The Trump EPA’s Baffling New Agenda Consists of Throttling Major Environmental Rules

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

Donald Trump’s administration is to reconsider the official finding that greenhouse gases are harmful to public health, a move that threatens to rip apart the foundation of the US’s climate laws, amid a stunning barrage of actions to weaken or repeal a host of pollution limits upon power plants, cars and waterways.

Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an extraordinary cavalcade of pollution rule rollbacks on Wednesday, led by the announcement it would potentially scrap a landmark 2009 finding by the government that planet-heating gases, such carbon dioxide, pose a threat to human health.

The so-called endangerment finding, which followed a Supreme Court ruling that the EPA could regulate greenhouse gases, provides the underpinning for all rules aimed at cutting the pollution that scientists have unequivocally found is worsening the climate crisis.

“The Trump administration’s ignorance is trumped only by its malice toward the planet.”

Despite the enormous and growing body of evidence of devastation caused by rising emissions, including trillions of dollars in economic costs, Trump has called the climate crisis a “hoax” and dismissed those concerned by its worsening impacts as “climate lunatics.”

Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, said the agency would reconsider the endangerment finding due to concerns that it had spawned “an agenda that throttles our industries, our mobility, and our consumer choice while benefiting adversaries overseas.”

Zeldin wrote that Wednesday was the “most consequential day of deregulation in American history” and that “we are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age.” He boasted about the changes and said his agency’s mission was to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business.”

Environmentalists reacted with horror to the announcement and vowed to defend the overwhelming findings of science and the US’s ability to address the climate crisis through the courts, which regularly struck down Trump’s rollbacks in his first term.

“The Trump administration’s ignorance is trumped only by its malice toward the planet,” said Jason Rylander, legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute. _“_Come hell or high water, raging fires and deadly heatwaves, Trump and his cronies are bent on putting polluter profits ahead of people’s lives. This move won’t stand up in court. We’re going to fight it every step of the way.”

_“_Zeldin’s EPA is dragging America back to the days before the Clean Air Act, when people were dying from pollution.”

In all, the EPA issued 31 announcements within just a few hours that take aim at almost every major environmental rule designed to protect Americans’ clean air and water, as well as a livable climate.

The barrage included a move to overturn a Biden-era plan to slash pollution spewing from coal-fired power plants, which itself was a reduced version of an Obama administration initiative that was struck down by the Supreme Court.

The EPA will also revisit pollution standards for cars and trucks, which Zeldin said had imposed a “crushing regulatory regime” upon auto companies that are now shifting towards electric vehicles; considering weakening rules limiting sooty air pollution that is linked to an array of health problems; potentially axing requirements that power plants not befoul waterways or dump their toxic waste; and considering further narrowing how it implements the Clean Water Act in general.

The stunning broadside of actions against pollution rules could, if upheld by the courts, reshape Americans’ environment in ways not seen since major legislation was passed in the 1970s to end an era of smoggy skies and burning rivers that became the norm following American industrialization.

Pollutants from power plants, highways and industry cause a range of heart, lung and other health problems, with greenhouse gases among this pollution driving up the global temperature and fueling catastrophic heatwaves, floods, storms and other impacts.

_“_Zeldin’s EPA is dragging America back to the days before the Clean Air Act, when people were dying from pollution,” said Dominique Browning, director of the Moms Clean Air Force. “This is unacceptable. And shameful. We will oppose with all our hearts to protect our children from this cruel, monstrous action.”

The EPA’s moves come shortly after its decision to shutter all its offices that deal with addressing the disproportionate burden of pollution faced by poor people and minorities in the US, amid a mass firing of agency staff. Zeldin has also instructed that $20 billion in grants to help address the climate crisis be halted, citing potential fraud. Democrats have questioned whether these moves are legal.

Former EPA staff have reacted with shock to the upending of the agency.

“Today marks the most disastrous day in EPA history,” said Gina McCarthy, who was EPA administrator under Obama. “Rolling these rules back is not just a disgrace, it’s a threat to all of us. The agency has fully abdicated its mission to protect Americans’ health and wellbeing.”

The Trump administration has promised additional environmental rollbacks in the coming weeks. The Energy Dominance Council that the president established last month is looking to eliminate a vast array of regulations in an effort to boost the fossil fuel industry, the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, told the oil and gas conference CeraWeek in Houston on Wednesday. “We will come up with the ways that we can cut red tape,” he said. “We can easily get rid of 20-30 percent of our regulations.”

Additional reporting by Dharna Noor

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Trump’s American Caste System

In 1995, then–Assistant Attorney General Walter Dellinger testified in Congress about proposed legislation to deny certain immigrants’ children automatic citizenship upon birth. He was clear. Such a bill, Dellinger argued, was “unconstitutional on its face.” Even the lawful alternative—an amendment to the Constitution—would go against the country’s history and traditions.

“They could be deported anywhere the administration chooses. They could become stateless. These folks are going to be living in fear.”

Perhaps more importantly, Dellinger made a compelling and enduring case for why lawmakers and judges shouldn’t be entrusted with the power of excluding an entire class of US-born children from the right to citizenship. Tampering with birthright citizenship would “create a permanent caste of aliens, generation after generation—born in America but never to be among its citizens.” He continued: “To have citizenship in one’s own right, by birth upon this soil, is fundamental to our liberty as we understand it.”

Thirty years later, that notion is once again being put to the test by a Trump administration’s executive order meant to take away birthright citizenship from the American-born children of undocumented immigrants and visa holders. Mother Jones spoke with Carol Nackenoff, the Richter Professor Emerita of Political Science at Swarthmore College and co-author of American by Birth: Wong Kim Ark and the Battle for Citizenship, about the order’s ramifications, the specter of a caste system, and the potential creation of countless stateless people in the United States.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you talk about the origins of the text of the 14th Amendment—which is at the heart of arguments guaranteeing birthright citizenship—as a product of the post-Civil War moment and a reaction to white supremacy?

I should first say that the notion of birthright citizenship didn’t start with the Civil War. It started long before that and we brought it over in American jurisprudence from English common law. It dates at least back to 1608—the idea that citizenship follows the soil on which you were born. A number of nations in the 19th and 20th centuries had birthright citizenship rules, especially settler nations.

The 14th Amendment was a reaction to the Dred Scott [Supreme Court]ruling of 1857 in which the chief justice writing for the majority said that Dred Scott had no standing in a US federal court to raise the question about his freedom because the framers never intended for slaves or formerly enslaved people to be part of “We the People,” part of the citizenship of the United States. The framers of the 14th Amendment surely wanted to correct the understanding in Dred Scott and make slaves, or former slaves, born on this soil citizens of the United States—and they wanted to use a simple language to do it.

When the members of Congress were deliberating the 14th Amendment, some people said: What about gypsies? What about the Chinese? And the response was, yes, if they’re born on this soil, they’re citizens. If they started saying that people who were born here had to be naturalized or were not citizens, they were concerned about the American-born children of people who had come here from England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Germany, and so on. People who they had no desire to exclude and, in fact, were happy to have here. So they made a conscious decision not to exclude anybody from this general statement.

In a recent interview, a Harvard law professor described birthright citizenship as a “rule of non-racial citizenship” that “avoids the creation of a hereditary caste of people who are not citizens.” In what ways would Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship enforce a caste system in the United States?

The 14th Amendment makes everyone born here equal. It is a non-caste-based notion of citizenship and once you start meddling with that, you’re introducing classes of people whose expectations and life chances will vary with their citizenship status. The people born after this artificial date will be treated very differently than people born beforehand.

People won’t be able to get social security numbers, passports, birth certificates, and driver’s licenses. They can’t cross international borders securely and expect to come back. If they find low-wage work, they’re going to be subject to the whims of their employers. They’re unlikely to be able to get health insurance. They’re going to be like any other undocumented resident, even though they were born here. They may lack fluency in another language, they may lack any contact with another country, and they could be deported anywhere the administration chooses. They could become stateless. These folks are going to be living in fear. They’re going to be living in the shadows. They’re going to become liminal.

Also, everybody’s going to have to provide proof of their parents’ citizenship status at the time of their own birth. My mother’s birth certificate is a handwritten note from a country doctor before there were any kind of standardized birth certificates. My father’s birth certificate was held in some kind of facility in St. Louis, and there was a fire and they were all burned up. There are an awful lot of people who are going to be caught in limbo, who are not going to be able to provide documents. Some scholars, including ProfessorLinda Bosniak, have talked about this sort of long-term limbo based on alienage, for example, as another form of caste. There will be a new kind of stratification among people put in place if this were allowed to go into effect.

Opponents of birthright citizenship have long argued for it to be abolished. Is there something different about the effort at this current moment?

Without someone like Trump in the White House, I don’t think we would be where we are right now. But there is still a growing vocal contingent speaking out against liberal birthright citizenship. I would say there are three things going on. One, there is a global trend to make birthright citizenship less generous. I think it’s partly due to ethno-nationalism and the rise of populism. A second reason is we’ve seen a huge surge in immigration. A third reason is a lot of people have been freaking out since population projections started indicating that we were going to become a majority-minority nation by 2050. For some folks, that is uncomfortable and intolerable. It’s not their country, it’s our country.

At the core of Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship is a centuries-old conflict over who gets to be an American citizen and who decides that. You co-authored a book titled American by Birth that covers some of that history in a context where anti-immigrant sentiment was also very prevalent. What is the importance of the Wong Kim Ark Supreme Court case for today’s debate?

Wong Kim Ark was born in the United States [to Chinese parents] in probably 1873 and always maintained an address in San Francisco. He was classified as a laborer. So, if he had been trying to come from China after 1882 he would not have been allowed in [under the Chinese Exclusion Act] if he had not been born here. He traveled with his family to China to find a bride and his parents stayed there. On return, he was not allowed to land. At this point, there were some US officials who wanted a test case about birthright citizenship. They were arguing that Wong Kim Ark was born to alien parents who were subjects of the Emperor of China and therefore he was not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.

The Supreme Court rejected all those arguments and Justice Horace Gray wrote for a 6-2 majority that Wong Kim Ark was a citizen by birth. They read the 14th Amendment very simply and the exceptions very narrowly. What’s ironic is we like to love Justice [John Marshall] Harlan, who wrote the dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson that “there is no caste here, our Constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” But he dissented in Wong Kim Ark, saying the nation has a right to exclude a race that it considers unassimilable.

Trump’s executive order has already faced several legal challenges, with lower courts blocking its implementation. Do you anticipate that the Supreme Court might take up this case and, if so, how do you think the justices might rule?

I don’t see the Trump administration yet trying to make an argument that Wong Kim Ark should be overturned. But the argument that children of people who themselves broke the law to come here without the nation’s consent shouldn’t be birthright citizens scares me a little bit, given this current court. They tend, right now ,in these federal cases to say that it’s different because Wong Kim Ark’s parents were here with the permission of the United States. They were legally domiciled here. I could imagine the possibility, if [the justices] get really aggressive, that they would say there is a difference.

One thing that might slow things down is that in the current version of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the rule is the Wong Kim Ark rule. It’s reading the 14th Amendment very simply and the exceptions very narrowly. And Congress hasn’t changed that. They’ve proposed changes to birthright citizenship laws every Congress since 1993 and most of them don’t even get a hearing. This year, 40 people introduced an amendment to the INA that mirrors the language in Trump’s executive order, except it adds protections for children of non-citizens who are actively serving in the US armed forces. The court could simply say: Congress has spoken and the executive order doesn’t override it.

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Wildlife and Conservation Scientists Are Next in Line for Trump’s Chopping Block

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

The scientists responsible for crucial fish and wildlife research projects in the West involving species like elk, mule deer, sage grouse, and wild horses might be next in line for the Trump administration’s chopping block to improve government efficiency.

Like many of the federal workforce cuts that include biologists, trail crews, and even waste-water treatment managers, experts say rather than improving government efficiency, laying off employees from the US Geological Survey Cooperative Research Units could actually end up costing taxpayers more.

It’s still unclear exactly how deep the cuts could be, although the Department of Interior told the USGS and cooperative units to present plans to slice their budgets by 10 percent, 25 percent, and even 40 percent, said Ed Arnett, CEO of The Wildlife Society. Any cuts to the agencies will have ripple effects throughout the wildlife world, experts say, while cuts of up to 40 percent could cause permanent harm to fish and wildlife, from mule deer and elk to endangered desert tortoises and sage grouse. And Western states and nonprofits, which have millions of dollars of their own money wrapped up in hundreds of research projects, are bracing themselves for the worst.

“My concern is really high. The Nebraska Game and Parks Commission has over $4 million worth of projects, either ongoing right now, getting close to wrapping up, or new projects,” said the commission’s director, Tim McCoy, including projects on the greater prairie chicken, studying declines in wild turkey numbers, and how to more efficiently manage invasive carp. “Our co-op unit is pretty integral to our ability to do and answer the real applied science questions, like declining populations.”

The federal government established the cooperative fish and wildlife research units, often just called co-ops, in 1935. Congress codified it in 1960, allowing for annual appropriations to be nestled within the US Geological Survey under the Department of Interior. Their mandate was clear and simple: Help states with research projects they didn’t have the capacity to do on their own, offer technical assistance and train the next generation of biologists.

And so they did, often as teams of two or three, working in 44 universities spread across 41 states—at most about 120 scientists altogether, at least until the recent cuts, which already laid off nearly half a dozen probationary employees. “Losing (the co-ops) would be devastating,” said John Carroll, a University of Nebraska wildlife professor and president of the National Association of University Fish and Wildlife Programs.

The co-ops are already lean, he added; in many ways, they are the definition of efficiency. They are the opposite of “ivory tower” university programs, providing a critical link between university science and local fish and wildlife needs.

“This is blue-collar, boots-on-the-ground, getting-it-done stuff,” said Tony Wasley, former head of the Nevada Department of Wildlife and current president of the Wildlife Management Institute, which partners with the USGS, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, universities, and state wildlife agencies to run the units.

About 700 projects are underway at any given time across the country, supporting more than 1,000 jobs each year for skilled workers including graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and research technicians. Ultimately, they raise about $3 for every $1 they receive from the federal government.

Projects include the Wyoming Migration Initiative, which sprang out of the University of Wyoming’s cooperative unit and led to the mapping of dozens of big game migration routes across the state. That co-op also worked with other states around to the West to produce atlases that help state wildlife agencies and lawmakers remove harmful fences, invest in easements and identify good locations for highway over- and underpasses that save both wildlife and human lives.

The scientific research the co-ops do helps state agencies address the threats that fish and wildlife face from development and diseases, said Jerod Merkle, a University of Wyoming assistant professor of migration ecology and conservation. In Wyoming, scientists provide information the state uses to maintain its wildlife and fisheries and preserve the state’s hunting and fishing heritage.

Arnett said he anticipates cuts perhaps as early as mid-March. The USGS did not respond to requests for comment.

The firing of hundreds of biologists across the country is creating a chilling effect, not only on those who lose their jobs as well as those who remain, but also on the future of wildlife and fisheries research. Many fired biologists were local people who shook hands with landowners, discussed important programs over coffee and maintained critical relationships between the government and Westerners who live with fish and wildlife.

And co-ops are responsible for training many of the biologists who go on to work for state fish and wildlife agencies, said Wyoming Game and Fish Director Angi Bruce. “The added benefit of working with these young scientists and giving them exposure to real application in the field is something we couldn’t find anywhere else.”

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After 2024, We Need to Rethink “Ground Game” Completely

When a presidential campaign ends in failure, small things prepared for the victory die with it. Celebratory merchandise rots in boxes; laudatory magazine covers leak to social media instead of going to the printers. And, as the news moves on, election season narratives that hardened over the campaign float away. Moments away from becoming doctrine, these explanations are half-forgotten, never to be used by journalists and historians to authoritatively describe what Middle America is and what it cares about again. The way that politics will never be the same again end up never to be at all.

The campaign of former Vice President Kamala Harris had many such stories prepared to explain her victory. Remember when the election would be decided by the celebrity endorsements? Remember when—following a comedian calling Puerto Rico “garbage” at the Trump campaign’s capstone rally—Latino voters would reject Trump? Recall Harris winning enough of the “quiet female” vote to topple the right’s embrace of the manosphere? What about the theory (which I took) that pollsters might be overcorrecting for mistakes made in past Trump elections? There was even a final big headline to fit Harris’s main attack on the 45th president and gain the many moderates: Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly declared Trump a fascist in the New York Times—which was made into a key push at the end of Harris’ campaign.

Each of these stories and theories gave those to the left-of-center reasons to hope that a margin-of-error election would end well. But, among all of these late-breaking reports and declarations, there was one anecdote hung above the rest. This was perhaps the narrative-of-all-narratives on liberal social media at the tail end of the election: that Harris had a major advantage over Donald Trump because of the strength of her “ground game.”

As the story—and real reporting—explained, Harris’ campaign had used their substantial financial advantage to build what was described as a “turnout machine”: a tightly-structured effort centered around 2,500 paid campaign staffers who went out to knock on doors, recruit volunteers, and get voters to the polls. Trump, on the other hand, had largely outsourced his field operations to a constellation of inexperienced, risible individuals. Most notably, he predominantly relied on PACs led by Charlie Kirk, mostly known for attempting to own the libs as a podcaster, and Elon Musk, the world’s richest and most brain-rotted by X man.

Reports seemed to confirm that this choice by the Republican was a disaster. On October 30th, Wired reported that a firm associated with Musk’s America PAC had tricked volunteers into signing up, moved them across the country in the back of U-Hauls, and threatened to withhold pay unless unrealistic quotas were met. Maybe that explained why The Guardian had reported less than two weeks earlier that canvassers associated with Musk’s PAC were committing serial fraud. Roughly a quarter of door knocks in Arizona and Nevada recorded were potentially faked, the paper said.

But then, disaster did not come. Once the election results rolled in, it was hard to find much evidence that Harris’ heralded field operation yielded her benefit. Trump swamped her in all of the seven swing states where her campaign had made their major investments. Campaign staffers, in post-mortems, have often noted the most fiercely-contested states wound up swinging to the right by less than the country overall. But it was hardly clear that even that was a direct result of her campaign effort. Three of the states most resilient to the national rightward shift (Washington, Utah, and Oklahoma) saw basically not investment whatsoever by either campaign.

Those who followed the 2016 election likely felt a sense of déjà vu. Hillary Clinton supposedly had a major advantage in “ground game” in her contest against Trump, too. Famously, Trump’s campaign office in one of the largest counties in Colorado had a 12-year-old as key in helping coordinate volunteers and the get out the vote operation. But, just like what happened eight years later, this supposedly insurmountable gap wound up meaning nothing. In the end, Trump won not just all of the truly important contested states, but also either contending in or carrying several places that Clinton’s supposedly sophisticated operation never even thought of as competitive.

It all begs the question: What is it the “ground game” that Democrats supposedly are winning? And why is it alluring to talk up, despite the fact that they keep losing?

Field operations are very far from new to American politics. In fact, for most of early American history, the activities that might be described as a “ground game” essentially encompassed all of American political activity. Parties were structured as vote-producing machines, with elections being won and lost based on the efforts by operations like Tammany Hall. As late as the 1960s, Republicans alleged political machines manipulated democracy, even outright stealing a presidential election. The “new politics” of the 1960s and 1970s were organized as an explicit revolt against this status quo, one that would ultimately triumph with the dismantling of the New Deal coalition by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Machine politics, it appeared, were out, and a politics defined by TV-style branding and polarization was in.

This consensus would prevail over American politics over the following decades, ultimately shifting styles towards a brand of telegenic centrism embodied by the likes of former President Bill Clinton and an early “compassionate conservative” version of former President George W. Bush. Over this period, as detailed in Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman’s book The Hollow Parties, the structures of both parties would atrophy until they served little purpose other than raising funds from their favored batch of the rich.

A major break came—or, at least, seemed to come—with the campaign of former President Barack Obama. The then-young Illinois Democrat positioned himself as an opponent to the establishment. He adopted grassroots, and online fundraising—a direct social media presence combined with a robust “ground game” across the country. It followed in the geeky hope of Howard Dean’s campaign that was screamed out of existence. And the effort received substantial media attention, first during the campaign itself but especially after it seemingly brought results. Obama won in a landslide, and his field operations were immediately memorialized as one of the many innovations that allowed him to run laps around his old, stodgy opponents.

Studies found Obama’s field operations had a real impact. But, on reflection, they also helped enshrine an idea of “ground game” as simple effort and innovation: the political equivalent of Apple producing a better mobile phone than its competitors and the technocrat hope of Democrats generally to outsmart politics. There was a sense that Obama had essentially “solved” politics; that, in the words of one expert, “In the 21st century, the candidate with [the] best data, merged with the best messages dictated by that data, wins.”

Through this, one understanding of Obama’s success took a unique form. Rather than focusing on what he actually represented—his promises, rhetoric, and charisma—both the media and political establishment chose to fixate on the nuts-and-bolts of his campaign. His organization, not his message, was understood to be the thing that future Democratic campaigns needed to replicate. From this, we got the false promise of our modern “ground game”: a form of political organizing that didn’t require, well, politics.

In 2016, that idea met disaster. That year, Hillary Clinton—whose evident political liabilities were all but ignored by an establishment class who presumed to have hacked elections themselves—employed many of the same staffers from Obama 2012. Instead of crafting the kind of cohesive messages her opponents did, she tallied endorsements and often honed messages for swing voters based on specific demographics to be targeted. During the general election, she infamously left the campaign trail for nearly the entire month of August to tour the fundraising circuit, presumably to fund her expansive operation. Once the election finally came, her effort had everything you’d want for a successful campaign, but very little of what you would want for a successful candidate. In the end, it failed dramatically. The product itself mattered far more than how it was sold.

In the years since, these elements of Clinton’s campaign have been understood separately: a bizarre case where an effort utterly unable to define itself also managed to create a robust organizational structure. But, in light of the Harris campaign seeming to do the exact same thing often with the same Obama-era people in charge, it’s worth considering that this contradiction isn’t really much of a contradiction at all. Think about what it would entail if it actually were the case that better field operations were all that were needed to win national elections? You wouldn’t need to make any hard decisions or tough promises. No candidate would be any worse than any other. Politicians would come to power with no obligations to anyone besides the volunteers and the donors—especially the donors—who provided them with the resources to create their new political machines. If you’re the kind of person in D.C. who doesn’t hold any real beliefs other than the idea that it should be you working in the White House, it must sound like an absolute dream come true. It may even be appealing enough that you’d bet the country on it twice.

In and of itself, there’s nothing wrong with having a “ground game”—even a robust one. But if there is anything that the Trump era has made clear, it is that an effective organization is absolutely no substitute for a deficient product. After two attempts to push forward a deliberately vague candidacy on the back of field organizers, one can hope Democrats won’t assume a third time try will be the charm.

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Goodbye, Kevin Drum

Our friend and colleague Kevin Drum passed away on March 7. He was 66 and had been living with multiple myeloma for 11 years, and being the extraordinary journalist he was, he had taken readers along on the journey, sharing health updates on his blog. They were, in trademark style, matter-of-fact, data-driven, and wry; the last one included, like so many of his posts, a chart he’d made (this one to track the status of his C-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation). There were 140 replies, many from readers who had followed him for years and decades. They worried for him, wished him a speedy recovery, and one wrote:

If, however, it is “time” I wish for YOU the same thing that my Dad wished for my Mom. May your journey be pain free, and your memories clear! You have brought more joy to others than you received. Nothing in this life on earth is better than going when it’s your time, with the knowledge that you brought to others joy, and happiness.

This was quite in line with Kevin’s own thinking about death and dying. In 2016, two years after he was first diagnosed, he wrote an in-depth piece about the death with dignity movement. It had in-depth reporting, but he also grappled with the decisions he would have to make. He wasn’t sure how much longer he might have—“Five years? Ten years? Two?”—but he was very clear that when the time came, he wanted the option of going out on his own terms.

It was an extraordinary piece of writing and like any great piece, it was also a gift to the rest of us, helping make sense of something messy, scary, and confusing. That was Kevin’s talent, from the moment he first started posting as Calpundit as a pioneer of the blogosphere, later blogging at Washington Monthly under the sobriquet of Political Animal. His sweet spot was making complicated political and economic topics accessible to the rest of us, and by the time we took the helm of Mother Jones in 2006, he was one of our favorite bloggers. (Who couldn’t love the inventor of Friday cat blogging?) We asked him if he’d write for the magazine, and then whether he would consider bringing his blogging over to MoJo, and, by 2008, he’d agreed to both.

That began a 13-year run during which, it’s no exaggeration to say, Kevin was a big part of turning Mother Jones into a force to be reckoned with. When he went long, he went big: He wrote a groundbreaking piece on the link between lead exposure and crime rates that helped advance the conversation about environmental racism. Long before most people were paying attention, he explained how the destruction of unions was bad for the whole middle class and how AI was going to take all of our jobs. He unpacked the aftermath of the housing crisis and bank bailout. He told his mostly liberal audience that earmarks were good, actually. Meanwhile, producing posts at a breathtaking clip, his blog routinely reached hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes millions, a month. His most loyal readers were a fierce community who debated the finer points of this or that feat of statistical analysis, laughed with him at the antics of the pompous and entitled, and cooed over the cat photos he faithfully posted every Friday.

Kevin Drum with one of his many cats, 2015.Kendrick Brinson

Like every blogger worth his salt, he sometimes shot from the hip and occasionally missed; unlike some, he had the courage and integrity to take the resulting flack, listen, and change his mind. And true to his menschy self, he turned down every proposed increase to his modest salary, asking that we use the money to help more junior staffers instead.

No matter the topic or format, Kevin loved busting myths, puncturing truisms, and perhaps most of all, helping all of us see that regardless of how bizarre, unnerving, or terrifying things got, the end of the world was not yet nigh. On hearing of Kevin’s passing, our former colleague Dave Gilson, a fellow chart genius who often worked with Kevin, sent us a note that read, “Kevin was passionate and principled, but his default setting was calm in the face of hyperventilation and hyperbole. So when he did get angry, you knew it was bad.”

When Kevin first had to undergo cancer therapy that took him out of commission for a time, he worried about abandoning his readers. Other staffers helped fill in, but we also reached out to the OG blogging community, to see if they had a post to offer in honor of him. A veritable who’s-who—Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Ann Friedman, Ana Marie Cox, Jonathan Chait, David Dyden, Felix Salmon, and many others—signed up. Over the next few years, his health ebbed and flowed but eventually got to a point where he decided he had to blog at his own pace and timing. He eschewed Substack—didn’t like the vibe—and set up his own blog, naming it Jabberwocking. And he spent the next few months working on a long piece for us about how Fox News had made America so angry.

Donald Trump did make Kevin angry, but even in the chaotic weeks of the second Trump administration, he found ways to knock the chaos-mongers down a notch. He had a realist’s idealism—a cautious, but steadfast faith in the ability of democracy to muddle through its darkest hours and come out the other side. In these last ten years, that was unique and sanity-preserving for so many of his readers, us included.

A few weeks ago, when he was in the hospital struggling with pneumonia, Kevin had a low point and posted a brief update that ended with the words “Take care of Donald Trump for me.” It was a little cryptic, but also classic Kevin: He didn’t want us to take ourselves, or Trump, too seriously. He knew that this, too, would pass.

Kevin was a passionate amateur photographer and loved to post about some new thing he’d accomplished with a lens, or an evening he’d spent outdoors trying to capture some moment in the skies. He set up Jabberwocking so as to display one of his photos every time you reloaded it, along with a quote from some writer or blogger. When we checked it after learning of his death, it showed a photo of the Santa Ana Mountains, shot from Irvine in Orange County, California, where he spent his entire life. The quote that accompanied it was “Everything takes longer than you think,” and it was from Kevin himself. We’d like to think it was a reminder: these tough, confusing times will be hard, and will last longer than we’d like, but not forever.

Kevin’s wife Marian has set up a remembrance page on Facebook and we encourage his fans to leave their goodbyes there.

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The Many Misrepresentations of Mahmoud Khalil

Early this week, as Columbia students scrambled to respond to the United States government’s arrest of recent graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a series of logistical hurdles emerged. What would the protesters do if approached by police? What did the fine print of Columbia’s recently-updated public events policy say? What should the group tell the media?

As one student told me, there was a grim humor amid the discussion. “Shit,” they thought each time an obstacle came up, “Mahmoud would’ve known what to do.”

“My husband was kidnapped from our home, and it’s shameful that the US government continues to hold him because he stood for the rights and lives of his people,” Khalil’s wife said.

Khalil, according to the many student protesters I spoke with, was an anchor for the movement, though he reportedly did not participate directly in the Columbia encampment. Rather, he was a spokesperson and a mediator: as the group navigated a tumultuous spring of protest, Khalil always seemed to know how to move forward calmly under pressure. Politicians and outsiders have painted a different—and more sinister—picture of Khalil, who is Palestinian, labeling him as “aligned” with terrorists and in need of deportation.

On the evening of March 8th, plainclothes Department of Homeland Security officers—including one who was given a shoutout at President Donald Trump’s inauguration, as Drop Site News reported—stopped Khalil outside his home, detained him in front of his eight-months-pregnant wife, and, without presenting a warrant, took him away. In legal filings, Khalil’s lawyers said his wife was not told where her husband would be taken.

NEW: The docket for the Mahmoud Khalil case has been updated with today's orders:
– Restrictions on filings have been lifted
– Govt will file its motion to transfer or dismiss for improper venue by midnight
– Parties will file opposition by noon 3/14, replies by 5pm 3/17 https://t.co/c1o8LimAJ9 pic.twitter.com/M0urvPjab9

— Tyler McBrien (@TylerMcBrien) March 12, 2025

Federal agents told him they were there to revoke his student visa, according to his lawyers. When Khalil told the officers he is a legal permanent resident with a green card, they told him they would revoke that instead.

“My husband was kidnapped from our home, and it’s shameful that the US government continues to hold him because he stood for the rights and lives of his people,” Khalil’s wife said in a statement delivered Wednesday. “His disappearance has devastated our lives—every day without him is filled with uncertainty, not just for me but for our entire family and community.”

At noon on Tuesday, March 11th, Columbia students and faculty staged a sit-in on the Low Library steps, demanding that ICE leave Columbia’s campus and return their friend. Within ten minutes, public safety officers had the area fenced off, as helicopters hovered overhead. It was a different campus from one year ago: nearly every green space was fenced-in, and almost no outsiders were allowed through Columbia’s gates.

At the protest, a student named Carly—a classmate of Khalil’s from Columbia’s School of International and Professional Studies—said the detained graduate’s friends know him as someone who wants to help others, even when that means making himself a target.

“He has really gone above and beyond to protect his peers and protect those around him in a way that has even directly harmed him,” Carly said. During last spring’s protests, “when Columbia University admin threatened student safety, Mahmoud served as a mitigator to protect students, which also made him more directly targeted.”

Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia, has known Khalil for a year. The professor had grown to rely on Khalil, he said. “Throughout the year, I came to realize that Mahmoud is someone you can always count on to get a straight answer and to talk you through a difficult situation,” Howley said. “Last year, anytime I had a question about what someone was doing or concerns about something in the protest movement and wanted to get some facts checked, I could always call Mahmoud and get a straight answer.”

Carly—who wore a Magen David necklace and a large heart-shaped necklace with the word “Palestine”—said that as a Jewish Columbia student, she felt her supposed “safety” was being used as a pretext for arresting her friend.

The evening that Mahmoud was taken from his university-owned apartment, Carly said, she was messaging back and forth with him about how to keep other students safe from deportation threats. “The night of his detainment, there was a call to action among students, about how we can help with this threat from ICE,” she remembered. “Mahmoud was one of the first people to respond and ask, ‘How can I help?’” Hours later, he was arrested.

These descriptions of Khalil stand in stark contrast to how politicians have spoken of him. President Donald Trump took credit for the arrest. His administration has promised “many more to come.” Border czar Tom Homan called Khalil a “national security threat,” and asserted that he violated free speech “limits.” Homan said on Fox News that they were “absolutely” allowed to deport Khalil.

Even Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), in condemning Khalil’s arrest, still made time to equivocate by prefacing his statement by declaring “I abhor many of the opinions and policies that Mahmoud Khalil holds and supports” (though the Senator did not say what those opinions might be). House Majority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), similarly, asserted that Khalil “created an unacceptable hostile academic environment for Jewish students and others” before calling on DHS to stop his deportation.

For Schumer and Jeffries, Khalil’s first-amendment rights are seemingly limited by the alleged content of his speech. But, they say, deportation is out of line. For Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio—who said “this is not about free speech”—Khalil is an example of the coming crackdown and reminiscent of the War on Terror limits of political thought. “The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law,” an unnamed White House official told Bari Weiss’ Free Press. but that Khalil “is a threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.”

Reporting in The Forward suggests that the Trump administration may have obtained his name via a targeted campaign on social media by pro-Israel doxxing groups like Betar and Canary Mission—and that Columbia, as the owner of the property Khalil lives on, did not stop DHS agents from entering. (Columbia has released a statement saying that they did not “request” the presence of ICE agents on campus, and that agents “must have a judicial warrant to enter non-public university buildings.”)

On Wednesday morning, Khalil’s attorney Diala Shamas said outside a Manhattan courthouse that the legal team was unable even to get a call with their client. “A phone call with his lawyers is the bare minimum, and it’s what we need to do…to simply be able to file the papers we need to file to get him back,” Shamas said.

New York federal judge Jesse Furman said he would order the government to allow Khalil’s lawyers to speak with him once on Wednesday, and once on Thursday. So far, despite his lawyers’ hopes, Khalil remains in Louisiana, where he was sent to a GEO Group facility that has reports of previous human rights abuses.

“Fundamentally everything that’s happening to Mahmoud is because of his advocacy for Palestinian rights,” Shamas said. Documents obtained by the Washington Post show that the specific provision the US government is trying to invoke against Khalil requires Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s personal assertion that ““the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe that your presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

“The government is invoking this very rarely used provision of the immigration and nationality act that they claim allows them to deport people simply because of their political opinions,” Shamas said.

Khalil’s Columbia classmates disbanded their sit-in after five hours. That same evening, another large protest marched through Manhattan in support of Khalil. And the following morning, he appeared in court. He had still not been accused of any crime.

At a briefing Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said this was just the beginning. Khalil, she said, was present while “pro-Hamas propaganda fliers” were distributed (which is not a crime) and suggested that the Department of Homeland Security is in possession of a list of further Columbia students to deport.

Columbia University, when asked for comment on his case, still has not responded.

Najib Aminy contributed reporting.

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‘Health Security Is At Risk’: Inside the Purge of HHS

On Monday night, a longtime employee of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) sat down with his wife at their kitchen table in a D.C. suburb and decided to leave the job he loves.

Three days earlier, he was one of thousands of employees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) who received an email offering them up to $25,000, pre-tax, to leave their jobs. Initially, the NIH employee, who analyzes how grants are spent, was not sure he’d take it. The deadline is this Friday at 5 pm, which gives workers only a week to decide whether or not to leave jobs that many have been in for decades. (HHS officials make the final decisions about who gets approved for the buyouts based on who says they want them, according to the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM.)

But over the weekend, the NIH employee considered the toll the past six weeks since President Trump’s inauguration—especially the antics of unelected billionaire Elon Musk—had taken on his mental and physical health and his productivity at work. By Monday, he had made up his mind: “I’m out,” he said.

He and his wife had crunched the numbers and determined they had enough retirement savings—plus from her higher salary—to get by. (He and the other HHS employees Mother Jones spoke to for this story are being granted anonymity for fear of retaliation for speaking out.)

“I just can’t take the hostile work environment and what this administration is doing to our country and to public health in general,” he told me. “I can’t, in good conscience, serve this administration any longer.”

He also worries about what a mass exodus of employees from the agency, either voluntarily due to the buyouts or forcibly as a result of more layoffs, could mean for public health. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an unqualified anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist, is now running the agency. “I absolutely feel like I’m making [this decision] under duress—we’re not being given enough time to think about it,” the NIH worker said. “I didn’t want to leave under these circumstances.”

I spoke with five HHS workers over the past two days who are eligible for the buyouts, three of whom said they plan to try to take it. Two others said they will stay in their jobs. Each one characterizes the choice as a daunting one: Leave and lose income and abandon critical work, or stay and try to continue to make a difference in public health as officials at the highest levels of government seem hellbent on undermining them and imposing burdensome working conditions.

“Somebody has to stay to help clean up the mess that they’re most likely going to make,” a public health advisor on infectious diseases at the CDC told me. “If you want to get rid of me, you’re basically going to drag me kicking and screaming out of here.”

Spokespeople for HHS did not respond to ten detailed questions from Mother Jones on Thursday.

The buyouts are the latest efforts to scale back the workforce at HHS, a massive and highly consequential umbrella agency that employs more than 80,000 people.

Last week, eligible HHS employees were also offered early retirement buyouts under a separate program also managed by OPM, according to an email sent to staff. HHS also reportedly lost 5,200 probationary employees following the purge of those workers across the federal government. The agency has since reportedly rehired some. An unknown amount also resigned from HHS following the January “fork in the road email” that offered federal workers eight months of pay if they resign. It is not immediately clear how many workers at HHS had accepted the latest buyouts. But on Tuesday, HHS seemed to try to entice more workers to do so, by offering employees eight weeks of full pay and benefits in addition to the lump sum, according to a copy of an email to staff reviewed by Mother Jones.

HHS is not alone in trying to lead staff to the door. The Education Department and the Social Security Administration are among those that have also reportedly offered workers the same buyouts HHS workers were offered. And more layoffs will soon hit the entire government, given that Thursday is the deadline for agency heads to come up with “reorganization plans” to implement “large-scale reductions in force,” based on one of Trump’s executive orders, according to OPM.

RFK Jr. has been tight-lipped about which HHS workers will be on the chopping block, saying on Fox last month that he has a “list in my head” of who he wants to go; he also previously said he would fire and replace 600 NIH workers on day one of a second Trump term, as my colleague Anna Merlan wrote—though that has not happened yet.

Ingraham: Do you have list of people that need to be removed and quickly?

RFK JR: I have a list in my head pic.twitter.com/4fyv2wldx7

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 14, 2025

Experts say the impacts of losing thousands more HHS workers could be broadly felt by Americans given the agency’s vast mandate. For some, this is motivation to stay and fight. “Health security is at risk,” said a CDC researcher who studies infectious diseases and plans to reject the buyout. “We had enough problems keeping up during COVID, just having enough employees to be part of the response.”

She and the other CDC researcher pointed to the fact that the CDC is monitoring more than 220 measles cases in Texas and New Mexico, which have led to two deaths so far—incluidng of an unvaccinated child. (RFK wrote in an op-ed for Fox earlier this month about the importance of the measles vaccine—but also characterized vaccination as a “personal” choice. As my colleague Kiera Butler wrote, he has also promoted unproven measles remedies such as steroids and cod liver oil.) Officials are also tracking the bird flu, of which there are 70 cases and one death so far. And influenza, or the flu, has also been surging this season—at the same time that the meeting of the FDA’s flu vaccine panel, to determine the composition of the next flu shot, has been canceled.

Employees working on vaccine-related research are also concerned that their work could be impacted by RFK Jr.’s opposition to it. On Monday, the Washington Post reported that the NIH is terminating or limiting more than 40 grants related to researching vaccine hesitancy. On Sunday, Reuters reported that the CDC is planning a large study into potential connections between vaccines and autism, despite the fact that theories of such links have been disproven. (As of Tuesday afternoon, the CDC website—last updated in December—still noted that.)

The NIH worker who is taking the buyout said those directives are prime examples of why he is leaving. For those who stay at HHS, he predicts “there’s going to be a lot of people forced to do things that go against their personal sense of morality.”

That has already been the case since Trump took office. Several HHS employees say they had to reluctantly carry out his executive orders targeting transgender people and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs across government. “I had two grant applications where I had to tell people, ‘you need to go back and take up every single reference to DEI in this application, because we can’t fund it,’” said a worker in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), an agency that oversees child welfare, including programs such as Head Start and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Another day recently, the worker—who plans to take the buyout—spent four hours combing through hundreds of pages of documents to eliminate DEI-related language. “It’s insulting,” she said. “They’re just trying to push people out.”

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, senior advisor to the president, on the South Lawn of the White House in March.Samuel Corum/Pool/Cnp/CNP/Zuma

For some, it’s working. A scientific review officer at NIH, who oversees grant applications and plans to take the buyout, recounted “realizing that things that you hold important are no longer valued and are actually demonized” when she was told to remove her pronouns from her email signature and that grant reviewers should ignore parts of applications focused on diversity to comply with the anti-DEI orders. “The things that brought me to public health years ago,” she told me, “are not the things that are being prioritized, if we’re not allowed to be looking at how we create an equitable environment for everybody.”

While lofty ideals may motivate some federal workers’ decisions on the buyouts, practicalities also matter. A sticking point for the scientific research officer is the mandated return-to-office policy, as dictated by one of the executive orders Trump signed on his first day in office.

Some HHS employees reportedly had to return to the office last month, while others—those who live within 50 miles of an HHS office—have to return Monday. Those who live outside the 50-mile radius have been ordered to work from any federal office starting next month.

“Where do we sit? How do we buy things?” one of the CDC researchers asked, noting that offices may not be equipped for an influx of staff from other agencies. There’s also the $1 spending limit imposed by DOGE, which staff worry could prevent them from buying basic office supplies. “It’s hard to function on a day-to-day basis without some assurance that the resources and assets that you might need to do your job are readily available,” the other CDC employee said.

The return-to-office mandate comes at the same time that the administration has curtailed work-related travel. Internal emails that are first being reported by Mother Jones confirm the NIH cancelled its plan to send some National Cancer Institute (NCI) employees to an annual conference, put on by the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR), in Chicago in late April, despite it being the only federal office dedicated to researching cancer. The email does not provide a reason why NCI will not exhibit at the conference this year, only saying it’s “in light of current guidance.” An AACR spokesperson said the decision is believed to be due to a travel ban in place at the agency.

An employee of NCI, who was supposed to attend and is not eligible for the buyouts, called the AACR conference “one of the most important cancer research meetings.” Not having a larger presence there, she added, ultimately limits NCI’s reach. The internal NIH email more or less acknowledges this: “We recognize the valuable opportunity that our exhibit booth provides to engage with grantees and the broader research community,” it says, “so we will continue to search for alternative ways to connect and engage with these audiences.” It also says some NCI staff will still be able to attend the conference in-person or virtually, but only to present at sessions on NCI funding opportunities—as long as the content complies with Trump’s executive orders.

Taking the buyout brings its own set of uncertainties and frustrations.

Both NIH employees who plan to leave said they are not sure what they will do next. “This wasn’t my career plan—I came to the NIH thinking I’d be able to grow within this agency and do good,” the scientific review officer said. One thing she cannot easily do anytime soon is return to the federal government: If employees who take the buyout resume working for the federal government within five years, they have to pay it back.

A small consolation, though, is that the agency she is leaving does not feel like the same one she joined. “Given that we’re not funding so much important science at this point,” she said, “it’s hard to imagine the work you do is going to matter anyway.”

Meanwhile, those who are rejecting the buyouts on principle are bracing for the fact that they could wind up being fired anyway. “I hope I do not get let go,” one of the CDC researchers said, “but if I do, I don’t worry about myself as much as I worry about who will do the work if we are gone.”

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How Musk, Trump, and Your Boss Learned to Hate Democracy

You sit in a cubicle. You stand behind a cash register. You press your knees into the ground, straining to fix a burst pipe. It is a Thursday at 11 a.m., and you are at work. Are you free?

Professor Elizabeth Anderson in her book Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don’t Talk About It) says, in a way, no. You are not in a democracy in your workplace; you’re under a private government run by a dictator: your boss. The rules are set. And you—especially if you’re not in a union—have almost no say.

As the New Yorker noted, Anderson’s idea hits on a “striking American contradiction.” Private Government shows how, “on the one hand, we are a freedom-obsessed society, wary of government intrusion into our private lives; on the other, we allow ourselves to be tyrannized by our bosses, who enjoy broad powers of micromanagement and coercion.”

Since Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, two CEOs, took the reins of the United States government, I have been thinking a lot about Anderson’s theory of bosses as dictators.

Musk and Trump have framed a series of blatantly anti-democratic and disruptive executive branch actions as the efficient maneuverings of “high-IQ” businessmen. The president has signed a series of executive orders that are likely illegal, as he stretches the law in the name of his “mandate.” Musk and his legion of engineers have been dismantling the government under the righteous banner of fighting “fraud.” If the violent January 6 riot was a seditionist insurrection, how should one describe the 2025 version of a MAGA takeover?

The moves by DOGE, Musk, and Trump—running roughshod over norms and republican democracy—seem more familiar to me than armed revolt. It’s downsizing; it’s layoffs; it’s control by one annoying guy who for some reason is richer than you and is convinced that “working the weekend is a superpower.” It’s government run like a business. (Specifically a start-up.) The president not as democratic leader within a system of checks and balances, but as an imperious CEO with the power to do what’s needed. It’s dictator as boss, and boss as dictator.

I think when you consider that businesses are run by dictators—that a firm is not a democracy—it makes sense why a series of rich guys at the top of the capitalist world think government can be run without following any laws. I called up Anderson to discuss all this. We talked about DOGE, Musk, capitalism, and much else.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

How do you think understanding your boss as a dictator helps us make sense of what’s happening right now in the Trump administration?

Once we grasp that the default constitution of the capitalist workplace is a dictatorship—that the business class feels that it’s infinitely superior to government workers; that they think they could clean things up and make things way more efficient by running government as a “business”—we realize what they’re essentially saying is: We gotta run government like a dictatorship, a place where the boss rules.

That’s the picture. And so, they think these bosses can ignore all the regulations and constraints on the internal operation of the agencies; they can fire people at will without cause; they can just go through smashing and disrupting stuff—and, somehow, innovation will come out of it.

It’s this Ayn Rand-ian element of glorifying the megalomaniacal CEO. Musk can say: Let me do my thing, because I am the brilliant, disruptive innovator who’s going to transform everything. But I can only do that if I can fire people en masse and destroy all industries—so that I can emerge as the hero.

Rand’s idea of freedom was that the smart people, like John Galt in Atlas Shrugged, were screwed by rules and restrictions on the talented. And so we need to free people like him and other brilliant CEOs to do whatever they want. The key is not empathy but empowering the right people. And whatever happens to other people, so be it.

Exactly, because Rand thinks those other people don’t matter—deep down.

That’s why under capitalism now there’s a selection effect. It is the megalomaniacs—the narcissists—who rise to the top, given the incentive structure of the system. But, you know, these narcissists…they’re very thin-skinned. In their inner psychic lives they feel wounded every time somebody doesn’t worship them.

Which sounds a lot like anyone’s annoying boss—powerful and thin-skinned. It also helps me understand why so many on the right are obsessed with IQ. It can’t be that bosses got lucky. It has to be that they are naturally destined to rule.

Musk is a classic example of this. He has had genuine entrepreneurial success. I’ll grant him that. But he thinks that it’s because he has general intelligence. IQ is actually only measuring like a tiny part of intelligence. Musk is a total idiot when it comes to public policy. He believes any kind of crap that some idiot posts on X. He has no sense of reality outside of his business. He just goes smashing through, thinking that he’s a great innovator; in fact, he’s wrecking everything.

The capitalist firm, as it is set up right now, rewards that kind of person.

Right, and it rewards the kind of people who think that the rest of us are nobodies and it doesn’t matter what happens to us.

Right now, there’s the abstract boss behavior: I am the ruler, god of government, I don’t have to follow the rules for executive orders. And also the literal ways in which they’re acting like a boss: Elon Musk telling employees to send me an email of five things you did this week or you will be fired. How do you connect those two things?

The history of all right-wing parties is their base is business owners—small, medium, and large. And thecapitalist firm is a dictatorship, that’s its constitution. The boss, whatever he says, goes.

Most American workers who are not unionized have false ideas about their entitlement to a job. Most American workers are not aware that the default status of employment is at will. You can be fired at any time, for any reason (except for like a handful of anti-discrimination rules).

That power changes how bosses think. They don’t think they have to follow rules. They can do what they want to you.

Then you look wider. What are the objectives of so many policies over the last 50 years of neoliberalism? It’s plutocracy: To make capitalists rule, not just within the firm. That’s happening now. They get to be the bosses of everything.

That makes me think of the radicalization of the supposedly “normal” Silicon Valley types. I listened to a podcast with Marc Andreessen. He’s among many rich tech people who talked about being radicalized to vote for Trump. And he didn’t say it started with President Joe Biden’s attack on tech or Black Lives Matter protests. He said: I was radicalized around 2012 by all the annoying “kids” working for me. His experience as a boss is a big part of what moved him further right.

That’s exactly right. The problem that the tech bros got into is that in order to attract talented engineers for their start-ups they had to give them a lot of power within the firm. You attract a lot of talent if the workers feel like they’re empowered and they’re being listened to and treated with respect.

But then that turned in the 2010s. At some point, the tech bros become billionaires. Then, they feel miffed. The money goes to their heads! They feel like they’re Superman. Why aren’t people respecting them? And this is where respect means following orders, keeping your silence—it’s not your place to talk back to them, because look at how much richer they are than you. And they started getting pissed off.

That merges with the ideology of the tech world, where there is a cult of the founder. And it can turn into dictatorial ideology. Now, we have nutcases like Curtis Yarvin whispering about the benefits of monarchism.

Now it’s not just rulers of their company. They think they ought to be rulers of the world.

The philosophy changes as it appeals to what they need. Monarchism becomes appealing when you’ve been a monarch in a company.

Another point here is that often the tech bros have been cast as libertarian-right. They just want freedom. But, no, what they want is freedom for themselves. They want impunity for themselves to do whatever they like. That is to be free of government regulation, but also to be free of criticism.

They always billed themselves as libertarians, but in reality there’s always been a symbiotic relationship between libertarianism and authoritarianism within the capitalist firm. And once you’re a billionaire, you have a much bigger footprint than just your firm. You can affect whole states just by threatening to leave, like Amazon.

When you talk about Amazon like that, it reminds me of what you mentioned earlier, when you talked about the goal of neoliberalism. That term can be confusing. But really—and I think I am getting this right from Quinn Slobodian’s book—it’s that many people in the 20th century and during decolonization wanted money and capital to float freely above the constraints of a specific country. This gave businesspeople supreme power, and it gave companies power to act like nation-states themselves.

You’re totally right about that. It was in the 70s, somebody wrote a book called The Sovereign State of ITT. ITT was this big, sprawling, global company of its day. And basically it said: Look, this is not, you know, just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill corporation. It really is acting like a sovereign state. That’s what we have today in spades, with these much bigger, more powerful companies than ITT ever was.

What do you think being in charge of one of those companies, like Musk and Trump have been, makes you think of democracy?

Well, what good is it? I mean, that’s what they think.

That was there for a long time in Silicon Valley culture: disruption. What was disruption? I’m going to walk in there and start breaking a lot of laws and establish my business model. And that’s essentially how Uber got launched—ignore, just completely disregard, laws.

The thing is, many people want this. They want to see government “run the government like a business.”

Like a dictatorship, is what they’re saying.

There is a grain of truth in some of this: private for-profit corporations make decisions much quicker than the bureaucracies of democratic states do. Absolutely, that’s true. And so what happens is, when you have an encounter between what are these very successful corporate types and a civil servant, they just look at the civil servant and they think: These guys are idiots; I can run circles around them. To a certain extent, it’s due to the fact that there’s been a systematic repression and defunding for a lot decades of government, too.

I was actually thinking more about the obsession with Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore. Which is to say that so often it seems totally fine to many people not to have a democracy as long as the streets are clean. It’s popular.

But also, we also have to factor in the fact that people don’t know what the government does for the middle class—it’s enormous, but it’s hidden. It’s buried in the tax code, like the mortgage interest deduction, the fact that you don’t pay income taxes on employer-covered health care, these enormous tax advantages, the tax deferral of your pension plan. It’s there for the better-off middle class.

That’s the neoliberalism part: It was about both freeing markets and the government working through markets—so we hid the government’s work.

I mean, what’s interesting about DOGE is it will take a while for the American people to realize that this random, nihilistic destruction—just for the gleeful destruction of it all—actually comes back to bite. Because people are unaware of how much they depend on government services. Still, now you’re starting to see people show up at town halls yelling. Veterans can’t book an appointment at a Veterans Affairs hospital. They serve their country, and now they’re getting screwed over. They’re getting pissed, not to mention that almost a third of civil servants are veterans.

Another example: you can look at it both from the employment perspective and the consumer perspective. The National Park Service has been gutted, so now people who would spend their vacation camping out at Yellowstone, maybe they can’t get a reservation because the systems have broken down.

Well, everything is broken.

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If You Think Tesla’s Stock Is Bad, Check Out Trump’s Truth Social

Donald Trump took to Truth Social Monday night to offer support to his most important political ally, promising to buy a “brand new Tesla” as a “show of confidence.” Elon Musk’s electric car company has been rocked by protests in recent weeks, and its share price has fallen by more than 50 percent since its post-election peak in mid-December.

But Musk isn’t the only member of the administration with a company that is plummeting in value: Trump’s own business has been suffering, as well.

A week before the election last fall, the stock price for Trump Media & Technology Group—which operates Truth Social— spiked to $51.51. But thanks to an unrelenting string of bad news about the company’s business prospects—along with the consequences of Trump’s economic policies, which have sent nearly all stocks plunging—the company’s shares briefly fell below $19 on Tuesday.

In some ways, Trump’s business predicament appears more significant than Musk’s. Tesla is confronting steeply declining levels of consumer interest, but it still earns substantial revenue and owns major assets. Truth Social’s financials, by contrast, have since the very beginning been bad—and downright inexplicable for a company that is said to be worth $4 billion (even at the greatly reduced share prices of late). For a company that, in theory, has the eyes of the world on its biggest user, Truth Social had just $3.6 million in revenue in 2024.

To put that in context, according to a recent review of fast food restaurant chains, Trump’s entire social media operation had less revenue than the average Chik-Fil-A, Raising Canes, What-a-Burger, or Shake Shack location—and just barely more in sales than your typical McDonald’s. If that’s an odd comparison to make, it’s because it’s almost impossible to compare Truth Social’s revenue to other social media companies—Facebook and Instagram owner Meta booked $164.5 billion in revenue in 2024. That’s about 45,500 times more revenue than Truth Social.

Those lousy revenue numbers would suggest that the company’s profitability is also lousy—and that’s absolutely true. In its 2024 year-end filings, Truth Social reported losing more than $400 million.

But it’s not just the fact that the company has scant advertising sales and few users. It also seems to be spending money in odd and unhelpful ways—it paid Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., $813,000 (or almost a quarter of its revenue) just for showing up at board meetings. And company CEO Devin Nunes has made at least $6.3 million running the company since 2022, a stunning figure for a firm that is struggling to earn any money.

Investors might be able to forgive that pay arrangement if there appeared to be real innovation happening at the company. But in the last month, some of company’s press releases have trumpeted rather mundane accomplishments, including:

• Paying tribute to former Florida congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart, who passed away last week.
• Paying lawyers to join a lawsuit in Brazil, in support of Rumble, a MAGA-friendly video-hosting site meant as an alternative to YouTube.
• Filing paperwork to move the company headquarters to Florida (where it has been physically based since the beginning).

Since Trump’s Truth Social post Monday, Tesla’s stock has seen a small rebound—up about 4 percent, as of Tuesday afternoon. Truth Social was down slightly for the day. Based on its current price, Trump’s stake in the company is now worth about $3 billion less than it was in October.

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Why the Right Is to Blame for Distrust in the Media

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

Recently, I attended a conference in Washington, DC, on the all-important topic of “Innovating to Restore Trust in News.” The Semafor-sponsored event featured one-on-one interviews with such media bigshots as Joe Kahn, the executive editor of the New York Times;Emma Tucker, the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal; Mark Thompson, the CEO of CNN; Katherine Maher, the CEO of NPR; Bret Baier, the chief political anchor of Fox News; Mehdi Hasan, the editor-in-chief of Zeteo; Cesar Conde, chair of the NBCUniversal News Group; Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission; and Megyn Kelly, the former Fox host who’s now a podcaster.

The prompt for the conversation was a Gallup poll that shows that only 31 percent of Americans have some degree of trust in newsies, a drop from about 70 percent in 1972. Yet there was not much talk of specific innovations that could restore this trust. And it wasn’t until the reception afterward—tuna tartare!—that I realized what had been absent from the hours-long discussion: any consideration of why polls record a decline in trust of the media. I’ll get to that in a moment.

Rupert Murdoch had to pay Dominion $787.5 million for knowingly broadcasting falsehoods. Given that, what qualifies a Fox anchor to talk about trust in the media?

I’m not sure what one could expect from a lineup of media honchos who, if they had a brilliant idea, would probably not want to share it with competitors. But most of the speakers sidestepped the notion that news organizations could whip up something shiny and new to forge stronger bonds with their audiences. Kahn did speak about actions the New York Times has adopted to boost the relationship between its reporters and its readers, such as featuring them on The Daily, the paper’s daily podcast. If you know these folks, you’re more likely to trust their stories, Kahn told the crowd. (Kahn also referred to X as “a cesspool for attacks.”)

His remarks came closest to hitting the target Semafor had set up. Thompson proclaimed that he himself didn’t trust the media and commented, “I’d rather have a questioning audience than a compliant audience that is deferential to media.” He touted CNN’s future, noting its growth will not occur on its cable television platform but on the internet. Baier basically defended his daily show as a straight-news operation. Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith did not grill him on the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit that revealed that Fox had pushed Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election and that showed the world this network is more a propaganda-for-profit shop than a news outlet. Rupert Murdoch had to pay Dominion $787.5 million for knowingly broadcasting falsehoods that catered to its audience’s paranoia and bias. Given that, what qualifies a Fox anchor to talk about trust in the media?

Conde boasted that NBC News is the largest news organization in the nation and hailed its local news operations as means for enhancing trust in the media. (Local reporters often score well on the trust-o-meter.) Maher sought to slay the shibboleth that NPR is too liberal and said one way the network engenders trust is to “show our work” to the audience. Hasan was pressed by Semafor’s Max Tani on why he hasn’t disclosed the investors in Zeteo, the media startup he launched a year ago. He countered that this question has been raised by those who fear his tough coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and who want to suggest he’s secretly backed by pro-Arab interests. (He said his investors were friends and relatives, many of whom do not wish to be targeted because of their support.) On the matter of trust, Hasan remarked that many news consumers are “fed up” with the “coziness” they see when mainstream news people conduct interviews with prominent subjects. That produces a “trust deficit,” he asserted.

Tucker, when asked if Washington was freaking out too much about Trump, replied, “Maybe yes, a little bit.” I imagine that thousands of federal workers dismissed abruptly and perhaps illegally from jobs in which they provided essential services might disagree with her—as might needy people overseas who were cut off from food, clean water, and health care necessary for their survival because of the Trump-Musk blitzkrieg on government agencies.

Carr called social media companies “the greatest threat [to free speech] that we have seen over the last several years.” He did not seem to have X in mind and focused instead on the conservative complaint that the Biden administration leaned on these platforms during the Covid pandemic. He also defended his decisions to investigate NPR and PBS over their advertising policies and to revive complaints into CBS, ABC, and NBC. He told the audience he would fast-track a probe of how CBS News covered the last presidential election. His remarks were more about vengeance than trust.

Pointing to the huge audience her internet show draws, Megyn Kelly brayed, “I’m not having a trust issue.”

A real head-scratcher was Kelly’s place on the list of participants. What could this ex-Foxer tell us about restoring trust in the news media? After all, she endorsed Trump last year and campaigned for him, and Trump is arguably the biggest liar in the history of American politics. No surprise, she had nothing productive to offer. She snarked at CNN (too lefty!) and MSNBC (too, too lefty!). She did a mean-girl thing about Rachel Maddow and sneered that Amazon billionaire and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos had bent the knee for Trump. (Even a broken clock…)

Pointing to the huge audience her internet show draws, Kelly brayed, “I’m not having a trust issue.” The problem, she claimed, was that every establishment media institution is left-leaning—which is what you’d expect a Trump backer to say. Kelly had not much to share about how the legacy media could regain trust. Her suggestion seemed to be that these outfits ought to cover Trump’s lies as truth. Moreover, her presence at this “summit” was odd. If you want to boost trust in the media, why legitimize a right-wing journalist who became a partisan and helped elect a prodigious liar? By inviting Kelly to this shindig, Semafor indicated it believed she had something to contribute to this important conversation. She didn’t.

Back to the question of why trust in media is low. At the conference, there were crickets regarding the reason for this. A casual glance at the polling provides some insight. In 1972, according to Gallup, 72 percent of Democrats had a great deal or some trust in the media; 68 percent of Republicans felt the same way. Not much of a difference. Independents back then were the least trusting at 59 percent.

Then came a major split. From that point on, the numbers steadily dropped for all three groups. But the decline was sharpest for Republicans. Today, only 12 percent of them trust the media, while 54 percent of Democrats do.

So the overall collapse in trust has been driven most by Republicans losing faith in the media. Trust has fallen for all three groups—though on the chart above you can see there have been times when Democratic trust has rebounded to above 70 percent. Republicans have not hit the 50 percent mark in over 20 years. Take Republicans out of the equation, and the trust-in-media problem looks much less dire.

No one at the conference noted this. What also went unmentioned was that Trump, the GOP, and right-wing media (most notably Fox) have done much through the decades to degrade the national discourse with lies and disinformation, while simultaneously and purposefully encouraging profound distrust and hatred of media outlets that don’t buy their bunk.

The GOP war on the media is not the only reason for the free-falling trust numbers. But it’s a large slice of the story.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Republicans and the right began a crusade against the mainstream media, looking to delegitimize it in the eyes of conservatives. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), a hero of the ultra-right, excoriated the “liberal media,” which he despised for its coverage of the civil rights movement. Other conservatives assailed the conventional media for their critical reporting on the Vietnam War and Watergate. All of this fueled an extensive and well-planned effort on the right that aimed to discredit the media. In the 1970s, this media-bashing became a bedrock of Republican politics, and it has continued to this day. Trump turbocharged this tradition with his vituperative attacks on the press as the “enemy of the people.”

So here’s a basic fact: A long time ago, the right initiated a scheme to encourage distrust and, no surprise, it worked—at least among Republicans and probably among GOP-leaning independents.

The GOP war on the media is not the only reason for the free-falling trust numbers. But it’s a large slice of the story. And as the Republican Party has turned into the MAGA cult, it retains a sharp interest in undermining media that would challenge the “alternative facts,” lies, and disinformation peddled by Trump and his crew. Trump benefits from distrust in the media, and he has deliberately spurred it.

He and his minions don’t want to increase trust in the media because a trusted media would pose a threat to them. During Trump’s first administration, the Washington Post chronicled more than 30,000 lies, false claims, or misrepresentations from Trump. Imagine if Republican voters accepted the newspaper’s portrayal of Trump as a con man. But thanks to the long-running right-wing project to undermine the credibility of the mainstream media, Trump and other GOP politicians are insulated from such damning truths.

No one at the Semafor gabfest pondered why this dramatic decrease on the GOP side has occurred. Consequently, there was no discussion of how this distrust was, to a degree, orchestrated by the right. And if you’re not going to look at what’s driving the problem, you’re not going to be able to fix it.

Perhaps Kelly was right: Throw more right-wing slop at Republicans, and they will trust the media more. But would that bring us to a better spot? Distrust of the media is not a nonpartisan issue. If media barons don’t recognize this, they will not likely concoct innovations that effectively address it.

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Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a Fracking Industry CEO, Touts Fossil-Fuel Expansion

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

The world needs more planet-heating fossil fuel, not less, Donald Trump’s newly appointed energy secretary, Chris Wright, told oil and gas bigwigs on Monday.

“We are unabashedly pursuing a policy of more American energy production and infrastructure, not less,” he said in the opening plenary talk of CERAWeek, a swanky annual conference in Houston, Texas, led by the financial firm S&P Global.

Wright, a former fracking executive who was picked by Trump to the crucial cabinet position, also attacked the Joe Biden administration for focusing “myopically on climate change.”

“The Trump administration will end the Biden administration’s irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change that imposed endless sacrifices on our citizens,” he said at the conference, for which tickets cost upward of $10,000. “The cure was far more destructive than the disease.”

Wright has been called a climate skeptic, for instance for repeatedly denying that global heating is a crisis. “This is simply wrong: I am a climate realist,” he said.

“The Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is, a global physical phenomenon that is a side-effect of building the modern world,” he added. “Everything in life involves trade-off.”

Though he admitted fossil fuels’ greenhouse gas emissions were warming the planet, he said “there is no physical way” solar, wind and batteries could replace the “myriad” uses of gas—something top experts dispute. Further, a bigger and more immediate problem was energy poverty, Wright said.

“Where is the COP conference for this far more urgent global challenge,” he said, referring to the annual United Nations climate talks, known as the Conference of the Parties. “I look forward to working with all of you to better energize the world and fully unleash human potential.”

Chris Wright is “one of us,” noted an oil industry rep in advance of the press conference.

The night before his CERAWeek plenary session, Wright had a meeting with top executives of fossil fuel firms including TotalEnergies, Freeport-McMoRan, Occidental Petroleum, and EQT, Axios and Reuters reported. Trump’s interior secretary Doug Burgum, who will address CERAWeek attenders on Wednesday, also attended the dinner meeting.

Trump obtained record donations from the fossil fuel industry in his 2024 campaign. In April, he came under fire for a meeting at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, at which he reportedly asked more than 20 executives, from companies including Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Occidental, for $1 billion and promised, if elected, to slash climate policies.

Under Biden, Wright said, ordinary Americans suffered. “The expensive energy or climate policies that have been in vogue among the left in wealthy western nations have taken a heavy toll on their citizens,” he said, putting the word “climate” in scare quotes.

US citizens “heat our homes in winter, cool them in summer, store period foods in our freezers and refrigerators and have light, communications and entertainment at the flip of a switch,” he said—a lifestyle that “requires an average of 13 barrels of oil per person per year.”

Meanwhile poorer countries lack energy, he said, meaning they need more fossil fuels. “The other 7 billion people on average, consume only three barrels of oil per person per year,” he said. “Africans average less than one barrel.”

The comments came after Wright addressed the Powering Africa Summit in Washington DC on Friday, saying that it would be “paternalistic” and “100 percent nonsense” to encourage Africa to halt coal development because of climate concerns.

“Coal transformed our world and made it better, extended life expectancy and grew opportunities,” he said.

The comments came under fire from climate advocates globally. “One of the transformations caused by American fossil fuels was destroying our previously well-balanced climate and plunging some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in Africa into a life dealing with extreme weather and lost homes and livelihoods,” said Mohamed Adow, founding director of Power Shift Africa, a non-governmental organization and thinktank based in Nairobi.

The African continent also had huge potential to expand renewable energy, “but lacks the right investments to exploit these resources”, said Ali Mohamed, the chair of the African group of negotiators and Kenya’s special envoy for climate change.

At CERAWeek, Wright said the Trump administration was embracing an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy. “Anything that adds affordable, reliable energy, we are in favor of,” he told reporters in a press conference after his speech, where he also announced the extension of a permit for the company Delfin, which is developing a floating liquefied natural gas project off the coast of Louisiana.

But domestic oil and gas production soared to record levels under Biden. And Trump has launched a war on renewable energy, temporarily suspending all clean energy development on federal lands and attacking wind and solar in speeches.

Wright’s speech was not made available to the public via live stream, sparking outrage from climate advocates. “As energy secretary, Chris Wright is supposed to serve the American people, not the fossil fuel industry,” said Allie Rosenbluth, a campaign manager at the non-profit Oil Change International. “It’s unacceptable, though not surprising, that this former fracking CEO is depriving the public of the chance to see what he’s saying to fossil fuel executives.”

Wright has long been a fixture at the CERAWeek fossil fuels conference. Before joining the Trump administration, he led the oil and gas company Liberty Energy for 13 years. Ahead of his press conference, one representative from an oil industry podcast said the energy secretary was “brilliant.”

“He’s one of us,” the person said. “He gets us.”

Additional reporting by Oliver Milman

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Supreme Court to Decide Whether States Can Ban Anti-LGBTQ Conversion Therapy on Kids

In what couldforeshadowa major new onslaught against queer and trans children, the US Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will hear a case challenging a 2019 Colorado law forbidding licensed therapists from trying to turn LGBTQ kids straight and cisgender.

The court’s decision to hear the case next fall is a major victory for practitioners of “conversion therapy,” a term used colloquially to describe attempts to shift a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Before the 1970s, when being gay was still considered a mental illness, conversion therapy was the standard treatment—sometimes involving “aversion” techniques like electric shocks or chemically induced nausea paired with images of gay porn. Today, conversion therapy mostly involves talk therapy, often between conservative religious clients and practitioners.

Still, talk-based conversion therapy can cause immense harm to LGBTQ people’s mental health, according to leading experts. The American Psychological Association has concluded that efforts to change peoples’ sexual orientation lack “sufficient bases in scientific principles” and that people who have undergone such therapies are “significantly more likely to experience suicidality and depression.”

The same goes for therapies aimed at making trans people identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. In 2015, the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, part of the US Department of Health and Human Services, published a report concluding that “none of the existing research supports the premise that mental or behavioral health interventions can alter gender identity or sexual orientation.” Interventions aimed at a fixed outcome, such as gender conformity or heterosexual orientation “are coercive, can be harmful, and should not be part of behavioral health treatment,” the authors concluded. (Since President Donald Trump took office and ordered government websites stripped of information related to so-called “gender ideology,” the SAMHSA report has been taken down.)

“None of the existing research supports the premise that mental or behavioral health interventions can alter gender identity or sexual orientation,” federal experts wrote in a now-deleted report.

States started banning conversion therapy on minors in 2012, as gay rights was achieving widespread acceptance and the scientific community increasingly recognized that efforts to change sexual orientation both didn’t work and could cause harm. Today, according to the Movement Advancement Project, 23 states have passed laws to revoke licenses from mental health professionals practicing conversion therapy on queer and trans people under the age of 18, and more states have executive orders restricting the practice.

But as soon as those laws began to pass, conversion therapists began fighting back, filing at least 11 lawsuits in eight states from 2012 through 2023. Typically, those cases have argued that the restrictions on therapists’ conversations with minors infringes on the therapists’ First Amendment right to free speech.

Federal appeals courts mostly haven’t bought that argument, ruling that that states have the power to regulate medical treatment, even when that treatment consists entirely of spoken words. But in 2020, the 11th Circuit went the other way, overturning a local conversion therapy ban in Florida in response to a lawsuit by the former president of the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity, the leading US advocacy group for licensed conversion therapists.

During an ATCSI conference I attended in late 2023, presenters showed a video illustrating what their therapy technique, which they called “mindfulness,” looked like:

A young adult client, played by an actor, sits nervously across from [counselor Joseph] Nicolosi Jr. in a room filled with books. Nicolosi Jr. asks him to describe his ideal sexually attractive man. The client responds that the man would be strong, confident, informal. “I would definitely say a guy who’s like, um, on the taller side,” he says.

Then, Nicolosi Jr. asks the client what he would change about himself: Shorter or taller? Stronger or weaker arms? More or less confident? He urges the client to compare himself to the imagined man, and the client says he feels inadequate. “How do you feel about the fact that you feel that inferiority, weakness?” Nicolosi Jr. asks.

“Sadness,” the client says.

“Feel your sadness as you continue looking at that guy,” Nicolosi Jr. urges. “And as you hold them together right now, zero to 10, how strong is your sexual attraction toward him?”

As my colleague Henry Carnell and I reported in that investigation last year, conversion therapists have seized on disputes over the treatment of trans youth—a controversy fomented by religious-right organizations and anti-LGBTQ fringe groupsand exploited by Republican politicians—to argue that they should be allowed to encourage kids to not be trans. Accordingly, in recent years, conversion therapists’ lawsuits have increasingly focused on trans people and gender identity, rather than gay people and sexual orientation.

That’s the argument made by Kaley Chiles, the licensed counselor in Colorado who filed Chiles v. Salazar, the case the US Supreme Court has now agreed to hear. Conversion therapy bans “silence counselors’ ability to express views their clients seek on a topic of ‘fierce public debate’—’how best to help minors with gender dysphoria,”‘ Chiles’ petition to the court argues.

Chiles is represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, the powerful religious-right law firm behind the most significant anti-LBGTQ Supreme Courtcases of recent years. Targeting Colorado in particular, ADF has found great success using the First Amendment to chip away at the state’s strong anti-discrimination protections for queer and trans people in the name of “religious freedom.” The court’s conservative supermajority has repeatedly sided with ADF, deciding that First Amendment allows Christian cake-bakers and wedding–website designers to refuse service to LGBTQ people planning same-sex weddings.

ADF’s argument on behalf of Chiles likewise centers on her religious beliefs—in this instance, her feelings about trans people. “A practicing Christian, Chiles believes that people flourish when they live consistently with God’s design, including their biological sex,” her petition argues. “Many of her clients seek her counsel precisely because they believe that their faith and their relationship with God establishes the foundation upon which to understand their identity and desires. But Colorado bans these consensual conversations based on the viewpoints [Chiles and her clients] express.”

Like all other conversion therapy bans, Colorado’s ban applies only to licensed therapists, not to religious advisers like priests and pastors. (Of course, church-based conversion therapy can also cause immense harm, as Carnell reported.)

At least two Supreme Court justices are known to be friendly to the argument that conversion therapy for minors is protected by the First Amendment. Last year, when the court declined to take up a nearly identical case challenging a conversion therapy ban in Washington state, Justice Clarence Thomas issued a dissent, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, that described bans on conversion therapy for minors as “viewpoint-based and content-based discrimination in its purest form.”

“Although the Court declines to take this particular case, I have no doubt that the issue it presents will come before the Court again,” Thomas wrote at the time. “When it does, the Court should do what it should have done here . . . consider what the First Amendment requires.” With arguments in Chiles v. Salazar expected to be scheduled for next fall, Thomas will soon get the chance he’s been waiting for.

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Where Is Mahmoud Khalil?

Around 8:30 p.m. on March 8th, Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia and a student leader in last year’s protest encampments, was returning to his University-owned apartment after an iftar meal when he was arrested by Department of Homeland Security agents. Khalil, who is Palestinian, is a legal permanent resident and green card holder, his lawyers say. His arrest marks a dramatic escalation in President Donald Trump’s crackdown on free speech.

“ICE agents wrongfully arrested Mahmoud Khalil, claiming his student visa was revoked—even though Mahmoud is a legal permanent resident”

“This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump posted on Monday afternoon, personally taking credit for Khalil’s arrest. “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country—never to return again.”

On Sunday, the US Homeland Security X account posted that ICE arrested Khalil for leading “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” in order to enforce Trump’s January executive orders on “combatting anti-semitism.” (“Aligned to” is a term that is not used in the US law on “inadmissible aliens” referenced by Trump’s executive order; as of now, there are no reports Khalil has been charged with a crime.)

As we have previously reported, Trump promised to deport student protesters during his campaign. This is his administration’s first explicit attempt to do so. According to public detainee location data, Khalil was taken first to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in New Jersey, then to an ICE detention center in Louisiana. His lawyers and wife spent Sunday scrambling to find him.

“ICE’s arrest and detention of Mahmoud follows the US government’s open repression of student activism and political speech, specifically targeting students at Columbia University for criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza,” Khalil’s lawyer, Amy Greer, told press. “The US government has made clear that they will use immigration enforcement as a tool to suppress that speech.”

In Trump’s first term, Columbia declared itself a “sanctuary campus,” saying it would not turn over student information to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Last year, the Manhattan university’s campus was one of the epicenters of mass student protest calling for divestment from companies that do business in Israel, among other demands. The university has, for now, not commented on the arrest.

The day before Khalil’s arrest, the Trump administration announced that they would be “pulling $400 million in grants” from Columbia as part of the “joint task force to combat antisemitism.” ( The task force was launched February 3rd and has produced no reports.)

Members of a Columbia-donor WhatsApp chat, including Trump advisors, celebrated the funding changes. “One group chat member wrote on Friday that they ‘can’t wait for the rest of the funding to be cut,’” as Natasha Lennard of The Intercept reported. This group chat reportedly includes professors who discussed deporting pro-Palestinian foreign students and faculty.

By the time DHS officers showed up at Khalil’s door, right-wing commenters on and off Columbia’s campus had been agitating for his arrest for days. Shai Davidai, a Columbia professor banned from campus for harassing pro-Palestinian students, posted on X thanking Secretary of State Marco Rubio for the withdrawal of funding—and directly encouraging him to take “strong action” against Khalil individually.

Khalil’s lawyers disagree. “ICE agents wrongfully arrested Mahmoud Khalil, claiming his student visa was revoked—even though Mahmoud is a legal permanent resident (green card) and not in the US on a student visa,” Greer said. “Confronted with that fact, the ICE agents detained him anyway.”

Khalil is reportedly in a repurposed prison, owned by private-prison company GEO Group. A petition calling for his release has gained over one million signatures in the last 48 hours, and a protest is planned outside ICE’s office in downtown New York on Monday afternoon.

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Musk and Trump Bash Immigrants While Destroying Programs to Stabilize Their Home Countries

Two days before staffers at the US African Development Foundation (USADF) refused to let DOGE staffers enter the door to their offices, Donald Trump stood before Congress and mocked what he described as “appalling waste” in foreign aid.

“Eight million to promote LGBTQ+ in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of,” the president scoffed. “Sixty million for indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombian empowerment in Central America. Sixty million.”

Grassroots aid aims to help communities “solve their own problems”—and stem migration to the U.S.

The expenditures he outlined weren’t USADF programs, and it’s unclear if the Lesotho funding, for instance, is even real—the country’s government has said it has “no idea” what Trump was referring to. But as Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE team continue trying to dismantle foreign aid, they’ve stepped beyond the USAID to set their sights on two very small agencies: the USADF and the Inter-American Foundation (IAF), which was founded by Congress in 1969 and funds community development in Latin America and the Caribbean.

On February 19, Trump issued an executive order directing that both agencies should “eliminate non-statutory functions and associated personnel to the extent consistent with applicable law.” In practice, that has meant quickly gutting both in ways that the agencies themselves and some Democratic members of Congress say is illegal, given that both were founded by Congress and should only be dismantled by an act of Congress.

As Trump’s speech made clear, the campaign against these tiny agencies has relied on literal, government-backed disinformation. Trump and DOGE have twisted and mischaracterized the U.S.’ own aid programs to make them sound frivolous, wasteful, and unimportant. Ironically, both agencies have worked towards goals that Trump and Musk have claimed they support: the IAF was specifically focused on reducing what they call “irregular migration” to the United States. And the USADF tries to stabilize economies in rural Africa, in part, a USADF staffer tells Mother Jones, to discourage people from joining terrorist groups which destabilize the region and could be hostile to the United States.

The USADF works in Somalia, where the group Al-Shabaab is based, and in Uganda, which borders the Democratic Republic of Congo; that border is where a rebel group called the Allied Democratic Forces is based, who, among other acts, attacked a Ugandan school in 2023 and killed at least 41 people, many of them students in dormitories that were set on fire.

“If we leave there’s going to be a vacuum not just of U.S. presence, but economic stability,” says a USADF worker who asked for anonymity to freely discuss their work. “And a significant increase in unemployment in young men who are now much more susceptible to joining a terrorist organization… you’re going to start seeing those terrorist organizations reach into other countries and end up In Europe and America.”

The anti-foreign aid campaign has been pushed forward by wide mockery from Musk’s DOGE and their allies at outlets like Fox News of purportedly “questionable” foreign spending, including “$813,210 for vegetable gardens in El Salvador, $731,105 to improve the marketability of mushrooms and peas in Guatemala, $677,342 to expand fruit and jam sales in Honduras, $483,345 to improve artisanal salt production in Ecuador and $39,250 for beekeeping in Brazil.” The Fox News article refers to these as “big ticket items”—which they are not; they are in fact trivially small amounts compared to the billions spent by, for instance, the Pentagon. A supposedly automated Twitter/X account dedicated to extolling DOGE’s achievements also mocked Guatemalan mushrooms, calling the outlay “a prime example of taxpayer dollars funding foreign pet projects while ignoring American needs.”

But in fact, as the IAF’s now-deleted website made clear, the real goal of funding such grassroots programs was to help communities “realize opportunities and solve their own problems”—and to stem migration to the U.S.

“If we leave there’s going to be a vacuum not just of U.S. presence, but economic stability.

“People in the Latin American and Caribbean region leave their homes due to violence and insecurity, lack of viable economic opportunities, food insecurity, and increasingly harsh environmental conditions that exhaust their household resources,” a 2023 version of the IAF website explained. “With corruption and impunity commonplace, people can also lose faith that their governments will effectively meet their needs.”

The organization explained that people are “less likely to uproot their lives and migrate if they can remain safely at home, earn a living, provide for their families, and have a say in making decisions to improve their quality of life. We also understand that people are most motivated to stay when they can tackle and see improvement on multiple issues.” In a story on the shuttered IAF website, a Guatemalan woman working with a local mushroom cooperative is quoted saying, “I haven’t migrated to the U.S. because I’ve had the opportunity to work here.”

Given Trump and Musk’s virulently anti-immigrant rhetoric (despite Musk being an immigrant himself), those efforts to reduce immigration would presumably have been something they should have supported.

If DOGE is looking for “big ticket items” to cut, they also won’t find any at USADF, where the maximum amount that could be given to any organization was $350,000, “after thorough due diligence and a background check on the organization,” according to the employee who worked there.

Trump’s foreign aid freeze caused many of the people the agency works with in Africa to immediately lose their jobs “with no severance or notice,” the USADF worker said. “These are our colleagues. We work with them daily.”

Musk’s DOGE, along with Trump ally and State Department official Peter Marocco, have been the architects of the destruction of foreign aid. Marocco was placed in charge of IAF last week, after the White House fired its CEO Sara Aviel, who did not respond to a request for comment. Redacted minutes from a hasty February 28 board meeting where Marocco declared himself to be in charge of IAF show that the only people present were Marocco and two DOGE staffers, Ethan Shaotran and Nate Cavanaugh. During the meeting, Marocco claimed he was convening the board on an emergency basis pursuant to Trump’s executive order to reduce the agency’s staffing, and said that he had not been able to reach anyone associated with IAF before calling the meeting.

“Until I am more familiar with the agency and can appoint a new one, I am designating myself as the acting CEO and president of the IAF,” Marocco declared before immediately closing the meeting.

An IAF employee told Mother Jones that workers at the agency have been issued reduction in force notices, which are usually given 60 days before employees will be let go. In the case of IAF, for reasons that weren’t explained, it was only 30. “Intentional cruelty is their M.O.,” the employee said.

USADF has filed a lawsuit laying out DOGE’s aggressive tactics in trying to wrest control.

The shuttering of the IAF also means that millions of dollars from private foundations will also have to be returned. “As a result of this illegal destruction of the agency, taxpayers are giving back more than $5 million dollars donated by the private sector and private philanthropy,” that person told Mother Jones. “Half was in hand and half was committed legally; nearly all will never be invested on behalf of the U.S. in the region.”

On Wednesday March 5, Marocco arrived at the USADF offices with DOGE staffers to try to execute an administrative coup similar to the one they engineered at IAF. There, however, employees refused to let them enter. The following day, Marocco and the DOGE staffers returned to USADF with five U.S. Marshals, according to the Washington Post. USADF employees, meanwhile, left through a back entrance, one tells Mother Jones.

Later that day, USADF filed a lawsuit suing Trump and DOGE, laying out the aggressive and highly unusual tactics Marocco and the DOGE staff took in trying to wrest control of the agency. On Thursday night, USADF won a preliminary injunction to keep from being shut down, at least for a few days: a judge’s order bars current CEO Ward Brehm from being removed from the foundation’s board and prevents DOGE from adding members to it.

Nonetheless, a USADF employee told Mother Jones on Friday morning that workers were unable to enter the building with their key cards, which appear to have been disabled. The employee saidthey and their colleagues plan to try to continue doing their jobs as long as they legally can: “Just as Trump did, I also took an oath of office and I’m abiding by it. I take it very seriously.”

“I’m resigned to the fact that I’m going to lose my job,” the USADF worker said. “But if you’re going to fire me, fire me legally.”

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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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