Why Some Doctors Are Pushing to End Routine Drug Testing During Childbirth

The request from child welfare authorities seemed harmless enough: Order a newborn drug test. Dr. Sharon Ostfeld-Johns and her hospital colleagues had done it countless times before.

This time, however, the request gave the doctor pause. A patient at Yale New Haven Health in Connecticut, the largest health system in the state, had said that she’d used marijuana to help her eat and sleep during her pregnancy. The hospital had reported her to child welfare authorities. Now, an investigator wanted Ostfeld-Johns to drug test the newborn.

Ostfeld-Johns knew there was no medical reason to test the baby, who was healthy. A drug test would make no difference to the infant’s medical care. Nor did she have concerns that the mother, who had other children at home, was a neglectful parent. The doctor did worry, however, that the drug test could cause other problems for the family. For example, the mother was Black and on Medicaid — race and income bias could influence the investigator’s decision on whether to put the children into foster care.

“Why did I ever order these tests?” Ostfeld-Johns found herself wondering, about past cases. She thought about her own son, then in kindergarten, and how she would feel if she faced an investigation over a positive test. Eventually, she would review her own prenatal records and learn that she had been tested for drugs without her knowledge or consent. “You try to imagine what it would be like if it was you,” she said. “The hurt that we do to people is overwhelming.”

Ostfeld-Johns had encountered this scenario many times before, but this time, she refused the drug test request. Then she began a research process that, in 2022, led to an overhaul of the Yale New Haven Health network’s approach to drug testing newborns. Now, doctors are directed to test only if doing so will inform medical care — a rare occurrence, it turns out. The hospital also created criteria for testing pregnant patients.

“The hurt that we do to people is overwhelming.”

Many doctors and nurses across the country have long assumed that drug testing is both a medical and legal necessity in their care of pregnant patients and newborns — even though most state laws do not require it. Yet drug testing during labor is common in America, with a positive test often triggering a report to child welfare authorities. Ostfeld-Johns and Yale New Haven are among a small but increasing number of doctors and institutions across the country that have started questioning those drug-testing policies. This cadre of doctors is pushing hospitals to become less reliant on tests and to focus instead on communicating directly with patients to assess any risks to babies.

No one seems to be tracking just how many hospitals have revised their testing policies, but over the past three years, changes have come to networks across the country, from California to Colorado to Massachusetts. The institutions vary, from large nonprofit networks and teaching facilities to private, for-profit hospitals.

While doctors pushing for reform argue that legislation is still needed to require hospitals to reduce testing, individual hospital efforts seem to be spreading. In Colorado, doctors worked with a child abuse prevention nonprofit to distribute a voluntary new policy as guidance, prompting several hospitals to change their practices. An educational effort, “Doing Right by Birth,” convened virtual groups of health care professionals across the country in 2023, to teach them their requirements under the law. Some participants were surprised to learn that most state laws do not actually require hospitals to drug test pregnant patients or newborns, and are now questioning the policies of their institutions, suggesting more reforms may come.

At Yale, Ostfeld-Johns said she initially faced resistance to the policy change. Some of her colleagues feared that by ending near-automatic testing, “we were ultimately going to hurt babies,” she said. “We were hurting them by preventing identification of substance exposure that happened during pregnancy.” But Ostfeld-Johns said they found they didn’t need the drug tests to identify babies who might, for example, develop symptoms of opioid withdrawal that would require special care.

At the New Haven hospital, the policy change appears to have curbed unnecessary child welfare reports without harming babies. After the policy went into effect, child welfare referrals from the newborn nursery dropped almost 50%, according to preliminary data provided by Ostfeld-Johns. At the same time, the hospital did not see an uptick in babies coming back in need of new treatment for drug withdrawal, she said. “No babies came in with uncontrolled withdrawal symptoms,” she said. “No safety events were identified.”

The New Haven data is consistent with the anecdotal experiences of providers at other institutions. “I don’t think we’re missing babies” who have been exposed to substances, said Dr. Mark Vining, the director of the newborn nursery at UMass Memorial Medical Center near Boston. The hospital did away with automatic testing of newborns in 2024. At the same time, Vining said, it has reported fewer families to child welfare authorities due to positive tests caused by hospital-administered medications, like morphine. A newborn drug test “rarely adds any information that you didn’t already know,” he said.

The new policies are beginning to upend an approach that has existed in the United States for decades.

Hospitals first began routinely drug testing mothers in labor during the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic. The practice expanded during the opioid epidemic, following the passage of a federal law in 2003 and another in 2016, both of which require hospitals to notify child welfare agencies anytime a baby is born “affected by” substances. Federal law and laws in most states do not require hospitals to drug test new parents or their babies, but hospitals frequently do so anyway — often out of concern that if they don’t, they’ll miss babies who are at risk.

Widespread drug testing has caused a variety of harms. A previous investigation by The Marshall Project found that urine tests, the type used by most hospitals, are easy to misinterpret and have false positive rates as high as 50%. Parents have been reported to child welfare authorities over false positives caused by things ranging from poppy seeds to blood pressure medication. Substances prescribed to patients during a hospital stay, such as the fentanyl in an epidural, can show up on maternal drug tests and also pass quickly from mother to baby, causing infants to test positive for drugs.

Poppy seeds, used in bagels, salads and other foods, can yield positive results for opiates in urine tests.Photo illustration by Andria Lo for The Marshall Project

Race and class bias can also influence drug testing, with multiple studies finding that low-income, Black, Latina and indigenous women are most likely to be tested. Yale New Haven Hospital found that, before the drug testing policy change, Black babies in its care were twice as likely as White babies to be tested at birth. Studies elsewhere have found that racial disparities extend to child welfare cases and removals as well, with Black, Latino and indigenous babies being less likely to be reunited with their parents once removed.

In many hospitals, the tests are not typically used to make medical decisions. Instead, tests have become a cheap, fast way to assess whether a parent might be a danger to their child.

“We should be doing medical tests for medical reasons, not criminal, punitive, prosecutorial reasons,” said Dr. Christine Gold, a pediatrician who works at the University of Colorado Hospital system near Denver. Even for that purpose, Gold noted, drug tests fall short. “It is a really poor-quality test,” she said. It cannot tell doctors how often someone used a substance during pregnancy, if a patient has an addiction or if the drug use impacted their ability to parent. “Toxicology tests are not parenting tests,” Gold said.

“We should be doing medical tests for medical reasons, not criminal, punitive, prosecutorial reasons.”

In 2020, Colorado lawmakers removed positive drug tests at birth from the list of reasons for hospitals to automatically report a family to child welfare authorities. But many hospitals continued to test pregnant patients and newborns, prompting Gold to lead the effort to release guidance in 2023 that encourages hospitals in the state to test only when medically necessary. Now the entire University of Colorado Health system is reforming its policy on testing pregnant patients, and others in the state are reportedly considering changes.

Instead of automatic drug tests, the revised policies use screening questionnaires, which collect certain information from patients, such as their family’s history of drug use, and the patient’s own history and frequency of use. Researchers and leading medical groups say these questionnaires are effective at identifying someone with an addiction or at risk of developing one, which can help doctors steer parents into treatment, or determine whether a baby might need extra medical care. Some hospitals continue to drug test patients under certain circumstances. For example, at UMass Memorial, pregnant patients with diagnosed substance use disorders and new patients without any prenatal care are still drug tested.

The growing movement to limit drug testing is a source of optimism for many doctors. But its success hinges in part on doctors building more meaningful relationships with their patients, so the people they treat feel inclined to confide about substance use and ultimately agree to enter treatment. “That is really the goal here,” said Dr. Katherine Campbell, chief of obstetrics at Yale New Haven Hospital. “We’re trying to reduce substance use disorder in reproductive-age people.”

That may include asking a patient for informed consent to submit to a drug test, and medical personnel being transparent about both the purpose of the test and its potential legal consequences.

But these types of conversations can be challenging. They also require longer appointments, something many medical institutions are unable or unwilling to provide. “The system is set up to make it difficult for us to really develop a knowing and trusted relationship with a family,” said Dr. Lauren Oshman, a family physician at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor.

By comparison, urine tests are fast and often involve little interaction with patients.

“It takes longer to talk to someone and really understand, than it does to place an order and have the person give a urine sample,” Campbell said.

The new policies also don’t solve other problems. After Oshman and colleagues discovered that clinicians at Michigan Medicine ordered drug tests for Black newborns more often than for White newborns, the hospital network changed its policy in 2023 to require testing of babies only in certain circumstances. But early data indicates the new policy had no impact on the racial disparities in testing and reporting.

One reason, in Oshman’s view, is that Michigan law requires the reporting of a patient whom a provider “knows or suspects” has exposed their newborn to “any amount” of a controlled substance, whether legal or illegal. That includes marijuana, which is legal in Michigan. When the health network team dug into the data, it found that for almost half of all low-risk patients whose babies tested positive, the only drug detected was marijuana, and the patients were most likely to be Black. Most marijuana-only cases do not result in findings of abuse or neglect by child welfare authorities, according to the team’s research. But hospitals are still required to report these patients, Oshman said.

“And that won’t change until the state law changes,” she added.

Dr. Lauren Oshman, a family physician and associate professor in the University of Michigan Department of Family Medicine.Sylvia Jarrus for The Marshall Project

Hospitals in most other states face similar challenges. A review by The Marshall Project found that at least 27 states explicitly require hospitals to alert child welfare agencies after a positive screen or potential exposure — though not a single state requires confirmation testing before a report.

Many hospitals that have changed their policies are in states that do not require reporting positive tests to child welfare authorities. In both Colorado and Connecticut, for example, hospitals are required to report a parent only if providers have identified other safety concerns. In Connecticut, providers fill out an anonymized form that allows the state to collect data on substance-exposed newborns without requiring a child welfare report.

But even in states that don’t require reporting positive tests, drug testing remains ubiquitous. For example, the New York Department of Health advised hospitals in 2021 to test labor-and-delivery patients only when “medically indicated” and only with their consent. But women continue to report nonconsensual drug testing at hospitals across the state, which has led to them being reported to child welfare authorities over false positive and erroneous results, The Marshall Project has found.

These challenges show that reducing the consequences of drug testing may require a multipronged approach, from legislative reforms to policy revisions to enforcement, experts say.

“We’re just at the beginning,” Oshman said. “This is the start of creating a system that provides that trustworthy care.”

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook.

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Elon Musk Tried to Buy Wisconsin’s Supreme Court. He Lost.

“Musk has made this a referendum on the idea of an American oligarchy,” Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler told me recently, as he warned about the potential fallout from the $25 million that the world’s wealthiest person spent trying to flip a state Supreme Court seat.

In the first major statewide election since Donald Trump’s 2024victory, oligarchy lost and democracy won. Progressive candidate Susan Crawford handily defeated Musk-backed candidate Brad Schimel to preserve the liberal majority on the Wisconsin high court through at least 2028.

“Today Wisconsinites fended off an unprecedented attack on our democracy, our fair elections and our Supreme Court, and Wisconsin stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price,” Crawford said at her victory party Tuesday night. “Our courts are not for sale.”

It’s a seismic event both inside and outside Wisconsin. On a state level, the court could soon decide the fate of an 1849 abortion ban, a law restricting collective bargaining for public sector unions, and Wisconsin’s gerrymandered congressional maps—the latter of whichcould help determine which party controls the US House in 2027.

But, because of Musk, the race was much bigger than just a judicial election in Wisconsin. Crawford’s victory provides a blueprint for how Democrats and progressives can run against Musk’s plan for oligarchy all across the country—and win.

“The world’s richest man tried to buy Wisconsin’s democracy in order to corrupt Wisconsin’s judiciary, but Wisconsinites demonstrated that our state is not for sale,” Wikler said in a statement Tuesday night. “In a moment of national darkness, Wisconsin voters lit a candle. Let the lesson of Wisconsin’s election ring out across the country: hope is not lost, democracy can yet survive, and the voice of the American people will not be silenced.”

Musk indeed did everything he could to buy the race, investing more money through his political groups than any donor to a judicial race in US history. He paid people $100 to sign a petition against “activist judges” and gave outthree $1 million checks to voters, which drew an unsuccessful legal challenge from Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul.

But, unlike in November, Democrats had an effective plan to counter it.

Wisconsin Democrats launched the People v. Musk campaign in early March, with Wikler calling the race “the first referendum on Musk-ism.”

Crawford, a circuit court judge in Madison, made Musk a central part of her messaging. “I need to talk for just a minute or two about my opponent,” she told a crowd of supporters when I saw her campaign in Kenosha. “Elon Musk.”

Wisconsinites may have been repelled by the idea of a billionaire swooping in to purchase an election. “It’s everything that Wisconsin is not,” Democratic State Rep. Robyn Vining told me. “The Wisconsin work ethic is a big deal. You work hard for what you have, and to have the richest man in the world come in and just to buy a seat for his own advantage, it’s not who we are. As a Wisconsinite, that’s infuriating.”

The race became an outlet for frustrated Democrats to turn their anger—at losing to Trump again, at the rudderless leadership of the national Democratic Party, at Musk’s massive campaign expenditures—into organizing. As Katie Whitecotton, a Democratic volunteer who hosted a get-out-the-vote canvass in suburban Milwaukee put it, “Our sorrow has turned into rage and into action.”

On the Friday before Election Day, the same day Musk announced he’d be travel to Wisconsin to hand out two million-dollar checks, I met up with Wikler at the local Democratic Party headquarters in Kenosha. There were still posters up for Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Tim Walz, a reminder that the November hangover had not yet fully worn off.

But Democrats were eager to flush the memories of November and fight back against the naked concentration of wealth and power that Musk represented.

“We have a gift and I know that’s weird to say because this is a terrifying time in our country,” Wikler said to a room of Crawford supporters. “Here in Wisconsin, by supporting Susan Crawford, we have a chance to fight back in this moment and say we’ve had enough of these attacks.”

After Harris lost it by 6 points, Crawford carried Kenosha County by about6 points on Tuesday.

It’s particularly noteworthy that Musk’s effort to buy Wisconsin’s highest court backfired at the very moment that Musk and Trump are threatening to impeach federal judges who rule against the most extreme and unconstitutional parts of the Trump agenda. Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Dallet emphasized that point when she campaigned in suburban Milwaukee for Crawford.

“We realize now, with everything going on, how important our courts are,” Dallet said. “We are the backstop on democracy.”

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The JFK Assassination Files Didn’t Have a Smoking Gun, But a Very Weird Congressional Hearing Tried to Create One

On Tuesday, MAGA Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna presided over a colorful hearing devoted to one specific goal: speedrunning a revival of 61 years of conspiracy theories about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Jr.

In that goal, Luna, the chairwoman of the brand-new Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, and her witnesses—a bouquet of JFK researchers, including famed director Oliver Stone—succeeded admirably. They excoriated the Warren Commission, whose investigation into Kennedy’s death ended in 1964; denigrated what JFK skeptics call the “magic bullet” from Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle, which they say could not possibly have killed Kennedy; and promoted theories that the CIA or perhaps the Mob were involved in Kennedy’s murder.

One member referenced Trump’s attempted assassins to ask if “you guys on the panel believe we’re seeing history repeat.”

All this is certainly good fun, and at times, the hearing even briefly raised important questions about government transparency regarding the investigation into Kennedy’s death. Inevitably, though, Tuesday’s hearing couldn’t prove that the CIA killed Kennedy or that Oswald didn’t act alone. At times, it was more about Donald Trump than Kennedy, with Republican members of Congress obliquely trying to prove that the Deep State they suggest could have either killed Kennedy or else covered up the true causes of his death is now coming for Trump too. That Deep State, declared Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, at one point, “is here today. They are right before our eyes.”

The JFK assassination remains the ur-conspiracy theory in American life, the event about which most Americans have at least some suspicions: recent polls show the majority of Americans don’t believe Oswald acted alone. That’s not new: conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s death began the instant the president was shot, and have continued right up until the present day.

Upon returning to office, Trump took up the politically popular task of declassifying what he claimed were new JFK files, along with others related to the crimes of billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. While the Epstein release was a poorly-conceived stunt that flopped immediately, containing little except documents that have already been public for years, the JFK release contained some genuinely fascinating archival material. It showed the extent of the CIA’s historic activities in other countries and at home—including what one CIA employee wrote were ways that the agency had “exceeded its mandate”—and provided a new window into U.S. spycraft in general. Among other things, the documents help further reveal the jawdropping extent of joint CIA-FBI collaborations inside the United States, including, as one released file described, “breaking and entering and the removal of documents” from the French embassy.

For Oliver Stone, however, Trump’s release wasn’t enough. The 78-year-old filmmaker, one of the world’s more famous JFK conspiracy theorists, said he believed Congress should reopen their investigation into Kennedy’s death, to force the CIA to reveal what else they may know about it.

“Nothing of importance has been revealed by the CIA in all these years,” Stone testified, “although we know from other records that there are illegal, criminal activities in every facet of our foreign policy in practically every country on earth.”

We “do not know and are not allowed to know anything about the CIA’s true history of the United States,” he added.

In her opening statement, Rep. Luna claimed that the panel was originally set to contain more witnesses. “We had more but for various reasons those individuals did not want to come forward,” she said. The handling of the JFK assassination contributed to the “deep distrust” the American people have towards their government, she added.

Congresswoman Mace didn’t hesitate to make sure the event was viewed through a partisan lens, declaring, “I’m grateful to President Trump for keeping good on his promise of transparency. This is a man who also took a bullet for our country.” It was imperative, she said, to get the truth “out of whatever three letter agency is hiding information.” She also tied a purported Kennedy coverup to modern-day issues closer to her heart, adding, “We saw 51 intelligence leaders sign a letter saying the Hunter Biden laptop was fake… We saw a presidential candidate, Donald Trump, spied on by the political opposition. We saw Biden’s health—the previous administration lied to the American people about the president’s health… We saw the origins of Covid covered up.” The Deep State was, she added, still covering up “the Epstein list, refusing to disclose “who is on that list.” (Journalists who have covered Epstein for years do not believe a concrete “list” of his accomplices exists.)

“Republicans are relitigating whether the CIA agents lied 60 years ago.”

The closest anyone got to attributing blame in Kennedy’s death was Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter who’s written about Kennedy for years. In response to questions from the Congress members, Morley said that the “intellectual author” of JFK’s death was “probably” the CIA and the Pentagon.

Other Republican members wanted to say wild stuff about the CIA, some of it pulled up from the deepest dregs of JFK history. In his remarks, Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona implied that CIA contact Gary Underhill was murdered after telling someone that he believed a “clique” within the CIA was responsible for Kennedy’s death. (Underhill is believed to have died by suicide, although that, like much else related to JFK’s death, is disputed.)

“Do any of you guys on the panel believe we’re seeing history repeat itself” Crane asked, referencing assassination attempts targeting Donald Trump and “how little we know” about the attempted assassins

“I would see similarities here,” Oliver Stone responded.

Democratic members used the hearing to make their own political points. Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois pointed out that JFK established USAID, now in the process of a drawn-out death at DOGE and Donald Trump’s hands, and pointedly asked the panelists how Kennedy would have felt about that. Rep. Summer Lee of Pennsylvania noted how the rushed release had exposed personal information, including Social Security numbers, of people mentioned in the files. “The release didn’t really give us a smoking gun,” she said, “but it did produce plenty of collateral damage.” Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas said that while “Republicans are relitigating whether the CIA agents lied 60 years ago,” they aren’t as eager to discuss modern-day security scandals like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth texting about bombing Yemen in a group chat that mistakenly included the Atlantic‘s editor in chief.

The youngest House Republican, Brandon Gill of Texas, asked the panelists whether the CIA was “in compliance” with Trump’s demand to release all JFK documents. Morley said no, adding that he believes the CIA still has documents “in the hundreds” that have yet to be disclosed.

That would leave plenty more to sift through. While the story of what happened that day in Dallas may never be settled to the unanimous satisfaction of the American people, Tuesday’s odd little hearing proved that JFK’s death can provide lots to argue about in various politically profitable ways for years to come.

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Without USAID, Myanmar Is Struggling to Recover From Its Massive Earthquake

Chris Milligan arrived in Myanmar in 2012 with a mandate: Help repair diplomatic relations with the southeast Asian country by reopening its United States Agency for International Development (USAID) mission.

By that point, Milligan had worked for the USAID for more than two decades—a tenure that included working on reconstruction in Baghdad following the Iraq War and coordinating the recovery response to Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake. His Myanmar assignment posed a similarly significant challenge: After decades spent under brutal military rule, the country was in the midst of trying to transition to democracy.

Reopening the USAID mission in Myanmar, at the American embassy in the city of Yangon, was meant to facilitate that process by helping “reestablish [Myanmar’s] capacity to feed its people and to care for its sick, and educate its children, and build its democratic institutions,” former President Barack Obama said during his 2012 visit to the country—the first by a US president.

According to Milligan, the efforts the mission ultimately pursued in Myanmar—such as providing humanitarian assistance, working with local groups to facilitate peace talks, supporting farmers, and partnering with local health organizations to combat diseases—“were really all designed to strengthen the democratic and economic reforms that were ongoing in the country.”

“By now, we would have a search and rescue team of hundreds of people on the ground in Myanmar, digging people out of rubble. Now all we’re told is, ‘we may be able to send three people there.’”

Fast forward to now, and that progress has been decimated, with USAID missions shuttered around the world after the Trump administration reportedly fired all but 15 legally required positions of the agency’s global staff, throwing it into chaos.

In Myanmar—where a civil war has been raging since 2021, when the country plungedback into military rule—the significance of the cuts to USAID is becoming devastatingly clear, as the country reels from the 7.7-magnitude earthquake that hit Friday, killing at least 2,700 people and leaving more than 3,900 injured, according to Myanmar officials. (The US Geological Survey estimates fatalities are actually north of 10,000, and that the economic losses could exceed the country’s GDP.) There are no US officials currently on the ground, and the New York Times reports that a three-person USAID team is not expected to arrive until Wednesday, citing a source with knowledge of the deployment efforts. Even before the earthquake, there were nearly 20 million people in the country in need of humanitarian assistance, a UN official has said.

People walk through the rubble of a collapsed building in the capital city of Naypyitaw on Tuesday.AP

On Sunday, the US Embassy in Myanmar announced that the American government would provide up to$2 million towards recovery efforts—an amount that Milligan says is paltry compared to prior support for similar natural disasters**,** like the more than $2 billion USAID committed to recovery efforts in the decade after the 2010 quake in Haiti. On Monday, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce told reporters at a press briefing she rejected the notion that USAID cuts were impacting the earthquake response, claiming, “people are on the ground,” and then confusingly adding, “I would reject the premise that the sign of success is that we are physically there.” The State Department did not respond to questions from Mother Jones for this story.

I spoke with Milligan, who retired from USAID in 2021, via Zoom on Tuesday about the inadequacy of the US response to the earthquake recovery and its impacts on citizens of Myanmar; how the absence of American forces on the ground could give China and Russia a geopolitical edge; and how the recovery effort would be different if USAID were still intact.

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

The State Department claims the cuts to USAID have not impacted their ability to assist with recovery efforts on the ground in Myanmar. Is this plausible?

When you dismantle an entire bureau of thousands of people who provide humanitarian assistance, no, it’s not plausible that there’s no impact on the US government’s authority to provide humanitarian assistance. And what we’re seeing is that impact.

At this stage normally, we would have a disaster assistance response team (DART) on the ground. The initial wave of experts would be on the ground within hours, and then the DART would then grow. So, for example, following the 2023 earthquake in Turkey, we had a DART of 200 people on the ground; 160 of them were search and rescue individuals.

“We have the capacity, we have the ability, and we have the assets to save lives, and the choice has been not to use it, and people are dying.”

By now, we would have a search and rescue team of hundreds of people on the ground in Myanmar, digging people out of rubble. Now all we’re told is, ‘we may be able to send three people there.’

USAID still maintains humanitarian assistance advisors, who have a specialty in the overall establishment of humanitarian assistance. But the provision of humanitarian assistance requires highly developed technical skills: You need someone who knows all about potable water and child protection; you need security; you need shelter experts; you need communication experts; you need food security experts. That’s why the DART is full of these experts who have careers in delivering this kind of assistance.

So to say that’s been replaced by three people and $2 million is ludicrous. Meanwhile, China and Russia and others have scrambled with larger teams. They’re actually providing the support that’s required, but it’s not filling the gap of what we would do with a team of 200 people on the ground.

Indian and Myanmar rescuers carry a dead body at U Hla Thein Buddhist monastery, which collapsed in Friday’s earthquake in Mandalay.AP

Help contextualize the $2 million American officials said they will provide to Myanmar for recovery—is it adequate, and how does it compare to how the US previously responded to natural disasters like this, in Myanmar or elsewhere?

This is not adequate. Generally, the US government makes a small pledge, and then builds upon the pledge. So hopefully, the $2 million is seed money, and then there’ll be more funding forthcoming.

“The world is wondering why the country with the most developed expertise, that has the capacity, that has the resources, isn’t stepping up and helping.”

The scale of assistance can vary. On one hand, the response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010—in which we scrambled and provided enormous assistance to the 1.4 million people who were displaced and who needed food and shelter and help—was about a billion dollars within six months. The support we provided following the 2008 Cyclone Nargis—Myanmar’s worst natural disaster in history, which killed more than 80,000 people—was $196 million over the following four years.

So $2 million is not going to have much of an impact at all, and it fails by comparison, because we know that China is already at $14 million. The world is wondering why the country with the most developed expertise, that has the capacity, that has the resources, isn’t stepping up and helping at this time.

I know you worked on the earthquake response in Haiti for USAID. What are the challenges that a place like Haiti, or Myanmar, have in responding to an earthquake, and what role did foreign assistance from USAID typically play in rebuilding?

Although no two disasters are the same, they do follow similar processes. What you want to do initially is save lives. You want to get people out of rubble, you want to provide emergency shelter, water, food, health care. Secondly, you want to avoid a second rate of death that comes from the spread of diseases, cholera, lack of food. You want to avoid conflict over scarce resources. So there is a rhythm to a response: immediate life saving, relief, recovery, and then finally, back to development. It’s a continuum shared between Haiti or Myanmar, even though the context is always different.

Fairfax County Urban Search and Rescue team personnel deployed by USAID loaded their bags bound for Haiti in Sterling, Virginia, in January 2010.Jacquelyn Martin/AP

In Myanmar, you have no central government, really. You have a brutal civil war. It’s more difficult for a national level response. Not only were transportation networks destroyed by the earthquake, they’ve been destroyed by the civil war, and you can’t freely move goods across the country because different territories and land are held by different factions.

It’s very difficult to mobilize international support that’s needed to rebuild and recover because of the lack of a legitimate government to work with.

I wanted to ask you about China and Russia, given reports that they are among the countries that have sent teams of people to Myanmar to help rescue people from the rubble and assist with on-the-ground recovery. What impacts could their assistance have on building their soft power in the region and undermining US interests?

The United States government provides humanitarian assistance based upon need, not on politics. However, there are enormous dividends to doing so. First of all, it showcases American values of generosity and compassion. It links America directly to communities overseas. It creates enormous goodwill. It increases our diplomatic power as well.

China already is the major trading power for 120 countries around the world. It’s one of the largest creditor nations in the world. So it has stronger and deeper economic ties to most countries in the world than the United States does. By getting rid of the economic work that USAID does, we’re strengthening China’s economic ties with the world, and by walking away from the work that we do, we’re creating a political vacuum that China is filling.

Members of China’s national rescue team gathered in Beijing before departing for Myanmar on Saturday.Cai Yang/Xinhua/ZUMA

China needs a world that looks like China. That’s what countries do: they work in their own national interest. The work that we do to build stable, safe, prosperous democracy overseas has all stopped. The support we provide to human rights actors has stopped. The support we provide for free press, free information, has stopped. China will take advantage of this to conform the world for its own benefit at our cost.

The location of the USAID mission is in Yangon, which is the southern part of the country, not in proximity to the earthquake. Certainly they felt the shocks, but the destruction was in the second largest city further north, Mandalay, and then more disruption in the capital Naypyidaw. I’ve been in touch to share my concerns with people there. Very few of them have been able to travel to the earthquake zone. The American staff have all received their termination letters, and the administration has notified Congress that it will be terminating all the local hires as well.

“We are going to turn our backs on those who serve the US government and also serve their own country by trying to bring reforms to it.”

These local hires have spent decades, some of them, working for USAID and the US government, and they’re just going to be let go and dropped—and they will be in a risky situation, because the military government knows who they are and what they’ve been doing. We are going to turn our backs on those who serve the United States government and also serve their own country by trying to bring reforms to it.

How do you think the US response would differ if USAID was still intact? How would things look different on the ground?

If USAID were still intact, we would have a large disaster assistance response team on the ground. We would have mobilized urban search and rescue teams from Los Angeles County and Fairfax County, Virginia; they would be there with the sniffer dogs and the equipment necessary to pull people out of the rubble. We would have experts—in nutrition, food, water, shelter, protection—on the ground; they would be working with the other donors to find out where the needs are, where are the gaps, and how the United States government can best help. We would be supporting the international coordination effort, which would be led by the UN but with our support. And so what you would have is a more robust international effort, and you’d ultimately be saving more lives.

We have the capacity, we have the ability, and we have the assets to save lives, and the choice has been not to use it, and people are dying.

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RFK Jr.’s HHS Just Dismantled a Center Focused on Efficiency

On Tuesday, in a series of emails sent at 5 a.m. Eastern Time, all employees—around 20—of the federal Administration for Community Living’s (ACL) Center for Policy and Evaluation were laid off. This follows the news last week that ACL, a subsidiary of the Department of Health and Human Services responsible for key issues around disability and aging, would essentially be shut down as part of a massive restructuring and firing campaign led by HHS head Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which is expected to involve some 10,000 layoffs overall. Although the Kennedy plan claims that at least some of the Administration for Community Living’s responsibilities will be transferred to other Health and Human Services agencies, the dismantling of units like the Center for Policy and Evaluation suggests that many of ACL’s functions will be lost—or at least severely diminished.

The Center for Policy and Evaluation, according to ACL’s website, analyzes services and evaluates programs that are “designed to ensure older Americans and persons with disabilities are able to fully participate and contribute in an inclusive community life,” including through collaboration with other HHS agencies like the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Vicki Gottlich, the head of the Center for Policy and Evaluation until her retirement in June 2024, believes that HHS’ move makes no sense “if you’re interested in government efficiency.”

“I fear this purge will drain the department of crucial disability subject matter expertise and humanity just when we need it most.”

The center “collects the data on how Older Americans Act money is spent and how many people are served,” Gottlich told me. “It helps states and grantees understand how to run their programs and helps ACL project staff with compliance. In other words, CPE helps make sure federal dollars are well spent.”

Given that the Kennedy-run HHS’ plans for reorganizing “vital” parts (and it’s unclear what “vital” means) of ACL are incredibly vague, it’s still unknown which agency, if any, will take up those responsibilities.

A CPE staffer who received a “Reduction in Staff” notice this morning told me, “I fear this April 1 purge will drain the department of crucial disability subject matter expertise and humanity just when we need it most,” and that “the loss of subject matter expertise may threaten the Department’s ability to meet its statutory and regulatory obligations.”

As I reported last week, ACL also saves federal government funds by supporting programs that help disabled and aging adults remain in their communities, a less costly approach than institutionalization.

While the HHS cuts, and the Trump administration’s wider slashing of federal agencies and services, are nominally about saving money, Jacobs doesn’t believe that eliminating the Administration for Community Living—which helps keep people out of nursing homes—will do so. “Community living costs our taxpayers a third of what it costs for people to live in institutional settings,” [former ACL disability commissioner Jill] Jacobs said. “There are very economically sound reasons for ACL to continue to exist.”

The Department of Health and Human Services has not responded to a request for comment.

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Elon Musk Is Running the Most Brazen Scheme to Buy an Election in Modern US History

On March 17, Elon Musk appeared on Sen. Ted Cruz’s podcast and falsely alleged that Democrats were giving undocumented immigrants fraudulent access to programs like Social Security and Medicare to lure them to the US.

“By using entitlement fraud the Democrats have been able to attract and retain vast numbers of illegal immigrants,” Musk claimed.

“And buy voters,” Cruz added.

“And buy voters, exactly,” Musk said. “They basically bring in 10, 20 million people who are beholden to the Democrats for government handouts and who will vote overwhelmingly Democrat as seen in California.”

“It’s an election strategy,” Cruz said. “It’s power.”

When Musk was heckled during the rally, he blamed it on “Soros operatives,” without any acknowledgment that he was the only billionaire quite literally handing out million dollar checks in the race.

Republicans have been alleging for years that Democrats have been buying elections, usually with the help of liberal billionaires like George Soros. Indeed, election deniers, including Musk, widely promoted a conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was “bought by Mark Zuckerberg” because an organization he funded directed election grants to blue areas to juice Democratic turnout. (In reality, it gave grants to both red and blue areas for routine election administration activities to help offset the Covid-19 pandemic.)

These claims are particularly ironic in light of how Musk has engaged in the most openly brazen scheme to buy an election in modern American history, with groups linked to him spending more than $20 million and aggressively pushing the boundaries of legality to flip the Wisconsin Supreme Court in an election on Tuesday that will decide the court’s ideological majority.

It’s not just how much Musk and his groups have spent—more than any donor to a judicial election in US history—but how he has spent this money that makes Musk’s intervention in Wisconsin so alarming.

In addition to funding two dark money political groups that ran TV ads against liberal Judge Susan Crawford and sought to get out the vote for conservative candidate Brad Schimel, Musk resurrected a controversial scheme from 2024, paying voters $100 for signing a petition from his America PAC opposing “activist judges.” He then awarded Scott Ainsworth, a mechanical engineer from Green Bay, $1 million for signing the petition.

On the Friday before the election, he dramatically escalated this sketchy tactic, saying he would travel to Wisconsin to “personally hand over two checks for a million dollars each in appreciation for you taking the time to vote.” Unlike paying a Wisconsin resident to sign a petition, these million-dollar checks were contingent on someone actually voting. Legal experts quickly pointed out that Musk’s pledge violated the state constitution, which prohibits offering “anything of value…in order to induce any elector to…vote or refrain from voting.”

Musk backtracked, saying the money would only go to people who signed his PAC’s petition, holding a rally in Green Bay on Sunday where he hand-delivered two $1 million checks. The Wisconsin attorney general sued to stop him, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to intervene before the event.

The recipients were allegedly chosen at random, but the winners aroused suspicion on closer inspection. One check went to Nicholas Jacobs, the chair of the state College Republicans. Another went to Ekaterina Diestler, a graphic designer at a packaging company in the Green Bay area that is owned by a Republican donor who has given tens of thousands of dollars to the Trump campaign and other GOP candidates, including $7,500 to Schimel.

Diestler filmed a video for Musk’s America PAC linking her payment to voting—the very thing that is illegal under Wisconsin law. “I did exactly what Elon Musk told everyone to do: sign the petition, refer friends and family, vote, and now I have a million dollars,” she says. (Musk’s PAC has since deleted the post.)

When Musk was heckled at one point during the rally, he blamed it on “Soros operatives,” without any acknowledgment that he was the only billionaire quite literally handing out million dollar checks in the race.

Undeterred by legal challenges, Musk unveiled a new scheme on Sunday to recruit “block captains” for Schimel, paying people $20 a pop to “hold a picture” of Schimel with a thumps up, with a bonus $20 for those who posts pictures of themselves on social media with a polling site in the background (Wisconsin law forbids electioneering within 100 feet of a polling place).

“You could make over $1000 in one day just by getting out the vote in Wisconsin!” Musk wrote in one post on X. “Easiest money you ever made!” he said in another.

The scale of Musk’s spending and the scope of his aggressive pay-to-play tactics has dramatically raised the stakes of Tuesday’s election. “Musk has made this a referendum on the idea of an American oligarchy,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler told me when I visited the state last week.

“Voters casting a ballot for Susan Crawford are not only voting for their own freedom and their own democracy in their own state,” Wikler added, “they’re also sending a national message about whether wealth has unchecked power in this country, or whether the people still rule.”

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DOGE Moves to Gut CDC Work on Gun Injuries, Sexual Assault, Opioid Overdose Data, and More

On Tuesday, thousands of staffers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta received early morning emails asking them to resign. The centers affected included those working on reproductive health, chronic disease, occupational safety, birth defects, smoking, tuberculosis, asthma and air quality, accidental and intentionalinjury, and prevention of violence and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV.

“It’s a blood bath this morning,” one CDC employee messaged me. Several others told me that their entire departments had received the letters. It wasn’t immediately clear whether everyone who had received the notices would ultimately be laid off.

“I regret to inform you that you are being affected by a reduction in force (RIF) action,” the letters stated. “After you receive this notice, you will be placed on administrative leave and will no longer have building access beginning Tuesday, April 1, unless directed otherwise by your leadership.” This action follows the announcement last week, byHealth and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to cut 10,000 employees from the agency. “This overhaul will be a win-win for taxpayers and for those that HHS serves,” Kennedy said in a statement. “That’s the entire American public because our goal is to Make America Healthy Again.”

Yet the staffers I talked to weren’t convinced that the cuts would improve public health or efficiency—on the contrary, they said they worried that government efforts to improve the lives of Americans would be undermined.

An employee I’ll call Amanda (she didn’t want me to use her name for fear of retribution) works in the Web-Based Injury and Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISKARS) a team within the Injury Center that is responsible for processing all the data around injuries, including both fatal and nonfatal injuries caused by guns. Her branch of 40 employees all received RIF notices. “The cost analysis, the return on investment, all of the non-fatal and fatal data processing that goes to our lobbyists, our congressmen, our decision-makers, senators—all of that is gone,” she said. Her team also provides data that determine the leading causes of injury-related deaths.

An employee I’ll call Jen is a health scientist in the Division of Violence Prevention, with a specific focus on sexual and intimate partner violence. Jen and her team “had an inkling” that given the Trump administration’s gutting of other programs that prevent sexual violence,their work might be imperiled. In January, the US Department of Education enacted policies that would protect students accused of sexual harassment and assault. In February, the Department of Defense paused its military sexual assault prevention training. That same month, rape crisis centers reported that their scheduled federal funding payments hadn’t arrived.

“All of the actions, including getting rid of my team, is showing sexual violence prevention isn’t a priority,” Jen said, “and in fact, they don’t think it is needed at all.”

Jen noted that the teams in her center that work on opioid overdose prevention and suicide prevention did not appear to be affected by the cuts yet. The fact that those groups were spared may reflect the Trump administration’s focus on the impact of the opioid epidemic, especially on rural communities—yet it’s not clear whether the teams that support this work would remain intact. Emily, the employee whose data team in the Injury Center all received notices, said that she and her colleagues had been working on machine learning initiatives for opioid overdose and suicide data. That work will cease to exist if her department is laid off.

Another employee, whom I’ll call Emily, told me that her unit, the entire office of public health practice at the Center for Chronic Disease, had also received RIF notices. Many of which, she added, contained factual errors, including misinformation about employees’ previous performance reviews, which are used to calculate their severance pay.

Emily noted that her team’s job is “to work across every programmatic cooperative agreement in the center, across all those staff, and try to create efficiencies in the work that they do, guide them toward measuring the impact and return on investment of our programs.” That mandate seems in line with what the Trump administration through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has identified as their goal. Nonetheless, they all still received the RIF notices.

“It would be great if there was a plan and then some kind of logic to how people are fired. But that’s not the way this administration is functioning.”

In addition to harming their work, staffers reported that the disorganized nature of the cuts had created an atmosphere of widespread confusion and stress. Until last week, they said, even leadership had been uncertain of what was to come. Colleagues “were telling me that at 2 a.m. they can’t stop checking their computer,” said Jen. “They’re afraid to step away from their computer because they’re afraid they [suddenly] won’t have access.” Emily added, “It would be great if there was a plan and then some kind of logic to how people are fired. But that’s not the way this administration is functioning.”

Several centers convened all-staff meetings on Tuesday morning. In some cases, employees reported, their leaders had to negotiate with security simply to let staffers who had received RIF notices back in the building to attend the meetings. Those who did not receive the notice reported that metal detectors had been set up at the entrances to at least one CDC building—a security measure that had not existed previously. CDC spokespeople did not immediately respond to my request for comment.

The employees I talked to said they worried that given the sweeping nature of the cuts, much of the work the agency does will simply cease to exist. “Where’s the plan to replace this work?” asked Jen. “There is no plan. It is just being removed.”

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A Win for Repro Rights: Alabama Can’t Charge Activists Helping Patients Get Out of State Abortions

In the nearly three years since the US Supreme Court overturned the national right to abortion, grassroots abortion funds and advocates have facilitated care for many thousands of patients living in states where abortion is banned, helping them find providers in other parts of the country, organize their travel, and pay some or all of the costs. That’s what Alabama advocates were expecting to do when that state’s near-total abortion ban took effect the day Roe v. Wade fell.

Instead, these advocates found themselves embroiled in an epic legal battle with Alabama’s attorney general, who threatened to use a criminal conspiracy statute from 1896to prosecute anyone who helped pregnant patients obtain an abortion in another state—charges potentially punishable by decades in prison.

Now, in a decision that could have major implications for states’ efforts to regulate abortion help and helpers in the post-Roe era, a federal judge in Montgomery, Alabama,has ruled that Attorney General Steve Marshall’s threats to prosecute abortion advocates violate fundamental protections for free speech and the right to travel.

“Alabama’s criminal jurisdiction does not reach beyond its borders, and it cannot punish what its residents do lawfully in another State,” US District Judge Myron H. Thompson declared in a 131-page ruling issued Monday, adding: “The Attorney General cannot prosecute those who assist people in Alabama to travel out of state to obtain a lawful abortion.”

“It is one thing for Alabama to outlaw by statute what happens in its own backyard,” Thompson wrote. “It is another thing for the state to enforce its values and laws, as chosen by the attorney general, outside its boundaries by punishing its citizens and others who help individuals travel to another state to engage in conduct that is lawful there but the attorney general finds to be contrary to Alabama’s values and laws.”

“It is one thing for Alabama to outlaw by statute what happens in its own backyard. It is another thing for the state to enforce its values and laws, as chosen by the attorney general, outside its boundaries.”

The ruling was immediately hailed by abortion rights advocates. “We won! Our abortion fund is reopened!” Kelsea McClain, health care access director of Alabama’s Yellowhammer Fund, texted in reaction to the ruling Monday evening. “Immediately! We’ve already funded our first abortion!”

A request to Marshall’s office for comment was not immediately answered.

The case consists of lawsuits by Yellowhammer—the state’s only abortion fund—and a trio of former abortion providers, including the West Alabama Women’s Center (now WAWC Healthcare) in Tuscaloosa and Dr. Yashica Robinson, an OB-GYN in Huntsville. Before the Dobbs decision, Yellowhammer and the providers worked together closely to help patients throughout Alabama get abortion care; indeed, for a couple of years before Roe fell, Yellowhammer owned WAWC.

Even when abortion was still legal in Alabama, Yellowhammer and providers often sent patients out of state to avoid restrictions like Alabama’s 48-hour waiting period or those surrounding later-term abortions. In the months leading up to the Supreme Court decision, as it became clear Roe was doomed, advocates began planning to get many more Alabama patients to clinics in states where abortion would remain legal in the post-Roe era. “We were like, we’re okay. We can figure that out. It’ll be fine,” Yellowhammer’s executive director, Jenice Fountain, recently told Mother Jones.

But the day the Dobbs decision was handed down in June 2022, and Alabama’s trigger law, the Human Life Protection Act that banned virtually all abortions, went into effect, a Democratic state lawmaker from Tuscaloosa tweeted a warning: “helping someone either get or even plan to get an abortion in another state is a Felony as well.” WAWC’s director, Robin Marty, says she got a phone call that day alerting her to the threat. “They’re going to come after you for criminal conspiracy, ” she recalled being told. “If you try to get those patients somewhere else, they’re going to come after you.”

The day the Dobbs decision was handed down, and Alabama’s abortion ban took effect, a state lawmaker tweeted a warning: “helping someone either get or even plan to get an abortion in another state is a Felony as well.”

Over the following months, Marshall—who has been attorney general since 2017—repeatedly expressed the view that the state’s conspiracy law could be used to bring charges against groups and individuals who helped patients get abortions out of state. In one interview with conservative talk show host Jeff Poor, Marshall singled out organizations in Tuscaloosa, where Yellowhammer and WAWC were based.

Marshall has never actually charged an abortion helper under the Alabama conspiracy law—but he didn’t have to. Almost immediately, Yellowhammer stopped paying for patients’ out-of-state abortions or offering other direct abortion support, instead focusing on a wide range of non-abortion help, from free emergency contraception to diapers. WAWC—which is now a full-spectrum women’s health clinic—and other providers stopped giving referrals and other specific information about out-of-state abortion care.

Yellowhammer and the providers finally filed suit in July 2023, asking the court to block Marshall from using the criminal conspiracy law against them. Meanwhile, the advocates continue to refrain from providing abortion-related assistance. “The attorney general chilled so much help from all sorts of people, not just Yellowhammer Fund,” says Jamila Johnson, senior counsel with the Lawyering Project, one of the attorneys in the case.

Alabama has long had a reputation for pushing the legal envelope when it comes to reproductive rights—including laws and court decisions enshrining fetal personhood and declaring frozen IVF embryos to be “extrauterine children.” At the time of its passage in 2019, its Human Rights Protection Act—blocked while Roe was the law of the land—was the most restrictive abortion law enacted in the US since the 1970s.

Marshall’s threats against the abortion helpers were especially alarming to reproductive justice activists because they were so broad. Theoretically, Alabama’s criminal conspiracy law could apply to anyone in the state who helps someone do something in another state that would be a crime in Alabama, even if that. conduct is legal in that other state.

Indeed, Judge Thompson wrote in Monday’s decision that, according to Marshall’s logic, “the Alabama Attorney General would have within his reach the authority to prosecute Alabamians planning a Las Vegas bachelor party, complete with casinos and gambling, since casino-style gambling is outlawed in Alabama.” The judge added: “As the adage goes, be careful what you pray for.”

Thompson also ruled that the advocates’ support for people seeking abortions was a form of speech. “The court finds that Yellowhammer Fund’s act of pledging and providing funds on behalf of pregnant Alabamians who seek a legal abortion outside Alabama is expressive conduct, and, therefore, subject to First Amendment protection.”

Monday’s outcome was not unexpected. In a 98-page opinion last May, Thompson—appointed to the bench by President Jimmy Carter—rejected Marshall’s motion to have the case dismissed, saying the attorney general’s threat to prosecute abortion advocates “contravenes history, precedent, and common sense.”

The Alabama case highlights frustration among anti-abortion lawmakers and activists that even in states with total or near-total abortion bans, patients have continued to access abortion care. Indeed, in the two years following the end of Roe, the total number of abortions increased slightly nationwide compared to the pre-Dobbs period. Abortion funds provided financial support to almost 103,000 patients in just the first year after Dobbs, the National Network of Abortion Funds has reported.

Alabama isn’t the only state to target abortion helpers. In Texas, lawmakers have tried to stop out-of-state abortion travel by empowering private citizens—bounty hunters—to sue anyone who aids or abets an abortion for thousands of dollars. In Idaho and Tennessee, lawmakers have passed so-called “abortion trafficking” laws targeting people who help pregnant teenagers leave the state—laws Yellowhammer’s attorneys are also challenging in court. Louisiana has charged a New York doctor for providing telehealth abortion services and abortion pills through the mail, while a Texas judge has ordered the same provider to pay more than $100,000 in fines.

“What we saw in Alabama was something we hadn’t seen in other states, which was an immediate effort to get on the airwaves and tell people that the helpers would be prosecuted,” Johnson told Mother Jones. “In those other states, legislators passed a law, right? But in Alabama, no legislature got together and said, ‘This is what we’re going to do.’ Instead, the attorney general said, we are going to prosecute [abortion helpers] just on his own enforcement authority.”

Johnson said that Thompson’s decision could resonate in ongoing legal challenges to the Tennessee and Idaho abortion travel bans. “While the [Alabama] decision is not precedent in those jurisdictions,” she said, “the reasoning is sound and could be indicative of how other jurisdictions may think about some of these issues in the future.”

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RFK Jr.’s Old Environmental Group Is Extremely Unhappy With Trump’s EPA

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

Donald Trump’s push to repurpose the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) amid funding cuts and staffing losses poses a huge threat to water safety and environmental advances in one of the big environmental success stories in the US in recent decades: the clean-up of the Hudson River.

Once a byword for environmental degradation, the Hudson River is now recovering, in part due to the work of Riverkeeper, a non-profit environmental organization that established a model of legal activism for water protection and inspired more than 300 programs globally. It is also where Robert F Kennedy Jr cut his teeth as an environmental lawyer, before becoming a senior member of Trump’s right-wing cabinet.

The political threat to America’s environment generally and more specifically the work of Riverkeeper has shocked the organization’s president, Tracy Brown, who spoke to the Guardian from its headquarters in the Hudson River commuter town of Ossining.

She was mulling over the impact of EPA administrator Lee Zeldin’s latest salvo: the termination of $14 billion in Biden-initiated grants to three climate groups, now blocked by a federal judge, alongside plans to eliminate 1,155 chemists, biologists, toxicologists, and other scientists from the EPA’s office of research and development.

“No one at the EPA was prepared to be so attacked and cannibalized by their own leadership, and they don’t have a playbook on how to cope. It’s hard to get one’s head around what we’re losing here in terms of resources, momentum, knowledge, and trust. It’s a pandemic-level shock to the system, and the effects could last for decades,” Brown said.

The game of cat-and-mouse between the administration and the courts will take time to play out, but the implication is clear: reliance on federal government environmental research is in jeopardy, and with it the efficacy of groups such as Riverkeeper that rely on EPA data to direct their efforts, including climate change and industrial contamination assessments.

“We’re in a moment where the environment is changing. We’re seeing climate changing the conditions we’re living in and need to be leaning into science to find out what is changing and how we do better to be prepared for the changes,” Brown said, palpably frustrated. “But right at that moment we’re trying to understand what’s changing, we’re losing research.”

For Riverkeeper and other groups, this means building up scientific knowledge to move from Hudson River restoration work toward adaptation work, including the measures to mitigate the impact of flooding from the increased frequency of heavy rain events that cause the loss of habitat and property.

One of those areas is the removal of industrial-era dams from tributary rivers and streams to allow fish to reach spawning grounds they have been cut off from and slow flooding. But removing old paper and textile industry dams also risks releasing PFA pollution in sediment behind the dams.

Dam removal has already proved to be a contentious issue when Trump blamed the removal of dams in northern California on water shortages to fight the Los Angeles wildfires in January.

Brown fears that federal funding for dam removal along the 315-mile (500km) Hudson is now under question, along with that, the hopes of stalling or reversing the loss of freshwater fish stocks.

“You’re starting to hear a general sense of fear and paranoia among people doing this work.”

“The whole program of doing infrastructure-level adaptation projects is in jeopardy,” Brown said. “Those dams weren’t designed for heavy storm events and the kind of pounding they’re taking now, so there is urgency or we could see unplanned dam failures.”

While the proposed rollbacks have hit groups like Riverkeeper, there have been attendant fears of retribution over speaking out among environmentalists. “You’re starting to hear a general sense of fear and paranoia among people doing this work,” Brown said.

In May, Riverkeeper has its big annual river cleanup. “I’m hoping that even if federal support goes down, local community, putting-our-shoulder-to-it support will rise up. People, I think, realize that we’re more on our own and we can’t leave it to the government to do the basics,” Brown said.

“There’s been historically an over-reliance on the hand of God perception, people thinking, ‘Oh well, people are swimming, the beaches must be clean.’ The perception of how much the government was doing was already a little overblown in people’s minds and this is a wake-up call.”

Her organization, she said, will have to spend more time on research, publishing data, and doing watchdog work.

Becoming more aware and active in local environmental responsibilities could at least reduce the sense of powerlessness inherent in divisive national politics and the government’s ability to come to grips with the climate crisis when it is locked in what Brown called a “zero-sum death battle every four years”.

“Broadly the upside to the climate disaster is that we all come back into right relationship with Earth. We think we have dominion over all things, and clearly we don’t, and that delusion is one of the reasons for the trouble we’re in,” Brown said. “When we have disasters brought about by poor governance it brings us back to a hyper-local place.”

If any environmental organization has shown the promise of self-organization, it would be Riverkeeper, an organization founded by commercial fishers and with a significant conservative gun-and-rod membership. Nearly 60 years after its founding, the Hudson River is one of the healthiest estuaries on the Atlantic coast.

Zeldin, the EPA’s administrator, called the extraordinary series of rollbacks the “greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen.” But the characterization of Republicans as all anti-environment is also wrong, Brown said. “It’s corporate manipulation—a false choice between jobs and clean environment, and it’s tearing us apart.”

But the actions of the Trump administration are confounding. “I was holding out hope for Zeldin, who lives on an island, to acknowledge in his confirmation hearings that climate change is real and state his care for water,” Brown said.

But now those hopes have dimmed.

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France Cracked Down on Far-Right Corruption—And Team Trump Is Triggered

After a French court found far-right leader and former presidential frontrunner Marine Le Pen guilty of embezzlement on Monday—a conviction that will bar her from holding political office for five years—some of President Donald Trump’s closest allies are boosting baseless conspiracy theories alleging that Le Pen’s conviction is part of a global scheme to keep right-wing populists from holding office.

Le Pen is reportedly accused of wrongfully diverting $5 million in funds earmarked for the European Parliament to staffers of her nationalist, xenophobic party, the National Rally, over a 12-year period. The verdict makes her ineligible to run in the country’s next presidential election in 2027—and comes after she was polling at 37 percent, more than 10 points ahead of her closest challenger. Le Pen has run for that office three times before, and became more popular as right-wing political parties across Europe rose in prominence in recent years; in the 2022 presidential runoff, Le Pen earned 41.5 percent of votes to President Emmanuel Macron’s 58.6 percent. (Macron is term-limited.)

In addition to being ineligible to hold office as a result of the conviction, Le Pen will also have to serve two years’ house arrest and pay a fine of more than $100,000. The politician has denied wrongdoing and said she intends to appeal the charges, which she dismissed on French television Monday night as “a political decision” intended to prevent her election. “The rule of law has been completely violated by this decision,” Le Pen added. (Sound familiar?)

A variety of right-wing politicos from around the world condemned the verdict. Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán posted on X, “I am Marine!” Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro—who will face a trial on accusations of inciting a 2022 coup attempt seeking to overturn the election he lost, the country’s Supreme Court ruled last week—characterized Le Pen’s conviction to Reuters as “left-wing judicial activism.” And Le Pen’s protégé, National Rally president Jordan Bardella, alleged that “French democracy…is being executed” by the verdict.

You might think Trump’s cronies would abstain from commenting and count themselves lucky that their guy managed to evade criminal conviction himself for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. But you’d be wrong.

Trump allies couldn’t help but characterize Le Pen’s conviction as evidence that the American president, too, had been unfairly targeted in his many court cases. “When the radical left can’t win via democratic vote, they abuse the legal system to jail their opponents. This is their standard playbook throughout the world,” Elon Musk wrote on X in a post Monday morning, which had more than 16 million views by that afternoon. Musk made those comments when he re-shared a post from Mike Benz, a former Trump State Department official who previously posted racist conspiracy theories online and interacted with white nationalists under a pseudonym, according to a 2023 NBC News report. The Benz post that Musk re-shared on Monday grouped Le Pen and Trump with a series of others accused, or convicted, of crimes—”[Jair] Bolsonaro in Brazil, Imran Khan in Pakistan, Matteo Salvini in Italy…Călin Georgescu in Romania”—and alleged, “The criminal prosecution of every populist challenger is a dagger in the heart of the credibility of democracy.”

In response to another post from Benz boosting the conspiracy theory about the Le Pen verdict, Musk wrote: “This will backfire, like the legal attacks against President Trump.” (But Trump has not, in fact, been immune from court rulings: Several court orders have successfully halted or even reversed some of his most outlandish moves since taking office for the second time, such as his attempts to overturn birthright citizenship and fire thousands of probationary federal workers. Trump was also found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the hush-money payments he made to Stormy Daniels, and found liable by a jury of sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll.)

Responding to a post from X user Alex Lorusso—executive producer of the right-wing commentatorBenny Johnson’s Benny Show on YouTube—that alleged, “they’re trying the same playbook they did to Trump in France,” Musk wrote: “Same playbook everywhere.” And in response to a two-minute video posted by Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a right-wing Dutch political commentator characterizing the Le Pen verdict as “lawfare against the European right-wing,” Musk replied: “Unreal.”

Donald Trump Jr. also got in on the baseless paranoia, writing in his own post: “France is sending le Pen [sic] to jail and barring her from running?! Are they just trying to prove JD Vance was right about everything?” (He was presumably referring to the vice president’s well-documented disdain for Europe.) Trump Jr. made that post while re-posting another from Robby Starbuck—a conservative activist who brags about getting corporations to roll back their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts—claiming that “the left in France” was behind the “BS charges” Le Pen was convicted of.

Trump does not appear to have publicly commented on Le Pen’s conviction yet, and spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones about whether the president supports Musk’s and Trump Jr.’s claims.

There is no evidence to support the idea that Le Pen’s conviction was politically motivated; instead, it’s a reminder that despite Trump’s successful evasion of punishment himself, nobody—not even an aspiring president—is above the law in a truly healthy and just democracy. It’s no wonder this concept triggers the Trump crowd.

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Trump Wants to Shutter FEMA. Can States Fill Its Shoes?

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

President Donald Trump appears to be serious about getting the federal government out of disaster response. Earlier this week, his secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, said in a Cabinet meeting that she would move to “eliminate” the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the beleaguered agency that handles relief and recovery after extreme weather events, and has reportedly conferred with FEMA’s Trump-appointed interim leader about winding down the agency.

Noem’s announcement was just the latest in a series of Trump administration moves to radically decrease or eliminate the federal government’s role in responding to climate-driven disasters. Just after taking office, the president mused about eliminating FEMA and then convened a council to consider the agency’s future. In recent weeks, he has laid off hundreds of staff who work on resilience and preparedness. And last week, Trump signed an executive order that called for state and local governments to “play a more active and significant role in national resilience and preparedness” and directed agencies to “streamline” their disaster resilience efforts.

Trump’s unprecedented efforts to weaken FEMA come at a time when many disasters are intensifying due to climate change. A study of more than 750 recent heat waves, wildfires, and flood events found that around 75 percent of these events had been made significantly worse by human-caused warming. Though experts say there is merit in the idea of beefing up state and local emergency preparedness, they also caution that the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn approach to remaking the federal government could backfire when it comes to FEMA. While they acknowledge that disaster response needs reform, they also argue that a total withdrawal by the federal government would leave many communities in the lurch, especially those that can’t fund disaster recovery on their own.

For much of American history, a state that suffered a disaster had to plead with Congress for a one-off infusion of money, then figure out how to spend that money on its own. In 1980, the Carter administration created FEMA to speed up the government’s response to worsening disasters. The agency got its own multibillion-dollar pot of money to reimburse states for disaster response, including for disasters that are too small to get a special transfer from Congress. Over the past 45 years, it has distributed billions of dollars in grants to help local areas prepare for future disasters, reduce flood risk, and—more recently—address climate change. The agency also coordinates multistate responses to large disasters, summoning search-and-rescue and cleanup teams from across the country after big hurricanes.

In the decades since FEMA’s botched response to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, the agency has been a frequent target of criticism by politicians and the public. Local officials often complain that federal involvement tends to slow down disaster response, and emergency management experts warn that it disincentivizes state and local authorities from taking action to reduce climate risks. FEMA’s programs to increase disaster resilience come with reams of paperwork, and the agency often pays to rebuild the same areas over and over again without reducing actual risk.

Trump’s recent executive order pushing for a bigger state and local role in disaster response echoes some past criticism of the agency, calling for reforms “to reduce complexity and better protect and serve Americans.”

“A lot of this stuff in the order, I look at it, and it just sounds like Emergency Management 101,” said W. Craig Fugate, who served as FEMA administrator under then-president Barack Obama. He said emergency managers have long maintained that state and local governments should not rely on federal aid to make them whole after disasters, and need to find their own ways to reduce risk over the long run.

However, other experts fear that what Trump is proposing could leave cities and states unable to pay for much-needed resilience projects—and that a rapid shuttering of FEMA would leave most states and local governments unprepared to fill the gap.

“The Trump administration aims to shift most of the responsibility for disaster preparedness to state and local governments, asking them to make more expensive infrastructure investments without outlining what support the federal government will provide,” said Shana Udvardy, senior climate resilience policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental advocacy organization.

Trump’s public statements and executive orders on the issue have been vague — so vague, in fact, that Udvardy called them “baffling.” If Noem and Trump tried to wind down the agency altogether, the move would likely face similar legal challenges as his attempts to destroy the Department of Education—neither agency can lawfully be closed without congressional approval. But in theory, if the administration prevailed in closing FEMA, or moved some of its operations to the Department of Homeland Security, there are a few ways the change could play out.

Then-candidate Donald Trump appears with then-South Dakota governor Kristi Noem during a campaign rally in October 2024. Trump selected Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA.Jim Watson / AFP / Getty via Grist

One scenario would be a return to the situation that existed before FEMA, when states had to seek direct help from Congress or another federal agency every time they suffered a disaster. Congress works differently now than it did in the decades before FEMA existed—it often takes months or years for lawmakers to send out long-term recovery money after a disaster such as the 2023 Maui wildfires, which can make it hard for local governments to find money to develop replacement housing and restore public infrastructure. Congress is also far more polarized than it used to be, even on the issue of disaster aid—Republican leaders have suggested they might impose political “conditions” on wildfire assistance to California, goading the state to change its policies on immigration or water management.

Without a centralized disaster fund like the one FEMA has, the party in control of Congress would control who gets relief money, which could delay or derail rebuilding efforts in states run by the out-party.

Another possibility, whether or not FEMA is abolished, would be for Congress to provide a flat amount of preparedness money to each state and let states decide how to spend it, which is how some other big federal programs work. But this scenario could also be subject to political maneuvering: When the Department of Housing and Urban Development distributed its own disaster recovery block grant to Texas after Hurricane Harvey, the state government allegedly favored white and rural areas over Black and Latino residents in Houston, according to a federal probe.

If FEMA shrank or disappeared, it’s unclear who would coordinate lifesaving aid between states during large disasters. But if states continued to receive robust disaster funds from Congress, and if they distributed this money equitably, it could potentially speed up a spending process that is often described as being slow and bureaucratic.

For instance, in Harris County, Texas, which encompasses the massive Houston metro area, floodplain officials said that removing federal oversight could accelerate the process of acquiring and demolishing so-called “repetitive-loss” homes—those that flood multiple times. Officials would no longer be subject to federal paperwork requirements before they bought out homes.

“Currently, every level of government is involved when utilizing federal grant programs for flood mitigation,” said James Wade, who leads the county’s home buyout program. “Removing one level of government may help expedite the process.” Wade’s program could certainly use some paperwork relief. Thanks in large part to federal grant requirements, it can take as long as five years for the county to purchase and destroy a flooded home, during which time flood victims have no choice but to wait or flip their homes to private buyers.

But if Trump’s reforms led to a reduction in overall federal disaster funding—as seems likely, given his focus on cutting spending—the county might not be able to keep up its current pace of adaptation projects. The county flood control district has applied for no fewer than 14 FEMA grants, for stormwater upgrades as well as buyouts, and a shift away from national funding could make it harder to fund these essential projects.

“The question is who decides how to allocate the funds to the states and how much each is allocated.”

The district “relies heavily on federal programs to leverage the local funds for flood mitigation,” said Wade. Under Trump’s new approach, “The question is who decides how to allocate the funds to the states and how much each is allocated.”

A reduction in federal grant money for resilience projects could force local governments to make harder choices. This wouldn’t always be a bad thing. Fugate pointed to the state of Florida, which rolled out strong building codes after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, forcing developers to build houses that could withstand strong winds. The move led to up-front costs for builders, but reduced damage in the long run.

The problem with this tough-love approach is that many states and local governments aren’t ready to handle disaster resilience on their own—they don’t have the expertise to design new building codes or plan for climate change, and they don’t have the money to build infrastructure that can protect against existing flood and fire risk. Past administrations have rolled out a number of reforms to help these communities design and fund such infrastructure projects: In 2020, FEMA began providing “direct technical assistance” to help rural communities and low-income areas figure out their vulnerabilities and design projects. It also changed its scoring for grant applications to privilege rural and disadvantaged communities more. (The direct technical assistance page is now unavailable on FEMA’s website.)

Udvardy, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that taking FEMA out of the resilience equation would leave smaller and poorer communities in the lurch, without either the money or expertise they needed to reduce their risk. This would cost the government and disaster victims more in the long run.

“Based on the indiscriminate way this administration has laid off staff with deep expertise and upended critical science…I am very concerned that the implications of this order will mean less support for communities to help them prepare for and recover from the disasters to come,” said Udvardy.

The worst-affected places would be rural areas in poor states like West Virginia, where the federal government is the only entity with the resources to finance even basic adaptation projects like flood retention ponds or home elevations. Many of these areas supported Trump last year by wide margins.

A resident of Treasure Island, Florida, cleans up debris from Hurricane Helene in September 2024 as she prepares for incoming Hurricane Milton. Spencer Platt / Getty via Grist

The rural city of Grants Pass, Oregon, is already experiencing the potential consequences of such a federal shift. The city has been working to secure $50 million from a FEMA grant program designed to enhance climate resilience. The city’s water treatment plant is almost 100 old, and it sits right next to the flood-prone Rogue River. In the event of a big storm or earthquake, the plant could flood or collapse, leaving locals without clean drinking water.

Grants Pass has already raised utility rates on its 33,000 customers to fund the construction of a new plant, but it was still falling short of the money it needed for such a large project. In 2023, FEMA advanced the city’s grant application to build a new treatment plant away from the floodplain, which the local public works director called “incredible good fortune.”

But late in February, the state of Oregon informed Grants Pass that FEMA had canceled all coordination meetings around the grant program, and now city officials have no idea if they’ll receive the money they’ve spent years counting on.

“This grant is a critical piece of our funding strategy,” said Jason Canady, the city’s public works director. “We are concerned, but at this point, we are not sure what actions can be taken to ensure an award will be forthcoming.”

Fugate, the former FEMA administrator, said that cuts to federal resilience funding would split the nation into haves and have-nots. States and cities that have the staffing and money to pursue adaptation efforts would do so, and might even be able to complete some projects faster than they can right now. But rural areas would no longer have access to federal money that enables them to even consider reducing climate risk. People living in those places will have less protection from future disasters, exposing them to the risk of death or injury, and will have a harder time recovering after disasters, which could push them into poverty.

“They’ll have more flexibility—with less money,” said Fugate.

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“I’m Not Joking”: Trump Again Floats Running for Anti-Constitutional Third Term

President Donald Trump has repeatedly teased running for a third term in violation of the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, which limits presidents to two terms.

Until now, it has been unclear whether he was making such comments seriously. But in a phone call with Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker of NBC News on Sunday, Trump gave his clearest indication yet that he is indeed serious. “I’m not joking,” he reportedly said. “But I’m not—it is far too early to think about it.”

“There are methods which you could do it,” Trump continued. NBC reports that when Welker asked about the plausibility of Vice President JD Vance running for office and then passing power to Trump (who would try to run as VP in 2028, and then take over when Vance resigns, according to the theory) Trump replied, “That’s one,” adding, “but there are others too.” He declined to provide specific examples, NBC reported.

White House Communications Director Steven Cheung did not respond directly to a question from Mother Jones about what “methods” Trump specifically was referring to; instead Cheung sent a statement claiming: “Americans overwhelmingly approve and support President Trump and his America First policies. As the President said, it’s far too early to think about [a third term] and he is focused on undoing all the hurt Biden has caused and Making America Great Again.” (Polls do not indicate “overwhelming approval” for Trump: The latest CBS/YouGov poll shows Americans split down the middle, and several recentothers others show that majorities of Americans disapprove of him.)

When asked by Welker if he would like to serve a third term, Trump replied, “I like working.”

Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said in a post on X that there may be three ways Trump could attempt to “grab” an illegal 3rd term: 1) Ignore the Constitution and dare anyone to stop him. 2) Have GOP-run states just appoint Trump electors since any state not voting Trump is by definition ‘corrupt’. 3) Military coup and martial law—i.e., a successful January 6.”

NBC reports that Trump also claimed, “A lot of people want me to do it. But, I mean, I basically tell them we have a long way to go, you know, it’s very early in the administration.”

Some public figures have indeed voiced sycophantic support for this idea of an illegal power grab. They include longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who has claimed Trump may be able to get around the 22nd Amendment and told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo that “Trump will run and win again in 2028.” In January, Republican Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee introduced a farfetched resolution proposing to amend the 22nd Amendment so that Trump could serve a third term. Additionally, GOP activists behind an initiative called the Third Term Project are advocating for amending the constitution to allow Trump to run again in 2028, or to have Trump run as VP with the understanding that the presidential candidate on the ticket would resign after being elected, to allow Trump to retake power.

Success in amending the Constitution—especially to set up a possible third term for Trump—would be extremely unlikely, as it would require approval from two-thirds of both chambers of Congress, and then ratification from three-fourths of state legislatures.

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Susie Wiles Finally Goes Public—and Shares Her Strange Goal for a Trump “Legacy”

One of the most powerful people in the White House remained obscure to most Americans since the start of Trump’s second presidency, until Saturday night.

Susie Wiles, the secretive White House chief of staff and former Trump campaign manager, gave what she called her “first and probably only” sit-down television interview to President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, on Fox News. As I wrote when Lara Trump’s weekly show was announced last month, the programming cements the network’s role as a mouthpiece for the Trump White House, and extends a clear pattern of nepotism from an administration claiming to champion merit-based hiring.

The roughly 17-minute segment consisted of Wiles discussing mostly anodyne topics: her long work hours, her “easy” relationship with the president, her penchant for reading and walking, and her office decor. But at the end of the sit-down, Wiles made a curious assertion: She said she hopes her “legacy” will include strengthening the country’s education system—despite the fact that Trump recently signed an executive order seeking to abolish the Department of Education.

The Trump team claims that ending the DOE is about rolling back diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in schools and giving power back to the states.But such a move—also attacking the authority of Congress, which established and funds the DOE—is one that experts say will harm education nationwide, particularly when it comes to under-resourced schools, poor students, and those with disabilities.

“What do you hope your legacy is?” Lara Trump asked Wiles. “What do you hope people remember about your time as White House?”

“That is such a hard question, because I don’t think that way,” Wiles replied. After taking a beat, she continued: “I want a world at peace. I want an America that’s strong. I want a border that’s secure. I want an education system—something we don’t talk about as much, but I’m passionate about—that will position our kids to meet the future, whatever that may be.”

Lara Trump: What do you hope your legacy will is?

Wiles: I want an education system, something we don't talk about as much, but I'm passionate about that we will position our kids to meet the future, whatever that may be.. pic.twitter.com/J8rnCeQ0s1

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 30, 2025

As my colleague Sarah Szilagy reported, Education Secretary and former WWE Executive Linda McMahon has played a key role in Trump’s effort to close the $268 billion agency that administers federal funds to schools and enforces civil rights laws. The policy seems to be motivated in part by right-wing paranoia stoked by groups like Moms for Liberty:

Within hours of her confirmation on March 3, McMahon sent agency employees a memo titled “Our Department’s Final Mission.” In it, she commended Trump’s sweeping actions, including his slate of executive orders that promote school choice programs, seek to root out so-called “gender ideology” and end “radical indoctrination” of children through diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, while also banning trans girls and women from women’s sports.

After Trump signed the March 20 executive order directing McMahon to “facilitate the closure” of the agency to the “maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law,” Robert Kim, executive director of the Education Law Center, told Szilagy, “It’s just moving the country in such a wrong direction,” adding that closing the DOE will “take us back to those generations where education was deprioritized and really only a privilege for a subset of our children.”

In a statement, the National Education Association said that kneecapping the DOE “will hurt all students by sending class sizes soaring, cutting job training programs, making higher education more expensive and out of reach for middle class families, taking away special education services for students with disabilities, and gutting student civil rights protections.” Subsequent reductions in force to the DOE have resulted in roughly half of the agency’s employees being terminated and seven of its dozen regional offices shuttered.

Wiles’ ostensible passion for boosting education nationally does not seem to come from a history of actually working in the field. As my colleague Dan Friedman wrote last November, Wiles made her name working as a lobbyist and helping to shape Florida’s Republican party:

The daughter of late NFL broadcaster Pat Summerall, Wiles is a longtime GOP operative in Florida with a history of working for rich candidates. She ran Sen. Rick Scott’s 2010 campaign for Florida’s governorship, worked as former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign manager in 2012, and ran Trump’s campaign in Florida in 2016 and 2020. She also worked for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis before a falling out with him.

Wiles has also worked as a lobbyist, and held onto a senior lobbying position with the Republican-leaning advocacy firm Mercury Public Affairs during the campaign, according to the New York Times. She was registered as a lobbyist for a tobacco company as recently as this year.

In her sit-down with Lara Trump, Wiles said she had long been “an establishment Republican…and then Donald Trump came along, MAGA came along.” But despite her appearance of being fully MAGA-pilled, Wiles seemed to draw a subtle distinction between her self and her boss when it came to their ability to accept his 2020 election loss.

“Do you remember the toughest thing you’ve ever had to tell him?” Lara Trump asked her.

“Coming to him after the 2020 election, in ’21,” Wiles replied, “and telling him that what he thought was the circumstance, wasn’t.”

Lara Trump: Do you remember the toughest thing you've ever had to tell him?

Wiles: The 2020 election. Coming to him after the 2020 election in 21 telling him what he thought was the circumstance wasn't which is how I got into all this.. pic.twitter.com/1GeaADfqri

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 30, 2025

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Farmers in Trump Country Banked on Clean Energy Grants. Then Things Changed.

This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

The US Department of Agriculture announced late Tuesday it will release previously authorized grant funds to farmers and small rural business owners to build renewable energy projects—but only if they rewrite applications to comply with President Donald Trump’s energy priorities.

The move has left some farmers perplexed—and doubtful that they’ll ever get the grant money they were promised, given the Trump administration’s emphasis on fossil fuels and hostility toward renewable energy.

Some of the roughly 6,000 grant applicants have already completed the solar, wind, or other energy projects and are awaiting promised repayment from the government. Others say they can’t afford to take on the projects they’d been planning unless the grant money comes through.

A Floodlight analysis shows the overwhelming majority of the intended recipients of this money reside in Trump country—congressional districts represented by Republicans.

After hearing of the USDA’s latest announcement Wednesday, Minnesota strawberry farmer Andy Petran said he suspects many previously approved projects won’t be funded. He’d been approved for a $39,625 grant to install solar panels on his farm. But like many other farmers nationally, Petran got word from the USDA earlier this year that his grant money had been put on hold.

“It’s not like any small farmer who is looking to put solar panels on their farms will be able to put a natural gas refinery or a coal refinery on the farm,” Petran said. “I don’t know what they expect me to switch to.”

Petran was counting on the benefits that solar power would bring to his farm.

After getting word in September that the USDA had approved his grant application, he expected the solar panels would not only reduce his electricity bill but allow him to sell power back to the grid. He and his wife figured the extra income would help expand their Twin Cities Berry Co. and pay down their debt more quickly.

Petran’s optimism was soon extinguished. A USDA representative told him earlier this year that the grant had been frozen.

His 15-acre farm about 40 miles north of Minneapolis operates on a razor-thin margin, Petran said, so without the grant money, he can’t afford to build the $80,000 solar project.

Andy Petran, shown here at his Minnesota strawberry farm, had been counting on a USDA grant to help him build a solar array that would have saved the farm money. Now that the grant is frozen, Petran can’t move forward with the project.Photo courtesy of Andy Petran

“Winning these grants was a contract between us and the government,” he said. “There was a level of trust there. That trust has been broken.”

In its announcement, issued Tuesday night, the USDA said grant recipients will have 30 days to review and revise their project plans to align with President Trump’s Unleashing American Energy Executive Order, which prioritizes fossil fuel production and cuts federal support for renewable energy projects.

“This process gives rural electric providers and small businesses the opportunity to refocus their projects on expanding American energy production while eliminating Biden-era DEIA and climate mandates embedded in previous proposals,” the USDA news release said. “This updated guidance reflects a broader shift away from the Green New Deal.”

USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins said in the release that the new directive will give rural energy providers and small businesses a chance to “realign their projects” with Trump’s priorities.

It’s unclear what this will mean for grant recipients who’ve already spent money on renewable energy projects—or those whose planned projects have been stalled by the administration’s funding freeze.

The USDA didn’t directly answer those questions. In an email to Floodlight on Wednesday, a department spokesperson said the agency must approve any proposed changes to plans—but offered no specific guidance on what or whether changes should be made.

“Awardees that do not respond via the website will be considered as not wishing to make changes to their proposals, and disbursements and other actions will resume after 30 days,” the email said. “For awardees who respond via the website to confirm no changes, processing on their projects will resume immediately.”

Thousands of farmers and small rural business owners have been left in limbo because of the Trump administration’s decision to freeze funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for renewable energy projects.(Dee J. Hall / Floodlight)

The grant funding was put on hold after an executive order issued by President Trump on his first day in office. It froze hundreds of billions of dollars for renewable energy under President Joe Biden’s massive climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

The law added more than $1 billion to the USDA’s 17-year-old Rural Energy for America (REAP) program.

About 6,000 REAP grants funded with IRA money have been paused and are being reviewed for compliance with Trump’s executive order, according to a March 5 email from the USDA’s rural development office to the office of Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland).

A lawsuit filed earlier this month challenges the legality of the freeze on IRA funding for REAP projects.

Earthjustice lawyer Hana Vizcarra, one of the attorneys who filed the suit, called the latest USDA announcement a “disingenuous stunt.”

“President Trump and Secretary Rollins can’t change the rules of the game well into the second half,” she said in a statement Wednesday. “This is the definition of an arbitrary and capricious catch-22.”

Under the REAP grant program, farmers pay for renewable and lower carbon energy projects and then submit proof of the completed work to the USDA for reimbursement. The grants were intended to fund solar panels, wind turbines, grain dryers, irrigation upgrades, and other projects, USDA data shows.

At a press conference in Atlanta on March 12, Rollins said, “If our farmers and ranchers, especially, have already spent money under a commitment that was made, the goal is to make sure they are made whole.”

But some contend the administration is unfairly making farmers jump through more hoops.

“This isn’t cutting red tape; it’s adding more,” said Andy Olsen, senior policy advocate with the Environmental Law and Policy Center, a Midwest-based environmental advocacy group. “The USDA claims to deliver on commitments, but these new rules could result in awarded grants being permanently frozen.”

Rep. Chellie Pingree, a longtime farmer and Maine Democrat who sits on the House Agriculture Committee, said she thinks it’s illegal and unconstitutional for the administration to withhold grant money allocated by Congress. Beyond that, she said, it has hurt cash-strapped farmers.

“This is about farmers making ends meet,” she told Floodlight. “It’s not some ideological issue for us.”

Using USDA data, Floodlight identified the top 10 congressional districts that received the most grants. They’re all represented by Republicans who have said little publicly about the funding freezes affecting thousands of their constituents. It’s impossible to tell from the USDA data which REAP grants will get paid out.

The congressional district that received the most REAP grants was Iowa’s 2nd District, in the northeastern part of the state. Farmers and business owners there got more than 300 grants from 2023 through 2025. The district is represented by Rep. Ashley Hinson, who has previously voiced support for “alternative energy strategies.”

“More than half of the energy produced in Iowa is from renewable sources, and that is something for Iowans to be very proud of,” she told the House Appropriations Committee in June 2022.

Hinson’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the matter.

The number 2 spot for REAP grants: Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District, represented by Rep. Brad Finstad. In that district, which spans southern Minnesota, more than 260 farmers and rural businesses were approved for REAP grants.

Finstad’s office did not return multiple emails and calls requesting comment. His constituents have been complaining about his silence on funding freezes. They’ve staged at least two demonstrations at his offices in Minnesota. Finstad said he held a February 26 telephone town hall joined by 3,000 people in his district.

In a Feruary 28 letter to a constituent, Finstad said Rollins has announced that the USDA will honor contracts already signed with farmers and that he looks forward to working with the administration “to support the needs of farm country.”

Finstad is no stranger to the REAP program. Before becoming a congressman, he was the USDA’s state director of rural development for Minnesota. In that role, he was a renewable booster.

“By reducing energy costs, renewable energy helps to create opportunities for improvement elsewhere, like creating jobs,” Finstad said in a 2021 USDA press release. That has since been deleted from the agency’s website.

Rollins, meanwhile, called herself “a massive defender of fossil fuels” at her confirmation hearing, and she has expressed skepticism about the findings of climate scientists. “We know the research of CO2 being a pollutant is just not valid,” Rollins said at the Heartland Institute’s 2018 conference on energy.

She has also said that she welcomes the efforts of Elon Musk and his cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency team at the USDA.

Jake Rabe, a solar installer in Blairstown, Iowa, said he has put up more than 100,000 solar modules in the state since getting into the business in 2015. More than 30 of his customers have completed their installation but are awaiting frozen grant funding, he said. At least 10 more have signed the paperwork but are hesitant to begin construction. Millions of dollars worth of business is frozen, he said.

On top of that, Rabe said, the state’s net metering policies—in which solar users get credits for any excess power they send back to the grid—are set to expire in 2026.

“I kind of feel like it may be the beginning of the end for the solar industry in Iowa with what’s going on,” said Rabe, who owns Rabe Hardware.

Despite it all, he remains a Trump supporter.

“Under the current administration, I think we’re doing things that are necessary for the betterment of the entire United States,” he said.

On March 13, Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law group, filed a federal lawsuit against the USDA on behalf of five farmers and three nonprofits. They’re seeking a court order to compel the Trump administration to honor the government’s grant commitments, saying it violated the Constitution by refusing to disburse funds allocated by Congress.

Vizcarra, the Earthjustice lawyer, said she is disturbed by the lack of concern from Congress, whose powers appear to have been usurped by the administration.

She added, “These are real people, real farmers, and real organizations whose projects have impacts on communities who are left with this horrible situation with no idea of when it will end.”

One of the plaintiffs, Laura Beth Resnick, grows dahlias, zinnias, and other cut flowers on a small farm about 30 miles north of Baltimore.

Florists are her customers, and demand for her flowers blooms during cold-weather holidays like Thanksgiving. Each of her three greenhouses is half the length of a football field, and heating them during those months isn’t cheap, Resnick said. The power bill for Butterbee Farm often exceeds $500 a month.

So a year ago, Resnick applied for a USDA renewable energy grant, hoping to put solar panels on her barn roof—a move that she estimated would save about $5,000 a year. In August, the USDA sent word that her farm had been awarded a grant for $36,450.

The cost of installing solar panels was $72,000, she said. So she paid a solar contractor $36,000 upfront, expecting that she’d pay the rest in January when the federal grant money came in. The solar panels were installed in December.

Laura Beth Resnick, photographed here inside a greenhouse at her Maryland flower farm, spent $36,000 to have solar panels installed at her farm, expecting to get the same amount in grant money from the federal government. But the grant she was set to receive has been put on hold. Now she has joined a lawsuit to fight the Trump administration’s decision to freeze those grants. LA Birdie Photography

But the federal government’s check never arrived. A February 4 email from a USDA representative said her request for reimbursement was rejected due to the Trump administration’s recent executive orders.

Resnick said she sought help from her elected representatives but got “pretty much nowhere.”

After hearing about the USDA’s announcement Wednesday, Resnick said that based on the response she’s previously gotten from the USDA, she’s not confident she will get her grant money.

“I’ve lost my trust in the USDA at this point,” she said. “Our project is complete, so we can’t change the scope of it.”

Van Hollen, the Maryland Democrat, said he supports the legal fight against the funding freeze.

“Donald Trump and Elon Musk are scamming our farmers,” Van Hollen said in a statement to Floodlight. “By illegally withholding these reimbursements for work done under federal grants, they’re breaking a promise to farmers and small businesses in Maryland and across the country.”

Since 2023, when IRA funding became available, the USDA has given or loaned about $21.3 billion through programs to support renewable energy in rural areas, according to a Floodlight analysis of agency data, including the REAP program.

Those grant payments were processed until January 20, when the Trump administration announced its freeze.

Trump’s decision was in line with Project 2025, a conservative blueprint crafted by the Heritage Foundation aimed at reshaping the US government. That document called for repealing the IRA and rescinding “all funds not already spent by these programs.”

Environmental groups have sharply criticized the administration’s move, and several lawsuits are challenging the legality of the freeze of IRA funding.

At a recent public roundtable, Maggie Bruns, CEO of the Prairie Rivers Network which supports Illinois communities’ transition to clean energy, listed REAP grants that have been held up in Illinois, where her multifaceted environmental nonprofit is based. A $390,000 grant for a solar array at the grocery store in Carlinville; $27,000 for solar panels at an auto body shop in Staunton; $51,000 for a solar array for a golf course in Alton.

Since 2023, farmers and businesses in Illinois have been approved for more than 590 REAP grants, making the state the third highest in number of recipients in the United States, Floodlight’s analysis shows. In an interview with Barn Raiser, Bruns said the decision to freeze such grants has caused unneeded stress for farmers. Before the executive order, USDA’s rural development team had worked hard to bring dollars for renewable energy projects to Illinois farmers, she said.

“That’s the thing we should be celebrating right now,” Bruns said, “and instead we have to fight to make sure that money actually does land into the pockets of the people who have gone ahead, jumped through all these hoops, and are attempting to do the right thing for their businesses and their farms.”

In January, Dan Batson’s nursery in Mississippi was approved for a $400,367 REAP grant—money that he planned to use to install four solar arrays. He intended to use that solar energy to power the pumps that irrigate more than 1 million trees, a move that would have saved the company about $25,000 a year in electricity costs.

Seated in a wooded area about 30 miles north of Biloxi, his 42-year-old GreenForest nursery ships potted magnolias, hollies, crepe myrtles, and other trees to southern states. Until a couple of months ago, Batson had been excited about what the grant money would mean for the business.

Daniel Batson’s GreenForest tree nursery, shown here, was approved for a $400,367 grant to install solar panels. The move would have saved the Mississippi nursery $25,000 a year, he said. But now the grant has been frozen and Batson says he can’t afford to move ahead with the project. Photo courtesy of Daniel Batson

But when he saw news about the funding being held up earlier this year, he called a local USDA representative who confirmed the funds had been frozen. Batson had already sent the solar contractor $240,000. Now, his plans are on hold.

“I just can’t do the project if I don’t get the money,” he said.

Tuesday’s announcement from the USDA makes him no more confident he’ll get the money, he said.

Batson said he’s a fiscal conservative so he understands the effort to cut costs. “But,” he said, “the way they’ve gone about it has disrupted a lot of business owners’ lives.”

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Trump Tells SCOTUS There’s a “Rigorous Process” for Deporting Venezuelan Migrants. Yeah, Right.

On Friday, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to lift a lower court ruling blocking the mass deportation of thousands of detained Venezuelan migrants under the controversial Aliens Enemies Act of 1798, claiming in a filing that it has a “rigorous process” for identifying gang members.

However, Mother Jones‘ reporting suggests that the Trump administration is detaining people without due process on the flimsiest evidence, including their tattoos.

Since March, Donald Trump has been using the Alien Enemies Act to give himself the power to send migrants to El Salvador under the loosest of suspicion that they’re connected to Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that the president has designated as a “global terrorist group.” Despite claiming to have a strict vetting process of identifying alleged TdA members, the Trump administration has provided little to no evidence that this is the case. As my colleagues Noah Lanard and Isabela Dias reported,

When pressed on the criteria used for their identification, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt pointed to unspecified “intelligence” deployed to arrest the Venezuelans she has referred to as “heinous monsters.” Trump’s border czar Tom Homan has insisted—without providing specific details—that the public should trust ICE to have correctly targeted the Venezuelans based on “criminal investigations,” social media posts, and surveillance.

The administration’s Supreme Court filing likewise does little to provide evidence of careful vetting, simply describing the process as “weeks of work by President Trump and his cabinet.”

Lanard and Dias spoke with the families, friends, and lawyers of 10 men detained in El Salvador by the Trump administration, all of them contesting that their loved ones were profiled based on their tattoos and have no connection with gang or terrorist activity. As Lanard and Dias report:

The families have substantiated those assertions to Mother Jones, including—in many cases—by providing official documents attesting to their relatives’ lack of criminal histories in Venezuela. Such evidence might have persuaded US judges that the men were not part of any criminal organization had the Trump administration not deliberately deprived them of due process.

One of these men is Frizgeralth de Jesus Cornejo, a baker who has a tattoo of an autism awareness ribbon dedicated to his 15-year-old brother.

“I never imagined being imprisoned just for getting a tattoo,” Cornejo wrote. “I never imagined being separated from my family. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, not even my worst enemy if I had one. It’s horrible, it’s mental torture every day.”

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“Spiraling Deeper and Deeper Into Danger”: RFK Jr. Forces Out Top Vaccine Official

Robert F. Kennedy’s Jr. war on vaccines just landed another major blow as the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services successfully forced one of the nation’s top vaccine officials out of his position.

Dr. Peter Marks, who was given the choice by HHS officials to either be fired or step down as the director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, announced his resignation on Friday.

“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Marks reportedly wrote in his letter of resignation. He added that leaving his position was a “weight lifted from me” as working in this environment “was spiraling deeper and deeper into danger.”

For nearly a decade, Marks led the FDA’s regulation of vaccines, including playing an instrumental role in the development of the COVID-19 vaccine. So it should come as no surprise that his presence would cause conflict with the starkly anti-vaccine head of the HHS.

In response to Marks’ departure, an HHS official said in a statement, “If Peter Marks does not want to get behind restoring science to its golden standard and promoting radical transparency, then he has no place at FDA under the strong leadership of secretary Kennedy.”

This news comes as Kennedy plans to lay off thousands of HHS employees, while hiring his own fleet of anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists. According to several reports, Kennedy recently tapped David Geier, a discredited vaccine skeptic, to look into the long debunked scientific link between vaccines and autism.

As the New York Times reports, experts said appointing Geier to work on a study of vaccine safety is “like having a basketball referee show up in one team’s jersey.”

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Crypto: The Currency of the (Uninhabitable) Future

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

Once upon a time, not long ago, Elon Musk was worried sick about climate change. Stopping it became an overarching career mission, reflected in both his business decisions and everyday actions. He gave the electric vehicle industry a jolt after taking over Tesla Motors in 2004. He joined President Donald Trump’s first business advisory council in 2017, then resigned in protest when Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement. He directed Tesla to buy up $1 billion worth of Bitcoin in 2021 and accept the cryptocurrency in formal transactions, only to backtrack when he remembered that Bitcoin mining is, by design, a heavily energy-intensive process that requires masses of fossil fuel­–powered computer servers to run at all times. It was such a notorious moment in the crypto world that one speaker led “FUCK ELON” chants during that year’s Bitcoin conference.

What a remarkable thing, then, for Musk to embrace Trump more closely than ever as the reelected president decorates his administration with oil-industry shills and with crypto insiders, whose energy-intensive mining rigs and data centers make them something of a natural complement to the fossil fuel industry’s expansionist goals.

But of course, it tracks with his general shifts in ideology and mission since the COVID era. Scientific nerdery gave way to virus conspiracies; climate change took a back seat to his longtime A.I. fears as his former nonprofit, OpenAI, achieved staggering successes; Tesla’s dangerous self-driving cars and dubious robotics earned priority over the electrification of transport. Musk has been happy to re-embrace Bitcoin because incorporating the currency into Tesla’s assets and accounting has allowed him to artificially boost the company’s profit reports and keep investors happy. The Earth is one thing, but revenue is another.

The core issue can be boiled down to the fact that Bitcoin mining is—to put it lightly—really, really, really bad for the environment. This is primarily due to a system it relies on called “proof of work.” Take the computer servers with access to online blockchain protocols, set them up with high-efficiency chips (like those highly coveted GPUs) that can transmit more computing power at a faster rate, and run those servers 24/7 to solve the cryptographic puzzles required to unlock new Bitcoins. To replicate this operation at scale requires whole data centers’ worth of GPUs, which produce audible noise and require a lot of water to keep cool. A 2024 paper published in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability found that the water usage of US Bitcoin miners alone is as much as the average yearly water consumption of 300,000 US households. On top of that, a single Bitcoin transaction uses enough water to fill a swimming pool.

Much of the power used to keep these things running is sourced from fossil fuels, with all the attendant emissions. It’s been estimated that worldwide Bitcoin mining and transactions have consumed more power than countries like Finland each year. It’s worrying enough that even Republican lawmakers in crypto-friendly red states, like Arkansas, have passed bills to regulate the digital-asset industry’s noise and air pollution. (Those efforts might be undercut should Trump carry through with an ill-advised campaign promise to ensure all Bitcoin is mined within US borders only. Ironically, however, his trade war with China has prevented American Bitcoin miners from securing needed equipment.)

The techno-centric vision for Trump 2.0 was laid out in various written screeds from Musk’s Silicon Valley friends at Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital hydra (and crypto funder) whose namesake founders became enthusiastic Trump converts and staffers this election cycle. Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” insisted upon building out energy “abundance” instead of cutting back on any fossil-fuel use; Ben Horowitz’s “Politics and the Future” blog announcement pledged his support for any political candidate who believed, like he did, that crypto “will create a fairer, more inclusive economy”; the duo’s co-written “Little Tech Agenda” all but declared war against the regulatory state in the wake of Biden administration attempts to impose tighter crypto regulations.

With Andreessen himself having joined Musk in keenly advising Trump throughout the presidential transition, the new administration has gotten to work implementing all facets of the Andreessen Horowitz blueprint—and yes, the crypto and energy policies are not incidental, because top-down climate denial is hardly irrelevant to their goals. The Securities and Exchange Commission, now a far more crypto-friendly agency under Trump, has also scrapped a Biden-era requirement for large companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions in depth. The president has once again withdrawn the US from the Paris Agreement, with no objection from Musk this round. In fact, his already-infamous Department of Governmental Efficiency has been targeting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency for data purges, grant freezes, and mass firings. It’s not a coincidence that Musk is doing this under the aegis of a fake “department” that’s named for the Dogecoin cryptocurrency and was staffed with Marc Andreessen’s help.

(Also not a coincidence: that the primary zero-carbon energy source the new Department of Energy is interested in expanding is nuclear power, a fixation of both Andreessen’s and Horowitz’s. Why is that? Well, it’s a good way to thumb their noses at misguided environmentalists who protested fission plants after the Three Mile Island meltdown. Also, they want more data and mining centers to be powered by nuclear power specifically.)

While purges of NOAA and EPA data are troubling for many reasons, one of the biggest is that they’ve censored key resources for tracking American energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

While purges of NOAA and EPA data are troubling for many reasons, one of the biggest is that they’ve censored key resources for tracking American energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Those have been especially useful markers for independent researchers surveying and tracking how America utilizes its electricity, both dirty and clean. There’s Digiconomist, the much-cited project from Dutch economist Alex de Vries, that keeps a public monitor of Bitcoin mining’s environmental and emissions impacts. There’s also the fact that this data affects the pricing and regulation of agricultural commodities—and since Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will be considered commodities like gold and silver, it will be the agriculture-focused members of Congress who lead legislative oversight. What could go wrong?

Digital-asset evangelists are especially sensitive to the climate critiques, which popped up time and again during the pandemic-era crypto bubble as myriad celebrities—even the nominally environmentalist ones—got in on the grift. Some crypto ventures, like the alternative currency and blockchain Ethereum, shifted to coin-mining methods that were far less energy-intensive.

But Bitcoin truthers and like-minded users are dedicated to their all-systems-go, all-the-time approach. Why should the government make it easier for anyone to scrutinize and call out their electricity needs? And why should banks and other firms express any skepticism over cryptocurrency’s actual value, or take the time to meet their climate and environmental goals, when they could just be forced to mine this stuff instead? Trump himself has been cozying up to the stuff in increasingly concerning ways, from a disastrous meme currency to a coin-hoarding private venture to the establishment of a crypto arm for his Truth Social network, dedicated data centers, and all. No better way to ensure regulatory capture than to grant the president his own funny money.
To that end, why should the government do anything to oppose the “financial innovation” tech in which some powerful VCs just so happen to have staked millions of dollars? If the consequence happens to be a hotter, less-inhabitable Earth, so be it. At least the crypto mavens will have their digital riches to isolate them from the real-world consequences of these decisions.

True believers in crypto have often championed it as the answer to so many of our financial, political, and even cultural woes. It’s decentralized, giving money and power back to the people without having to rely on evil banks or governments. It allows anyone to keep their money safe from inflation and the finicky, unpredictable economy. So what if it takes a few million gallons of water and untold amounts of greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere each year?

This is the currency of the future. It’s just too bad that there might not be a habitable future to spend it in.

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Trump’s Secret Police Are Stalking More and More Students

On Tuesday afternoon, a federal judge in New York’s Northern District heard opening arguments in the case of Momodou Taal v. Trump. Neither party was present in the courtroom—in large part because Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has been trying to find Taal for days, reportedly staking out his home and entering his university’s campus.

Taal, a British-Gambian doctoral student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, sued the administration on February 15 to challenge Trump’s executive orders curtailing free speech and seeking to deport pro-Palestinian activists, which have been paired with a wave of attacks by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers—in some cases masked and hooded—on graduate and undergraduate students.

At 12:52 a.m. on Friday—within five days of Taal’s lawsuit—Taal’s lawyers received an email “inviting” their client to “surrender to ICE custody.” At 7:00 p.m. the following day, Trump’s lawyers filed a brief informing Taal that the State Department had already revoked his visa, without his knowledge, on March 14—the day before Taal filed his lawsuit. Days later, ICE agents arrived on Cornell’s campus attempting to find and seize him.

Over the past two weeks, the Trump administration has targeted at least eight foreign academics in America for deportation, often sending officers to snatch them off the street or in their homes, retroactively changing what they’re charged with, and shipping them halfway across the country, far from their families lawyers—increasingly in apparent defiance of court orders against their rendition. Members of the commentariat like venture capitalist Paul Graham have mused that “the students ICE is disappearing seem such a random selection.”

But experts and people close to the cases say it’s not random at all. The scholars in question are immigrant academics—Gambian, Palestinian, Korean, and Turkish—targeted for pro-Palestinian social media posts, op-eds, and participation in last year’s campus-based opposition to the continuing slaughter in Gaza.

Momodou Taal knew this was coming for months. “Given my public exposure, if he were to deport student protesters, I think I would be at the top of the list as a target,” he told Mother Jones in January. But, Taal said in a recent Intercept podcast appearance, his personal stakes pale in comparison to those of Palestinians in Gaza, where the number of known dead has passed 50,000—as the US continues shipping bombs and warplanes to Israel, and as Israeli officials threaten a full-scale military takeover of the territory, “I know it’s a very frightening moment,” Taal said in that Intercept appearance,“but for me, this is the time to double down.”

Taal’s lawsuit, filed with fellow Cornell doctoral student Sriram Parasuram and Mukoma Wa Ngũgĩ, a Cornell literature professor, asserts that Trump’s late January executive orders cracking down on campus speech violate both Taal’s right to political expression and the rights of those around him to hear it.

“It’s quite calculated and deliberate,” Taal told me on Thursday.

Suing the president “is the only form of redress many of us have, in this moment, as a form of protection.”

ICE agents, usually plainclothed and sometimes masked, are accosting students in the streets, using what even former House Rep. Ron Paul calls “Gestapo” tactics.

Trump’s executive orders conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, Taal said, have “clearly placed a target upon many people’s backs.” Taal recommends that students in his situation “lawyer up”—because the Trump administration, he said, is not acting alone: right-wing groups such as Canary Mission, an online doxxing platform that collects the personal information of anti-Zionist students and professors, have claimed credit for some students’ detentions.

Suing the president, Taal said, “is the only form of redress many of us have, in this moment, as a form of protection.” Yunseo Chung, a Korean undergraduate at Columbia University who has been a legal permanent resident of the US since she was seven years old, filed suit on Monday for a temporary restraining order to prevent her deportation. Her case went to court on the same day as Taal’s, and her order was quickly granted; Taal’s own request for a temporary restraining order was deniedby a New Jersey judge a day after it was filed.

“I think the stakes in all these cases are the same,” said Abed Ayoub, the executive director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), whose lawyers are representing Taal. While each case has its nuances—some students have been detained, others have not; some are on green cards, others on visas—“what we’re seeing is an attack on the First Amendment rights of folks in this country to express themselves,” Ayoub said.

Chung’s suit accuses the Trump administration of a “larger pattern of attempted US government repression of constitutionally protected protest activity and other forms of speech,” and asserts that the federal government aims to “retaliate against and punish noncitizens like Ms. Chung for their participation in protests.” Taal’s asserts that Trump’s executive orders prohibit noncitizens from “engaging in constitutionally protected speech” that the Trump administration “may subjectively interpret as expressing a ‘hostile attitude” to its interests by deploying the threat of deportation.

That threat, Taal says, casts a frighteningly broad net. “It’s important that people recognize that it could be anyone, and that they need to rise up, and escalate, and refuse this to be normalized,” Taal said Thursday.

Chung and Taal are now two of many. Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of Palestinian nationality, and a Columbia graduate student until December of last year, is also suing the president for the right to have his immigration case heard near his home in New York; he was arrested by ICE at his Manhattan residence on March 8 and, after initially being imprisoned in a New Jersey immigration detention facility, was remanded to an ICE “processing center” in Louisiana, where he is still being held. His fellow Columbia graduate student, Ranjani Srinivasan, fled the US for India on March 11 after ICE came knocking at her door. International students and professors Badar Khan Suri of Georgetown University in Washington, DC, Rasha Alawieh of Brown University in Rhode Island, Alireza Doroudi of the University of Alabama (who has not publicly engaged in pro-Palestine activism), and Rumeysa Ozturk of Tufts University in Massachusetts have also been seized in the past two weeks.

Chilling footage of Ozturk’s arrest swept the internet Thursday: six masked individuals in civilian clothes surrounded the graduate student on a sidewalk in Somerville.

“Hey ma’am,” one said, and grabbed Ozturk’s wrists. She screamed as several others surrounded her.

“It’s important that people recognize that it could be anyone, and that they need to rise up, and escalate, and refuse this to be normalized.”

“Can I just call the police?” Ozturk asked in the surveillance video. “We are the police,” one masked, hooded person responded. They handcuffed her and dragged her away.

In a Thursday press conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended Ozturk’s abduction. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa,” he told reporters Thursday. Ozturk’s “lunatic” behavior appears to consist only of co-authoring one student newspaper op-ed, exactly one year before she was detained, asking her university to acknowledge a student government resolution calling for divestment from Israel. She has not been charged with any offense, but was painted by Rubio as “a social activist that tears up our university campuses”—and was forcibly disappeared.

Rubio’s State Department, meanwhile, has issued new guidance calling for extensive screening of student visa applicants’ social media for any posts that “demonstrate a degree of approval” of what it calls “terrorist activity.”

Ayoub, of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, says the recent spate of ICE abductions echoes the Nixon era: In 1972, the Nixon White House deployed an extensive surveillance program against Arab communities in the United States—scrutinizing the visa status of anyone who appeared to have an Arabic last name—ostensibly to screen out terrorists.

In practice, Ayoub said, the policy inevitably led to unjust detainments, deportations, and even disappearances: “A number of our community members just disappeared,” he said. “There was no social media, and nobody walked around with a cell phone. So people just disappeared, and you wouldn’t hear from them until six, seven months later.” More than 150,000 people were investigated.

“Before all of this started,” Ayoub said, “I was warning people that we will see the same: people just picked up and moved to a location where we’re not going to hear from them, because this is the practice of what happened before.”

Then, as now, he said, those in power were “banking on not everybody being upset, on people buying into the ‘threat to national security’ type of language.” But it’s no longer as easy for authorities to move in darkness; this time, people are organizing. The same day that footage of Ozturk’s arrest was released, more than one thousand people rallied on her behalf in Somerville, and protests in support of Mahmoud Khalil have been taking place across the country since his arrest almost three weeks ago.

The Trump administration, Ayoub said, is “betting on the idea that not many are going to come out and defend the students, or support the students, or defend their right to express their opinions in this country. But that, I think, is where they’re mistaken.”

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Marco Rubio Is Quite Chuffed

Amid intense outrage over the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts student who was ambushed and detained by plainclothes federal immigration officers this week, Marco Rubio appeared gratified.

“We revoked her visa, it’s an F-1 visa, I believe,” the secretary of State told reporters at a press conference in Guyana on Thursday when asked about the arrest. “We revoked it and I’ll tell you why.”

“If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student,” Rubio continued with increasing conviction, “and you tell us that the reason you are coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we are not going to give you a visa.”

“Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas,” he added, estimating that as many as 300 people have similarly had their visas revoked as the Trump administration pursues its dramatic crackdown on free speech.

Yet nowhere in his remarks did Rubio provide evidence that Ozturk—who was on her way to break the Ramadan fast when federal agents in face masks arrested her in broad daylight—participated in the types of destructive behavior Rubio outlined as grounds for deportation. Instead, as many have now reported, Ozturk was the co-author of a 2024 opinion piece in a student newspaper criticizing Tufts’ handling of student demands to divest from companies with ties to Israel. A Fox News description of the same op-ed even appeared to acknowledge the scant evidence that Ozturk was the kind of trouble-making activist characterized by Rubio: “While her op-ed never mentioned support for Hamas, the terrorist network, it did call on the university to divest from companies,” the Fox story noted.

In a court filing, Ozturk’s attorneys noted that she has been criticized by Canary Mission, a website documenting individuals it deems as holding hateful views toward Israel. The site, which focuses on students and professors, has been referenced in multiple court cases related to campus protests over Gaza. As Ozturk’s own lawsuit notes:

“In February 2025, the website Canary Mission published a profile on Rumeysa, including her photograph, claiming she “engaged in anti-Israel activism in March 2024….” The profile describes Rumeysa as “a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.” Its sole support for the contention that Rümeysa “engaged in anti-Israel activism” was a link and screenshots of the March 2024 opinion piece.

The lawsuit also cited Rubio’s push as a US senator to punish pro-Palestinian activists protesting Israel’s devastation of Gaza. Here he was in 2023, calling on then-President Joe Biden to revoke visas and initiate deportation proceedings for foreign nationals who were supposedly “supporting Hamas.”

“You are not even American,” he said from the Senate floor. “You’re a foreign national. You’re here because we gave you a visa to be here temporarily, and now you’re out there defending and supporting Hamas, a terrorist organization? You need to go.”

That language eerily echoes the rhetoric Rubio used Thursday, as he once again seemed to imagine himself chastising protesters face-to-face: “Don’t come here. If you’re going to do that, go somewhere else. Don’t come here.”

Now, as Trump’s secretary of State, Rubio is far better positioned to convince the president to embrace his undemocratic approach to the country’s visa process. That access to power doesn’t seem to have convinced him to stop talking about protesters like a puffed-up bully at the playground.

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RFK Jr. Moves to Close Administration For Community Living

On Thursday, the federal Department of Health and Human Services moved, through a department-wide restructuring order, to eliminate the Administration for Community Living (ACL), a subsidiary established in 2012 to support disabled and aging people—part of a broader series of cuts that will see the firing of some 10,000 HHS staff. HHS’ press release on the restructuring claims that ACL’s responsibilities will be redesignated elsewhere within the department, which has yet to issue further details or clarify its plans. An unknown number of the administration’s workers will also be laid off.

Jill Jacobs, a Biden-era commissioner of ACL’s Administration on Disabilities, was shocked to hear the news. “It’s not something that’s been on anyone’s radar, not a conversation that anyone’s been having,” said Jacobs, who is now the executive director of the National Association of Councils on Developmental Disabilities.

“Where exactly are they going to go? Who is going to implement [it]? Is this the first step in cutting further programs?”

Mia Ives-Rublee, senior director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the nonpartisan Center for American Progress, believes that the move “shows that this administration is not committed to community living and the Americans with Disabilities Act.”

The decision by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s HHS is only the latest Trump administration action to bring harm to disabled people. Disability experts I spoke to expressed that the decision reflected a lack of awareness of the Administration for Community Living’s crucial role for disabled and aging Americans. That may not be surprising given the department’s current leadership; Kennedy mainly talks about disability in the context of conspiracy theories that vaccines cause autism in children. Now, disabled people worried about cuts to their Medicaid coverage will also have to worry whether the assistance they receive through independent living centers will continue.

“There’s nothing in here that explains how they are going to continue implementing these programs,” said Alison Barkoff, ACL’s acting administrator and assistant secretary for aging for most of the Biden administration. “Where exactly are they going to go? Who is the staff that’s going to implement them? Is this the first step in cutting further programs?”

A central part of ACL’s purpose has been oversight of state protection and advocacy agencies for disabled people, providing grants for approved independent living centers, support for employment programs for disabled people, and assistance with adult protective services—all with the goal of helping disabled and aging people live successfully within their communities, rather than in institutions.

“The real concern,” Barkoff says, “is that if ACL and its programs are spread across the [HHS] department, we will see more people forced into institutional settings, out of their own homes, out of their own communities.” A letter from the co-chairs of the Disability and Aging Collaborative, which consists of 62 member organizations that focus at least in part on disability and aging, cautions that the changes could result in “homelessness and long-lasting economic impacts.”

The Administration for Community Living was designed for “bringing programs together to make sure that there were efficiencies and synergies between aging and disability networks,” said Barkoff, now director of George Washington University’s health law and policy program. To do so, ACL coordinates with other HHS agencies like the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in areas like Home and Community-Based Services, and externally, with agencies like the Department of Transportation. ACL’s own workforce, Jacobs said, “is comprised of people with disabilities and older Americans.”

The ACL had not been a notable target of the Republicans before Thursday. On Wednesday, Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) even cosponsored a bipartisan bill aiming to require ACL “to provide peer support services for children, grandparents, and caregivers impacted by the opioid crisis.”

There are “very economically sound reasons for ACL to continue to exist.”

Even Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for an arch-conservative remaking of the federal government—which the Trump administration has consistently followed—counted on ACL to remain in place: it proposes distributing funds provided by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act through the agency. Now that President Donald Trump has started hollowing out the federal Department of Education with an eye to its abolition, Ives-Rublee and Jacobs want to know how the federal government will continue to serve disabled students. “How are they going to do that,” Ives-Rublee said, “when they basically destroyed ACL?”

But Ives-Rublee isn’t convinced that the Trump administration can necessarily make good on its plan. “It’s going to be very, very important for community members to come together and start filing lawsuits,” she said, “because this is incredibly illegal—to be reducing staff and reducing the ability for individuals with disabilities to receive services.”

While the HHS cuts, and the Trump administration’s wider slashing of federal agencies and services, are nominally about saving money, Jacobs doesn’t believe that eliminating the Administration for Community Living—which helps keep people out of nursing homes—will do so. “Community living costs our taxpayers a third of what it costs for people to live in institutional settings,” Jacobs said. “There are very economically sound reasons for ACL to continue to exist.”

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Greenland’s Elections This Month Weren’t About Trump. They Were Mostly About Fish.

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

Last week, Greenlanders trudged through snow and ice to cast ballots in their most closely watched parliamentary elections in modern history—possibly ever.

Just two months earlier, Donald Trump had returned to power, vowing to achieve what American presidents had tried and failed to do before: bring the world’s largest island under Washington’s direct control. Since World War II, the United States has boasted a large security presence in the autonomous Arctic territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. During a speech before Congress a week before the March 11 election, Trump repeated his offer for Greenlanders to join the United States but vowed to take the island “one way or the other.”

Greenlandic voters overwhelmingly rejected the invitation. While virtually all major parties support independence from Denmark, the party that won the most seats in the legislature backs a slow separation from the Nordic nation, which provides the bulk of Greenland’s public funding.

More than anything, however, the election came down to fish.

The incumbent left-wing government placed new rules on who could obtain fishing permits. To better spread the wealth from the biggest industry among the island’s roughly 56,000 people, the government wanted to redistribute quotas to a greater number of fishermen over the next 10 years. The new quota system had yet to come into effect. But regulators pursued a strict methodology that barred members of the same family from obtaining competing permits. If one fisherman loaned money to another for a boat, for example, the two would count as a single unit under the new quota system.

That created problems, according to Christian Keldsen, director of the Greenland Business Association, the largest industry group on the island. “With the money I may have made in the industry, if I wanted to use that to finance others downstream, that would not be possible going forward,” he told me.

That made the political messaging from the pro-business Demokraatit party—whose platform calls for maximizing “personal freedom” and ensuring that the public sectors “never stand in the way of” private enterprise—appealing to voters.

In its manifesto, the center-right party—known as the Democrats—said the fisheries law will make the industry “less efficient.”

“The sad truth is that the new fisheries law will harm the earnings of individual fishermen overall, while the economy will also deteriorate,” the document reads. “This means that there will be less money to improve the healthcare system. Less money to raise the level of primary schools. Less money to ensure better daycare institutions. Less money for the elderly. Less money for sports. In short; less money to run the country in the best possible way.”

The Democrats gained seven seats in Greenland’s single-chamber legislature, the Inatsisartut, seizing roughly one-third of the 31-seat parliament.

Keldsen said the party won a clear mandate to reform the fisheries law. What the new government does besides that depends largely on which party the Democrats form a coalition with.

The centrist party Naleraq, which is more pro-American and advocates the fastest-possible pathway to independence from Denmark, doubled its share of the parliament to eight seats, vaulting the party into second place.

“If you look at the Democrats, they focused on things that are important to people—housing, health care, education and growing the economy,” said Mads Qvist Frederiksen, the executive director of the Arctic Economic Council, a regional business group that includes Greenlandic industry.

“Independence from Denmark and Donald Trump did not take up a lot of the campaign,” he told me by phone. “But for Naleraq, it did.”

The party managed to secure most of the votes in the less populous northern reaches of Greenland, where its populist message played better than in the more populous, cosmopolitan and industrialized south. Given its strength in the new parliament, it’s a natural opposition party.

That makes an alliance between the Democrats and the left-wing Inuit Ataqatigiit party, which controlled the outgoing government, more likely. Another potential coalition partner may be the pro-Denmark Atassut party, which came in fifth place.

But Keldsen warned that the Democrats are “fairly open” to “all scenarios.”

“If you take the Naleraq situation, they’re more aligned on business, but they stand far from each other on sovereignty,” he said. “With the IA, they’re very close on sovereignty, but very far apart on business.”

Siumut—a center-left party that held the junior role in the outgoing governing coalition—fell from second to fourth place this time, likely because once-loyal voters affected by the fisheries law jumped ship to the Democrats this time. That could make a tie-up with the Democrats harder.

The one thing uniting all parties: Opposition to becoming part of the United States.

In a joint statement issued on March 13, two days after the election, the heads of all five parties condemned Trump’s “repeated statements about annexation and control of Greenland.”

“As party chairmen, we find this behavior unacceptable to friends and allies in a defense alliance,” they wrote.

It’s not hard to see why. Survey data on public opinion in Greenland was scarce ahead of the election. But 85 percent of Greenlanders opposed joining the US in a poll taken in January, while just 56 percent backed independence.

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“A Sicker America”: RFK Jr.’s HHS Will Lay Off 10,000 Staff

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s remaking of the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) entered a new phase on Thursday, when officials announced that the department’s workforce would shrink by another 10,000 staff to comply with President Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s orders to drastically shrink the federal government.

HHS announced that the “dramatic restructuring” of the agency will include cuts to offices including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Combined with HHS’s other efforts to reduce its workforce—the buyout offers it recently made to employees and its January “fork in the road email” that offered federal workers eight months’ pay to resign—the department’s overall workforce will go from 82,000 to 62,000 full-time employees, a reduction of nearly 25 percent. In a six-minute video posted to X detailing the plans, Kennedy acknowledged that the cuts will bring about “a painful period for HHS.”

We are streamlining HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective. We will eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments, while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for a Healthy America or AHA. This… pic.twitter.com/BlQWUpK3u7

— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) March 27, 2025

The agency offered some details on the specific offices that will see cuts, including the NIH, which will lose about 1,200 employees; the FDA, which will lose about 3,500 employees, which HHS claims “will not affect drug, medical device, or food reviewers, nor will it impact inspectors”; the CMS, which will lose about 300 employees, which the agency says “will not impact Medicare and Medicaid services”; and the CDC, which will lose about 2,400.

HHS’ 28 divisions will be reduced to 15, to include a new division called the Administration for a Healthy America, which “will centralize core functions such as Human Resources, Information Technology, Procurement, External Affairs, and Policy,” according to the HHS news release; that office will also now include the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), which HHS says “will break down artificial divisions between similar programs.”

The press release from HHS also announced the dismantling of the Administration for Community Living, which oversees vital programs and services for disabled and aging people. It includes independent living centers and protection and advocacy agencies, which were established by Congress and perform important tasks such as investigating claims of abuse in group homes for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities; in 2022, ACL also unveiled a National Strategy to Support Family Caregivers. In a LinkedIn post, former ACL acting administrator and Assistant Secretary for Aging Alison Barkoff said that ACL “has been incredibl[y] effective, with lean staffing and programs with incredible returns on investments.” Its dismantling, Barkoff wrote, was “yet another” move that hurt disabled and older adults, in addition to ongoing attacks on Medicaid and an executive order hollowing out the federal Department of Education as a prelude to abolishing it altogether.

While the press release said that programs under ACL will be reorganized, there will likely be disruptions along the way. “We are deeply concerned that these HHS organizational changes and workforce reductions may undermine the momentum and implementation of our nation’s first-ever National Strategy to Support Family Caregivers,” said Jason Resendez, President and CEO of the National Alliance for Caregiving, in a press release.

HHS will also shutter five of its regional offices, which amount to half of the total.It is not immediately clear how this will affect the agency’s return-to-office mandate, which required employees within 50 miles of an HHS office to begin working in-person five days a week; those who live more than 50 miles from an HHS building have been ordered to report to any federal office building—which, as previously reported, led federal workers to question how offices would manage the influx of in-person employees.

Spokespeople for HHS did not immediately respond to specific questions from Mother Jones about which regional offices would close, the 13 specific divisions that will be consolidated, and how many, if any, employees of the ACL would lose their jobs.

The department claims that, in total, the measures will save the agency $1.8 billion annually. The agency said it would also appoint a new Assistant Secretary for Enforcement “to combat waste, fraud, and abuse in federal health programs.”

“Over time, bureaucracies like HHS become wasteful and inefficient even when most of their staff are dedicated and competent civil servants,” Kennedy said in a statement. “This overhaul will be a win-win for taxpayers and for those that HHS serves.”

Some public health experts, though, believe otherwise.

Dr. Tom Frieden, former CDC director under President Obama, said in a post on X: “CDC has been the flagship of public health for generations, pursuing its core mission of saving lives and protecting people from health threats of all kinds. A weaker CDC means a sicker America.”

Jill Rosenthal, director of public health policy at the nonpartisan Center for American Progress, said in a statement: “This is not ‘streamlining’ work—it’s slashing what Americans across the country rely on to keep them, their families, and their communities healthy. This move to gut HHS will bring to a screeching halt crucial efforts to ensure Americans that our food is safe, drugs and medical devices are up to standards, our family members can access needed health services, and our communities are protected from health emergencies.”

Some also find it hard to believe that the cuts will not affect the work of the targeted offices. “I worry how losing 3,500 people at the FDA will ensure drug, medical devices, and food are still inspected and approved efficiently,” one CDC researcher told us. “Those function areas were already understaffed,” she said, adding that it was also unclear how cuts to the FDA would help achieve HHS’ new stated goals to tackle “chronic illness by focusing on safe, wholesome food, clean water, and the elimination of environmental toxins.”

“I just don’t see how things can operate the way they are now with 10-20,000 less people,” said an employee of the Administration for Children and Families.

An NIH employee said he saw the news as proof that “RFK Jr. is carrying out the marching orders of President Musk with total disregard for how these ‘changes’ will impact public health and the public health system.”

“He’s not a doctor. He’s not a scientist,” the NIH employee said of the HHS head. “In fact, just the opposite. He’s a conspiracy theorist.”

“This Make America Healthy Again nonsense will do just the opposite of what they’re claiming it will do,” he added. “It will make us sicker. Mentally and physically.”

Multiple HHS employees told us on Thursday morning that they had received no internal announcement of, nor further information on, the planned cuts, and had instead learned about them from the news media. Due to the lack of detail on which employees would lose their jobs, according to those staffers, the potential impacts of the cuts on public health and the agency’s mission were still impossible to determine. Several said they expected to receive more information on Friday about how their offices would be affected by the changes.

An NIH scientific review officer said the lack of internal communication was “part of why we have been mired in such uncertainty and chaos.”

“We often learn [about changes] from outside sources,” like the media or former colleagues, she said. She characterized the lack of communication as “yet another move that feels designed to be demoralizing and stressful for the workforce.”

“It’s not clear what our leadership knows, or if they have been consulted,” she added. “Without that, it’s difficult to imagine changes being effective and efficient and in service of our mission.”

Even without knowing whether they will be impacted, employees are bracing for the worst. “The mood is pretty awful,” another ACF worker said. “Supervisors told us we could go home if we needed to.”

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“The Opposite of Efficiency”: DOGE’s Credit Card Crackdown Is Making Research Slower, Harder, and Worse

An employee at one government-run national research lab spent half a day this week cancelling orders for equipment—time that, as a technician, he could have spent running experiments.

That worker is one of many whose “PCard,” or purchasing card, will be revoked at the end of the month—part of an internal order by the Department of Energy to “significantly” reduce the number of such cardholders across the system. Effectively an official credit or debit card, PCards are used by the national laboratories, which conduct research on a wide range of scientific and technical subjects ranging from environmental management to national security, to save valuable time and streamline transactions. But to the Trump administration, the cards are further evidence that there’s an epidemic of overspending on science—so they’re on the DOGE chopping block, whatever the consequences.

The technician’s name and the laboratory employing him have been withheld to ensure his safety. He is passionate about the work he does in the field of research: “things [that] have benefited us so much over the years.” He received notice via email, which Mother Jones has reviewed, citing the upcoming changes.

The email conceded that the decrease in PCard holders is “significant” and listed the remaining employees authorized to use the cards. While the email said more announcements would be coming, there was no acknowledgement of how the changes would disrupt workflows or research.

This is not the first time the administration has targeted government cards. At the end of February, the Trump administration ordered all credit cards frozen by March 26th in his “Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Cost Efficiency Initiative” executive order. The order, which was not cited in the Department of Energy email correspondence reviewed, excludes disaster relief or other critical services as determined by the agency head. The National Park Service and parts of the Pentagon were already hit with $1 PCard limits.

Rather than yielding savings, suspending the cards seems to have already cost both time and efficiency on researchers’ part: Some orders the technician had already made—to purchase materials required for ongoing experiments—wouldn’t have been charged for several weeks, forcing him to cancel them so they wouldn’t charge a card that would be defunct.

That just kicks the can down the road: one of the remaining or new cardholders will have to refile the orders. Some have little to no experience with the process, says the technician: “We may eventually get what we need, but it’s just going to push everything back. There’s going to be a lot of delays.”

That felt, he said, like the “opposite of efficiency.” There are already processes in place—not just in that lab, but everywhere government purchasing cards are used—to ensure that there isn’t fraud or misuse of funds. Every purchase requires a paper trail that is reviewed. “If there’s even something slightly off, the accounting department is going to contact me back,” the technician explains.

To the technician blowing the whistle on the changes, it looks more like a method to limit and throw up hurdles to scientific research, which has been a general goal of the Trump administration. He points out that the research funding has already been allocated—the cards do not, in fact, draw on some kind of unchecked scientific slush fund.

“This attack on science and research is not just going to just hinder us from advancing,” the technician said, “but actually set us back.” In that sense, the administration is achieving its goal: there is “apprehension” in the lab these days, he says, and colleagues he works with are fairly certain their contracts will not be renewed.

The policy is only succeeding in “creating a bottleneck,” the technician laments. “We’re going from a five-lane highway down to a two-lane highway.” He pauses. “I should say, two lanes [as in] one way in each direction.”

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In Good Climate News, a Federal Judge Upholds NYC’s Ban on Gas in New Buildings

Cities looking to eliminate fossil fuels in buildings have notched a decisive court victory. Last week, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by plumbing and building trade groups against a New York City ban on natural gas in new buildings. The decision is the first to explicitly disagree with a previous ruling that struck down Berkeley, California’s first-in-the-nation gas ban. That order, issued by the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in 2023 and upheld again last year, prompted cities across the country to withdraw or delay laws modeled after the Berkeley ordinance.

While New York City’s law functions differently from Berkeley’s, legal experts say that this month’s decision provides strong legal footing for all types of local policies to phase out gas in buildings—and could encourage cities to once again take ambitious action.

“This ruling demonstrates that there’s absolutely no reason to interpret the Berkeley decision so broadly.”

“It’s a clear win in that regard, because the 9th Circuit decision has had a really chilling effect on local governments,” said Amy Turner, director of the Cities Climate Law Initiative at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “Now there’s something else to point to, and a good reason for hope for local governments that may have back-burnered their building electrification plans to bring those to the forefront again.”

In 2021, New York City adopted Local Law 154, which sets an air emissions limit for indoor combustion of fuels within new buildings. Under the law, the burning of “any substance that emits 25 kilograms or more of carbon dioxide per million British thermal units of energy” is prohibited. That standard effectively bans gas-burning stoves, furnaces, and water heaters, and any other fossil-fuel powered appliances. Instead, real estate developers have to install electric appliances like induction stoves and heat pumps. The policy went into effect in 2024 for buildings under seven stories, and will apply to taller buildings starting in 2027.

Berkeley’s law, on the other hand, banned the installation of gas piping in new construction. The first-of-its-kind policy was passed in 2019 and inspired nearly a hundred local governments across the country to introduce similar laws. But the ordinance quickly faced a lawsuit by the California Restaurant Association, which argued that gas stoves were essential for the food service industry. In April 2023, the 9th Circuit court ruled in favor of the restaurant industry, holding that federal energy efficiency standards preempted Berkeley’s policy.

In January 2024, a petition by the city of Berkeley to rehear the case on the 9th Circuit was denied. The denial included a detailed dissent by eight of the 29 judges on the 9th Circuit, who argued that the court’s ruling had been decided “erroneously” and “urge[d] any future court” considering the same argument “not to repeat the panel opinion’s mistakes.” Writing a dissent at all is unusual for an action as procedural as denying a rehearing, Turner noted. “It was clearly drafted to give a road map to other courts to find differently than the 9th Circuit did.”

One year later, that’s exactly what happened. In the New York City lawsuit, building industry groups and a union whose members work on gas infrastructure used the same logic that prevailed in the Berkeley case, arguing that the city’s electrification law is preempted by energy efficiency standards under the federal Energy Policy Conservation Act of 1975 (EPCA).

This law sets national efficiency standards for major household appliances like furnaces, stoves, and clothes dryers. Under the law, states and cities can’t set their own energy conservation standards that would contradict federal ones. The trade groups argued that EPCA should also preempt any local laws, like New York City’s, that would prevent the use of fossil-fuel powered appliances that meet national standards.

Berkeley’s law, which was struck down by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, banned the installation of gas piping in new construction.Robert Nickelsberg / Getty via Grist

“By design, the city set that level so low as to ban all gas and oil appliances,” the groups wrote in their complaint. “The city’s gas ban thus prohibits all fuel gas appliances, violating federal law” and “presents a significant threat for businesses in New York City that sell, install, and service gas plumbing and infrastructure.”

Citing the 9th Circuit’s dissent, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed those claims. The plaintiffs’ argument broadens the scope of EPCA beyond reasonable bounds, District Judge Ronnie Abrams wrote in the court’s opinion. Regulating fuel use within certain buildings is standard practice in states and cities, she noted: New York City, for example, has banned the indoor use of kerosene space heaters for decades. “Were plaintiffs correct about the scope of EPCA, these vital safety regulations would likewise be preempted—an absurd result that the court must avoid,” Abrams wrote.

The decision could help reassure some states and cities that withdrew electrification plans after the Berkeley case, said Dror Ladin, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, a nonprofit that submitted an amicus brief on behalf of local environmental groups in the lawsuit. “This ruling demonstrates that there’s absolutely no reason to interpret the Berkeley decision so broadly,” he said. The argument brought forth by trade groups “is one that would bar a whole host of health and safety regulations, and alter the power of cities and states in a way that we’ve never seen in this country.”

By agreeing with the 9th Circuit dissent’s interpretation of EPCA, last week’s decision bolsters all types of electrification policies, including the one in New York City and those modeled after Berkeley, Turner noted. “This decision we’ve just gotten from the Southern District is more broadly protective,” she said. “Even if the air emissions route is not right for a city for whatever reason, other variations of a building electrification requirement or incentive could pass muster.”

The trade groups behind the lawsuit have said they will appeal the decision. Meanwhile, legal challenges using the same arguments brought against Berkeley’s gas ban have been launched against New York’s statewide building code and electrification policies in places like Denver; Montgomery County, Maryland; and Washington, DC.

Judges in those cases will inevitably refer to the Berkeley decision and last week’s ruling by the Southern District of New York, said Ladin—and he hopes they’ll give more weight to the latter. “Berkeley is not a well-reasoned decision, and this judge saw right through it, and I think many other judges will see through it too.”

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Senate Confirms Trump’s Anti-Abortion Pick to Lead the FDA

On Tuesday night, the Senate 56 to 44 voted to confirm Martin Makary as Trump’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner.

Three Democrats—Senators Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) —joined Republicans in the confirmation vote to appoint Makary, formerly a surgeon and professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, to lead the agency’s 18,000 employees and spearhead the regulation of products as vast and varied as food, cosmetics, and medical devices.

As I wrote back in January, as commissioner, Makary will also wield immense power to help facilitate—or stymie—anti-abortion Republicans’ efforts to roll back access to abortion pills, which now account for more than half of all abortions and have helped the total number of abortions increase since the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in June 2022. The pills have become much easier to access since 2021 whenthe FDA ruled that mifepristone—the first drug in the two-drug regimen, which also includes misoprostol—could be distributed by mail or at pharmacies instead of requiring that they be obtained in person at a clinic or hospital.

But Makary has made no secret about his anti-abortion views. AsI previously wrote:

The head of the FDA, housed within HHS,could lead the agency’s efforts to reinstate the in-person requirement to access abortion pills—which would prevent them from being legally mailed to patients, creating a massive blow to access—and in the longer term revoke FDA approval of the drugs entirely, as Project 2025 recommends. Markary…has been open about his anti-abortion views. After Dobbs was handed down, Markary joined ex-Fox host Tucker Carlson on-air and described false information about fetuses’ abilities to feel pain in utero, as the Center for Reproductive Rights points out. All this makes it clear why the conservative political advocacy group CatholicVote celebrated Makary as a pro-life pick who could reverse FDA approval of the pills. Reproductive Freedom for All, an abortion rights advocacy group, on the other hand, called Makary “a known anti-abortion extremist” after Trump announced his nomination.

It’s worth noting, though, that if Markary did try to roll back the agency’s approval of abortion pills, he would face an immediate legal challenge under the Administrative Procedure Act, which prevents agencies from acting in ways that are “arbitrary or capricious,” according to Rachel Rebouché, reproductive law scholar and dean of Temple Law School. (A spokesperson for the FDA said the agency would not comment on pending litigation or hypotheticals.)

Attacks on the pills—seeking to both reinstate the in-person requirement and eventually roll back FDA approval of the medicationentirely,as both Project 2025 and anti-abortion advocates have outlined—come as more than 100 scientific studies have proven they are safe and effective. One study published last year that confirmed they are also safe and effective when prescribed virtually and mailed to patients.

But this didn’t stop Makary, and some Republican senators, from peddling misinformation suggesting that the pills are dangerous during his March 6 confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. He refused to commit to upholding FDA approval of medication abortion when asked the question bySen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.). Instead, his reply was evasive: “You have my commitment to follow the independent scientific review process at the FDA.”

FDA nominee Martin Makary just dodged a simple, straightforward question from @PattyMurray on whether he would uphold nearly TWO DECADES of evidence that mifepristone is safe and effective.

That tells you all you need to know about how he'll lead the agency if confirmed. pic.twitter.com/kNMsznYdX7

— Reproductive Freedom for All (@reproforall) March 6, 2025

At the March 6 hearing, Hassan—one of the Democratic senators who ultimately voted to confirm Makary—followed up, noting that when they met previously, Makary told her he was not familiar with mifepristone. “Have you reviewed the data, and do you agree that mifepristone is safe and effective?” Hassan asked. “I did read those articles,” Makary replied, adding that he was not unfamiliar with the drug itself, but rather with the evidence regardingits safety and efficacy.

“The concern is whether you are going to unilaterally overrule the data that currently exists for political reasons,” Hassan pressed. Makary again declined to clarify. “Senator, you have my commitment that once I’m in office I will do a review of the data,” he replied, adding, “I have no preconceived plans to make changes to the mifepristone policy.” Hassan concluded her time by stating, “I wish you were hedging a little bit less today.” A spokesperson for Hassan did not immediately respond to a question from Mother Jones about why she voted to confirm Makary in light of her comments, and his responses, during his hearing.

Makary’s response to anti-abortion Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-Mo.) question about whether he would reinstate in-person requirements for obtaining the drugs inspired less confidence than his claim to Hassan that he has no “preconceived plans” to restrict mifepristone. “I do think it makes sense to review the totality of data and ongoing data,” Makary said. “I know, personally, of OB doctors who prefer to insist…that mifepristone be taken, when necessary, in their office, as they observe the person taking it. And I think their concern there is if the drug is in the wrong hands, it could be used for coercion.”

The reproductive coercion argument has long been discredited, but abortion opponents brought it to the Supreme Court last year when they sought to restrict mifepristone access. As I wrote then of the argument:

And like many arguments from the anti-abortion side, the claim that medication abortion prescribed through telehealth contributes in any significant way to domestic abuse is baseless: Experts told me it’s unsupported by evidence and ignores many of the ways reproductive coercion actually manifests—as well as the many benefits telehealth abortion can provide for people experiencing intimate partner violence.

Meanwhile, legitimate research suggests that increasing numbers of abortion restrictions nationwide are what is driving reproductive coercion.

Unsurprisingly,abortion rights advocates greeted the news of Makary’s confirmation with despair. “Martin Makary’s confirmation jeopardizes two of the most important aspects of the FDA: independence and decision-making rooted in science,” Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said in a statement Tuesday night. “Trump just succeeded at giving yet another extremist the green light to chip away at birth control, medication abortion, and more.”

In a statement provided to Mother Jones, Anna Bernstein, principal federal policy advisor at the reproductive research and policy center, the Guttmacher Institute, said that Makary’s confirmation “could further erode abortion access nationwide.”

“Makary’s refusal to acknowledge the well-established safety of mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in a medication abortion regimen, during his confirmation hearing signals a willingness to prioritize political pressures over scientific evidence,” Bernstein added.

Freya Riedlin, senior federal policy counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told Mother Jones that Makary “has indicated he is open to playing politics with medicine and pregnant people’s lives.”

“The FDA needs a leader committed to protecting access to quality health care for everyone—not someone with a documented history of opposing reproductive health care access and spreading inaccurate health information,” Riedlin added.

Responding to his confirmation, Sen. Murray wrote on X: “We need an FDA Commissioner who will put science over politics to protect the health and safety of all Americans. That means opposing far-right efforts to restrict safe & effective medication abortion—at minimum. I voted NO on Dr. Makary to lead the FDA.”

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“You’re Here Because of Your Tattoos”

On Friday, March 14, Arturo Suárez Trejo called his wife, Nathali Sánchez, from an immigration detention center in Texas. Suárez, a 33-year-old native of Caracas, Venezuela, explained that his deportation flight had been delayed. He told his wife he would be home soon. Suárez did not want to go back to Venezuela. Still, there was at least a silver lining: In December, Sánchez had given birth to their daughter, Nahiara. Suárez would finally have a chance to meet the three-month-old baby girl he had only ever seen on screens.

But, Sánchez told Mother Jones, she has not heard from Suárez since. Instead, last weekend, she found herself zooming in on a photo the government of El Salvador published of Venezuelan men the Trump administration had sent to President Nayib Bukele’s infamous Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. “I realized that one of them was my husband,” she said. “I recognized him by the tattoo [on his neck], by his ear, and by his chin. Even though I couldn’t see his face, I knew it was him.” The photo Sánchez examined—and a highly producedpropaganda video promoted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the White House—showed Venezuelans shackled in prison uniforms as they were pushed around by guards and had their heads shaved.

The tattoo on Suárez’s neck is of a colibrí, a hummingbird. His wife said it is meant to symbolize “harmony and good energy.” She said his other tattoos, like a palm tree on his hand—an homage to Suárez’s late mother’s use of a Venezuelan expression about God being greater than a coconut tree—were similarly innocuous. Nevertheless, they may be why Suárez has been effectively disappeared by the US government into a Salvadoran mega-prison.

Mother Jones has spoken with friends, family members, and lawyers of ten men sent to El Salvador by the Trump administration based on allegations that they are members of the Venezuelan organized crime group Tren de Aragua. All of them say their relatives have tattoos and believe that is why their loved ones were targeted. But they vigorously reject the idea that their sons, brothers, and husbands have anything to do with Tren de Aragua, which the Trump administration recently labeled a foreign terrorist organization. The families have substantiated those assertions to Mother Jones, including—in many cases—by providing official documents attesting to their relatives’ lack of criminal histories in Venezuela. Such evidence might have persuaded US judges that the men were not part of any criminal organization had the Trump administration not deliberately deprived them of due process.

On March 14, President Donald Trump quietly signed a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act—a 1798 law last used during World War II. The order declared that the United States is under invasion by Tren de Aragua. It is the first time in US history that the 18th-century statute, which gives the president extraordinary powers to detain and deport noncitizens, has been used absent a Congressional declaration of war. The administration then employed the wartime authority unlocked by the Alien Enemies Act to quickly load Venezuelans onto deportation flights from Texas to El Salvador.

In response to a class action lawsuit brought by the ACLU and Democracy Forward, federal judge James Boasberg almost immediately blocked the Trump White House from using the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport Venezuelans, and directed any planes already in the air to turn around. But in defiance of that order, the administration kept jets flying to El Salvador. Now Suárez and others like him are trapped in the Central American nation with no clear way to contact their relatives or lawyers.

Suárez, whose story has also been reported on by the Venezuelan outlet El Estímulo, is an aspiring pop musician who records under the name SuarezVzla. His older brother, Nelson Suárez, said his sibling’s tattoos were intended to help him “stand out” from the crowd. “As Venezuelans, we can’t be in our own country so we came to a country where there is supposedly freedom of expression, where there are human rights, where there’s the strongest and most robust democracy,” Nelson said. “Yet the government is treating us like criminals based only on our tattoos, or because we’re Venezuelan, without a proper investigation or a prosecutor offering any evidence.” (All interviews with family members for this story were conducted in Spanish.)

“Well, you’re here because of your tattoos,” the ICE agent reportedly said. “We’re finding and questioning everyone who has tattoos.”

The Justice Department’s website states that Suárez’s immigration case is still pending and that he is due to appear before a judge next Wednesday. Records provided by Nelson Suárez show that Arturo has no criminal record in Venezuela. Nor, according to his family, does Suárez have one in Colombia and Chile, where he lived after leaving Venezuela in 2016. They say he is one of millions of Venezuelans who sought a better life elsewhere after fleeing one of the worst economic collapses in modern history. (Just a few years ago, Secretary Rubio, then a senator from Florida, stressed that failure to protect Venezuelans from deportation “would result in a very real death sentence for countless” people who had “fled their country.”)

The stories shared with Mother Jones suggest that Trump’s immigration officials actively sought out Venezuelan men with tattoos before the Alien Enemies Act was invoked and then removed them to El Salvador within hours of the presidential proclamation taking effect.

“This doesn’t just happen overnight,” said immigration lawyer Joseph Giardina, who represents one of the men now in El Salvador, Frizgeralth de Jesus Cornejo Pulgar. “They don’t get a staged reception in El Salvador and a whole wing for them in a maximum-security prison…It was a planned operation, that was carried out quickly and in violation of the judge’s order. They knew what they were doing.”

Arturo Suárez performing and speaking with his baby daughter from detention.Courtesy Arturo Suárez

The White House has yet to provide evidence that the hundreds of Venezuelans flown to El Salvador—without an opportunity to challenge their labeling as Tren de Aragua members and “terrorists”—had actual ties to the gang. When pressed on the criteria used for their identification, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt pointed to unspecified “intelligence” deployed to arrest the Venezuelans she has referred to as “heinous monsters.” Trump’s border czar Tom Homan has insisted—without providing specific details—that the public should trust ICE to have correctly targeted the Venezuelans based on “criminal investigations,” social media posts, and surveillance.

Robert Cerna, an acting field office director for ICE’s removal operations branch, said the agency “did not simply rely on social media posts, photographs of the alien displaying gang-related hand gestures, or tattoos alone.” But Cerna also acknowledged that many of the Venezuelans deported under the Alien Enemies Act had no criminal history in the United States, a fact he twisted into an argument to seemingly justify the summary deportations without due process. “The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat,” Cerna wrote. “In fact, based upon their association with TdA, the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”

The relatives who talked to Mother Jones painted a vastly different picture from the US government’s description of the men as terrorists or hardened criminals. Many said their loved ones were tricked into thinking they were being sent back to Venezuela, not to a third country. (The Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not respond to a detailed request for comment asking for any evidence that the Venezuelans named in this articlehave ties to Tren de Aragua.)

Before leaving for the United States in late 2023, Neri Alvarado Borges lived in Yaritagua, a small city in north central Venezuela. His father is a farmer and his mother supports his 15-year-old brother, Nelyerson, who has autism.

Neri Alvarado with his brother Nelyerson in 2023.Courtesy María Alvarado

Alvarado’s older sister, María, stressed in a call from Venezuela that her brother has no connection to Tren de Aragua. She said her brother was deeply devoted to helping Nelyerson—explaining that one of his three tattoos is an autism awareness ribbon with his brother’s name on it and that he used to teach swimming classes for children with developmental disabilities. “Anyone who’s talked to Neri for even an hour can tell you what a great person he is. Truly, as a family, we are completely devastated to see him going through something so unjust—especially knowing that he’s never done anything wrong,” María said. “He’s someone who, as they say, wouldn’t even hurt a fly.”

Still, Alvarado was detained by ICE outside his apartment in early February and brought in for questioning, Juan Enrique Hernández, the owner of two Venezuelan bakeries in the Dallas area and Alvarado’s boss, told Mother Jones. One day later, Hernández went to see him in detention and asked him to explain what had happened. Alvarado told Hernández that an ICE agent had asked him if he knew why he had been picked up; Alvarado said that he did not. “Well, you’re here because of your tattoos,” the ICE agent replied, according to Hernández. “We’re finding and questioning everyone who has tattoos.”

The agent then asked Alvarado to explain his tattoos and for permission to review his phone for any evidence of gang activity. “You’re clean,” the ICE officer told Alvarado after he complied, according to both Hernández and María Alvarado. “I’m going to put down here that you have nothing to do with Tren de Aragua.”

For reasons that remain unclear, Hernández said that another official in ICE’s Dallas field office decided to keep Alvarado detained. María Alvarado said her brother told her the same story at the time.

Hernández spoke to Alvarado shortly before he was sent to El Salvador. “There are 90 of us here. We all have tattoos. We were all detained for the same reasons,” he recalled Alvarado telling him. “From what they told me, we are going to be deported.” Both assumed that meant being sent back to Venezuela.

Hernández, a US citizen who moved to the United States from Venezuela nearly three decades ago, searched desperately for Alvarado when he didn’t show up in his home country that weekend. He was nearly certain that Alvarado was in El Salvador when he first spoke to Mother Jones on Thursday. “I have very few friends,” he said. “Very few friends and I have been in this country for 27 years. I let Neri into my house because he is a stand-up guy…Because you can tell when someone is good or bad.” Later that day, on Alvarado’s 25th birthday, Hernández got confirmation that his friend was in El Salvador when CBS News published a list of the 238 people now at CECOT.

A centerpiece of Bukele’s brutal anti-gang crackdown, CECOT is known for due process violations and extreme confinement conditions. Last year, CNN obtained rare access to the remote prison, which can hold up to 40,000 people. The network found prisoners living in crowded cells with metal beds that had no mattresses or sheets, an open toilet, and a cement basin. Visitation and time outdoors are not allowed. A photographer who was allowed into the prison as the Venezuelans arrived earlier this month wrote for Time magazine that he witnessed them being beaten, humiliated, and stripped naked.

The Trump administration has indicated in court records that the El Salvador operation was weeks, if not months, in the making. In a declaration, a State Department official said arrangements with the Salvadoran and Venezuelan governments for the countries to take back US deportees allegedly associated with Tren de Aragua had been made after weeks of talks “at the highest levels”—including ones involving Secretary of State Rubio—and “were the result of intensive and delicate negotiations.”

As part of the deal, the US government will pay El Salvador $6 million to hold the Venezuelan men for at least one year. Calling the agreements a “foreign policy matter,” Rubio has claimed the outsourcing of deportees’ detention to Bukele’s “excellent prison system” is saving money for US taxpayers.

It is unclear if, or when, anyone sent to CECOT will be able to return to Venezuela. A Human Rights Watch program director noted in a declaration that the organization “is not aware of any detainees who have been released from that prison.” During an appeals court hearing on March 24, the ACLU’s lead counsel Lee Gelernt said, “We’re looking at people now who may be in a Salvadoran prison the rest of their lives.”

Neri Alvarado working at the bakery and the autism awareness tattoo with his brother’s name.
Courtesy María Alvarado

Joseph Giardina’s client Frizgeralth de Jesus Cornejo Pulgar thought he was set to return to Venezuela on a deportation flight. Carlos, Frizgeralth’s older sibling, said his 26-year-old brother called their sister, who lives in Tennessee, from the El Valle detention center in Texas. He said Frizgeralth told her he was going to be deported to Venezuela later that day. “He was happy that he was going to be here with us,” Carlos said from Caracas in a video call with Mother Jones.

But Frizgeralth never arrived. Eventually, the family heard from the girlfriend of another Venezuelan set to be deported on the same flight as Carlos. She had identified him in videos shared on social media of the men who had been sent to the prison in El Salvador. On March 19, Carlos started scouring the internet and spotted his brother in a TikTok video. In it, Frizgeralth has his freshly shaved head pressed down, a rose tattoo on his neck peeking out from under a white t-shirt.

“We felt very powerless and in a lot of pain,” Carlos said. “To see how they mistreat a person who doesn’t deserve any of that. It’s not fair.”

“I never imagined being imprisoned just for getting a tattoo.”

Frizgeralth arrived in the United States in June 2024 after crossing the Darién Gap and waiting several months in Mexico for a CBP One appointment. The Biden-era program, which the Trump administration has since terminated, allowed migrants to schedule a date to present lawfully at a US port of entry. Carlos said Border patrol agents let Frizgeralth’s girlfriend and their other brother, as well as two friends, through but they held Frizgeralth back. He ended up detained at Winn Correctional Center, an ICE facility in Louisiana.

In messages to his family from detention, Frizgeralth expressed concern he was being investigated because of his tattoos. He explained that none of the 20 or so images—including one on his chest of an angel holding a gun—he has tattooed on his body have any connection to gang activity. He also described feeling discouraged from hearing stories in detention of Venezuelans who had recently been redetained and said ICE agents picked them up over suspicions about their tattoos.

Frizgeralth even had a declaration from his tattoo artist confirming the harmless nature of the artwork. “I never imagined being imprisoned just for getting a tattoo,” Frizgeralth, who owns a streetwear clothing brand with Carlos, wrote. “I never imagined being separated from my family. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, not even my worst enemy if I had one. It’s horrible, it’s mental torture every day.”

Like Suárez and Alvarado, Frizgeralth had no criminal record in Venezuela, documents show. Giardina said his client also had no known criminal history in the United States. Nor did he have a final deportation order. During his preliminary court hearings, the US government never claimed or presented evidence that Frizgeralth had ties to Tren de Aragua. “He was doing everything he was supposed to do,” Giardina said. “He got vetted and checked when he came into the country. He was in detention the entire time. It’s insanity.” If anything, Giardina said, his client had a strong claim for asylum based on political persecution. He said Frizgeralth was being targeted by the colectivos, paramilitary groups linked to the Maduro regime.

About a week prior to his deportation, they moved Frizgeralth to Texas. His next hearing, which is scheduled for April 10, still appears on the immigration court’s online system. “To detain them in this maximum security prison with no access to lawyers, no charges, just because you’re saying they’re terrorists…,” Giardina said. “I mean, what the hell?”

Génesis Lozada Sánchez said she and her younger brother Wuilliam are from a rural Venezuelan “cattle town” called Coloncito near Colombia. Following Venezuela’s economic collapse, both she and Wuilliam lived in Bogota, where her brother saved up for the journey to the United States by making pants at a clothing factory. After he reached the border last January, Wuilliam was detained for more than a year, Génesis said.

On Friday, March 14, he called a cousin in the United States to say that he was about to be deported to Venezuela. “But to everyone’s surprise, that’s not what happened. They were kidnapped,” Génesis said. “Why do I say kidnapped? These people have no ties to El Salvador. They haven’t committed any crimes there. And they’re not even Salvadoran. They don’t even cross into El Salvador after going through the Darién Gap on their way to the United States. So, it’s a kidnapping. They tricked these guys into signing papers by telling them they were being sent to Venezuela.”

Like other men sent to El Salvador, Wuilliam has tattoos. But Génesis said that they have nothing to do with Tren de Aragua and that her brother has no criminal record. His goal had been to make enough money in the United States to help support their parents and to save up enough to hopefully open a clothing factory back home.

Other reporting and court briefs further support the families’ suspicions that their loved ones were primarily targeted for deportation because of their tattoos. In one instance, a professional soccer player, whose attorney said had fled Venezuela after protesting against the Maduro regime and being tortured, was accused of gang membership based on a tattoo similar to the logo of his favorite team, Real Madrid.

John Dutton, a Houston-based immigration attorney, said that he started noticing ICE officers detaining Venezuelans during check-ins due to their tattoos earlier this year. “If they notice they have a tattoo, they’re just taking them into custody,” he explained. “No more questions to ask.” Dutton estimated he now has about a dozen clients who have been arrested because of tattoos.

One of his clients, Henrry Albornoz Quintero, was due in court for a bond hearing last Wednesday after being taken into detention at a routine ICE check-in. “I show up. The judge asked me where my client is,” the Houston lawyer said. “I asked the same question to the DHS attorney. She looked at her notes, shuffled papers around as if she’s gonna find the answer in there, looks up, and said, ‘Judge, I don’t know.’”

Dutton told the judge that his client might be in El Salvador; his relatives had recognized him in one of the images of people at CECOT. The judge then decided not to hear the case on the grounds that he no longer had jurisdiction. “You could tell he wanted to help me,” Dutton added. “He just couldn’t. There’s nothing he could do.”

The next day, Albornoz’s name appeared on the list of people imprisoned in El Salvador. So far, Albornoz is the only one of Dutton’s clients to be sent there. His wife is nine months pregnant with their first child.

“They didn’t just deport these people and then set them free,” says Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University. “They sent them to El Salvador, where that country, at the behest of the United States, is incarcerating them for at least a year in their prison system. This is not just deportation without due process. This is imprisonment without due process in a foreign prison system that has terrible conditions. That’s a pretty blatant violation of the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause, which says that you can’t take away people’s life, liberty or property without due process of law.”

Until Thursday, March 20, Barbara Alexandra Manzo still wasn’t sure if her brother Lainerke Daniel Manzo Lovera was among those sent to El Salvador and transferred to CECOT. The family hadn’t heard from him since that Saturday, when he called from El Paso, Texas, to say they were deporting him to Venezuela or Mexico. Her confirmation also came when she saw his name on the CBS News list.

Barbara Alexandra told Mother Jones that Lainerke didn’t even have a tattoo before he left Venezuela in December 2023. He got one—a clock on his arm—while living and working in Mexico, waiting for a CBP One appointment. It was a gift from a roommate who had been given a date before he did. Last October, Lainerke showed up at the border and was sent to ICE detention; first in San Diego, then briefly in Arizona. He had a court hearing scheduled for March 26.

“My son went to look for a better future, the American Dream,” his mother Eglee Xiomara said in a video. “And it didn’t come true. That was the worst trip he has ever made in his life.”

Lainerke has yet to meet his six-month-old daughter, who was born in the United States. “He’s never been in prison,” Barbara Alexandra said. “[We’re wondering] if he’s ok or if something is happening to him. And we’ll never know because we have no recourse.”

Nelson Suárez fears that he, too, could meet the same fate as his brother Arturo, the Venezuelan musician. Even during the first Trump administration, the fact that Nelson has Temporary Protected Status and a pending asylum case would have been enough to protect him from deportation. But there are no guarantees that it will be now. If Judge Boasberg’s temporary restraining order is lifted or overturned, he could be immediately deported to Venezuela, or sent to El Salvador, without due process. He doesn’t know if he will walk out of a scheduled check-in with ICE in May free or in chains.

“I’m really scared,” he said last week. “My three daughters are here with me. My wife is here. My kids are in school. I don’t know what could happen. Since this happened to my brother, I really haven’t been able to sleep. I have no peace, no sense of calm. I’m afraid to go out on the street. But at the same time, we have to go out to work and get things done.”

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Trump’s New Executive Order Is an “Astonishing and Unprecedented Voter Suppression” Effort

On Tuesday afternoon, President Trump signed a far-reaching executive order that Eliza Sweren-Becker, senior counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s voting rights and elections program, described as “an astonishing and unprecedented voter suppression” effort. It would upend how Americans register to vote, how they cast their ballots, and how their votes are counted.

“We are at an astonishing moment where the President of the United States is issuing policy directives with the unmistakable intent of stopping Americans from participating in our democracy,” Sweren-Becker says.

“If this policy were implemented it would block tens of millions of Americans from voting.”

Legal experts across the political spectrum believe the order is unconstitutional, since the states, with some oversight from Congress, have the power to set the rules for federal elections according to the Constitution, not the president. “Under our American system, voting and voter registration are predominantly responsibilities of the states, with Congress constitutionally empowered to add some overlays through legislation of general applicability,” wrote Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Cato Institute. “A president cannot change those basics by putting out an executive order, nor may he commandeer the states, through funding blackmail or otherwise, into acting as instruments of his pleasure.”

The executive order includes a laundry list of suppressive policies that the voting rights group Fair Fight Action called a “MAGA fever dream.”

Here are four aspects of the order that most concern voting rights advocates.

1. It would prevent millions of Americans from registering to vote.

The centerpiece of the order is a requirement that voters show proof of citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections. It directs the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to mandate that information on a federal voter registration form.

There’s two big problems with that proposal. The first is that Trump can’t order the EAC to do that, since it is an independent agency created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002. The EAC has already been blocked by the courts from requiring documentary proof of citizenship on the federal voter registration form; instead, voters already have to attest to their citizenship, under penalty of perjury.

The second is that millions of Americans don’t have or can’t easily get the documents that Trump wants to require. According to the Brennan Center, nine percent of American citizens, roughly 21 million people, don’t have ready access to citizenship documents, like a birth certificate or passport. Trump’s proposal is even more restrictive than the SAVE Act, the voter suppression bill passed by the GOP-controlled House last year and set to be considered again soon. That’s because it does not specify that birth certificates or naturalization papers can be used to determine US citizenship for the purposes of registering to vote. Since driver’s licenses in most states don’t specify citizenship, voters would have to use a passport to register to vote, but 146 million Americans do not have one, with passport ownership interestingly far lower in red states than blue ones.

“If this policy were implemented it would block tens of millions of Americans from voting,” says Sweren-Becker.

2. It would severely limit voting by mail.

The order claims that mail-in ballots must be received by Election Day or else states will lose federal funding or face lawsuits by the Justice Department if they don’t comply. Currently 18 states allow mail-in ballots to be received some time after the election if they are postmarked by Election Day, including blue states like California and New York and red states like Kansas and Utah. Election law expert Rick Hasen calls the argument behind this provision “a bonkers theory.”

“It would certainly disrupt the way that voting is conducted across many states in the country,” adds Sweren-Becker. “And it is again a very clear attempt to just limit the number of Americans who can participate in our elections.”

3. It would allow Elon Musk to subpoena voting records

The order gives the Department of Homeland Security and the Musk-led DOGE the power to cross-check state voter registration lists with federal immigration databases and subpoena state voting records to search for alleged voter registration fraud. The DOJ can take action against states that don’t comply. This appears to lay the groundwork for massive, error-prone voter purges.

“It appears extraordinarily dangerous to give DOGE the ability to review all of that material and sift through voter registration records without the protections that are required and the very present risk of abuse of that information,” Sweren-Becker says.

There’s a lot of evidence in recent years of states attempting to remove alleged non-citizens from the rolls in ways that disenfranchised many legitimate American voters. For example, before the 2024 election, Alabama attempted to remove 3,251 suspected non-citizens from its voter rolls. But it turned out that at least 2,000 eligible voters on the list had been slated for removal before the courts put a stop to the purge.

Indeed, much of the executive order rests on the false claim that the United States does not “adequately…prohibit non-citizens from registering to vote.” In fact, it’s already illegal for non-citizens to vote in US elections and such fraud is exceedingly rare. An audit in Georgia last year found only 20 suspected noncitizens on the rolls out of 8.2 million registered voters. A similar review in North Carolina found only nine possible non-citizens registered to vote in the state out of more than 7.7 million total voters.

The latest proposal brings to mind the disastrous effort by Trump’s 2017 “election integrity” commission to subpoena sensitive voting records from all 50 states, which led to a widespread bipartisan backlash as both red and blue states refused to comply. The commission abruptly shut down without finding any evidence of voter fraud.

4. It gives Trump King-like power to make it harder to vote

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the executive order, aside from all of the suppressive policies, is how it purports to give the president power over elections that he does not have.

“Don’t waste time on which parts of his elections order might be good, bad or a mixed bag [or] were they enacted by a legitimate authority such as a state legislature or Congress (as the case may be),” CATO’s Olson wrote on Bluesky. “Trump is trying to usurp power not rightfully his. That’s the key point and that’s where to focus.”

Trump is trying to push the unitary executive theory to the extreme. And even if he loses in court, the order could have dangerous ramifications. It could embolden states to enact similar policies. And Trump could use any loss in court as a pretext to make more bogus claims of voter fraud and attempt to overturn future elections.

“What I’m most concerned about is that the president and this administration are trying to rewrite election law unilaterally and completely alter the way that elections are run in order to stop American voters from participating in elections,” Sweren-Becker says.

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They Lied, Again

Amid efforts to downplay the extraordinary security lapse exposed by the Atlantic after Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally included in a group chat with top Trump administration officials discussing war plans, the magazine on Wednesday published new exchanges that confirmed operational details—including launch times—of the upcoming mission to bomb Houthi targets across Yemen were discussed in the Signal chat.

The decision to publish the messages, Goldberg and reporter Shane Harris wrote, came as the administration, including President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, smeared the publication and denied that classified information was discussed in the chat.

“The statements by Hegseth, [Director of National Intelligence Tulsi] Gabbard, [CIA director John] Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions,” the magazine wrote. “There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.”

The messages, which you can read in their entirety here, appear to undermine the Trump administration’s claim that war plans were not included in the Signal chat. Yet in another staggering refusal to bend to reality, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt asserted that the release amounted to a concession by the Atlantic that the scandal was a “hoax.”

The Atlantic has conceded: these were NOT “war plans.”

This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin. pic.twitter.com/atGrDd2ymr

— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) March 26, 2025

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Exclusive: Trump Fired This Top Watchdog. Now He’s Speaking Out.

Fraud, waste, and abuse.

That’s what inspectors general are tasked with investigating throughout the federal government. For decades, these watchdogs have been a key layer of oversight, working to ensure agencies are spending taxpayer money wisely. But in his first week in office, President Donald Trump did something unprecedented. He fired at least 17 IGs—more than any president in history—without notifying Congress or providing a substantive rationale for doing so, both of which are required by federal statute.

Trump, instead, said he would “put good people in there that will be very good.”

On this week’s episode of More To The Story, host Al Letson talks with one of those fired IGs, Larry Turner of the US Department of Labor. This is his first extended interview since being fired.

“It was a power purge to get rid of the people, the watchdogs, that actually provide oversight,” he says of Trump’s mass firings. “We are really the eyes and the ears for the American public.”

Trump has authorized Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to root out the same kind of fraud, waste, and abuse that congressionally authorized IGs are typically responsible for investigating.

Turner has spent much of his career as an IG, including stints at the Department of Defense and the Army. Since 2021, he’d overseen hundreds of employees who worked to publicize waste within the Labor Department. His office uncovered widespread unemployment insurance fraud after the COVID-19 pandemic. So far, 2,000 people have been for filing fraudulent claims that cost U.S. taxpayers $47 billion.

Turner is now one of eight IGs suing the Trump administration to be reinstated. He describes Trump’s effort to oust IGs as a threat to democracy itself.

“They have basically dismantled the civil service,” Turner says. “What they have done is cruel.”

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app.

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Senator Grills Tulsi Gabbard on Omission of Climate From Annual Threat Assessment

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

Much of the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday was taken up by questions about the use of a private, encrypted messaging app by leaders of the US intelligence community to discuss the details of an upcoming attack on Yemen. The Signal chat included the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and the national security adviser Michael Waltz, as well as the editor of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, who was apparently added by mistake in what many security analysts consider an appalling and even mortifying security breach.

But while concerns about this “sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior” (per Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia) dominated the hearing, there was also a brief, telling exchange between Sen. Angus King of Maine and Gabbard, in which King grilled her about the 2025 Annual Threat Assessment by the US intelligence community, which made no mention of climate change for the first time in 11 years.

“I’ve been on this committee now for—this is my 13th year,” said King. “Every single one of these reports that we have had has mentioned global climate change as a significant national security threat except this one. Has something happened? Has global climate change been solved? Why is that not in this report, and who made the decision that it should not be in the report, when it’s been in every one of the 11 prior reports?”

The omission “ignores the hundreds of American lives lost and nearly $200 billion in damage from climate-fueled disasters in 2024.”

In her response, Gabbard implied that climate change was no longer considered a direct threat to US national security. “I can’t speak to the decisions made previously, but this annual threat assessment has been focused very directly on the threats that we deem most critical to the United States and our national security,” she said. “Obviously, we’re aware of occurrences within the environment and how they may impact operations, but we’re focused on the direct threats to Americans’ safety, well-being, and security.”

King pressed her again, asking about the connection between climate change and “mass migration, famine, dislocation, political violence.” He specifically mentioned the 2019 annual threat assessment under the first Trump administration, which included a section on “Environment and Climate Change.”

That report stated, “Global environmental and ecological degradation, as well as climate change, are likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond. Climate hazards such as extreme weather, higher temperatures, droughts, floods, wildfires, storms, sea level rise, soil degradation, and acidifying oceans are intensifying, threatening infrastructure, health, and water and food security. Irreversible damage to ecosystems and habitats will undermine the economic benefits they provide, worsened by air, soil, water, and marine pollution.”

Again, Gabbard responded, “For the intelligence community being aware of the environment that we’re operating in is a given. What I focused this annual threat assessment on and the IC focused this threat assessment on are the most extreme and critical direct threats to our national security.”

King repeatedly asked if Gabbard gave explicit instructions to the authors of the report to not include climate change, and Gabbard eventually replied, “I don’t recall giving that instruction.”

In response to an email asking if Sen. King wanted to elaborate on his concerns about omitting climate change from the threat assessment, a representative replied: “I think the exchange was fulsome and speaks for itself. (At least Sen. King’s side of it).”

Director Gabbard’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Previous intelligence reports, like the 2021 National Intelligence Estimate, have found “that climate change will increasingly exacerbate risks to US national security interests as the physical impacts increase and geopolitical tensions mount about how to respond to the challenge.”

The 2024 Annual Threat Assessment mentioned climate nine times and stated: “The accelerating effects of climate change are placing more of the world’s population, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, at greater risk from extreme weather, food and water insecurity, and humanitarian disasters, fueling migration flows and increasing the risks of future pandemics as pathogens exploit the changing environment.” Echoing the 2021 report mentioned above, the report went on to say, “The risks to US national security interests are increasing as the physical effects of climate and environmental change intersect with geopolitical tension and vulnerabilities of some global systems.”

For the latest Annual Threat Assessment to make no mention of climate change whatsoever, while the evidence and impacts of climate crisis continue to mount, is a striking change from prior years and a dangerous one, according to security and defense experts contacted by the Bulletin.

“If the last 11 threat assessments by the intelligence community have cited climate change as a significant national security threat, it kind of begs the question, ‘what’s changed?’” said Sherri Goodman, former deputy undersecretary of defense and the author of Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security. “Temperatures keep getting hotter, fire is more intense, sea level rise—all the indicators of climate [change] continue to shine red, and if we ignore it, then we do so at America’s peril, because we know that our adversaries like China, Iran, North Korea, and even Russia are continuing to account for the adverse effects of climate change on our national security and our global security.”

Just because the new report ignores the threats climate change poses to national security doesn’t make those threats go away—it just makes the intelligence community and the leaders of the United States less aware and able to respond to those threats.

“The omission of climate change ignores the hundreds of American lives lost and nearly $200 billion in damage from climate-fueled disasters in 2024, the warmest year in human history,” said Rod Schoonover, co-founder of the Ecosecurity Council and former Director of Environment and Natural Resources at the National Intelligence Council. “By trading objective reality for ideology, the intelligence community leadership is deliberately handicapping its ability to comprehensively analyze the very security landscape it’s tasked with understanding.”

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