Eighty Percent of Germans Voted Against the Far Right. Can That Happen Here?

The day before the German election, I was sobbing uncontrollably over a video that my German family sent me. It shows a table on a sidewalk, set with pretty porcelain and a sign “Feel like coffee like at Grandma’s?” As passersby sit down, a young man with a guitar carefully pours a cup and offers cream and sugar. Then he sings: “Oma, you’ve been gone a while, but I remember how you’d sit down at our kitchen table and say ‘Never again is now.’”

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The viral video, created by a Hamburg singer as part of a day of action against the extreme right, is a little corny. It’s definitely part of the “remembrance culture” that some sneer at. But for, I dare say, anyone who grew up in Germany somewhere between the 1950s and 2000s, it’s a gut punch. The grandmother in the song would have been, give or take, my dad’s generation—someone who was a child during the Nazi era, maybe didn’t talk about it much, but when they did, had this to say: Never, ever, ever again.

Right now, even as we mourn the last of those who remember the Third Reich and the Holocaust, Germany and other countries are electing parties that are, at the very most generous, fascist-adjacent. Twenty percent of Germans voted for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in Sunday’s election, twice as many as did so four years ago. That’s the gut punch part.

But tears are not going to get us out of here. So what will? From my perch here in the US—where I arrived decades ago, thinking that having grown up in a country that experienced fascism was never going to be relevant again—here are a couple of thoughts on what we might learn from the German election.

1: Multiparty democracy is a mess, but it has one big plus: It creates options for people who are mad at the status quo. The German campaign echoed a lot of Trump v. Harris 2024: Immigration and inflation were the drivers, and underneath that was the discontent with “those in charge” that has been a theme in virtually every recent election in the West. But unlike Americans, Germans who wanted to send a message to a government they didn’t like had options.

2: One of those options—but only one—was the AfD. Call them the Make Germany Great Again movement, but unlike MAGA they were not able to take over one of the dominant parties. They had to create their own. The AfD is where you’ll find traditional conservatives who’ve been radicalized, people who were always radical but couldn’t say so in polite society, and people who are simply mad as hell. It’s not a Nazi party: That would be illegal in Germany, and politically nonviable too, at least for now. But the AfD absolutely has created a space for fascist-adjacent politics and ideas, from forced “remigration” of immigrants including those with German citizenship, to rehabbing Third Reich slogans and questioning whether SS members were criminals.

3: Twenty percent for the AfD is about exactly what the polls predicted; they’d hoped for 25 percent, which would have been seismic. I can’t help thinking of my dad, who used to say that in any country, 20 percent of voters will vote for the nutbags, if nutbags are on offer. The big problem is when they sweep in a bunch of other folks.

4: But again, those other folks had options. The left-wing party (which has pretty thoroughly repudiated its roots in East Germany’s Communist Party) looks to be landing at close to 9 percent, up from just over 5. The libertarian party was punished for having been part of the unpopular governing coalition, but the new left-populist party BSW—anti-immigration, anti-aid to Ukraine, anti-pronoun, but pro-labor, pro-welfare state, and decidedly anti-Nazi—looks close to making it past the 5-percent threshold that would get it seats in Parliament. Think of BSW as if the Obama-Trump voters had made their own party. It’s a fascinating development and one we might see replicated elsewhere at some point.

5: More parties means more options for forming a non-fascist government. The “firewall” that Germany’s democratic parties have erected against the far right, pledging never to let them govern, has eroded, but it will hold. For now.

So what’s next? To be sure, being the strongest opposition party is the ideal scenario for the far right: They get to demagogue everything the government does and everything it can be blamed for, such as the soaring energy prices caused by its pal Putin and his war in Ukraine. That posture is where the far right is most comfortable (other than complete control). But throwing rocks also has its limits in a country that is divided not along a single line, but along a spectrum. Others, especially the emboldened left party, will challenge the AfD as the voice of protest.

And here’s who else turned out to be less popular than feared: Putin and Elon Musk. Musk, as my colleague Julianne McShane reported, campaigned hard for the AfD, and Putin’s courtship of them may have extended to paying one of its officials. But being the puppet of either an American billionaire or a Russian dictator is not a great look anywhere in Europe.

What should we take away from this for US politics? For one, that people vote in protest for lots of different reasons. It’s a mistake to assume (as Trump and Musk seem to believe, and some in the media too) that a MAGA victory means a MAGA country. America’s two-party system does a lot to mask the differences between voters, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

And just as importantly, small-d democrats were an overwhelming majority in Germany—and they might be here, too. Eighty percent voted for parties that vowed not to make common cause with the far right. That can’t happen in the US in quite the same way because of the far right’s takeover of the GOP. But America’s small-d democratic coalition still exists, and capital-D Democrats might capitalize on that by showing that their tent is big enough. Disagreement is healthy, if you can agree on the most important part—that democracy is about agreeing to disagree.

The next few years will be hard on small-d democrats everywhere. Bad things will continue to happen—maybe another pandemic, almost certainly an economic slowdown, quite possibly more armed conflicts. Demagogues and authoritarians will exploit those things as hard as they can. But 20 percent is about their ceiling, unless they get extraordinarily lucky or democratic forces cave.

So let’s dust ourselves off and get to work. Because never again is now.

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Elon Musk’s Bid to Propel Germany’s Far-Right Party to Victory Has Failed

Elon Musk may be able to control—to some extent—the American government. But on Sunday, German voters showed he does not control theirs.

After polls closed Sunday in snap elections sparked by Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s vote of no-confidence in December, early exit polls showed the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party—which Musk has been boosting for months—finishing in second place, with about 20 percent of the vote. In first place is the center-rightChristian Democratic Union, former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s old party, which garnered about 29 percent of the vote—a victory that meansparty leader Friedrich Merz will become Chancellor.

The racist, far-right, pro-Russia AfD—founded in 2013 as an anti-European Union party—is an outlier even among Europe’s nationalist parties. One senior leader has been twice convicted of using banned Nazi slogans; the party has also been under observation by the German domestic intelligence agency for suspected extremism.

Like Trump, the AfD supports mass deportations of immigrants and “unassimilated citizens,” which they term “remigration,” as my colleague Isabela Dias explained last year. As Mother Jones contributor Josh Axelrod, a Berlin-based reporter, wrote for us in December:

The AfD’s central pledge is to counteract the so-called Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory that claims white Europeans or Americans are the victims of a plot by nonwhite immigrants to “replace” them and poison their societies. It was the inspiration for shooters to take up arms and target Muslim victims in Christchurch, Jews in Pittsburgh, Black people in Buffalo, and gay people in Bratislava.

“It’s the thing that brings together the far-right in multiple countries,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Mother Jones.

For months, Musk has been warning that anything less than an AfD victory would bring about the destruction of Germany. “Only the AfD can save Germany,” he has repeatedly said. His efforts to boost the party have also included, as I have written, penning an op-ed in one of Germany’s biggest newspapers, Die Welt, about why he supports the party; interviewing party leader Alice Weidel on X last month; and making a video appearance at one of their rallies, at which he claimed Germans need to “move on” from “past guilt”—a comment many interpreted as referring to the Holocaust and subsequently condemned.

Musk continued his pro-AfD push this weekend in the lead-up to the election. When he wasn’t throwing the federal workforce into further disarray or asking elected officials—over whom he has no authority—what they got done this week, Musk spent much of the last couple of days boosting the AfD on X.

Despite coming in second, the results are still an unprecedented success for AfD, whose popularity has grown over the years at the same time as they have succeeded in pushing other German politicians further right. (As Axelrod explained for Mother Jones, the AfD has collaborated with the Christian Democrats in local government.) Weidel, the AfD party leader, is characterizing Sunday’s historic showing as a “success,” and said that they are prepared to be part of Germany’s next government—even though Merz has ruled out forming a governing coalition involving the AfD.

When Musk made his video appearance at the AfD rally last month, he lamented “too much control from [the] global elite” in German affairs. Through their elections, the German people have spoken—and it seems that, like many Americans, they don’t actually want the world’s richest man involved in their government.

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Trump Officials Remind Federal Employees That Elon Musk Is Not Their Boss

Early Saturday morning, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to make a seemingly unprompted post egging on Elon Musk.

“ELON IS DOING A GREAT JOB,” the post says. “BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM GET MORE AGGRESSIVE. REMEMBER, WE HAVE A COUNTRY TO SAVE, BUT ULTIMATELY, TO MAKE GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE. MAGA!”

“Will do, Mr. President!” Musk replied in a post on X.

Within hours, the unelected tech billionaire looked to be eagerly complying, by seemingly ordering the sending of an email to untold numbers of federal employees demanding they promptly respond with “approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.” The email, which is similar to one Musk sent to employees at X after he bought that company, was unsigned and came from a human resources account at the Office of Personnel Management. It told recipients the deadline was Monday at 11:59 p.m. ET.

“Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” Musk said in a post on X announcing the directive.

That’s unlikely to be the case. The email itself does not say that, and as a federal employment law expert [told][7] CNN, Musk doesn’t have the authority to force federal employees to resign—and if he tried to, they would have ample legal recourse.

But predictably, the email created even more mass chaos across a federal workforce that Musk has already [thrown][8] into [disarray][9] through [mass layoffs][10] prompted by his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

But the biggest surprise may have been the federal officials—including a couple of Trump loyalists—who sought to guard their own turf from Musk, even by quickly telling their staff to essentially ignore the email, because Musk is not their boss.

Among them are newly-confirmed FBI Director [Kash Patel][11], who wrote to staff Saturday night telling them to “please pause any responses” to the OPM email, while reminding them that the FBI will conduct its own internal reviews, NBC News [reported][12]. Interim US attorney for the District of Columbia [Ed Martin][13], who was one of three people [appointed][14] by the RNC and the Trump campaign to run the party’s 2024 platform committee, wrote to employees to undermine the email, telling them to “be general” in their responses, and adding, “If anyone gives you problems, I’ve got your back,” CNN [reported][15].

Ambassador Tibor Nagy, acting under secretary of management at the State Department, told staff that the department would respond on behalf of employees, adding, “No employee is obligated to report their activities outside of their Department chain of command,” NBC also [reported][16]. CNN reported, citing an anonymous source, that employees of the National Security Agency were told they should not respond until they get further guidance from the Department of Defense.

So far, it seems the only official who has publicly ordered employees to comply was Secret Service Director Sean Curran, who told employees that the email “requires your response,” according to CNN. Spokespeople for the White House and the Office of Personnel Management did not immediately respond to questions.

All of this—Musk’s overstepping of his authority and upending the federal workforce with uncertainty—is part of why GOP voters have turned out to recent town halls in droves to demand their Republican congresspeople answer how they would respond to how DOGE has accessed sensitive data and mass firings of federal workers, the Washington Post [reported][17] Friday.

As I have previously reported, [polls keep showing][18] that many Americans want Musk and DOGE out of government; new polls out this week from [CNN][19] and the [Washington Post][20], for example, show far more Americans disapprove of Musk’s role in government than approve of it.

[7]: http://a federal employment law expert [8]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/donald-trump-elon-musk-doge-war-on-usaid/ [9]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/cdc-elon-musk-doge-layoffs-trump-chaos/ [10]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/elon-musk-doge-private-equity/ [11]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/kash-patel-donald-trump-fbi-confirmation-financial-disclosure-marbury-shahin/ [12]: https://x.com/KenDilanianNBC/status/1893479494079410229 [13]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/07/rnc-platform-ed-martin-abortion-ban-softening-gop/ [14]: https://gop.com/press-release/rnc-trump-campaign-announce-leadership-for-2024-republican-national-conventions-platform-committee/ [15]: https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/22/politics/elon-musk-employees-emails/index.html [16]: https://x.com/Yamiche/status/1893517922586239358 [17]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/21/doge-georgia-town-hall-gop/ [18]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/polls-elon-doge-out-of-government/ [19]: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25539589/cnn-poll-on-trumps-performance-so-far.pdf [20]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/20/trump-poll-unpopular-post-ipsos/

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North America’s Largest Solar Plant Is Taking Shape. Yep, in Canada.

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

North America’s largest urban solar power park is set to take shape in Medicine Hat, Alberta., following the sale on Tuesday of a 325 megawatt (MW) project to the prairie city.

The Saamis project, progressed to this point by Irish renewables developer DP Energy, is a planned photovoltaic development on an old industrial site in the northeast of Gas City—as Medicine Hat is known, due the area’s vast fossil gas reserves.

The multistage project, if fully built out, would be able to meet the peak load demand for the city’s industrial and commercial facilities as well as its 65,000 residents, a city official said.

“This provides us with a strategic option to build a utility-scale renewables energy project that would—in the first phase—complement our current natural gas generation,” Travis Tuchscherer, Medicine Hat’s director of energy marketing and business analysis, told Canada’s National Observer.

Tuchscherer said a final decision would be made later this year on the lead-off phase of the PV project, expected to generate 75 MW at a cost of around $120 million. The total value of the sale to the city was not disclosed.

Medicine Hat—which has more days of sunlight in a year than any other Canadian city—is weighing the impact of Alberta’s ongoing electricity market restructuring and changes to provincial carbon legislation that could affect the project timeline, he said.

Damian Bettles, DP Energy’s North America head of development, said the Saamis project was a model for other small and mid-sized cities with “suitable land” and looking to add large-scale clean power production.

Saamis was among the projects caught up in Alberta’s renewables moratorium last February, which established no-go zones for projects on prime agricultural land and “pristine viewscapes,” including a 27,000-square-mile area between the Rocky Mountains and the city of Calgary.

“But ours was ultimately a well-sited project, so we got through once we dealt with the viewscapes, decommissioning and high-grade agricultural land stipulations” in later revised guidelines by the Alberta Utility Commission, Bettles said.

Alberta is Canada’s biggest solar power market, with 17 new projects totalling 402 MW of new capacity added to the grid in 2022—before the moratorium—that boosted provincial capacity to over almost 1,150 MW.

Saamis will be built on a 1,600-acre plot of contaminated land near the Medicine Hat Complex, the country’s largest fertilizer plant. The acreage, damaged by a solid waste byproduct of nitrogen production, will be capped with clay before the solar panels are installed.

“Not only is it a productive use of a large area of contaminated land with limited development potential, it now also has the potential to contribute to the city’s energy transition to clean, renewable power,” Beetles told Canada’s National Observer.

P Energy, based in Cork, Ireland, has five Canadian wind and solar projects, in Alberta, Ontario, and Nova Scotia, and a tidal power pilot in the Bay of Fundy, and renewable energy developments in its home country as well as the United Kingdom and Australia.

“There is great potential for solar in Canada,” Bettles said, pointing to clean energy procurement plans underway in BC, Ontario and Quebec. DP Energy is in talks to develop several utility-scale projects across the country, he said, without giving further details.

Canada’s installed solar power capacity reached nearly 6,500 MW in 2022, with over 4,300 gigawatt-hours of electricity generated, enough to supply almost 500,000 homes.

Tuchscherer said Medicine Hat is exploring how to best incorporate future solar, wind, and battery storage plants into the city’s energy transition.

“Overall we are looking for proven technologies that can provide affordable power to our rate base and our own internal carbon compliance,” he said, adding the city would consider a battery energy storage plant to deal with the variability of solar power production as the Saamis project moved ahead.

Aside from growing interest in renewable energy from Medicine Hat’s “largest industrial consumers,” Tuchscherer said they are also studying the future energy needs for hyperscale data centres.

“So while we don’t believe there is a direct play for data centres and the Saamis project, we are keeping all options open for clean power supply in the long-term for present and future customers.”

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Federal Judge to Trump: No, You Can’t Ban DEI

On Friday, a federal judge partly blocked President Donald Trump’s attempt to root out programs related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, within the government.

That includes at least one far-reaching executive order titled, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” in which the president claimed DEI programs are illegal. As my colleague Alex Nguyen reported at the time:

[The order] argues that DEI programs violate civil rights laws by illegally enforcing “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences” that “deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement.” The White House also claimed that these policies are discriminatory because they select based on “how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing.”

As the New York Times has reported in detail, Maryland District Judge Adam B. Abelson barred the Trump administration from any effort to “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate any awards, contracts or obligations” related to diversity and inclusion, noting that such programs have been seen as “uncontroversially legal for decades.”

A coalition of academic institutions brought the lawsuit. In the initial complaint, as the Associated Press reports, the plaintiffs argued that “ordinary citizens” would “bear the brunt” of Trump’s DEI crackdown: “Plaintiffs and their members receive federal funds to support educators, academics, students, workers, and communities across the country,” it read. “As federal agencies make arbitrary decisions about whether grants are ‘equity-related,’ Plaintiffs are left in limbo.” After weeks of chaos within the educational system, the plaintiffs were granted some relief.

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Purged By Trump: A National Science Foundation Worker Speaks Out

On Tuesday, leaders at the National Science Foundation reportedly laid off about 170 employees, many via Zoom—an estimated 10 percent of the agency’s workers. One of those workers spoke to Mother Jones_, requesting anonymity, about the chaotic and emotional meeting, and what the job losses mean for the $9 billion agency, which is tasked with funding and supporting the country’s academic research. Here’s their account in their own words_.

At 9 a.m., we got an email from HR calling us for a meeting at 10 am. There was no agenda offered. But many of us suspected what it was.

Initially, the Zoom invitation listed all of the people who were going to be fired as co-hosts of the meeting, so they sent a second invite. Because of the confusion about which invitation was the correct one, a lot of people joined late. And so, at first, people who came late didn’t hear what the meeting was about.

They told us we were being terminated. People were angry. People were crying. It was just confusing, too. We were told, you could resign or you could be terminated. How do I know what to do? Some people had thought, I had finished my one-year probation. I am not a probationary employee. We were told the agency had made a mistake—it should have been two years, and they’d corrected that.

We had until 1 p.m., when our termination letters would be sent, and we’d be shut out of the system. So by the time the meeting was over, we had about two hours to get any information we needed from our computers and to coordinate handing off our workload to someone else.

Afterward, I think because of the mix-up with Zoom link, people were sent a recording of the meeting. You can hear leadership talking before it starts, and you can hear people in the room laughing. I don’t know what it was about. But it just added to this feeling of disregard for what was taking place.

Then there was the delay. We don’t have your letters ready. It’ll be 2:00 when we send the letter. Then, It’ll be 3:00. Meanwhile, people who haven’t been called into the meeting are finding out about it. Supervisors of people in the meeting did not know about [it]. To me, that is one of the most disturbing pieces of this. It didn’t feel like an agency decision at all. It’s like there was a shadow institution inside or surrounding the agency. Who is making decisions? On what basis are they making decisions?

The paranoia and fear are part of the erosion of our work. Getting emails from people you don’t know. The agency changing your personnel status without informing you. The idea that there’s a list going around of people on probation. Am I on the list? Are you on the list? That’s a straight-up McCarthy-era question.

I think sometimes science is too abstract for the public to immediately recognize the importance of what we do. And that’s not because they can’t. In fact, that’s part of our mission: to create a scientifically literate public who can understand and appreciate how we’re using their taxes to make a positive difference in society.

But the people terminated on Tuesday represent a cross-section of those essential to getting the agency’s work done. They were administrative staff, people who track expenditures, write policy, organize review panels, and ensure conflict of interest policies are being observed. Some were brought on to help the agency run more efficiently. The irony.

In the afternoon, when people were supposed to be leaving, other staff started coming down to the lobby. They applauded people as they left the building. For this spontaneous swell of people to come out like that, it was very moving. It was a demonstration of care and respect that I’d not felt from the agency.

Since being terminated, I feel relieved, to be honest. Part of the relief was knowing cuts were coming and not knowing who or when or how. But I love the agency. I loved working there. I was so proud to work there. And the last month has been so disorienting. I couldn’t recognize NSF’s mission. I didn’t feel that same sense of pride and loyalty and faith.

I’m not most upset about losing my job. It’s more just this feeling of concern for our credibility. Like, what rules are we following? Whose rules are we following?

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. National Science Foundation media officer Mike England provided the following statement:

“Earlier this month, the President issued Executive Order, Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative (‘Workforce Optimization E.O.’). To ensure compliance with this E.O., the National Science Foundation released 170 employees from Federal service effective Feb. 18. This action impacted most of our probationary employees and all our employees on expert appointments. We thank these employees for their service to NSF and their contributions to advance the agency mission.

Expert appointments are defined as one year or less, normally on intermittent work schedules. Although appointments may be for one year, individuals may not work more than 130 days in a service year (the 365-day period that begins on the effective date of the appointment).

Of the 170 staff released, 86 were classified probationary, 84 staff were classified as experts.”

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Is This the End of USPS?

President Donald Trump is taking aim at the US Postal Service.

According to a Thursday report fromthe Washington Post‘s Jacob Bogage,the president plans to fire the members of USPS’ board and hand the keys to the agency over to the Department of Commerce.

Trump plans to make the move through executive order as early as this week, the Post reports. The board reportedly intends to take the administration to court if Trump carries out the firings or tries to take control, with postal experts telling the Washington Post that absorbing the independent agency would likely violate federal law. A White House spokesperson later denied the report.

After his re-election, Trump discussed privatizing the Postal Service with Howard Lutnick—later confirmed as Commerce Secretary—at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, according to a separate Post article from December.

But Trump’s new target is actually an old one. During his first term, the White House pushed to break up and sell off the Post Office—one of the most favorably viewed government agencies—in a 2018 plan: “A privatized Postal Service would,” among other things, “make business decisions free from political interference.”

On February 20, Mark Dimondstein, the president of the American Postal Workers Union, which represents over 200,000 USPS employees and retirees, issued a statement calling Trump’s reported plan an “unlawful attack” that was “part of the billionaire oligarch coup.” The move would increase costs and threaten the livelihoods of more than 7 million workers, Dimondstein said.

“Call your senator,” the union posted on X on Friday. “Urge them to block this unconstitutional takeover and ensure the Postal Service remains independent and in the hands of the people!”

I previously spoke with Dimondstein about the threat Trumpand DOGEpresent to the Postal Service. People who rely on USPS for essentials like medicine could be particularly at risk if the agency is privatized or loses its political independence, Dimondstein told me. Instead of privatizing the USPS, Dimondstein thinks the government should consider expanding it, pointing to opportunities for offering financial services for tens of millions of Americans with low incomes who are unbanked or underbanked—long a norm in many other countries. According to the Center for American Progress, a public policy research and advocacy organization, USPS is an “equalizer institution” that could allow access to free or low-fee bank accounts, as well as loan and check cashing services. USPS also provides outsized jobopportunities for women, Black workers, other workers of color, and veterans, he said.

Then there’s the role USPS plays in elections. As my colleague Pema Levy pointed out at the time, Democrats wanted to increase funding for the service prior to the 2020 election,to help delivermail-in ballots at the height of the Covid pandemic—but Republicans dissented.

Louis DeJoy, the postmaster general of the USPS and a Trump donor who earlier this week announced plans to step down, caused an uproar during that time. DeJoy made significant changes just before the 2020 vote, including scaling back the number of mail sorting machines and limiting the ability of workers to make additional postal trips where they would draw overtime. Critics said that those decisions restricted the agency’sability to serve mail-in voters during the pandemic—something that disproportionately hurt Democrats (according to the Elections Performance Index, 58 percent of Democrats voted by mail, while only 29 percent of Republicans did so in 2020).

Despite the postal service’s mandate to exist independently—passed by Congress and signed into law by Richard Nixon in 1970—the agency may, if Trump can override Congress, become one more brick in the wall of expanded executive power.

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Republicans Once Supported “Green Banks.” Trump Aims to End Them.

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

Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced last week that he had uncovered evidence of a massive fraud perpetrated by the Biden administration. In a video posted to social media, the former Republican congressman from New York said that Biden’s EPA had “parked” roughly $20 billion at a private bank, “rushing to get billions of your tax dollars out the door before Inauguration Day.”

The Biden administration’s plan, Zeldin said, was for the bank to distribute the money to a handful of nonprofits, which would then send it out to “NGOs and others” for climate-related spending. But he vowed to stop that plan. “The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over,” he said.

But the scheme Zeldin described is not novel or a secret. The $20 billion he is trying to recover is money that Congress passed in 2022 for a program known as the “Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund,” also known as the “green bank” initiative. This kind of program once enjoyed bipartisan support in states like Nevada, which opened a clean energy fund under a Republican governor in 2017, and Connecticut, where green bank legislation passed in 2011 with unanimous support from both parties. At least two centrist Republicans, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Don Young of Alaska, endorsed a national green bank bill in 2021.

These banks appealed to a number of Republican priorities since it offered local governments and groups flexibility and catalyzed private investment, but congressional Republicans turned against the idea after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the 2022 climate law that reduces carbon emissions through financial incentives. Now, the Trump administration is trying to cancel it altogether.

“The bank must immediately return all the gold bars that the Biden administration tossed off the Titanic,” he said in the video, adding that he would refer the matter to EPA’s internal watchdog and the Justice Department. The EPA now seems to be trying to seize the funds from Citibank, which received them months ago, though it has met with some resistance: A top Justice Department prosecutor reportedly resigned on Tuesday rather than sign an order demanding that a bank freeze federal clean energy funds. Even funded organizations themselves were unsure as of press time whether their funds were frozen.

The green bank program was designed to distribute billions of dollars to nonprofit lenders, who would then become banks for clean energy projects. These lenders would provide low-interest loans to tribes, companies, and local governments to build solar farms, improve energy efficiency, and reduce carbon emissions. The money would flow to places that were too disadvantaged or risky to attract private capital on their own—rural areas of Appalachia, for instance, or tribal reservations where income levels are low.

The program was modeled off successful funds in states like Rhode Island and Michigan, which respectively financed infrastructure repairs and homeowner energy upgrades. Although Republicans have described it as a left-wing “slush fund,” it incorporated the flexibility and private industry focus that have appealed to conservatives in several states, said Laura Gillam, a former senior policy adviser at the Senate’s Energy and Public Works committee who helped lead the drafting of the Inflation Reduction Act.

“The intention was very clear—to allow maximum flexibility for communities and to let the money leverage private investment,” she said. Because borrowers would pay back their loans over time, the initial $20 billion could be deployed over and over again, reducing the need for future climate spending.

An earlier version of the green bank proposal appeared in a bipartisan climate bill that was introduced in 2007 by former Republican senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. It also appeared in Ed Markey’s cap-and-trade bill, which passed the House of Representatives in 2009 with support from a handful of Republicans but died in the Senate. The Inflation Reduction Act version is “technology-neutral,” meaning that money can go to support forms of clean energy like nuclear and hydrogen, which are more palatable to Republicans.

Times have changed. Zeldin is now alleging that the transfer of money to Citi, and the fact that so much money went to just a few institutions, is evidence of “waste and abuse” by the Biden administration. The federal government has been parking money at private banks since the 1980s through “financial agent agreements,” and the Biden administration distributed the money to Citi before Trump won the presidential election.

The “gold bars” metaphor Zeldin referenced in the video posted to social media was not his own invention—it came from a former EPA staffer named Brent Efron, who helped implement the Inflation Reduction Act during the Biden administration. In December, the right-wing media organization Project Veritas, which is known for its sting operations on liberal politicians and media figures, posted a hidden-camera video of Efron talking about his work to dole out funding.

“We’re throwing gold bars off the Titanic,” Efron says as he drinks what appears to be a glass of orange wine. “When the Project Veritas operative asks him who is getting the gold bars, he responds, “nonprofits, states, tribes.” Grist could not reach Efron for comment.

Even before the Project Veritas video, Republicans in Congress had already taken aim at the green bank program. Last January, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce called a top Biden EPA official to testify about what it called “Biden’s green bank giveaway.” The administration’s inspector general (whom Trump has since fired) had also pointed to the potential for fraud in the green bank and other programs, saying in a September letter to Congress that the “pace of spending [by the EPA] escalates not only the risk for fraud but also the urgency for oversight.”

Although the Biden administration parked most of the green bank money at Citi before Trump took office, grantees have so far drawn down very little of it, and only a few projects have gotten off the ground. Climate United, a coalition of financial nonprofits that received the largest single tranche of money from the green bank, issued a $32 million loan for what would be the biggest industrial solar development in Arkansas history. The solar system at the University of Arkansas would save the school around $120 million in energy costs over the next 25 years.

Citi may return the money to the EPA rather than risk a public spat with Trump, but if it does, funding recipients could sue the administration for breaching its contract and withholding obligated funds, said people involved with the green bank initiative. State attorneys general, for instance, could sue to recover money that they were supposed to receive under a $7 billion residential solar program that was part of the initiative. The EPA didn’t answer Grist’s questions about the legality of the clawback.

In a curious twist, Efron himself predicted that the administration might withhold funds in the very video that Zeldin cites as evidence of malfeasance. After the “gold bars” comment, he predicts that Trump will try to impound money that the Biden administration sent out.

“I think they will come in, and they will issue an order that all grants have to stop,” says Efron in the video. “They’ll say, ‘we’re reevaluating it,’ and then Congress will…pass a law that says, this money doesn’t exist anymore, that you wanted to give out.”

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GOP Activist Who Co-Hosted Podcast with White Nationalist Pushes Third Trump Term at CPAC

At the Conservative Political Action Conference, a new group pushed for President Donald Trump to serve an unconstitutional third term.

The effort, called the Third Term Project, is being led by Shane Trejo, who once co-hosted a neo-Nazi adjacent podcast called “Blood Soil and Liberty.” An episode of the now-deleted show was titled “Tanner Flake for Fuhrer,” an homage to a senator’s son who’d posted racist and anti-gay comments under the screen name “n1–erkiller.”

The imagery and language being used by the Third Term Project is transparently authoritarian. The group’s poster at CPAC features Trump in the style of Julius Caesar. Trejo told the independent journalist Ford Fischer on Thursday that the group did so because “Trump is the Caesar figure that America has needed.”

“We’re putting that out there, Trump as Caesar,” Trejo continued. “We think it’s great optics. We love the idea of Trump as our Julius Caesar-type figure.” He also argued that Trump is the “Napoleonic figure that has emerged to lead our country out of perdition and into greatness.”

2. I asked Trejo about Trump as Julius Caesar.

"Trump is the Caesar figure that America has needed" he replied. "Trump is the Napoleonic figure that has emerged to lead our country out of perdition and into greatness."

"We think it's great optics!" pic.twitter.com/yaYHqhP6nY

— Ford Fischer (@FordFischer) February 21, 2025

In 2023, I ran into Trejo at an event in Big Rapids, Michigan, while reporting on how the state GOP had been taken over by right-wing grassroots activists. Unlike most people at the event, Trejo declined to be interviewed. I learned afterward that Trejo had hosted the “Blood Soil and Liberty” with Alex Witoslawski, a member of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa.

A description for the “Tanner Flake Fuhrer” episode.

The Daily Beast reported in 2021 that Trejo and Witoslawski launched the podcast, which is no longer available online, shortly after the 2017 Charlottesville neo-Nazi Unite the Right rally. A description for the podcast stated that it discussed “current events from a consistently uncucked perspective” and that its common targets included “commie trash, losertarians, cuckservatives, thots, tokens, welfare migrants, and the French.”

According to the Daily Beast, Witoslawski wrote an article for the podcast’s website calling for a white “ethnostate” with “an immigration system that virtually excludes non-European immigrants.” He argued that “Most Jews” and members of Black Lives Matter “should be encouraged through government policy to leave the country and resettle in their own ethnostates.”

On its own, the Third Term Project might not be not worth that much notice. It calls itself a “think-tank [sic] devoted to getting President Donald J Trump his rightful third term in office” but mostly seems to be Trejo and a fellow traveler or two. The bigger issue is that Trump has repeatedly floated the possibility of running again in recent weeks. (According to the New York Times, Trump tells his advisers that he is just trying to get attention and annoy Democrats.)

The third term Trejo is pushing is barred by the 22nd Amendment, which states: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” To get around that Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) recently introduced a bill to allow Trump to run for a third term. (As I previously reported, the FBI seized Ogles’ phone last year after he admitted to lying about making a $320,000 loan to his 2022 campaign; Trump’s Justice Department abruptly pulled prosecutors off the case one week after Ogles introduced his third term bill in January.)

Ogles’ bill has no chance of becoming law but the Third Term Project does not feel bound by the clear meaning of the 22nd Amendment. The group’s website states that Trump could skirt the amendment by running for vice president in 2028 with the understanding that the presidential candidate would immediately resign the office to Trump upon taking office. “This plan while unorthodox, would show that MAGA cannot be stopped by any procedural rule,” the website states.

On Thursday, at an event to commemorate Black History Month, Trump talked once more about a potential third term. “Should I run again? You tell me,” the president asked. “There’s your controversy right there.”

Even if he was joking, his supporters in the audience didn’t necessarily think so. “Four more years,” they shouted back. “Four more years.”

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As Eric Adams Implodes, Can NYC Progressives Seize the Moment?

It’s hard to imagine a better opportunity to oust an incumbent than the one currently before the Democratic primary candidates challenging New York City Mayor Eric Adams. In the last few weeks, Adams has been engulfed in a growing scandal surrounding the Trump Justice Department’s decision to dismiss his federal corruption charges and the mayor’s corresponding willingness to cooperate with the administration’s mass deportation agenda. Though Adams has denied any quid pro quo, the administration’s border czar Tom Homan did threaten—on national television—to be “up [Adams’] butt” if the mayor doesn’t allow immigration enforcement officers on Rikers Island.

Adams—who is battling a crowded field of challengers in June’s mayoral primary—now faces escalating calls to resign or be removed from office. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has decided against removing the mayor for now, but he could also be ousted by an “inability committee” made up of top city officials. Comptroller Brad Lander, who is running for mayor, has floated convening it. Adams, meanwhile, shows no sign of retreat, writing on X over the weekend, “I’m not stepping down, I’m stepping UP.”

If Adams does leave office before his term is up—voluntarily or not—he’d be replaced by New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. According to the city charter, if that happens before March 27 (90 days before the primary), the city would hold a nonpartisan special election to replace Adams. If it happens afterward, Williams would remain acting mayor until the general election in November. Either way, both the primary and general election would proceed as normal. But the process is untested, and it’s not clear if Adams could run again if removed.

So where does that leave New York City’s sizeable but scattered progressive wing? They’re hoping to capitalize on Adams’ increasing vulnerability and what they see as a resurgence in anti-Trump momentum to elect one of several left-leaning candidates for mayor. But no definite frontrunner has appeared in the pack of progressive challengers. Instead, New Yorkers could see a familiar name atop the ballot in November: Andrew Cuomo.

George Albro, co-chair of the New York Progressive Action Network, described the former governor as the “500 pound gorilla about to enter the room.”

The former New York governor has yet to formally jump into the race, but it has been widely reported that he is meeting with donors and key constituent groups in preparation. Cuomo has dominated early polls despite resigning in 2021 under a cloud of sexual harassment allegations (which he denied) and facing heavy criticism for how his administration handled nursing home deaths during the pandemic. But many voters remember him fondly. On Valentine’s Day, Cuomo posted a video of his visit to an East Harlem community center, where his popularity among the city’s older women was on full display. He handed out roses, embraced supporters, and, in what was essentially a campaign speech, promised to “make this state safe for everyone.” A moderate like Adams, Cuomo stands to benefit the most from the mayor’s dwindling re-election odds. There is still time for a singularly compelling progressive candidate to rise to the occasion, but it’s starting to look like Cuomo’s race to lose.George Albro, co-chair of the New York Progressive Action Network, described the former governor as the “500 pound gorilla about to enter the room.”

There is no coherent center of power in New York City’s political left. The city’s progressive groups are diverse and have sometimes dissonant policy priorities—making it unlikely that they will vote as a bloc. Ana María Archila, co-chair of the state’s Working Families Party, is hoping to prevent the “fragmentation and division” that plagued the left during the 2021 mayoral election, when a leading contender didn’t emerge until the last minute. The party is among the most influential progressive groups and is using its endorsement process to encourage candidates to work more collaboratively under ranked-choice voting. But Archila acknowledged that progressives will have to eventually coalesce around a single candidate.

Progressive challengers have been clustered near the bottom of recent public polls, though many Democrats see Lander as the tentative frontrunner. The comptroller, who previously represented the Park Slope area in the city council, has been trying to court more moderate voters while campaigning on his experience managing the city’s finances. He will have to compete for the brownstone liberal vote with former comptroller Scott Stringer, whose 2021 mayoral campaign was derailed by a decades-old sexual assault allegation (which he has denied). A strong early contender was state Sen. Jessica Ramos, a former labor organizer representing Queens, though she is now trailing in fundraising.

State Sen. Zellnor Myrie is gaining popularity and earned a coveted endorsement from US Rep. Dan Goldman, who prosecuted Trump’s first impeachment case. Myrie, who represents Adams’ old district in central Brooklyn, is well-positioned to win over Black voters who may be disillusioned with the mayor and might otherwise support Cuomo. The breakout star, though, has been state Rep. Zohran Mamdani, a social media-savvy socialist representing Astoria, Queens. Riding a wave of viral videos about his proposals for city-owned grocery stores and a rent freeze for rent-stablized tenants, Mamdani raked in $640,000 over the last three-month fundraising period—more than any other candidate.

But candidates like Mamdami may struggle to gain widespread support among Democratic primary voters, who tend to be older, wealthier, and more highly educated. After a spate of high-profile violent incidents on the subways, these voters may be looking for a law and order candidate—like Cuomo, who has long framed himself as a protector. At the same time, rising rents remain an issue in a city experiencing a perennialhousing crisis. Progressive candidates have rolled out plans to dramatically increase housing supply, bolster public safety, and make childcare more affordable.“Often the issue on voters’ minds picks the winning candidate rather than candidates picking the most compelling issue to champion,” Laura Tamman, a political science professor at Pace University, said.

Some see Trump himself becoming a central issue in the mayoral primary, as outrage grows around Adams’ cooperation with the administration. “People have found it really unacceptable that Eric Adams is bending the knee,” Archila, the Working Families Party co-chair, said. “In the last few weeks, it has become more visible that people in New York City actually want a mayor who will fight back against Trump.”

Though the resistance is certainly not at 2016 levels—and Trump gained significant support in parts of New York City—large protests in the city have opposed the administration’s sweeping federal cuts, targeting of transgender youth, and immigration crackdowns. Some on the left hope that the momentum will help a progressive mayoral candidate rise to the top. Albro, co-chair of the New York Progressive Action Network, said that the Mamdani and Lander campaigns have started winning over younger progressives, who tend to be skeptical of electoral politics. “Part of it is the Trump effect,” Albro said, “and part of it is they have begun to realize that the electoral process is a major way you can make change.”

But if voters are looking for a mayor willing and able to brawl with Trump, they very well might turn to Cuomo. As governor, he developed a reputation as a “tough guy” with a “muscular” approach to politics, said Eric Lane, a law professor at Hofstra University. If Cuomo does run, he would be the only candidate truly familiar with the national stage. Cuomo’s daily Covid-19 briefings in the early days of the pandemic helped the governor cast himself as even-keeled and trustworthy—particularly in contrast to Trump’s chaotic pandemic response.

Still, John Mollenkopf, a political science professor at the City University of New York, warned against reading too much into Cuomo’s two-digit leads in early polls, which reflect a “high point for his standing, not necessarily a base from which he can rise.” Both opponents and progressive groups will do their best to remind primary voters of every ghost in Cuomo’s past. But political attention spans are short, and many of the men whose careers were derailed during the #MeToo movement are returning to public life. It’s unlikely that the former governor’s checkered history alone will dissuade supporters.

The possibility of Mayor Cuomo has sent some political players hunting for a Hail Mary candidate. This week, Politico reported a last-minute effort to recruit City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, a moderate Democrat with no relation to the mayor.

The race will come into sharper focus in the next month, after the petitioning process begins on Monday. In order to appear on the ballot, candidates must collect several thousand signatures from registered Democratic voters by early April—the first real test of each campaign’s fundraising and organizing power.

Top image credits, from left: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP; Debra L. Rothenberg/Zuma; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP (2); NDZ/STAR MAX/IPx/AP; Steve Sanchez/Pacific Press/Zuma

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He Sued to Block a Biden Vaccine Mandate. Now He’s Helping Dismantle USAID.

When workers at the United States Agency for International Development got an emailearlier this month informing them they were soon to be put on administrative leave, veteran staffers took note of the name and title appended to the bottom—Peter Marocco, a former USAID political appointee now serving both as USAID’s deputy administrator and as director of foreign assistance in the State Department.

Thornton founded an organization that has promoted conspiracies and participated in Project 2025.

“All the AID people hate him—not because he’s a rightist or leftist, but because he’s an asshole,” says one person who worked in the agency during the first Trump administration. In 2018, while working for the State Department, Marocco took part in a secret meeting with Serbian separatist leaders, causing a diplomatic incident. After he moved to USAID two years later, his behavior prompted a 13-page “dissent” memo from agency staffers. Online sleuths have picked him out in photos of the crowdstorming the Capitol on January 6, 2021—an allegation he has called a “petty smear,” but not formally denied.

But Marocco is not the only State Department name that has raised eyebrows at USAID. According to adifferent email sent to agency staffers last week, another right-wing activist has been selected to play a key role in the dissolution of the agency Elon Musk said should “die” and President Donald Trump ordered to be folded into the State Department. Helping to lead the “Coordination Support Team” tasked with bringing home overseas USAID personnel, according to the memo, was Marcus Thornton, a “member of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff” reporting directly to Marocco. Until now, Thornton has been better known as the founder and president of Feds for Freedom. The group was founded to fight the Biden administration’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate for federal workers, and has since promoted conspiracies about public health, campaigned against DEI, and participated in the planning of Project 2025.

Thornton, who according to his Feds for Freedom bio joined the State Department as a foreign service officer in 2016 following a stint with Border Patrol, launched the group as “Feds 4 Medical Freedom” in 2021. On the organization’s podcast, “The Feds,” Thornton described himself during a 2023 appearance as “staunchly pro-life” and said that he was opposed to the mandate, in part, because “there were aborted fetal cells used in every single product on the market.” (As the New York Times has explained, while fetal cells were used to develop Covid vaccines, the vaccines themselves do not use or contain fetal cells.)

The organization led a lawsuit against the vaccine mandate on behalf of more than 50 government employees and contractors in 2021, winning an injunction from a federal judge in Texas before being blocked by the Fifth Circuit. Feds for Freedom appealed to the Supreme Court, but the end of the mandate in 2023 rendered the case moot.

That activism brought Thornton and his organization into a wider coalition that included prominent anti-vaccine activists and other conspiracy theorists. In 2022, Thornton spoke at a Stop the Mandates Rally in Los Angeles, where anti-vaccine activist and RFK Jr.-ally Del Bigtree claimed that 25,000 people had been killed by “the jab.” The official Feds for Freedom podcast recently featured an interview with a guest who argued that both the pandemic and the accompanying vaccines were part of a eugenicist global population control project. Other episodes have asked if “mRNA gene therapy supports one world government,” warned the US was “sliding into totalitarianism,” spread conspiracies about the “Deep State” and the Federal Reserve, said that the FBI was becoming a “secret police,” and called DEI “the manifestation of Marxism in America.” (The co-host of that last episode—Feds for Freedom’s then-vice-president—is now the interim director of FEMA.)

Years before he was helping to coordinate USAID’s recall program, it was Thornton who was being taken away from an overseas assignment against his wishes. In late 2023 he posted a video on YouTube from the airport in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, explaining how he was being sent home from his foreign service posting by the US ambassador as “reprisal and retaliation” for “exercising my constitutional rights”—in other words, because his political activism. (The State Department did not respond to a request for comment; Thornton responded to a request for comment by sending a version of Feds For Freedom’ mission statement.)

For both Thornton and his group, what started as resistance to the vaccine mandate has evolved into a larger structural attack. “What we found in the process of fighting this battle was that the vaccine mandates were just one symptom of deeper root issues within our government,” he told conservative podcaster Jerry Cirino Jr. in 2023. “The government as it is now primarily consists of an unelected bureaucracy that is not reflective of the values of the people that it serves.”

Thornton, who slammed his fellow bureaucrats as “unaccountable” and “untransparent,” said that reforms should focus on bringing the “level of fear and accountability that we have in the private sector and bring that to government.”

“All the AID people hate him—not because he’s a rightist or leftist, but because he’s an asshole.”

His more recent work has paired neatly with the Trump administration’s DOGE-driven efforts to radically transform both the State Department and the broader bureaucracy. Last year, in a Feds for FreedomYouTube video filmed outside Independence Hall, Thornton invited federal workers “to get involved in agency-level working groups” to identify “who the bad actors are” within the government. An op-ed he co-wrote in The American Conservative titled “A Plan to Infuse American Values Into State Department Hiring” proposed combating “DEIA extremism” by, among other things, replacing the current foreign-service recruitment process with a system in which members of Congress would nominate people from their districts. (Around the same time, the Heritage Foundation awarded Feds for Freedom a $100,000 “innovation prize,” for its work in what the think tank called “the pronoun fight.”)

The second Trump term has been a nightmare for many USAID staffers and their families, including those whose “orderly, safe, and voluntary return” is now part of Thornton’s remit. But it has represented a career-making opportunity for others. Early last year, Thornton and Feds for Freedom led a workshop to encourage federal employees to submit their resumesas part of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which produced a planning document for a new Trump administration that has served as a model for much of what’s unfolded over the last month.

“The 2025 Presidential Transition Project (Project 2025) was created to ensure the next administration can move quickly to execute badly needed government reforms,” Feds for Freedom wrote in a March 2024 Instagram post. “There is a pressing need for political appointees at all grade levels – not just executives, but starting from GS-7 and up – to carry out this critical mission. In January 2025, these appointments will be filled by PATRIOTS just like YOU.”

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Climate Groups Sue Over Trump’s Orders to Expand Offshore Drilling

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

Green advocacy groups filed two lawsuits against the Trump administration on Wednesday, marking the first environmental legal challenges against the president’s second administration.

Both focus on the Trump administration’s moves to open up more of US waters to oil and gas drilling, which the plaintiffs say are illegal.

“The Arctic Ocean has been protected from US drilling for nearly a decade, and those protections have been affirmed by the federal courts.”

“Offshore oil drilling is destructive from start to finish,” said Kristen Monsell, the oceans legal director at the conservation organization Center for Biological Diversity. “Opening up more public waters to the oil industry for short-term gain and political points is a reprehensible and irresponsible way to manage our precious ocean ecosystems.”

In the first lawsuit, local and national organizations including the Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the Louisiana-based Healthy Gulf, and the Northern Alaska Environmental Center took aim at the president’s revocation of Joe Biden-era protections for 265 million acres of federal waters from future fossil fuel leasing. Trump signed an order withdrawing the protections just hours into his second term.

Another related challenge, filed by many of the same groups, calls for a court to reinstate a 2021 decision affirming protections from nearly 130 million acres in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans.

“The Arctic Ocean has been protected from US drilling for nearly a decade, and those protections have been affirmed by the federal courts,” said Sierra Weaver, a senior attorney at the organization Defenders of Wildlife, which is a plaintiff in the case. “Though these coastlines have been protected, the administration is showing no restraint in seeking to hand off some of our most fragile and pristine landscapes for the oil industry’s profit.”

The lawsuits will probably be the first of hundreds of environmental lawsuits filed by green groups against the Trump administration. During his first weeks in office, Trump has already rolled back a swath of Biden-era environmental protections while freezing green spending programs—part of his pledge to boost the fossil fuel industry.

Trump says the US must boost fossil fuels—which are responsible for the vast majority of global warming—to meet demand and ensure that the United States remains a global energy leader. The US is currently producing more oil and gas than any other country in history.

The Guardian has contacted the White House for comment about the litigation.

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Report: Sepsis, Maternal Deaths Surged in Texas Following Abortion Bans

There’s been ample evidence over the past few years that abortion bans lead to death and major health risks for pregnant people and babies. Now, a groundbreaking analysis by ProPublica shows just how dire the situation has become in Texas since the state implemented a six-week abortion ban in 2021, followed by an even more draconian, near-total ban after the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in 2022.

According to ProPublica, dozens more pregnant and postpartum womenhave died in Texas hospitals since those bans were implemented, compared with maternal deaths in the state immediately before the pandemic. A total of 79 maternal hospital deaths were reported in the state in 2018 and 2019, versus 120 hospital deaths in 2022 and 2023, ProPublica reports. Jonas Swartz, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Duke University, told the outlet that the 2022-23 figure was likely “an underestimation of the number of people who died.”

ProPublica notes that not all deaths of pregnant women and new mothers occur in hospitals; the Texas hospital data used in the analysis also don’t provide the causes of women’s deaths.But other data confirms there has been a sharp rise in maternal deaths in the state since the abortion bans. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, for example, shows that the rate of maternal deaths in the state rose 33 percent from 2019 through 2023—making Texas an outlier, given that the national maternal mortality rate decreased by 7.5 percent over the same time frame, ProPublica notes.

ProPublica also found that for women who were hospitalized when they lost their pregnancies in the second trimester, the number of women suffering from sepsis shot upmore than 50 percent—from 147 women in the period before the implementation of the six-week ban, also known as SB8, to 213 women after. Sepsis is a life-threatening condition that can lead to septic shock and is caused by the body’s improper response to an infection. According to the ProPublica analysis, rates of sepsis were found to be particularly high in patients whose fetuses still had detectable cardiac activity when the patient was admitted to the hospital.

ProPublica notes its analysis of sepsis rates is conservative “and likely missed some cases” given that it does not, for example, reflect miscarrying patients who were turned away from emergency rooms.

At the time Texas enacted its six-week abortion ban, in 2021, it was the most restrictive law in the country, allowing private citizens to sue anyone who “aids and abets” an abortion for $10,000. The following year, Texas enacted a post-Dobbs trigger ban that prohibits almost all abortions and threatens anyone providing one with criminal charges and $100,000 fine. While both bills claim to offer exceptions for medical emergencies and life-threatening physical complications, respectively, they have had a chilling effect on doctors who have wound up delaying necessary abortion care to people experiencing pregnancy complications—sometimes, until it’s too late—for fear of breaking the law.

Last year, ProPublica reported on two Texas women—Josseli Barnica andNeveah Crain—who died of sepsis in 2021 and 2023, respectively, after doctors delayed in intervening while they were miscarrying. (The outlet also reported on two women in Georgia, Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, who died after experiencing rare complications from abortion pills; their deaths could have prevented by a routine procedure—a dilation and curettage, or D&C, which is functionally the same as an abortion—to clear unexpelled fetal tissue from their uteruses, if performed in time.)

Following ProPublica‘s publication of Barnica’s and Crain’s stories, more than 100 Texas doctors sent a letter to state legislators demanding that the near-total banbe amended to reduce the risk of future maternal deaths. Several bills have been introduced in the current legislative session to amend the law.

ProPublica says it conducted its analysis by purchasing and analyzing Texas hospital discharge data from 2017 to 2023. More than a dozen maternal health specialists reviewed the findings and characterized them as more evidence that abortion restrictions lead to poor health outcomes and dangerous delays in care for pregnant people. Many of the experts told ProPublica that the abortion bans were the only reason they could see for the dramatic rise in sepsis rates.

Other recent analyses have also shown the devastating health impacts of abortion bans—in Texas, and beyond.

A paper by the Journal of the American Medical Association, published online last week, analyzed US national vital statistics data from 2012 through 2023 and found that infant mortality rates were 5.6 percent higher in 14 states—including Texas—after they adopted six-week or near-total abortion bans. The researchers found Black infants, those with serious birth defects, and those born in Southern states faced disproportionately larger increases in mortality. (“Texas had a dominant influence on the overall result,” the paper notes.)

Another new analysis—presented at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine conference last month—found that adverse maternal outcomes, and particularly sepsis, increased in Texas following the implementation of SB8. (A link to the full paper was not immediately available.)

So far, abortion opponents have been largely unmoved by evidence suggesting that abortion bans lead to negative health outcomes. Miller’s and Thurman’s deaths were not enough to make Senate Republicans back a resolution to guarantee abortion access to protect a pregnant person’s life, as I wrote last year. Meanwhile, some lawmakers in Texas are trying to restrict abortion even further, introducing legislation to reclassify abortion pills as “controlled substances” and allow Texas women who obtain abortions to be charged with homicide, potentially allowing them to face the death penalty.

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Elon Musk Is Trying to Buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court

Not content with spending more than a quarter of a billion dollars to elect Donald Trump and Republican candidates in 2024 and then taking a wrecking ball to the federal government, Elon Musk is now trying to flip the balance of power on the top court in one of the country’s most important swing states.

Building America’s Future,a dark money group backed by Musk, is spending at least $1.6 million in support of Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel, a conservative judge in suburban Milwaukee who is running for an open seat in an April election that will decide whether progressives or conservatives control the court. The group began running ads across the state on Thursday.

“Elon Musk is buying off Brad Schimel,” his opponent, Dane County Judge Susan Crawford, responded. She is backed by Democrats and progressive groups.

To a remarkable degree fo~~r~~ a state supreme court justice hopeful, Schimel is running as a MAGA-aligned candidate who wants to export Trump’s radical agenda to Wisconsin. He attended Trump’s inauguration, welcomed the president’s endorsement, and pledged that “we’re going to nationalize” the race.

Clearly, the stakes are high. Conservatives controlled the Court for fifteen years, helping to entrench an extreme right-wing agenda, but progressives won a majority with Janet Protasiewicz’s victory in April 2023. The progressive majority subsequently struck down the heavily gerrymandered maps that had ensured lopsided GOP legislative majorities for more than a decade. That allowed Democrats to pick up 14 seats in the state legislature in 2024, giving them a chance to retake both chambers in 2026.

The fate of Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban**—a measure that criminalized abortion as manslaughter unless it was to save the life of a mother—**which Schimel supports, and a 2011 law championed by former Republican Governor Scott Walker that eliminated collective bargaining rights for public sector unions are pending before the Court. The justices could also decide the constitutionality of Wisconsin’s congressional map. Republicans have a 6 to 2 advantage despite the closely divided nature of the state, and the decision could help determine the balance of power in the US House of Representatives.

“Elon Musk and Donald Trump want a MAGA Supreme Court to ensure that maps are rigged to lock in power for far-right legislators; to overturn elections when they don’t like the results; and to suppress voters that don’t kiss their ring,”

Musk’s intervention in Wisconsin shows how his oligarchic plans go well beyond Washington. “Elon Musk and Donald Trump want a MAGA Supreme Court to ensure that maps are rigged to lock in power for far-right legislators; to overturn elections when they don’t like the results; and to suppress voters that don’t kiss their ring,” said Wisconsin Democratic Chair Ben Wikler. “Musk’s attempt to buy Wisconsin’s Supreme Court is a red alert that his attack on democracy isn’t limited to gutting the federal government. He wants it all.”

Musk first mentioned the race on X in January, writing that it was “very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud!” He was referencing a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision in July 2024 reinstating mail-in ballot drop boxes, even though there is no evidence that the use of drop boxes has led to voter fraud.

“Elon Musk highlighted a critical issue in this race: election integrity,” Schimel said after Musk’s tweet. “Wisconsin’s voter ID law is under serious threat—Susan Crawford is the attorney who tried to eliminate the law and called it ‘draconian.’ If she wins, can we really expect the law to survive?”

Schimel, as Wisconsin’s attorney general from 2015 to 2019, defended the state’s strict voter ID law in court and claimed it was a key reason why Trump won Wisconsin in 2016. He also sent Department of Justice staff to monitor the polls in heavily Democratic areas in that election, which Democrats viewed as voter intimidation.

“We battled to get voter ID on the ballot for the November ’16 election,” he told conservative radiohost Vicki McKenna in April 2018. “How many of your listeners really honestly are sure that Sen. [Ron] Johnson was going to win reelection, or President Trump was going to win Wisconsin if we didn’t have voter ID to keep Wisconsin’s elections clean and honest and have integrity?”

Though Schimel said the law would “keep Wisconsin’s elections clean and honest,” the state didn’t present a single case of voter impersonation in court that the law would have stopped. But it did prevent tens of thousands of disproportionately Democratic voters from casting a ballot in 2016, as Mother Jones reported.

In a University of Wisconsin study published in September 2017, 1 in 10 registered voters in Milwaukee County and Madison’s Dane County who did not cast a ballot in 2016 cited the voter ID law as a reason why. That meant that up to 23,000 voters in the two heavily Democratic counties—and as many as 45,000 voters statewide—didn’t vote because of the voter ID law. Trump won the state by a little more than 22,000 votes.

Meanwhile, Schimel hasopenly solicited donations from dark money groups, anapproach thatis highly unusual—and some might say unethical—for a judicial candidate who may eventually hear cases from those very interests. “I’m hoping that very soon we’re going to start seeing friends like Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, Fair Courts America,other groups like that—that very soon they’re going to get on the airwaves and help take some pressure off,” he said recently, referring to the state’s top business group and another dark money organization linked to conservative billionaire Richard Uihlein, one of the biggest funders of the election denial movement. Shortly thereafter, the Musk-aligned group started running ads in the race while the Uihlein-affiliated PACdisclosed it had spent $1.35 million on TV ads attacking Crawford.

The 2023 race was the most expensive Wisconsin Supreme Court contest ever, topping $56 million, which quadrupled the previous amount. Protasiewicz outraised her GOP-backed opponent Dan Kelly, but conservative groups outspent liberal ones. Kelly was supported by prominent election deniers and funders of the insurrection who wanted to see a MAGA takeover of the court.

After that loss, the anti-democratic forces on the right are redoubling their efforts to take control of state supreme courts all over the country, including waging an unprecedented effort to overturn a Democratic victory on the North Carolina Supreme Court. More than likely, Musk and Trump are just getting started in Wisconsin.

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Team Trump Invents Fake “Emergency” to Sidestep Environmental Laws

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

Environmentalists were outraged on Wednesday after the Trump administration moved to fast-track fossil fuel projects through the permitting process, with activists describing it as an attempt to sidestep environmental laws that could harm waterways and wetlands.

In recent days, the US Army Corps of Engineers created a new designation of “emergency” permits for infrastructure projects, citing a Day One executive order signed by Donald Trump which claims the US is facing an “energy emergency” and must “unleash” already booming energy production.

“Agencies are directed to use, to the fullest extent possible and consistent with applicable law, the emergency Army Corps permitting provisions to facilitate the nation’s energy supply,” the order said.

“We don’t understand why a housing development… would qualify as an emergency.”

The move from the Army Corps could allow officials to rubber-stamp 688 pending applications for permits—including more than 100 for pipeline projects and gas-fired power plants—which are necessary for any entity aiming to build infrastructure in navigable US waters or wetlands, or discharge pollutants into them. Environmental reviews could be circumvented, and public comment periods could be skipped over.

“The Trump’s administration’s push for an emergency review of wetland destruction permits is a blatant attempt to sidestep environmental laws and fast-track fossil fuel projects at the expense of our wetland and our communities,” Matt Rota, senior policy director for the Louisiana-based environmental group Healthy Gulf, said on a Wednesday press call. “This emergency proposal will increase climate change, destroy wetlands and leave people even more vulnerable in its wake.”

Reached for comment, Doug Garman, a spokesperson for the US Army Corps of Engineers, said the agency “is in the process of reviewing active permit applications relative to the executive order.”

Despite Trump’s claims that the nation is facing an “energy emergency”—part of a campaign promise to boost planet-heating fossil fuel production—the US is currently extracting more oil and gas than any other country in world history, and levels are still increasing.

“The Trump administration appears to be gearing up to use false claims of an ‘energy emergency’ to fast-track and rubber-stamp federal approvals for projects across the country that will be destructive to America’s wetlands, waterways and communities,” said David Bookbinder, law and policy director at the green non-profit Environmental Integrity Project.

The Army Corps permitting process is meant to examine opportunities to minimize threats infrastructure projects pose to wetlands. Fast-tracking permits through that process could have disastrous impacts for the climate, activists say. Fossil fuels are responsible for the vast majority of global heating, and the wetlands being threatened also play a critical role as an absorber of greenhouse gases.

Because they can slow down waves and absorb rain, wetlands can also protect communities from storms, Rota said. “These wetlands are vital to the survival of coastal Louisiana, as each acre of wetland can absorb a million gallons of water and act as a buffer between communities and the storm surge caused by hurricanes that continue to increase in intensity due to climate change,” he said.

Among the projects that now receiving priority treatment from the Army Corps are oil and gas pipelines set to be built in the wetlands of Louisiana and Texas. Others are related to the controversial Enbridge Line 5 pipeline which crosses Wisconsin and Michigan, and for which developers want to construct a tunnel to bury the pipeline below two of the Great Lakes.

“If approved, this project will risk our fresh water and the millions of people who rely on it for drinking, jobs and tourism in exchange for a foreign oil company’s profits,” said Sean McBrearty, Michigan director of the environmental non-profit Clean Water Action, about the Line 5 proposal on Wednesday’s call.

And though the Army Corps cites Trump’s “energy emergency” order as the impetus for the move, not all of the projects on the “emergency” list relate to energy. One is a gold mine proposed in an Idaho national forest, and another is a plan proposed by the energy giant Chevron to build a housing subdivision on a former oil field.

“We don’t understand why a housing development qualifies either as an energy project, or certainly why it would qualify as an emergency,” said Bookbinder.

The move will likely be subject to court challenges. The Army Corps is permitted to curtail the National Environmental Policy Act—which requires federal agencies to analyze the environmental effects of major projects—in true emergency situations wherein officials have identified an “unacceptable hazard to life, a significant loss of property, or an immediate, unforeseen, and significant economic hardship.”

“We will find out the extent to which that is legal at some point, I’m sure in the not too distant future,” said Bookbinder.

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A Federal Judge Is Weighing Whether to Drop the Case Against Eric Adams

On Wednesday afternoon, New York City Mayor Eric Adams arrived at a federal courthouse in lower Manhattan for what may be the last hearing in his criminal case. US District Judge Dale Ho heard arguments from Adams’ lawyer and deputy US attorney Emil Bove over the Department of Justice’s request that the bribery and fraud charges against Adam be dismissed. The extraordinary development in Adams’ legal case led to the resignations of seven federal prosecutors and escalating calls for the mayor to resign or be removed from office.

Characteristically defiant, Adams seemed unperturbed as he strode into the wood-panelled courtroom. Ho had set the last-minute hearing just yesterday. Bove, the second highest-ranking official in Trump’s Department of Justice, had traveled to New York City to personally defend the motion. Ho, who was nominated to the bench by former President Joe Biden in 2023, acknowledged that his authority to deny the request was narrow and told the parties that he wanted to “proceed carefully.”

After being indicted on charges stemming in part from illegal campaign contributions last September, Adams has insisted that he was unfairly targeted for political reasons. Still, Adams publicly courted President Donald Trump after the November election and has shown a willingness to cooperate with the administration’s sweeping immigration enforcement plans. In his letter ordering prosecutors to drop the charges, Bove made the unusual argument that the case had “unduly restricted” the mayor’s ability to address illegal immigration and violent crime.

In a remarkable move, the acting head of the Manhattan US attorney’s office, Danielle Sassoon, resigned rather than heed orders to dismiss the case, claiming that Adams’ lawyers “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo” during one meeting. The accusation that the charges are being dropped in exchange for Adams’ cooperation on Trump’s immigration priorities have been widely echoed by the mayor’s critics, including the city’s Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and Comptroller Brad Lander (who is challenging Adams in the mayoral primary). The Department of Justice is requesting that the case be dropped without prejudice, meaning that the charges can be brought again—which has only fueled concerns that the Trump administration could use the threat of prosecution to exert influence over Adams.

Ho, at times deferential to Bove, prodded at the Department of Justice’s reasons for dismissing the case. Bove argued that dismissing the case is “a standard exercise of prosecutorial discretion” and that the judge had a straightforward decision to make.

Bove outlined the arguments made in the Department’s request for dismissal, claiming that the criminal inquiry into Adams amounted to an abuse of the criminal justice system. He said that the legal battle had meaningfully impeded Adams’ ability to make decisions around public safety. Adams’ lawyer, Alex Spiro, said that the mayor’s security clearance had been revoked because of the indictment and had prevented his access to sensitive information about “terroristic threats.”

Bove also argued that the prosecution was influencing the upcoming mayoral primary election, saying that Adams’ presence in court at that very moment amounted to “actual interference” in his ability to both govern and campaign.

At one point, Adams told the judge plainly that he had “not committed a crime.” Under oath, Adams said that he had not made any other agreements with the government in exchange for the dropping of his charges. Later, Bove seemed to refer to this answer when he insisted that the mayor had clearly established that there was no “quid pro quo.”

Ho brought up two amicus briefs that were submitted on Monday—one from three former US attorneys and the other from the watchdog group Common Cause—which argued against the case’s dismissal. Bove called the brief submitted by the former federal prosecutors “partisan noise.” The judge did not seem to come to a conclusion as to whether he would take them into consideration.

Ho did not make a ruling at the end of the hearing, saying that he did not want to “shoot from the hip” but would not allow the proceedings to drag on.

Even if Ho grants the dismissal, it will by no means put an end to the scrutiny on Adams’ relationship with the Trump administration. Yesterday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul met with a series of influential political figures as she weighs using her legal authority to remove the mayor. One of them was Rev. Al Sharpton, who told reporters that the governor would wait for Ho’s ruling on the dismissal.

When Adams left the courthouse, a small but lively group of protesters awaited him. One held a sign that read, “No Trump puppets running NYC.”

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RFK Jr., Onetime Environmentalist, Kills NIH Climate Change Programs

In 1999, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then an environmental lawyer, was named by Time magazine as a “hero of the planet” for his pioneering work to clean up America’s waterways. On February 14 of this year, his second day as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, he ended HHS funding for climate change and health programs at the National Institutes of Health, a move that will likely terminate this work.

That day, Ken Callahan, a senior adviser for policy and implementation in the Immediate Office of the Secretary for HHS, sent an email to Dr. Matthew Memoli, the acting director of NIH, noting that HHS would no longer support three programs run by the agency: the Climate Change and Health Initiative, the Climate Change and Health Research Coordinating Center, and the Climate and Health Scholars Program. In the email, a copy of which was obtained by Mother Jones, Callahan cited Executive Order 14154, titled “Unleashing American Energy,” which President DonaldTrump signed on his first day in office last month to revoke executive orders President Joe Biden had previously issued to implement actions to address climate change.

NIH, Callahan wrote Memoli, “will no longer participate in the…three initiatives unless Congressional [sic] mandate/authorized.” He left open the possibility that NIH could move forward on its own with the scholars program.

The defunded NIH programs do not focus on the causes of climate change, but rather its health effects.

These NIH programs do not focus on the causes of climate change. Instead, they concentrate on research and training to protect people from the health consequences of extreme weather events.

The Climate Change and Health Initiative, according to its website, “aims to stimulate research to reduce health threats from climate change across the lifespan and build health resilience in individuals, communities, and nations around the world, especially among those at highest risk.​” Its annual budget is $40 million.

A recent fact sheet prepared by the program notes that it has funded projects that study the long-term health impacts of wildfires; develop strategies for combating malaria (an increasing threat in the United States as temperatures rise); assess plans for addressing children’s asthma following hurricanes (which cause the spread of mold and mildew, exacerbating the disease); examine how common medications can make older adults more sensitive to heat; research how best to deal with gastrointestinal injury caused by heat-related algae blooms; and explore the the connection between heart health risks and drought. It has also sponsored projects that seek to predict the spread of Lyme disease, reduce the exposure of schoolchildren to wildfire smoke, and use urban planning to make cities more flood resistant.

The Climate Change and Health Research Coordinating Center was set up in 2023 to foster collaboration within the research community to better understand and reduce the health consequences of climate change. The Climate and Health Scholars Program connects climate and health scientists from outside the federal government with NIH researchers.

Callahan, the Kennedy aide who wielded the axe, served as chief of staff to the deputy HHS secretary during the first Trump administration. Prior to that he was a Republican operative, who worked several jobs in the GOP world, including director of political and field operations at the Republican Party of Wisconsin and direct marketing manager at the National Republican Congressional Committee. For the past four years, he has been a principal at the Hargan Group, a healthcare industry consulting firm.

As climate change progresses, research has increasingly pointed to the many health threats it poses. According to a 2022 study, more than half of known human pathogenic diseases can be aggravated by the crisis, including dengue and malaria. As Inside Climate News recently reported:

Climate change already kills Americans every year through rising heat, floods, runaway wildfires, exacerbated air pollution and other impacts. It’s also linked to increased spread of infectious disease, rising risks of chronic illness and heightened pandemic risk. The World Health Organization estimated in 2023 that climate effects will cause an extra 250,000 deaths a year globally between 2030 and 2050.

Such worrisome findings have prompted an increasing number of health researchers to focus on the issue.In its 2024 annual report, the Climate Change and Health Initiative put it this way: “As climate-change related disasters and exposures become more frequent and detrimental to human health, NIH must continue to undertake the research needed to understand and address the health impacts of our changing climate—especially for vulnerable populations in the US and globally.”

In the past weeks, Elon Musk’s crusade to dismantle large chunks of the federal government has targeted climate-change-related programs. The HHS decision to stop funding the NIH programs appear to be in sync with that, and it certainly jibes with Trump’s long-running and baseless denial of the climate crisis. (He has called it a hoax originating in China.) HHS did not respond for a request for comment.

Kennedy pointed out that on the topic of climate change, he and Trump “agree to disagree.”

During one of his confirmation hearings for the HHS position last month, Kennedy pointed out that on the topic of climate change, he and Trump “agree to disagree.” He stated, “I believe climate change is existential. My job is to make Americans healthy again.”

But these are not separate matters. According to the scientific and public health communities, there is a strong connection between these two issues that Kennedy has professed to care about. Yet in his initial hours as HHS secretary, he moved to kill NIH programs that strive to protect the health of Americans from the various threats of a warming globe. In doing so, this former “hero of the planet” failed to live up to both his past passion and his much-ballyhooed mission of the moment.

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Trump’s Order to Expand IVF Access Does Not Expand IVF Access

On Tuesday, President Trump signed an executive order on in vitro fertilization. Despite the executive order’s claims that it’s “expanding access” to the procedure, it does not actually do that. Instead, the order directs the assistant to the president for domestic policy to submit to Trump, within 90 days, “a list of policy recommendations on protecting IVF access and aggressively reducing out-of-pocket and health plan costs for IVF treatment.”

This is far less than Trump’s campaign promise to force the government or private insurers to fund IVF, which one estimate says could cost around $8 billion, based on an average cost of about $20,000 per cycle.

IVF describes a process in which an egg and sperm are combined in a laboratory setting to create an embryo, which is then transferred to a person’s uterus so they can carry the pregnancy. It’s often used for people struggling with infertility, LGBTQ couples, and single parents.

As the executive order notes, IVF is incredibly expensive. While costs vary, the price of a single cycle ranges from $12,000 to $25,000, the White House says. According to RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, a nonprofit organization that advocates for expanding IVF access, only a handful of states require insurance companies to cover IVF and fertility preservation in their plans.

Some reproductive rights advocates are calling the order a meaningless attempt at messaging that does not actually do anything to bring down costs or expand availability.

“Don’t be fooled by Trump and Republicans pretending to care about protecting IVF,” said Mini Timmaraju, CEO of the abortion rights group Reproductive Freedom for All. Timmaraju noted congressional Republicans repeatedly blocked a floor vote last year on a bill that would protect IVF access nationwide, as I covered at the time.

The sponsor of that bill, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), said in a post on X reacting to the executive order news: “Trump’s executive order does nothing to expand access to IVF. But if he’s actually serious about delivering on his campaign promise, he can prove it by calling on Republicans to back my Right to IVF Act. Otherwise, it’s all just lip service from a known liar.” (The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Duckworth’s bill.)

At the same time, anti-abortion advocates are freaking out over Trump’s executive order, with a prominent one alleging Tuesday night, “IVF turns children into a product to be created, sold, and discarded—violating their basic human rights.”

Trump is also, of course, responsible for appointing the three justices to the Supreme Court—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—who created the conservative supermajority that made it possible to overrule Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which directly imperiled IVF access. Dobbs was cited in a decision last year by the Alabama Supreme Court that ruled that frozen embryos—which are often discarded in the IVF process—could be considered children under state law. That decision caused nationwide panic as IVF advocates worried that the Dobbs could be used to enact a broader crackdown on IVF. (The state’s Republican governor, Kay Ivey, subsequently signed legislation into law providing doctors and health care professionals civil and criminal “immunity” for providing IVF services.)

Trump responded by promising he would expand IVF access if elected without providing details on how, exactly, this would work. His order basically continues this tradition of vagueness.

Dr. Jamila Perritt, president and CEO of Physicians for Reproductive Health and an ob/gyn based in DC, said the order “does not seem to have any meaningful impact on access to fertility treatments but the intentionally gendered language throughout this order makes me concerned that this will worsen discrimination regarding who can access resources for family building and, by default, determine who is worthy of care.” (The executive order says the administration wants to “make it easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children.”)

Amy Friedrich-Karnik, director of federal policy at the Guttmacher Institute, also said that the abortion rights organization is “deeply concerned that this administration may attempt to limit IVF access to only straight, married couples or otherwise discriminate against LGBTQ+ individuals and single parents.”

The White House did not immediately respond to questions about whether the administration would support measures making IVF more accessible to LGBTQ families—a legitimate question, given that the Trump administration has been doing everything they can to erase transgender people from public life, and given LGBTQ peoples’ frequent reliance on IVF to start families.

Other reactions were more mixed. Sean Tipton, chief advocacy and policy officer for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), said in a statement that the organization was “gratified” to see the executive order, but said the solution is already clear. “There is a fix to this problem: Require health insurance plans to cover IVF for patients who need it,” Tipton said.

But doing that would presumably require an act of Congress (though, as Tipton told me, “in 2025 America, it’s less clear”), and there is no bill that has been currently introduced by any GOP members that would back this.

Tipton pointed to the HOPE with Fertility Service Act, which would require health insurance plans to require appropriate fertility coverage and gained bipartisan support after it was introduced in the House last year, as a piece of model legislation, adding that ASRM hopes it will be reintroduced with bipartisan support in March.

In the meantime, Tipton added, Trump should immediately ensure “that all federal employees, civilian and military, have access to IVF.”

Last September, the Biden administration announced the Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) Program would offer expanded fertility benefits to federal workers and their families, with every state offering at least two plan options for IVF coverage—news that would affect an estimated 8 million people on FEHB plans, according to RESOLVE. But Tipton says that didn’t go far enough, because it did not require every plan to include fertility benefits. “It was good,” Tipton said, “but not nearly as good as what they should’ve done.”

TRICARE, the military health insurance program used by more than 9 million active service members, retirees, and their families, does not cover IVF services (though active duty service members who incur an injury that leads to their infertility may be eligible to access IVF and other fertility benefits at no cost, TRICARE says).

Trump, Tipton said, “can make TRICARE cover it and make every insurance plan available to federal employees include it—he can do that with a stroke of a pen.”

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Airlines Sue to Avoid Consequences for Breaking Disabled Travelers’ Wheelchairs

Five major airlines—American Airlines, Delta, JetBlue, Southwest, and United—havejoined an airline trade association lawsuit to overturn a Department of Transportation rule that forces airlines to treat wheelchair users and their mobility devices with dignity. The rule, issued last year by then–Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, made mishandling wheelchairs an automatic violation of the federal Air Carrier Access Act. The lawsuit, filed this past week in the Fifth Circuit Courtof Appeals, asserts that the rule is “unlawful.”

Buttigieg worked on the rule with disability advocates including Samantha Jade Duràn when creating the rule. Duràn’s own wheelchair was damaged by an airline in 2017 when it was placed with luggage in the cargo hold.

“My brake was completely broken, to the point where I couldn’t brake at all,” Duràn told me. Duràn couldn’t afford to have the wheelchair repaired, so she used the damaged one for two and a half years—which, she points out, is very dangerous.

Airlines damage or lose thousands of wheelchairs every year. People can stay in their own wheelchairs until they are at the gate, after which they will use an aisle chair for the most part. The number of mobility devices damaged or lost was not even counted until 2018, when Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D–Ill.), a wheelchair user herself, pushed for tracking of those damages and losses to be required in Congress’ annual reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Agency. As my colleague Russ Choma reported at the time, airlines had pushed lawmakers to resist the measure. “When the public gets information on how often assistive devices are broken, it will force them to actually handle wheelchairs better,” Duckworth said.

In addition to the new rule, the Department of Transportation also fined American Airlines $50 million last October for its mistreatment of disabled passengers, including damage to wheelchairs. At the time, Buttigieg said that the “era of tolerating poor treatment of airline passengers with disabilities is over.”

But if the airline industry’s lawsuit succeeds, that era may return sooner than expected. This infuriated Duràn, who called the about-face “beyond aggravating” after seeing how difficult, and slow, the initial progress had been~~.~~

The rule that the airlines are targeting was only finalized in December—and Duràn believes it made all the difference in her treatment on a flight last week. “I was treated with dignity,” she said. “They treated me like a normal human being.”

It is unclear just how the current Department of Transportation will respond to the lawsuit. At a January event with the Century Foundation, Duckworth said that Sean Duffy, the then-incoming Transportation Secretary, had “pledged to support the legislation that was passed that would make air travel more accessible.”

Read the lawsuit below.

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Dr. Phil Wants to Sell You Mass Deportations

In the tumultuous swirl of President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown—which has both succeeded in terrorizing communities across the country and largely failed to detain all those violent criminals supposedly rampant in the United States—an unexpected bit player has emerged: Phil McGraw.

Better known as the TV personality Dr. Phil, who rose to fame on the Oprah Winfrey Show during the ’90s, McGraw appears to have positioned himself as a willing narrator of our dystopian immigration policies. It follows a relatively recent embrace of Trumpism that in less than a year has taken McGraw from 2024 rally speaker to filming ICE raids.

There he was in Chicago last month, tagging along for an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid with the intimate access to border czar Tom Homan usually reserved for New York Mayor Eric Adams. Amid his documentation,McGraw seemed to employ a cinema vérité style. “Where you from? Where were you born?” McGraw asks in a video posted to Instagram, as officers detain a man they believe is a convicted sex offender. “You ever been deported from the United States?”

At one point during the arrest, the man seems to recognize the absurdity of McGraw’s presence. “You’re Dr. Phil,” he says. McGraw asks the man how he knows him. “You’re on TV,” he replies. It was a collision of valorizing cop propaganda and D-list celebrity. The main reward for McGraw, it seems, is content for his social media.

McGraw partaking in the raid struck many as inappropriate, even confounding. But his ICE embed was one of several highly publicized anti-immigration spectacles to have taken place since Trump’s return to power.

ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight pic.twitter.com/O6L1iYt9b4

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 18, 2025

The most absurd saw newly appointed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, one week after the inauguration, in heavily caked-on makeup and earrings, joining ICE officials for a predawn raid in the Bronx. “We’re getting the dirtbags off these streets,” Noem said in a three-second video clip, clad in a bulletproof vest. Then, of course, there’s the perennially camera-ready Adams, who, in between hanging out with Tucker Carlson, has been actively selling out New York’s sanctuary city policies since securing the president’s protection from federal corruption charges.

His aid in doing so? Dr. Phil. As my colleague Isabela Dias reported:

Back in December, McGraw reportedly brokered a friendly meeting between Homan and New York City Mayor Eric Adams, after which, according to Gothamist, the Democrat said he would alter sanctuary city laws to give local authorities more latitude to cooperate with the federal government on immigration enforcement.

Still, a discredited psychologist with barely remaining celebrity clout among a burgeoning landscape of fresh-faced right-wing influencers strikes as an oddity. Is he a patsy? Or, like Adams, does McGraw see something to gain by hitching a wagon to Trump?

As NBC News reports, it’s been less than a year since McGraw launched Merit Street Media, a period of reported struggle for the nascent venture that has seen McGraw taking an increasingly supportive stance of Trump’s immigration policies as the company attempts relevance. So between episodes with titles like “The World’s Biggest Bride Update,” will front-row access to cruelty boost Merit viewership? In this era of tabloid trash as politics, it just might work.

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US Fish and Wildlife Service Has Halted Critical Conservation Funding

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

The US Fish and Wildlife Service, the nation’s only government agency dedicated to conserving plants and animals, has frozen its vast portfolio of international conservation grants, Vox has learned. The agency, which supports wildlife protection in the US and overseas, ordered many of the organizations it funds to stop work related to their grants and cut its communication with them. According to USFWS internal communication shared anonymously with Vox, the agency has frozen grants for international projects that amount to tens of millions of dollars.

The freeze jeopardizes dozens of projects to conserve wildlife around the world, from imperiled sea turtles in Central America to elephants in Africa. Grant programs from the federal government protect species whose habitats straddle borders, and they also benefit Americans, such as by reducing the risk of pathogens like coronaviruses from spilling into human populations.

“I hope that most people care about wildlife, even if I fear they do not.”

On January 20, President Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for a three-month pause on “foreign development assistance.” The effort suspended funding under the US Agency for International Development, the nation’s humanitarian and development agency, as part of a broader effort to dismantle the agency (which does literal lifesaving work). USAID also funds biodiversity conservation overseas, on the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Some of those funds support grants for international conservation under the US Fish and Wildlife Service, making a pause on its grants somewhat expected. (On February 13, a federal judge temporarily lifted the pause, which should soon allow foreign aid money to flow again. It’s not clear whether this means the service will lift its freeze on grants.)

But the Fish and Wildlife Service funding freeze goes well beyond conservation projects supported by USAID. Numerous other projects are supported directly by Fish and Wildlife and, according to some of their recipients, could not accurately be described as foreign development assistance—and thus shouldn’t be impacted by Trump’s pause. In other words, money should still be flowing to organizations that work to conserve wildlife overseas with support from Fish and Wildlife. Instead, the agency has put all of those projects on ice.

The sudden suspension of Fish and Wildlife grants reveals how government agencies are scrambling to fall in line behind new leadership, often lacking clarity on how to carry out the Trump administration’s orders. Legally, the service may still be able to fund many of its international grantees, though experts I spoke to said the funding falls into a gray area. One Fish and Wildlife employee familiar with the agency’s international efforts said they think agency leadership thought it would appear better if they halted funding for all international projects. The employee spoke with Vox on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak with the press.

The employee told Vox they fear the Trump administration will be hostile towards international conservation efforts. In his first term, President Donald Trump’s administration moved to weaken the Endangered Species Act—the nation’s strongest wildlife protection law, implemented by Fish and Wildlife—and other environmental regulations meant to protect threatened animals and their ecosystems. “I hope that most people care about wildlife, even if I fear they do not,” they told me.

This week, further inflaming concerns about wildlife protections, the Department of Interior laid off more than 2,000 employees as part of broader government job cuts. The Fish and Wildlife Service is part of the Interior Department.

International conservation is a little-known part of the Fish and Wildlife Service’s remit. The agency, which had a budget of about $4 billion in 2024, works to protect some of the world’s most endangered and globally recognized animals including elephants, rhinos, and primates. Many of them live in poor regions of the world that lack funding for conservation, making US government support essential. Animals, such as migratory birds, also move and live across borders, so conserving them requires working internationally.

The grants from Species Funds “are probably the most efficient grant funds we have because they’re so targeted.”

Americans benefit from curbing threats to wildlife overseas, such as deforestation—which, among other things, can make it easier for zoonotic diseases to spill over into human populations. As the world’s largest economy, the US has precipitated the declines of animals abroad. Mining rare earth metals for our smartphones, for example, has helped destroy forests in Africa’s Congo Basin, whereas US carbon emissions fuel global climate change. Scientists say that with more climate warming more species will likely go extinct.

Several nonprofit organizations that receive funding from Fish and Wildlife confirmed with Vox that they received stop-work orders. Any costs associated with their grants would be “temporarily disallowed,” they were told, according to two emails reviewed by Vox. The grants range from under $100,000 to a few million.

In an email from agency leadership, Fish and Wildlife staff were directed on what to say in response to questions from grantees about funding: “The Department of the Interior continues to review funding decisions to be consistent with the President’s Executive Orders. The Department’s ongoing review of funding complies with all applicable laws, rules, regulations and orders.”

Funding from the service supports most of the world’s major conservation groups, such as the Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS). Peyton West, the FZS US executive director, said that money—at least some of which is now on pause—goes a long way. It helps support, among other things, anti-poaching efforts in a game reserve in southern Tanzania that have helped elephant populations rebound. “Less poaching means less illegal wildlife trade and all the illegal activity that goes along with it,” West said.

“The grants from USFWS Species Funds are probably the most efficient grant funds we have because they’re so targeted,” she told Vox. “The goal is to do one thing—protect the world’s most iconic but vulnerable species—and the focus is on the basic core needs to make that happen.”

Several other organizations that receive funding from Fish and Wildlife declined to go on the record, in fear that drawing attention to themselves may put their funding from the federal government at risk. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants from Fish and Wildlife, did not respond to a request for comment. The National Audubon Society, which also has grant funding from the service, directed Vox to a February 6 statement from the organization. “Audubon is prepared to work with the new administration, Congress, and our partners to meet the challenges ahead and secure a future where birds and people thrive,” Audubon CEO Elizabeth Gray said in the statement.

The Fish and Wildlife Service spends an almost invisible fraction of taxpayer money, compared to other government efforts. What it does, however, is vital and cannot be overlooked, environmental advocates told me. “There are so many issues with efficiency in our government, but I think it’s fair to say that the USFWS species conservation funds are managed very well in that respect,” West said. “They are also probably the best bang for buck of any of our grants because they focus on critical core activities, they leverage other funding, and they bring law and security into some of the most remote areas in the world.”

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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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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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“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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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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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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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 Hegseth—declared 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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