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Trump Cabinet Officials Embrace Far-Right Influencer Who Has Praised Fascists

Last week, the Washington Post sparked a media kerfuffle when it reported that talk-show-host-turned-defense secretary Peter Hegseth had invited MAGA provocateur Jack Posobiec to “participate” in Hegseth’s first overseas trip and that this was “triggering alarm among US defense officials worried about the military being dragged into partisan warfare.”

This article and pieces in other outlets noted that Posobiec was a 2020 election denier and a promoter of conspiracy theories who had championed Pizzagate—the bonkers idea that Democrats were running a Satanic pedophile ring from the basement of a Washington, DC, eatery. They reminded readers that last year at a conservative conference, he had proclaimed, “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.”

As it turned out, Posobiec, a podcaster and a senior editor at Human Events, an ultra-right publication, told Politico that he didn’t tag along with Hegseth. Instead, he accepted an invitation from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to travel with him as media to Ukraine for the secretary’s meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

All of this raises a troubling question: Why are Trump cabinet officials reaching out to a right-wing activist who has associated with white nationalists and who has pushed dangerous and debunked conspiracy theories (one Pizzagate believer showed up armed at the restaurant and fired an AR-15 rifle inside)? Moreover, last year, Posobiec published a book that praised fascist leaders who used violence to suppress their opponents and that demonized modern-day progressives as “unhumans,” claiming these diabolical people are waging an “Irregular Communist Revolution” to annihilate American civilization.

In Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), Posobiec and his co-author Joshua Lisec, urged a crusade to wipe out these “unhumans.” The book villified them as “people of anti-civilization” who are “ugly liars who hate and kill.” The book was a hyper-othering of political rivals, loaded with rhetoric that could provoke violence. The “unhumans,” Posobiec and Lisec maintained, were behind the Black Lives Matter movement, in charge of academia, and in control of corporations, the media, and even churches. “They just want an excuse to destroy everything,” they wrote. “They want an excuse to destroy you.”

“Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans. It is time to stop playing by rules they won’t.”

Repeating many assertions of the tinfoil-hat crowd, Posobiec, who was part of MAGA’s fraudulent Stop the Steal movement, and Lisec insisted that the riot at the US Capitol was a “lawfare trap” sprung to “destroy” Donald Trump’s followers and “make them an example to any other Republicans who want to get uppity in the future.” They claimed all was calm on Capitol Hill until guards “fired on the peaceful crowd with nonlethal munitions and flash-bangs.” The “insurrection hoax was used to begin a purge of Trump supporters from the military and from public life,” they wrote. In their eyes, the violent rioters, who injured more than 150 law enforcement officers, were “well-meaning patriots.”

With Unhumans, Posobic and Lisec went beyond the usual Tump-land talking points and hailed the efforts of past fascist dictators, while calling for trampling democracy in orderto vanquish their political enemies. To defeat the “unhumans” (liberals, Democrats, and others of that ilk), the pair contended, the right must be vicious and adopt extreme and underhanded measures. “Our study of history,” they wrote, “has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans. It is time to stop playing by rules they won’t.”

As examples of those who successfully fought against “unhumans,” they cited Francisco Franco, Spain’s fascist tyrant, and Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s fascist despot. These two men each led a murderous and repressive regime that smothered democracy. The Spanish government estimated that 114,000 Spanish civilians disappeared and were presumably killed by Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War and his subsequent 36-year-long dictatorship. Pinochet disappeared and killed thousands during and after the military coup he led in 1973 that overthrew a democratic and socialist government.

In their book, Posobiec and Lisec described Franco, who was backed by Nazi Germany, as “a great man of history.” And they justified the brutality and violence of Pinochet’s regime: “The story of tossing communists out of helicopter hails from Pinochet’s elimination of communism during the mid to late 1970s. Wherever Pinochet was, there was no communism.”

In their subtitle, the authors stated their goal was to “crush” the political opposition—a battle they see as being underway today. For them, Franco and Pinochet are excellent examples of winners in the right’s crusade against the “unhumans” of the left.

In the midst of President Trump’s blitzkrieg against the federal government and his political foes, Trump’s most senior officials are embracing Posobiec. But Hegseth and Bessent are not the first Trumpers to do so. Before the book was published last year and before he became Trump’s running-mate, JD Vance gave a thumbs-up to this McCarthyite paranoia by providing a blurb that the duo used to peddle the book:

In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR [Human Resources], college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans_, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back._

Vance’s recent speech in Munich, in which he was a cheerleader for the AfD, a far-right extremist party with a strong Nazi taint, echoed the sentiments of Posobiec and Lisec’s work.

Other MAGA luminaries have celebrated the book. Steve Bannon wrote a foreword for it. Donald Trump Jr. proclaimed it “teaches us how…to save the West.” Ret. General Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced first national security adviser, declared Unhumans “exposes their battle plans and offers a fifth-generation warfare system to fight back and win.” And Tucker Carlson said of Posobiec that he “sees the big picture and isn’t afraid to describe it.”

When Bessent, Hegseth, Vance, or other Trumpers cozy up to Posobiec, they are legitimizing and boosting a purveyor of falsehoods, a denigrator of democracy, and an agitator who has extolled murderous fascist dictators as role models for the right’s fight against Democrats, progressives, and the left. Put simply, they are endorsing a fan of right-wing political violence.

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Mother Jones

Trump Administration Cuts Off Legal Aid For Youth Facing Deportation

In an email circulated today by the federal Department of the Interior, the Trump administration has issued a stop-work order for organizations providing legal services, funded by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, to unaccompanied minors entering the United States. The order will lead to 25,000 minors losing the legal representation they now have, as well as about a hundred thousand missing out on programs designed to educate them about their rights.

The new order comes little more than a week after the Trump administration rescinded an earlier stop-work order and funding freeze for four programs providing legal services to undocumented immigrants. I previously reported on how this funding freeze was not only an attack on the rights of immigrants, but also on Congress’ “power of the purse”:

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

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

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

That lawsuit, which challenges the Trump administration’s previous attempt to usurp Congress’ constitutional power over how federal funds are spent, is still ongoing. And even though those four programs are restored for now, as I wrote in that previous article, there was no reason to believe Trump wouldn’t attempt something similar in the future—as he now looks to have done.

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Mother Jones

“I’m Suffering:” Holiday Massacre of Federal Workforce Is a Rude Awakening for Rural Westerners

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

A President’s Day weekend swept by fear and grief from the sudden termination of thousands of federal employees in the US Forest Service and Department of Interior left chaos and uncertainty after the latest assault on the federal workforce by the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

For people on the ground in mountain communities, small towns and rural areas, the cuts were nothing short of devastating. They came with no explanation, warning or discernment, and the impact on public land and wildlife, observers say, will be felt for years.

“It’s pretty hard to fathom,” said Claire Thompson, 35, a trail leader who was fired Friday afternoon after eight years with the US Forest Service. “It feels like they’re punishing the people who least deserve it. We have chosen to stay in careers working for so little money. We are literally the boots on the ground, physically working all day.”

“It feels like they’re punishing the people who least deserve it.”

Jobs cut included park rangers and interpreters, National Environmental Policy Act coordinators, endangered species biologists, trail crews, maintenance staff, and wastewater treatment operators.

Thompson and her partner, who was also fired on Friday, were co-leaders of the Wenatchee River Ranger District’s trail crew east of Seattle, Washington. They and their crew spent six months of each year clearing downed trees from hundreds of miles of trails, helping fight wildfires, coordinating volunteer efforts, and assisting with wildfire prevention work, among many other jobs. The Forest Service also fired the team’s mule packer who brought supplies into the wilderness for trail work, a front-country ranger, an office staff member, the rest of the trail crew and all but one of a team of wilderness rangers, according to Thompson.

Official counts of everyone fired across the country are still hazy, as many were still receiving termination emails over the holiday weekend, but early numbers show at least 3,400 people were fired from the Forest Service and about 2,300 people from the Department of Interior, the agency that oversees the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Most of the employees were “probationary,” which meant they had been in their current positions for less than one year. While some were new employees of their agencies, many others, like Thompson and her trail crew, worked for the federal government for years but had recently been promoted to new positions.

“This is super specialized work, and a lot of it is because of the remote nature of it,” Thompson said. “We’re experienced veteran employees. It’s not something you can hire a random contractor to do.”

“These are dedicated career employees who have worked through several administrations.”

A Western biologist who agreed to speak with High Country News on the condition of anonymity because of fears of retribution, said they made more money in the private sector but saw a dream job in the position as a biologist working with fisheries and riparian ecosystems at the Interior Department.

The biologist worked seasonal gigs in the federal government for 12 years before leaving for the private sector and returning to Interior in a permanent role last summer.

They understand agencies reorganize and cut staff when administrations change, but the biologist said these mass firings were indiscriminate—not targeted or thoughtful reductions. “These are dedicated career employees who have worked through several administrations. I worked through the first Trump administration. We’re not partisan,” they said. “We just put our heads down and do our work.”

And adding insult to injury, everyone HCN talked with received the same email stating that they were being fired for performance issues. The email from Forest Service Human Resources Director Deedra Fogle read, “You have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest.” But each person HCN spoke with who was fired also stated their annual reviews were all positive, and some hope to work with unions and attorneys to challenge the terminations.

President Donald Trump repeatedly distanced himself from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 while on the campaign trail, but efforts to slash agencies like the BLM are straight from its playbook. Cuts to recreation employees, however, seem contrary to portions of Trump’s first term when he signed the Great American Outdoors Act that increased support and funding for public lands including deferred maintenance in national parks.

The White House announced the “workforce optimization initiative” on February 11 as part of an executive order to be more efficient and save money. But the jobs they cut, Thompson said, aren’t going to save them much. Thompson, never made more than $22 an hour.

In fact, the Park Service alone contributes $55.6 billion to the national economy but spends only one-fifteenth of 1 percent of the federal budget, said Kristen Brengel, senior vice president of the National Parks Conservation Association. And as people gear up for spring break and summers spent outside, they may well find shuttered and understaffed visitor centers, closed campgrounds, overflowing toilets and impassable trails, she said.

Kate White co-lead the wilderness program on the Wenatchee River Ranger District in Washington. The group maintained 30 backcountry toilets and packed out 1,000 piles of improperly disposed human waste each season in the Enchantment Special Use Permit Area in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, one of the busiest and most fragile areas in the state. They also carried out hundreds of pounds of garbage on their backs, educated visitors, helped with search and rescue, and assisted in wildland firefighting.

The cuts expanded beyond trail crews, rangers, and biologists.

Cody Anderson was the NEPA coordinator and wilderness manager in the Wrangell Ranger District in the Tongass National Forest. He made sure projects followed the law and could get done. He said he worked seasonal jobs with the BLM with “above satisfactory” reviews before landing a permanent job with the Forest Service seven months ago. He was fired Thursday along with six other Forest Service employees in the 2,000-person town of Wrangell, Alaska.

“I’m suffering, and I have a bunch of friends who are suffering,” he said. “But at the end of the day, it’s these wilderness areas that will suffer as well.”

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Mother Jones

Across the US, Protesters Rally Against Donald Trump and Elon Musk

On Monday, thousands of protesters across the country hit the streets to tell Donald Trump and Elon Musk “No kings on Presidents’ Day” in response to the barrage of alarming actions—from legally questionable executive orders to mass firings—taken by the administration since the inauguration.

From California to Florida, demonstrators were seen armed with signs that read “Resist fascism” and “Fight for Democracy,” as they marched against Trump’s agenda. Some braved freezing temperatures.

“I thought it was important to be here on Presidents Day to demonstrate for what America stands for,” 55-year-old Emily Manning, an engineer who was one of nearly a thousand protesters in Boston, told the Associated Press. “American values are not the values of the plutocracy or the limited few rich people.”

Many of the protests were organized by the 50501 Movement, a grassroots organization aimed at mobilizing against “the anti-democratic and illegal actions of the Trump administration and its plutocratic allies.” The group started as a decentralized effort born from a Reddit thread of the same name; it organized a similar set of nationwide protests earlier this month.

A demonstrator holds a poster displaying a prohibited traffic sign reading “Musk DOGE” during a rally to protest President Trump’s policies on Presidents Day Monday, Feb. 17, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Etienne Laurent)

Big crowd at the SF Tesla dealership protesting our unelected overlord. A tiny sign hangs from an upstairs window

Ruth Malone, RN, PhD (@remalone.bsky.social) 2025-02-17T20:31:00.189Z

Shannon Perry, a special education teacher from Centreville, Va., wears a handmaids costume while attending a “No Kings Day” protest on Presidents Day in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Protesters holding a banner and signs march from Union Square to Washington Square Park. (Photo by Ron Adar / SOPA Images/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

People protest as part of the “No Kings Day” protest on Presidents Day in Washington, in support of federal workers and against recent actions by Trump and Elon Musk, Monday, Feb. 17, 2025, by the Capitol in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

People take part in the “No Kings Day” protest on Presidents Day in Washington, Monday, Feb. 17, 2025, by the Capitol in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

February 17, 2025, New York City, New York, United States: Protesters hold a rally and march against U.S. President Donald Trump, the GOP Congress, and ”unelected oligarchs”. (Credit Image: © Michael Nigro/Pacific Press via ZUMA Press Wire)

February 17, 2025, New York City, : Protesters hold a rally and march against U.S. President Donald Trump, the GOP Congress, and ”unelected oligarchs” (Credit Image: © Michael Nigro/Pacific Press via ZUMA Press Wire)

Meanwhile, despite reports of tension, Trump and Musk’s partnership in upending the federal government seems stronger than ever. Last week, the pair sat down for their first joint interview with Fox News‘ Sean Hannity, where Musk compared reactions among Democrats to Trump’s policies to “rabies.”

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Mother Jones

To Win America, Democrats Must Win the Story

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

Politics is a realm of stories. It is through stories that people understand their lives and the world. All good stories have heroes and villains. Whoever defines the story in a political battle usually triumphs, and the more a story is repeated, the greater the likelihood it prevails. Democrats and citizens who care about preserving American democracy must keep this in mind.

In December 2017, the New York Times reported, “Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.” The first season of Donald Trump’s presidency didn’t always play out that way, as he stumbled along—and then came the midterms, a sound rejection of Trumpism; the pandemic that he mismanaged, with lethal consequences; and the 2020 election that he lost and failed, though he tried, to overturn with his criminal conniving and promotion of violence.

In Season 2, Trump has stuck to the script. To get elected last year, he went full demagogue and mounted an extensive disinformation campaign that demonized immigrants and Democrats even more than he had done before. (“They’re eating the dogs…They’re eating the cats.”) He invented enemies—Venezuelan gangs taking over whole cities in Middle America—and vowed to conquer them. And as president once again, he has set up a series of rivals to best, including Mexico, Canada, Panama, and Colombia—as well as migrants, anything woke, the transgender community, anyone involved in past prosecutions that targeted him and his January 6 brownshirts, and, most of all, the US government.

Define the narrative, win the narrative.

At the center of his blitzkrieg has been the assault led by Elon Musk on the executive branch, with the US Agency for International Development and foreign aid the first targets for vanquishing. How the story of this attack is conveyed to the public will determine how it registers—and that will determine whether Trump, with the help of Musk, will succeed in establishing an autocracy that will crush the common good and benefit an American oligarchy. Are Trump and Musk fighting to remake a bloated, corrupt, inefficient, out-of-control bureaucracy and save American taxpayers money? Or are they waging a battle to undermine the one force that can counter the otherwise unchecked power of wealth and safeguard Americans from corporate abuses that threaten their safety, health, security, and well-being, as well as the environment we all share? Define the narrative, win the narrative.

Trump and Musk might have the advantage at the moment. Theirs is a holy war against waste, fraud, and abuse—against anonymous federal workers who are depicted as lazy and dumb yet underhanded and diabolical. Musk insanely has characterized USAID as a “criminal organization” that is part of a nefarious cabal that uses its funds illegally to support leftists, Democrats, the liberal media, academia, and evil election-riggers. The Trump White House decried USAID for spending $47,000 for a “transgender opera in Colombia.” (It didn’t.) And Trump denounced the agency as being run by left-wing “lunatics.”

For Trump and Musk, USAID has been merely the first and most vulnerable casualty of their war on the inept and capricious feds.

It’s a reckless smear campaign against an agency that spends $23 billion—one-third of 1 percent of the federal budget and far less than Musk’s $101 billion proposed compensation package from Tesla—helping millions of people around the world avoid malaria, obtain clean water and health care, build democracies, and develop better economies. The smearers know that the American public is both skeptical and uninformed about US foreign assistance. Americans tend to believe that 25 percent of the US government’s budget is used for foreign aid, while noting it should probably be 10 percent, far higher than the actual level of spending.

For Trump and Musk, USAID has been merely the first and most vulnerable casualty of their war on the inept and capricious feds—which has spread to an assortment of agencies that do crucial work, including the EPA, the IRS, the FAA, the Department of Eeergy, the Department of Education, the National Instituteas of Health and the Centers for Disease Control. A battle against supposed bloat is how they want Americans to see their crusade, and the media are helping them.

Recently the New York Times published a lengthy account on Musk’s “aggressive incursion into the federal government.” (There were six names on the byline.) “Empowered by President Trump, Mr. Musk is waging a largely unchecked war against the federal bureaucracy,” the newspaper declared. It noted his goal was to “reshape the federal work force.” It quoted Trump publicly praising Musk for being “a big cost-cutter.”

The piece did point out that there are extensive and unprecedented potential conflicts of interest for Musk, given the multitude of financial interests he and his companies have related to the federal government. And it quoted historian Doug Brinkley calling Musk’s efforts “a harbinger of the destruction of our basic institutions.” Overall, though, the article cast what’s transpiring in terms favorable for Musk and Trump. Battling the federal bureaucracy and reshaping the workforce to save money probably sounds good to many Americans. No one really likes a bureaucracy, right? It’s faceless, an abstraction. Think Kafka. Disruptors versus nameless red-tape pushers—that’s a characterization that favors the destroyers.

Musk wants to emasculate, if not eradicate, government and create a libertarian dystopia in which modern-day robber barons like him can romp along however they like.

But Trump and Musk are prosecuting a war on institutions that exist to serve and protect the public interest. (They do sometimes fail, can be hampered by fraud, waste, and political influence exerted by powerful interests, and warrant scrutiny and, frequently, reform.) These agencies and departments establish rules and standards to prevent corporations from despoiling the air and water. They establish safety regulations for the railroad business and other transportation industries. (Air traffic controllers!) They make sure foods, medical devices, and drugs are safe. They research remedies for disease and plan to thwart pandemics. They try to keep workplaces safe. They seek to monitor Big Finance and maintain a stable financial system. They protect consumers from being ripped off. They oversee national security. They strive to bolster cybersecurity. They should be monitoring the rise of artificial intelligence and ensuring it is safely and wisely developed and implemented. And they do much more.

Musk wants to do away with most of this. During a public chat on X with Vivek Ramaswamy and two GOP senators, he expounded, “Regulations, basically, should be default gone. Not default there, default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.” He said, “These regulations are added willy-nilly all the time. So we’ve just got to do a wholesale, spring cleaning of regulation and get the government off the backs of everyday Americans so people can get things done.” The man who has amplified racist, antisemitic, far-right, and loony social media posts also blathered, “If the government has millions of regulations holding everyone back, well, it’s not freedom. We’ve got to restore freedom.”

His is not just an effort to cut costs and modernize a bureaucracy—an appealing-sounding task. He wants to emasculate, if not eradicate, government and create a libertarian dystopia in which modern-day robber barons like him can romp along however they like, and the rest of us work and live at their mercy.

What’s up for grabs is the foundation of America. We are fighting over what sort of society this country will be.

That was not the story told by the New York Times. In all its thousands of words, the article did not include Musk’s publicly stated wish to eliminate all regulations or explain his desire to empower the powerful and erase any checks on the elites. Remember the awful derailment in 2023 in East Palestine, Ohio, of a train carrying hazardous materials? Republicans, including JD Vance, then a US senator from that state, blasted the Biden administration for failing the good people of East Palestine. Musk wants to weaken the government’s ability to prevent such accidents. Or to prevent E. coli outbreaks in food. Or to track climate change. Or to develop intelligence on national security risks to the United States. Or to pursue criminals. Or to regulate crypto and other financial interests.

In a recent issue of ny Our Land newsletter, I asked whether Democrats realized they were in a war. In the days since, more of them seem to be getting it and displaying the fierceness and fight required to meet this moment. But as they rush—or speed-walk—to the barricades, they need to be as savvy as Trump and Musk and, without the supersized bully pulpits these two demagogic liars possess, figure out how to out-story the forces of fascistic populism and to convey clearly the aims of Trump and Musk and the true nature and stakes of this fight.

Democrats have been forceful in defending USAID. But they should not allow this conflict to become mainly a clash over foreign aid, an easy matter for Musk and the right to exploit. The war goes far beyond that. What’s up for grabs is the foundation of America. We are fighting over what sort of society this country will be. Trump sees this battle as an entertaining TV show in which he can be the valiant hero, with the richest man in the world as his faithful sidekick, combatting a malignant mass of do-nothing, self-serving, out-of-touch unelected functionaries. By pushing this simple plotline, he seeks to turn the United States into an oligarchic empire that he rules. Those who wish to preserve the nation as a somewhat functioning democracy that often (though hardly always) serves the common good and that applies some checks on the influence and actions of the wealthy and powerful have the arduous task of counterprogramming Trump TV with reality, as ugly and messy as it may be. Whoever succeeds in establishing the story will likely write the ending.

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Mother Jones

CDC Staffers Describe an Increasingly Chaotic Agency as Layoffs Begin

Late last week, the mood at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta was tense. President Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency had called for a massive reduction in the federal workforce, after having savaged the US Agency for International Development just a few weeks before. But at the CDC, a mammoth agency with about 13,000 employees and an annual budget of nearly $9.7 billion, no one seemed to know exactly what was coming. Senior leaders weren’t sure how to prepare their teams for the immediate future, even as they all knew that at least 1,300 layoffs were imminent.

Over the weekend, Mother Jones spoke to five CDC staffers from several parts of the agency at various levels of seniority. These government workers, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, described a professional environment that has felt increasingly chaotic since Trump’s inauguration, with leaders scrambling to interpret and comply with broad executive orders that forbade any mention of diversity, equity, and inclusion. “We can’t do the science and the public health work anymore because we’re so consumed with responding to the executive orders or other mandates and censorship,” said one senior leader. “The current buzzwords right now are efficiency and accountability,” she added, “I cannot imagine a less efficient way of operating.” Another noted, “The feeling in the building is fear.”

One senior leader said that her team of supervisors had been given less than 24 hours to submit a list of names of workers in her center to the Department of Health and Human Services that could potentially be laid off. Those names were required to be sorted into categories organized by how critical their work was—but with only 10 percent of their workers were permitted to be categorized as being essential. The supervisors complied because “we were concerned that if we didn’t designate a top 10 percent we would just lose everybody,” she said. After spending hours engaged in the difficult task of sorting the team they learned the following day that none of their suggestions had been accepted. Those who received layoff notices seemed to be chosen at random. “The list made zero difference,” one of the supervisors said. “And we don’t think it even went up to HHS at all.”

“We can’t do the science and the public health work anymore because we’re so consumed with responding to the executive orders or other mandates and censorship.”

Another staffer shared an email that had come from senior management about the layoffs, expressing sadness about the cuts while encouraging employees to “support one another” through this difficult time.

Meanwhile, the more junior employees were left wondering when, or even if, they would receive an email informing them that they were going to be laid off. “We’re all terrified about what’s happening to our colleagues,” said one. In order to share information with one another, they had taken to using group chats on the encrypted communication platform Signal.

When it came to layoffs, rumors were flying. “I’ve gotten a lot of information about this from Reddit, not from CDC leadership, which feels very telling,” said someone who had worked [can we say for years at CDC or something so as not to us so many “staffer” references.] another staffer. The CDC did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.

Mother Jones obtained a screenshot of a Signal chat in which one employee warned colleagues not to open any email they suspected might be a layoff, because once the email had been read, the recipient would immediately lose access to the “network and campus.” If someone did open the email, they “should respond to it and CC [a] supervisor saying they disagree and are…filing grievance with the action and would like to know the justification.”

Finally, on Friday, the first round of layoffs appeared. But the rollout was disorganized. “I literally found out about [the layoffs] from the news,” one person said. “Like I was getting news alerts on my phone, having family and friends texting me, asking if I still had a job.”

That staffer still has a job, but someone else with whom I talked from the Division of Global Health Protection, does not. At 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, she received an email that she recognized from other reports on Signal as a notice of termination; the subject line was “Read this email immediately.” She had been hired in 2023 through a streamlined process for disabled people, though she had worked as a contractor for CDC for nearly two decades before that. CDC workers hired through that program, called Schedule A, are subject to a two-year probationary period; other employees have only one year of probation. About halfway through her probationary period, she had been told that her work exceeded expectations as part of an evaluation.

When she told her boss that she had received the termination email, the supervisor “was trying to be supportive, but she doesn’t really know what’s going to happen. She said they’re rolling with the punches, but no one’s really fighting back and there’s no firm action to take right now, because we’re at the whims of [President Trump].”

Aside from the implications for their livelihoods and careers, the haphazard nature of the layoffs was concerning to those who spoke to Mother Jones. “We have really highly skilled individuals that have technical specialties that are hard to find and hard to fill,” said one. “The fact that the current administration isn’t making strategic decisions about who to let go and what contracts to end—that is frightening.”

They all expressed dismay about the disruptions the executive orders had caused to their guidance to the public. Shortly after the release of the executive order to cease all work on projects having anything to do with diversity, equity, and inclusion, forbidding even the mere mention of one of those words**,** the CDC paused in publishing its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, its main way of transmitting scientific information to healthcare providers and others. Yet even after the MMWR was restored a week later, staffers said**,** there was widespread confusion about how to interpret the orders. Some of the centers combed through all their public-facing material to scrub any mention of DEI while still keeping much of the other information intact, while others took everything down out of an abundance of caution.

The sudden disruption was especially problematic for the CDC’s partner organizations—thousands of state and local health departments, contractors, and community public health nonprofits that rely on the CDC’s guidance. A screenshot of the platform that one center uses to distribute funding to its partners showed a message saying the site was unavailable due to HHS having “issued a pause” on non-emergency external communications.

Another employee from that same center said that almost all of her meetings with partner organizations had been canceled, leaving her calendar “70 percent empty.” The only external communication that was permitted in her center was answering partners’ technical questions. Someone else noted that her center was no longer allowed to distribute approved funds to partner organizations because the funding packages “had canned language in there about the about not discriminating based on race, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, and all that has to be stripped before they’re able to even touch anything.”

Add to the confused messages about programs and employment was the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to lead the US Department of Health and Human Services. His record of anti-vaccine activism, they said, threatened to undermine a key component of their agency’s work: the prevention of infectious diseases. Several noted that they agreed with Kennedy on some points, especially his dedication to combatting the epidemic of chronic disease in the United States. Yet they noted that any investigation of what Kennedy refers to as the “root causes” of disease would be incomplete without factoring in the influence of race, socioeconomic status, and gender on the risk of chronic disease.

And what about the well-documented racial disparities in access to health-enhancing resources such as nutritious food and safe spaces to exercise? “Black and Brown people are far more likely in most parts of the country, to have less access to these environments,” one staffer said. “I fear that in the future you won’t be able to put that in writing.” That inequity, she added, “doesn’t feel like a political statement—there’s data backing this up.”

All of these CDC employees, and now one former employee, emphasized that they believed strongly in the mission of the agency and that they had chosen a career in the government because of their dedication to public health. One person had left a lucrative career in the private sector to work at the CDC; another noted that she had chosen to serve for more than a decade despite the comparatively low pay. “The message that I want to get out there,” another said, is that “public servants are not your enemy.”

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America Will Pay Dearly for the NIH’s Mindless War on Wokeness and DEI

One Sunday in January, biologist Mark Peifer, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s medical school, got a call from campus police. Rising temperatures in a malfunctioning cold room at his lab had tripped an alarm. Materials he needed for his work—which has furthered the understanding and treatment of colorectal cancer—were in danger of being compromised.

He was able to get the cold room repaired that same day, and had the funding to do so, so the disruption was minimized. But now Peifer is concerned about the stability of that funding, which comes from the National Institutes of Health. His grants cover equipment and supplies directly related to his research. But the work takes place in shared research buildings and requires other, shared equipment and staff efforts—which is why, for every dollar he gets from the NIH, his institution gets an additional 55 cents in “indirect funding.”

That money is what paid to fix the cold room. It also goes toward his building’s HVAC, electricity, and sanitation, and pays for Peifer’s research assistants and the accountants who keep track of his grants.

“It’s incredible to me that we would give up this thing that has such obvious societal benefits.”

At least, it used to. On February 7, the NIH announced a 15 percent cap on indirect costs—an allowance that previously has averaged about 30 percent across the nation. For UNC, it meant a 40 percent research funding cut. The indirect rate, negotiated between the government and a given institution, is based on local and regional costs and various other factors.

Peifer and other researchers I interviewed say cuts of this magnitude will be devastating. “If my lab closes down, it will mean 10 people no longer have a job,” he says, and these are people “who live in my community, pay rent, go to the grocery store.” If they stand, the reductions will create roadblocks for fledgling scientists, he says, because in many cases undergraduates will “no longer have an opportunity to engage in research.”

“It will end biomedical research in the county. That that’s what it really comes down,” Peifer says, noting that even facilities doing private biomedical and pharmaceutical research depend on public funding and the discoveries that result from it.

On February 10, almost two dozen Democratic state attorneys general sued the Trump administration over the NIH directive, citing “immediate and devastating” effects. A federal judge quickly granted a temporary restraining order covering the 22 states in question.

“A lawsuit like this about grant funding is unusual,” says Don Kettl, a professor emeritus and former dean at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. “But it’s become increasingly common for state attorneys general to join together to challenge policies.”

Kettl argues that the NIH directive, which upends decades of federal science policy, violates federal law: “Assertion of an Executive Branch power to cut or eliminate grants runs right into the teeth of the Impoundment Control Act.”

The directive noted that private funders of biomedical research, such as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Packard Foundation, offer grantee institutions 15 percent or less for indirect costs, and said the federal government should not exceed those rates. But the government is by far the largest funder of such work, and its citizens benefit broadly, economically and in terms of medical innovations, from a thriving, publicly funded research infrastructure.

The NIH has existed for more than a century in the form of national labs and institutes, and to characterize the work it funds as “lifesaving” is not hyperbole, Peifer explains. Although cancer now vies with heart disease as America’s leading cause of death, “we have cancer death rates down 30 percent in the last 30 years,” he says, and “we’ve gotten even better at treating heart disease.”

The NIH cuts are part of a ham-fisted effort by the Trump administration to gut federal spending while rooting out “wokeness.” Capping indirect costs will save the $4 billion, the administration claims, but it’s easy to read between the lines. The NIH announcement cites a Heritage Foundation report titled, “Indirect Costs: How Taxpayers Subsidize University Nonsense,” which asserts that every 1 percent increase in indirect costs leads to two more “DEI employees.”

“The economics…would be dramatically different. New facilities would go unbuilt, private industries would suffer, and scientific support staff would be laid off. “

Indeed, the impetus for the cap may have come from Heritage staffer Lindsey Burke, who, in her chapter of the Project 2025 manifesto, writes that “these [indirect] reimbursements cross-subsidize leftist agendas and the research of billion-dollar organizations such as Google and the Ford Foundation. Universities also use this influx of cash to pay for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts.”

The cost-saving claims don’t hold up, in any case. Every dollar in NIH research grants generates $2.46 in economic activity, research shows—a total of $93 billion in 2023 alone. “It’s incredible to me that we would give up this thing that has such obvious societal benefits,” Peifer says.

The research is a key driver of private sector innovation. The$1.7 trillion US biotech industry was built on a century of government-funded discoveries at universities and research institutes. “Those developments that biotech firms and pharma put into practice come from NIH and NSF research,” Peifer says. And NIH-funded academic and private labs fuel the roughly $57 billion US market for sophisticated scientific tools and equipment.

Peifer lives in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, which is home to Duke, North Carolina State, and UNC-Chapel Hill. Because the area is a biomedical research hub, biotech, pharma, and equipment firms have a strong presence in the area—an estimated 4,000 tech companies and 600 life science companies. “They will be devastated,” Peifer predicts.

Peifer is eager to dispel the myth that slashing NIH funding is merely a matter of concern for academic scientist in their ivory towers. “There are so many working class jobs on the line: millions employed in the support industries,” he says.

Peifer himself was raised in working-class family, he told me. His dad often worked two jobs, including driving a forklift for General Motors. He wouldn’t be where he is today, he says, if not for publicly funded science. “We’re giving kids an opportunity to do something that their parents maybe didn’t have an opportunity to do. Do we really want to throw that away?”

Peifer and Kettl concede that there’s room for differing views on how research funding should be allocated. “There is a legitimate question about just how indirect costs should be calculated, but the costs are never the same between two institutions,” Kettl says. Notes Peifer: “If you want to build a building in Boston, it’s a whole lot more expensive than if you want to build a building in Birmingham, Alabama.”

The problem is that the administration’s blunt-force tactics, Kettle says, amount to “a clumsy effort to cut federal spending” that “is sure to stifle research and undermine the economy, with untold consequences down the line.”

On Wednesday, after nearly two weeks of ignoring two court orders instructing federal agencies to unfreeze any funds they were withholding, NIH officials finally relented. The online news outlet Popular Information reported that an internal NIH memo had authorized staff to resume payments, including indirect funds in excess of the 15 percent cap. The memo confirmed that the NIH had been aware of the court orders. One of its authors, Michael Lauer, has since left the NIH.

The administration is weakening science in other ways, too. On Friday, senior administrators at the NIH and CDC were informed that more than 5,000 probationary employees, those employed for less than two years, are set to be fired as part of widespread reductions across the government. “It’s an irreversible blow to the one of the most important engines of American science and an indication that this is a war to destroy biomedical research,” Peifer said in an e-mail after the news dropped. “I am not sure how I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”

For now, if his cold room breaks, Peifer will follow UNC’s directives and use indirect funds to fix, noting in the work order that he is adhering to previously negotiated agreements. But if the 15 percent cap is allowed to go forward, everything changes.

“The economics of research would be dramatically different,” Kettl says. “New facilities would go unbuilt, private industries would suffer, and scientific support staff would be laid off. “The inevitable result,” he says, “would be less research.”

Already, Peifer’s undergraduates applying to PhD programs can’t be sure those programs will continue to exist in their present state, and post-doctoral students may end up with fewer opportunities to hone their skills. More broadly, research and development into surgical techniques and treatments for cancer and other deadly diseases could slow down significantly.

It won’t be scientists like him who are hurt the most, Peifer says. Rather it will be “the people who could have had a new treatment for a devastating disease and don’t have it.”

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Trump’s Anti-DEI Order Stops Maryland National Guard from Celebrating Frederick Douglass

On the last day of January, the Department of Defense—now run by ex-Fox News host and alleged domestic abuser Pete Hegsethdeclared so-called “identity months,” like Black History Month, “dead” at the DoD. On the very same day, President Trump signed a proclamation affirming that February was Black History Month.

“Basically, what the DOD said is, ‘We’re not doing that, he’s Black and this is February so, no.'”

The DoD guidance says both that “the valor and success of military heroes of all races, genders, and backgrounds” should be celebrated and that the department “will focus on the character of [military members] service instead of their immutable characteristics.”

The consequences of the memo soon became clear.

In early February, the Maryland National Guard announced that it would not participate in an event to honor the life and legacy of famed slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass, citing the DoD memo. (The White House proclamation mentions Douglass as an example of a pioneering Black America.)

“Since this event is organized as part of a Black History month celebration, the Maryland National Guard cannot support,” says the letter from Maryland National Guard Lt. Col. Meaghan Lazak, which adds that they cannot provide a band, troops, a flyover, or military vehicles for the event.

The letter was posted on Facebook by Tarence Bailey Sr., who identifies himself as a distant relative of Douglass and is one of the organizers of the event. Bailey also told the Washington Post that the Massachusetts National Guard, which participated in the parade last year, bowed out this year, citing the DoD guidance. (He did not immediately respond to a Facebook message on Sunday.)

Bailey told the newspaper that the news prompted the organizers to cancel the parade portion of the event. (It will still include performances, dinner, and awards, according to the website.)

“Basically, what the DOD said is, ‘We’re not doing that, he’s Black and this is February so, no,’” Bailey told the Washington Post. “You’re discrediting everything—all of the work he did for this nation not as a Black man but as an American…They should really be ashamed of themselves.”

Spokespeople for the White House and the Defense Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sunday.

Douglass was born enslaved in Maryland in 1818, taught himself to read, and escaped slavery to the North at 20 years old. He gave speeches against slavery around the country with the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and recounted his years spent in slavery in his autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, published in 1845. He later helped people on the Underground Railroad; ran his own newspaper, The North Star; published two more autobiographies, titled My Bondage and My Freedom and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass; and worked in several high-ranking federal positions under five different presidents. He died in 1895, at 77 years old. (His biography is still available on the National Park Service website.)

The incident offers some of the clearest proof of the absurd impacts of the anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion executive orders Trump issued last month, as my colleague Alex Nguyen covered at the time. And with new reporting from the Washington Post published Saturday showing that internal documents from DOGE suggest Trump plans to expand the anti-DEI directives over the next six months, including by firing workers in offices established to ensure equal rights, expect more impacts to come.

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DOGE Worker Says He Was Radicalized by Reading Writer Who Later Denied Holocaust

In a since-deleted Substack post, an engineer working for Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) wrote about his radicalization, noting a key influence was an essay by Ron Unz—an infamous figure who has written about race science; donated money to the white nationalist website VDare, which according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, is a hate group; and has been accused by the Anti-Defamation League of “hardcore antisemitism,” including Holocaust denial.

The Substack post, titled “Why I Joined DOGE,” was written by DOGE engineer Gavin Kliger.

Kliger has already been in hot water. He also reportedly reposted white nationalist Nick Fuentes disparaging a Black child on hisnow-private X account. (On the account, Kliger called former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a slur and demanded military tribunals and executions of undocumented migrants who commit crimes, according to Rolling Stone.)

The post was published Friday and was still available online Sunday morning around 9:30 a.m. ET. It was deleted on Sunday. In the post, Kliger credits Unz’s “Our American Pravda“—a 2013 essay published in The American Conservative that railed against what Unz claimed were systemic media failures—with beginning the engineer’s “political awakening.”

Unz writes that he “concluded that the Holocaust was largely, perhaps almost entirely a hoax” and “a ridiculous concoction of wartime propaganda.”

“Reading it was like putting on glasses for the first time,” writes Kliger, whose LinkedIn says he is a senior advisor to the Director for Technology and Delivery at the Office of Personnel Management. “The issue wasn’t just bias—it was that entire narratives, the ones we took for granted as truth, were carefully curated illusions.” (Mother Jones saved a copy of Kliger’s Substack post before it was deleted.)

Unz is a writer, former (failed) gubernatorial and Senate candidate from California, and one-time publisher of The American Conservative. He has crusaded against everything from bilingual education (his 2016 Senate campaign slogan was: “Keep English. Vote Ron Unz!”) to media coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The essay that Kliger cited, “Our American Pravada,” was widely discussed on the right in 2013. It was also part of an eventual wider series—”American Pravada,” published on Unz’s website, The Uniz Review—that includes striking comments denying the Holocaust, questioning 9/11, and engaging in anti-Black racism.

In an email to Mother Jones on Sunday, Kliger said he did not read the later “American Pravada” posts from Unz.

“I specifically referred to this 2013 article from The American Conservative, ‘Our American Pravda.’ Note the ‘Our’,” Kliger wrote. “I have neither referenced or read [the other work in the “‘American Pravada” series].” (The DOGE engineer also noted The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf recommended the 2013 Unz essay in a blog.)

Kliger did not respond, as of publication, to a follow-up question about whether he finds it worrying that his radicalization was shaped by Unz given the views the writer later espoused about the Holocaust and Black people.

A recurring part of Unz’s “American Pravda” blogs is antisemitism and what the ADL has described as Holocaust denial. In a more than 17,000-word 2018 post, for example, Unz wrote:

Anyone who reads serious history books knows that Jews have generally enjoyed a reputation for producing many of the world’s greatest swindlers and frauds, hardly surprising given their notorious tendency to lie and dissemble.

In another blog, published last January, Unz doubles down, writing that he “concluded that the Holocaust was largely, perhaps almost entirely a hoax” and “a ridiculous concoction of wartime propaganda.”

Unz has also questioned the 9/11 attacks that killed more than 2,900 people and injured thousands more. He boosted conspiracy theories implying that Israeli Mossad agents were behind the attacks. In a 2018 post, Unz writes:

Based on my very recent readings in this topic, the total number of huge flaws in the official 9/11 story has now grown extremely long, probably numbering in the many dozens. Most of these individual items seem reasonably likely and if we decide that even just two or three of them are correct, we must totally reject the official narrative that so many of us have believed for so long.

As we wrote in 2017, Unz has also been a pathway for the alt-right. He has recruited contributors to The Unz Review to write about so-called human biodiversity, which includes posts blaming Black mothers for facing higher rates of maternal mortality and headlines like “Can nations have IQs?”

One regular contributor, John Derbyshire, was fired from the National Review in 2012 after penning a racist column in Taki magazine that urges his children to “avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally,” “stay out of heavily black neighborhoods,” and “before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white,” among other exhortations.

Unz’s characterizations of Black people do not fare much better. In a 2016 article discussing killings by the Ku Klux Klan—in which Unz claims the KKK’s murders are overcovered by media—he paints a picture of the mainstream press as misunderstanding violence in the era of Black Lives Matter. Unz writes:

For example, Trayvon Martin seems to have been a violent young thug and his antagonist, George Zimmerman, a half-Hispanic Dudley-Do-Right, whose main offense was attempting to defend himself while at risk of being beaten to death after he was attacked late at night without provocation in his own community. Similarly, Michael Brown of Ferguson fame was a gigantic, thuggish criminal, who casually committed the strong-arm robbery of a convenience store at night, then suddenly attacked the local police officer who attempted to stop and question him soon afterward.

Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment about Kliger and Unz.

Kliger’s deleted Substack posts recount a series of events and grievances that he says slowly eroded his faith in government and media: Warped polling that wrongly predicted Clinton would beat Trump in the 2016 election; reportedly violent 2017 protests led by members of antifa at Berkeley, where his LinkedIn says he completed his undergraduate studies in 2020; regulations on firearms; and COVID-era lockdowns and restrictions, including vaccine mandates.

But DOGE, Kliger promises, offers an alternative to the institutions that led to those aforementioned disappointments.

“For the first time in my lifetime, we have a genuine attempt to reform the federal government from within,” he writes of DOGE. “Not another blue-ribbon parade or congressional committee, but a focused effort to streamline bureaucracy, eliminate redundant agencies, and return power to the states.”

Kliger’s post ends with a recruitment attempt: “DOGE needs people with both technical expertise and the backbone to challenge bureaucracy. If you have those skills, don’t sit on the sidelines. Reach out. Apply.”

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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.

Sand dunes with purple flowers.

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 performing in front of a microphone with her eyes closed and hands raised.

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.

A trash bag is covering the USAID sign at the agency's DC headquarters. A poster in front says "RIP USAID."

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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