Tesla Protests Spread Nationwide

“Do not buy swasticars.”

“Constitution, yes. Musk, no.”

“No one elected Elon Musk.”

These are a sample of the messages that targeted Elon Musk over the weekend, as thousands of protesters across the country flooded local Tesla dealerships to express their outrageover the tech CEO’s escalating war on the federal government.

Pro-democracy patriots protest outside a Tesla showroom in downtown Chicago. Hit Elon Musk in the pocketbook, which is all he cares about. Check out TeslaTakedown.com for protests near you.

— Mark Jacob (@markjacob.bsky.social) 2025-03-08T19:39:06.331Z

#teslatakedown#teslatakedownalhambraGreat turnout today. We will be back tomorrow!

— Alhambra, CA Tesla Protests (@alhambraprotest.bsky.social) 2025-03-09T21:13:18.181Z

From Ohio to California, people demonstrated outside Tesla showrooms, some attracting large police presences.In New York,where at least nine NYPD officers were seen protecting a single Cybertruck, at least six protesters were reportedly detained. Instances of property damage against Teslas were also reported. Meanwhile, Tesla’s numbers have taken a significant dip amid Musk’s illegal takeovers and mass firings.NBC News reports that February was the electric vehicle company’s “worst month on the stock market since 2022.”

https://twitter.com/pop4climate/status/1898432151105732633

Musk responded to the protests on X Saturday, claiming, without evidence, that an unspecified “investigation” had discovered that ActBlue, a Democratic political action committee, was behind the protests.

Protest at a Tesla Showroom in New York City, NY (Sipa via AP Images)

Protest in New York City , New York (Photo by Steve Sanchez/Sipa USA).(Sipa via AP Images)

Protest in New York City, New York (Photo by Gabriele Holtermann/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

Protest against Elon Musk in New York (Photo by Michael Nigro/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

The protests targeting Musk come as Democrats struggle to find their political footing under Donald Trump’s administration. As my colleague David Corn wrote, “The Democrats are bringing a teaspoon to a gunfight. This is not how a party battling for its survival and the survival of the nation behaves.”

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RFK Jr. Reportedly Had a Call With Texans Helping Distribute Unproven Measles Remedies

The measles outbreak underway across West Texas and New Mexico has intensified, sickening 228 people, and killing two, a child and an adult. Amid the worsening public health emergency, a local historian in Seminole, Texas, Tina Siemens, has been helping a holistic medicine clinic raise money to distribute unproven remedies to families affected by the outbreak.

The same activist told Mother Jones that she had a phone call last week with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to understand the unique health challenges in the Mennonite community.

Siemens said she had been working with a clinic called Veritas Wellness in Lubbock, Texas, to distribute medications, including Vitamin C, cod liver oil, and the inhaled steroid budesonide. Last week, an online fundraiser appeared to collect donations that it says will be “used to defray the cost of essential vitamins, supplements, and medicines necessary to treat children enduring complications from the measles virus and other illnesses.” The fundraiser’s website says the funds will go to Tina Siemens and it lists its creator as Brian Hooker, a biologist and the chief scientific officer of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine advocacy group that Kennedy helmed until he ran for president.

On March 2, Kennedy penned an op-ed for Fox News in which he appeared to endorse the measles vaccines, writing that the shots “not only protect individual children from measles but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons.” Yet in an interview last week, Kennedy claimed, without citing research, that treating measles with steroids, antibiotics, and cod liver oil yielded “very, very good results.” Cod liver oil contains Vitamin A, which is often used in much higher concentrations to prevent complications from the disease, including blindness. There is no credible evidence that cod liver oil itself can treat or prevent measles.

Neither the US Department of Health and Human Services nor Veritas immediately responded to a request for comment for this story.

Siemens told Mother Jones she had been motivated to help in part because she believed that local Mennonite families had been unfairly blamed for causing the outbreak because some of them chose not to vaccinate their children against measles.

She said that she had had a phone call last week with Kennedy and Veritas’ Dr. Edwards, and that the topic of the phone call had been “to understand the Mennonite culture,” which, she said, was important “because Mennonites have typically gotten the blame” for spreading the illness. She noted that not all of the local Mennonite families had skipped the vaccination. “The media is spinning it as it’s all the unvaccinated, uneducated Mennonites, and that’s just not the truth,” she said.

Veritas sells supplements and offers services including “peace consultations,” “movement consultations,” and a “menu” of medications and supplements it can deliver intravenously. According to the website, Dr. Edwards opened the clinic when “a divine appointment in 2011 opened his eyes to the fact that US medical schools only teach a very narrow way of disease and symptom management with pharmaceuticals instead of disease and symptom resolution by addressing root causes.”

The online fundraiser has collected more than $12,000 in donations so far. Siemens said that she had already helped Dr. Edwards to distribute medications to “150 to 200 families,” and that she was glad that people in the community had the choice of whether or not to receive the vaccine. “I’m very, very grateful that we live in a community that has that choice,” Siemens said. “We live in a state that has that choice, for the parents to make that choice for their family.”

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As Europe Criminalizes Environmental Protest, Some Activists Turn to Sabotage

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

It was raining and the sparkling lights of the City of London shone back from the cold, wet pavement as two young men made their way through streets deserted save for a few police and private security. In the sleeping heart of the global financial system, they felt eyes on them from the city’s network of surveillance cameras, but hoped their disguise of high-vis vests and hoods hiding their faces would conceal them.

Reaching Lime Street, they stopped by a maintenance hole and looked around to make sure no one was watching. One took off the cover, located a bundle of black cables and started hacking away. Hours later, an email was circulated to news desks: “Internet cut off to hundreds of insurers in climate-motivated sabotage.”

Five years ago, climate activists from Extinction Rebellion (XR) and the school strikes movement believed getting huge numbers of people on the streets could persuade the powerful to change course on the climate crisis. Then protesters from groups such as Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil (JSO) put their bodies and freedom on the line to disrupt business as usual, in an effort to concentrate minds.

Now, with climate breakdown worsening and fossil fuel emissions showing no signs of peaking, let alone abating, some of them say it is time to escalate the campaign of disruption, by carrying out clandestine acts of sabotage against the corporations they see as responsible for the destruction of the climate.

“The actual number of people who are committed to risk jail time to do this are pretty small in number.”

In a manifesto published on the WordPress blogging platform, Shut the System (STS), the group that claimed credit for London action that took place in January, says it is “kickstart[ing] a new phase of the climate activist movement, aiming to shut down key actors in the fossil fuel economy.”

“We vow to wage a campaign of sabotage targeting the tools, property and machinery of those most responsible for global warming, escalating until they accept our demands for an end to all support for fossil fuel expansion.”

The Guardian spoke over the Signal encrypted messaging service to an activist from STS. He did not reveal his identity and the Guardian was unable to verify his claims.

He said new laws further criminalizing disruptive protests had made traditional, accountable methods of activism increasingly unsustainable, and a clandestine approach increasingly attractive. He pointed to the case of activists from JSO who received sentences of four and five years—reduced last week after an appeal—for organizing road blocks on the M25.

“If you want to do anything that is disruptive, the penalty is pretty massive now, and so these draconian laws mean it is hard to get very much pressure…by following the kind of things that [Extinction Rebellion] and JSO have done in the past, because people will be arrested and put away for a long time,” he said.

“You can’t just keep doing that,” he said. “The actual number of people who are committed to risk jail time to do this are pretty small in number.”

STS is not the first group to take clandestine direct action against fossil fuel targets. In 2022, unknown activists targeted a pipeline being built to funnel jet fuel from Southampton to west London, cutting holes in the pipe and severing hydraulic cables on a construction vehicle.

This month, another group claimed responsibility for drilling holes in the tires of more than 100 SUVs parked at Land Rover dealerships in Cornwall—a repeat of an action carried out last year. And the Tyre Extinguishers, a campaign group that urges people to take autonomous clandestine action against SUVs in cities by deflating their tires, have targeted hundreds of vehicles through activists heeding their call.

In the City of London, the action of STS, though carefully planned, had minimal impact. “We did our research, as best as we could and we planned about what sort of cables to be looking for, how they might be laid out, and we taught ourselves about opening up these manholes,” the activist said. “We did everything we could to maximize safety for everyone, and then in my small group we found targets and divvied them up.”

A cybersecurity expert said there had been “significant slowdown of internet speed” in the area, but the network continued to function.

“We had varying success throughout the UK,” the activist admitted. STS also claimed actions in Birmingham, Sheffield and Leeds. “I am aware of people in other areas that did this…where they then called up the next day and the phone lines were down. There is obviously a learning curve to these things.”

But actions such as this pale in comparison with the scale of those taken by climate activists abroad. In Germany, activists last year staged attacks against gas pipelines, while others escalated a campaign against concrete with two arson attacks on a Cemex plant in Berlin.

But it is in France where the tactic has been most widely used, with actions ranging from activists filling the holes in golf courses with cement to a full-scale riot when a crowd descended on the construction site of an agricultural reservoir in the country’s drought-stricken south, intent on dismantling it.

Andreas Malm, an associate professor of human ecology at Lund University, said, “France really is the one case in recent years…where you’ve had a radical mass movement that has actually been quite successful—and this is the only movement that has also deployed sabotage consistently as a tactic.”

Four years ago Malm, a Swedish social ecologist, penned How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a polemic on the future of effective climate action and an exploration of the tactic of sabotage. It has become a set text in the movement, and even spawned a movie adaptation.

Malm says that, with issues such as Israel’s wanton destruction of Gaza taking up activist energy, and the energy crisis precipitated by Russia’s war in Ukraine potentially discrediting those targeting fossil fuels as “stooges of Putin,” militant action for the climate has been on a downswing.

Nevertheless, he still sees it as the only sustainable route for climate activists increasingly facing a severe pushback against non-violent disruptive protest.

“One mistake made by the offshoots of XR [such as Just Stop Oil]—they started escalating a little bit and doing slightly more radical stuff…while still sticking to the protocol to wait until the cops come and arrest them,” he said. “If you want to actually escalate and do real material damage to fossil fuel property you cannot stick to this idea. You have to do this without offering yourself as a kind of virtue sacrifice.”

The STS activist who spoke to the Guardian did not see the group’s actions as more extreme than the kinds of things already carried out by other groups. “The only difference is that they stayed around to be arrested,” he said.

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Trump and His Commerce Secretary Differ Over Whether His Tariffs Will Spark a Recession

Here’s something you won’t read in Mother Jones too often: President Donald Trump was actually right about something—or at least, more right than one of his cabinet secretaries.

In a rare moment of honesty during a Fox News interview that aired Sunday morning, Trump declined to rule out the possibility that the 25 percent tariffs he imposed on Mexico and Canada this past week (and then paused—again), could trigger a recession.

When Sunday Morning Futures host Maria Bartiromo asked if Trump expected a recession this year, he replied, “I hate to predict things like that. There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big—we’re bringing wealth back to America.”

“It takes a little time, it takes a little time,” he added.

Indeed, as Bartiromo pointed out, the Federal Reserve Bank ofAtlanta estimates that GDP is expected to shrink by 2.4 percent in the first quarter of 2025—a decline of nearly 5 points from the bank’s positive estimates from mid-February, before the tariffs took effect.

Today exclusively on @SundayFutures with @MariaBartiromo, President Trump @POTUS @realDonaldTrump spoke about tariffs and the economy.@FoxNews pic.twitter.com/wT6zo49wyU

— SundayMorningFutures (@SundayFutures) March 9, 2025

One person who probably was not watching Trump’s interview? Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who was more optimistic in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, saying that Americans should “absolutely not” brace for a recession—despite the fact that, as host Kristen Welker noted, major banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have recently said there is a higher likelihood of it.

“Donald Trump is a winner. He’s going to win for the American people. That’s just the way it’s going to be. There’s going to be no recession in America,” Lutnick told Welker. He conceded that “some products that are made foreign might be more expensive” but argued that “American products will get cheaper, and that’s the point.”

But as this past week hasproved, it’s no so simple: When Trump’s tariffs took effect on Mexico and Canada, the stock market took a nosedive and Canadian officials said they would impose retaliatory tariffs, ultimately leading Trump to pause the tariffs, as he’d already done once before—though he has also said global retaliatory tariffs will take effect on April 2.

Economists have warned that tariffs, which are taxes countries levy on imported goods, will be passed on to consumers. That’s because tariffs raise the wholesale cost of finished goods like cars, clothing, produce, and toys, and also the cost of raw materials for farming, manufacturing, and refining (such asCanadian heavy crude, steel, lumber, fertilizer, gypsum, auto parts, etc). Sellers may eat some portion of the increase, but the rest will be reflected in higher prices, economists predict. What’s more, data from Lutnick’s own department showed that retail sales plunged in January.

Spokespeople for the White House and the Commerce Department did not immediately respond to an email on Sunday asking why Trump and Lutnick are not on the same page. In any case, the boss appears to be right on this one.

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Federal Health Agency Offers $25,000 Employee Buyouts—With Ramifications for Millions of Americans

As an outbreak of measles drags on in Texas, and wary officials monitor the bird flu, the Trump administration is reportedly offering $25,000 buyouts to most employees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

A purported copy of the buyout email, shared by a Rolling Stone reporter on social media, suggests it was sent out Friday night, directing employees to reach out to their HR offices by day’s end next Friday if they want to accept the offer.

The email says the Office of Personnel Management—the same office that sent the “what did you get done this week” email championed by Elon Musk, unleashing chaos across the federal workforce—had approved HHS to offer “voluntary separation incentive payments to a broad population of HHS employees.” OPM’s website also notes that “agencies that are downsizing or restructuring” can offer buyouts up to $25,000 to employees of at least there years who are in good standing. (Thousands of probationary, earlier-career federal workers have already lost their jobs.)

HHS is the vast and highly consequential umbrella agency overseeing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Food and Drug Administration (FDA), among others. The Associated Press reports that workers in all three of these agencies got the email, although it’s unclear how many of HHS’s more than 80,000 overall employees received it. (HHS representatives did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones sent on Sunday.)

With anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at the helm, the ability of HHS to carry out its core functions has become uncertain. Last year, as my colleague Anna Merlan reported at the time, RFK said he would fire and replace 600 people at the NIH on his first day as HHS Secretary. Kennedy did not wind up doing that, but Friday’s email signals the first large-scale effort to drastically reduce theHHS workforce.

The buyout offer comes at a pivotal moment for public health: The CDC is currently monitoring a bird flu outbreak (70 US cases so far, and one death) and a measles outbreak (more than 220 cases, most in Texas and New Mexico, and two deaths). The Republicans’ proposed cuts to Medicaid could affect many of the 72 million low-income, elderly, and disabled people who rely on it for coverage. Medicaid, thenation’s largest health insurance program, is administered by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is also part of HHS. (Trump has nominated celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz to run it.)

Logic, though, has never stopped Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency from seeking to cull federal workers who are tackling problems and providing crucial services to Americans. As I reported on Friday, DOGE is pursuing massive cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the midst of a housing affordability crisis and record homelessness.

HHS workers, at the very least, will have no shortage of colleagues to commiserate with.

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Copper Mining Is an Environmental Nightmare. This Collaboration Aims to Limit the Harm.

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

It is the key ingredient of bronze, the alloy that helped create some of the world’s greatest civilizations and took humanity out of the stone age on its way to modern times. For good measure, the metal is invaluable for electrical wiring, plumbing, and industrial machinery. We owe a lot to copper.

But the metal now faces an uncertain future as manufacturers prepare to expand its use to make the electric cars, renewable power plants, and other devices that will help the planet move towards net zero. Unrestricted extraction could cause widespread ecological devastation, scientists have warned.

The issue is to be the prime focus for the new Rio Tinto Centre for Future Materials, based at Imperial College London in partnership with several international university groups. A total of $150 million has been set aside for its first 10 years of operations.

“The world needs to electrify its energy systems, and success will absolutely depend on copper,” materials scientist and vice-provost Mary Ryan, one of the centre’s founders, told the Observer last week. “The metal is going to be the biggest bottleneck in this process. So, in setting up the center, we decided copper would be the first challenge that we dealt with—though we will turn our attention to other materials in future.”

This point was backed by Sarah Gordon, the center’s co-director. “Our first aim is to find new, responsible ways to source metals—in particular copper. Can we extract it without disturbing rocks at all? Or could we use viruses and bacteria to harvest copper? These are the first crucial questions the center aims to answer.”

Copper has become essential for powering devices ranging from smartphones to electric vehicles because it transmits electricity with minimal loss of power and is resistant to corrosion. Around 22 million metric tons of copper were mined in 2023, a 30 percent increase from 2010, and annual demand will reach around 50 million metric tons by 2050, say analysts.

Such an output will have enormous environmental consequences, because copper mining uses acids that poison rivers, contaminate soil, and pollute the air. Producers such as Peru, Chile, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have seen natural habitats destroyed, wildlife populations wiped out, and human health damaged near mines. Deep-sea mining has been proposed, but the idea horrifies marine biologists, who say such enterprises would devastate sea life.

The aim of the new center is to find ways round these problems and help provide the materials the world will need to reach net zero. It is funded by the mining group Rio Tinto and hosted by Imperial College London in partnership with the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, the University of California-Berkeley, the Australian National University, and the University of the Witwatersrand-Johannesburg.

One key project is seeking new ways to mine copper. “We typically extract it from minerals that have crystallized out of very saline, copper-rich brines,” said Professor Matthew Jackson, chair in geological fluid dynamics at Imperial College. “However, this process requires huge amounts of energy to break open the rocks and bring them to the surface and also generates a lot of waste as we extract copper from its source ores.”

To get round this issue, Jackson, working with international partners, has been searching for underground sites where copper-rich brines are still in liquid form. These brines are created by volcanic systems which can, crucially, provide geothermal energy for extraction.

“That means we can extract the copper by pumping the brines to the surface via boreholes—which is relatively easy—and also use local energy to power the mine itself and possibly provide excess energy for nearby communities,” Jackson said. “Essentially, we are seeking to build self-powered mines and have already pinpointed promising sites in New Zealand, and there is potential to explore conventionally barren areas such as Japan.”

A different approach is being followed by another Imperial project where a company, RemePhy, has been started by Imperial PhD students Franklin Keck and Ion Ioannou. They have used genetic technology to develop plant-bacterial systems that have an enhanced ability to extract metal from the soil. “Essentially, you will be able to grow these crops on land contaminated by waste left over from the mining of metals such as copper, and they will extract that metal,” said Keck.

The importance of these techniques was stressed by Ryan. “The world will need more copper in the next 10 years than has been mined in the whole of the last century. Currently, we do not have enough in circulation to meet this demand. “We therefore need to both reduce our demand for copper and work out how to extract it in the most sustainable way possible, and that is what we aim to help to achieve at the centre.”

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Now January 6 Apologist Ed Martin Says He Wants to “Defend the Police.”

Ed Martin, the acting US Attorney for the District of Columbia, is a former advocate for January 6 attackers who has demoted, fired, or investigated scores of prosecutors in his office who worked on cases against rioters who assaulted Capitol and DC police that day.

But Martin on Friday announced a new initiative he dubbed “Defend the Police,” which includes steps he said would help prosecutors in his office “get back to” protecting cops.

“We will tolerate no more ‘assaults on police officers,'” Martin wrote in what he called an “open letter” Friday to police officers.

Martin also cheered DC plans to paint over the “Black Lives Matter” mural on 16th Street. “Good riddance,” he wrote.

Martin is a former “Stop the Steal” organizer who has previously blamed the Capitol attack on “antifa,” called for “reparations” for rioters, and urged jailing people involved in prosecuting insurrectionists. While hounding assistant US Attorneys who worked on January 6 cases, he has has gained widespread attention for missteps that include a seemingly overtly unconstitutional effort to dictate curriculum at Georgetown’s law school, attempting to personally prosecute Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) for a 2020 speech faulting Supreme Court justices and declaring his office to be “President Trumps’ [sic] lawyers.”

But Martin, who has received President Donald Trump’s nomination to permanently run the US Attorney’s office, is attempting to generate more positive press, in part by promoting a plan to crack down on crime in Washington, a key responsibility of the office he runs. Martin has dubbed that effort “Make DC Safe Again.”

In his letter Friday, which begins with the salutation “Dear Blue,” Martin celebrated the reinstatement of two DC police officers, Terence Sutton and Andrew Zabavsky, who were pardoned by Trump for their convictions stemming from the 2020 death of a moped driver, Karon Hylton-Brown. A jury found the officers had tampered with the crime scene, tuned off body cameras and lied to senior officers to cover up the incident, in which they violated department rules by pursuing Hylton-Brown, who was fatally struck by a car. Both men were convicted of obstruction of justice. Sutton was convicted of second degree murder.

Martin said the men were “wrongly convicted of a bogus charge.” He also cheered DC plans to paint over the “Black Lives Matter” mural on 16th Street. “Good riddance,” he wrote.

Martin also said, vaguely, that he is instructing prosecutors to “stand up against” defense lawyers who malign officers “for sport or advantage unfairly.” And he said that he is rewriting his office’s policy on a DC law that requires prosecutors to inform judges and defense lawyers when an officer accused of egregious misconduct testifies in court.

Martin elaborated on the policy in a email to his staff, which was shared with Mother Jones, noting he has recently been “riding along with” DC police officers. “More and more, I hear from the Men and Women in Blue that they want to know we have their backs.” Martin wrote. “We do and we will.”

Martin’s communications about the policy do not mention the January 6 attack, which resulted in injuries to more than 140 officers and likely contributed to the deaths of five.

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The VA Promised DOGE Cuts Won’t Harm Veterans. Employees Say It’s Already Happening.

This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.

For years, his morning routine was as therapeutic as the job he loved: Wake up at 4:30. Run or lift weights by 5 a.m. Then head to the veterans mental health facility where he works in California to help veterans who are struggling after leaving the military—just as he once had.

But these days, he says he sleeps through his alarm and wakes up already exhausted, with a pulsing dread in his stomach. The first thing he does is check his email: Does his staff still all have jobs? Does he still have a job? Does his team still exist?

This decorated veteran-turned-veterans’ therapist shared his distress when The War Horse reached out to VA workers across the country to get a look at how the frenzy to downsize the federal government is impacting care for the nine million veterans who rely on VA.

At work, it’s hard to concentrate, he said. He tries to hide his anxiety from his employees, who he knows are feeling the same way. He especially tries to hide his worries from the veterans he counsels throughout the day. But he’s finding it harder to stay calm and grounded for his patients, he said, and he keeps second-guessing care decisions he normally wouldn’t have thought twice about—“Is this outside of policy?” “Is this something that could get me fired?”

The drumbeat of news from Washington makes him antsy, he said, and he’s reminded of his deployments to the Middle East, where he earned a Purple Heart. He remembers the dread of waiting before a firefight began.

“Honestly, the last time I felt this level of fear was in combat,” he told The War Horse.

The difference this time, he said, is how alone and unmoored he feels.

“At least in combat, I knew my mission. I was supported in it by my teammates, by my leadership, and I had agency. I had a weapon. I could fight against a tangible enemy. Now it’s just an invisible cloud of dread.”

“At least in combat, I knew my mission. I was supported in it by my teammates, by my leadership, and I had agency. I had a weapon. I could fight against a tangible enemy,” he said. “Now it’s just an invisible cloud of dread.”

Over the past month, VA has cut 2,400 positions, and VA Secretary Doug Collins said this week the department plans to slash more than 70,000 jobs. The goal would reduce VA staffing to 2019 levels, three years before the historic PACT Act expanded benefits to more than a million veterans sickened by exposures to toxins.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has repeatedly promised that the quest to shrink the federal government will not harm veterans or their care.

“We’re going to make the department work better for the veterans, families, caregivers, and survivors,” Collins said this week.

But VA employees from across the country said the cuts and a climate of fear are already hurting veterans.

The War Horse spoke with eight current employees who work directly with veterans in eight different states, as well as one employee who was among the 1,400 workers fired during the reporting of this story. We interviewed therapists, social workers, researchers, and others, from supervisors to trainees. Since the employees were not authorized to talk and feared repercussions for speaking out, The War Horse agreed to withhold their names so they could candidly describe their experiences.

VA employees from North Carolina to South Dakota said the federal hiring freeze has left teams short-staffed at their facilities. Mental health workers described scrambling to find private, HIPAA-compliant spaces to take telehealth appointments after the return-to-office mandate—one worker described a clinic where the only space with a closing door was a storage closet.

Multiple providers talked about the difficulties of worrying about losing their jobs while trying to provide care to patients nervous about exactly the same thing—veterans make up 30 percent of the federal workforce, and close to 6,000 have already been fired, according to estimates late last month from Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee.

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have expressed concern about the mass firings at VA, which Collins, the VA secretary, confirmed would slash 15 percent of the workforce after an internal memo about additional cuts leaked to the news site Government Executive. “We’ll be making major changes, so get used to it,” Collins said.

Illinois Republican Rep. Mike Bost, the chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said in a statement he had “questions about the impact these reductions and discussions could have on the delivery of services.”

In a statement to The War Horse, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, called the plan “an attack on our veterans.”

“How do you go through therapy session after therapy session, talking to a veteran and helping them through their traumas while you’re also simultaneously being traumatized?”

“The Trump administration’s plan to conduct mass firings of VA employees—more than a quarter of whom are veterans themselves—is a betrayal of those who have served our country,” she said.

The anxiety has made it especially difficult for VA mental health workers to create the therapeutic environment needed for working with veterans, many of them who struggle with complex psychiatric conditions.

“How do you go through therapy session after therapy session, talking to a veteran and helping them through their traumas while you’re also simultaneously being traumatized?” said one VA therapist.

A therapeutic relationship depends heavily on trust, says Carl Castro, a 33-year Army veteran and the director of military and veterans programs at the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work.

The irony, he said, is “the VA in particular has really, really come a long way in building trust…The old adage is it takes years to build trust, and it can be destroyed in a matter of minutes. Or in this case, by an email.”

Multiple therapists recounted veterans beginning sessions in recent weeks expressing relief that their therapist hadn’t been fired.

“Why should our veterans—the ones that we are serving, the ones we are working for—why should they be concerned about us?” a social worker in the Midwest said. “It shouldn’t be that way.”

President Trump has promised to shrink the size of the federal government, which he has called “bloated” with “unnecessary” people, and has directed the new Department of Government Efficiency and Elon Musk to root out fraud, waste, and corruption. Last month, Musk appeared at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference waving a chainsaw. “Waste is pretty much everywhere,” he told the crowd.

Many VA employees say they could have found work elsewhere, but they chose to work at VA because of its mission helping veterans. They agree there is bloat in the federal government, including at VA. But they argue taking a chainsaw to the workforce won’t result in a more efficient department.

The Trump administration has had to scramble to reinstate some fired workers, such as those who work in nuclear safety and avian flu prevention, and the Department of Veterans Affairs has also been forced to halt hasty cuts. After Collins on February 25 trumpeted $2 billion in cuts, including what he called millions in contracts to create PowerPoints and meeting minutes, the department reversed course the next day when it discovered it had slashed cancer programs, medical and burial services, and other vital programs.

A VA employee who worked with veterans with mental illness told The War Horse that her supervisors were blindsided by her dismissal a month before her probationary period ended. One had told her earlier that day her job was likely safe. She said she learned she was being fired just minutes before the end of the workday and scrambled to try to contact the veterans she was scheduled to meet with the following day.

Collins has promised that “mission-critical” positions will be exempt from cuts. But lawmakers and union officials have reported that Veterans Crisis Line workers—positions the VA specifically said would be safe—have been let go. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a retired Army National Guard lieutenant colonel and Illinois Democrat, has said she intervened on behalf of at least two crisis line workers, who have since been told they would be reinstated.

VA employees said they worried about the impact of cutting non-“mission-critical” programs and jobs. Transportation for disabled veterans and suicide prevention trainings have been canceled, according to Democratic senators. Two employees at different facilities said that therapy groups for veterans who had experienced racial trauma have been cut. The Phoenix VA fired three music therapists who worked with PTSD patients.

Programs like these can offer veterans critical social connections, says Jenny D’Olympia, a professor at William James College who teaches courses on veterans’ mental health needs.

“A lot of veterans live socially isolated, and they’re looking for experiences to be with other people who understand what it’s like to be them.”

“A lot of veterans live socially isolated,” she said, “and they’re looking for experiences to be with other people who understand what it’s like to be them.”

Several VA workers told The War Horse a moment that crystallized their fears came when VA facilities removed signs celebrating LGBTQ veterans that said, “We serve all veterans.”

“I just felt a lot of pride walking into work and seeing it and knowing, ‘This is a pretty cool place,’” one VA employee in Wisconsin said. “I really want to ask the VA now: Do we not serve all veterans anymore?”‘

Several clinicians told The War Horse that veterans have brought up concerns that their medical information might be accessed by people outside of VA. A representative from DOGE has access to internal VA systems, a VA spokesperson confirmed. DOGE employees have also accessed Treasury Department systems that include information about veteran disability payments.

Veterans who are federal workers have told VA providers that they are hesitant to discuss sensitive information—racial or gender identity, disability information, a history of military sexual trauma—worrying it could somehow be accessed and used against them at work, as DOGE looks for ways to shrink the federal workforce.

A VA spokesperson has said DOGE does not have access to veteran data. But VA providers said, given the secretive nature of DOGE’s work, they didn’t feel able to reassure patients. They said they are also second-guessing what they write in a patient’s chart.

“What do you do?” one mental health worker asked. “It feels wrong to withhold that from someone’s record if that’s the diagnosis they have, but it also feels like you as a provider might be putting someone’s…well-being in jeopardy.”

And then there’s the constant fear of losing resources, staff, or even for one’s own job. One employee described it as “a campaign of cruelty and terror.” Another said it felt like an “ax over my head.”

Several providers said they worried restrictions on what they could and couldn’t say or do might lead to ethical quagmires—they pointed out that their professional licenses require them to provide the best care possible to all of their patients, which means considering their identities.

This, and sinking morale, is leading some workers to consider employment elsewhere, even if they feel assured that their positions are secure at VA.

“As much as we want to serve the population, there’s only so much that some people can watch and be victim to before they’re overwhelmed and they can’t do it anymore,” one VA therapist said.

Over the past several weeks, veterans have started reporting they’re seeing the impact of the cuts. An Army veteran near Hampton, Virginia, told WTKR that her annual mammogram last month was canceled because of a staffing shortage, and the earliest she could reschedule it was in June. In a letter to the editor in The Villages, Florida, a veteran said he was told he could “no longer drive the five minutes in my golf cart to my hearing aids specialist,” and instead had to travel to a VA clinic 45 minutes away.

Veterans and VA employees also say wait times for appointments are increasing. One VA employee who works to enroll veterans in health care told The War Horse her department is seeing a big uptick in enrollments as veterans fired or worried about losing health care through their federal jobs turn to VA care. VA did not respond to questions from The War Horse about increased wait times or enrollment numbers in the new administration.

VA employees who spoke with The War Horse also shared concerns about the larger impacts of the cuts and cultural changes. The VA employs close to 5,000 researchers who work on projects that impact not just veterans but the broader public. It also has a lesser-known legal mandate to serve as the country’s backup healthcare system; during the Covid pandemic, every VA in the country put aside ICU beds for nonveterans as hospitals reached capacity. Some employees fear a gutted VA will be unable to provide backup care if the nation faces a bird flu or other pandemics in the coming years.

Similarly, one of VA’s foundational missions is “to educate for VA and the nation.” Seventy percent of all doctors in the country complete some of their training at VA facilities, and the department is responsible for training more than 1,000 psychologists each year. One psychologist intern at VA said she worried that under the new DEI guidance, she wouldn’t be able to complete a diversity-based project required for her certification.

“It’s these things that people don’t really focus on as much as they should,” Castro said. “They take it for granted, and they don’t see its importance until it doesn’t exist.”

For VA employees who spoke to The War Horse, the cuts to the department feel personal.

“We’re increasingly feeling, and the rhetoric is out there, that federal employees are corrupt people, that we’re gaming the system, that we’re somehow just skating through and just laughing all the way to the bank,” the mental health worker in California said.

He said knew he wanted to work with veterans after he found the support he needed through the VA.

“It turned my life around…I’ve worked in the [VA] my entire career post-military, and now to be seen or cast as this bad person after I served this country this whole time, it just feels really awful,” he said. “I feel betrayed.”

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The Country’s Most Famous Houseplant Is Missing. What Did Trump Do With It?

After the Washington Post ran a front-page photo of President Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu sitting in front of the Oval Office fireplace on February 4, careful reader Thomas M. Sneeringer fired off a letter to the editor. “It appears the fireplace mantel in the Oval Office has been subjected to President Donald Trump’s Midas touch,” he wrote. Sneeringer observed that the spray of Swedish ivy that has adorned the mantle for more than half a century had vanished, replaced by what he speculated might be… golf trophies?

“I was instantly offended and instantly understood how it happened,” Sneeringer told me in an interview. “It was just so consistent about what we know about Trump’s taste.”

He knew that the missing ivy was no ordinary plant. Irish ambassador Thomas J. Kiernan had given it to President John F. Kennedy as a gift in 1961, and ever sinceit has been a consistent backdrop to some of the most famous White House meetings. Back in 1984, during the Reagan administration, Kurt Anderson wrote a tribute to “The Plant” in Time magazine:

“The Oval Office may be the headiest place in America. When the President, sitting in his desk chair at the southern tip of the Oval, stares dead ahead to the far wall, he sees The Plant. Anywhere else it would be a robust but unremarkable Swedish ivy. But there on the marble mantelpiece, day after consequential day, it basks in the power and the glory. No matter who has been inaugurated since 1961, The Plant has always stayed…The Swedish ivy, given its potential for leaks, is an Administration team player first and last.”

The hardy plant’s scalloped green leaves are center stage in photos of Ronald Reagan meeting Gorbachev, George H.W. Bush schmoozing with Bruce Willis and Nelson Mandela, and Jimmy Carter conferring with Yitzhak Rabin or having lunch with his wife Rosalynn. Nelson Shanks painted Bill Clinton leaning next to the ivy in his official presidential portrait.

President Ronald Reagan talks with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev during a meeting in the Oval Office at the White House, Dec. 8, 1987. Barry Thumma/AP

The plant survived Trump’s first term, and it was even there to bear witness to that awkward meeting between Trump and Joe Biden after the 2024 election.

President Joe Biden meets with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2024. Evan Vucci/AP

But no more.

So where is it now? The White House did not respond to several inquiries about the plant’s whereabouts or the gold statues that replaced it.

Like so many things that Trump and his DOGE team are heedlessly destroying, the Oval Office ivy has a constituency that may not be immediately obvious to those wielding the chainsaws. With its own Instagram account and generations of progeny that even Elon Musk can’t rival, the humble houseplant enjoys a cult following.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, left, and President Jimmy Carter meet in the Oval Office in Washington, March 7, 1977./AP

Not really an ivy but closer to mint, and native to South Africa, not Sweden, Plectranthus verticillatus grows like a weed, making it well-suited to sharing. White House staffers over the years have given away clippings to visitors, interns, and many other lucky beneficiaries. Those gifted with a clipping have in turn passed along clippings to others. I have one that came from the Clinton Oval Office, and now my daughter has its offspring.

Journalist Gabriela Riccardi got her cuttings by way of a White House official who convened a sendoff for her current and former staff at the end of Obama’s second term. As a parting gift, the official gave away cuttings from the Oval Office mother plant. Riccardi’s co-worker at the Atlantic scored one, and in turn shared clippings with two friends, one of whom passed a stem on to Riccardi. She told the story in Quartz in 2023:

“The staff gift came with legacy. It came with gravitas. And it came with just one request: Grow the plant yourself, then pass a cutting of it on to someone else. In that way, the ivy would spread from person to person, a symbol of the connection between a government and its people.”

During Covid, Riccardi’s small cutting had wildly proliferated, so she decided to do something useful with the excess. She raffled off five clippings to anyone who donated $10 to When We All Vote, the civic group started by Michelle Obama to increase voter participation. The plants were so sought after that Riccardi raised more than $2,200. She was unaware that the original plant had recently gone MIA. “It’s a heartbreaker to hear that it’s not there anymore,” she told me after I gave her the bad news. “I think it’s just such a beautiful tradition.”

Riccardi and Sneeringer hope that the original plant has not been abandoned but is only in exile, being nurtured nearby until a more tradition-conscious president returns to the Oval Office.

Back in 1984, Kurt Anderson had interviewed Dale Haney, then the Supervisory White House Horticulturalist in charge of spritzing and pruning the country’s most famous houseplant. Haney reverently dubbed his charge “amazing” for its resilience and resistance to pests. In 2008, he ascended to the job of White House grounds superintendent, and in 2022, the Bidens celebrated his 50 years of White House service with a photo with them and their dog, Commander. (A year later, Haney was immortalized in another photo when a tourist witnessed the dog bite Haney on the arm.) Haney picked out this year’s White House Christmas tree, but the press office did not respond to an email asking whether he still works there.

Sneeringer hopes he does, as Haney seems like someone who’d orchestrate an ivy rescue mission. “Wouldn’t it be great if he was keeping it somewhere?” he asked hopefully.

President Donald Trump meets with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office, Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2025. Evan Vucci/AP

With all the terrible things happening in the country right now, Sneeringer admits that complaining about the missing ivy may seem “sort of petty.” But he sees the plant as much more than White House décor. The ivy, he told me, “symbolized to me continuity and stability and all the things we value about how we change power in the country.”

For him, the plant’s disappearance is emblematic of Trump’s assault on the federal government. “He’s completely unconcerned that this represents a break from tradition,” he said. “Or maybe no one bothered to tell him.”

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Thousands “Stand Up for Science” Across the Country

On Friday, protesters gathered in Washington, DC, and at more than 30 satellite protests nationwide in what appears to be the largest pro-science demonstration of President Donald Trump’s second term.

The “Stand Up for Science” rally, led by a small team of scientists, comes amid historic cuts to publicly funded research and firings at science agencies across the federal government. As I previously reported:

Since taking office, President Donald Trump and his administration have put research funding on hold; paused communication and travel at the National Institutes of Health; removed or edited websites related to DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) at NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration; slashed funding for universities’ “indirect costs” (a move academics say will limit research); and fired hundreds of federal employees across the government’s health agencies.

On their website, the Stand Up for Science organizers call for reversing those measures—ending “censorship and political interference in science,” securing and expanding scientific funding, and defending diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in science.

Hundreds now in Federal Plaza, Chicago for the #MarchforScience. It's another cold miserable wet day, but folks are turning out. #standupforscience

— Aaron Cynic (@aaroncynic.bsky.social) 2025-03-07T18:13:39.670Z

Standing up for science here at the Georgia State Capitol. @standupforscience.bsky.social

— Jaap de Roode (@jaapderoode.bsky.social) 2025-03-07T18:44:38.704Z

Strong @uaw.org presence at #standupforscience2025. UAW represents NIH workers (and also @motherjones.com / @revealnews.org workers like me)

— Jeremy Schulman (@jeremyschulman.bsky.social) 2025-03-07T18:02:08.965Z

In New York City, hundreds of Stand Up for Science protesters gathered in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park, holding signs reading, “Science Makes America Great,” “Fund Facts Not Felons,” and “Girls Just Want to Have Funding for Science.” At times, the crowd chanted in call-and-response, “When science is under attack, what do we do? Fight Back!”

“This Is What Mad Scientists Look Like”

— Jackie Flynn Mogensen (@jackiefmogensen.bsky.social) 2025-03-07T18:59:16.265Z

Several signs noted science’s role in saving lives. One attendee, a New Jersey resident who asked only to be identified by first name, Richard, held a small sign that said, “Government Funded Biomedical Research Saved My Child’s Life.” At 14, he told me, his daughter was diagnosed with cancer. With the help of a new drug called an immune checkpoint inhibitor, she recovered. In a few weeks, she’ll graduate from college, he says, with plans to attend medical school. The “miracle” drug is what inspired him to protest. “It did literally save her life,” he said.

Others were there in part to defend their own funding. “I’m really glad to be out here,” Christine, a 33-year-old neuroscience postdoc, told me, noting that Trump’s cuts would impact those at the beginning of their career the most. “I really hope that protests and opposition can grow in momentum, because it’s scary that there is just not enough pushback at the moment.”

In DC, the guest list included big names like Bill Nye the Science Guy; former NIH director Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project; Nobel Laureate Victor Ambros; Bill Nelson, the previous administrator of NASA; climate scientist Michael Mann; the Union of Concerned Scientists’ new president Gretchen Goldman, and others.

While this may have been the largest scientist-led action of the second Trump era, it wasn’t the first. As I previously reported, shortly after Trump paused funding for many scholars, hundreds of researchers held a phone bank to call on their elected officials to push back against Trump’s cuts. In February, a coalition of academic unions called Labor for Higher Education organized a national day of action, including protests and phone-banking events across the country.

Although reminiscent of 2017’s March for Science, Friday’s Stand Up for Science March felt distinctly different. “The spirit of it is the same,” Stand Up for Science founder Colette Delawalla told the New York Times, but “now we are in a position of being on defense as opposed to offense.” Or, as my colleague Jeremy Schulman, covering DC’s march, wrote on Bluesky, the March for Science “was overwhelmingly about Trump being a science denier.” Today, Schulman said, “it’s largely focused on the consequences of research funding cuts.”

Still, it’s hard not to hear an echo. As Amy Berkov, a retired tropical ecologist who attended the March for Science eight years ago, told me in New York, “[I’m] sad to be returning with my sign from 2017,” motioning to a sign that read, “Collect and Analyze Data” and “Reject Alternative Facts.” “But it’s time again.”

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Trump’s “Speak English” Order Explained—in Spanish

Trump wanted to make English the official language of the United States. But I want to speak Spanish.

On Saturday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order designating English as the country’s official language. Speaking in front of Congress on Tuesday, he again said that he had made English the official language of the US.

But as my colleague Julianne McShane recently wrote, what the order actually does is rescind an earlier executive order signed by Bill Clinton in 2000, which required government agencies and organizations that received federal funding to offer language assistance to non–English speakers. Agencies now have to decide for themselves whether they will offer documents and services in different languages.

This isn’t the first time Trump has attacked people for speaking other languages. He mocked Jeb Bush during the 2016 Republican primary for speaking Spanish, and has warned of languages coming into the United States that “nobody in this country has ever heard of.” I assume he wasn’t talking about the word “covfefe.”

In the executive order, Trump called the action a way to “promote unity” and “cultivate a shared American culture,” but critics disagree. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus responded to the executive order on X, formerly Twitter, by saying that the country “has never had an official language” and that the order was an “attack on our diversity”—and also that the tens of millions of Americans who speak other languages aren’t “any less American” for it.

67.8 million Americans, to be exact. That’s one in every five people living in the United States. The most popular language outside of English is Spanish, with about 13 percent of the population, or 41.7 million people, speaking it at home in 2019.

The Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus responded to the order by calling it an “attempt to allow federal agencies to discriminate against immigrants and individuals with limited English proficiency.”

Immigration advocates view the executive order as another attempt by the Trump administration to make immigrants feel like they don’t belong in the country. As Anabel Mendoza, communications director of immigration advocacy group United We Dream, told the Associated Press, “Trump is trying to send the message that if you’re not white, rich, and speak English, you don’t belong here.”

“Immigrants are here to stay,” Mendoza concluded. “No matter how hard Trump tries, he can’t erase us.”

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No One Voted to Defund 1,000 Community Health Centers

Kelly Kenley’s community clinic in rural Minnesota has already survived one crisis this year: her Open Door Health Center didn’t get federal funds for 10 days after Russell Vought—the Project 2025 architect turned head of the Office of Management and Budget—orchestrated a funding freeze in Januarythat plunged Medicaid and other funds into chaos.

“We could still make payroll,” Kenley said, but added that some other health centers in Minnesota couldn’t—and may have had to resort to staff furloughs, or worse.

The country’s first community health centers, or CHCs—neighborhood clinics that do not turn away uninsured patients, and charge sliding-scale fees—were formally piloted in the 1960s under the auspices of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty; in 1977, Congress started to fund them federally, and successive administrations pushed to expand the program.There are now more than a thousand community health centers across the US, providing some 32 million people annually—about a third of whom are children—with a wide range of services including primary, dental, and behavioral care. About six in ten CHC patients are people of color.

“When I say we will run out of money, that’s counted in weeks and months.”

“Roughly 90 percent of our patients have incomes below 200 percent of poverty, and about 50 percent are enrolled in Medicaid,” said Minnesota Association of Community Health Centers CEO Jonathan Watson. “We’re part of the healthcare safety net [and] our role is really to keep communities healthy where they’re located.”

Medicaid payments make up around 40 percent of CHC operating budgets, although that figure varies by state, according to KFF. If Congress slashes Medicaid funding to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, as House Republicans have proposed in a Trump-endorsed plan, the future of manyhealth centers will be in peril. Perhaps ironically, seven House Republicans who voted for the plan also sit on the Congressional Community Health Centers Caucus, including two of its co-chairs, Rep. Troy Balderson (R-Ohio) and Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-Va.). “When I say we will run out of money,” Kenley said, “that’s counted in weeks and months, that’s not counted in years.”

Many CHCs do not operate with a lot of money leftover, according to the Commonwealth Fund: in 2019, their total revenue was $31.43 billion against operating costs of $31.16 billion; in 2021, that margin was $38.85 billion to $36.79 billion; in 2023, it was $46.75 billion against $46.01 billion. The centers, the Commonwealth Fund wrote, “grappl[e] with uncertainty over the timing and generosity of future federal investments.”

Medicaid coverage was vastly expanded by the Obama-era Affordable Care Act; many GOP-run states now face the prospect of rollbacks that would strip millions more Americans of health insurance, driving up the need for community care while taking away a key source of its funding. Private practices, Watson said, have no obligation to offer sliding-scale rates—and can’t bridge the gap.

Kenley is not opposed to Medicaid reform—but the closure of CHCs, she said, will drive an influx of Medicaid patients to emergency rooms instead, which costs Medicaid more. A 2020 study focused on Massachusetts also linked community health center visits to decreased non-emergency ER visits. In addition, a 2009 study found that in Georgia counties with no community health centers, uninsured people were more likely to go to the ER.

In other words, Medicaid-backed clinics are cost-efficient—and indispensable to the communities they serve. “Day to day, we’re seeing a lot of patients where they walk through our doors and it’s probably the first time they’ve received any medical or dental care in years,” Kenley said.

“Particularly heartbreaking,” she said, was “the number of children that we see in our dental department that have never had routine dental care, who are in pain.”

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A Little Agency Is Standing up to Musk with a Tell-All Lawsuit

Nearly two months into President Donald Trump’s lawless dismantling of the federal government, a small agency has stood up with a tell-all lawsuit. The lawsuit from the president of the United States African Development Foundation (USADF) asks the courts to spare the agency from obliteration at the hands of Elon Musk and his band of tech bros. In doing so, it lays out in detail just how Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency go about their illegal takeovers—and how one tiny agency stood up for its mission and the rule of law.

DOGE sought to take control with an outlandish series of threats, lies, and actions without legal authority.

Since the opening days of the administration, Musk and his minions have barged into agencies, including such august institutions as the Treasury Department, where they demanded access to the most sensitive systems and were handed the keys to the kingdom. Across government, career officials facing DOGE orders have resigned quietly, leaving the public to guess as to what is happening as reporters rush to share snippets.

But the lawsuit offers something that has been generally lacking—an example of top agency officials who not only fought DOGE’s attacks, but are sharing with the public exactly how these attacks are taking place.

USADF and its president Ward Brehmhas something going for him that some larger agency leaders do not, in that it operates outside the purview of any Trump-appointed cabinet official. By blocking DOGE’s access to their systems, despite threats, and then filing a lawsuit, USADF demonstrates how smaller agencies and officials can stand up against Musk. After all, as the lawsuit points out, Musk and his staff do not have actual authority to do what they are doing. At least in this case, they just have bravado. While DOGE personnel were escorted into the USADF headquarters by federal marshals on Friday, if the agency’ lawsuit succeeds, its resistance could fend off annihilation at the hands of DOGE.

The allegations in the complaint lay bare how DOGE operates. First, Trump issued an executive order targeting several agencies as “unnecessary,” including USADF. Next, DOGE staff attempted to penetrate USADF’s internal networks “under the false pretenses of modernizing and streamlining USADF’s computer systems.” When USADF leadership were later told the real reason DOGE sought access was to essentially shut USADF down, they refused them access.

What followed was an increasingly outlandish series of threats, lies, and actions without any legal authority on the part of DOGE as they sought to take control at USADF.

“DOGE employees began threatening members of the Board—telling them that unless they carried out DOGE’s plans to strip USADF to its core, the Board would be fired,” the complaint alleges. “When that didn’t work, USADF was told that President Trump did not need to follow the required process for advice and consent of the Senate and instead had appointed Pete Marocco as the sole board member (despite there still being four properly appointed board members, none of whom had received any notification of termination).”

On March 5 DOGE staffers tried to physically force their way into USADF’s offices. Denied access by Brehm, Marocco and DOGE staffers threatened the building’s property manager with a lawsuit and warned they would bring in U.S. Marshals and Secret Service agents.

Had Brehm and USADF capitulated, we already know what would have happened, because it already happened to its sister agency, the InterAmerican Foundation. As the complaint lays out, IAF experienced the kind of hostile takeover you’d expect in a dictatorship, not a functioning democracy that operates under to the law:

Using the same bullying tactics, they attempted to get access to IAF’s grants and contracts. When that failed, they purported to fire IAF’s President and then announced by fiat that Marocco had been appointed sole board member (despite the IAF board also not having been fired). In a closed-door board meeting last Friday, February 28—which consisted of just Marocco in the IAF lobby—Marocco appointed himself acting President of IAF. That night, at Marocco’s direction, Treasury cancelled all but a handful of IAF’s contracts. And two days ago, Case 1:25-cv-00660 Document 1 Filed 03/06/25 Page 3 of 26 4 purporting to act as both President and sole board member, Marocco directed DOGE to cancel all but a few of IAF’s grants, shut employees out of the IT systems, laid off almost the entire IAF staff, and shut down IAF’s website.

Brehm’s lawsuit hits upon the lawless absurdity of these developments: the legally unfounded DOGEis seizing a congressionally approved and funded agency, with leadership appointed according to the law, and destroying it without any legal justification or authority. (According to the complaint, DOGE’s goal is to reduce the agency to its core statutory function, which it assessed could be carried out with one or two contracts.) It underlines how much of what has happened since January 20 is not a legal reorganization or assessment, but rather an hostile takeover on the part of Musk and his henchmen. (Musk, the de facto head of DOGE is not named in the lawsuit, but the titular head, Amy Gleason, is.)

Republicans have for decades complained that government is wasteful, inefficient, even evil. DOGE plays on these fears to justify its evisceration of government. But even where there is truth to these complaints, the USADF’s lawsuit demonstrates that what isbeing undertaken by Trump and Musk is not an orderly downsizing—but a destructive rampage that trades the laborious work of following bureaucratic rules with a rule-less rule by thugs.

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Elon Musk’s $1 Credit Card Spending Cap Is Paralyzing Federal Agencies

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

Last month, the Trump administration placed a $1 spending limit on most government-issued credit cards that federal employees use to cover travel and work expenses. The impacts are already widely felt.

At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, scientists aren’t able to order equipment used to repair ships and radars. At the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), laboratories are experiencing delays in ordering basic supplies. At the National Park Service, employees are canceling trips to oversee crucial maintenance work. And at the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), employees worry that mission-critical projects could be stalled. In many cases, employees are already unable to carry out the basic functions of their job.

“The longer this disruption lasts, the more the system will break,” says a USDA official who was granted anonymity because they aren’t authorized to speak to the media about the looming crisis.

This “felt like the rug was being pulled out from under us.”

A researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who tests new vaccines and treatments in rodents says he has had to put experiments on hold; his lab is not able to get certain necessary materials, such as antibodies, which are needed to assess immune response. “We have animals here that are aging that will pretty soon be too old to work with,” says the researcher, who requested anonymity as they aren’t authorized to speak publicly about the agency. Young mice and rats that are 6 to 8 weeks old are typically used for drug and vaccine studies, but some of the animals in their lab have now aged out of that window and may have to be euthanized.

They say NIH workers have been using internal listservs to ask for reagents and lab equipment from other buildings or institutions to try to compensate for shortages, but they’re not always able to track down what they need. The NIH is made up of 27 institutes and centers, and its Bethesda, Maryland, campus is spread across more than 75 buildings. “Sometimes you need something that’s really niche, and you’re just not going to find it from someone else on campus,” they say.

The change comes as Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency continues to hunt for alleged examples of waste across the federal government. Late last month, DOGE announced that it was working to “simplify” the government’s largest credit card program, which issues GSA SmartPay travel and purchase cards for federal employees. Last Wednesday, the agency claimed 24,000 cards had been deactivated.

The credit card program allows federal workers to bypass the typical procurement process required to buy goods and services. A 2002 report from the Department of Commerce said that, “by avoiding the formal procurement process, GSA estimates the annual savings to be $1.2 billion.” It also enables federal employees to avoid paying sales tax on expenses that the government is exempt from.

At the FDA, labs that analyze samples to ensure that food, drugs, medical devices, and cosmetics are safe and meet regulatory standards are already facing shortages. “While we are always acutely aware of when Congress’ funding is going to run out, we are able to order supplies to keep things going in the lab. This abrupt ending felt like the rug was being pulled out from under us,” says an employee at the FDA who requested anonymity because they aren’t authorized to speak with the media.

The employee recently placed an order for pipette tips, an essential laboratory supply, but found that order was put on hold. “Now we are running out, asking colleagues at other offices to share what they might not be using,” they told WIRED.

In addition, workers say FDA labs now have to go through a lengthy process to order liquid nitrogen, which is used to keep ultra-cold freezers running. These freezers preserve samples of cells and other biological material that reflect years, and sometimes decades, of research. Delays in getting liquid nitrogen tanks could destroy that material. Previously, new tanks could usually be acquired the same day as putting in a request. Now, it takes a week or so to receive a tank after initiating a request.

An employee at the Environmental Protection Agency says her facility is not able to place regular orders of liquid nitrogen at the moment. “We have dozens of these freezers full of important environmental samples that are imminently at risk of being lost because we can no longer get our regular shipments of liquid nitrogen,” says the employee, who requested anonymity. These samples are used as part of research on detection and remediation methods for chemicals such as PFAS, which are found in many products and break down very slowly over time.

“Scientists are being forced to jerry-rig the connection points on these freezers to accept pressures of liquid nitrogen they were not designed to handle,” the employee says. “Divisions are resorting to bartering with each other to obtain needed items.”

“Instead of focusing on other work, I’m focused on three different contingencies on how to handle this.”

The FDA and EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED.

The credit card freeze also means that federal researchers who were working on scientific manuscripts can’t pay journal fees, meaning they can’t submit their work to certain journals for publication.

An employee at a federal forensics lab told WIRED that spending limits mean the lab is no longer able to pay to ship evidence back to agents, effectively halting its ability to do casework. Before a case goes to trial, defendants have the right to access and review evidence that the prosecution intends to use against them, which includes access to the evidence in their case. Defendants are able to send that evidence to an outside lab for analysis if they choose. “Cases can’t progress until we return the evidence,” says the forensics lab worker, who asked to remain anonymous. “I basically can’t do my job right now.”

NIH employees were told that travel cards could not be used at all for 30 days, forcing scientists to cancel plans to attend a major infectious disease conference next week. USDA employees at the Pest Identification Technology Laboratory have stockpiled reagents used for molecular tests in advance of the spending limits, according to the USDA official.

FAA employees who travel to work on and test aviation systems worry the credit card freeze will prevent them from completing their projects. “We are allowed to use our personal cards in emergencies but none of us trust them to pay us back now,” says one employee.

The impacts have hit the National Park Service as well. One employee was poised to go on a trip to oversee road maintenance at a national monument when the change went into effect on February 20. “Unless I want to pay for it myself, I can’t go. I can’t pay for my hotel, my rental car, fuel for the car. Now I can’t carry out the mission,” the employee says. “Today, instead of focusing on other work, I’m focused on three different contingencies on how to handle this. Do I go? Do I call my engineering team and tell them to reschedule? And if so, when? The project is on an indefinite hold.”

A memo written to staff at the National Park Service specified that “all travel that is NOT related to national security, public safety, or immigration enforcement should be canceled if it begins on Wednesday, February 26, through the end of March 2025.” A long-term decision on the travel policy, it said, will come “at a later date.” Some NPS staffers were able to travel in February despite not getting official clearance. They have now been told no travel will be allowed in March. To date, roughly 75 trips have been canceled or rescheduled, according to a source familiar with the situation.

The National Park Service did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED.

Some government employees say they were given a warning prior to the change being announced on February 20. “We went out and bought cases and cases of toilet paper the night before,” another current employee at the National Park Service says. “There’s a general acknowledgement that things are going to break.”

That employee works in the Pacific West Region, which manages federal land in California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Nevada, as well as parks in Arizona, Montana, Guam, and American Samoa. While the GSA did allow for the possibility of exceptions to the clamp-down, the employee claims there are only four purchase cards with spending limits above $1 available for the entire region.

Some of these parks pay for services like internet and wireless on purchase cards—leaving staffers wondering if their work devices could soon be cut off. “Before someone can fix a bathroom a work order has to be issued,” the current employee explains. “That happens electronically. Like any business, we rely on email, Teams, and chat to get things done.”

The spending limits reflect Musk’s belief in zero-based budgeting. After he purchased Twitter, he slashed the budget to zero and forced employees to justify every expense. He also froze people’s corporate credit cards.

“With the Twitter pausing of payments, at some point we were in a meeting at 1 am on a Saturday, and it was like, ‘Hey, let’s turn the credit cards off to see what bounces, and what happens,’” explained angel investor Jason Calacanis on the All In podcast in February. (Calacanis was part of Musk’s transition team at Twitter.) “And of course, we started getting calls … The people who come first, they’re probably the ones who are in on the biggest grift.”

Employees see it a different way. “There are so many controls in place to make sure fraud doesn’t happen,” alleges the current NPS staffer. “I honestly believe the only fraud occurring is being committed by Musk, [Russell] Vought, and [Donald] Trump.”

Kate Knibbs and Aarian Marshall contributed to this reporting.

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Trump Allies Are Deploying This “Book-Banning Pastor” to Local School Districts

This story was originally published on the Popular Information substack, to which you can subscribe here.

In a January 24 press release from the Department of Education, the Trump administration declared that book-banning was a “hoax.”

But last month, President Donald Trump invited John Amanchukwu, the self-proclaimed “book-banning pastor,” to the White House for a Black History Month event. Since 2023, Amanchukwu, a youth pastor from North Carolina, has travelled to at least 23 school board meetings in 18 states on a nationwide book-banning tour financed by Trump donors and allies, including Turning Point USA (TPUSA).

On this tour, Amanchukwu demands that school districts remove books that do not align with his conservative Christian ideology—usually books written by or about LGBTQ people. Amanchukwu relies heavily on insults and threats during his school board speeches, maximizing each appearance’s potential for social media virality.

At a recent stop in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Amanchukwu launched into a typical rant about the book It Feels Good to Be Yourself. Amanchukwu said the book was “a lie” because it acknowledged that gender identity is fluid and intersex people exist. As proof that the book was lying to children, Amanchukwu cited Genesis 1:27.

Informed by the chair of the school board that he was out of order because his comments did not pertain to items on the day’s agenda, Amanchukwu just began speaking louder, attempting to drown out the board members. Asked to return to his seat, Amanchukwu was undeterred. “We want to ban books that seek to pervert the hearts and minds of children,” he shouted. The shouting continued for approximately three minutes, until the board declared a recess.

In April 2023, Amanchukwu attended a meeting of the Wake County Board of Education in his home state of North Carolina with then-candidate for state superintendent Michele Morrow and other local activists. In his comments (see video below), Amanchukwu said that inappropriate books were being “purchased and delivered” to local schools as part of a plot by the “Democrat Party” that “castrates children, mutilates children, perverts children, grooms children, murders children, and indoctrinates children.” (The Wake County Board of Education is nonpartisan.)

At a July 18, 2023 meeting in Temecula, California, Amanchukwu described a textbook lesson about civil rights icon Harvey Milk as “filth.”

In August 2023, Amanchukwu officially announced a nationwide tour of school boards in partnership with a “major organization,” TPUSA. In June 2024, he appeared on a podcast hosted by TPUSA Founder Charlie Kirk during which Amanchukwu revealed that TPUSA had chipped in “thousands and thousands” of dollars to support his work. Amanchukwu also said he received “hundreds of thousands” of dollars from Robert “Dr. Bob” Shillman.

Shillman is a businessman and right-wing donor who has previously funded anti-muslim activists including Laura Loomer, Brigitte Gabriel, and Tommy Robinson. Shillman also hosted a fundraiser with JD Vance for the Trump campaign in September 2024. Some specifics of the financial arrangement between Amanchukwu, TPUSA, and Shillman have not been disclosed. But, based on TPUSA social media posts, it appears that Shillman’s donations to TPUSA are being used to fund Amanchukwu’s school board tour.

Amanchukwu has worked with TPUSA Faith, an offshoot of TPUSA, as a contributor since July 2022. Amanchukwu was a featured speaker at America Fest, TPUSA’s annual conference, in December 2024 and is often featured on TPUSA’s social media accounts.

TPUSA and Amanchukwu’s agent did not respond to requests for comment.

In fall 2024, Amanchukwu became a visiting fellow at the Center for Renewing America, an organization founded by Russell Vought, a lead author of Project 2025 who was recently confirmed as Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget. (The group did not respond to questions about Amanchukwu’s work.)

At many school board meetings, Amanchukwu appears wearing hoodies emblazoned with his quotes from past meetings. These hoodies (see below) are available for purchase on his website, iknowgodmerch.com, for $60. (At the time of publication, Amanchukwu’s merch store was password protected.)

Amanchukwu has also written two books, which he promotes frequently in podcast appearances. He released a film in October 2024 about his school board tour, which can be purchased for $9.99. The film, produced in partnership with TPUSA Faith, features other prominent right-wing figures, including billionaire and self-proclaimed historian David Barton.

When Amanchukwu announced his school board tour, he said he would travel to the “wokest and bluest and darkest cities in America.” Instead, his tour has largely stopped in purple or red districts, including Boise, Idaho; Washoe County, Nevada; Gwinnett County, Georgia; and Midland, Texas. On at least two occasions when he visited school boards that only allow public comments from people residing in their district, Amanchukwu has claimed to be the roommate of a local activist.

Amanchukwu’s school board speeches follow a routine format. He identifies a few books he feels do not belong in school libraries. These books often feature LGBTQ characters and range from picture books to more mature young-adult novels. Amanchukwu reads a passage from one of the more mature books and admonishes school board members for allowing such “perverse” material in their libraries. Amanchukwu frequently breaks meeting rules, which has resulted in him being escorted out of meetings by police on several occasions—and provides eye-catching content for his social media accounts.

At a meeting of Florida’s Indian River County School Board in August 2023, Amanchukwu was escorted from the meeting by police because he continued reading from 13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher after the board asked him to stop. Amanchukwu and TPUSA have used footage of Amanchukwu being removed from this meeting to promote his school board tour and foster a narrative that Amanchukwu is being persecuted for his beliefs.

At a school board meeting in New Jersey, Amanchukwu, who is Black, was asked to leave after using the n-word, but refused to leave the speaker’s podium for several minutes. He shouted to the school board that he would not leave because it was his “Rosa Parks moment.” He also compared himself to Rosa Parks on an episode of Kirk’s podcast.

In Mesa, Arizona, Amanchukwu called school board members “racist bigots” for celebrating Black History Month when less than 5 percent of the student body is Black and for having a library book about a trans Black boy. Amanchukwu specifically called out the board’s only Black member, saying she should be “voted off first.”

On podcasts, Amachukwu’s language is even more inflammatory and insulting—often directed at women and trans people.

On an episode of Kirk’s podcast, Amanchukwu mocked a woman featured in a Planned Parenthood sex education video, saying she looked like a “two-liter bottle.” Amanchukwu said the video would deter students from having sex because they would be disgusted by the woman’s appearance. “I mean the last thing you want to think about is sex looking at that woman…” he said, “if it’s a woman.”

In July 2024, Amanchukwu uploaded a video about his visit to a school board meeting in Washoe County, Nevada. In it, he spent several minutes attacking Debi Stears, the collections director for Washoe County libraries, and quoted a Bible verse implying it would be better for her to be killed than to continue providing books he deems inappropriate for children.

“Debi, Debi, Debi, you don’t know what you’re doing,” Amanchukwu said. “Do you not know that the Bible tells us in Luke 17:2 ‘it is better for a man to be thrown into the sea with a millstone around his neck, than for someone to do harm to a child’?”

In an episode of a conservative podcast on Rumble, a right-wing alternative to YouTube, Amanchukwu said that he would physically attack a transgender athlete—presumably a minor—if they were to compete against his young daughter.

“I can only imagine myself being in the stands and seeing some hairy man walking out on the track or getting ready to jump in the pool to swim against my precious baby girl. Man, let me tell you something, it would be WWE Raw, because listen Brad, I’m just gonna be honest with you, you are not gonna disenfranchise and defraud my baby girl, alright. The way I love my daughter, no siree. I’m going on that track, I’m jumping in that pool, and we’re gonna fight it out. And by the time we’re done, no one’s gonna want to get in the pool because I have turned it upside down. I’m gonna turn green,” Amanchukwu said. “I’m not saying that I’m trying to promote people to violence, but I am saying I’m calling people to speak up and use their voice.”

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Private Prison Companies Set to Make Billions Reopening Jails for ICE

Late Wednesday afternoon, the private prison company CoreCivic announced that they would be reopening a notorious family detention center in South Texas, under an amended contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The Texas facility, first built in 2014, will house up to 2,400 people—including children. It was shut down in June 2024 to save costs, after years of reports suggesting poor treatment, including a report of one toddler who died due to a lack of medical care.

The reopening is part of a trend. CoreCivic isn’t the only company bringing back facilities. We are at the beginning of what looks like a private prison boom, as the groups profit off of Trump’s plans for mass deportation. They are set to make billions. As the Washington Post reported, GEO Group and CoreCivic stand to benefit in particular from President Donald Trump’s immigration plans—the companies hold at least 16 vacant facilities that can be reopened within months for mass detention and deportation.

GEO Group, another private prison giant, announced in late February that it would be reopening Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, as a “massive” immigration detention center, and dramatically increasing its capacity by 1,000 beds. In California, ICE is considering repurposing and reopening the women’s prison FCI Dublin, closed in April 2024 due to mass sexual abuse, for immigrant detention. In Baldwin, Michigan, ICE and GEO Group have expressed interest in reopening North Lake Correctional Facility, a former private prison shuttered in 2022. (A Biden Administration order directed the Department of Justice to allow contracts with private prison groups to expire.) In Leavenworth, Kansas, CoreCivic looks likely to partner with ICE to reopen yet another shuttered private prison, an ACLU FOIA revealed.

As of February 23rd, ICE held 43,759 detainees, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan data-gathering organization. Trump is putting pressure on ICE to increase the number of arrests per day. His administration has already fired one ICE director, ostensibly for not deporting enough people.

In the communities surrounding these new jails for migrants, activists and politicians are fighting back. In Newark—where GEO Group stands to make $1.2 billion by reopening Delaney Hall—the immigrant-rights organization Make The Road is planning a rally against the jail on March 11th.

“The reopening of Delaney Hall will mean heightened ICE presence and arrests in New Jersey,” said Eliana Fernandez, Make The Road’s organizing director. In 2017, when the detention center was last operational, its private management came under fire for physical and sexual abuse of detainees. To Fernandez, this is a cash grab by GEO Group, benefiting from the suffering of immigrants. “There’s a private interest behind the detention and the incarceration of our community…but we have been through this road before, and we have made it to the other side.”

It’s also not clear whether the reopening of places like Delaney Hall would be entirely legal. In 2021, New Jersey passed a law banning private detention facilities. CoreCivic, the company planning to operate Delaney Hall, sued and won the right to operate. Still, on the city level, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka threatened to issue a stop-work order on Delaney Hall.

“The reality is, they have to go through the permitting process,” Baraka said in early March. “They don’t go through that, then the building can’t be opened. We’re going to go over there in the next couple of days and probably do a stop-work order to shut the building down until they finish getting permits.”

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Gavin Newsom’s MAGA Drift Is Here

As Donald Trump wages an all-out war on just about every corner of American life, Democrats have appeared nothing short of comatose. Their struggle to respond, which has since seen pink attire and auctioneer-styled signs, has instead revealed a party relying on the last dregs of Resistance Era politics to pull us through this unending series of crises.

But one Democrat is taking a radically different approach to such fecklessness: California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who on Thursday, debuted a new podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom. The result seems to be an open invitation for the right to embrace a new man. In fact, Newsom, in his first episode, appears eager to abandon his record of supporting LGBTQ rights, cozy up to the likes of Charlie Kirk, and criticize so-called cancel culture as well as Black Lives Matter. This comes against a larger pivot, as Newsom ditches his identity as a resistance leader to become the first Democrat to hang out with Trump in the Oval Office this term. But perhaps the most striking feature of Newsom’s first podcast was a full-throated willingness to side with Kirk on the issue of trans athletes.

“I think it’s an issue of fairness, I completely agree with you on that,” he told Kirk. “It is an issue of fairness, it’s deeply unfair. I am not wrestling with the fairness issue. I totally agree with you.” Newsom later praised the effectiveness of a 2024 Trump campaign ad that had claimed, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

Newsom’s thirst for the presidency may be as longstanding as it is humiliating. But there is something especially craven about these remarks, as they come at a moment of immense danger for the vulnerable groups he abandons with clear ease. That they arrive as Democrats continue to flail seems to unveil the true rot of his political calculus.

Today it’s trans folks. Who else will Newsom ditch? As Newsom teased in a trailer, This Is Gavin Newsom is set to feature a string of MAGA darlings the California Democrat claims to “fundamentally disagree with.” But when details prove otherwise, such assertions are rendered meaningless.

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Trump Cuts May Leave More Elephants and Rhinos Vulnerable to Poachers

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

Environmentalists have urged the Trump administration to reverse its decision to cut off funding for key conservation work aimed at saving iconic at-risk species, including anti-poaching patrols for vulnerable rhinos and elephants.

International conservation grants administered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) have been frozen by Trump, throwing conservation nonprofits around the world into disarray. These grants, amounting to tens of millions of dollars, help protect imperiled species in countries that lack the US’s financial muscle to combat threats such as poaching.

An environmental group, the Center for Biological Diversity, said it would sue the FWS if the funding isn’t restored. It said the money is vital for patrols safeguarding rhinos in Africa, which have suffered a 94 percent population decline over the past century, as well as efforts to reduce human-elephant conflict and help conserve species such as freshwater turtles and monarch butterflies.

“The Trump administration’s funding freeze for anti-poaching patrols and other international conservation work is maddening, heartbreaking and very illegal,” said Sarah Uhlemann, international program director at the center.

“These Fish and Wildlife Service funds help protect elephants, rhinos and other animals across the globe that Americans love. No one voted to sacrifice the world’s most iconic wildlife to satisfy some unelected billionaire’s reckless power trip.”

In a letter to the FWS, the center said that the funding halt violated the US Endangered Species Act, which requires the government to consider at-risk species in its decisions, and flouted proper agency procedure in rescinding funding. “This insanity has to stop or some of the world’s most endangered animals will die,” said Uhlemann.

The freeze on grants is part of a broader crackdown on US foreign aid by Trump and his billionaire backer Elon Musk. A judge has ordered the freeze to be reversed, although the administration has yet to comply with the directive.

In his previous term in office, Trump sought to weaken the Endangered Species Act and has set about trying to bypass the conservation law during his latest term. The president has demanded that a little-known committee, nicknamed “the God squad” due to its ability to decide if a species becomes extinct, help push through fossil fuel and logging projects in the US even if they doom a species.

Experts have said that the use of the committee in this way is likely illegal. A court case may now unfold over the stymying of FWS grants for international conservation, too.

Alongside illegal poaching, legal hunting tours in Africa are popular with some Americans, including Donald Trump Jr, who was pictured holding a severed elephant’s tail more than a decade ago.

The FWS was contacted for comment on the potential lawsuit.

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White House Scared of Trans Mouse

“Eight million dollars for making mice transgender. This is real,” Donald Trump said in his first joint address to Congress on Tuesday, leading to an onslaught of online mockery. So the administration issued a release—titled “Yes, Biden Spent Millions on Transgender Animal Experiments”—to prove how right the commander-in-chief was. (Their other press release on Trump’s speech, “President Trump’s Historic Address Captivates America,” was roughly as accurate.)

Calling out the “Fake News losers at CNN” who “immediately tried to fact-check it,” the White House wrote:

FACT: Under the Biden Administration, the National Institutes of Health doled out millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants for institutions across the country to perform transgender experiments on mice.

It listed six NIH–funded experiments that involved mice and gender-related keywords, seemingly drawn in part from outspoken anti-trans House Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.)’s February testimony on “taxpayer-funded animal cruelty.”

Mice are the most common lab animal, central to biomedical research due to their short lifespans and biological similarities to humans. Are the mice transgender? No. Can we characterize them as “transgender experiments on mice”? Sure. Why not.

For example, one study asks how long-term gender-affirming hormone therapy affects skeletal maturation—a question raised by earlier research on bone density. Another considers how such care affects fertility. A third investigates differing breast cancer risks in those undergoing testosterone replacement therapy.

These are all questions important to any providing the best medical care in any scenario. And, in fact, many of the research questions—cancer, fertility, bone health—are questions that those skeptical of transgender health care bring up to suggest it should be further restricted.

As they beat the drum of “insufficient evidence,” you’d think that they would relish the chance to generate more evidence. Of course, these studies do conflict with their reality—or at least reveal a more nuanced one. (Don’t worry, the trans skeptics are busy producing their own which casts doubt on medical consensus.)

The results of the transgender mouse studies that so upset the White House? The skeletal maturation study showed that gender-affirming care preserves or improves bone formation. The fertility study showed that, while the number of eggs produced by trans men decreased, their quality did not. The one on cancer showed that trans men have a reduced risk of breast cancer after undergoing HRT—a useful finding for cisgender patients as well, researchers note.

The far right would be all for this research—if it proved their point. I mean, imagine the Daily Wire if any one of these studies had led to mass mouse death.

Notably, one of the studies listed in the White House document isn’t even about transgender health care. It asks how asthma affects regular ol’ men and women differently. (It had the word “sex hormones” in it, so it’s fair that they found it confusing.)

It’s a common talking point on the right to bring up animals in the same breath as trans people (litter box panics, Elon Baby Mom Four’s children’s book Elephants Are Not Birds). But I’m not sure they want to go down that rabbit hole. Then I’ll start talking about sex-changing clownfish. No one wants that.

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RFK Jr.’s Former Anti-Vax Group Is Running a Mysterious Online Measles Fundraiser

Over the weekend, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. roiled the anti-vaccine community when he appeared to endorse the vaccination that prevents measles amid an ongoing outbreak in West Texas that has killed one child and sickened 159 people. But Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group that he helmed for a decade, hasn’t fallen in line with their former leader. Instead, an online fundraiser has appeared to collect donations that it says will be “used to defray the cost of essential vitamins, supplements, and medicines necessary to treat children enduring complications from the measles virus and other illnesses.”

The details of the plan, however, are murky. The fundraising site doesn’t specify exactly which treatments will be bought with the funds collected, how they will be administered, or by whom, and Children’s Health Defense didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.

The timing of the fundraiser matters. Over the last few days, following his apparent endorsement of the MMR vaccine, Kennedy hasadvocated for measles treatments for which there is limited medical evidence. In a Tuesday Fox News interview, he referred to “very, very good results” from treating measles with steroids, antibiotics, and cod liver oil—but he didn’t point to any specific research. Cod liver oil contains Vitamin A, which is often used in much higher concentrations to prevent complications from the disease, including blindness, but there is no credible evidence that cod liver oil itself can treat or prevent measles.

The fundraiser’s website lists its creator as Brian Hooker, a biologist and the chief scientific officer of Children’s Health Defense. It says the funds will go to Tina Siemens, a local historian of the community of Seminole, Texas. Over the last week, Siemens, a member of the local Mennonite church, has been outspoken about what she sees as the media’s unfair portrayal of her Mennonite community, some of whom choose not to vaccinate their children because of their religious beliefs.

“The media is portraying the unvaccinated as uneducated,” Siemens told Children’s Health Defense’s publication Defender on Tuesday. She said the unvaccinated families she knows “did more reading than those who say, ‘My doctor says [to get the shot], and I’m going to listen to my doctor.’”

“It’s not like, ‘Oh we’re so anxious, this is an outbreak, we got to really be scared,’ Siemens told the Washington Post earlier this week. “You work through it and you learn from your hardships and you get stronger because of it.”

Following Kennedy’s remarks about Vitamin A, some members of the anti-vaccine community have begun to tout unproven measles remedies. One such influencer is Stella Immanuel, the Texas doctor whose viral 2020 video falsely claimed that the antimalarial medication hydroxychloroquine was a Covid cure. Immanuel, who has also insisted that female reproductive problems were caused by having sex with demons, is currently selling elderberry and zinc supplements she says can “strengthen your immunity against measles.” One “bundle” she recommends, called CoviLyte, costs $170 and has been sold in her online store since the pandemic.

The Weston A. Price Foundation, a group that advocates for diets based around animal fats and has promoted raw milk, posted on X this week to its 43,000 followers, that measles “is not the disease it is portrayed as, nor has it ever been eradicated with a vaccine as we’ve often been told. What we refer to as measles characterizes symptoms that can be treated with vitamin A-rich foods.” Those claims have absolutely no basis in scientific fact.

Siemens didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones. At the time of publication, the fundraiser had collected just shy of $5,000 in donations.

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This Pentagon Press Secretary Has a Long History of Bigoted and Xenophobic Posts

On Donald Trump’s first day in office, the Department of Defense announced a spate of hires, including 26-year-old Kingsley Wilson, who will serve as the Pentagon’s deputy press secretary. Wilson is the daughter of Steve Cortes, a longtime Trump advisor and right-wing commentator who promotes Latinos moving to the political right. Wilson is also a Trump 2020 campaign alum, and until taking the job at the DoD, ran digital media and communications for the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank founded by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought.

She’s also an overt internet troll with a long history of bigoted, xenophobic, and deliberately provocative shitposting.

Wilson has made the rounds in DC politics while flirting with a career as an online provocateur.

Wilson in many ways embodies the face of the new Trump administration: she’s worked in the MAGA world for seemingly her entire, very short career; besides her roles in the Trump campaign and at the Center for Renewing America, she also served as the national committeewoman for the DC Young Republicans. She also briefly worked at Gettr, the social media platform founded by former Trump aide Jason Miller and with deep links to fugitive Chinese mogul Guo Wengui.

When she wasn’t doing any of that, Wilson was busy reeling off an endless tweets excoriating immigrants and trans people, advocating for what she called “zero immigration and mass deportations,” and bemoaning the “death of the West,” a term popularized by Pat Buchanan and often used by nativist, isolationist, and white nationalist groups to argue that immigration dilutes “Western” culture.

At least twice, Wilson also repeated long-debunked lies online about the lynching death of Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was kidnapped from a Georgia prison and murdered in 1913, claiming he was guilty of the murder for which most modern historians agree he was wrongly convicted. She also claimed the Black Lives Matter movement had an “affinity for race-based violence,” and derided George Floyd, the Black man murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, a “career criminal,” and scornfully called him “Saint George Floyd.”

“If you identify as transgender and/or are undergoing hormone therapy—you should NOT be allowed to legally purchase a firearm,” she posted, in one of her many tweets claiming transgender people are abnormal or mentally ill. “In a healthy country… transgender people aren’t visible,” she tweeted in 2024 (ellipses hers).

Wilson also explicitly lent her support to Great Replacement theory, a racist and xenophobic conspiracy theory that holds that non-white immigrants are being lured to the United States to replace white Americans.

“The Great Replacement isn’t a right-wing conspiracy theory… it’s reality,” she tweeted in 2024, over a screenshot of a Bloomberg article about the growth of the U.S. Hispanic population.

Wilson also called to “make Kosovo Serbia again,” a particularly weird stance for an American now working in the Pentagon; the United States has recognized Kosovo as an independent state since 2008 and maintains troops there as part of peacekeeping efforts.

Wilson also lent her support for the German far-right party AfD, tweeting in 2024, “Globalist elites hate AfD because they put Germans before foreign migrants and radical Islam. Ausländer Raus!”

Wilson has tweeted the phrase “Ausländer Raus” at least four times, including the slogan, “Deutschland den Deutschen. Ausländer raus.” The phrase, which means, “Germany for Germans, foreigners out,” is explicitly considered to be an extremist slogan in Germany with neo-Nazi roots; in fact, the Department of Justice published a paper about its use among German skinheads in 1992. At least one German prosecutor has said that using the phrase is a criminal offense. Nonetheless, the chant has been adopted by some young AfD supporters. A video of the chant being sung at a trendy bar in the holiday island of Sylt sparked an enormous controversy last summer, and again when it was sung a month later at a village festival in Germany. (Non-Germans signaling their contempt for immigration, including accused human trafficker Tristan Tate, have also tweeted the phrase.)

Wilson’s career seems to have followed a dual track, both making the rounds in DC politics and the Trump campaign and flirting with a career as an online provocateur—though those roles that are increasingly blurred in the MAGAfied Republican party. During her time at the Center for Renewing America, she appeared as a talking head on conservative news sites like The Blaze, and has appeared multiple times on the podcast of Tim Pool’s, the once “heterodox” streamer who’s become increasingly far-right.

While Wilson deleted some of her tweets before beginning her DOD job, in the Trump Administration, they’re unlikely to be seen as a liability. While DOGE staffer Marko Elez resigned after the Wall Street Journal reported on his history of racist posts (“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” one read), Musk said almost immediately on Twitter/X that he would be reinstated.

On social media, Wilson has made it clear that she brings her online stances into her personal life. “3 years ago today I went to a Halloween party dressed as Border Patrol and met my husband,” she tweeted on October 31, 2024 over a photo of herself wearing a green Border Patrol hat. “Be unapologetically right-wing. It will pay off.”

The Department of Defense didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about Wilson’s tweets and her hiring.

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The Supreme Court Is Just One Vote Shy of Making Trump and Musk Kings

On Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court issued its first decision in Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s escalating war on government agencies and Congress’ power of the purse. The result: the court is one justice shy of letting Trump and Musk do whatever they want—at least for now.

In a 5-4 decision, the justices allowed a district court order to take effect that requires the government to pay out about $2 billion in foreign aid for work already performed. In other words, the court ordered the government not to stiff its contractors.

Justice Alito’s malignant dissent feeds into Elon Musk’s claims of a judicial “coup.”

The Supreme Court order, however, doesn’t require immediate compliance. Instead, it instructs district court Judge Amir Ali to “clarify what obligations the Government must fulfill to ensure compliance with the temporary restraining order, with due regard for the feasibility of any compliance timelines.” In other words, the high court is giving the government grace in complying with this order, which it may now be able to dispute and draw out implementation, as any clarification made by the judge can be argued against. This comes after the government already refused multiple times to comply. So while five justices did green-light the district court, in this subtle way, the ruling gives the White House more time to dispute and draw out payment—even though these bills are now going to be paid.

And this is the good news.

The bad news is that four justices think Trump and Musk should be able to unilaterally turn off congressionally-mandated spending, including for work already done. Justice Samuel Alito, in a dissent, argued that not only can the government simply refuse to pay its bills, but that those who have been stiffed cannot sue for payment. “I am stunned,” he wrote, that the majority didn’t agree with him.

Alito’s dissent, which Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh signed onto, is not only an argument for allowing Trump and his chosen officers to ignore Congress’ power of the purse—but it is tonally a vindication for Musk, Trump, and their allies who have turned their ire on judges who have ruled against them.What is stunning, yet at this point not surprising, is that four justices have joined the MAGA alliance in maligning a district court judge who is already in the crosshairs of Musk and his followers, including in explicitly racist terms.

For weeks, Musk has ramped up his rhetoric against judges who rule against the actions of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency that he runs. “Democracy in America is being destroyed by judicial coup,” he posted on X last month. “An activist judge is not a real judge.” In the case over foreign aid spending, Musk called for impeaching Judge Ali and elevated a post pointing out that Ali is Muslim, implying that that discredits him. Then, on February 25, he attacked Ali with explicit racial stereotypes over his handling of the foreign aid case: “Tragic that Amir Ali could have been writing software instead of forcing taxpayers to fund bogus NGOs.”

Two days later, a Republican congressman introduced articles of impeachment against Ali because he disagreed with his ruling in this case. He is the third judge Republicans have filed articles of impeachment against because they have blocked one of Trump’s orders.

Four justices think Trump and Musk should be able to turn off congressional spending.

Rather than defend the role of the judiciary and of federal judges under such assault, Alito’s dissent piles on. “Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars?”, Alito begins his dissent by asking. Note that it is not the lawlessness of Musk canceling $2 billion in congressionally-appropriated funds that is an affront, but the fact that a judge dared to stand up for Congress’ spending power.

Alito goes on to make a legal case for why he believes the Trump administration’s refusal to pay the government’s bills is unreviewable by the courts—a stunning argument on its own—but there is no reason to deploy the malignant tone he takes against Ali except to provide more ammunition for those targeting him and other judges who stand in the way of Trump and Musk’s unconstitutional project.

At the end of his dissent, Alito circles back to Ali to criticize him again. He calls Ali’s order—the one that five of his colleagues upheld—”an act of judicial hubris” and “self-aggrandizement of its jurisdiction.” These words feed directly into the attacks of a judicial “coup” lobbed by Musk, and the impeachment efforts of their allies in Congress.

This opinion is not the final word on this case. Instead, it is simply the Supreme Court allowing a temporary restraining order to take effect—a first step of emergency relief before the merits of the case will be decided. It is less than two months into the Trump administration, and Chief Justice John Roberts in particular may be wary of immediately appearing, for all intents and purposes, to crown Trump as King, particularly after Trump told him Tuesday night at the State of the Union, “Thank you again. Thank you again. I won’t forget.” (I think we all know why.)

When this case or another like it does reach the Supreme Court on the merits in the months ahead, will this 5-4 bulwark against autocracy hold? We’ll find out soon enough.

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Trumpian Chaos Has Infected the Planet’s Most Remote Research Outpost: Antarctica

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

Few agencies have been spared as Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has ripped through the United States federal government. Even in Antarctica, scientists and workers are feeling the impacts—and are terrified for what’s to come.

The United States Antarctic Program (USAP) operates three permanent stations in Antarctica. These remote stations are difficult to get to and difficult to maintain; scattered across the continent, they are built on volcanic hills, polar plateaus, and icy peninsulas.

But to the US, the science has been worth it. At these stations, more than 1,000 people each year come to the continent to live and work. Scientists operate a number of major research projects, studying everything from climate change and rising sea levels to the cosmological makeup and origins of the universe itself. With funding cuts and layoffs looming, Antarctic scientists and experts don’t know if their research will be able to continue, how US stations will be sustained, or what all this might mean for the continent’s delicate geopolitics

“Even brief interruptions will result in people walking away and not coming back,” says Nathan Whitehorn, an associate professor and Antarctic scientist at Michigan State University. “It could easily take decades to rebuild.”

One form for staffers “asked if you had a preference with which gender you housed with,” a source says. “That’s all been removed.”

The USAP is managed by the National Science Foundation. Last week, a number of NSF program managers staffed on Antarctic projects were fired as part of a wider purge at the agency. The program managers are critical for maintaining communication with the infrastructure and logistics arm of the NSF, and the contractors for the USAP, as well as planning deployment for scientists to the continent, keeping track of the budgets, and funding the maintenance and operations work. “I have no idea what we do without them,” says another Antarctic scientist who has spent time on the continent, who along with several others WIRED granted anonymity due to fears of retaliation.

“Without them, everything stops,” says a scientist whose NSF project manager was fired last week. “I have no idea who I am supposed to report to now or what happens to submitted proposals.”

Scientific research happens at all of the stations. At the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, scientists work on the South Pole Telescope and BICEP telescope, both of which study the cosmic background radiation and the evolution of the universe; IceCube, a cubic-kilometer detector designed to study neutrino physics and high energy emission from astrophysical sources; and the Atmospheric Research Observatory that studies climate science and is run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (Mass firings have also taken place at the NOAA.)

“The climate science [at the South Pole Station] is super unique,” an Antarctic scientist says. “The site has so little pollution that we call it ‘the cleanest air on Earth,’ and they have been monitoring the ozone layer and CO2 content in the atmosphere for many decades.”

Other directives from the Donald Trump administration have directly affected daily life on those stations. “Gender-inclusive terms on housing documents” have been removed from Antarctic staffer forms, a source familiar with the situation at McMurdo Station tells WIRED. “It asked if you had a preference with which gender you housed with,” the source says. “That’s all been removed.”

“The damage caused by gutting the [Antarctic] science budget like this is going to last generations.”

Staffers have already pushed back. “People have been painting waste bins saying “Antarctica is for ALL” in rainbow, people’s email signatures [have] pride additions, [others] keep adding preferred pronouns to emails,” the source says.

“There’s a sense of unease on the station like people have never felt before,” they add. “The job still has to get done, even though people feel like the next shoe can drop at any moment.”

That unease extends to their own job security. “There are some people currently at the South Pole that are worried about losing their jobs any day now,” a source with familiarity of the situation tells WIRED. Workers present at the station aren’t able to physically leave until October, and a midseason firing, or loss of funding, would present a unique set of challenges.

Sources are also bracing for at least a 50 percent reduction in the NSF’s budget due to DOGE cuts. These cuts are sending Antarctic scientists with assistants and graduate students scrambling. “We didn’t know if we could pay graduate students,” says one scientist. While research is conducted on the continent, scientists bring their findings back to the US to process and analyze. A lot of the funding also operates the science itself: For one project that requires electricity to run detectors, the scientist “was paranoid we would not be able to literally pay bills for an experiment starved for data.” That hasn’t come to fruition yet, but as funding cycles restart in the coming weeks and months, scientists are on tenterhooks.

Sources tell WIRED that Germany, Canada, Spain, and China have already started taking advantage of that uncertainty by recruiting US scientists focused on Antarctica.

“If the South Pole [station] is shut down, it’s basically nearly impossible to bring it back up. Everything will freeze.”

“Foreign countries are actively recruiting my colleagues, and some have already left,” says one Antarctic scientist. “My students are looking at jobs overseas now…people have been coming [to the US] to do science my whole life. Now people are going the other way.”

“Now is a great time to see if anyone wants to jump ship,” another Antarctic scientist says. “I do worry about a brain drain of tenured academics, or students who are shunted out.”

“The damage caused by gutting the [Antarctic] science budget like this is going to last generations,” says another.

Throughout DOGE’s cuts to the federal government, representatives have said that if something needs to be brought back, it could be. In some cases, reversals have already happened: The US Department of Agriculture said it accidentally fired staffers working on preventing the spread of bird flu and is trying to rehire them.

But in Antarctica, a reversal won’t necessarily work. “One of the really scary things about this is that if the Antarctic program budget is cut, then they’ll very quickly get to the point where they can’t even keep the station open, much less science projects going,” an Antarctic scientist tells WIRED. “If the South Pole [station] is shut down, it’s basically nearly impossible to bring it back up. Everything will freeze and get buried in snow. And some other country will likely immediately take over.

Others share this fear of a station takeover. “Even if science funding is cut back, there is an urgent need for the US to invest in icebreakers and polar airlift capability otherwise at some point the US-managed South Pole station might not be serviceable,” says Klaus Dodds, an Antarctic expert and professor of geopolitics at Royal Holloway University of London.

Experts are concerned that countries like Russia and China—who have already been eagle-eyed on continental influence—will quickly jostle to fill the power vacuum. “Presumably it would be humiliating for anyone who wishes to promote ‘America First’ to witness China offer to take over the occupation and management of the base at the heart of Antarctica. China is a very determined polar power,” says Dodds.

The political outcome of the US pulling back from its Antarctic research and presence could be dire, sources tell WIRED.

Antarctica isn’t owned by any one country. Instead it’s governed by the Antarctic Treaty System, which protects Antarctica and the scientific research taking place on the continent, and forbids mining and nuclear activity. Some countries, including China and Russia, have indicated that they would be interested in rule changes to the Treaty system, particularly around resource extraction and fishing restrictions. The US, traditionally, has played a key role in championing the treaty: “Many of the leading polar scientists and social scientists are either US citizens and/or have been enriched by contact with US-led programs,” says Dodds.

That leadership role could change quickly. The US also participates in a number of international collaborations involving major Antarctic scientific projects. A US pullback, Whitehorn says, “makes it very hard to regard the US as a reliable partner, so I think there will be a lot less interest in accepting US leadership in such things…The uncertainty will drive people away and sacrifice the leadership the US already has.”

“If the NSF can’t function, or we don’t fund it, projects with long lead times can just die,” another scientist says. “I’m sure international partners would be happy to partner elsewhere. This is what it means to lose US competitiveness.”

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“You Have No Mandate!” Congressional Democrats Protest Trump’s Speech

Congressional Democrats’ resistance to President Donald Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congressbegan when he first started to speak.

During the opening moments of the president’s speech, Rep. Al Green (D-Texas), stood and shook his cane at Trump. Green’s actions prompted Vice President JD Vance to appear to mouth “get him out,” and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to interrupt Trump’s speech. He admonished members, urging them to “uphold and maintain decorum in the House and to cease any further disruptions.”

“That’s your warning,” he added before ordering Green to take his seat.

Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) kicked off the Democrats’ protests at President Trump’s speech to Congress Tuesday night before being escorted out of the chamber. Win Mcnamee/Pool/CNP/ZUMA

After he appeared to refuse, Johnson told the Sergeant-at-Arms to remove the Democratic lawmaker from the chamber, prompting massive cheers from Republicans.“You have no mandate to cut Medicaid!” Green yelled at Trump, pointing his cane at the president, before being removed. He was referring to the Trump-backed Republican budget resolution proposing to cut the health insurance program serving low-income people.

House Speaker Mike Johnson ejects Rep. Al Green (D-TX) from President Donald Trump's speech for not sitting down. pic.twitter.com/zsxIAGjaAg

— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) March 5, 2025

But that didn’t stop other congressional Democrats from continuing to protest.

Cameras panned to a group of several Democrats—including Rep. Rashida Talib (D-Mich.), Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.)—holding up signs that said “false,” “Musk steals,” and “save Medicaid.”Talib also held a whiteboard with “That’s a lie” written in marker. At times, Democrats also vocally protested Trump’s lies or mischaracterizations—some shouted “January 6” when Trump talked about law and order, and others yelled out “lies!” when Trump reiterated false claims about massive fraud within Social Security.

Meanwhile, Republicans continued to rise and cheer at each of Trump’s subsequent pronouncements.

Frost and several other Democrats, including Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), left the chamber before Trump finished speaking. “My shirt showed Trump an important message: NO KINGS LIVE HERE,” Frost wrote in a post on Bluesky. “In the spirit of student protestors from the Civil Rights Movement, I’m proud to have protested and walked out with many of my colleagues. This is NOT a normal time.”

Other protests were more subtle. Members of the Democratic Women’s Caucus,for instance, wore pink, with several saying they were doing so to draw attention to how Trump’s policies—including potential cuts to Medicaid and SNAP and the imposition of tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China on Tuesday, which economists say will raise prices for consumers—wereharming women and families. “Women can’t afford Trump,” Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Calif.) posted on X before the speech. “We can’t afford eggs, we can’t afford attacks on our health care, and we can’t afford the discrimination and abuse by his administration.”

As a member of the @DemWomenCaucus, I’m wearing pink to protest Trump betraying women and families for his billionaire buddies.

Women can’t afford Trump. We can’t afford eggs, we can’t afford attacks on our health care, and we can’t afford the discrimination and abuse by his… pic.twitter.com/qZYeb3IZtb

— Rep. Doris Matsui (@DorisMatsui) March 4, 2025

Some lawmakers—including Pressley, Rep. Johnny Olszewski (D-Md.), Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.), and several others—brought federal workers who lost their jobs due to mass firings enacted by unelected billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) chose to express their opposition to the administration by boycotting the event entirely. Ocasio-Cortez posted on Bluesky throughout the address and said she would host a discussion on Instagram Live after.

I Think We’re Being Lied to About DEI

“DEI is dead.”

At least that’s what the headlines scream.

I spent the last few weeks reading the public statements, leaked internal memos, and listed changes from the organizations that are reportedly rolling back their DEI programs — corporate giants like McDonald’s, Meta, and Amazon — and what I found was a mismatch. These corporations aren’t actually dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives outright. They’re doing something more disingenuous, using, instead, an old-fashioned corporate sleight of hand: rebranding.

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Their statements indicate that they are, largely, keeping the DEI practices they’ve come to rely on for business success intact. Initiatives like supplier diversity, recruiting diverse talent into their ranks, and programs aimed at fostering belonging—DEI—will remain, though, perhaps, cloaked with a new name.

On the surface, this sleigh of hand might seem smart — avoid a Fox News backlash cycle while quietly continuing to do the work.

But I think the risks of these fake rollbacks may outweigh their potential benefits.

The issue isn’t just that business leaders are carrying out symbolic DEI rollbacks to appease Trump and the MAGA mob. It’s that by feigning submission to Trump and his base, these companies may be helping to legitimize Trump’s dictatorial inclinations. They are reinforcing the illusion of Trump’s power, effectively granting him authority he doesn’t actually have. They are doing the work of manufacturing public consent for the executive overreach Trump dreams of getting away with.

In his book On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder warns against this exact kind of thing, calling it “anticipatory obedience.” In authoritarian regimes, Snyder warns, citizens (and more importantly, institutions) begin to conform to an expected order before they’re forced to. They restrict themselves, bend their practices, and adjust their language to align with what they assume the authoritarian leader will approve of, often before the authoritarian even demands it.

What could be seen as a savvy, strategic, business move by business leaders, may be helping to legitimize Trump’s worst inclinations.

Snyder reminder readers that “[adapting] in this way is teaching power what it
can do.” As such, the solution is simple: stop pretending Trump is more powerful than he actually is. Call his bluff. Do not obey in advance.

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Moms for Liberty Is Very Excited for the DOE’s New Snitch Line

Paranoid right-wing parents now have a new tool at their disposal.

Last week, the Department of Education launched a so-called End DEI portal, a place where people—parents, teachers, students, and anyone else—are invited to submit reports of “illegal discriminatory practices at institutions of learning.” (Reminder that DEI is not illegal, and Trump can’t actually ban it in the federal government, as a judge ruled last month—but that hasn’t stopped the DOE from alleging that DEI perpetuates reverse racism against white students.) The portal asks for contact information, along with information on the school or school district and up to 450 words of detail on the alleged discrimination.

“The US Department of Education is committed to ensuring all students have access to meaningful learning free of divisive ideologies and indoctrination,” the portal says, under a banner that reads, “Schools should be focused on learning.”

The move instantly prompted mockery, with many social media users [suggesting][5] they would [spam][6] the portal with [fake reports][7]. But one person who publicly cheered it was [Moms for Liberty][8] Co-Founder Tiffany Justice. Coincidentally, she was also the only person quoted in the department’s press release announcing the portal’s launch, where Justice urged parents to use it to “share the receipts of the betrayal that has happened in our public schools.” Since then, Justice has aggressively promoted the portal on social media, [announcing][9] it in an X post and repeatedly [pushing][10] parents to use it.

Despite this, neither Moms for Liberty nor the DOE will clarify what role, if any, the right-wing group known for pushing baseless conspiracy theories and fear-mongering to support so-called “parents’ rights,”had in setting up the portal. When I reached out for details, a spokesperson for the DOE reiterated vaguery, claiming the office’s Office for Civil Rights will use the submissions “as a guide to identify potential areas for investigation.” But they declined to respond to additional questions about Moms for Liberty and the potential role they may have had in the portal’s creation or maintenance; Nor would the DOE answer how many submissions the portal has received since its launch or who is reviewing them.

Moms for Liberty also did not respond to specific questions about their potentialinvolvement, instead only providing a statement saying the group “has been working closely with a number of key members of the Trump administration to ensure that students’ needs are prioritized in the education system.”

“With the release of The ‘End DEI’ Portal,” the statement continued, “we are beginning to see the fruit of our efforts from the last four years.” The group did not respond to follow-up questions, and Justice did not respond to a message on X.

If Moms for Liberty did help set the portal up, it would certainly be on-brand. The group, which was [founded][8] by a group of conservative school board moms in early 2021 to protest mask and vaccine mandates in schools, has since played an influential role in stirring up moral panic around pronoun usage and representation of diversity in schools; [promoted][11] book bans in schools; and baselessly claimed public school teachers are “[grooming][12]” and “indoctrinating” kids. Despite—or maybe because of—this, they have [grown][13] into an organization with hundreds of chapters nationwide and more than 100,000 members. The group also has a track record of evasiveness on other matters related to their influence. As I [reported][14] last year, the group launched more than $3 million in Biden attack ads in swing states during the presidential campaign, but would not say where the cash came from.

But Justice’s inclusion in the DOE’s announcement last week suggests that the group is attempting to bounce back from a slew of bad press in recent years. There was the disastrous “60 Minutes” interview last year, in which they [failed to effectively articulate][15] their reason for existing and dodged questions; the loss of a bunch of candidates they backed in 2023, as my colleague Kiera Butler [reported][16]; and, of course, the sex scandal [involving][17] co-founder Bridget Zielger, who also helped author Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law.

[5]: http://Many social media users suggested they would use [6]: https://x.com/DocMellyMel/status/1896101383893631347 [7]: https://x.com/sunburnss/status/1895882078153294036 [8]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/08/the-most-powerful-moms-in-america-are-the-new-face-of-the-republican-party/ [9]: https://x.com/4TiffanyJustice/status/1895162729230475698 [10]: https://x.com/4TiffanyJustice/status/1895163520099979603 [11]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/07/moms-for-liberty-conference/ [12]: https://x.com/60Minutes/status/1764449124663861416 [13]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/01/that-time-when-when-moms-for-liberty-came-to-deep-blue-nyc/ [14]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/05/moms-for-liberty-swing-states-ad-buy-election-2024/ [15]: https://www.motherjones.com/media/2024/03/moms-for-liberty-had-a-chance-to-explain-themselves-it-didnt-go-well/ [16]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/parents-rights-moms-for-liberty-lost-big-in-elections-last-night/ [17]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/12/bridget-ziegler-in-the-wake-of-a-sex-scandal-a-moms-for-liberty-cofounders-career-is-crumbling/

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Musk’s Reckless Ebola Cuts Could Lead to Deadly Pandemics

Last week, standing in front of President Donald Trump’s first Cabinet meeting, Elon Musk, the unelected billionaire running a blitzkrieg against the US government, acknowledged that he had made a mistake—that in going after the US Agency for International Development, the foreign assistance program that he has all but destroyed, he accidentally ended the Ebola prevention project it ran overseas. Musk claimed the error was quickly fixed and there was no interruption in service. But former and current USAID staff quickly told the Washington Post that Musk was wrong—the Ebola response remained sharply curtailed. And, as the Bulwark reported, Nicholas Enrich, the acting assistant administrator for global health at USAID, who was placed on administrative leave Sunday, had drafted an unfinished memo that predicted the demolition of USAID would lead to more than 28,000 cases of Ebola and related diseases, as well as a 28 to 32 percent increase in tuberculosis globally, up to 18 million cases of malaria (with up to 166,000 deaths annually), and an additional 200,000 cases of paralytic polio a year.

Musk’s assertion that his slash-and-burn assault on USAID had no negative impact on combating Ebola was disinformation. He was hiding the truth on a critical global health issue. I spoke about Musk’s claim with Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International. He ran the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance at USAID during the Obama years and returned to the agency to work on Covid during the Biden administration. I asked him to describe how dangerous the cuts are. Have Trump and Musk seriously undermined the nation’s ability to prevent a major pandemic from hitting the United States?

Watch the interview and read the lightly edited and condensed Q&A below.

What does USAID do to prevent the spread of Ebola and other highly infectious and dangerous diseases overseas?

So you’ve got two big chunks to that. One is preparedness. You want to have the systems in place at a country level that can respond when an outbreak emerges and also reduce the likelihood that it emerges. That includes things like laboratory capacity for diagnostics and surveillance, so you can detect things rapidly when they emerge. And then you have to implement treatment, isolation, and infection prevention, so that when people begin showing up sick, they don’t infect health workers or other people.

USAID makes those kinds of investments, along with the Centers for Disease Control [and Prevention], in a lot of countries overseas that are prone to novel outbreaks. When something is detected—like the Ebola outbreak now underway in Uganda—USAID would normally swing into action with an active response team, deploying technical experts to support the Ugandan government, ramping up supplies, and providing personal protective equipment.

Another important element is traveler screening. You might remember the big hullabaloo in 2014 about travelers reaching the United States with Ebola. There’s a lot of investment in traveler screening to prevent people who are sick from traveling and potentially spreading the disease to other countries.

We should underscore here that this obviously helps people in the countries where this is happening. But we also have a bit of self-interest in preventing the spread, right? We’re doing good for others and for ourselves. Does this entail using USAID workers or working with contractors?

Typically, that would mean deploying some USAID personnel, but a lot of the frontline work is done through partner organizations—providing grants and contracts to aid organizations to support the Ugandan government and to run some of their own activities.

When Elon Musk came in with his minions and shut down USAID and froze federal foreign assistance, how did that affect this?

Almost none of the things that would routinely happen in a major outbreak actually took place. USAID did not deploy anyone to Uganda to support the response. They did not get money out to partners quickly. It took them weeks, when it would normally take hours or days. And even the funds that did go out were very, very small. Some contracts were canceled. One of the awards that had been made was to a partner supporting traveler screening at Uganda’s major airport in Entebbe—that was just canceled last week.

That means people can get on a plane in Entebbe and fly to London, Frankfurt, New York—wherever—and no one’s asking them about Ebola?

It means that the support to the Ugandan government to make sure that screening is as robust and airtight as possible is gone. So it’s a huge risk.

Elon Musk “has no idea what he’s talking about. He’s making it up as he goes. He doesn’t understand the things he’s canceling.”

Elon Musk says everything’s been fixed. No?

He has no idea what he’s talking about. He’s making it up as he goes. He doesn’t understand the things he’s canceling. He and his team of teenagers and twentysomethings are using AI—or keyword searches, as far as we can tell—to decide what to cut. They’re not bothering to stop and understand what they’re actually losing when they shut these programs down.

We’re focused here on Ebola, but what does this mean in terms of other diseases and other possible pandemic threats?

One of the things you realize really quickly when you start getting involved in outbreak response is that there are outbreaks all over the world all the time. It’s really hard to know at the front end of one which has the potential to truly explode at a global level. That’s why it’s important to get on top of all of them very, very quickly, before they have a chance to spread. When you lose these capabilities, you increase the chances that one of those outbreaks will spread and get out of control globally.

I read in the newspaper that there’s something going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 50 people dead from a mysterious illness. What does it mean now that the US aid capacity has been severely cut, if not abolished?

This is a good and interesting example. This was a mystery for the first few weeks. Over the weekend, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced they now believe it’s due to water contamination—a waterborne illness. If that’s confirmed, then hopefully that one won’t pose a risk of spreading. But we only know that because WHO was on top of it.

Why is WHO on top of it? Because the section at WHO that handles emergencies and outbreaks was largely created at the behest of—and under pressure from—the US government after Ebola in 2014. And we are the principal funder of it.

“We’re actively weakening the entire global infrastructure we built to keep us safe from these threats.”

Now, the United States is withdrawing from WHO, and the CDC has been barred from talking to WHO. All of our funding is being pulled. So we’re not just taking ourselves out of the game—we’re actively weakening the entire global infrastructure we built to keep us safe from these threats.

That doesn’t sound very encouraging. Let’s see if we can end on a somewhat optimistic note. Would it be possible to restore these capacities if, for some reason, a wave of rationality and sanity struck the Trump-Musk team?

It absolutely would. One of the ironic things here is that clearly, Musk feels pressure over this. He wants to reassure the public and the administration that they’re not cutting things that put Americans at risk. But, of course, they are. He has no idea what to cut and what not to cut—he’s just cutting everything by default.

“It’s going to take decades to rebuild what we’re about to lose.”

There could be a different approach. Congress could intervene and put parameters around this, asserting itself in the process. They haven’t really done that yet. But when you look at what’s actually been done to USAID—yes, they are canceling contracts; yes, they’re trying to push out staff—none of that is unsalvageable. It could still be pulled back, as you say, in a fit of rationality. The risk is that if we persist on this path—if we lose all this capability, all this expertise—it’s going to take decades to rebuild what we’re about to lose. Right now, they’ve done more talking than actual damage. They’re close to locking it in, but it’s not locked in yet. They have no idea how to read the things they’re looking at, and they’re not bothering to stop and listen to the people who could explain it to them. They’re just making fools of themselves.

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Trump’s NIH Pick Made a Big Mistake on Covid

Senate Republicans seem to be cruising toward confirming as the director of the National Institutes of Health an academic who made a huge mistake about the most serious health crisis to confront the United States in a century and who refuses to acknowledge he erred big-time.

President Donald Trump’s pick to lead NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of economics and health policy at Stanford, was a fierce critic of Covid vaccine mandates and other anti-pandemic measures, such as lockdowns and mask mandates. He was one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which was developed at an October 2020 meeting of a libertarian think tank. It recommended the United States strive for Covid herd immunity through mass infection and focus on sequestering particularly vulnerable populations, such as older Americans.

A large number of public health experts and organizations assailed this approach. A collection of these groups responded: “If followed, the recommendations in the Great Barrington Declaration would haphazardly and unnecessarily sacrifice lives. The declaration is not a strategy, it is a political statement. It ignores sound public health expertise. It preys on a frustrated populace… The suggestions put forth by the Great Barrington Declaration are NOT based in science.”

Bhattacharya, who advanced the paranoid idea that the pandemic was being used to create a “biosecurity state,” was hailed by libertarians, conservatives, and MAGA-ites for his defiance—even as public health experts noted he had not presented a workable plan to achieve herd immunity while protecting at-risk Americans. He went on to champion himself as a victim of censorship.

Perhaps more worrisome is that he totally misread the potential danger of Covid and now won’t admit that.

At the start of the Covid pandemic, in late March 2020, he co-wrote with Eran Bendavid, another Stanford professor, an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in which they dramatically downplayed the possible consequences of this public health crisis. The pair noted there was “little evidence to confirm” the “premise” that Covid would kill millions in the absence of such measures as quarantines and shelter-in-place orders.

Bhattacharya and Bendavid pointed to estimates that predicted 100 million Americans would contract the disease and 2 to 4 million would perish. “We believe that estimate is deeply flawed,” they wrote. They noted that statistical misinterpretations “could make the difference between an epidemic that kills 20,000 and one that kills two million.” And they insisted the lower number was “not only plausible but likely based on what we know so far.”

Covid has killed 1.2 Americans, and that number would probably be much higher—perhaps in the 2 to 4 million range—had a vaccine not been developed.

The two Stanford professors presented a bunch of statistics to contend that the pandemic would likely be of a “limited scale.” And they made an obvious point: “A 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million.”

This was not merely an academic exercise. Their numbers had significant policy implications. They asserted that in the face of a “limited” epidemic, there would be no need for the most severe measures, such as lockdowns. They were providing ammo to those who were opposing the restrictions being advocated by public health officials.

Bhattacharya got it wrong. But what’s worse is that he now won’t concede he was off the mark by a factor of at least 25.

Last fall, I got in a tussle with him over this. Hedge fund manager and Trump fanboy Bill Ackman tweeted that Bhattacharya was a “brilliant scientist” who’s “unafraid to stand by his carefully researched opinion.” Citing the 2020 Wall Street Journal article, I responded that Bhattacharya at the start of the pandemic said that only 20,000 to 40,000 people would die from Covid, adding, “He was only off by 1.16 million.”

Bhattacharya replied, “This is a lie. The article pointed out that, given the evidence available in early 2020, the pandemic could end up killing anywhere between 20k and 4 million. And it called for a study to reduce the uncertainty.” Elon Musk also chimed in to promote a community note attached to my tweet that read, “Bhattacharya never claimed only 20-40K would die from Covid.”

These responses to my tweet were misleading. Bhattacharya hadn’t merely called for better studies. The intent of his article was to suggest that those experts who feared a pandemic and who were proposing tough measures to prevent such a wave of death were likely wrong and overreacting. His op-ed had indeed noted that the estimates of Covid deaths varied from his figure of 20,000 to other predictions of 4 million. But he and Bendavid had clearly stated that they believed the number would end up being at the lower end and that the United States would face an epidemic of “limited scale.”

Bhattacharya and his supporters, including Musk, cannot acknowledge his big error, and they have been trying to erase it. And he is probably prepared to stick to this misleading CYA spin during his Senate confirmation hearing scheduled for Wednesday. There’s nothing wrong about an academic expressing skepticism about the conventional wisdom. More troubling is when a supposed expert in health stats blunders significantly and cannot ‘fess up to it. Such disingenuous defensiveness is not a good trait for the top appointment at the federal agency in charge of biomedical and public health research.

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Growers Who Rely on Climate Data Sue USDA for Cutting Off Access

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

In late January, the director of digital communications at the U. Department of Agriculture sent an email to staff instructing them to remove agency web pages related to climate change by the end of the following day.

Peter Rhee, the communications head, also told staff members to flag web pages that mention climate change for review and make recommendations to the agency on how to handle them. The new policy was first reported by Politico.

The result is that an unknown number of web pages—including some that contained information about federal loans and other forms of assistance for farmers and some that showcased interactive climate data—have been taken down, according to a lawsuit filed this week on behalf of a group of organic farmers and two environmental advocacy groups. The plaintiffs are demanding that the USDA stop erasing climate-related web pages and republish the ones taken down.

“Farmers are on the front lines of climate change,” said Jeff Stein, an associate attorney with the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice, who is representing the plaintiffs. “Purging climate change web pages doesn’t make climate change go away. It just makes it harder for farmers to adapt.”

One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit is the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York (NOFA-NY), a group that helps educate and certify producers in organic farming practices. The organization has a hotline that often directs interested farmers to USDA websites as a starting point for more information.

“The Trump administration is demonstrating itself to be the most anti-science administration in history.”

“All of a sudden, it’s like anything marked with climate is starting to disappear,” said Wes Gillingham, the board president of NOFA-NY. According to the complaint, the Farm Service Agency and Farmers.gov, both part of the USDA, removed information about how farmers could access federal loans and technical assistance to start adopting practices that help reduce emissions and sequester carbon, known as climate-smart agriculture.

The speed with which websites were taken down encouraged NOFA-NY to move quickly when it came to filing a lawsuit. “We want to prevent good science and information that farmers need from disappearing, especially this time of year,” Gillingham added, since the colder winter months are when farmers plan for the growing and harvesting seasons ahead.

Gillingham emphasized that access to scientific information about drought, extreme weather, and other climate impacts is essential to farmers’ ability to stay in business. “Farmers are constantly trying to improve their situation. They’re under immense economic pressure,” he said.

One tool that allowed farmers to assess their risk level when it came to climate impacts was an interactive map published by the US Forest Service, which combined over 140 different datasets and made them accessible to the general public, said Stein. Land managers could see how climate change is expected to impact natural resources throughout the country; for example, they could look up which watersheds are projected to face the greatest climate impacts and highest demand in the future. But this tool is no longer available. (As of late Monday evening, a link to information about the map on the Forest Service’s website was dead.)

When tools like this go offline, they disrupt farmers’ ability to protect their lands and their livelihoods. In New York, where Gillingham’s group is located, the majority of farms are small: under 200 acres. “The margin of error to be successful, it’s pretty slim already,” said Gillingham. “So taking away information that allows farmers to make decisions about their business, and that also protects the planet, protects their soil, enhances their crop yields, it’s really insane to be doing that.”

In its complaint, filed Monday, Earthjustice referred to emails sent on January 30 by Rhee, the director of digital communications at USDA, instructing staff to remove web pages. These emails were obtained by multiple news outlets last month. It’s unclear how Rhee’s directives were meant to be implemented—if all web pages that were taken down also had to be sorted and flagged for review, or if the staff received further guidance on which ones to unpublish and which ones to leave online. To date, neither Rhee nor the Department of Agriculture has publicly acknowledged the emails or the removal of climate-related web pages. “That’s problematic for a number of reasons, including that we don’t know the full scope of the purge,” said Stein.

Larry Moore, a spokesperson for the USDA, said the agency is working with the Department of Justice, or DOJ, on court filings, and directed inquiries to the DOJ. The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Jason Rylander, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity who is not involved in the lawsuit, said that the agency’s move serves to diminish the public’s confidence in climate science, and the scientific community more broadly. “Once again, the Trump administration is demonstrating itself to be the most anti-science administration in history,” he said. The loss of dedicated web pages for climate research, mitigation programs, and datasets “holds back scientific inquiry and public knowledge,” he added.

In addition to NOFA-NY, the other plaintiffs in the complaint are the National Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group, an activist group focused on toxic pollution.

A hearing date is still pending. Rylander argued it’s likely that more complaints will be filed over the removal of climate information from other federal agency websites, like the Environmental Protection Agency. He also said the Center for Biological Diversity may look into these purges.

Gillingham referred to these moves as part of “an indiscriminate political agenda scrubbing climate” from any government website. “We can’t sit by and just wait to see what happens. You know, they should not be doing what they’re doing. So it has to stop. And the courts are the only option right now.”

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WWE Exec Linda McMahon Is Poised to Oversee the End of the Department of Education

In President Donald Trump’s meritocracy**,** you apparently don’t need much educational experience to run the Department of Education.

The Republican-controlled Senate on Monday confirmed former wrestling exec and billionaire Linda McMahon as the next Secretary of Education. With a demonstrated lack of knowledge about even the most basic education laws and policies, McMahon is now the head of a department that Trump has called a “big con job” that he hopes to dismantle.

The Senate voted 51-45 to confirm McMahon after Democrats spent hours opposing the confirmation and a pending bill to ban trans girls and women from women’s sports from kindergarten through college. After confirming McMahon, Senate Republicans immediately, and ultimately unsuccessfully, moved to end debate on the bill, which would codify Trump’s change to Title IX that classifies trans-inclusive athletic policies as sex discrimination.

Created by Congress in 1979, the Department of Education is one of the largest agencies in the federal government, responsible for the disbursement of tens of billions of dollars each year for everything from preschool readiness programs to grants for low-income college students and school funding for students with disabilities. It holds more than $1.5 trillion in federal student loans from 43 million borrowers. It’s also responsible for ensuring that schools comply with a variety of federal laws, including Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination, and Title VI, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race or national origin.

“We need a Secretary of Education who will put students first, not billionaires, who will stand up for our students—every single one of them—even if it means standing up to Donald Trump and Elon Musk,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said on the Senate floor. “Linda McMahon fails to make the grade.”

Best known as the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment and a major Trump donor alongside her since-separated husband Vince, McMahon’s experience in education is limited. She worked for a semester as a student teacher while studying at Eastern Carolina University, served for a year in 2009 on the Connecticut State Board of Education (which ended after the Hartford Courant discovered she falsely claimed to have an education degree), and spent more than a decade on the board of a private Catholic university. She unsuccessfully ran for US Senate in Connecticut in 2010 and 2012. During the first Trump administration, she served as the administrator of the Small Business Administration, resigning in 2019 to join the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action.

“We need a Secretary of Education who will put students first, not billionaires, who will stand up for our students—every single one of them—even if it means standing up to Donald Trump and Elon Musk.”

According to Senate Republicans, McMahon’s business track record matters much more than her skimpy experience in education.

“I know that some people feel the Secretary of Education should have extensive experience in a school system. However, it is important to remember that education is still mostly a state and local responsibility,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said. “The job is to manage a bureaucracy who [stet] runs a number of funding programs.”

During her confirmation hearing in February, McMahon largely defended Trump’s vision for education in America, affirming her dedication to the expansion of school choice programs and following the administration’s interpretation of federal anti-discrimination laws—such as using Title IX to investigate schools that allow trans women and girls to play girls’ sports. As I reported:

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

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

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

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

As for questions about multiple education laws, including the Every Student Succeeds Act, one of the major laws governing K-12 public schools, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, McMahon was unable to reply. When Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) asked McMahon about Title IX, the nominee mischaracterized the policy and incorrectly stated that under the 2020 Trump rules, colleges are obligated to investigate off-campus sexual assaults. (In fact, those rules expressly forbid universities from investigating off-campus assaults.) Her difficulty in demonstrating some understanding of the foundational laws and policies affecting education prompted groups including the National Education Association and the National Center for Learning Disabilities to condemn her nomination. After the hearing, nearly 100 civil rights organizations penned a letter urging senators to reject McMahon.

“McMahon’s defense that she hopes to learn on the job what is required of a Secretary of Education would be a disqualifying answer in any environment,” the letter from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights read. “In this moment, when the threats to education are so overwhelming, and when so much damage has already been done in the first few weeks of this new administration, McMahon’s response is even more alarming.”

Along with nearly every federal agency, the Education Department has been upended since Trump took office. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team has canceled nearly $1 billion in contracts, mostly affecting the department’s nonpartisan research arm that provides schools and states with valuable information about school performance. DOGE asserts that its calculations result in only about $450 million in savings. Dozens of department employees, including civil rights investigators, have been fired. In a prelude to a “very significant” workforce reduction, on Friday afternoon, the department’s top human resources official offered remaining employees a $25,000 buyout if they resigned by midnight on Monday, according to Politico.

“McMahon’s defense that she hopes to learn on the job what is required of a Secretary of Education would be a disqualifying answer in any environment.”

Meanwhile, the department has shut down income-driven repayment plans for student loan borrowers for at least three months. These plans tailor monthly loan payments to a person’s discretionary income and offer the lowest monthly payments compared to other plans. It has stopped investigations into race- and gender-based discrimination. In furthering Trump’s targeting of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the department gave schools until the end of February to halt initiatives that, in its view, unlawfully discriminate to achieve “nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity.” The memo, which the department admits holds no legal weight, faces a legal challenge. Still, colleges across the United States have shuttered diversity offices and scrubbed all DEI references from their websites rather than risk federal funding.

But it’s not as if McMahon has not invested in education. According to her December 2024 financial disclosure report, she holds millions of dollars worth of bonds issued to colleges and school districts across the country. Within 90 days, she’ll divest from more than 75 such bonds, most of which explicitly relate to education, she has said. Her ethics report also notes that she’ll resign from several boards, including those of America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank; the right-wing dark money group America First Works; Sacred Heart University, and the Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social.

“[Trump] pledged to make American education the best in the world, return education to the states where it belongs, and free American students from the education bureaucracy through school choice,” McMahon said at her confirmation hearing. “November proved that Americans overwhelmingly support the president’s vision, and I am ready to enact it.”

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