is discriminatory and directly violates the agency’s core mission.”

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Trump’s White Nationalist Agenda, Explained

The Trump administration doesn’t have a policy plan for America, but it does have an ideology: white nationalism.

That’s what’s driving the barrage of executive orders, shutdowns, and freezes currently wreaking havoc in America. Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes explains why it’s important to know the difference between white supremacy and white nationalism.

For years, Trump has surrounded himself with right wing ideologues like Stephen Miller, whose penchant for citing white nationalist websites in policy discussion was uncovered during Trump’s first term. Now, America is seeing the impact of the belief in a zero-sum game. “For one group to win, others must lose,” Hayes concludes in an interview with Eric K. Ward, executive vice president of Race Forward, a racial justice non-profit.

“This administration has no solution,”Ward explains. “In the meantime, what they seek to do is distract us,” Ward explains.

Follow @garrisonh and Mother Jones for more coverage on the rise of white nationalism in America.

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Kash Patel Failed to Disclose Companies Involved in a Million-Dollar Land Deal

Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s pick to head the FBI, failed to divulge an important set of corporate ties on the financial disclosure form and questionnaire he was required to fill out as part of his Senate confirmation process.

These connections involve a land purchase he made in Virginia with a friend through a chain of limited liability corporations in which Patel held an interest. Patel’s filings acknowledge his ownership of the property, but the lack of disclosure of these LLCs obscures the partnership he formed when acquiring this undeveloped lot.

Here’s what happened. On November 1, 2021, Patel registered a company called Skeleton Coast in Nevada. That same day another LLC named Dons of Marbury was created in Nevada, with two officers—Patel’s Skeleton Coast and a Virginia-based firm, NextGen Building & Management LLC.

NextGen Building is a real estate development company founded by realtor Jordan Shahin, a friend of Patel who plays with him on an ice hockey team called the Dons that competes in a Washington, DC, league. According to a recent Washington Examiner article on Patel’s hockey hobby, Shahin has “grown close” to Patel in recent years.

Patel and Shahin registered two other LLCs in Nevada on November 1, 2021, according to Nevada state business records: Monarchs of Marbury LLC and Marbury Empires LLC. For each company, two officers were listed: Patel’s Skeleton Coast and Shahin’s NextGen Building.

Several months later, on March 7, 2022, Marbury Empires purchased a 3.64-acre vacant lot in Chantilly, Virginia, for $550,000, according to Loudon County property records. The land abuts a development named Marbury Estates. A year earlier it had been listed for sale for $850,000, according to Zillow. (The sellers were two companies, Bethany LLC and 931 Bonnie Brae LLC. Their owners are not publicly known.)

Eight months after Marbury Empires LLC bought this property, Patel and Shahin changed the officers of this company, removing Skeleton Coast and NextGen Building and replacing them with the Dons of Marbury LLC as the sole officer. This placed a layer of corporate ownership between the companies for which Patel and Shahin were publicly identified as officers and the LLC that purchased the Virginia property.

In April 2023, the undeveloped lot, still owned by Marbury Empires LLC, was listed for sale for $1,095,000—about twice what Patel and Shahin had paid for it. Two months later, it was taken off the market. This past October it was again listed for sale, this time for $1.8 million. As of Friday, the listing remained active.

On the questionnaire that Patel filled out for the Senate Judiciary Committee, he disclosed he was a managing member of Skeleton Coast and noted that his equity interest in this LLC was $773,357. He did not disclose his interest in Dons of Marbury, Monarchs of Marbury, or Marbury Empires.

On his financial disclosure form, he likewise recorded his position as an officer of Skeleton Coast, but on this document he said the LLC had no value (contradicting his Senate questionnaire). He did report on this form that he owned undeveloped land in Chantilly worth between $500,001 and $1 million dollars. He did not disclose his ties to any of the Marbury LLCs.

The financial disclosure form Patel filled out required him to report “all positions as an officer, director, trustee, general partner, proprietor, representative, employee, or consultant.” And the Senate questionnaire instructed him to list all “corporations, companies, or other enterprises [and] partnerships…with which you have been affiliated as an officer, director, partner, proprietor, or employee since graduation from college.” Patel appears to have had a controlling or significant interest in the LLC that purchased the Chantilly land through two other LLCs he set up, yet he did not disclose two of these three firms.

Because the rules for financial disclosures can provide wiggle room, it’s unclear if Patel violated any in not revealing the LLCs that he and Shahin used to purchase this land. But for a national security position, it’s important that all significant financial relationships be revealed. And Patel kept these interactions hidden.

Patel and a spokesperson for Patel did not respond to queries about this land deal and the LLCs he did not disclose. Shahin did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The missing LLCs are not the only problem with Patel’s disclosures. Investigative journalist Roger Sollenberger revealed this week that Patel had failed to acknowledge his financial ties to two companies connected to a specialist in off-shore banking. And Patel did not file his financial disclosure statement until two days after the Senate Judiciary Committee held his confirmation hearing. That meant senators at this session could not ask him about any of the questions his disclosures (or lack thereof) have raised. This includes questions abouta payment from a Kremlin-linked source, Patel’s stake in a Chinese manufacturing firm, and money he received for “consulting” work for Qatar that he has not publicly explained.

On Thursday—after Republicans on the committee voted to approve his nomination and send it to the Senate floor—Senate Democrats sent Patel a list of queries. Several referred to unresolved matters related to his disclosures. One concerned the story first reported by Mother Jones that Patel received $25,000 from a Ukrainian-Russian-American filmmaker who has worked for a propaganda operation funded by Vladimir Putin. None of the questions related to Patel’s partnership with Shahin and the LLCs he did not mention.

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Another Lead Prosecutor in Eric Adams’ Corruption Case Resigned. Read His Stunning Letter.

On Friday, Hagan Scotten became the seventh federal prosecutor assigned to New York Mayor Eric Adams’ corruption case to resign, after he refused the Justice Department’s order to dismiss the case.

“I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion,” Scotten wrote in a fiery, letter obtained by the New York Times. “But it was never going to be me.”

Scotten’s departure follows similar acts of extraordinary defiance this week after six senior Justice Department officials refused to comply with Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove’s demand to dismiss the case. That included US Attorney Danielle Sassoon, who wrote an eight-page letter that significantly questioned the government’s standing. Together, the resignations marked the most high-profile repudiation of President Donald Trump’s influence over the Justice Department.

In September 2024, after months of reports of suspicious luxury travel to Turkey, Adams was charged with bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy, and soliciting campaign contributions from foreign nationals. And for a moment, the indictment appeared to be the end of Adams’ political career. But since the November election, Adams has brazenly cozied up to Trump, who, in turn, publicly signaled that he was considering a pardon for the embattled mayor.

The kowtowing has only continued. On Thursday, after meeting US Border Czar Tom Homan, the New York mayor promised to reopen Rikers Island’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement office.

So will Adams’ case ever secure a prosecutor willing to do the Justice Department’s bidding? According to Reuters, Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove pressured the remaining prosecutors to decide amongst themselves who would sign the motion during a meeting on Friday.

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“Elon Musk Is a Walking Conflict of Interest”

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

Elon Musk is serving as President Donald Trump’s hatchetman, slashing government spending as part of the administration’s efforts to end federal support for everything from dying babies in warzones and Americans displaced by disasters to US schools and startups working to slash energy bills for rural farmers and grocers.

As the world’s richest man pitches himself as the savior of the American taxpayer, the companies he runs are raking in more federal dollars.

This past Sunday, Tesla finalized a deal to sell 430 megawatts of batteries to Genera, the private company that now operates Puerto Rico’s power plants, for $767 million. The contract, first brokered in October before the election, will be “fully financed with federal funds,” according to a press release.

On Monday, SpaceX netted another $7.5 million supplemental contract with NASA, bringing the total value of that particular deal with Musk’s private rocket firm to $38 million. That’s on top of the more than $4 billion NASA is already paying SpaceX.

“Over and over again, he’s just involved in governmental actions that directly and substantially impact his own financial wellbeing.”

Appearing on television alongside the president in the Oval Office on Tuesday, a defiant Musk dismissed concerns over any conflicts of interest, insisting he had little to do with contracts brokered by the companies where he serves as chief executive.

“You have to look at the individual contract,” Musk told reporters. “First of all, I’m not filing the contract. It’s people at SpaceX…and I like to say if you see any contract where it was awarded to SpaceX and it wasn’t by far the best value for the taxpayer, let me know—because every one of them was.”

On Thursday, the State Department backed away from plans to spend $400 million on armored Tesla vehicles, after the proposal was revealed on social media and reported by the New York Times. The procurement forecast did not specify which Tesla model would be purchased, but the Times speculated the stainless-steel Cybertruck “would be the most suitable vehicle,” despite questions about its safety.

All seven of Musk’s companies—which include X (formerly Twitter), xAI (a rival to OpenAI), Neuralink (a brain implant startup), Starlink (satellite internet service) and the Boring Company (a tunnel drilling firm), in addition to Tesla and SpaceX—have netted a combined $20 billion in US government contracts and subsidies, according to the Financial Times.

“Elon Musk is a walking conflict of interest,” Craig Holman, the government affairs lobbyist at the consumer watchdog Public Citizen, told me by phone on Thursday. “Over and over again, he’s just involved in governmental actions that directly and substantially impact his own financial wellbeing.”

The federal code known as 18 USC 208 “prohibits an executive branch employee from participating personally and substantially in a particular Government matter that will affect his own financial interests, as well as the financial interests of certain individuals with whom he has ties outside the Government,” according to the US Office of Government Ethics.

In theory, that “should” apply to Musk, Holman said. But Trump can easily issue a waiver exempting Musk from complying with the rules as a so-called special government employee.

Lawmakers have considered tightening federal ethics rules on special government employees in the past, but those were “not serious efforts,” Holman said.

“We haven’t seen this type of abuse until now,” he said.

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RFK Jr. Is Already Taking Aim at Antidepressants

Hours after being confirmed as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. issued a statement that laid out sweeping plans for his first 100 days in office. Chief among his goals, he wrote, was to combat what he called a “growing health crisis” of chronic disease. The document called for the federal government to investigate the “root causes” of a broad range of conditions, including autism, ADHD, asthma, obesity, multiple sclerosis, and psoriasis. Conspicuously absent was any explicit mention of childhood vaccines, which Kennedy has long railed against as the head of the anti-vaccine advocacy group Children’s Health Defense.

But the document did zero in on another one of his fixations: a class of widely prescribed drugs that treat depression, anxiety, and mood disorders. The government, he said, would “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, [and] mood stabilizers.”

Kennedy has repeatedly railed against what he sees as rampant overprescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, commonly known as SSRIs, which treat depression and anxiety and include medications like Prozac and Zoloft. As with his previous assertions about vaccines, many of his statements about these drugs are not backed by science. In a 2023 livestream on X with Elon Musk, he claimed that “tremendous circumstantial evidence” suggested that people taking antidepressants were more likely to commit school shootings. (Actually, most school shooters were not taking those drugs, evidence shows.) Kennedy has also called people who take SSRIs addicts—and then tried to claim he didn’t during his confirmation hearings.

When government researchers follow Kennedy’s orders to study SSRIs, they’ll find reams of research, including long-term studies, that have found that the drugs are safe and non-addictive. That’s good news for the 13 percent of American adults who use SSRIs to treat depression and anxiety. In addition to this well-documented track record of safety, manufacturers have closely monitored adverse reactions to the drugs in children and teens. The Food and Drug Administration already requires drug manufacturers to include warnings in packaging because of some evidence that SSRIs can cause a temporary increase in suicidal thoughts in pediatric patients (though evidence on this point is mixed).

So despite this evidence, what options does Kennedy offer in response to the supposed overprescription of and addiction to SSRIs? In a podcast appearance last July, Kennedy said he planned to dedicate money generated from a sales tax on cannabis products to “creating wellness farms—drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country.” He added, “I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need—three or four years if they need it—to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities.” The farm residents would grow their own organic food because, he suggested, many of their underlying problems could be “food-related.”

In advance of Kennedy’s confirmation, 15,000 physicians signed an open letter opposing his appointment; the letter specifically mentioned his false claims “linking school shootings to antidepressants.” During the confirmation hearings, Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) said Kennedy’s statements about antidepressants “reinforce the stigma that people who experience mental health [conditions]…face every single day.” Smith said she was “very concerned that this is another example of your record of sharing false and misleading information that actually really hurts people.”

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Trump’s “Iron Dome” Looks Like Another Payday for Elon Musk

When I first reported on President Donald Trump’s promise to “BUILD A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD,” an expert summed up the idea as “the insane ramblings of a senile old person.” But, with Trump in office, the “Iron Dome for America” plan is seemingly happening—and the project’s benefits for some of the most powerful people in the world are coming into focus.

In late January, Trump announced details for the Dome. A land-based missile-interceptor system—like the one Israel has—would not be possible to build for a country the size of the United States. Instead, military commentators coalesced around another plan: build a cloud of “satellite missile interceptors” similar to former President Ronald Reagan’s ill-fated 1980s “Star Wars” proposal.

In turn, the US Missile Defense Agency asked defense companies on January 31 to pitch space-based sensors and interceptors that could detect and defeat “advanced aerial threats” from low-space orbit. That means the proposed Iron Dome would almost certainly require thousands of satellites for putting interceptor weapons in space.

The company that currently dominates the market for such equipment? Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

“SpaceX is the only company that currently has the capacity to launch that many things,” Dr. Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists told Mother Jones. “They’re such a critical resource at this point that…if you’re going to launch a lot of things, SpaceX is going to be in the mix.”

There are—according to astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, who maintains a count of pretty much everything orbiting this planet—just over 11,000 working satellites in orbit. 6998 of them are Starlink satellites. That means 62 percent of all working satellites orbiting this planet belong to a company started byElon Musk, a drastic increase from only 5 years ago. More critically: SpaceX has the necessary launch capacity to send thousands of load-bearing satellites into orbit. They already handle the majority of NASA’s launches, for billions of dollars each year.

“So, yeah, they’d make a ton of money,” Grego said. “And companies building these interceptors would make a ton of money.”

A paper published in February by the National Security Space Association—a military-industrial think tank—highlights this further: though it might not be capable of efficiently stopping intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), a satellite missile-interceptor system like the proposed American Iron Dome cloud would be uniquely capable of getting Elon Musk paid.

NSSA’s Chris Williams estimated that an Iron Dome for America would require about 1,500 “space-based interceptor” satellites in low-earth orbit. This, he said, would only be possible because “the advent of low-cost launch, enabled by SpaceX, significantly reduces the anticipated cost.”

Todd Harrison of the American Enterprise Institute put the likely cost at somewhere between $11 and $27 billion for such a system—and pointed out that despite all that money, the system would only be able to intercept up to two rockets at a time. (For context, two is a small number. The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation estimates that China has over 100 ICBMS, Russia has over 300, and the US has over 400.)

“You need something like three interceptors to have a pretty good chance of taking down one incoming ICBM,” said John Erath, CACNP’s Policy Director. “So the numbers add up quickly, and the math isn’t good.”

While technology has improved since Reagan dreamed of space lasers, Erath said, “that does not necessarily make it easy.”

“You might say that protecting an American city from a nuclear attack is worth billions. That may be correct, but this is the kind of thing that needs to be discussed in Congress before it’s approved,” he added. “If you could even get to where a system like this could be made to work, the costs would be literally astronomical. That needs to be made clear to the taxpayers, who would be ultimately paying the bills.”

Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, said many missile-shield plans have come and gone since the first anti-ballistic missile system was proposed by Soviet scientists in the early 1960s. But outside of spatially limited cases like Israel’s, he’s never seen missile shield technology make anyone safer.

“Things are very different in the nuclear context,” he said. In practice, building elaborate missile shield systems might just encourage other countries to build more missiles. During the Cold War, he explained, the Soviet Union deployed a ground-based missile defense system around Moscow. And rather than deterring tensions, it inflamed them. “[The United States] knew there was a missile defense,” he said, so “they ended up allocating, I think, 60 warheads against Moscow.” (Now, Russian spokespeople are calling the American Iron Dome plan an attempt to turn space into “an arena of armed confrontation.”)

Grego, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, called the re-emergent idea a “fantasy,” more a branding attempt than a useful proposition.

“Invoking Iron Dome is just marketing, trying to manufacture credibility for something that has never worked,” she said. Instead of wasting money on the unachievable, she said, US efforts would be better spent on nuclear disarmament—something Trump threw his support behind this week. But paying companies like SpaceX to create an “American Iron Dome,” Grego argued, would have the opposite of that effect.

“Missile defenses are not a useful or long-term strategy for keeping the US safe from nuclear weapons,” she said.

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Trump Prepares to Wipe Out Years of Progress on Gun Violence

By the time Joe Biden became president in January 2021, guns were the top killer of children and teens in America, overtaking car crashes and cancer as the leading cause of death. As that trend continued, the Biden White House responded with gun safety policies to enforce existing laws and bolster gun-violence prevention programs. In June 2022, following mass shootings at a grocery store in Buffalo, NY, and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, Congress passed gun legislation for the first time in three decades. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act strengthened background checks for some gun buyers and prohibitions for domestic abusers, and it dedicated about $15 billion for states to build mental health and violence intervention programs. The Biden White House later established the Office of Gun Violence Prevention and an initiative to help states implement “red flag” laws that allow for removing guns from troubled people who pose a danger to themselves or others.

These policies at a broad level have coincided with a reduction in gun violence nationally: By 2024, shooting homicides overall were in steady decline throughout the country. Mass shootings also declined, both by conservative and broader measures of the problem.

Now, President Donald Trump has moved quickly to undo the progress made with gun safety policies. He shut down the Office of Gun Violence Prevention immediately after taking office. And on Feb. 7, he signed an executive order directing US Attorney General Pam Bondi to “examine all orders, regulations, guidance, plans, international agreements, and other actions of executive departments and agencies” from Biden’s term, to assess whether those “infringe on the Second Amendment rights” of Americans. Within 30 days, Bondi is to give Trump “a plan of action.”

Trump made clear during his 2024 campaign what that plan is likely to do. At the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in Dallas last May, he vowed to “roll back every Biden attack on the Second Amendment.”

Areas at risk could include efforts to combat the emerging danger from untraceable firearms that are made from kits or using 3-D printers, known as “ghost guns.” Trump has a history from his first term in office of undermining regulation of these weapons. When Biden became president, crime involving ghost guns was skyrocketing. Biden moved to make such firearms subject to serial numbers and background checks, and later established an ATF task force to focus on the problem. (A gun industry-backed challenge to Biden’s ghost gun policy is currently at the Supreme Court.) By 2023, crimes using ghost guns began declining nationally.

The problem of ghost guns came back into stark view in December, when a disgruntled 26-year-old man allegedly used one to execute UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a street in New York City. That attack apparently was the first time a ghost gun was used for a high-profile assassination.

Trump’s supporters in the gun industry now anticipate a big political payoff.

Red flag laws, which have strong bipartisan support among voters and spread to nearly half of all states in recent years, are also vulnerable under Trump. In early 2024, then-Vice President Kamala Harris announced a new center based at Johns Hopkins University to provide technical and training support to states implementing the laws, an initiative funded with a grant from the US Justice Department. Studies in California and elsewhere have shown that these laws— which allow a civil court judge to remove guns temporarily based on evidence that a person poses a threat—are effective for preventing suicide and mass shootings.

Trump in fact openly supported red flag laws following a spate of gun massacres in summer 2019. But in 2022, he blasted the bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which provided states with funding for red flag laws, painting it as a nefarious gun grab by “Radical Left Democrats” and “RINO” senators including Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn.

Demagoguery from Trump and the firearms industry about government “gun grabs” is disconnected from the reality in the United States. There are more than 400 million guns in circulation today, far surpassing the total population. Americans buy more than a million guns every month, and in many states there are few restrictions on doing so. The number of civilian-owned AR-15s—a popular rifle that was designed for maximum killing in war and became a profit center for the industry—has ballooned to well over 20 million. In recent years those became the weapon of choice for mass shooters, too.

Trump’s supporters in the gun industry now anticipate a big political payoff.

“NRA members were instrumental, turning out in record numbers to secure his victory, and he is proving worthy of their votes, faith, and confidence in his first days in office,” NRA CEO Doug Hamlin said in a statement after Trump’s executive order.

The number of civilian-owned AR-15s—a rifle that was designed for maximum killing in war —has ballooned to well over 20 million.

“Gun owners fought hard to elect a president who would take a sledgehammer to Biden’s unconstitutional gun control policies, and today, President Trump proved he’s serious about that fight,” Aidan Johnston, a director for Gun Owners of America, said in a statement. “We hope that this executive order is just the first of many victories reestablishing our Second Amendment rights during the Trump administration.”

Gun safety advocates are sounding the alarm, including those galvanized by the devastating high school massacre that took place seven years ago Friday in Parkland, Florida.

“Trump’s priorities couldn’t be more clear. Spoiler: it’s not protecting kids. Gun deaths finally went down last year, and Trump just moved to undo the rules and laws that helped make that happen,” said Natalie Fall, Executive Director of March For Our Lives, in a statement. “He is going to get Americans killed in his thirst for vengeance and eagerness to please the gun lobby and rally armed extremists. Remember the next time that a mass shooting happens, Trump did everything in his power to enable it, not prevent it.”

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DOGE Website Features Data From a Climate Denial Group With Industry Ties

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

Flanked by Donald Trump in the Oval Office this week, Elon Musk claimed his much-vaunted, but ill-defined Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was providing “maximum transparency” on its blitz through the federal government. Its official website was empty, however—until Wednesday, when it added elements including data from a controversial rightwing think tank recently sued by a climate scientist.

New elements include DOGE’s feed from X, Musk’s social network, and a blank section for savings identified by the agency, promised to be updated “no later than” Valentine’s Day. At the top of the website’s regulations page, DOGE used data published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a libertarian think tank that claims to fight “climate alarmism.”

The CEI’s “unconstitutionality index,” which it started in 2003, compares regulations or rules introduced by government agencies with laws enacted by Congress.

The CEI claims to fight “climate alarmism,” and has long worked to block climate-focused policies, successfully lobbying against the ratification of the international climate treaty the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 as well as the enactment of the 2009 Waxman-Markey bill, which aimed to place a cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

The think tank ran ads to counter Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, claiming in one ad: “The Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker, not thinner…Why are they trying to scare us?” In a second ad, the CEI said carbon dioxide was “essential to life,” adding: “They call it pollution. We call it life.” The campaign incited pushback from a scientist who said his research was misrepresented in the ads.

During Trump’s first term, the organization also successfully pushed him to pull the United States from the 2015 Paris climate treaty. Today, it regularly publishes arguments against the mandatory disclosure of climate-related financial risks and increased efficiency regulations on appliances.

Last January, the CEI lost a lawsuit filed against it by the climate scientist Dr Michael Mann for $1 million in punitive damages.

The think tank has extensive ties to the far-right network formed by the fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch and his late brother David. In 2020, the network provided some $900,000 to CEI, public records show—a number that is likely an underestimate, as it does not include “dark money” contributions which need not be disclosed. CEI also accepted more than $640,000 from the Koch network between 1997 and 2015.

CEI’s other donors have included the nation’s top oil and gas lobbying group, American Petroleum Institute, and the fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil. It is an associate member of ultraconservative State Policy Network, which has also received funding from Koch-linked groups and whose members have fought to pass punitive anti-pipeline protest laws.

The White House and CEI were contacted for comment.

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Poet Aja Monet’s Cure for Loneliness

On the first brisk night of fall in Los Angeles, the self-described surrealist blues poet aja monet emerges onstage at the El Rey Theatre, an art deco movie house turned concert venue, to rapturous applause. Flanked by a double bassist, a saxophonist, a keyboard player, and a drummer, monet stares out in disbelief at the packed room. “I can’t believe y’all came,” she says to the crowd of roughly 500 people, visibly­ humbled.

If poets are often characterized as misanthropes toiling in obsessive solitude, monet instead sees her work as inseparable from the collective experience.

Moments later, she kicks off the show with a poem titled “why my love?” which wends its way through a sumptuous jazz groove. About midway through the song, monet begins to cry out “why” on loop, evoking a distinctly different emotion with each repetition, oscillating from care to frustration to elation. With nary a phone outside a pocket, the room of mostly twentysomethings collectively holds its breath. One woman places her hand over her heart and leaves it there. In that moment, monet transforms into a rock star. As her friend and collaborator V (formerly Eve Ensler) describes it, to see monet perform is to be in the presence of someone “channeling something.”

Only a handful of artists can bring together club kids, businessmen, and librarian types, on a chilly Wednesday no less, to stand reverentially as a poet leads a jazz band in electrifying spoken-word numbers. Fewer still can make a concert feel like a genuinely communal affair—a rare sight in a city that, by design, makes chance encounters and spontaneity difficult to come by. But monet, a New York City native who calls LA home, is uniquely situated to meet our divisive moment.

Monet, 37, draws from the lineage of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s, an era when gifted wordsmiths nurtured one another’s ideas, often performing in tandem with musicians. A poet since her teenage years, monet, who prefers lowercase letters because “they feel more feminine…and have less sharp corners,” won the coveted Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam title at 19—the youngest person at the time to have ever taken that crown. After racking up accolades like the NAACP’s Image Award for her acclaimed poetry collection My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter in 2018, she went on tour to showcase her Grammy-nominated 2023 album, when the poems do what they do, which features a jazz ensemble and several vocalists.

Like much of monet’s work, the album tackles polarizing systemic issues—environmental racism, exploitative labor practices, income inequality—in granular and galvanizing ways. In scintillating poems like “the devil you know,” these verses also explore the psychic barriers that prevent humans from truly accepting, and doling out, love. “Revolution is not a spectator sport,” she proclaims. “It begins with you loving you enough to love me as i am you.”

Another theme in her performance is technology’s all-consuming nature—and how algorithms help shield people from harsh truths by hiding them under filters, photographic and otherwise. One of the most gripping moments of the El Rey show came when monet urged her audience not to use their phones to hide from real experiences and emotions: “Let us not be too precious to be hurt, to have gone through a thing or two.”

Monet urged her audience not to use their phones to hide from real experiences and emotions: “Let us not be too precious to be hurt, to have gone through a thing or two.”

This tender and present approach is likely why monet has won over Gen Z fans. Logan Richardson, the alto saxophonist who tours in monet’s band, notes that monet wasn’t sure what the turnout might be at their Toronto Longboat Hall show in June 2024, given that she’d never been to the city before. “We looked out the window,” Richardson says, “and the line was all the way down the street.” In the past year, monet and her band performed at larger festivals like the Newport Jazz Festival and Montreal International Jazz Festival, thanks in part to her appearance on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series in December 2023. “At times, her words—gentle gut punches to the soul and psyche—had those in the audience whooping in agreement or silently weeping,” an NPR blog post observed.

Sometimes called “a poet of the people,” monet stands out because she counterprograms against the feelings of alienation coursing through our society. Amid a loneliness crisis and the decline of physical third spaces in American life, her work offers a radically different alternative for listeners: communion through grassroots gatherings. (She has dubbed this worldwide tour of her poetry “let’s be offline together.”)

If poets are often characterized as misanthropes toiling in obsessive solitude, monet instead sees her work as inseparable from the collective experience. She is not content just to publish volumes that a niche set of readers consume alone. “Most people think my path in poetry is very untraditional,” she tells me. “I think what was unique for me was that I always saw it as being a part of a community.”

And part of a long tradition. Back during the Black Arts Movement, poets such as Amiri Baraka and Jayne Cortez often performed spoken word pieces alongside inventive musicians and improvisers. (Cortez had her own band, known as the Firespitters.) New York City–based poet Saul Williams, a mentor and friend of monet’s, says that during that era such collaborations became “part of the tradition of Black poets in America,” and poets including Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and the Last Poets were “as revered as ­popular rappers.”

Born well after the movement’s heyday, in 1987, monet came to find resonance in these artists’ words after she began to interrogate her own history. Hailing from Cuban and Jamaican heritage, she was raised by her single mother in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York. Over Ethiopian food in Los Angeles one balmy summer afternoon, I ask monet about her childhood. She replies via a quote that’s long stuck with her: “Coincidence, if traced far back enough, becomes inevitable.” The circumstances of her early life were knotty, she says. She did not wish to elaborate, beyond adding that she went through a litany of events that no person should ever have to experience, causing her to turn within. “That’s what I think developed my strength as a poet,” she says. “How inward I was forced to go because of the things that were outside of my control.”

Monet also threw herself into school, where English class became a balm. “I was very inquisitive about what else was beneath words, and what was beneath what people were saying, and beneath gestures,” she says, biting into a piece of injera. “Language is such a big part of how I have navigated the world, and having to find language for the things that felt unlanguageable.” But save for Langston Hughes, the writers and poets she was introduced to were predominantly white and never fully reverberated. “My heroes were all the people that I was growing up around and speaking to and witnessing,” she says. “So when I saw that they weren’t showing up in the classroom, I was like, ‘Oh, y’all are missing so much about the world.’”

She penned one of her early poems, “Why I Write,” as a teenager. When she read it at a talent show, she felt struck by the audience’s reception. “That was the first time I felt like my teachers looked at me differently and were like, ‘Oh, this kid’s got something,’” she recalls. Monet won the competition. Shortly afterward, she started going to poetry slams and competitions all around the city. She had come home. “I found a whole community in that organization of other young people who are nerdy about poems, like myself,” she says. While monet now rejects the idea of “being scored for your poem,” being exposed to that scene as a young poet was “effective” for her, she says, “if only for the fact that it allowed you to see in real time how people were feeling about what you were saying, and it lets you learn how to read a room.”

She met Williams at Brave New Voices, a youth poetry festival, around 2005. He remembers the then-teenage monet’s work as standing out; she had “an old soul.” Even in the slam poetry era of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Def Poetry Jam was airing on hbo, monet seemed to understand the poetic traditions of earlier decades. “I always heard Sonia Sanchez’s voice in her voice. And June Jordan’s voice in her voice,” Williams says.

Aja Monet performs during 2022 BRIC celebrate Brooklyn at Lena Horne Bandshell at Prospect Park on July 08, 2022 in New York City. Jason Mendez/Getty

Monet started attending weekly salons at the home of Abiodun Oyewole, part of the Last Poets, a collective of poets and musicians whose rhymes were pivotal to how hip-hop evolved. She kept traveling, performing, competing, each time probing the way language could more precisely reflect the “real stuff” going on around her. One of her early poems, for instance, concerned a young man she’d heard about on the news who’d taken his own life.

But words were only part of her mission; in keeping with the slam poetry tradition she came up in, monet sees her poetry and her community organizing work as entwined forces. After stints in Chicago for graduate school and then Paris, in 2015, she moved to Miami and co-founded Smoke Signals Studio, a convening where people could gather, jam, record, plan events, and share music and ideas—an initiative inspired by the salons she attended at Oyewole’s house back in New York. Members of the community would come over to watch A Tribe Called Quest perform on Saturday Night Live or partake in a poetry open mic.

Over the years, comedian Hannibal Buress, author Mahogany L. Browne, musicians Talib Kweli and Yasiin Bey, poet Sanchez, and other cultural luminaries stopped by. Smoke Signals provided resources, such as guides for people to know their rights should ice come to their doorstep unannounced. She also began working with the nonprofit prison abolition group Dream Defenders, which soon led to a 2015 trip to Palestine that “politicized me in a way that there was no going back the same,” as she told the Los Angeles Times’ Image magazine. “I wasn’t going to just go back to trying to be a poet and publish some books.”

She continued her organizing work and kept nurturing relationships with other artists. “Working with [monet], I’ve reintegrated, in a refreshed way, the importance of people in community and grassroots—actual grassroots—­efforts,” Richardson, the alto saxophonist, says. “That is, for me, really the essence of the history of any art that has meaning: the people surrounding that thing and the culture that pushes that.”

After her 1996 play, The Vagina Monologues , became a phenomenon, V launched V-Day, an activist organization dedicated to ending violence against women and girls, which regularly puts on the show. When V decided it was time to pass the torch in 2020, she asked monet, whom she’d met a few years back, if she would put together a new kind of performance. Monet set about sourcing nearly 900 submissions from Black women around the world for the eventual audio play titled voices : a sacred sisterscape. V was floored by how monet reimagined the play. “She’s an amazing combination of this visionary, refuse to play by the rules, refuse to do what everyone expects you to do,” she says of monet. “And she’s one of the best organizers I’ve ever met.”

“She’s an amazing combination of this visionary, refuse to play by the rules, refuse to do what everyone expects you to do.”

Monet’s organizing work in Miami and the simultaneous healing and destructive qualities of water compose the backbone of her forthcoming poetry collection, Florida Water, which will hit shelves in June. When we meet this past summer, monet is agonizing over last-minute edits to the collection while facing another kind of challenging terrain: the dissolution of her former relationship. “The book is going to be far more personal,” she says.

For monet, insulating oneself from the painful realities of life, heartbreak and otherwise, is no way to live. “Hurt was here before we were,” she writes in “unhurt”; “someone you love will eventually disappoint you / maybe even break your heart or hurt your feelings / this will happen / accept it.” This ethos has helped her accept some of her childhood experiences, and it informs how she moves through the world. “We have to implement the sort of structures and support systems in our communities”—like art spaces, she later adds—“that allow us to see our struggles not necessarily as limitations, but as invitations for improvisation, creativity, and inspiration.” As she writes in her poem “castaway,” “the wound teaches us to remember where tomorrow glows.”

Black artists have been doing this for centuries, she notes. “Because of the hardships and the things that we’ve had to overcome, we’ve had to discover and create new pathways that were not there. And that innovation has allowed us to survive, to thrive, and to develop.”

That resilience is more essential than ever. Since the beginning of the pandemic, she says it has become especially difficult for young poets to find a foothold. Organizations like Brave New Voices, the youth poetry festival that monet continues to work with, are, in her view, “not at the scale at which it was when I was growing up, and they’re struggling with numbers post-Covid,” she says. Boosting participation in these international poetry slams, and amassing the funds necessary to do so, faces an uphill challenge in today’s political climate.

Arts organizations around the United States are bracing for potential animosity and budget cuts that a second Trump administration might bring: During his first term, President Donald Trump tried to axe federal arts funding (to no avail). The Heritage Foundation, the architects behind Project 2025, widely thought to be a policy blueprint for Trump’s second administration, has advocated that both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities be “eliminated.”

Young adults have consistently become lonelier over the past 40 years.

Simultaneously, monet has noticed that the young people she often works with feel “extremely lonely, extremely isolated” because of a confluence of factors, not limited to spending more time indoors alone, mental health struggles, and anxiety about the state of the world. Research has shown that younger people are more likely to feel a sense of loneliness compared with their older counterparts right now. According to a review of hundreds of studies, young adults have consistently become lonelier over the past 40 years. A study by Harvard’s Graduate School of Education found that lonely people say they lacked community and meaningful group activities.

Monet’s shows gently invite audience members to participate in a sense of collective connection, whether by galvanizing them to volunteer in their neighborhoods or simply absorb the words and sounds in the room. “It was so sweet to taste the joy of the moment in between the tears of the movement,” a fan who’d attended her LA performance commented on monet’s Instagram feed.

When the poet and her band eventually take their final bow on the fake flower–festooned stage at that show at El Rey, the room feels different, as though the audience had exhaled a collective, contented sigh. By virtue of contemplating and reveling in thoughtful art in a room with others, hundreds of people spill out onto the street, each of them turning over different ideas and ways of being—emerging, perhaps, a little transformed.

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Linda McMahon Just Showed the Senate How Little She Knows About Education

Former professional wrestling exec and billionaire GOP donor Linda McMahon faced tough questioning—and scattered protests—on Thursday during her confirmation hearing to head an Education Department that President Donald Trump is keen on abolishing.

During two-and-a-half hours of questioning (and opining) by senators, McMahon attempted to thread the needle between Trump’s plans to gut the 45-year-old US Department of Educationand federal laws and constitutional guardrails that stand in his (and Elon Musk’s) way.Even as she expressed support for key Trump policies—includingprivate-school voucher programs and bans on trans girls and women from sports—McMahon’s scant experience in education was on display as she misstated, or failed to answer key questions about, federal education law.

McMahon, who was head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, is best known for her role at World Wrestling Entertainment, which she co-founded and ran with her now-estranged husband, Vince. Her experience in education is limited: She earned a teaching certificate in college and was a student teacher for a semester. She served for a year on the Connecticut Board of Education, resigning in 2010 after the Hartford Courant found that she’d claimed an education degree she never obtained. She has spent more than a decade as a trustee of a private Catholic university. She also ran unsuccessfully for the US Senate in 2010 and 2012.

As board chair of theultra-conservative American First Policy Institute, McMahon now oversees a think tank that supports education-related policies including universal school-choice programs, parental review of all school curriculum, and removal of so-called “gender ideology” and “political activism” from coursework. If confirmed, she says she will boost support for technical schools and vocational programs and ban the teaching of critical race theory—all while emphasizing that education policy is best left to states and local school districts.

The Department of Education, which began operating in 1980, now ranks sixth among federal agencies in total spending, accounting for 4 percent of all federal spending in fiscal year 2024. As secretary, McMahon would oversee the distribution of tens of billions of dollars every year to a vast array of federal and state programs, including funding for early childhood education, kids with disabilities, low-income schools, and federal Pell Grants for college students. She would also be tasked with enforcing anti-discrimination laws and investigating schools and universities for alleged civil rights violations, including sexual harassment and racial discrimination.

The department has been one of the early targets of the Trump administration, with the new president calling for its immediate elimination, even as he has acknowledged that only Congress can actually dismantle it. Trump’s executive order on trans-inclusive sports and bathroom policies effectively rewrites Title IX policy. Meanwhile, Musk’s DOGE team has cut nearly $900 million for education research and policy evaluation, and staff in the civil rights and financial aid divisions have been fired en masse.

Between outbursts from protesters at the Senate hearing—most of whom identified themselves as teachers—McMahon did not say whether she supports Trump’s plan to get rid of the department. She vowed that important programs protected by statute, such as the Title I program for high-poverty schools, Pell Grants, and the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, would continue.

McMahon suggested that other federal departments and agencies might be able to oversee key education-related programs.

But she also expressed support for downsizing the department and suggested that other federal departments and agencies might be able to oversee key education-related programs. For example, she said the department’s Office of Civil Rights, which enforces federal anti-discrimination laws including Title VI and Title IX, might be better managed by the Department of Justice. Disabled students might have their funding and protections overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, she suggested.

When pressed on her understanding of federal education law, McMahon came up short. Under questioning by Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin), she stated that schools are obligated to investigate sexual assaults that occur off campus. In fact, under Title IX rules promulgated during Trump’s first term and still in effect, schools are prohibited from investigating off-campus assaults. (It’s worth noting that McMahon, as WWE’s former CEO, is being sued for allegedly tolerating the sexual abuse of children by an employee of their company, a charge she has denied.)

McMahon also floundered when asked about the Obama-era Every Student Succeeds Act, one of the main laws governing K-12 education in the nation’s public schools. She didn’t know the specifics of funding required by another major statute, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. She falsely stated that “private schools aren’t taking federal dollars” (in fact, while private schools don’t directly receive federal funding, most do receive funds through grants).

When asked about choosing between upholding the law—for example, administering education funds already appropriated by Congress—and carrying out Trump’s directives, McMahon said that “the president will not ask me to do anything that is against the law.” She repeatedly asserted that defunding federal educational programs is not the Trump administration’s goal—ignoring Musk’s directive to slash funding, cancel grants, and end contracts.

“I believe the American people spoke loudly in the election last November to say they do want to look at waste, fraud and abuse in our government,” McMahon told the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, suggesting Musk’s budget cuts amount to an “audit.”

The committee will vote on whether to advance McMahon’s nomination after another hearing on February 20.

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JD Vance Used Catholic Theology to Justify Trump’s Immigrant Expulsion. The Pope Said He Was Wrong.

Reprinted by permission of National Catholic Reporter www.ncronline.org.

En route to Marseille, France, to headline a September 2023 migration conference, Pope Francis was speaking to reporters when he offered unsolicited praise for El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz and his strong support of migrants and refugees.

It wasn’t the first time he had singled out the Texas border bishop. “I do not know if he is conservative, or if he is progressive, if he is of the right or of the left, but he is a good pastor,” remarked the pope in a December 2022 interview.

Since the beginning of his papacy in 2013, there’s been a recurring accusation that Francis fails to understand the United States. While he may not regularly break bread with American neoconservatives the way that the past two popes were known to do, it’s an unfair and inaccurate charge to levy against history’s first pope from the Global South.

Francis’s knowledge is informed by regular conversations he has with US prelates who are frequent visitors to Rome and by meetings he convenes with groups like the West/Southwest Industrial Areas Foundation who have met with the pope the last three years for free-ranging conversations on the situation of migrants and US political life.

And to top it off, according to his public calendar, Francis meets every Saturday morning with Chicago-born Cardinal Robert Prevost, who advises the pope on bishops’ appointments around the world. Surely, he receives ample information from the US from these figures.

Given this context, it’s not exactly surprising that following the election of a US president who has pledged to deport millions of undocumented migrants, the pope might have a few things to say.

After all, this is a pontiff who chose to visit the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa on his very first trip outside of Rome following his election as pope to pay tribute to the lives of migrants lost at sea and spotlight the “globalization of indifference” towards their plight.

So this week, on February 11, when the Vatican published a letter from the pope to US bishops warning that Trump’s mass deportation plans would “end badly” and rejecting the administration’s characterization of migrants as criminals, no one should have been shocked by Francis’ concerns.

According to one senior Vatican official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the pope has closely followed the response of US prelates to Trump’s attacks on migrants and he expects them to offer a united front in opposing any mass deportation efforts.

What is novel about this latest papal correspondence, however, is the manner in which the pope directly responded to a recent effort by Vice President JD Vance to use Catholic theology to justify the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, invoked the ancient theological concept of ordo amoris to argue in a Fox News interview and later on social media platform X that “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”

The pope didn’t buy it.

“It’s very shocking to see the pope disavowing what a Catholic vice president has said in an interview.”

“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” Francis wrote in his letter to U.S. bishops. “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

The Vatican-White House exchange is nearly unprecedented in modern history.

Catholic theologian Massimo Faggioli, author of the recently published book From God to Trump: Catholic Crisis and American Politics, told me, “It’s very shocking to see the pope disavowing what a Catholic vice president has said in an interview.”

While culture wars have always raged when it comes to questions of marriage and family, Faggioli said what’s new about this current moment is Vance’s choice to directly use Roman Catholic theology to push the White House’s agenda.

What may have once been a political conflict, has escalated into a theological one.

The eminent Italian church historian Alberto Melloni told me that Francis, in writing this letter to the American bishops, is using a similar tool to Pope Pius XI, when he condemned the Action Française in the 1920s—a nationalist French political movement buttressed by many of the country’s Catholics.

“If Trump believes that right-wing Catholics are a Trumpian Catholic Church, the pope of Rome tells him ‘go ahead, make my day,'” said Melloni of Francis’ letter.

Faggioli concurred with Melloni’s assessment, but offered another parallel: Pope Leo XIII’s 1899 letter, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae (“Witness to our Good Will”), warning US Catholics of the dangers of “Americanism”—particularly expressed through an overzealous attachment to individual liberty.

“Right now this is something similar, but it’s more interesting,” Faggioli said. “Now Pope Francis is basically asking US Catholics to remember what America is about. And that’s an interesting twist of history.”

While Francis—and recent popes—have penned letters addressed to particular bishops’ conferences and countries, the scope of those letters have been markedly different. In 2018, Francis wrote to the Chilean bishops to address the mounting clergy abuse crisis in that country and, in 2024, Francis wrote to Catholics in Nicaragua to express his closeness as they endured religious persecution.

Yet in his latest letter, the pope is expressly concerned with what it means to be Catholic. According to Faggioli, it is an effort to safeguard that identity and ensure that the church’s theology isn’t perverted.

“The pope has ramped up the confrontation,” he said. “And here we have two moral views of the world that are clearly colliding.”

The National Catholic Reporter’s Rome Bureau is made possible in part by the generosity of Joan and Bob McGrath.

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Trump to Put in Top Military Post Podcaster Fired from Space Force for Self-Publishing Book About Marxism

In 2021, Matthew Lohmeier, a lieutenant colonel in the Space Force and former Air Force fighter pilot, self-published Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military. The book, and Lohmeier’s decision to promote it on conservative talk shows, blindsided his superiors. A Space Force general general quickly, and predictably, fired the lieutenant colonel “due to loss of trust and confidence in his ability to lead.”

Now, Lohmeier is set to have far more power than he ever had in uniform. President Donald Trump has picked him to be the Under Secretary of the Air Force, the military branch’s second-highest civilian position.

Like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—who has obsessed over alleged wokeness in the military—Lohmeier’s greatest asset in today’s Republican party is not his service record but his belief that the military is being stabbed in the back by leftist infiltrators. In the eyes of MAGA, he is qualified for a senior military post precisely because he was previously pushed out of it. (Lohmeier did not respond to a request for comment.)

After leaving the Space Force—where he commanded a squadron responsible for detecting ballistic missile launches—Lohmeier was embraced by right-wing politicians. In particular, his cause was taken up by former Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Trump’s now abandoned pick for Attorney General, and Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), who is now the president’s National Security Advisor. Lohmeier made the rounds on right-wing podcasts and started one of his own, where he devoted the first three episodes to a painstaking reconstruction of why he was relieved of command before leaving the military. (In the first episode, he reads the entire complaint he sent to the Air Force Inspector General that he wrote before publishing his book.)

Lohmeier has not proven to be a natural in today’s world of right-wing trolling. On X, where he has posted only a few dozen times, he has fewer than 150 followers. On his podcast, he speaks at the plodding pace of an audiobook reader and gives off the earnestness of the former Mormon missionary he is.

Lohmeier—who served as an executive vice president of STARRS, a group of veterans “standing against CRT/Woke ideology in the military,” does not read as someone eager for a fight—but his decision to risk his career by publishing Irresistible Revolution is less surprising in light of his personal history of rebellion. In 2017, he explained in a four-part series for the talk show “Mormon Stories” that he converted to the Church of Latter-day Saints as a teenager. As an adult, his views diverged as he read more about the so-called Snufferites led by Denver Snuffer, a now-excommunicated Mormon. Around 2015, Lohmeier was excommunicated, too, after church leaders charged him with apostasy for teaching scripture that challenged their authority.

Following his excommunication, Lohmeier continued serving in the Air Force and later became part of the newly formed Space Force. It was his experience in the military in the wake of George Floyd’s murder—when fellow soldiers took up what he saw as a radical racial agenda—that led him to self-publish.

The book he ended up writing is not a good one. But it is useful for understanding both Lohmeier and the wider milieu he swims in—a group of Republicans who think that Marxism has begun a “destructive conquest” of the US military.

Lohmeier’s argument boils down to this logical chain: Critical race theory, which emphasizes system forms of racism, is an intellectual descendant of Marxism; some of the “Diversity and Inclusion” workshops and related material that he says soldiers were exposed to fit with a CRT agenda; therefore, the military and other parts of American society are being taken over by Marxism without many people even realizing it. As he puts in the book’s introduction, “Becoming aware of the Marxist conquest of American society, one will never again look at things in the same way. ”

To support his case, Lohmeier includes an anecdote about seeing a car on his base parking lot with a decal on the rear window that he says read “#BLM…SO BACK THE FUCK OFF.” He then writes of a chaplain at the base who wanted to share a “Race in America” workshop after Floyd was killed. The workshop would have included a discussion of systemic racism. These are galling examples presented of the military being corrupted by Marxism.

Another disturbing sign of extremism for Lohmeier is a policy proposal written during the summer of 2020 by West Point graduates—including multiple valedictorians and a Rhodes Scholar—designed to promote anti-racism at the military academy. (Lohmeier calls it a “manifesto” before labeling the authors, who were no longer cadets but fellow military officers, “merely parrots reciting the same talking points as other ideologically possessed, hand-me-down Marxists”

The details he omits are telling. Lohmeier does not include that the group of people hoping to fix racism at West Point detailed multiple instances of Black cadets at West Point being called the n-word. Nor does he mention that one of the authors, Simone Askew—the first Black woman to be named First Captain, the highest role for a West Point cadet—writes that soon after receiving that honor someone put a picture under her door that had a monkey’s face photoshopped over her own.

Lohmeier, instead, reserves his outrage for the treatment of Chase Standage, a former midshipman at the Naval Academy who faced potential expulsion after his disturbing and violent social media posts came to light. In one tweet, Standage who is white, wrote that Breonna Taylor received “justice” on the day she was killed by police in 2020. In other posts, he suggested delivering “Law and Order from 25,000 ft,” or blowing up fellow Americans with Hellfire missiles. (Standage, who reached a settlement after suing the Naval Academy, was eventually allowed to graduate and report to flight school.)

Lohmeier admits that Standage’s tweets were bad. But in a rare bit of empathy, he argues that the midshipman was caught up in the “social media frenzy” of the moment. Moreover, Lohmeier explains in a form of right-wing therapy speak that Standage was triggered: “The emotional connection Standage experiences in police-related dialogue is the result of his parents’ line of work—both are career Los Angeles Police Department officers.”

The author’s ability to spot Marxism and extremism is called further into question when he criticizes a fellow servicemember for praising a speech delivered by Michael Santiago Render, the rapper better known as Killer Mike, during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.

The speech begins with Killer Mike noting he is the son of an Atlanta police officer and the cousin of someone on the force. The prelude is part of an unmistakable theme running through the eight-minute speech: An argument that racism should be dismantled through peaceful political action—no matter how great the temptation to turn to violence. Render obviously did not mean for his t-shirt, which read “Kill Your Masters,” to be taken literally.

“It is time to beat up prosecutors you don’t like at the voting booth,” Render, the rapper, stressed. He added, “What I can tell you is that if you sit in your homes tonight instead of burning your home to the ground, you will have time to properly plot, plan, strategize and organize and mobilize in an effective way.” Two of the best ways to do that, he explained, were to register for the Census and to exercise one’s “political bully power” in service of “beating up” politicians at the ballot box.

Lohmeier quotes from that section of the speech in his book. But the repeated calls to express outrage at the polls were not necessarily peaceful in the mind of Lohmeier. Instead, the rhetoric could “understandably be interpreted as an incitement to violence,” the potential top Air Force official wrote. He adds ominously that Killer Mike’s call to strategize and organize is repeated several times.

Careful planning, peaceful protest, and voting. If these are the signs of creeping Marxism, then one can see how Lohmeier mistakenly came to believe America’s military was overrun by radicals.

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Does The State Department Want To Spend $400 Million on Elon’s Bad Cars?

Update February 13, 12:32 p.m.: After initial reports, the State Department said it had put plans to buy armored electric vehicles that could have benefited Elon Musk on hold.

The State Department said it could spend $400 million to buy Tesla Cybertrucks and cover them in armor this year, according to public records. This caused an understandable freakout. But the full story is a bit complicated.

As Drop Site News reported, in the late days of the Biden administration, after President Donald Trump won his election, the State Department listed a potential fiscal outlay of $400 million for “Armored Tesla (Procurement Units).” Late Wednesday, the State Department document listing planned vehicle purchases changed the label to remove the brand name. In the most recent version of the document, a secondary $40 million contract—for “Armored EV (Not Sedan)”—is also listed, bizarrely, under the category of “Ice Manufacturing.”

All the weird listings aside, the State Department is, according to available documents, potentially going to buy $400 million in what appears to be Cybertrucks and armor for Cybertrucks—causing a bevy of potential conflicts of interest. As Gizmodo notes, that does not mean the contract has yet been awarded.

Musk said he was unaware of the potential contract late Wednesday. “I’m pretty sure Tesla isn’t getting $400m,” he wrote. “No one mentioned it to me, at least.”

Musk, whose businesses have already received $13 billion in federal contracts over the past five years, spent $250 million to elect Donald Trump. He is also now the head of a government-axing initiative called the Department of Government Efficiency. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has said the billionaire’s involvement in government—as a major government contractor himself—shouldn’t worry anyone: He will essentially monitor his own conflicts of interest.

If the point of having armored vehicles is to keep State Department workers safe, then the potential choice of Tesla raises some questions. As my colleagues have reported, Telsas are not particularly safe cars. One study shows they are 17 times more deadly than the infamously-combustible Ford Pinto, and are known to rust quickly, lock drivers inside their cars, struggle in snowy conditions, and get stuck in the mud.

Some portion of that $400 million contract, as the New York Times reported, is likely destined for companies like Utah’s Armormax, which “installs bulletproof glass and other equipment to convert the Cybertruck passenger compartment into a ‘cocoon’ that protects occupants,” according to the Times.

However, it’s also not clear how well the Tesla Cybertruck performs in conflict zones. One Chechen warlord, who installed a machine gun on his Cybertruck and said he’d send it into battle in Ukraine back in 2022, was skewered online for retrofitting his truck into an “effectively useless” military vehicle.

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Chaos, Harassment, and Unpaid Bills: Inside Elon Musk’s War on USAID

Early in the morning of January 29, a few dozen US government employees and their families, clutching pets, small children, and whatever they could fit in a carry-on, left their homes in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and began an exhausting evacuation—by van, boat, and two planes—back to the United States.

Staffers at the mission had spent the first week of the Trump administration grappling with a series of confusing and debilitating new directives from Washington. They struggled to get answers to basic questions, like how to wind down programs they had been ordered to stop, and what kinds of work, if any, they were allowed to pay for. But the USAID workers in Kinshasa now had more pressing issues. The previous afternoon, demonstrators had attacked embassies in the city, and overrun the home of a USAID employee. Staff had been given an hour to pack their things.

When they landed at Dulles International Airport 48 hours later, State Department and USAID employees did their best to make the arrivals feel welcome. People were on hand with food, clean clothes, and balloons. But while the evacuees spent the weekend recovering at a Marriott near the airport, the message from the highest levels of the government was far less inviting. Staffers who had left almost all of their possessions behind and were scrambling to find housing and schools for their kids followed the news in horror, as Elon Musk bragged about “feeding USAID into the wood chipper” and called the agency’s civil servants “radical-left Marxists who hate America.”

“We’ve given up everything to serve our country overseas,” one evacuated USAID employee recalled thinking, “and we’re being maligned by the richest asshole in the world.”

Musk’s attacks have been working. While Secretary of State Marco Rubio has offered a softer tone in discussing the agency he now oversees, vowing to save, not destroy, foreign aid, nearly a dozen employees and contractors at USAID—who spoke on condition of anonymity, given the hostility they now face—told Mother Jones that directives from the new administration have already inflicted short- and long-term damage to the government’s ability to administer aid work and development programs. Musk’s threats and conspiracy theories have undermined their mission, while the demands of the Trump-ordered spending freeze have interrupted life-saving projects and shattered the foundations of the entire humanitarian aid industry. Above all, their experiences—working in what they describe as a culture of fear and mass confusion—reflect a world in which the complaints about waste and inefficiency have become self-fulfilling. DOGE was sold as a plan to fix bureaucracy. The story of USAID offers a glimpse of how to break one.

Career employees at USAID are used to dealing with new administrations and adjusting to their priorities. But they were caught off guard by the ferocity with which Trump and Musk moved to undo their work. On his first day in office, the president ordered a 90-day administrative review of all foreign-aid programs, followed not long after by internal instructions to stop work on ongoing projects. Then came DOGE.

While his team gained access to the agency’s books, Musk spent days spreading conspiracy theories about its work. He charged that the USAID was secretly underwriting Politico. He falsely accused the agency of starting the Covid-19 pandemic. In some cases, staffers noted, the White Househas even blamed USAID for programs that were instead run by the State Department.

“I don’t have the adequate words,” a veteran USAID official wrote to their team. “Please just know that your work was good, and it mattered.”

The blitzkrieg, magnified by Musk’s own social media platform, blindsided people in development circles. “We always joke that you come armed to an interagency knife fight with a spreadsheet,” said a former USAID employee who worked, until recently, as an agency contractor. “We’re like, ‘but the data say,’ and ‘the evidence shows.’”

Musk, on the other hand, was lobbing accusations at their work while stripping them of the tools to defend themselves. Much of the agency’s senior leadership had been put on leave early on—ostensibly for “insubordination.” The USAID website has been down for nearly two weeks. Many employees couldn’t even respond to their emails. “We can’t even fact-check,” complained one foreign service officer, who has worked in missions in multiple African countries.

In fact, the administration’s gut renovation has hampered the agency’s ability to prevent actual malfeasance. On Monday, USAID Inspector General Paul Martin released a report indicating, among other things, that reductions in available staff had left the agency “susceptible to inadvertently funding entities or salaries of individuals associated with U.S.-designated terrorist organizations.” Trump fired Martin the next day without explanation. (The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.)

Musk’s stated goal was to destroy the agency, and he came pretty close. Last week, not long after Trump announced that the agency would be absorbed into the State Department, a Trump appointee at USAID—following directions from Rubio’s office—informed staff that all but 290 members of the 14,000-person bureau, including almost all of those stationed abroad, would be placed on administrative leave.

“I don’t have the adequate words,” a veteran USAID official wrote to their team that week, in an email announcing that the agency’s entire Africa Bureau was being reduced to just 12 people across two continents.

“Please just know that your work was good, and it mattered.”

Hours before staffers were set to go on leave on Friday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order, blocking the purge, and restoring thousands of employees to full-time work. But the threat was emblematic of the chaos that the new administration’s efforts have unleashed.

The stereotype of bureaucracies is that it is easy to get lost in them. Indeed, the firehose of acronyms and elongated titles at USAID can sound, to the uninitiated, like a different language entirely. A long set of rules and procedures, though, is easier to make sense of than the absence of any. The reality of the Trump takeover of USAID is that it has produced the sort of mismanagement that his administration promised to roll back.

Tributes are placed beneath the covered seal of USAID at their headquarters in Washington, DC, on February 7, 2025. US President Donald Trump on February 7, 2025 called for USAID to be shuttered, escalating his unprecedented campaign to dismantle the humanitarian agency. Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

DOGE has created a corner of government in which simple things don’t work. Several employees said they had scrambled to put in reimbursement requests before they lost access to the system—but their requests could not be processed because the people whose job it was to approve them were already on administrative leave. In one African country, housing for American workers abroad is running on a generator because funds haven’t come through to pay utilities. One employee in DC told Mother Jones she was locked out of her email without ever being informed she was on leave; even HR couldn’t say for sure what was happening.

The team from Kinshasa was stuck in a particularly cruel loop. Even as the State Department advised US citizens to “safely depart while commercial options are available,” USAID employees received guidance from Washington that in order to ensure compliance with the administration’s new spending dictates, the acting administrator would need to approve a waiver to cover the costs of their evacuation, according to an affidavit filed in federal court on Tuesday; by the time the waiver was approved, “the evacuation had already begun.” Upon arrival in the US, evacuees were instructed to find temporary housing in the DC area, in order to comply with a Trump order mandating that employees work at the office—but their office was closed, and they were about to be put on leave. All the while, they have been paying out of pocket for lodging the government is supposed to foot the bill for.

Staff in other foreign postings, many with pets or small kids, were kept in suspense for days, with no guidance about whether and how they would be asked to relocate if they were placed on leave, and what they might bring. While Rubio had said, prior to the injunction, that the agency’s recall would work to accommodate overseas staffers with extenuating circumstances, the disruptions have already hit workers hard. In an affidavit filed as part of a lawsuit challenging the purge, a pregnant foreign service officer in her third trimester identified as “Beth Doe” explained that the new directives forced her to find a new hospital in a different city, and “left us searching for high schools that will admit our children.”

The threats from the new administration instilled a fear bordering on paranoia. It felt like “psychological warfare,” said one person. Employees described a never-ending campaign of harassing emails, sometimes sent in the middle of the night, asking them to quit. “It’s just like Retire! Retire! Retire! Do this!,” said a USAID staffer who works on food assistance programs. “Oh you missed the ‘Fork in the Road’ email? Well, now we updated it with FAQs that don’t make sense!” When the staffer who was placed on leave without notification finally returned to work, she discovered the “Fork in the Road” emails had kept coming, even while she’d been locked out of the account.

The chaos has been just as debilitating for the work itself.At USAID, the people breaking stuff don’t seem to understand how and what they’re breaking. Take the “stop-work” orders. In aid and development work, staffers emphasize, you can’t just bring a program to an immediate halt; it has to be wound down, and in such a way that it can eventually be restarted at the end of the review period. For both legal and ethical reasons, partners have to be paid and services might have to be maintained. If you are transporting food or medication, it has to go somewhere. At the same time, a USAID employee who had been working at a mission in Africa said, staffers were given contradictory instructions to “not incur any cost whatsoever.”

“There was mass confusion about this in my office, in my bureau, across the agency, about what those guidelines and restrictions were,” another official said. “That also included things like, ‘Okay, so you’re telling us we have a stop work order, but does that mean that partners should fire all staff to help us implement these programs? Or is it just a pause?’”

DOGEhas pushed hard to end programs outright. At least 350 USAID programs have been cancelled permanently, says a USAID worker who has seen the lists. The staffer adds that managers were never given a chance to justify their programs’ existence. Some colleagues questioned whether DOGE simply did a keyword search for terms Musk doesn’t like—a tactic the administration has deployed at other federal agencies. “No one knows what the rhyme or reason is,” the staffer says about the canceled programs.

“I really think they think we just fly around in helicopters dropping packages on villages in the jungle.”

While their marching orders were perplexing, staffers did their best to follow them. “An analogy I’ve heard a few times is nobody wanted to be the tallest blade of grass,” one employee in Washington, DC, said. “Everyone was trying to lay low, thinking, ‘Okay, if we actually go through this review process, and this is in earnest, maybe we can get back online.’ And I think it’s very clear a lot of that was a farce. There is no review process.”

The consequences on the ground from all this chaos have been profound. The New York Times reported last week that children receiving experimental malaria vaccinations were no longer being monitored for adverse side effects. Millions of dollars of agricultural products have been wasting away in bins, and bednets for malaria prevention have been in limbo, presumably stuck in a warehouse somewhere.

Rubio has insisted that USAID’s work will go on, and has announced that he’s granting waivers for food aid and health programs such as PEPFAR, the George W. Bush-era program that has saved millions of lives by supporting HIV prevention and treatment programs. So far those have mostly been empty promises. One problem, agency insiders explained, was that there was a cumbersome process to obtain a waiver, and many of the links in that chain were now missing. Even if a waiver was approved, the work on the ground had to be restarted. In Sudan, where hundreds of thousands of citizens rely on assistance, aid was cut off for weeks, before a pause on World Food Program aid was lifted on Sunday.

To the extent that the Trump administration eventually allows more USAID operations to resume, there will be immense costs. People have to be re-hired. Programs have to be re-started. Supplies have to be repurchased. Relationships have to be repaired.

“Everything that’s happening at the top fundamentally misapprehends how any of this works,” said the staffer who was evacuated from the DRC. “I really think they think we just fly around in helicopters dropping packages on villages in the jungle.”

Bureaucratic delays are deadly. In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, challenging the administration’s authority to pause and redirect congressionally approved funding, eight contractors and nonprofits alleged that $150 million worth of medical supplies were awaiting shipment, and $89 million more health products were already in transit to USAID sites that can’t distribute them. Without logistical support, medications risk expiration, damage, and theft. The complaint stated that “[n]ot delivering these health commodities on time could potentially lead to as many as 566,000 deaths from HIV/AIDS, malaria, and unmet reproductive health needs, including 215,000 pediatric deaths.”

USAID contractor Democracy International had to stop providing medical care to hundreds of children in Bangladesh who were seriously injured in protests last year, according to Tuesday’s lawsuit. Human rights workers that track the persecution of Christians in Burkina Faso face increased risk of violence because Democracy International can no longer provide them food and shelter.

Some contractors whose work involved planning for PEPFAR’s supply chain lost their jobs weeks ago. Instead of working on one of the government’s flagship public health programs, one worker spent nine hours last week at the dentist—scrambling to get any necessary work done before their benefits expired.

It’s not just USAID on the chopping block. An entire line of work is at risk. The government effectively backstops the global development sector, comprising roughly 40 percent of all funding. Now it’s backing out of those commitments, while trying to lay off thousands of people who work in these fields. The administration has “destroyed basically the entire development industry,” as one staffer put it. By refusing to pay outstanding invoices—dating as far back as November—the government is already forcing some companies to shutter operations.

The global development company Chemonics had to furlough 600 employees as it awaits payment on $104 million worth of unpaid invoices from 2024, according to court filings.

“We’re one of the few that have been able to hang on this long,” said the former USAID employee, whose firm was expecting to furlough staff this week because the contractor can no longer make payroll. “The US government is not paying its bills just because some people arbitrarily decided they didn’t want to.”

Like late fees on cable bills, the US government’s nonpayment to contractors will likely lead to higher expenses down the road. “Class action from NGOs, from implementing partners, from staff, from people who have not gotten paid by the government—that is all going to cost massive amounts of taxpayer money,” a current USAID staffer said.

“The 60 years of goodwill that USAID has built around the world is gone. We no longer have that in two and a half weeks.”

Musk and his allies haven’t just blown up existing programs. They have poisoned the well for future ones. By spreading conspiracies about what USAID does, staffers believe the new administration undermined the country’s capacity for development projects for the foreseeable future, and undermined the national-security goals of their work.

USAID isn’t just a charity. It is the government’s mechanism for establishing symbiotic partnerships with nations that can later help us. “The nature of our work was to seek winning situations for both countries,” says one of the many laid-off USAID workers. “It’s through that sort of win-win relationship building that we gain real allyship with countries in the face of national security risks.”

It took decades to build up enough trust with partner countries before their citizens were open to accepting, for example, vaccines for their children.

“The 60 years of goodwill that USAID has built around the world is gone,” said one foreign service officer. “We no longer have that in two and a half weeks.”

In the meantime, USAID employees who are not on leave are still without a place to work. The few dozen employees who showed up at the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown Washington on Monday were turned away by security. USAID didn’t have a lease there anymore, they were informed. Black plastic bags had been draped over agency signage, and the windows inside had been papered over.

The space “will be repurposed for other government needs,” a Government Services Agency spokesperson told Mother Jones, but declined to say what might take its place. But USAID staffers who stuck around on Monday discovered a prospective new tenant was already eyeing the complex. It was an agency better suited to the administration’s relationship with the rest of the world: Customs and Border Protection.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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“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.

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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.”

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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.”

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