DOGE 4 2025

ESTB 2 25somewhat neglect re 3

merri ok

SEE PRIVACY 2 DATA GIVEN TO ELECTION INTEGR BS

INCLUDES NEW ROBERTS FUCKERY

INCLUDES ANY DUMB DANGEROUS FIRE FED WORKERS SEE SCHED F

SEE FAIL FAMINE KID KILLER USAID

see DOGEBAGS barton mtg

KILL GREEN INNOVATION JOBS CEDE SECTORS TO CHINA

SEE DEI ~ APPRENTICE

SEE IG FIRED, STATS KILLED TO COVER DAMAGE

see musk 6

TARGET ABA LEGAL SUPPRESS --> FASCISM

odd vought vanish (after freeze fail?) 5M$ SEC CFPB reaper 10 25 shutdown

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9 26 1b$ clawback dei AI bs

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jan 2026 report

67 pp https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/DOGE_-From-Meme-to-Government-Erosion-Machine.pdf

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gmail 5 26 left hook

People Over Billionaires: The DOGE Whistleblower Running For Congress!

Alexis Goldstein's brief stint on Wall Street transformed her into an activist advocating for oversight, reform & regulation. She called out DOGE, lost her CFPB job, and is now running for office.

Alexis Goldstein knows the elite are corrupt, selfish, and greedy because she once worked for them. The DOGE whistleblower started her career on Wall Street and grew so disenchanted by the villainous psychopaths around her that she joined the Occupy movement and advocated for financial regulation and transparency.

This led to her becoming a public servant and joining the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis and, since its founding, has returned more than $21 billion to consumers defrauded by the same financial institutions that continue to serve Trump and the broligarchy.Naturally, one of Musk and Trump’s first orders of business was to gut this successful agency.

On February 7, 2025, Goldstein saw unbadged personnel at the CFPB attempting to gain access to secure government networks containing Americans’ sensitive, personal data. These incels worked for Elon Musk’s DOGE team. Attempting to do her job and protect data, Goldstein recorded the men and repeatedly asked them for their badges and IDs.

For her sins, she was fired.

Now, Goldstein is running a grassroots campaign as a Democrat to represent Maryland’s 6th district. She doesn’t take any super PAC money, rejects AIPAC, demands an end to unjust wars, and advocates for the abolishment of ICE and AI data centers. She’s not alone in her critique of AI and its abuse of workers. Pope Leo just published his first encyclical, “Magnificent Humanity,” and urged companies to respect workers, uplift their humanity, and rein in AI, which he compared to the Tower of Babel.

As you can imagine, the establishment is not thrilled.

Regardless, Goldstein persists because she knows how the broligarchy operates and realizes the system must be fundamentally reformed or else the elites will continue drinking all of our milkshakes. Give her a listen.

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SHADOW DOCKET PROTECT DOGE FROM FOIA? MAJ REPT MARK JOS STERN, GOT OUR DATA

Trump's Loyalty Test Exposes Federalist Society Rift - YouTube

KARA S SAM HARRIS YT 12 25 ~ MUSK USAID

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AN 4 26

Trump once opposed government surveillance — at least the kind he claimed was directed against him.

“KILL FISA," Trump wrote on Truth Social in 2024. "IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS."

But now that Trump can surveil rather than be surveilled, a conservative is calling him out over his surveillance state.

“It's been two years and five days since Trump wrote that, but it might as well have been another lifetime,” said Eric Boehm, a reporter at Reason who covers economic policy, trade policy and elections. “On Wednesday, Trump again took to Truth Social as Congress was debating a possible extension to Section 702 of FISA, which allows intelligence services to scoop up electronic communications between Americans and individuals overseas.”

Trump is now looking to extend FISA surveillance powers, even as other privacy-minded members of the Republican Party oppose that effort. The extension would permit the CIA, National Security Agency, FBI and other agencies to collect and analyze huge swathes of overseas communications without a warrant. It also sweeps up the conversations of any Americans who interact with international targets for surveillance.

"I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country!" Trump wrote. "We need to stick together when this Bill comes before the House Rules Committee today to keep it CLEAN!"

Boehm has written for conservative publications like The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Signal and The Washington Examiner and is the a featured speaker at seminars hosted by The Libertarian Institute and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). And he vehemently opposes what he calls Trump’s overreaches in government power.

“It sure would be nice if Trump, who was once a prominent target of these surveillance powers, were willing to advocate for changes,” said Boehm. “Alas, now that those powers are ones he gets to wield, there is no need for consistency or principles.”

Last year The Conversation raised alarms over Trump potentially abusing civil liberties when staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency gained access to the agency’s databases — and then shortly thereafter the Department of Homeland Security obtained access to the same Internal Revenue Service tax data.

"Once confined to separate bureaucracies, data now flows freely through a network of interagency agreements, outsourcing contracts and commercial partnerships built up in recent decades," said Nicole M. Bennett, a Ph.D. Candidate in Geography and Assistant Director at Indiana University's Center for Refugee Studies.

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AN 3 26

A Social Security advocacy organization on Thursday blasted the Trump administration for covering up damaging information contained in an inspector general report released in December.

According to The Washington Post, a report from the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) inspector general (IG) about call wait times for beneficiaries was altered to make it seem as though wait times to speak to representatives had been reduced to under 10 minutes per call.

“An unpublished draft of the report... showed that the inspector general had planned to report another metric—called the ‘total wait time’—to measure the overall time it takes for callers to be connected with an SSA employee,” the Post explained. “According to that draft report, in 2025 total wait time averaged 46 minutes to over two hours.”

The Post added that this “information was deleted from the draft after the agency reviewed it before publication.”

Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, responded to the report by saying that “now we know why [President Donald] Trump fired the inspector general at Social Security,” noting that the SSA IG was one of several fired across multiple agencies at the start of Trump’s second term.

Altman then argued that the attack on inspectors general was part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to dismantle government transparency all together.

“Inspectors general are the American peoples’ eyes and ears in these agencies,” said Altman. “The Trump administration is undermining that oversight at every turn. Under this administration, the IG has no ability to conduct independent oversight. There is no meaningful check on the Trump administration’s Social Security sabotage.”

Democratic communications consultant Jesse Lee linked the damage to the SSA documented in the draft IG report to efforts by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which went on a firing spree of federal workers last year.

“So DOGE did a smash and grab at the Social Security Administration, breaking into the most sensitive data, firing phone and in-person case workers,” Lee wrote. “Trump appointee waved around an IG report claiming wait times were fine—after burying the real report saying they were up to two hours.”

MMA

On MS NOW, Media Matters' Angelo Carusone explains how DOGE created “a veneer” to push the Project 2025 agenda

01/12/26

AN 12 25

After President Donald Trump returned to the White House, his administration aggressively downsized a wide range of federal government agencies with the help of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and its then-leader, Tesla/SpaceX/X.com head Elon Musk. Democrats warned that the cuts — which targeted everyone from the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) to the National Weather Service (NWS) to the Internal Revenue Service (IRA) — would have painful results in the red states that voted for Trump in big numbers in 2024, but Trump claimed that he was only targeting "waste, fraud and abuse."

In an article published by **Politico on December 15, Montana-based journalist Cassidy Randall details some of the negative effects that Trump Administration/DOGE cuts are having in her state — which Trump carried by roughly 20 percent in 2024.

According to Randall, "DOGE cuts to public lands agencies" are "hitting rural, conservative communities — one of this administration's strongest voting bases — the hardest." And the result, according to Politico, is a "revolt" that threatens to "wake a sleeping political giant" in a deep-red state.

"Starting in February," Randall reports, "an estimated 5200 people have been terminated from the agencies that manage the 640 million acres of federal public lands in the U.S. That number doesn't include the many who took the (Trump) Administration's buyout or early retirement offers also meant to cut staff. Further, Trump's 2026 budget proposes more budget cuts and a reduction of nearly 18,500 more public lands employees."

Terry Zink, a 57-year-old hunter who lives in Montana, voted for Trump in 2024 but is now criticizing the effects that Trump Administration/DOGE cuts are having on rural public lands.

Zink told Politico, "You won't meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didn't vote for this…. We have to listen to our wildlife biologists. We have to be strong advocates for those people."

Zink said of rural areas, "You cannot fire our firefighters. You cannot fire our trail crews. You have to have selective logging, and water restoration, and healthy forests."

*Read Cassidy Randall's full article for Politico at this link.

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AN 12 25

After President Donald Trump returned to the White House on January 20, his administration aggressively downsized a long list of federal government agencies with the help of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and its then-leader, Tesla/SpaceX/X.com head Elon Musk. Trump claimed that his goal was reducing "waste, fraud and abuse," but critics of the Trump Administration/DOGE cuts argued that they were robbing the agencies of crucial personnel they need in order to function properly — from the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) to the National Weather Service (NWS) to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

Another agency that has been suffering chaos during Trump's second presidency is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

In an article published on December 4, Axios' Pete Sullivan describes the FDA departures that are contributing to instability at the agency.

"Another abrupt departure of a high-ranking Food and Drug Administration official is raising alarm about a brain drain that could mean new drugs take longer to reach the public," Sullivan reports. "Why it matters: Biotech and pharmaceutical companies rely on the FDA for dependable guidance as they spend huge sums developing new treatments. The American public needs the agency to ensure treatments are safe and effective…. Driving the news: The latest uproar surrounds the unexpected departure of Richard Pazdur, a respected oncologist who just three weeks ago became the fourth person to direct the FDA's drug center this year."

Sullivan adds, "Pazdur's appointment had helped calm nerves to some degree within industry after months of turmoil. But now, executives and even former FDA commissioners are publicly questioning the agency's direction."

One of the people who is sounding the alarm about the FDA is Biotechnology Innovation Organization CEO John Crowley.

Crowley told Axios, "This constant turmoil is undermining America's leadership in biotechnology, creating unprecedented regulatory instability and unpredictability, and risks ceding this critical sector to China."

According to Sullivan, "morale" has "plummeted" at the FDA.

A former FDA staffer, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told Axios, "They don't talk to each other. They go to the bathroom, they come (back), they shut their door."

*Read Peter Sullivan's full article for Axios is available at this link.

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an 12 25

Washington Monthly writer Anne Kim reports the president and former star of “The Apprentice” vowed to “reach and surpass 1 million new active apprentices,” before surrendering his commitment to funding cuts, grant cancellations, and layoffs.

Trump directed the Department of Labor to deliver his commitment to surpass 1 million new active apprentices within 120 days in an April executive order, but Kim reports that deadline has passed, “with no evidence of progress or even a plan to reach the one-million apprenticeship milestone.”

“Instead, drastic layoffs, funding cuts, and a purge of ‘DEI’-related initiatives have sabotaged the emerging apprenticeship movement. Growth in apprenticeships is at its slowest in years, far more sluggish than during Joe Biden’s administration or even [Trump’s] first term,” said Kim.

“I don’t see them getting to 1 million apprentices till 2032,” Former Department of Labor senior staffer Nick Beadle told Kim.

The number of new apprentices has grown by only about 3 percent so far, according to Zach Boren, Senior Vice President of Apprenticeships for America and the former chief of registered apprenticeship and policy for the Department of Labor.

“We’ve got a White House that has really good talking points on apprenticeship, but no road map,” Boren said.

“One major problem: the gutting of the DOL’s Office of Apprenticeships, first by Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, and then by the exodus of key staff,” said Kim. “There’s literally no one available to write a plan, let alone implement it.”

The office lost its national director and several division chiefs, and staffing levels are down by as much as 30 percent, according to Boren. The website for the national office lists just three people, all of them designated as working in an “acting” capacity.

“The Department of Labor, and especially the Office of Apprenticeship, are running on fumes,” said Boren.

The Trump administration has also paused or canceled grants for apprenticeship programs and apprenticeship research, which means fewer resources for recruiting and preparing candidates, helping employers and community colleges launch programs, or evaluating their effectiveness.

In fact, at least $30 million in funding appropriated by Congress last year was never spent and has expired, said Beadle.

Meanwhile, Trump’s executive order “Ending Radical and Wasteful DEI Programs,” has purged websites, data, and programs perceived to promote diversity. And the administration canceled dozens of grants under the Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations (WANTO) program established in 1992 by President George H.W. Bush.

“Much as he did on his show, Trump seems to favor a particular kind of apprentice,” said Kim, pointing to a recent Department of Labor social media campaign featuring what’s “presumably Trump’s ideal: a blond, broad-shouldered, AI-generated Aryan avatar ripped straight from the manosphere, with a chiseled jaw and a cleft chin.”

Historians say the style of the DOL posts evoke “historical government propaganda, including posters from New Deal-era America and fascist Europe,” but Kim said propaganda is probably the most Trump’s commitment to apprenticeships will amount to.

“Like so many of his promises to his working-class base, ‘one million apprenticeships’ will likely prove hollow,” Kim said.

Read the Washington Monthly report at this link

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ms blog 11 25 dingdong?

White House’s failed DOGE experiment ends with a whimper, not a bang

The Department of Government Efficiency was hyped as a governmental game changer. Its doors are now closing as a pitiful failure.

Nov. 24, 2025,

Steve Benen

In September 2024, Donald Trump delivered a new campaign pledge: If elected to a second term, the Republican said, he’d appoint Elon Musk to lead some kind of government “efficiency” panel.

To hear the then-candidate tell it, the endeavor was going to work miracles: The Musk-led commission, Trump boasted, would save taxpayers “trillions of dollars” and implement “an action plan to totally eliminate fraud and improper payments within six months.”

For a variety of reasons, none of this made any sense, but in early 2025, the Republican White House followed through and launched the Department of Government Efficiency, which generated immediate hype.

The quasi-governmental DOGE operation, however, didn’t quite reach its first birthday. Reuters reported:

U.S. President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency has disbanded with eight months left to its mandate, ending an initiative launched with fanfare as a symbol of Trump’s pledge to slash the government’s size but which critics say delivered few measurable savings. ‘That doesn’t exist,’ Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told Reuters earlier this month when asked about DOGE’s status.

According to the Reuters report, which has not been independently verified by MS NOW, Kupor went on to say that the department is no longer a “centralized entity.”

To be sure, the office had an impact. As The New Republic summarized, “DOGE’s legacy is both very stupid and very sad: It decimated the federal workforce, including Social Security personnel at local offices, and made it easier for hackers to access your data. The agency tore apart USAID, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of lives lost globally.”

Indeed, the damage DOGE did made people’s lives worse — both in the United States and abroad.

But as important as those truths are, it’s equally easy to conclude that the department represents a failed experiment in governing.

Amid all the hype and tumult, it’s easy to lose sight of DOGE’s original remit: Trump tasked Musk and his team with leading an effort to cut spending and make the federal government more efficient. As the department closes its doors, the facts show that government spending went up, not down, during Musk’s tenure, and the DOGE endeavor made the government less efficient, not more.

Even the “savings” the office touted proved illusory, misleading or both.

DOGE’s goals went unmet. Its promises went unfulfilled. It envisioned one set of results but delivered the opposite.

Good riddance.

*This post updates our related earlier coverage

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OMFG PUBLIC HEALTH

an 11 25

When President Donald Trump posted a satirical music video on social media in early October depicting his budget director, Russell Vought, as the Grim Reaper lording over Democrats in Congress, public health workers recognized a kernel of truth.

Vought has exerted extraordinary control over government spending this year, usurping congressional decisions on how the nation’s money is used. His push for more layoffs during the government shutdown is only the latest blow, following months of firings, canceled grants, and withheld funds.

By cutting and freezing public health funds, in particular, the Trump administration has already begun to undercut efforts to provide medical care, outbreak response, housing assistance, and research across the U.S., according to health officials, nonprofit directors, and federal agency staffers interviewed by KFF Health News.

Since most federal funds for public health flow to states, Vought is rivaling the Department of Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in his ability to upend government-led efforts to keep Americans healthy. In Texas, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funds to stem a measles outbreak weren’t available until after the crisis had subsided and two children had died. A project to protect Alabamans from raw sewage and hookworm was abandoned. People with HIV have had to delay medical care as clinics scale back hours. Time-dependent surveys on HIV and maternal mortality were halted. Food banks have canceled events. Tobacco prevention programs lapsed. Initiatives to protect older adults at risk of falling have been harried.

No matter what budget Congress ultimately passes for next year, the Trump administration may continue to thwart financial support for such programs in ways that will harm people’s health. “The White House has shown that they are willing to unilaterally exert control over funding,” said Gillian Metzger, a constitutional law professor at Columbia University.

“This is a huge deal,” she added, “because the power of the purse is central to Congress’ ability to shape and direct policy.”

Before he was appointed to lead the White House’s Office of Management and Budget this year, Vought outlined budgetary strategies the executive branch could deploy to wrest power from Congress and federal agencies in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative blueprint.

Vought’s tactics unfolded this year, often below the radar. They include abrupt grant cancellations, extraordinary constraints on how funds can be spent, and excessive layers of review, agency officials say, at every step in the grantmaking process. Getting money out the door has been further complicated by layoffs that have gutted offices overseeing grants on chronic disease prevention, HIV, maternal mortality, and more.

Government employees have described these tactics to members of Congress, said Abigail Tighe, executive director of the National Public Health Coalition, a group that includes current and former staffers at the CDC and HHS. “We want Congress to act, because this is preventing states and communities from doing critical public health work to keep our country safe,” she said. “If they don’t have capacity, we all collectively suffer.”

Democrats on the House and Senate appropriations committees have pushed for transparency, but the extent to which money Congress appropriated for public health in 2024 and 2025 has gone unspent because of the administration’s disruptions is not yet known. “This is a sophisticated strategy to cause money to lapse and then say, ‘If they can’t spend it, they don’t need it,’” said Robert Gordon, a public policy specialist at Georgetown University and a former assistant finance secretary at HHS.

“No one thought this was possible or legal, but that is what’s happening,” he said.

Details on how the administration has subverted health spending have received little attention because many changes have been made quietly — and people who rely on federal funds fear retribution. The Trump administration has defunded and threatened federal offices that hold the government accountable and fired whistleblowers. It has abruptly revoked funds for local governments and organizations.

Vought and spokespeople at the White House and the OMB did not respond to queries from KFF Health News. However, Vought described his intentions in VID] a. He said that federal agencies and Congress had gained more power over spending since the 1970s and that their control became “woke and weaponized” under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

“Thankfully, President Trump won,” he said. “And we have now been embarked on deconstructing this administrative state.”

Many Parts, Many Malfunctions

Like a car, the federal budget process has many components that can break down. Through the OMB and its partner, Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, the administration has intervened at various junctures. “There are so many ways in which money is not operating in the way it is supposed to operate,” said Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, and a former OMB adviser.

Typically, Congress passes a budget that appropriates money for the next fiscal year to federal agencies. For many public health programs, ranging from housing assistance to cancer screening, agencies then post open calls online for states, local governments, and organizations to apply for funding. Agency experts select winners and send notices of awards — or notices of ongoing funding to groups that previously won multiyear awards.

Next, the OMB, which administers the federal budget, activates money for agencies, like a bank activates a credit card, so that grantees can spend and get reimbursed rapidly. Auditors keep an eye on spending, but the government has in the past limited interruptions so that programs run smoothly.

Early on, the Trump administration canceled billions of dollars in awards granted in 2024 and early 2025 for research and global health. In March, it clawed back $11.4 billion in covid-era funds that Congress had earmarked for health departments that were using the money for disease surveillance, vaccinations, and more.

Although some funds have been restored because of lawsuits, the Supreme Court has allowed other cuts by the administration to stand while the cases move through the courts.

Beyond these “shotgun” cancellations, the administration has taken a quieter, “in-the-weeds, slowing, cutting, conditioning” approach that’s frozen funds for public health, said Matthew Lawrence, a law professor specializing in health policy at Emory University.

By August, the CDC’s center for HIV and tuberculosis prevention had doled out $167 million less than the historical average, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank focused on reducing inequality. The CDC’s funding for chronic disease prevention lagged by $259 million, the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program had underspent by $105 million, and funds for mental health at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration were more than $860 million behind what was expected.

An unknown amount of Congress’ 2025 funding for research and public health has yet to be awarded and will probably lapse this year, said Joe Carlile, an author of the center’s analysis and an associate OMB director during the Biden administration. The obstructions appear to be concentrated in areas where the White House proposed cutting the federal budget next year. “The administration may be executing their 2026 budget request through administrative controls,” Carlile said.

“This is boring but crazy-high stakes,” he added. “A one-branch veto of spending neuters the power of the purse in the Constitution that Madison said was the fundamental check on the executive branch.”

Incremental Chaos

A key tactic Vought described in Project 2025 occurs when the OMB activates funds for agencies in installments, called apportionments. Vought wrote that “apportioned funding” could “ensure consistency with the President’s agenda.”

Under Vought, the OMB shrank the size of apportionments, HHS and CDC staffers said. It’s illegal for agencies to let grantees withdraw money before the total amount is in the metaphorical bank, so that delayed agencies’ ability to greenlight spending.

The OMB and DOGE also placed conditions on apportionments through memos, footnotes, and spoken directives telling agencies to ensure that spending “aligns with Administration priorities,” according to reports and HHS employees who said that notices of funding opportunities and awards required excessive layers of sign-off. The CDC and other agencies circulated lists of priorities that reflect White House stances, including those targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts; immigration; and transgender rights. Public health efforts have been especially caught up in red tape, since many focus on populations bearing an unequal burden of death, disease, and injury.

Groups that rely on federal funds have largely been unaware of the reasons grants were held up, but they’ve fielded what they viewed as unsettling queries. For example, Kathy Garner, the head of a Mississippi nonprofit, said officials asked her to defend the exclusion of men from a program to shelter women who experienced domestic violence.

Delays were made worse by uncertainty. Grantees said they’ve been unable to reach program officers because tens of thousands of federal workers have been laid off. Agency officials said firings slow funding further.

“Everyone’s inbox is full of letters from grant recipients asking, ‘How do we proceed?’” one high-ranking CDC official told KFF Health News, which granted agency officials anonymity because of their fears of retaliation. “We just say, ‘Please wait.’”

Time was critical as a measles outbreak surged in West Texas early this year. The state asked for federal funding for the response in March, but it didn’t arrive until May, after the outbreak had largely faded in Texas, according to an investigation by KFF Health News. Apportionment control was a key reason, CDC staffers said.

In July, 81 HIV organizations sent a letter to Kennedy. “With every day of delayed FY2025 funding release, the delivery of essential HIV services is compromised,” said the letter, which was reviewed by KFF Health News. Because of delays and uncertainty, it said, HIV clinics had laid off case managers and reduced clinician hours, closed sites, and pared down hotlines that patients call with urgent questions. The funds arrived about a month later, but HIV providers remain shaken.

Lauren Richey, medical director at University Medical Center’s HIV clinic in New Orleans, backed out of hiring a sorely needed dentist she had recruited. “I was afraid to tell someone to move across the country for a job when I wasn’t sure if or when we’d get the funding for their salary,” she said. “The wait is now three to four months for dental services, when it was usually a couple of weeks at most.”

Tamachia Davenport, program director at the St. John AIDS outreach ministry in New Orleans, said that “a lot of us are having to rob Peter to pay Paul.”

When the group didn’t get CDC funds it expected this summer, Davenport had to decide between cutting staff or supplies. Concerned her top employees would take jobs elsewhere, she stopped buying the condoms they distribute throughout the city to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted infections.

Louisiana already has one of the highest rates of HIV, chlamydia, and gonorrhea in the country. Condoms cost far less than treating these diseases. For a person infected by HIV at age 35, such costs exceed $326,000.

Groups focused on cancer, diabetes, and heart disease also report lasting repercussions from delays, as well as ongoing fears that they will happen again. Louisiana State University’s Healthy Aging Research Center canceled some of its workshops to train health workers on caring for people with dementia. “There may be fewer people who have this very specific expertise next year in Louisiana and Mississippi,” said Scott Wilks, the director of the center. “That’s on top of the big shortage we have already.”

Nationwide surveys tallying maternal and infant mortality froze for about five months because of funding delays, causing an irrecoverable gap in data that had been collected continuously since 1987, CDC officials say.

“We are seeing the administration get their way with or without an approved budget,” one said. “It’s such a terrible shame to play with people’s health this way.”

DOGE also inserted itself into grant reimbursements this year, stalling the rapid turnaround that public health groups typically expect to cover salaries, rent, and other monthly costs outlined in budgets that have already been approved. In what’s now labeled Departmental Efficiency Review, itemized expenses must be regularly justified by multiple government officials, according to documents reviewed by KFF Health News.

DOGE posted on its website expense reports covering about a month’s span from April to May. Nearly 230 of the individual expenses filed to federal agencies during that period are for $1 or less. Other entries break down monthly salaries for individual employees and petty costs for postage or monthly subscriptions.

“Public funds deserve scrutiny, but this is different from audit practices I’ve been a part of,” Carlile said.

DOGE also stalled calls for applications for 2025 funding — and some calls never appeared as the fiscal year came to a close on Sept. 30. Among them are programs for groups that provide housing assistance. People will be evicted when these organizations run out of money left over from 2024, said Steve Berg, chief policy officer at the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

Other solicitations came out months behind schedule, leaving groups with a few weeks to put together complicated applications for multimillion-dollar awards, including for Alzheimer’s care, addiction recovery, senior support, and chronic disease management.

“They’ve set projects up to fail,” one HHS official said.

*KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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an 10 25

Prominent conservatives are rebuking Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation — the organization behind Project 2025 and self-described “intellectual backbone” of the conservative movement — after he threw his support behind right-wing political commentator and podcaster Tucker Carlson, now under fire for platforming far-right extremist leader Nick Fuentes this week.

The editors of the right-wing National Review in a scathing editorial explained: “Tucker Carlson, knee-deep already, has taken another step into the muck with a friendly interview with Nick Fuentes.”

“The issue isn’t merely that Carlson ‘platformed’ a white-nationalist influencer,” they wrote. “The deeper problem is that Carlson didn’t actually challenge any of Fuentes’s noxious views that he has spelled out quite clearly over the years. Fuentes has engaged in Holocaust denial, called Adolf Hitler ‘really f– cool,’ and said that if his movement gained power, it would execute ‘perfidious Jews.'”

The editors continued: “In his appearance, Fuentes stated that the ‘big challenge’ to unifying the country against tribal interests was ‘organized Jewry in America,’ and he expressed admiration for Soviet butcher Joseph Stalin. He did not receive any pushback from Carlson.”

IFrame Content

In a video rushing to Carlson’s defense, Roberts declared, “The Heritage Foundation didn’t become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians. And we won’t start doing that now.”

Instead, he framed the controversy surrounding Carlson and Fuentes as “the robust debate we invite, with our colleagues, our movement friends, our members, and the American public,” while vowing to “always defend truth.”

And Roberts insisted that “we will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda. That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains, and as I have said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.”

He vowed that the “attempt to cancel him will fail,” and said that “canceling” Fuentes is also “not the answer” — before denouncing “the vile ideas of the left.”

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) in remarks made at a Republican Jewish Coalition gathering, said:

“If you sit there and nod adoringly while someone tells you that Winston Churchill was the villain of World War II, if you sit there and nod while someone says, ‘Well, there’s a very good argument that America should have intervened on behalf of Nazi Germany in World War II.’ If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, and you say nothing, then you are a coward, and you are complicit in that evil.”

As Jewish Insider reported, Cruz “did not mention the Heritage Foundation, Roberts, Carlson or Fuentes by name, though he accused anyone who uncritically promotes Adolf Hitler of being ‘complicit’ in spreading virulent antisemitism.”

Jewish Insider also reported that the head of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Matt Brooks, told the news outlet, “I am appalled, offended and disgusted that [Roberts] and Heritage would stand with Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes as somehow being acceptable spokespeople within the conservative movement.”

Brooks added, “obviously there’s going to be a reassessment of our relationship with Heritage in light of this.”

U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the former longtime Republican Leader, responded to Roberts’ video with biting condemnation: “The ‘intellectual backbone of the conservative movement’ is only as strong as the values it defends.”

“Last I checked, ‘conservatives should feel no obligation’ to carry water for antisemites and apologists for America-hating autocrats. But maybe I just don’t know what time it is…”

Right-wing commentator Erick Erickson, in a lengthy rebuke, blasted Roberts (and numerous other targets): “Kevin Roberts could have chosen to criticize Carlson as a friend. Kevin could have chosen silence. Instead, he picked the worst possible option of dismissing very legitimate criticism and did so in the most straw-man possible way.”

“I also know what Kevin Roberts, J.D. Vance, and others are doing as they dance around some of these guys, Erickson wrote. “They want to attract young zoomers to their side, many of them male, and they think the way to do that is to punch back hard at critics, refuse to fold to criticism, and show a high tolerance for inflammatory positions that rile up the left.”

===

an 10 25

After President Donald Trump returned to the White House almost nine months ago, his administration carried out an aggressive campaign to downsize a range of federal government agencies. And it did so with the help of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was led by Tesla/SpaceX/X.com head Elon Musk at the time.

Agencies ranging from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) were targeted for mass layoffs. Another was the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

In a Canary Media article republished by Mother Jones on October 16, journalist Maria Gallucci details the Trump Administration's push to eviscerate the Energy Department's Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) — a move that might have killed a lot of job creation.

"The Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations was supposed to be a launchpad for ambitious projects to help America lead the way on cleaner power and manufacturing. Now, it's been reduced to a shell of itself," Gallucci explains. "As the Trump Administration slashes spending and fires workers across the federal government, the U.S. Department of Energy has emerged as one of the hardest-hit agencies — and perhaps no other of its divisions has been singled out as deliberately as OCED…. The situation is best summarized by the budget the White House has requested for OCED for the next fiscal year: $0."

According to Gallucci, this is a "dramatic reversal" from former President Joe Biden's energy policies.

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"During the Biden Administration," Gallucci explains, "Congress endowed it with nearly $27 billion to try to scale up cutting-edge technologies that could curb planet-warming pollution from industrial facilities and power plants. Trump officials have, in recent months, hollowed out the office, canceling billions in previously issued awards for everything from low-carbon chemical manufacturing to rural energy resiliency, while also dismissing over three-quarters of its employees…. Experts and insiders warn that the tumult within OCED and the DOE more broadly is eroding the private sector's trust in the federal government and its ability to drive energy innovation."

Advait Arun of the Center for Public Enterprise told Gallucci that the Trump Administration "has really created a chilling effect on the willingness of future early-stage technology developers to work with the Department of Energy."

A former OCED staffer, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told Gallucci, "We are eliminating ourselves as a leader in the clean energy space, especially for the industrial complex. What I'm seeing is China is about to slip right into that position. Just logically and economically, I don't understand the steps that are being taken."

*Read Maria Gallucci's full article at this Mother Jones link.

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an 10 25

According to Gallucci, this is a "dramatic reversal" from former President Joe Biden's energy policies.

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*Read Maria Gallucci's full article at this Mother Jones link.

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vought sez goal 10k plus

note gut blue state climate funds in vought shutdown BS 10 25

CAPsome names cut tbl

no lnx

project-2025-would-jeopardize-global-climate-action

Project 2025 Would Jeopardize Global Climate Action

During a critical decade for climate action, Project 2025’s architects call for an end to American climate leadership on the international stage, which would harm Americans and prevent the global community from achieving climate goals necessary to maintain a livable planet.

Authors

Courtney Federico

Frances Colón

Mike Williams

Tackling Climate Change and Environmental Injustice, Asia-Pacific, Clean Energy,

Media Contact

Sam Hananel

Senior Director, Media Relations

shananel@americanprogress.org

Government Affairs

Doug Molof

Director, Government Affairs

dmolof@americanprogress.org

Part of a Series

Project 2025: Exposing the Far-Right Assault on America

This article is part of a series from the Center for American Progress exposing how the sweeping Project 2025 policy agenda would harm all Americans. This new authoritarian playbook, published by the Heritage Foundation, would destroy the 250-year-old system of checks and balances upon which U.S. democracy has relied and give far-right politicians, judges, and corporations more control over Americans’ lives.

On July 22, 2024, people across the globe experienced the hottest day in recorded history. In the United States, deaths from heat exposure are increasing year after year as these extreme climate events become the norm. The science clearly tells us that we are in the critical decade to head off the worst impacts of climate change and that this can only be achieved if the world transitions away from fossil fuels. To meet the moment, countries are developing new emissions reductions targets and implementation plans by early next year in an effort to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Yet, influential far-right policy shops, such as the Heritage Foundation, would effectively abandon America’s critical leadership role in addressing the climate crisis. Project 2025, the group’s nearly 1,000-page policy manifesto for the next right-wing president, seeks to gut the country’s 250-year-old system of checks and balances in order to implement extreme policies that would increase global temperatures and undercut developing countries’ efforts to remain resilient in the face of climate impacts.

By advocating for a “whole-of-government unwinding” of U.S. climate policy, Project 2025 puts forward a vision that threatens global efforts to counter climate change effectively. Coupled with efforts to strip government civil service employees of labor protections so that they can more easily be replaced with political loyalists, Project 2025’s policy agenda would trade the federal government’s vast institutional knowledge and forward momentum on climate solutions for dangerous climate denialism and obstructionism. These policy proposals threaten America’s role as a leader in the global clean energy transition, supported by Inflation Reduction Act investments that have ignited job creation and economic growth in communities across the world.

If implemented, Project 2025’s policies would damage all aspects of U.S. international engagement, including climate cooperation among countries that are stepping up to the climate challenge, financing to help vulnerable communities around the world, national security measures to protect defense assets and geopolitical interests, and trade policies that center workers and job creation. These harmful proposals are united by a common theme: an abdication of global climate leadership to the benefit of big oil and gas companies.

Stepping back from the decision-making table

Project 2025 threatens collective, global action on climate change by advocating for the United States to step away from formal engagement in international forums where countries of the world collaborate on shared solutions to the hardest questions facing humanity. These multilateral institutions—which include development banks like the World Bank and intergovernmental organizations like the United Nations—are the main venue for nearly all nations of the world to collectively take on global challenges such as climate change. The scale and complexity of the climate crisis means that every country must do their part to protect the planet.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policies, however, seek to weaken these institutions and, in turn, impair the global response to climate change. They don’t just call on the next right-wing administration to withdraw from the Paris Agreement—the world’s landmark commitment to climate action—but propose to go even further by withdrawing from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the platform for climate change negotiations, entirely. The United States has served as a party to the UNFCCC since its creation in 1992, when the U.S. Senate ratified the treaty under Republican President George H.W. Bush.

The establishment of the UNFCCC has given nations of the world a place to coordinate and hold each other accountable on climate action, prompting countries to step up and establish emissions reduction goals and strategies to decarbonize their economies to counter the climate crisis. Before the Paris Agreement was established in 2015, the world’s temperature was on track to rise 4 degrees Celsius, which would result in catastrophic impacts. But under the 2030 emissions reductions goals created as part of the Paris Agreement, the world’s projected temperature rise is now 2.5 to 2.9 degrees Celsius, with countries working to implement more ambitious goals and policies to further reduce that rise.

America’s absence from this vital forum would hinder the world’s ability to curb emissions, given its position as the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter and biggest oil and gas producer in history. Therefore, the goals of the Paris Agreement—to maintain a livable world—would be out of reach without ambitious mitigation efforts from the United States, inspired by its commitments to the world resulting from international climate negotiations. The withdrawal of the United States from the UNFCCC could also lead to other prominent emitters stepping back from their responsibility to reduce emissions, to the detriment of both America and the wider world.

"The scale and complexity of the climate crisis means that every country must do their part to protect the planet."

Moreover, Project 2025’s plan to replace career civil servants in favor of politically aligned appointees would eliminate the deep wealth of institutional knowledge, subject matter expertise, and relationships the United States relies on to advance climate change solutions internationally. For example, the position of special presidential envoy for climate was created to lead diplomatic initiatives to address climate change. Yet as indicated by Project 2025’s call to reverse climate policies and scrub climate from government documents, this position would be terminated and its mandate unfulfilled. While in this role, Secretary John Kerry leveraged his many years of government service and relationship building to help secure a global commitment to transition away from fossil fuels—a historic outcome achieved at the UNFCCC annual climate negotiations in 2023. With this position eliminated, along with the entire office of subject matter experts who support these diplomatic engagements and negotiations, the United States would not only relinquish its role as an international climate leader but also leave less climate-ambitious nations, such as Russia or China, the opportunity to wield increased influence in international forums.

American absence from multilateral climate action would not stop there under Project 2025 proposals. The radical policy blueprint also advocates for the United States to withdraw from the World Bank, the world’s largest provider of climate finance in developing countries, and to end all financial contributions to the bank. As the World Bank’s largest shareholder, the United States has played an integral role in influencing and shaping its priorities. For example, the United States advanced the World Bank’s Evolution Roadmap, a series of reforms to better allow the institution to address modern crises, including climate change. Eliminating U.S. support would not only severely impair the World Bank’s ability to mobilize the financial assistance on which climate-vulnerable nations rely to prepare for the impacts of climate change and catalyze private sector investment in climate projects around the world; it would also be an insurmountable setback in the bank’s efforts to fulfill its mandate to reduce global poverty, eroding trust in the ability of the United States to follow through on its international commitments, climate-related or not.

Wednesday, July 30, 2025

Project 2025 Architect Mounting Primary Challenge to Sen. Graham

Here is more from the New York Times:

The Republican architect of Project 2025 — the right-wing blueprint that Democrats made a rallying cry in the presidential election last year — is mounting a primary challenge to Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, saying he isn’t sufficiently devoted to President Trump’s political movement.

As he begins his challenge, Paul Dans, who is not originally from South Carolina, starts out as a distinct underdog. Mr. Graham, who has the support of Mr. Trump, has won past primaries handily despite appearing vulnerable, and he is likely to have a significant financial edge.

But Mr. Dans plans to run highlighting the work of Project 2025, from which Mr. Trump distanced himself during his campaign before enacting significant portions of it into his government.

Mr. Dans joined the Heritage Foundation in 2022 and started Project 2025, although he later had a falling out with the think tank that led to his departure.

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AN 9 25

To many of President Donald Trump's hardcore MAGA supporters, his second presidency is bringing about a variety of reforms at a rapid pace — from downsizing federal government agencies to carrying out mass deportations. But Trump's opponents on both the left and the right counter that his policies are inflicting considerable damage on the United States in a wide variety of areas, including the economy, health care, civil liberties, and national security.

One of those opponents is New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall.

In his September 9 column, Edsall draws a distinction between "damage" that is permanent and "damage" that can be fixed.

"As President Trump continues his march through America's democratic institutions," Edsall warns, "trampling constitutional restraints and silencing dissent, one of the most pressing questions is: What damage is beyond repair, and what can still be undone?"

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To answer that question, Edsall interviewed political experts ranging from New York University law professor Sam Issacharoff to the Brookings Institution's William Galston.

Issacharoff told Edsall, "The dismissal of career experts, the dismantling of long horizon science projects are examples of what cannot be recreated. What happens if tensions resurface between North and South Korea or between India and Pakistan? Who guides policy if the state and defense departments lose their experts? This is something where the next administration cannot simply reopen the spigot and recreate. Expertise is long to create and fast to destroy."

Galston believes that Trump has inflicted "irreparable" damage on everything from international relations to science.

"Most of what's irreparable has occurred in programs and policies that affect our relations with the rest of the world," Galston told Edsall. "Trump has upended the system of multilateral trade relations that the United States created and sustained after World War II, and there's no going back. Most serious of all, Trump has destroyed the trust the United States built up over decades as the guarantor of European security, of support for democracy and human rights, and provider of global public goods such as freedom of the seas…. There has been some irreparable damage on the home front as well."

Galston continued, "The most serious, in my judgment — the destruction of America's reputation as the best place in the world for the most promising scientists and innovators of various kinds to conduct research. The evisceration of funding for basic research will be hard to reverse without restoring some bipartisan agreement about the importance of knowledge and expertise. I'm not holding my breath."

Trump insists that his administration's downsizing of federal government agencies is targeting "waste, fraud and abuse," but Max Stier — chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service — counters that Trump's policies are depriving the federal government of a considerable amount of expertise.

The federal government, Stier noted, has lost "200,000 civil servants with an expected 100,000 more by end of year."

Stier told Edsall, "We have been deprived of both the most experienced public servants and the next generation we so desperately need. The harm to our nation is incalculable…. At least as damaging, they have made clear through mass firings that federal employees risk losing their jobs for speaking truth and for choosing the law or constitution over an order from a political appointee."

According to Edsall, Brookings' Robert E. Litman was even more "pessimistic" than the other interviewees.

Litman told Edsall, "By the end of Trump's term…. even if he dies and (Vice President JD) Vance takes over, there will be nothing left of the America we knew four years before. All institutions, norms, government — you name it, all of it gone. The political-societal equivalent of a neutron bomb. It will take far more than the next four years, if Democrats get a chance, to rebuild it."

*Thomas Edsall's full New York Times column is available at this link (subscription required).

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not a win yet?

an 8 25

President Donald Trump's administration is having a difficult time defending the legality of its policies — even to judges Trump himself put on the bench.

Politico reported Monday that U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, who Trump appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia during the first year of his first term, wasn't buying the administration's argument in favor of withholding congressionally appropriated funds for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Politico correspondents Katherine Tully-McManus and Kyle Cheney called Friedrich's Monday ruling "one of the most significant benchmarks in the legal response to the Trump administration’s effort to test the president’s power to withhold congressionally approved funds."

White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought claimed that the administration's refusal to disburse the $315 million appropriation for NED was legally justified by not only saying the administration had the right to hold onto money that wasn't lined up with the president's priorities, but that it was also in the best interest of NED.

"The defendants’ official justification for that withholding — preserving the Endowment’s funding stability for the coming year — is not plausible," Friedrich wrote in her ruling, while also slamming "repeated maneuvers to impede the Endowment’s flow of funds."

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NED — which focuses on promoting democratic ideals overseas – has typically had access to its full amount of funding since it was established in 1982 under then-President Ronald Reagan's administration. However, after Trump took office in January, NED became a casualty of Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which rampaged through multiple federal agencies, fired thousands of workers and axed billions of dollars in federal grants and contracts.

Previously, NED had pursued litigation to gain access to its full congressional appropriation, though its efforts were somewhat curtailed after the Trump administration relented and released most of its money. However, NED's legal efforts continued after the administration continued to justify freezing the disbursement of millions of dollars designated as "no-year" funds, meaning there was no deadline attached to when they had to be spent.

Congress banned presidents from singlehandedly refusing to disburse money passed in appropriations bills with the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, and Politico reported that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the administration had violated the act on five different occasions since his second term began. Vought complained in a May social media post that Trump critics were "going to call everything an impoundment because they want to grind our work to manage taxpayer dollars effectively to a halt."

Click here to read Politico's full report in its entirety.

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RWW

07/28/2025

Peter Montgomery

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts urged right-wing state legislators this month to “de-charter” liberal capital cities and replace them with “state municipal districts.”

In a speech to a gathering of the American Legislative Exchange Council in Indianapolis, Roberts asserted, “We are in the second American Revolution,” which he explained by saying “we are renewing sovereignty and self-governance and faith in fellow man.”

Roberts showed no apparent recognition of the glaring inconsistency between his declared support for “sovereignty and self-governance” and his demonstrated contempt for the democratic choices made by voters in cities who disagree with Heritage’s agenda.

"When we have cities like Austin, or Nashville, or other capital cities whose local government is not representative of the will of the people, de-charter them and establish them as state municipal districts in the name of common sense,” he urged.

Roberts called Austin, Texas his “adopted home town” and described it as “a once-great place that has been taken over by Marxists.”

Roberts’ justification for this brazen attack on democratic self-governance? He claimed that the biggest threat to the Trump-Vance agenda, which is essentially the Project 2025 agenda promoted by Roberts and Heritage, is “that there are government entities that illegitimately are imposing something other than the American dream on their people.”

Roberts promised the legislators that Heritage would provide “air cover” if they made this virtual declaration of war against their own capital cities.

Roberts’ recommendation was part of a ten-point policy agenda he urged the state legislators to adopt. Among his other recommendations:

Roll back environmental regulations—“nonsense from the Green New Scam”—that he said are contributing to a crisis in affordable housing;

End subsidies and preferential treatment for “fickle energy resources.” (He said nothing about the subsidies enjoyed by fossil-fuel industries);

Force every local law enforcement agency to sign cooperation agreements with ICE’s 287 (g) program;

Replace SAT and ACT tests with the Classic Learning Test, which is promoted by right-wing culture warriors like Christopher Rufo and favored by conservative Christian schools and homeschoolers; the test was approved for statewide use in Florida in 2023.

The Heritage Foundation is a deep-pocketed think tank that has spent 50+ years shifting the Republican Party to the right and making America less free, less fair, and less safe. It was the sponsor of Project 2025, which Trump falsely disavowed during his 2024 campaign before aggressively implementing its recommendations since taking power this year, putting the country on a fast road to fascism. The American Legislative Exchange Council functions as a sort of matchmaker between corporate lobbyists and right-wing interests and state legislators eager to do their destructive bidding.

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pete smother

...bringing the Department of Justice and the FBI as an arm of the Presidency. Project 2025, hatched in the Heritage Foundation, might just as well be called the Powell report.

:{:{It’s aims: • Replace merit-based civil servants with political appointees loyal to the President.}:

• Abolish or dismantle the Department of Education, the Department of Homeland Security, the USAID, one of our chief ways of implementing ‘soft’ power by helping the poor and ill around the world. • }:

Reduce Corporate Tax rates from 21% to 18% and instituting flat taxes for everyone else at 15% and 30% for high earners, with no deductions and credits.

:{:{• Abolish the Federal Reserve and return to a gold-backed dollar. •}:

Remove Full Employment from the Federal Reserve’s Mandate.}:

Abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (virtually the sole watchdog protecting American consumers from fraudulent practices.) •

Repeal the $35 Insulin cap and the $2,000 annual out of pocket Medicare Advantage plans.

• Eliminate Head Start and Title I Grants for low-income schools • End public service loan forgiveness.

:{:{• Restrict Federal enforcement of civil rights in schools and redefine Title IX protections to sex at birth.}:

• Increase fees for immigrants and asylum seekers, fast-track those who can pay higher fees}:

:{:{• Authorize Mass Arrests, detention, and deportation of immigrants. (How’s that working for you?)}:

• Reduce Federal spending on renewable energy, increase fossil fuels (so we could live on some other planet, at least those with access to rockets.)}:

...

:{:{• Abandon climate change mitigation and increase use of fossil fuels. • Remove legal protections against anti LGBTQ and criminalise pornography.}:

• Enact laws aligned with Christian right priorities (their term) restricting access to abortion and contraception.}:

:{:{• Curtain civil rights enforcement in housing, lending, and education, ending HUD.}:

• Privatize or eliminate major social programs like Head Start and reduce access to student loans. }:

• Defund Public broadcasting and revoke NPR’s non commercial license. • Reduce local news in favor of national programming.

• Prevent the Federal Elections Commission from countering election misinformation

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an 7 25

'Buyouts': Trump’s mass layoffs are costing taxpayers a fortune — here’s why

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omg

an 725

Trump official bills CFPB $5 million for his security detail while gutting agency’s consumer work

A top Trump White House official who has incessantly bemoaned wasteful government spending has reportedly billed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau nearly $5 million for his security detail as he guts the agency's ability to fight for Americans scammed by predatory corporations.

Government Executive on Wednesday obtained a memo from the CFPB's deputy chief financial officer showing that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the consumer bureau "are entering into an interagency agreement to pay the costs" of Russell Vought's security.

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Vought currently serves as both OMB director and acting director of the CFPB—a longtime target of Trump, congressional Republicans, and corporate forces.

"The memo spelled out that the agreement was 'on a fast track,' despite the funding not being included in the bureau's fiscal 2025 budget," Government Executive noted. "The $4.7 million will cover Vought's security through December, meaning it will draw from both fiscal years 2025 and 2026."

Earlier this year, Vought described the consumer agency's budget—around $820 million for 2025—as "excessive in the current fiscal environment." An OMB spokesperson did not respond when Government Executive asked why CFPB is footing Vought's security bill.

David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, wrote sardonically that Vought—who has helped turn the consumer bureau into a shell of its former self—is "finally getting things done that matter at CFPB."

"And when I say that, I mean his security detail," Dayen added. "At heart, these guys are all kleptocrats."

Don Moynihan, a professor at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, wrote that Vought is "simultaneously stopping CFPB from protecting American consumers from scams, while also charging it $5 million for his security team."

While the Trump administration's effort to dismantle the bureau entirely has been held up in court, Vought and Republicans in Congress have succeeded at slashing the consumer agency's budget and grinding its enforcement work to a halt. A pair of advocacy groups noted in a memo released in late May that the Vought-led CFPB has quietly dismissed more than 20 public enforcement actions against corporate wrongdoers.

Supporters of the CFPB, which was established in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, have described the agency as a "model of efficiency," touting the fact that it has returned tens of billions of dollars to consumers since its creation.

But that's done nothing to slow the Trump administration's assault on the bureau.

The Prospect's Maureen Tkacik and James Baratta wrote earlier this month that for close to half of 2025, the CFPB's roughly 1,500 staffers "have been locked out of their offices and agency computers, while attorneys and judges deliberate over the degree to which Trump's wrecking crew is legally allowed to assassinate the bureau."

"In the meantime, formal entries into the CFPB's consumer complaints database have soared, suggesting that the business of junk fees, predatory terms, and routine swindles is booming," the pair wrote. "All told, 2.5 million complaints have flooded into the CFPB over the past six months, roughly a quarter of the total complaints the agency has recorded since its inception in 2011, with reports of everything from being shut out of bank accounts after a hurricane to scammers impersonating ICE officials who convince consumers to buy them gift cards in order to help them avoid deportation."

"The ability to force financial scammers to return ill-gotten gains to millions of customers is an awesome authority in a political system that makes it so difficult to materially improve people's lives," they added, "so Vought has unsurprisingly dedicated special effort to destroying that power."

A report released earlier this week by the nonprofit Better Markets notes that the Trump administration's regulatory rollbacks at the CFPB have cost American consumers billions in savings and left them more vulnerable to corporate misconduct.

"The magnitude of the rollback and its costs for American consumers is staggering," said Brady Williams, legal counsel at Better Markets. "The Trump CFPB has aligned itself with industry interests, abandoning its mission to protect consumers."

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OMFG

AN 7 25

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's decision Friday to eliminate its scientific research arm drew horrified responses from public health experts and climate advocates, who warned that the Trump administration is targeting the foundation of the department's work to shield Americans from hazardous chemicals, toxic pollution, and drinking water contaminants.

"This is grim news," said Adam Gaffney, an ICU doctor at the Cambridge Health Alliance. "For decades, the EPA's Office of Research and Development has produced the science that underlies the regulations and technologies that protect us from innumerable hazards."

"You can't put a number on the lives that it has saved. Now Trump and Zeldin are killing it," Gaffney added, referring to the president's handpicked EPA administrator.

Since taking charge at the EPA, Lee Zeldin has moved aggressively to implement President Donald Trump's executive orders aimed at gutting the agency's staff and freeing oil and gas corporations from regulatory restraints.

The agency will soon have 12,448 employees, after starting the year with more than 16,000. Staffers at the targeted research office—which had more than 800 employees as of earlier this week—reportedly learned of what one public health expert called "the ultimate Friday night purge" through the EPA's public press release.

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In the statement, Zeldin said the elimination of the Office of Research and Development would help "ensure the agency is better equipped than ever to deliver on our core mission of protecting human health and the environment."

But scientists said the closure of the research office would have the opposite impact, leaving the agency's ability to protect the environment and public health badly compromised.

Gretchen Goldman, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that "it is absolutely devastating that Trump officials would shut down this office in its entirety."

"Science, data, and research underpin all of EPA's work, from protections from harmful chemicals to air quality standards to safe drinking water. It's hard to see how EPA can fulfill its mission without its scientific research arm," said Goldman. "The nation enjoys a cleaner environment thanks to the decades of high-quality research coming out of this office. Our nation cannot let this stand. Members of Congress must act."

In his public messaging, Zeldin has deemphasized the EPA's fundamental responsibility to protect the environment, instead casting the agency as a promoter of "energy dominance"—the slogan Trump administration officials have used to describe the president's commitment to boosting fossil fuel drilling.

Earlier this year, Zeldin boasted about launching "the biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history," targeting power plant rules, Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, and other regulations.

"Out in the open, Zeldin's EPA has been dismantling protections against precisely the sorts of dangers that right-wingers warn are coming from alleged deep-state conspiracies: toxic, cancer-causing chemicals that corporations have lobbied to freely inject into our air, water, food, and bodies," The New Republic's Kate Aronoff wrote in a recent column.

"Among the broader suite of regulations Zeldin's EPA has promised to roll back," Aronoff wrote, "is one that would require coal-fired power plant operators to upgrade wastewater treatment facilities, limiting their ability to freely discharge toxins like mercury, arsenic, selenium, lead, and bromide and to threaten local drinking water supplies."

NOW READ:'Like an open fire hose': Trump ripped as cracks show in MAGA media

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an 7 25

Although Donald Trump vehemently denied knowing anything about Project 2025 during the 2024 presidential race, far-right Christian nationalist Russell Vought — a major architect of the Project 2025 agenda — now heads the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Project 2025 called for federal government employees to be fired in huge numbers and replaced with an army of MAGA loyalists, and Vought has been pushing Project 2025's recommendations at OMB.

On Thursday morning, June 17, Vought attended a Christian Science Monitor breakfast — where, according to Politico's Katherine Tully-McManus, he openly expressed his disdain for bipartisanship.

Vought told reporters, "The appropriations process has to be less bipartisan…. There is no voter in the country that went to the polls and said, 'I'm voting for a bipartisan appropriations process.' That may be the view of something that appropriators want to maintain."

The previous day, the U.S. Senate passed a rescissions package that includes major cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) as well as to foreign aid. And Vought is hoping that more cuts will be forthcoming.

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Vought told reporters, "We are willing to send up additional rescissions. I think if this continues to pass, we're likely to send up another rescissions package that would come soon, and we'll be working on that to try to get that across the finish line. We're not there yet."

Politico's Nicholas Wu posted Tully-McManus' reporting on X, formerly Twitter. And Vought's comments against bipartisanship are generating a lot of discussion on the social media platform.

X user Roger Dodger posted, "That is one of the more obscene things I have heard. Just terrible."

Another X user, Catherine H., sarcastically wrote, "Yeah, because why would you want a unified country?"

X user Scott Plante commented, "Not how democracies work, Russ."

Another X user, Biscuit Salad, wrote, "He is old, and any pretense that the two term president with a decade-long death grip on his party isn't 'the establishment' gets more hilarious every day."

7 25

pass 9b recission 2 gop defect? ! PBS

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MMA

Project 2025 contributors celebrate the Trump administration moving to dismantle the Department of Education

Written by Sophie Lawton

Published 07/16/25

The Heritage Foundation and other Project 2025 partners are praising the Supreme Court decision opening the doors for President Donald Trump to dismantle the Department of Education — a key Project 2025 initiative marking another U-turn from Trump's early disavowal of the unpopular transition plan.

The court's July 14 ruling allows the administration to continue with the reduction in force of over 1,300 Education Department employees, more than one-quarter of the department's workforce. Trump praised the decision in a post on Truth Social, writing, “The Trump Administration may proceed on returning the functions of the Department of Education BACK TO THE STATES.”

The ruling also reverses a block on Trump's March executive order to close the department, though officially shuttering it requires congressional approval. The lower court judge who had halted the administration's efforts claimed the layoffs alone would effectively “cripple” the department.

The Department of Education has already struggled with enforcing civil rights laws and supporting students with disabilities since the Trump administration ordered a freeze on new cases and pressured the office to focus on investigations into transgender students on sports teams and antisemitism. The approved layoffs will shutter seven regional civil rights offices in major cities like New York and Chicago. The department’s Federal Student Aid office, which has already battled technical difficulties due to layoffs, is also facing large cuts. According to a Time magazine review, reducing the FSA offices may “massively disrupt” student loan operations. Trump has announced plans to move many of these offices’ functions to other government departments such as Health and Human Services and the Small Business Administration, both of which are also facing layoffs.

Alongside the personnel cuts and grand plans for closure of the department, the Trump administration is withholding billions of dollars in federal education grants to ensure they “align with President Donald Trump’s priorities,” effectively shuttering many after-school programs and other federally funded education initiatives.

Project 2025 — the extreme right-wing plan for a second Trump administration organized by the Heritage Foundation and over 100 conservative partners — pledged to “gut federal education funding, sanction discrimination against LGBTQ+ students, divert taxpayer funds to private schools,” and “dismantle the federal role in public education.” Now, Project 2025 partner organizations are celebrating the Supreme Court ruling.

Extremist “parental rights” group Moms for Liberty posted, “Parents should raise children, not government bureaucrats,” and has already begun a campaign to eliminate the National Education Association.

Extreme anti-LGBTQ group the Family Research Council released an episode of its Washington Watch podcast in which host Tony Perkins claimed “the left is going to be fearmongering” about the cuts to the Department of Education but argued there will be little change to classrooms. Speaking with Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT), Perkins praised the Supreme Court ruling, arguing it will “free up education at the state level to do what works.”

The Heritage Foundation's Jonathan Butcher appeared on The Steve Gruber Show and argued the layoffs and other changes to the department won't majorly affect students, repeating the claims that essential programs will simply be moved to other federal agencies. Butcher also attested that “Congress is going to look to disentangle the U.S. Department of Education and other federal responsibilities from federal law” to move education policies to the states.

Video

Citation

From the July 16, 2025, edition of Real America's Voice's The Steve Gruber Show

All of the Trump administration's steps to dismantle the Department of Education reflect the goals of the Project 2025 policy book, Mandate for Leadership. The Heritage Foundation has argued for shuttering the Department of Education since the first Mandate for Leadership book published in 1981. The 2024 edition of Mandateincluded specific plans for demolishing the Department of Education in a chapter written by Heritage's Lindsey Burke.

Burke's chapter for Project 2025 called for the Trump administration to “devolve” the Department of Education “as a stand-alone Cabinet-level department" and recommended that its programs, offices, and personnel be moved to other federal agencies or completely eliminated. Project 2025 specifically argued that the department’s Office of Civil Rights “should move to the Department of Justice,” a plan that Education Secretary Linda McMahon echoed during her confirmation hearing. Burke also suggested that only “employees whose positions are determined to be essential to the mission” would possibly move to other agencies now handling their office's work.

Closing down the Department of Education is just one area of many policies where the Trump administration is following the lead of Project 2025.

For instance, in January, the Trump administration released an executive order requiring any federally funded schools to remove so-called “critical race theory,” “gender ideology,” and other “radical indoctrination” from their curriculums. This measure was taken directly from Mandate for Leadership, which called for lawmakers to prevent the teaching of CRT and to “take particular note of how radical gender ideology is having a devastating effect on school-aged children.”

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NOTE NOEM DUFFY BLAME BIDEN

As TX deaths rise, officials blast faulty forecast by DOGE-gutted National Weather Service

Brett Wilkins Common Dreams

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When an AI script written by a Department of Government Efficiency employee came across a contract for internet service, it flagged it as cancelable. Not because it was waste, fraud or abuse — the Department of Veterans Affairs needs internet connectivity after all — but because the model was given unclear and conflicting instructions.

Sahil Lavingia, who wrote the code, told it to cancel, or in his words “munch,” anything that wasn’t “directly supporting patient care.” Unfortunately, neither Lavingia nor the model had the knowledge required to make such determinations.

“I think that mistakes were made,” said Lavingia, who worked at DOGE for nearly two months, in an interview with ProPublica. “I’m sure mistakes were made. Mistakes are always made.”

It turns out, a lot of mistakes were made as DOGE and the VA rushed to implement President Donald Trump’s February executive order mandating all of the VA’s contracts be reviewed within 30 days.

ProPublica obtained the code and prompts — the instructions given to the AI model — used to review the contracts and interviewed Lavingia and experts in both AI and government procurement. We are publishing an analysis of those prompts to help the public understand how this technology is being deployed in the federal government.

The experts found numerous and troubling flaws: the code relied on older, general-purpose models not suited for the task; the model hallucinated contract amounts, deciding around 1,100 of the agreements were each worth $34 million when they were sometimes worth thousands; and the AI did not analyze the entire text of contracts. Most experts said that, in addition to the technical issues, using off-the-shelf AI models for the task — with little context on how the VA works — should have been a nonstarter.

Lavingia, a software engineer enlisted by DOGE, acknowledged there were flaws in what he created and blamed, in part, a lack of time and proper tools. He also stressed that he knew his list of what he called “MUNCHABLE” contracts would be vetted by others before a final decision was made.

Portions of the prompt are pasted below along with commentary from experts we interviewed. Lavingia published a complete version of it on his personal GitHub account.

Problems with how the model was constructed can be detected from the very opening lines of code, where the DOGE employee instructs the model how to behave:

This part of the prompt, known as a system prompt, is intended to shape the overall behavior of the large language model, or LLM, the technology behind AI bots like ChatGPT. In this case, it was used before both steps of the process: first, before Lavingia used it to obtain information like contract amounts; then, before determining if a contract should be canceled.

Including information not related to the task at hand can confuse AI. At this point, it’s only being asked to gather information from the text of the contract. Everything related to “munchable status,” “soft-services” or “DEI” is irrelevant. Experts told ProPublica that trying to fix issues by adding more instructions can actually have the opposite effect — especially if they’re irrelevant.

The models were only shown the first 10,000 characters from each document, or approximately 2,500 words. Experts were confused by this, noting that OpenAI models support inputs over 50 times that size. Lavingia said that he had to use an older AI model that the VA had already signed a contract for.

This portion of the prompt instructs the AI to extract the contract number and other key details of a contract, such as the “total contract value.”

This was error-prone and not necessary, as accurate contract information can already be found in publicly available databases like USASpending. In some cases, this led to the AI system being given an outdated version of a contract, which led to it reporting a misleadingly large contract amount. In other cases, the model mistakenly pulled an irrelevant number from the page instead of the contract value.

“They are looking for information where it’s easy to get, rather than where it’s correct,” said Waldo Jaquith, a former Obama appointee who oversaw IT contracting at the Treasury Department. “This is the lazy approach to gathering the information that they want. It’s faster, but it’s less accurate.”

Lavingia acknowledged that this approach led to errors but said that those errors were later corrected by VA staff.

Once the program extracted this information, it ran a second pass to determine if the contract was “munchable.”

Again, only the first 10,000 characters were shown to the model. As a result, the munchable determination was based purely on the first few pages of the contract document.

The above prompt section is the first set of instructions telling the AI how to flag contracts. The prompt provides little explanation of what it’s looking for, failing to define what qualifies as “core medical/benefits” and lacking information about what a “necessary consultant” is.

For the types of models the DOGE analysis used, including all the necessary information to make an accurate determination is critical.

Cary Coglianese, a University of Pennsylvania professor who studies the governmental use of artificial intelligence, said that knowing which jobs could be done in-house “calls for a very sophisticated understanding of medical care, of institutional management, of availability of human resources” that the model does not have.

The prompt above tries to implement a fundamental policy of the Trump administration: killing all DEI programs. But the prompt fails to include a definition of what DEI is, leaving the model to decide.

Despite the instruction to cancel DEI-related contracts, very few were flagged for this reason. Procurement experts noted that it’s very unlikely for information like this to be found in the first few pages of a contract.

These two lines — which experts say were poorly defined — carried the most weight in the DOGE analysis. The response from the AI frequently cited these reasons as the justification for munchability. Nearly every justification included a form of the phrase “direct patient care,” and in a third of cases the model flagged contracts because it stated the services could be handled in-house.

The poorly defined requirements led to several contracts for VA office internet services being flagged for cancellation. In one justification, the model had this to say:

The contract provides data services for internet connectivity, which is an IT infrastructure service that is multiple layers removed from direct clinical patient care and could likely be performed in-house, making it classified as munchable.

Despite these instructions, AI flagged many audit- and compliance-related contracts as “munchable,” labeling them as “soft services.”

In one case, the model even acknowledged the importance of compliance while flagging a contract for cancellation, stating: “Although essential to ensuring accurate medical records and billing, these services are an administrative support function (a ‘soft service’) rather than direct patient care.”

Shobita Parthasarathy, professor of public policy and director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at University of Michigan, told ProPublica that this piece of the prompt was notable in that it instructs the model to “distinguish” between the two types of services without instructing the model what to save and what to kill.

The emphasis on “direct patient care” is reflected in how often the AI cited it in its recommendations, even when the model did not have any information about a contract. In one instance where it labeled every field “not found,” it still decided the contract was munchable. It gave this reason:

Without evidence that it involves essential medical procedures or direct clinical support, and assuming the contract is for administrative or related support services, it meets the criteria for being classified as munchable.

In reality, this contract was for the preventative maintenance of important safety devices known as ceiling lifts at VA medical centers, including three sites in Maryland. The contract itself stated:

Ceiling Lifts are used by employees to reposition patients during their care. They are critical safety devices for employees and patients, and must be maintained and inspected appropriately.

This portion of the prompt attempts to define “soft services.” It uses many highly specific examples but also throws in vague categories without definitions like “non-performing/non-essential contracts.”

Experts said that in order for a model to properly determine this, it would need to be given information about the essential activities and what’s required to support them.

This section of the prompt was the result of analysis by Lavingia and other DOGE staff, Lavingia explained. “This is probably from a session where I ran a prior version of the script that most likely a DOGE person was like, ‘It’s not being aggressive enough.’ I don’t know why it starts with a 2. I guess I disagreed with one of them, and so we only put 2, 3 and 4 here.”

Notably, our review found that the only clarifications related to past errors were related to scenarios where the model wasn’t flagging enough contracts for cancellation.

This section of the prompt provides the most detail about what constitutes “direct patient care.” While it does cover many aspects of care, it still leaves a lot of ambiguity and forces the model to make its own judgements about what constitutes “proven efficacy” and “critical” medical equipment.

In addition to the limited information given on what constitutes direct patient care, there is no information about how to determine if a price is “reasonable,” especially since the LLM only sees the first few pages of the document. The models lack knowledge about what’s normal for government contracts.

“I just do not understand how it would be possible. This is hard for a human to figure out,” Jaquith said about whether AI could accurately determine if a contract was reasonably priced. “I don’t see any way that an LLM could know this without a lot of really specialized training.”

This section explicitly lists which tasks could be “easily insourced” by VA staff, and more than 500 different contracts were flagged as “munchable” for this reason.

“A larger issue with all of this is there seems to be an assumption here that contracts are almost inherently wasteful,” Coglianese said when shown this section of the prompt. “Other services, like the kinds that are here, are cheaper to contract for. In fact, these are exactly the sorts of things that we would not want to treat as ‘munchable.’” He went on to explain that insourcing some of these tasks could also “siphon human sources away from direct primary patient care.”

In an interview, Lavingia acknowledged some of these jobs might be better handled externally. “We don’t want to cut the ones that would make the VA less efficient or cause us to hire a bunch of people in-house,” Lavingia explained. “Which currently they can’t do because there’s a hiring freeze.”

The VA is standing behind its use of AI to examine contracts, calling it “a commonsense precedent.” And documents obtained by ProPublica suggest the VA is looking at additional ways AI can be deployed. A March email from a top VA official to DOGE stated:

Today, VA receives over 2 million disability claims per year, and the average time for a decision is 130 days. We believe that key technical improvements (including AI and other automation), combined with Veteran-first process/culture changes pushed from our Secretary’s office could dramatically improve this. A small existing pilot in this space has resulted in 3% of recent claims being processed in less than 30 days. Our mission is to figure out how to grow from 3% to 30% and then upwards such that only the most complex claims take more than a few days.

If you have any information about the misuse or abuse of AI within government agencies, reach out to us via our Signal or SecureDrop channels.

If you’d like to talk to someone specific, Brandon Roberts is an investigative journalist on the news applications team and has a wealth of experience using and dissecting artificial intelligence. He can be reached on Signal @brandonrobertz.01 or by email brandon.roberts@propublica.org.

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still saying 300 yr get SS but now fixed!

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Late-night Trump brag shattered by 'damning' report issued just hours later

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An analysis by Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler shows the Trump administration is still wheeling out lies months after they’ve been outed.

“This is an example of how, even after falsehoods are exposed, the spin machine keeps working,” wrote Kessler, referring to a March 4 post by President Donald Trump that “government databases list … 3.47 million people from ages 120 to 129, 3.9 million people from ages 130 to 139. 3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149. And money is being paid to many of them.”

In February, the Washington Post published an article documenting the truth of the matter, that Social Security databases rely on an almost 70-year-old computer programming language called COBOL, which doesn’t have a standardized way to store dates.

This means ancient programmers assigned a default date, such as 1875, to people lacking birth information, many of them seniors born before a reliable federal birth recording program was in place. But when Musk’s DOGE team scanned Social Security systems, “they were shocked to find people listed in the system with absurd ages because of the limitations of an old programming language,” writes Kessler.

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People familiar with Social Security’s systems were already aware of the issue, of course. The Social Security Administration has automatically terminated the benefits of people once they reach age 115 since 2015. Kessler reports the U.S. Office of Inspector General had recommended a cleanup of the system in 2023, but Social Security deferred the project because it would “divert resources” from other important work and “would have limited or no benefit to the administration.” A 2023 IG report found the vast majority of beneficiaries who lacked a birth date had already died and been purged from the system anyhow. Plus, any major overhaul could introduce new errors to the system.

Still, the notion of wrongdoers scamming Social Security was “an irresistible talking point,” says Kessler, so much so that DOGE bragged of fixing the “problem” late last month on social media: “After 11 weeks, Social Security has finished this major cleanup initiative: ~12.3M individuals aged 120+ have now been marked as deceased.”

“The post was carefully worded,” said Kessler. “It did not claim that 12 million people had received improper payments. Instead, it said that these people had been marked as deceased. In other words, DOGE appears to have implemented the plan suggested by the IG two years ago.”

Despite that, Kessler said Trump supporters eagerly greeted the news and used it to justify the president's “original false claim.”

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) was one of many cheerleaders jumping aboard a non-moving train, claiming: "No more 300-year-olds getting Social Security checks because of Elon Musk. Thank God President Trump had the wisdom to put Elon in place."

The train included other personalities such as right-wing entertainer Sean Hannity, and Speaker Mike Johnson.

“… [W]ithin the echo chamber of the pro-Trump universe, a problem that never existed now has been fixed,” Kessler said.

Read the original Washington Post report at this link.

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raw story

Exclusive: Memo exposes DOGE's potential 'end game' for U.S. Postal Service 6 25

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President Donald Trump’s push to slash federal spending could have devastating consequences for America’s national parks, with proposed budget cuts threatening to gut the Park Service and dismantle protections for the country’s most treasured landscapes, the New York Times reported Sunday.

In 2023, the latest year with available data, an estimated 325 million people visited national parks, monuments, and historic sites, spending around $26.4 billion in nearby communities. That number grew even higher the following year, with park visits reaching an all-time record of nearly 332 million, per the article by Ted Kerasote, a nature and wildlife writer.

Theresa Pierno, president of the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), an advocacy organization, cautioned last monththat the park system "would be completely decimated" if the proposed cuts go into effect.

"Even before he took office, the Park Service was running lean, on a slim operating budget of about $3 billion. But since January, an estimated 13 percent of its staff has departed through pressured buyouts, early retirements and deferred resignations," the Times piece noted.

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According to the NPCA, the Trump administration’s proposed $900 million cut to the Park Service’s operating budget could force the closure of more than 80 percent of the 433 parks, monuments, historic sites, and other areas under its care.

Such a drastic move would mark the unraveling of a system that for over 100 years has safeguarded the nation’s most iconic natural and cultural treasures. Long seen as a global example of public land preservation, the national parks represent a legacy of conservation and shared heritage that could be severely compromised, Kerasote argued.

"Mr. Trump has proposed hacking the Park Service’s operating budget by roughly 30 percent, which would be catastrophic, and transferring less visited national parks and other Park Service locations to states and tribal governments," he said.

The writer said Trump "seems bent on eroding one of the country’s greatest achievements, a national park system open to all."

He continued: "As the Western writer Wallace Stegner once put it, the national parks are 'absolutely American' and 'the best idea we ever had.'

Will the millions of Americans who cherish their parks allow Mr. Trump to destroy them?"

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People in the tornadoes' path wonder if Trump cuts contributed to death and destruction in KY

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Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast - How Project 2025 is Reshaping America with David Graham | Free Listening on Podbean App

plan got mesed up but also boosted by musk freelanacing on doge; some loyalists never got installed to transform the agy?

We got a pretty clear heads up about what Trump 2.0 could portend for so many facets of American life. The Mandate for Leadership, also known as Project 2025, is perhaps the clearest compilation of goals for Trump’s second term. Now that 100 days have passed of the second Trump administration, we thought it would be a good time to see where things stand. David Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of “The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America.” He joins WITHpod to discuss what has already been done, what’s been most surprising, how he sees the plans playing out and more.

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More than a million people in some of the world's most impoverished countries could be fed for three months and hundreds of thousands of children's lives could be saved if $98 million in ready-made meals and other rations were able to leave four warehouses run by the U.S. foreign aid agency dismantled by the Trump administration.

But instead, there is no end in sight to the food languishing in the facilities—or to the starvation of millions of people in Gaza, Sudan, South Sudan, and other parts of the Global South facing high levels of hunger and malnutrition.

Some of the 66,000 tonnes of food, including grains, high-energy biscuits, and vegetable oil, are slated to expire as soon as July, when they will likely be turned into animal feed, incinerated, or otherwise destroyed, Reuters reported Thursday.

The warehouses are located in Houston, South Africa, Djibouti, and Dubai, and are run by the U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID) Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance. Many of the staff who help run the warehouses are scheduled to be fired on July 1 in the first of two rounds of cuts that will effect nearly all of USAID.

Contracts with suppliers, shipping companies, and contractors have been canceled since USAID was taken over by the Trump administration's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, with the White House saying the agency—with a relatively small budget of just $40 billion—was responsible for "significant waste."

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Since DOGE, run by tech billionaire Elon Musk, targeted USAID in one of its first full-scale attacks on a federal entity, the agency is being run by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The State Department's Office of Foreign Assistance has not yet approved a proposal to give the stranded food stocks to aid organizations for distribution, two former USAID staffers told Reuters.

That office is being led by Jeremy Lewin, a 28-year-old former DOGE employee who is overseeing the complete decommissioning of USAID, which has provided humanitarian assistance in conflict zones and the Global South for more than six decades.

Max Hoffman, a foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), said the massive waste of life-saving food rations was the result of President Donald Trump and Musk deploying "some idiot 20 year old staggering around USAID turning things off without the faintest idea of the consequences."

Some of the rations were intended for Gaza, where half a million Palestinians are currently facing starvation and the rest of the population of 2.3 million people are suffering from acute levels of food insecurity due to Israel's total blockade on humanitarian aid which was reimposed in March after a brief cease-fire. Thousands of children have been hospitalized with acute malnutrition since the beginning of the year, but Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Gaza has left health providers with extremely limited means to treat them.

The entire population of Gaza could be fed for a month and a half with the food rations that are on the verge of rotting in the four warehouses, Reuters reported.

Nearly 500 tonnes of high-energy biscuits in Dubai are among the stocks that will expire in July, a former USAID official told the outlet. They could feed at least 27,000 acutely malnourished children for a month.

The food aid was also scheduled to go to Sudan, where famine has been confirmed in at least 10 areas as the country faces the third year of a civil war.

Action Against Hunger is one of many aid groups that have had to scale back operations after losing significant funding due to U.S. cuts; the group said last month that its suspension of work in the Democratic Republic of Congo had already directly led to the deaths of at least six children.

In addition to USAID's warehouses full of soon-to-be-expired food, the U.S.-based company Edesia, which makes the peanut-based Plumpy'Nut, told Reuters that USAID's cuts to transportation contracts had forced the company to open an additional warehouse. A $13 million stockpile of 5,000 tonnes of Plumpy'Nut, which is used to prevent severe malnutrition in children, is in the warehouse now—but could be used to feed more than 484,000 children.

"The dismantling of USAID and cuts to humanitarian aid has been devastating and unacceptable," said Oxfam America.

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An internal Trump administration document reportedly shows that anti-fraud checks recently installed at the Social Security agency have found just two cases of potentially improper benefit claims out of more than 110,000—a rate of 0.0018%.

The documents, first reported Thursday by Nextgov/FCW, further undercut President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk's narrative that Social Security is brimming with fraud. Musk falsely in March that "40% of the calls into Social Security were fraudulent."

The anti-fraud checks for Social Security have been applied only to benefit claims made over the phone. According to the internal document, "No significant fraud has been detected from the flagged cases." Earlier this year, amid widespread outrage, the Social Security Administration (SSA) walked back a proposal to scrap many of its phone-based benefit claim services.

Nextgov/FCW noted Thursday that the Trump administration's deployment of the anti-fraud tools beginning last month "did cause delays, as SSA changed its phone procedures to add the checks on the backend."

"The lags stem from the three-day hold placed on telephone claims in order to run the anti-fraud [checks], a move that 'delays payments and benefits to customers, despite an extremely low risk of fraud,'" Nextgov/FCW reported, citing the internal document.

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a statement that "the Trump-Musk Social Security takeover has only meant more chaos and confusion for Americans."

"Every one of DOGE's so-called 'mistakes' is a backdoor cut to people's benefits," said Warren. "There's nothing efficient about making it harder for people to access the checks they’ve earned and are owed."

On social media, Warren called the revelations in the internal administration document "a HUGE scandal."

It's long been clear that Social Security fraud is minuscule, with an inspector general report published last year estimating that just 0.84% of Social Security benefits paid out between 2015 and 2022 were dispensed improperly—and even those improper payments were not necessarily fraudulent.

The new reporting out Thursday bolstered warnings that the Trump administration's hunt for fraud is a mere pretext for slashing Social Security benefits and weakening the program.

"Turns out there ISN'T rampant Social Security fraud, but Elon's witch hunt, driven by his insane conspiracy theories, IS keeping seniors from getting their benefits as quickly as they should be," Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) wrote on social media. "THIS is Republican governing: hunting for nonexistent fraud while breaking Social Security."

Frank Bisignano, the newly confirmed SSA administrator, has close ties to Musk's Department of Government Efficiency and has defended the president's false claim that tens of millions of "dead" people are receiving Social Security benefits.

CNNreported earlier this week that as SSA combs "through its databases to check whether beneficiaries are alive or dead" at Trump and Musk's behest, agency staffers are "seeing more people coming in to be resurrected" after being falsely deemed deceased.

"I've been saying it all along," former SSA chief Martin O'Malley wrote Thursday. "Elon Musk is the biggest fraud, not Social Security."

NOW READ:The backlash is here — and Republicans have no one to blame but themselves

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Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump, with the help of billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has sought to vastly reduce the number of government workers through mass firings, drawing concern, criticism and several legal challenges.

According to a report from Reuters, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, an advisory body created through an executive order, has prompted the firing, severance and early retirement of more than 260,000 government employees. However, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston has issued a temporary restraining order, blocking efforts to restructure the federal government.

In March, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his own DOGE-related cuts, aiming to terminate 20,000 full time employees and reorganize the department’s 28 divisions to 15. The department has also closed its regional offices in Boston, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco and Seattle, halving its total regional facilities.

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services, testifies during his Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Jan. 29, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

However, a coalition of 20 attorneys general, including Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, have taken legal action against Kennedy and several department officials, arguing these cuts would functionally dismantle the DHHS.

If the court doesn’t provide immediate relief, and the case is allowed to play out, Nessel warned that these cuts could cause “immeasurable harm” to the nation and its health system.

“You’re essentially leaving the agency, as a whole, completely dysfunctional by eliminating so many departments or regions, you know entire offices just wiped off the map and, of course, getting rid of some people with some incredible expertise,” Nessel told the Michigan Advance

The DHHS is eliminating roughly 3,500 employees at the Food and Drug Administration, 2,400 at the Centers for Disease Control, 1,200 at the National Institutes of Health and 300 at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

It will also work to consolidate the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, Health Resources and Services Administration, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health under the new Administration for a Healthy America.

Public health and infectious diseases know no borders, Nessel said, warning that the decision to shutter regional health programs, close CDC labs and close all 10 of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services’ regional offices jeopardizes public health in every community.

“Also it’s just a flagrant violation of the law. Disregards the separation of powers, and it places this new burden now, of course, on the states, because there are certain things that you rely upon the federal government to do, especially in terms of coordinating efforts between the states,” Nessel said.

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“Let’s say you have an outbreak of a new variant in bird flu that could impact the entire country. Maybe that happens in Vermont. Is Vermont supposed to coordinate that response with Michigan? You know, it’s the CDC that does that. How are we supposed to make up for that?” Nessel questioned.

While the state has its own lab testing capabilities, the federal government and its labs act as a conduit for sharing data with the states and across the nation, as well as monitoring other countries.

“They fill this incredibly important role in terms of preventing the next global pandemic and mitigating it here in Michigan. And it’s a burden that, frankly, the state simply can’t sustain. It’s the reason why we have a federal government,” Nessel said.

Additionally, it’s the federal government’s job to ensure its laws are enforced, Nessel said, and Congress delegates money to ensure those laws are complied with. Deciding to withhold those funds and cut staffing without regard for which workers are essential, and shutting down offices without regard for whether the department can continue to comply with federal law not only violates the law and the Constitution in a myriad of ways, Nessel contends, but it compromises the safety and health of people in Michigan.

While Kennedy said the intent of the cuts was to address waste and inefficiency within the department, Nessel said the argument doesn’t hold water due to the way the DHHS approached its firings.

“It’s not as if it took any significant period of time to evaluate, you know, is this really a necessary function of the government, and do we really need this to fulfill the mission of this agency? There were no determinations of any kind made like that” Nessel said, pointing to comments Kennedy made to the media where he admitted 20% of cuts at the agency were a mistake, and would need to be reinstated.

[VID] He he had forgone a line-by-line review of each employee’s jobs because “it takes too long, and you lose political momentum.”

Among those cuts were doctors and the administrator of the World Trade Center Health program, which certify illnesses in first responders and survivors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks as part of the requirements of the Zadroga Act, with the New York Daily News reporting nearly all 16 employees cut from the program had been rehired as of May 7, including the program’s director, James Howard.

“If you were more careful and cautious before you fired them in the first place, maybe we wouldn’t have this issue,” Nessel said.

The case filed by the attorneys general points to several other examples of offices impacted by the cuts, including the Food and Drug Administration missing a vaccine application deadline and canceling a critical test for the bird flu virus, suspending the testing program for a year.

The case also points to Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views and history of promoting misinformation about vaccination.

According to the filing, some FDA employees were told to go home following the March 27 downsizing announcement and prepare for the possibility that they would not be back. If they received a termination email, they would lose access to the building.

“Beginning in the early morning of April 1, 2025, HHS employees in all offices, administrations, agencies and sub-agencies began to receive termination notices. Some employees had not seen their early morning termination email before leaving for the office, and were surprised when they arrived at work to find their access cards had been deactivated,” the case reads.

“Many notices contained errors. For example, some listed incorrect information about workers’ recent performance ratings. At FDA, the listed point of contact for the Equal Employment Opportunity office had departed a month earlier,” it says.

While this case doesn’t directly address that lack of support and protection for employees, several unions and groups of federal employees have taken legal action on these concerns.

“It’s embarrassing and disturbing to see any workers treated like this, but especially, you know, ones that have worked so hard to protect the American people,” Nessel said.

She also pointed to the ways these firings would impact the economy, calling them “penny wise but pound foolish.”

In the announcement, Kennedy promised to lower costs for taxpayers, with the 10,000 person layoff expected to cut down on $1.8 billion a year. However, Nessel said these costs would crop up in other ways.

“What has a bigger impact on the economy than people’s health, you know? If people are too sick to be able to work, that’s a problem,” Nessel said, noting that widespread infectious disease can have a devastating impact on the economy.

“It’s not just that we’re not really saving money. We’re going to lose an unknown amount of money, an untold amount of money, if people who could otherwise have been healthy are not healthy,” Nessel said.

While Michigan is still assembling its state-specific declarations, these firings will also impact the state’s efforts on issues like mental health and create issues in how they distribute resources within their budgets, Nessel said.

“If we’re trying to prioritize and say, ‘Well, how much money are we going to spend on substance abuse, or how much money are we going to spend on mental health treatment?’ It’s kind of important to know how much of it you’re going to get from the federal government. And because this is done in such a chaotic manner, it’s really hard to know,” Nessel said.

In addition to their case on the mass firings, Nessel and 23 other attorneys general filed suit against Kennedy and the DHHS for terminating almost $11 billion in critical public health grants across the country.

That includes $379.3 million in grant funding awarded and owed to the State of Michigan for certain mental health and substance abuse grants and grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention meant to support infectious disease control and vaccinations for children and vulnerable adults, among other programs.

Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor for questions: info@michiganadvance.com.

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'Embarrassment:' Trump admin asks judge to hide it's tactics for mass layoffs

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no lnx

Democratic Lawmakers Denied Entry to the Department of Education

It was the fourth agency this week that federal employees blocked congressional Democrats from entering amid a push to shutter government agencies and dramatically cut the federal work force.

House Democrats Denied Entry to the U.S. Department of Education

Several Democratic lawmakers attempted to access the department’s headquarters on Friday, after a request to meet with the acting education secretary went unanswered.

“We’re coming in. Don’t block the door. We’re coming in. Who are you?” “You’re not coming in.” “Who are you?” “Under whose orders?” “Who are you?” “Who are you, sir?” “Do you have business here? “Yes, we do.” (crowd shouting) “I have sent the secretary, I have sent the assistant secretary a letter, alerting her that we would be here today, and we have asked her for a meeting.” “Yeah, I don’t know that’s been accepted. So until that’s accepted.” “Who are you?” “What authority do you have?” “And what do you do here?” “What do you do here?” “I have security responsibilities.” “Get out of the way.” “We pay for your job. We pay you.” “I understand.” “We’re members of Congress, we’re not a threat.” “We’re members of Congress.” “Nobody has accepted a meeting.” “We haven’t heard that from the secretary. We haven’t heard that from her spokesman.” “I’m relaying that.” “You are not the spokesman for the department. You are a security guard.” “Are you prepared to stand here all night if we decide to stay?” “I guess, yeah.” “All right, well you just stay right there, then. And you just stay and stand there.” “Why are you letting us go to that desk like we were able to do last year?” “He’s a U.S. employee, right?” “No, he’s not.” “He’s not a U.S. employee.” “This is a public institution.” “Did Elon Musk hire you?” “Who do you work for?” “I’m a federal employee working for the education.” “Now they’ve called the police on us.” “Advocate on behalf of your children.” “Trump and Musk have placed DOGE staffers in the building, where they have access to the private data of millions of students and families. Already, they have placed dozens of employees who perform vital services on which our schools, teachers and students depend, on leave. We will not cede the responsibility for our future generations to one man, his ideology and his unelected lieutenants.”

Several Democratic lawmakers attempted to access the department’s headquarters on Friday, after a request to meet with the acting education secretary went unanswered.

By Robert Jimison

Reporting from Washington

Feb. 8, 2025

In a striking display of the limits being placed on congressional authority in the first weeks of the new administration, several Democratic lawmakers were denied entry to the U.S. Department of Education on Friday.

“Get out of the way,” Representative Maxine Waters of California told a man blocking more than a dozen House Democrats from the doors at the department’s Washington offices. The man, who was not identified by name, said he was a federal employee working for the department.

“Did Elon Musk hire you?” asked Representative Becca Balint of Vermont.

“This is an outrage,” Representative Mark Takano of California shouted as he and his colleagues were physically blocked from entering the building. “We have oversight responsibilities,” he said during the unsuccessful attempt to enter.

The clash, captured on video by multiple members, was yet another episode that became a flashpoint in the intensifying battle over the administration’s efforts to reshape the federal bureaucracy.

“They are blocking members of Congress from entering the Department of Education! Elon is allowed in and not the people? ILLEGAL,” Representative Maxwell Frost of Florida wrote in a post.

It is unclear, however, if the federal employee violated any laws by refusing entry. While members of Congress do have an oversight role over federal agencies, that power is typically exercised through hearings and enforcement of policies.

And while the Constitution grants Congress the power to establish federal government offices, it is unclear whether individual members are granted unfettered access to those buildings.

Lawmakers have expressed frustration with the broader transformation underway within the federal government, where Elon Musk — the world’s wealthiest man and the head of what Mr. Musk has labeled the Department of Government Efficiency — has been granted an unusual degree of influence.

The standoff follows a campaign promise by President Trump to dismantle and eventually shut down the Department of Education, which he has characterized as an agency injecting extreme ideology on race and gender into the nation’s public schools.

“We will move everything back to the states, where it belongs,” he said during one campaign speech. “They can individualize education and do it with the love for their children.”

Since taking office, a number of broader actions by Mr. Trump have directly affected the Department of Education and its work force.

Last month, employees across the Education Department were put on administrative leave. The department cited guidance from the Office of Personnel Management, which had instructed federal agencies to submit plans for reducing staff associated with diversity, equity and inclusion efforts by the end of the day on Jan. 31.

Alarmed by the action and threats of more efforts to overhaul the department, Democratic lawmakers sent a letter late Wednesday seeking a meeting with Denise L. Carter, the acting education secretary. When their request went unanswered, they showed up at the department’s headquarters on Friday morning, only to find themselves denied entry.

No official explanation was given for the refusal of entry, and lawmakers grew more agitated at the arrival of armed federal officers. The Education Department did not respond to requests for comment on Saturday.

“We aren’t dangerous,” Mr. Frost wrote in a social media post. “We are here to represent our people.”

Similar scenes played out throughout the week at other agencies where Democratic lawmakers were locked out, including Treasury Department offices, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Environmental Protection Agency.

See more on: Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Education Department (US), Democratic Party

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Politico legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney reportsemployees responsible for conducting Trump’s mass layoffs at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) are now "also going to fire themselves," per new emails released in court.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has already ordered nearly 1,500 employees fired from CFPB. This leaves only about 200 employees protecting consumers from unlawful digital theft and home-owners from being wrongfully ousted from their homes by disreputable loan practices.

Now what jobs still remain are cannibalizing themselves, according to filings.

“We are three positions off, but we are reconciling it,” read an email from CFPB COO Adam Martinez. “My team doing all of the number/name crunching are running on low fuel and have not slept for a couple of days. They also happen to be RIFing themselves.”

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“RIFing,” reports The New Republic, refers to “reduction in force,” a government term for layoffs.

Up until the DOGE eviscerations, the CFPB was the American consumer’s strongest ally. Sen. Elizabeth Warren proposed the agency in 2007 in response to the U.S. subprime mortgage meltdown and the subsequent worldwide financial crisis. It is an independent bureau within the Federal Reserve that intervenes on behalf of U.S. consumers.

Prior to DODGE, if enough alerts against a lending agency piled up at CFPB, the agency could launch its own investigation and scrutinize the company’s history and practices. In 2022, the CFPB whacked Wells Fargo with a $3.7 billion fine after discovering Wells Fargo had illegally assessed fees and interest charges on consumers’ loans, wrongly repossessed their properties, misapplied bank loans and hit consumers with unlawful surprise overdraft fees and other “incorrect charges.”

Notches in CFPB’s belt also included ordering Navy Federal Credit Union to pay more than $95 million over illegal surprise overdraft fees charged to military servicemembers, veterans and consumers, despite customers’ bank accounts having sufficient funds at the time of purchases. Some college graduates may also recognize the name “Navient,” and be thankful CFPB banned Navient from servicing federal student loans after slapping the company with a $120 million fine for widespread student lending failures.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is known also for ordering lending company Mr. Cooper to cough up more than $70 million for wrongfully foreclosing on homeowners during reviews and impermissibly raising homeowners’ monthly payments and failing to honor mortgage payment arrangements.

Now gutted by DOGE, TNR reports the agency will no longer focus on protecting consumers making digital payments, people with medical debt, or those using peer-to-peer payday lending platforms.

Read the full TNR report here.

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Center for American Progress offers a tool to look at thestate-by-state impact of the Trump regime’s cuts.

MuskWatch lets you take a detailed look at DOGE’s cancelled contracts.

For those who are in a betting mood, gamble-on-anything site Polymarket offers a feed for DOGE tracking, also based on public data on DOGE’s contract cancellations.

And for an interesting snapshot, AP did a case study on how DOGE cuts have affected Kansas City, Missouri

Ever wonder what tax dollars were doing to improve public health? Our Health ROI has the inside scoop on what we’re at risk of losing now.

If you only follow national papers and social feeds, you’ll miss a lot of what’s happening on the ground. News from the States gives you a window into local journalism.

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4 25 MSNBC EX usaid HEAD SAYS 3.3M KIA AIDS MALARIA BC OF CUTS

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A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board reported an unusual spike in potentially sensitive data flowing out of the agency’s network in early March 2025 when staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency, which goes by DOGE, were granted access to the agency’s databases. On April 7, the Department of Homeland Security gained access to Internal Revenue Service tax data.

These seemingly unrelated events are examples of recent developments in the transformation of the structure and purpose of federal government data repositories. I am a researcher who studies the intersection of migration, data governance and digital technologies. I’m tracking how data that people provide to U.S. government agencies for public services such as tax filing, health care enrollment, unemployment assistance and education support is increasingly being redirected toward surveillance and law enforcement.

Originally collected to facilitate health care, eligibility for services and the administration of public services, this information is now shared across government agencies and with private companies, reshaping the infrastructure of public services into a mechanism of control. Once confined to separate bureaucracies, data now flows freely through a network of interagency agreements, outsourcing contracts and commercial partnerships built up in recent decades.

These data-sharing arrangements often take place outside public scrutiny, driven by national security justifications, fraud prevention initiatives and digital modernization efforts. The result is that the structure of government is quietly transforming into an integrated surveillance apparatus, capable of monitoring, predicting and flagging behavior at an unprecedented scale.

Executive orders signed by President Donald Trump aim to remove remaining institutional and legal barriers to completing this massive surveillance system.

DOGE and the private sector

Central to this transformation is DOGE, which is tasked via an executive order to “promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization.” An additional executive order calls for the federal government to eliminate its information silos.

By building interoperable systems, DOGE can enable real-time, cross-agency access to sensitive information and create a centralized database on people within the U.S. These developments are framed as administrative streamlining but lay the groundwork for mass surveillance.

Key to this data repurposing are public-private partnerships. The DHS and other agencies have turned to third-party contractors and data brokers to bypass direct restrictions. These intermediaries also consolidate data from social media, utility companies, supermarkets and many other sources, enabling enforcement agencies to construct detailed digital profiles of people without explicit consent or judicial oversight.

Palantir, a private data firm and prominent federal contractor, supplies investigative platforms to agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Defense, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Internal Revenue Service. These platforms aggregate data from various sources – driver’s license photos, social services, financial information, educational data – and present it in centralized dashboards designed for predictive policing and algorithmic profiling. These tools extend government reach in ways that challenge existing norms of privacy and consent.

The role of AI

Artificial intelligence has further accelerated this shift.

Predictive algorithms now scan vast amounts of data to generate risk scores, detect anomalies and flag potential threats.

These systems ingest data from school enrollment records, housing applications, utility usage and even social media, all made available through contracts with data brokers and tech companies. Because these systems rely on machine learning, their inner workings are often proprietary, unexplainable and beyond meaningful public accountability.Data privacy researcher Justin Sherman explains the astonishing amount of information data brokers have about you.

Sometimes the results are inaccurate, generated by AI hallucinations – responses AI systems produce that sound convincing but are incorrect, made up or irrelevant. Minor data discrepancies can lead to major consequences: job loss, denial of benefits and wrongful targeting in law enforcement operations. Once flagged, individuals rarely have a clear pathway to contest the system’s conclusions.

Digital profiling

Participation in civic life, applying for a loan, seeking disaster relief and requesting student aid now contribute to a person’s digital footprint. Government entities could later interpret that data in ways that allow them to deny access to assistance. Data collected under the banner of care could be mined for evidence to justify placing someone under surveillance. And with growing dependence on private contractors, the boundaries between public governance and corporate surveillance continue to erode.

Artificial intelligence, facial recognition systems and predictive profiling systems lack oversight. They also disproportionately affect low-income individuals, immigrants and people of color, who are more frequently flagged as risks.

Initially built for benefits verification or crisis response, these data systems now feed into broader surveillance networks. The implications are profound. What began as a system targeting noncitizens and fraud suspects could easily be generalized to everyone in the country.

Eyes on everyone

This is not merely a question of data privacy. It is a broader transformation in the logic of governance. Systems once designed for administration have become tools for tracking and predicting people’s behavior. In this new paradigm, oversight is sparse and accountability is minimal.

AI allows for the interpretation of behavioral patterns at scale without direct interrogation or verification. Inferences replace facts. Correlations replace testimony.

The risk extends to everyone. While these technologies are often first deployed at the margins of society – against migrants, welfare recipients or those deemed “high risk” – there’s little to limit their scope. As the infrastructure expands, so does its reach into the lives of all citizens.

With every form submitted, interaction logged and device used, a digital profile deepens, often out of sight. The infrastructure for pervasive surveillance is in place. What remains uncertain is how far it will be allowed to go.

Nicole M. Bennett, Ph.D. Candidate in Geography and Assistant Director at the Center for Refugee Studies, *Indiana University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Executive orders signed by President Donald Trump aim to remove remaining institutional and legal barriers to completing this massive surveillance system.

DOGE and the private sector

The role of AI

Artificial intelligence has further accelerated this shift.

Predictive algorithms now scan vast amounts of data to generate risk scores, detect anomalies and flag potential threats.

Digital profiling

Eyes on everyone

AI allows for the interpretation of behavioral patterns at scale without direct interrogation or verification. Inferences replace facts. Correlations replace testimony.

Nicole M. Bennett, Ph.D. Candidate in Geography and Assistant Director at the Center for Refugee Studies, *Indiana University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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rww

04/18/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham @ The New York Times: White House of Worship: Trump Elevates Christian Prayer and Power

Evangelical leaders are relishing the new atmosphere at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — and greater access to the president.

Angry White Men: Stew Peters: America Has A ‘Black Problem’

On The Stew Peters Show, Holocaust denier and Nazi sympathizer Stew Peters dedicated yet another segment to the killing of Austin Metcalf. In it, Peters claimed that America has a “Black problem,” and called for a “national conversation about the problem that we have with Blacks.”

Media Matters: Kevin Roberts tells Mark Levin that Heritage has started planning Project 2029

"I can tell you on behalf of all of my colleagues at Heritage, we're extraordinarily proud of our work, and I will also tell you, Mark, we're already starting Project 2029 because we are not tired of winning."

Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: Trump allies pitch an alternate reality in which his approval rating is ‘soaring’

Confronted with evidence that the president’s support is falling, Trump’s allies have some options. They’ve chosen the worst one.

David Badash @ The New Civil Rights Movement: Trump’s Latest Target: The Watchdog That Keeps Suing Him

From the outset of his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump signaled that a central focus of his presidency would be targeting and exacting retribution against his critics.

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Employees at one federal agency were reportedly kept up for more than a day and a half straight due to the demands of a staffer from South African centibillionaire's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

That's according to a Friday article from CNN, which reported on DOGE staffer Gavin Kliger's alleged treatment of workers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The allegations stem from a sworn declaration a CFPB employee made in U.S. District judge Amy Berman Jackson's court anonymously out of fear of retaliation.

In the declaration, the worker stated that Kliger "kept CFPB staffers working for 36 hours straight to send out mass layoff notices" and was apparently "screaming at those he thought weren’t working fast enough." Kliger — who Reuters reported had amplified content from white supremacist Nick Fuentes — has since been ordered to appear at a hearing scheduled for April 28 pertaining to the mass firing of CFPB employees.

On Friday, Judge Jackson ruled that the roughly 1,500 fired CFPB workers (out of approximately 1,700) would have to be reinstated, as she weighed whether their firings were a violation of a prior court ordered preventing DOGE from effectively shutting down the agency aimed at protecting American consumers from financial scams.

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That prior decision ruled that the mass firings of workers at the agency were illegal, as it would prevent the CFPB from meeting its statutory requirements that Congress legislated at the time of its creation. Because the CFPB is a Congressionally authorized agency, it would take an act of Congress to dismantle it.

The Trump administration argued that the mass firings were legitimate, asserting that the CFPB had "pushed well beyond the limits of the law" in its work while "engag[ing] in intrusive and wasteful fishing expedition. Mark Paoletta, who the administration named as the CFPB's chief legal officer, insisted that leaving the CFPB with just 200 employees was sufficient for the agency to fulfull its statutory obligations.

"An approximately 200 person agency allows the Bureau to fulfill its statutory duties and better aligns with the new leadership’s priorities and management philosophy," he said.

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kff

Overcome by worries, Lynette Isbell dialed a mental health hotline in April 2022. She wanted to talk to someone about her midlife troubles: divorce, an empty nest, and the demands of caring for aging parents with dementia.

“I did not want to keep burdening my family and friends with my problems,” Isbell said.

But she didn’t find the sympathetic ear she was hoping for on the other end. Frustrated, she hung up. Little did she know ending that call would set off events she would regret.

Police arrived at her home in Terre Haute, Indiana, handcuffed her, and had her committed to a hospital, records show, resulting in more than $12,000 in hospital charges.

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“The whole thing was an absolute, utter, traumatic nightmare,” she said.

Isbell’s call for help represented the need for a new approach to crisis calls just as the nation was readying to flip the switch to a revamped response system for mental health. Using just three digits — 988 — people could call or text for help from anywhere at any time starting in July 2022. Federal officials viewed the launch of 988 “as the linchpin” to reenvision the mental health crisis system. The idea was to reduce the reliance on police and the burden on emergency rooms, while eliminating the stigma of seeking help.

But recent federal funding and staffing cuts undermine the future of the 988 program and threaten to erase progress made in Indiana and elsewhere, mental health advocates said.

The Trump administration cut staffing at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the federal office that oversees 988, in recent weeks. It also ended $1 billion of its grants that a number of states relied on this year to help fund their 988 systems, said Stephanie Pasternak, state affairs director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. While a judge temporarily paused grant cutsfor 23 states that contested them, the trims to other states — including Indiana — have moved forward.

Between the SAMHSA cuts andpotential reductions to Medicaid, another crucial funding stream for these services, Pasternak and others are concerned about what this means for 988’s future.

Any disruption to federal funding streams is “gravely impactful,” said Zoe Frantz, CEO of the Indiana Council of Community Mental Health Centers. “We have put a lot of time, talent, and treasure — from the state to providers — in trying to build the system,” Frantz said. “We can’t go back.”

After Isbell hung up her call, a member of the Suicide Prevention Hotline, the crisis line formerly available, phoned the Vigo County Sheriff’s Office and told a dispatcher Isbell was “thinking of committing suicide,” according to the sheriff’s report obtained by KFF Health News.

Years later, Isbell maintains she never said this. “I’ve never been actively suicidal.”

But two officers drove to Isbell’s home.

When they arrived, Isbell was sitting on her back porch on a sunny day with trees just starting to bud. The officer’s report alleged she admitted to thinking about driving her car into a tree, wanting doctor-assisted suicide, and fantasizing about a semitruck hitting her.

She contends active suicidal ideation with a plan is different than the overwhelmed feelings she had that day.

“It was like a childhood game of telephone, only not at all funny,” she said. What she said became distorted and left her no recourse.

The officers walked her to a squad car, where they handcuffed her before transporting her to Terre Haute Regional Hospital, according to dashcam video obtained from a public records request. Neighbors watched as she was taken away.

“I don’t know why I needed to be handcuffed,” she said. “It was demoralizing.”

The Vigo County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to requests for comment about Isbell’s case.

Isbell said being hospitalized against her wishes humiliated her and forced her to battle confusing medical bills for months. An itemized bill shows the hospital charged $12,772 for her overnight stay. After insurance, Isbell was on the hook for roughly $2,800. By comparison, a one-night stay in the presidential suite at the new Terre Haute Casino Resort is $2,471. Terre Haute Regional Hospital spokesperson Ann Marie Foote said Isbell’s bill was “discounted down” to $1,400.

“Our highest priority is always the safety and well-being of patients,” Foote said.

According to Isbell’s medical records, doctors there said “she was very stressed” and “just wanted to speak to someone” and reiterated “she was not suicidal.” They said her anxiety “is increased and made worse by being in here.”

She had “anxiety” and a “depressed mood,” and, according to medical records signed by a psychiatrist there, “she does not meet current criteria for involuntary hospitalization.” She was discharged the next day.

Upset by how she was treated, she contacted 988, the sheriff’s office, and the hospital.

In response to KFF Health News’ questions about Isbell’s experience, Michele Holtkamp, a spokesperson at the time for Indiana’s Family and Social Services Administration, said that before the launch of 988, “the state did not have oversight of individual crisis lines and how they responded.”

After 988 began, Isbell received a follow-up email from an executive with Mental Health America, introducing her to the director of Indiana’s 988 hotline, Kara Biro.

“I shared your story with her and we agree that we would love to get you to help with a training video,” wrote Brandi Christiansen, CEO of Mental Health America-Wabash Valley Region. She explained it would provide workers an opportunity to understand the real-life implications an “outcall can have on a human being.” The video has yet to happen, Isbell said.

The sheriff’s department also asked for her input to improve the process, she said.

Isbell saw those as signs of a turnaround. For mental health leaders in Indiana, 988 represented a “springboard to transform and build” a new response system, according to a 2022 Indiana Behavioral Health Commission report. Too often, the report said, Indiana’s “ineffective and inefficient” system had relied heavily on police and emergency rooms.

Before 988, the state hotline also relied almost entirely on volunteers, complicating efforts to standardize responses, said Jay Chaudhary, a former director of Indiana’s Division of Mental Health and Addiction, who led the state’s transition to 988.

“When somebody makes the really brave step to seek help with mental health care, that system better be ready to catch them,” he said.

Today, Indiana ranks among the 10 states with the highest 988 answer rates, a sign it can handle the demand, said Laurel Stine, chief advocacy and policy officer with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

In Indiana, behavioral health professionals now lead the response via mobile crisis teams, not law enforcement, such as the officers who handcuffed Isbell.

As of July, mobile crisis teams were available to 4.8 million people living in 65 of Indiana’s 92 counties, reaching roughly 71% of residents, according to a 2024 report from the behavioral health commission. In the first half of last year, mobile crisis teams were dispatched 3,080 times for help. Law enforcement officers were involved in about 1% of those cases and roughly 10% resulted in a trip to the emergency room, according to the report.

Similar efforts have occurred nationwide since the 2022 launch. The 988 hotline received 4.8 million calls, texts, and chats during its first year, which is roughly nine times a minute, according to Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration data.

But the federal government has terminated numerous grants earmarked for Indiana and other states to tackle mental health and substance use issues. Still, SAMHSA spokesperson Danielle Bennett said the 988 hotline is a “critical function” and that the federal government “will never compromise” protecting people experiencing a crisis. The hotline, Bennett said, “continues daily, life-saving work.”

The Indiana agency tasked with overseeing 988 had more than $98 million in SAMHSA grants but received 73% of that as of March 24, when the grants were terminated, according to a government list of cuts. That leaves Indiana $26 million short.

Some federal grants were passed through to local organizations, including one group that received grant money for “mobile crisis units,” according to an online grant summary. In a statement, Indiana Family and Social Services Administration spokesperson James Vaughn confirmed it received notice of the terminated SAMHSA grants but declined to provide details other than to say it is “working to minimize the impact to Hoosiers.”

Isbell hopes the 988 option doesn’t disappear for those who need a hand, not handcuffs.

She dealt with the fallout of that fateful call for a long time. After more than a year, she said, she paid the $1,400 bill to put the ordeal behind her.

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A video of a by anti-Elon Musk protesters was posted on March 18, 2025, by an account on X called EndWokeness.

The next day Musk replied to the post, “Some people just want to watch the world burn,” an iconic line from the 2008 Batman film “The Dark Knight.” Alfred, the Wayne family’s faithful butler, says the line to Bruce Wayne – Batman – to describe the motivations behind the Joker’s chaotic acts of violence.

Musk – and Alfred – was right. Some people do, in fact, say they think that society should be burned to the ground. It’s part of a psychological measure political psychologists created called “need for chaos.”

New data from the Center for Political Communication at the University of Delaware suggests that those people – the ones who want society to burn – are the ones with more, not less, trust in Musk. They also report more trust in the Department of Government Efficiency, the government entity Musk advises, which the Trump administration claims it created to cut government waste and fraud.

Yet, critics point out that Musk and DOGE’s seemingly indiscriminate approach to spending cuts risks damaging the infrastructure necessary for American innovation.

This desire to watch the world burn doesn’t come out of nowhere.

Fear of losing status

Somewhat like the Joker, whose perpetual sense of victimhood – “You wanna know how I got these scars?” – drove his need for chaos and destruction, people can develop a need for chaos in response to a sense that they are losing.

When political psychologists introduced this concept of “need for chaos” in 2021, they described it not as a psychological trait, but as a character adaptation that occurs when some people experience a cultural and political situation that makes them feel like they are losing status and power. For some people, this feeling triggers a desire to “burn it all down” – “it” being society, institutions, the world – maybe to rebuild it all anew, or maybe just to see it all destroyed.

Only a small percentage of the U.S. population – less than 15% – tends to score high in need for chaos. But even so, understanding this minority is important to gaining insight into this political moment.

For example, people who score high in need for chaos exhibit greater support for political violence and a willingness to knowingly share hostile and false information online. And in our data, those higher in need for chaos report holding more trust in Musk, DOGE and Trump than people who score lower in the need for chaos measure.

Who wants to burn it down

We are political psychologists who study the link between psychological traits and political beliefs. Last month, the University of Delaware’s Center for Political Communication ran a national survey that we designed to understand where the public stands on various political issues and how those beliefs relate to psychological traits, including need for chaos.

In our national study of 1,600 Americans conducted between Feb. 27-March 5, 2025, by YouGov, we asked respondents how much they agreed or disagreed with the following statements:

• “I fantasize about a natural disaster wiping out most of humanity such that a small group of people can start all over”

• “I think society should be burned to the ground”

• “We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions; we need to tear them down and start over”

• “I need chaos around me – it is too boring if nothing is going on”

Similar to prior work by author Kevin Arceneaux and his colleagues, our data shows that a very small number – fewer than 20% of the sample – agrees strongly or agrees somewhat with each item.

However, looking at need for chaos among groups of varying ages, education levels and media habits, we find the highest need for chaos scores among people under age 40, those with less education, and those who pay the least attention to politics.

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Burning it down through government policy

Our new data also shows that while people highest in need for chaos report having more trust in Musk, DOGE, and President Trump, these chaos-seeking folks report having less trust in “people in general,” journalists or the federal government. These findings hold even when statistically accounting for other factors, among them party, race, gender, education and ideology.

Musk’s penchant for wielding chainsaws as a symbol of DOGE’s work provides some insight into why chaos seekers may like what they see in Musk.

It’s not clear exactly what Musk’s aim is with his work at DOGE, as he eliminates the jobs of hundreds of thousands of government workers.

What is clear, however, is that by many accounts, the mass firings and the gutting of agencies, like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Institute for Peace, are sowing chaos. And a significant portion of Americans want just that.

Dannagal G. Young, Professor of Communication and Political Science, University of Delaware and Kevin Arceneaux, Director of the Center for Political Research and Professor of Political Science, Sciences Po

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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an 4 25

Historian and presidential biographer Jon Meacham says the United States is not a stable and safe environment for scientists and builders anymore, because they can no longer pursue ideas that "may not find favor with" the Republican Party.

He referred to the Trump administration's recent steps to cut funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which will lead to a decline in crucial scientific research, as a "self-inflicted wound" during an appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Tuesday.

"I think that's one of the particular tragedies," he said, adding that several things are "unfolding at the moment, but it's a self-inflicted wound and one that may or may not be generational."

ALSO READ:'Unconstitutional usurpation of power': Small businesses sue Trump over 'devastating' tariffs

Meacham, who serves as the Canon Historian of the Washington National Cathedral, said that former Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who served between the 1940s and 1960s, could not "stand each other," but were still able to agree to invest government resources in research.

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"We might not see instant returns on a dollar, but that's what research is," Meacham said, referring to the views held by leaders during the Cold War period.

He added that many supporters of President Donald Trump don't want to "undo" the America that was "built by the institutions, the impulses, the investments."

"I don't think they really voted for that. They voted for this man. And whatever this man does, they're willing to follow," he said.

ALSO READ:The 'war on vaccines has started': Scientists blast 'ridiculous' Trump admin request

The cancellations of NIH-funded scientific projects “tears the long-standing fabric of the government’s contract to pursue medical research that seeks to better the healthspan and lifespan for all Americans”, Francis Collins, a geneticist who led the NIH, based in Bethesda, Maryland, for 12 years, told scientific journal Nature last week.

On Monday, the Trump administration said it would suspend $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and $60 million in multi-year contract funding for Harvard University after the institution indicated it would not comply with the administration's policy requests. Earlier that day, Harvard announced its decision to decline the administration's demands for policy modifications.

ALSO READ:'Bloodbath': Shock as Trump fires thousands at HHS amid outbreaks

Watch the video below or at this link.

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an 4 25

At over 400 federal agencies, officials appointed by President Donald Trump are reportedly collaborating with tech billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Their goal is to initiate a significant new phase in their effort to reduce the size of the federal government through "deregulation on a mass scale."

According to a New York Times reportpublished Tuesday, the president has devised a way to reverse regulations "swiftly and permanently" without going through the lengthy legal process that usually takes place before deregulations.

Following Trump's instructions, agency officials are gathering the regulations they plan to discard. They are working quickly to meet a deadline next week, per the report. Once they finish the job, the White House will create a comprehensive list to direct what the president refers to as the "dismantling of the overbearing and burdensome administrative state."

ALSO READ:DOGE'S turn for scrutiny: Government agency demands incident reports on misuse

The agencies being targeted govern "almost every aspect of American life," the report said.

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“Many people don’t realize how high the American quality of life is because of the competent and stable enforcement of regulations, and if that goes away a lot of lives are at risk,” Steve Cicala, co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Project on the Economic Analysis of Regulation, told the Times.

“This affects airplane safety, baby formula safety, the safety of meat, vegetables and packaged foods, the water that you drink, how you get to work safely and whether you’re safe in your workplace," he added.

According to interviews conducted by the Times, Trump and his supporters regard the recent actions as the final blow in a comprehensive restructuring of the federal government that started with significant job cuts and attempts to close down certain agencies.

ALSO READ:Federal judge 'skeptical' of DOGE: report

They think that swiftly eliminating various regulations, along with halting the enforcement of others, will dismantle a wide array of rules that others consider essential protections, but that they perceive as burdensome.

AlterNet reached out to DOGE for comment.

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A recent study has identified that the United States counties with "the most egregious water quality violations" are mainly found in four states: West Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Oklahoma, all of which supported President Donald Trump in the last presidential election.

According to a studyhighlighted by The Hill, Wyoming County in West Virginia emerged as the worst offender, having the highest number of violations within a single water system. The study was published on Tuesday in the international journal Risk Analysis.

The authors of the study also found that around 2 million Americans — roughly the same as the entire population of Nebraska —lack access to running water, and this issue tends to be concentrated in specific areas.

They wrote that this high number is neither equally nor proportionally distributed across the population.

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The study identified various violations, including non-compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act, such as exceeding maximum contaminant limits, failing to follow mandated water treatment procedures and lacking monitoring schedules or communication with customers.

“Our results suggest that privatization alone is not a solution,” lead author Alex Segrè Cohen, said in a statement, per The Hill.

The author hoped that lawmakers would take note of the study and regulators would be able to utilize the research to improve their water management strategies.

However, the administration appears to be expediting its efforts to cut the size of the federal government, including doing away with safety regulations. Over 400 federal agencies, officials appointed Trump are reportedly collaborating with tech billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Their goal is to initiate a significant new phase in their effort to reduce the size of the federal government through "deregulation on a mass scale."

According to a New York Times reportpublished Tuesday, the president has devised a way to reverse regulations "swiftly and permanently" without going through the lengthy legal process that usually takes place before deregulations.

The agencies being targeted govern "almost every aspect of American life," the report said.

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an pp 4 25

Trump makes no secret of his loathing for regulations that limit water and energy use by home appliances. For years, he has regaled supporters at his campaign rallies with fanciful stories about their impact. He is so exercised by the issue that, even as global stock markets convulsed Wednesday in response to his tariff plans, Trump took time out to issue an executive order titled “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads.”

Contemporary shower fixtures are only one of the items that rankle the president, who complains that “there’s no water coming and you end up standing there five times longer,” making it difficult to coif his “perfect” hair. He has frequently denounced dishwashers that he claims take so long and clean so poorly that “the electric bill is ten times more than the water”; toilets that require flushing “ten or 15 times”; and LED lightbulbs, which he faults for making him look orange.

In his first term, Trump pursued an array of gimmicks to try to undermine the rules. His moves were opposed by industry and environmental groups alike. If it’s possible for regulations to be popular, these ones are. They have cut America’s water and energy consumption, reduced global-warming emissions and saved consumers money. Legal prohibitions stymied most of Trump’s maneuvers back then, and the Biden administration quickly reversed the steps Trump managed to take.

Trump’s executive order on showerheads generated headlines, but it’s likely to have little effect (more on that later). Far more consequential steps have been taken outside the Oval Office.

With the aid of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team, Trump appears to be attempting an end run that could succeed where his past attempts failed: by simply terminating the consulting contract that the Department of Energy relies on to develop and enforce the rules. In late March, DOGE’s “wall of receipts” stated that it had “deleted” a Department of Energy contract for Guidehouse LLP (a PricewaterhouseCoopers spinoff) for “Appliance Standards Analysis and Regulatory Support Service,” producing a listed savings of $247,603,000. That item has now disappeared from the DOGE website, and its current status remains unclear.

This has produced confusion for everyone from appliance manufacturers to government officials to the contractors paid to enforce the rules. If the contract is indeed canceled, experts told ProPublica, it would cripple the government’s efficiency standards program, which relies on the consulting firm’s technical expertise and testing labs to update standards, ensure compliance and punish violators.

“It would have a huge impact,” said George Washington University law professor Emily Hammond, who helped run the program as deputy general counsel at the Department of Energy and now serves on its appliance standards advisory committee. “DOE does not have the internal capacity to do that work. Taking that away pulls the rug out from under the agency’s ability to run that regulatory program.”

Appliance manufacturers seem almost as concerned. “This is not a positive development,” said Josh Greene, vice president for government affairs at A.O. Smith, the largest manufacturer of water heaters in the U.S. Terminating the Guidehouse contract, he said, would create “a wild Wild West” where “upstart manufacturers” are free to import poor-quality products because “they know there’s no one to enforce the rules. That’s not good for American manufacturing and it’s not good for consumers.”

The Department of Energy has made no public attempts to clarify the matter. An agency spokesperson did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. Emails to DOGE and the White House brought no reply. And Guidehouse officials, reportedly eager to lay low, also offered no response to multiple requests for comment.

The government’s efficiency requirements originated with the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, signed into law in 1975, when the concern was an energy shortage, not global warming. Today, the Department of Energy is required to set rules for energy and water use by more than 70 appliances and commercial products sold in the U.S. The agency must consider imposing stricter standards for each product every eight years, based on what is “technologically feasible and economically justified.” Manufacturers then have three to five years to make their products measure up.

The Energy Department typically stiffens a requirement only after years of study, comment, negotiation and testing (and sometimes litigation) among industry, consumer and environmental groups. The law also includes an “anti-backsliding” provision that bars relaxation of standards that have been finalized. Guidehouse and its subcontractors have for years performed virtually all the necessary technical work; they also maintain a certification database that U.S. authorities use to keep illegal products from being imported.

Republican lawmakers, anti-regulation advocates and right-wing media have long decried the efficiency rules as an impingement on personal freedom, limiting product choice. The early rollout of water-throttling products produced some of the issues Trump complains about, lampooned in a titled “The Shower Head.”

But in the decades since, the standards have been widely embraced, dramatically cutting energy and water consumption, reducing emissions and providing plenty of attractive consumer choices. In 2023, Consumer Reports found that “even the simplest and least expensive showerheads can provide a satisfying shower.” Dishwashers and clothes washers clean better while using less than half as much water and energy as they once did. The transition to LED light bulbs, nearly complete, is estimated to have cut energy bills by $3 billion a year and eliminated the need for about 30 large power plants.

In January, days before Trump returned to office, a Department of Energy report estimated that the efficiency standards are now saving the average American household about $576 a year on their utility bills, while cutting the nation’s energy consumption by 6.5% and water consumption by 12%. A 2022 survey by the Consumer Federation of America found that 76% of Americans support the government setting efficiency standards for appliances.

None of that has slowed Trump’s attacks. During his first term, the Department of Energy ignored legal deadlines for considering efficiency updates on 28 products, blocked the long-planned rollout of new lightbulb rules and sought to bypass finalized appliance standards through byzantine legal maneuvers. Among other things, the Energy Department announced special new “product classes” for dishwashers, clothes washers and dryers that completed their “normal” cycle in an hour or less. This would exempt any such “short-cycle” devices that were introduced from the existing limits on water and energy use.

Manufacturers never brought those models to market. Most existing appliances already had a “short cycle” option that did their job well; those short on time simply had to push that button. And by mid-2022, Biden’s Energy Department had reversed Trump’s regulatory moves. The department went on to issue an array of tightened home appliance rules jointly recommended by industry and consumer groups; most were finalized early enough to be immune from congressional rollback.

This didn’t stop Trump from boasting on the 2024 campaign trail that he had changed everything during his first term. He vowed to fix it all again when he returned to the White House. “Eliminate energy efficiency standards for appliances” was on Project 2025’s list of “needed reforms.”

Sure enough, on his first day back in the White House, Trump issued two executive orders targeting the efficiency rules. On Feb. 11, he posted on Truth Social: “I am hereby instructing Secretary Lee Zeldin to immediately go back to my Environmental Orders, which were terminated by Crooked Joe Biden, on Water Standard and Flow pertaining to SINKS, SHOWERS, TOLIETS, WASHING MACHINES, DISHWASHERS, etc., and to likewise go back to the common sense standards on LIGHTBULBS, that were put in place by the Trump Administration, but terminated by Crooked Joe. I look forward to signing these orders.” (In fact, the rules Trump cited were issued and enforced by the Department of Energy, not the Environmental Protection Agency, where Administrator Zeldin presides.)

None of the standards Trump listed were subject to an executive order, or any other kind of rapid rollback. In simple terms, Trump did not have the legal authority to change these rules.

No matter. Energy Secretary Chris Wright — who had listed “affordability and consumer choice in home appliances” among his top nine priorities — took up the cause. Three days after Trump’s Truth Social post, Wright announced that the Department of Energy was postponing “seven of the Biden-Harris administration’s restrictive mandates on home appliances,” which “have driven up costs, reduced choice and diminished the quality of Americans’ home appliances.” Wright’s list of seven affected “home appliances” actually included three types of commercial equipment and three other regulations long past the point where they could be undone.

That left only one household-product regulation that could be challenged. It involved an item that seemed like an improbable symbol of “freedom” and “consumer choice”: the tankless, gas-fueled hot water heater.

The vast majority of U.S. homes have traditional water heaters with 40- to 50-gallon tanks. By contrast, tankless gas products represent 10% of sales. They are about the size of a carry-on suitcase and heat a stream of water on demand. They’re energy-efficient and roughly twice as expensive as standard heaters.

But the rules governing tankless gas water heaters were vulnerable because they were issued in the final weeks of Biden’s term. That meant lawmakers could reverse them under the Congressional Review Act, which allows lawmakers to block a recently enacted agency rule, if a resolution to do so passes both houses and is signed by the president.

Appearing at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 20, Wright drew cheers as he offered a Trumpian litany — “My dishwasher has to run for two hours now, and at the end I got to clean the dishes” — before turning to hot water heaters. “We have a factory in the southeastern part of the United States that employs hundreds of people to build a particularly popular product these days,” Wright said. “It is a tankless water heater powered by natural gas,” which he described as “selling like hotcakes.” So, what did the Biden administration do, he asked. “They passed a regulation that would make that product illegal, and that company would be dead.” But under Trump, declared Wright, waving his arms, “we are fixing that problem. That factory is staying open. … America is back, baby!”

Wright returned to “the hot-water thing” in a FoxBusiness interview a month later. Assailing “nanny-state, crazy, top-down mandates that makes it more expensive for American consumers and businesses to buy what they want,” he said the new rule was going to shut down a factory “just built in the southeast United States.” Wright acknowledged that U.S. law bars elimination of other efficiency updates that he and Trump have targeted because they’ve already been finalized. “We can’t officially get rid of them,” he commented. “So we just pushed back the enforcement date, hopefully, to never.”

Wright’s portrayal omitted significant details. The administration’s actions involve a single beneficiary: Rinnai, a Japanese appliance company with $3.3 billion in revenues last year. In 2022, Rinnai opened a $70 million factory south of Atlanta, where about 250 U.S. workers build “non-condensing” tankless gas water heaters, a major moneymaker for the company.

“Non-condensing” tankless heaters are less efficient and less expensive than “condensing” tankless heaters, which reuse heat from their exhaust gases. As a result, Rinnai wouldn’t be able to continue selling them when the new standards went into effect in December 2029.

That, however, wasn’t going to put the company out of business; it wasn’t likely to shut down its U.S. factory, either, though Rinnai raised that specter in government filings where its U.S. president warned the new standards would make the Georgia plant “largely obsolete … eliminating” all its jobs.

Rinnai sells a broad array of products across the world. It also already sold condensing tankless heaters in the U.S. that met the new standard and were imported from Japan. And Rinnai had plans to make them in Georgia, according to the company’s most recent annual report. (Rinnai agreed to make its U.S. chief, Frank Windsor, available for an interview with ProPublica, then canceled twice at the last minute. The company ultimately declined to respond to questions about its public representations.)

Nonetheless, the company, now backed by the Trump administration, has pursued a multitrack campaign to roll back the new standards. Its efforts appear to be on the point of success. A resolution has passed the House and won Senate approval on Thursday. Rinnai has spent $375,000 on Washington lobbyists since 2023, according to disclosure reports. The company also joined with Republican attorneys general in a court challenge to the energy rule.

Three major Rinnai competitors supported the Biden-era regulations. Wisconsin-based A.O. Smith has actively lobbied against Rinnai’s effort to win a congressional rollback. Greene said blocking the standard will “disadvantage” U.S. companies, which have already invested in more efficient condensing technology, by allowing continued sale of Rinnai’s less expensive competing products. “In this time of ‘America First,’ it just seems to us a shame that where we’re heading is rewarding foreign manufacturers,” Greene said. “There should be a level playing field.”

Meanwhile the administration’s campaign has expanded to multiple fronts. On Wednesday, the Department of Energy announced a review of its procedures for energy standards, which one expert described as a reprise of the first Trump administration’s attempts to create procedural hurdles to updating efficiency standards.

Then there was the executive order on showerheads that same day. It, too, seeks to revive a move by the first Trump administration: to circumvent the limits on waterflow by redefining “showerheads” to include multiple nozzles, each of which could emit as much water as the entire showerhead was previously allowed. The Biden-era Energy Department killed that regulation, and Trump is attempting to bring it back while proclaiming that “notice and comment is unnecessary because I am ordering the repeal.”

That order will have virtually no effect because manufacturers have little interest in making showerheads that exceed the current limits, according to Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, a nonprofit coalition of groups that support the efficiency rules. “The president is asserting king-like authority,” he added, about Trump’s claim that he does not have to follow administrative procedures.

In the end, DOGE could have more of an impact than a would-be monarch, if it’s able to kill the Guidehouse contract. Then, deLaski said, “it would be next to impossible for DOE to enforce its efficiency standards.”

Doris Burke, Mark Olalde and Pratheek Rebala contributed research.

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AN 3 25 THE CONV

“And one other thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education.”

Donald Trump made this promise in a Sept. 13, 2023, campaign statement and repeated it frequently on the.

Trump tried to make this long-standing pledge a reality on March 20, 2025, by signing an executive order that he said will “begin eliminating the federal Department of Education once and for all.”

Trump said that he hopes Democrats would support his executive order. “I hope they’re going to be voting for it,” said Trump, speaking from the White House in front of a group of children seated at desks. “Because ultimately it may come before them.”

Project 2025, the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the Trump administration, provides detailed recommendations for closing the Education Department, which was created by an act of Congress in 1979.

The Department of Education already announced on March 9 that it laid off more than 1,300 of its 4,100 employees.

Trump’s new executive order calls for Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure (of) the Department of Education and return education authority to the States, while continuing to ensure the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely,” according to a White House statement distributed to media.

I am an anthropologist and have been studying U.S. political culture for years. During Trump’s first presidency, I wrote a book about the extremist far right called “It Can Happen Here”. Since then, I have continued to study the Make America Great Again, or MAGA, movement, seeking to understand it, as the anthropological expression goes, “from the native’s point of view.”

Education policies in the U.S. are largely carried out at the state and local levels. The Education Department is a relatively small government agency, which as late as February 2025 had just over 4,000 employees and a US$268 billion annual budget. A large part of its work is overseeing $1.6 trillion in federal student loans as well as grants for K-12 schools.

And it ensures that public schools comply with federal laws that protect vulnerable students, like those with disabilities.

Why, then, does Trump want to eliminate the department?

A will to fight against so-called “wokeness” and a desire to shrink the government are among the four reasons I have found.

1. Education Department’s alleged ‘woke’ mentality

First and foremost, Trump and his supporters believe that liberals are ruining public education by instituting what they call a “radical woke agenda” that they say prioritizes identity politics and politically correct groupthink at the expense of the free speech of those, like many conservatives, who have different views.

Diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives promoting social justice – and critical race theory, or the idea that racism is entrenched in social and legal institutions – are a particular focus of MAGA ire.

So, too, is what Trump supporters call “radical gender ideology,” which they contend promotes policies like letting transgender students play on school sports teams or use bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity, not biological sex.

Trump supporters say that such policies – which the Education Department indirectly supported by expanding Title IX gender protections in 2024 to include discrimination based on gender identity – are at odds with parental school choice rights or, for some religious conservatives, the Bible.

Race and gender policies are highlighted in Project 2025 and in the 2024 GOP’s “Make America Great Again!” party platform.

Trump has repeatedly promised, as he did on Aug. 14, 2024, in North Carolina, to “keep critical race theory and transgender insanity the hell out of our schools.”

2. American Marxist indoctrination

For MAGA supporters, “radical left” wokeness is part of liberals’ long-standing attempt to “brainwash” others with their allegedly Marxist views that embrace communism.

One version of this “American Marxism” conspiracy theory argues that the indoctrination dates to the origins of U.S. public education. MAGA stalwarts say this alleged leftist agenda is anti-democratic and anti-Christian.

Saying he wants to combat the educational influence of such radicals, zealots and Marxists, Trump issued executive orders on Jan. 29 that pledge to fight “campus anti-Semitism” and to end “Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schools.”

3. School choice and parental rights

Trump supporters also argue that “woke” federal public education policy infringes on people’s basic freedoms and rights.

This idea extends to what Trump supporters call “restoring parental rights,” including the right to decide whether a child undergoes a gender transition or learns about nonbinary gender identity at public schools.

The first paragraph of Project 2025’s chapter on education argues, “Families and students should be free to choose from a diverse set of school options and learning environments.”

Diversity, according to this argument, should include faith-based institutions and homeschooling. Project 2025 proposes that the government could support parents who choose to homeschool or put their kids in a religious primary school by providing Educational Savings Accounts and school vouchers. Vouchers give public funding for students to attend private schools and have been expanding in use in recent years.

Critics of school vouchers, like the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers unions, argue that vouchers would diminish public education for vulnerable students by taking away scarce funding.

Trump has already issued a Jan. 29 executive order called “Expanding Educational Freedom and Educational Opportunity for Families,” which opens the door to expanded use of vouchers. This directly echoes Project 2025 by directing the Education Department to prioritize educational choice to give families a range of options.

4. Red tape

For the MAGA faithful, the Education Department exemplifies government inefficiency and red tape.

Project 2025, for example, contends that from the time it was established by the Carter administration in 1979, the Education Department has ballooned in size, come under the sway of special interest groups and now serves as an inefficient “one-stop shop for the woke education cartel.”

To deal with the Education Department’s “bloat” and “suffocating bureaucratic red tape,” Project 2025 recommends shifting all of the department’s federal programs and money to other agencies and the states.

These recommendations dovetail with Trump’s broader attempt to eliminate what he and his MAGA supporters consider wasteful spending and deregulate the government.

Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20 that establishes a “Department of Government Efficiency” headed by billionaire Elon Musk. Musk said on Feb. 4 that Trump “will succeed” in dismantling the Education Department.

Can Trump abolish the Education Department?

Trump’s executive order shuttering the Department of Education will almost certainly spark legal challenges in court.

Republican Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota also introduced a bill in November 2024 to close the department.

Trump has dismantled other government agencies in his second term, chiefly the U.S. Agency for International Development, without the required congressional approval. A federal judge ruled on March 18 that the dismantling of USAID likely violated the Constitution and ordered the Trump administration to restore all USAID employees’ email and computer access.

Abolishing the Department of Education would legally require congressional approval and 60 votes to move forward in the Senate, which is unlikely since Republicans only have 53 seats.

Regardless of such legal challenges, Trump’s March 20 executive order will further weaken the Department of Education even as it remains in the crosshairs.

Alex Hinton, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology; Director, Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University - Newark

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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OMFG DEEP SYSTEMIC ATTACK LAW SCHOOL ACCREDIDation

NBC 3 25

Allan Smith and Ryan J. Reilly

WASHINGTON — Two of President Donald Trump’s allies have launched bids for leadership roles with the D.C. Bar Association, an under-the-radar effort that would give them more control over the influential legal group.

The push comes amid bar associations’ confrontations with the Trump administration, and some federal attorneys have looked to their state groups for ethical guidance amid Trump’s rapid reshaping of government.

Bradley Bondi — a lawyer who is Attorney General Pam Bondi’s brother — and Alicia Long — a deputy to Ed Martin, Trump’s interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — are running for president and treasurer. The election runs from April to June, according to the organization’s website.

While the general public may not pay much attention to bar associations, lawyers do. The nongovernmental groups decide who gets to be a lawyer — and who gets to stay a lawyer when misconduct allegations are involved. The D.C. Bar, as it is known, has more than 120,000 members, and, by virtue of its location, it is where a significant number of federal attorneys are licensed.

The effort to take control of the D.C. Bar follows warnings Trump administration officials have directed at bar associations, which lawyers inside and outside the government have suggested could play a role in slowing down legally questionable elements of Trump’s agenda.

On one of her first days as attorney general, Pam Bondi warned career lawyers that they could be fired for refusing to carry out orders because of any personal objections. Meanwhile, the D.C. Bar maintains a confidential legal ethics hotline for members to submit concerns.

In a statement to NBC News after this article published, Bondi pledged to protect the D.C. Bar from being politicized and noted that he has been an active member of the organization for 26 years.

"The Bar has a non-partisan mission, which I intend to vigilantly protect against any push to politicize it," he said.

"My effort to run for DC Bar president began months before the federal elections and has no connection with national politics at all. With my six years of DC Bar leadership — having been elected two times to a Bar leadership position — three years in public service, and over 20 years in private practice and as a law professor, my record of serving the legal community with that integrity is plain to see," he added.

Bondi also said he wants to focus on "efficiency and practical benefits," including "free on-demand continuing legal education for all 50 states" and more educational programs and pro-bono opportunities.

"This isn’t about politics; I’m running to help strengthen our profession and support members of the Bar no matter what their beliefs or backgrounds," he said.

Bondi and Long each face one opponent. If elected, they would join the professional organization’s 23-person Board of Governors. Though the D.C. Bar does not have a direct role in disciplining lawyers for misconduct, its board does recommend members to sit on the D.C. Board of Professional Responsibility, the disciplinary arm of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.

Disciplinary cases are brought forward by a separate Office of Disciplinary Counsel, which investigates and prosecutes ethical complaints against lawyers.

With Republicans in control of the House and the Senate, bar discipline could be one of the last remaining ways to hold Trump-appointed attorneys accountable. On Thursday, a group of Democratic senators wrote a letter to the Office of Disciplinary Counsel expressing “grave concerns” about some of the highly unusual steps Martin has taken since he became interim U.S. attorney. The letter accused him of “serious violations of professional conduct” and abusing his position. Martin did not respond to requests for comment.

Some Trump attorneys have faced sanctions in Washington for their actions. Rudy Giuliani was disbarred in Washington last year in the wake of his efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 presidential election loss; a committee of the Board on Professional Responsibility found that what it called his “utter disregard for facts denigrates the legal profession.”

Jeffrey Clark — a former Justice Department lawyer whom Trump tried to make attorney general in the days before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack — appeared before the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility last year and invoked the Fifth Amendment. A panel made a preliminary determination that he had committed an ethical violation and recommended in August that he be suspended from practicing law for two years. With Trump back in the White House, Clark is now acting administrator of the White House Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

And a Republican report issued in December by Rep. Barry Loudermilk, of Georgia, alleged possible coordination between House Jan. 6 investigators and the D.C. Bar to target an attorney who represented a former Trump White House aide. (The Office of Disciplinary Counsel dismissed that complaint last year.)

Trump administrationTrump signs order to gut Voice of America, other agencies

Bondi’s and Long’s bids quickly caused some alarm among attorneys in Washington. An email seen by NBC News and sent to dozens of Washington-area lawyers — and also shared on social media — described the duo as “Trump/Pam Bondi loyalists” who were “making a bid to take over the DC Bar” and encouraged recipients to pay attention and vote.

An attorney at a federal agency said the pro-Trump effort to win leadership positions at the D.C. Bar suggests the administration “may be getting pushback internally” from lawyers who are concerned about potential professional consequences for carrying out Trump’s agenda.

“They know this is a potential weakness,” this person added.

Bondi and Long did not respond to requests for comment. NBC News has reached out to the D.C. Bar for comment.

Bondi’s opponent, Diane A. Seltzer, an attorney with a focus on employment law who already serves on the D.C. Bar’s Board of Governors, said she decided to run because she saw it as the culmination of decades of bar leadership experience at a critical time in history.

“I want to be able to support the members of our bar in this time of governmental chaos,” she said. “Our legal system needs a bar that understands and sees them and can support them in ways that will be helpful and keep everyone’s energy up and keep people from giving up or burning out.”

The D.C. Bar does not control the Office of Disciplinary Counsel, but anyone can submit a complaint there, which is then heard by the Board of Professional Responsibility. The D.C. Bar seeks candidates for the Board of Professional Responsibility, but the D.C. Court of Appeals ultimately chooses the candidates.

There are fears among some Washington lawyers, however, that with Trump-supporting officials in place, the D.C. Bar might choose to ignore Court of Appeals rulings or orders from the Office of Disciplinary Counsel.

“I would never want to be president of a bar that could do that or that would do that,” Seltzer said. “I wouldn’t want to be president of a bar where those lines could be blurred and we would say, ‘I am not going to follow what the Court of Appeals has decided or what the Office of Disciplinary Counsel has ordered.’”

The disciplinary process can be protracted. Jennifer Kerkhoff Muyskens — a former assistant U.S. attorney in Washington who led the aggressive prosecution of anti-Trump protesters arrested en masse during Trump’s first inauguration in 2017 — is only now facing a disciplinary hearing eight years later, accused of hiding exculpatory evidence from defendants.

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The Trump administration has had a contentious relationship with bar associations, and Republicans have long accused them of having a left-wing bent — tensions that reached a boiling point in Trump’s first term when the American Bar Association, the national bar organization, rated several of his judicial picks as “not qualified” for the jobs they were nominated for.

Project 2025 took aim at the American Bar Association in its policy road map for a future conservative administration, calling for the president to issue an executive order pursuing antitrust measures against it. In one of his first moves as president, Trump signed an executive order that said bar associations could be targeted for investigations over their diversity programs.

Last month, the American Bar Association lambasted what it described as the Trump administration’s “wide-scale affronts to the rule of law itself.” After billionaire Elon Musk, who is overseeing Trump’s effort to reshape government, called for judges who have ruled against Trump to be impeached, the ABA said in a new statement Tuesday that it would “not stay silent in the face of efforts to remake the legal profession into something that rewards those who agree with the government and punishes those who do not.” It added that such attempts at intimidation “cannot be sanctioned or normalized.”

On Wednesday, Chad Mizelle, the Justice Department’s chief of staff, punched back at the ABA, posting to X that “they disguise their advocacy as work to ‘promote the best quality legal education, competence, ethical conduct and professionalism, and pro bono and public service work in the legal profession,’ but they never mention that they also work hand-in-hand on left-wing causes.”

He also wrote that the bar association’s “dedication to left-wing activism undermines justice” and that under the attorney general’s “leadership, DOJ is carrying out President Trump’s executive orders putting an end to radical DEI programs, and we’re all over the ABA’s illegal and immoral diversity mandates for law school accreditation.”

In 2020, the ABA rated Mizelle’s wife, Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, as “not qualified” to serve as a U.S. district court judge in Florida. She was 33 at the time and the youngest person Trump had tapped for the lifetime appointment. She was confirmed to the seat in November 2020.

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AN 2 25

Few voters likely expected President Donald Trump in the first weeks of his administration to slash billions of dollars from the nation’s premier federal cancer research agency.

But funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health were presaged in Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” a conservative plan for governing that Trump said he knew nothing about during his campaign. Now, his administration has embraced it.

The 922-page playbook compiled by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group in Washington, says “the NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken” and calls for capping payments to universities and their hospitals to “help reduce federal taxpayer subsidization of leftist agendas.”

Universities, now slated to face sweeping cuts in agency grants that cover these overhead costs, say the policy will destroy ongoing and future biomedical science. A federal judge temporarily halted the cuts to medical research on Feb. 10 after they drew legal challenges from medical institutions and 22 states.

Project 2025 as Prologue

The rapid-fire adoption of many of Project 2025’s objectives indicates that Trump acolytes — many of its contributors were veterans of his first term, and some have joined his second administration — have for years quietly laid the groundwork to disrupt the national health system. That runs counter to Trump’s insistence on the campaign trail, after Democrats made Project 2025 a potent attack line, that he was ignorant of the document.

“I have no idea what Project 2025 is,” Trump said Oct. 31 at a rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico, one of many times he disclaimed any knowledge of the plan. “I’ve never read it, and I never will.”

But because his administration is hewing to the Heritage Foundation-compiled playbook so closely, opposition groups and some state Democratic leaders say they’re able to act swiftly to counter Trump’s moves in court.

They’re now preparing for Trump to act on Project 2025 recommendations for some of the nation’s largest and most important health programs, including Medicaid and Medicare, and for federal health agencies.

“There has been a lot of planning on the litigation side to challenge the executive orders and other early actions from a lot of different organizations,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group. “Project 2025 allowed for some preparation.”

The plan, for example, calls for state flexibility to impose premiums for some beneficiaries, work requirements, and lifetime caps or time limits on Medicaid coverage for some enrollees in the program for low-income and disabled Americans, which could lead to a surge in the number of uninsured after the Biden administration vastly expanded the program’s coverage.

“These proposals don’t directly alter eligibility for Medicaid or the benefits provided, but the ultimate effect would be fewer people with health coverage,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes KFF Health News. “When you erect barriers to people enrolling in Medicaid, like premiums or documenting work status, you end up rationing coverage by complexity and ability to pay.”

Congressional Republicans are contemplating a budget plan that could result in hundreds of billions of dollars being trimmed from Medicaid over 10 years.

Project 2025 called for expanding access to health plans that don’t comply with the Affordable Care Act’s strongest consumer protections. That may lead to more choice and lower monthly premiums for buyers, but unwitting consumers may face potentially massive out-of-pocket costs for care the plans won’t cover.

And Project 2025 called for halting Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood affiliates. The organization, an important health care provider for women across the country, gets roughly $700 million annually from Medicaid and other government programs, based on its 2022-23 report. Abortion made up about 4% of services the organization provided to patients, the report says.

The administration’s steps to scrub words such as “equity” from federal documents, erase transgender identifiers, and curtail international medical aid — all part of the Project 2025 wish list — have already had sweeping ramifications, hobbling access to health care and eviscerating international programs that aim to prevent disease and improve maternal health outcomes.

Under a memorandum issued in January, for example, Trump reinstated and expanded a ban on federal funds to global organizations that provide legal information on abortions.

Studies have found that the ban, known as the “global gag rule” or “Mexico City Policy,” has stripped millions of dollars away from foreign aid groups that didn’t abide by it. It’s also had a chilling effect: In Zambia, one group removed information in brochures on contraception, and in Turkey, some providers stopped talking with patients about menstrual regulation as a form of family planning.

Project 2025 called on the next president to reinstate the gag rule, saying it “should be drafted broadly to apply to all foreign assistance.”

Trump also signed an executive order rolling back transgender rights by banning federal funds for transition-related care for people under age 19. An order he signed also directed the federal government to recognize only two sexes, male and female, and use the term “sex” instead of “gender.”

The Project 2025 document calls for deleting the term “gender identity” from federal rules, regulations, and grants and for unwinding policies and procedures that its authors say are used to advance a “radical redefinition of sex.” In addition, it states that Department of Health and Human Services programs should “protect children’s minds and bodies.”

“Radical actors inside and outside government are promoting harmful identity politics that replaces biological sex with subjective notions of ‘gender identity,’” the Project 2025 road map reads.

Data Disappears

As a result of Trump’s order on gender identity, health researchers say, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took down online information about transgender health and removed data on LGBTQ+ health. A federal judge on Feb. 11 ordered that much of the information be restored; the administration complied but added notices to some webpages labeling them “extremely inaccurate” and claiming they don’t “reflect biological reality.”

The CDC also delayed the release of information and findings on bird flu in the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Federal workers have said they were told to retract papers that contain words such as “nonbinary” or “transgender.” And some hospitals suspended gender-affirming care such as hormone therapy and puberty blockers for youths.

Advocacy groups say the orders discriminate and pose barriers to medically necessary care, and transgender children and their families have filed a number of court challenges.

Lawyers, advocates, and researchers say implementation of many of Project 2025’s health policy goals poses a threat.

“The playbook presents an antiscience, antidata, and antimedicine agenda,” according to a piece last year by Boston University researchers in JAMA.

The Project 2025 blueprint sets out goals to curb access to medication abortion, restructure public health agencies, and weaken protections against sex-based discrimination. It would have seniors enroll by default in Medicare Advantage plans run by commercial insurers, in essence privatizing the health program for older Americans. And it calls for eliminating coverage requirements for Affordable Care Act plans that people buy without federal subsidies, which, insurance experts say, risks leaving people underinsured.

“It’s the agenda of the Trump administration,” said Robert Weissman, a co-president of Public Citizen, a progressive consumer rights advocacy group. “It’s to minimize access to care under the guise of strict work requirements in Medicaid, privatizing Medicare, and rolling back consumer protections and subsidies in the Affordable Care Act.”

The White House didn’t respond to a message seeking comment. Conservatives have said implementation of the project’s proposals would curb waste and fraud in federal health programs and free health systems from the clutches of a radical “woke” agenda.

“Americans are tired of their government being used against them,” Paul Dans, a lawyer and former director of Project 2025, said last year in a statement. “The administrative state is, at best, completely out of touch with the American people and, at worst, is weaponized against them.”

Dans did not return messages seeking comment for this article.

The Heritage Foundation has sought to separate itself and Project 2025 from Trump’s executive orders and other initiatives on health.

“This isn’t about our recommendations in Project 2025 – something we’ve been doing for more than 40 years. This is about President Trump delivering on his promises to make America safer, stronger, and better than ever before, and he and his team deserve the credit,” Ellen Keenan, a spokesperson for Heritage, said in a statement.

Versions of the document have been produced roughly every four years since the 1980s and have influenced other GOP presidents. Former President Ronald Reagan adopted about two-thirds of the recommendations from an earlier Heritage guide, the group says.

In some instances, the Trump administration hasn’t just followed Project 2025’s proposals but has gone beyond them.

The document called on the next president to scale back and “deradicalize” the U.S. Agency for International Development, an independent federal agency that provides foreign aid and assistance, including for many international health programs. The administration hasn’t just scaled back USAID. Trump adviser Elon Musk bragged on his social media platform, X, that his “Department of Government Efficiency” fed the agency “into the wood chipper,” physically closing its offices and putting nearly all its staff on administrative leave while ending funding for its programs and disseminating misinformation about them.

But the administration risks waning public support if it adopts the project’s goals to upend U.S. health care and health policy. Almost 60% of voters said they felt negatively about Project 2025 in a September poll by NBC News.

“Project 2025 was never a thought exercise; it was always a blueprint,” said Ally Boguhn, a spokesperson for Reproductive Freedom for All, an abortion rights group. “We’re only a few weeks into his presidency, and it’s setting the groundwork for even more.”

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