TRACKING THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S NOSEDIVE
By Philip Bump, The Washington Post
A lot of lines on a lot of charts are pointing down and to the right. Perhaps the best analogy for the first three months of Donald Trump’s second presidential term comes not from American history but from Looney Tunes. “We’re in the Wile E. Coyote Moment where actually all the key changes have already happened,” writer Julian Sanchez offered this month, “and we’re just waiting for folks to look down.”
That seems right. Trump and his allies have ripped through any number of systems that constitute and bolster the United States, but the full extent of damage hasn’t yet become apparent to most Americans — and may not for years. We’re still jogging straight ahead, unaware that there’s no more cliff underneath us.
There are actually two unknown variables here. The first: when Americans are likely to realize that there’s no ground underneath. The second is how far we will fall.
There is one area in which many Americans are already feeling the tug of gravity (if you’ll forgive the ongoing extension of the metaphor): the markets. Since Trump took office in January, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down significantly, far more than during any other recent presidency.
We should note an individual stock that’s relevant to the administration: that of Tesla, the car company run by Trump adviser Elon Musk. It fared poorly in the early months of Joe Biden’s administration, too, but not to this extent. In Tesla’s case, though, that’s more a function of Musk than Trump.
The value of the American dollar offers another indicator that investors are wary of the U.S. economy. Particularly in the past month, its value has plunged.
According to these measures, at least one group — investors — is aware that the ground under its feet isn’t as sturdy as it was 100 days ago. But a sense that the economy is wavering isn’t unique to the investor class. The University of Michigan’s measure of consumer sentiment shows that Americans generally are much less confident in the economy than they were at the outset of Trump’s second term.
The administration’s articulated strategy is to reshape the economy to shrink our trade deficits with other countries while addressing the ongoing federal deficit through a combination of increased revenue (through tariffs on imported goods rather than increased income taxes) and decreased spending. This formulation is wildly generous in a variety of ways, including that the brunt of the cost of tariffs is paid by Americans. It’s also generous in suggesting that spending will be cut.
Despite the myriad claims of savings from Musk’s team and the endless stream of stories about the immediate and long-term effects of culling government programs, the government has spent more money so far this year than it had at the same point last year. 2025 was also outpacing 2021 until Biden-era programs targeting the covid-19 pandemic were implemented.
Perhaps Musk’s cuts will manifest. Or, as is more likely the case, we have sacrificed or hampered those programs with little effect on the massive federal budget — but inevitable effects on American and global populations.
Trump’s approval numbers are also declining. This is expected to some extent; new presidents often enjoy an initial bump in their approval polling that fades. Trump’s net approval (the percentage viewing his job performance positively minus the percentage viewing him negatively) slipped into negative territory in recent weeks, according to averages compiled by data journalist G. Elliott Morris. The only president as unpopular as Trump at this point in his presidency? Trump, eight years ago.
Even on immigration, Trump’s approval numbers have slipped according to Economist-YouGov data. Their most recent poll shows that more people now view his handling of immigration negatively than positively. A poll released this week by Reuters also has him net negative. That slide may be in part because the discussion about Trump and immigration is about Trump’s worrisome overreach.
Trump’s election last year was heavily centered on the idea that he would be a better steward for the economy than his opponent. His approval on jobs and the economy, though, has dropped quickly.
There is one other set of data worth noting in our status check of the second Trump presidency. By this point in his first term, he’d already visited properties owned by the Trump Organization on 29 days, with stops at golf courses on 17 days. So far this year? He’s been at a Trump property on all or part of 39 days, with 26 of those spent at golf courses.
Of the 26 weekend days he’s been president, he’s been at a Trump Organization property on 23. If nothing else, this does not seem like a way to reduce federal spending.
By Philip Bump, The Washington Post
A lot of lines on a lot of charts are pointing down and to the right. Perhaps the best analogy for the first three months of Donald Trump’s second presidential term comes not from American history but from Looney Tunes. “We’re in the Wile E. Coyote Moment where actually all the key changes have already happened,” writer Julian Sanchez offered this month, “and we’re just waiting for folks to look down.”
That seems right. Trump and his allies have ripped through any number of systems that constitute and bolster the United States, but the full extent of damage hasn’t yet become apparent to most Americans — and may not for years. We’re still jogging straight ahead, unaware that there’s no more cliff underneath us.
There are actually two unknown variables here. The first: when Americans are likely to realize that there’s no ground underneath. The second is how far we will fall.
There is one area in which many Americans are already feeling the tug of gravity (if you’ll forgive the ongoing extension of the metaphor): the markets. Since Trump took office in January, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down significantly, far more than during any other recent presidency.
We should note an individual stock that’s relevant to the administration: that of Tesla, the car company run by Trump adviser Elon Musk. It fared poorly in the early months of Joe Biden’s administration, too, but not to this extent. In Tesla’s case, though, that’s more a function of Musk than Trump.
The value of the American dollar offers another indicator that investors are wary of the U.S. economy. Particularly in the past month, its value has plunged.
According to these measures, at least one group — investors — is aware that the ground under its feet isn’t as sturdy as it was 100 days ago. But a sense that the economy is wavering isn’t unique to the investor class. The University of Michigan’s measure of consumer sentiment shows that Americans generally are much less confident in the economy than they were at the outset of Trump’s second term.
The administration’s articulated strategy is to reshape the economy to shrink our trade deficits with other countries while addressing the ongoing federal deficit through a combination of increased revenue (through tariffs on imported goods rather than increased income taxes) and decreased spending. This formulation is wildly generous in a variety of ways, including that the brunt of the cost of tariffs is paid by Americans. It’s also generous in suggesting that spending will be cut.
Despite the myriad claims of savings from Musk’s team and the endless stream of stories about the immediate and long-term effects of culling government programs, the government has spent more money so far this year than it had at the same point last year. 2025 was also outpacing 2021 until Biden-era programs targeting the covid-19 pandemic were implemented.
Perhaps Musk’s cuts will manifest. Or, as is more likely the case, we have sacrificed or hampered those programs with little effect on the massive federal budget — but inevitable effects on American and global populations.
Trump’s approval numbers are also declining. This is expected to some extent; new presidents often enjoy an initial bump in their approval polling that fades. Trump’s net approval (the percentage viewing his job performance positively minus the percentage viewing him negatively) slipped into negative territory in recent weeks, according to averages compiled by data journalist G. Elliott Morris. The only president as unpopular as Trump at this point in his presidency? Trump, eight years ago.
Even on immigration, Trump’s approval numbers have slipped according to Economist-YouGov data. Their most recent poll shows that more people now view his handling of immigration negatively than positively. A poll released this week by Reuters also has him net negative. That slide may be in part because the discussion about Trump and immigration is about Trump’s worrisome overreach.
Trump’s election last year was heavily centered on the idea that he would be a better steward for the economy than his opponent. His approval on jobs and the economy, though, has dropped quickly.
There is one other set of data worth noting in our status check of the second Trump presidency. By this point in his first term, he’d already visited properties owned by the Trump Organization on 29 days, with stops at golf courses on 17 days. So far this year? He’s been at a Trump property on all or part of 39 days, with 26 of those spent at golf courses.
Of the 26 weekend days he’s been president, he’s been at a Trump Organization property on 23. If nothing else, this does not seem like a way to reduce federal spending.
TRUMP IS WRAPPING UP 100 DAYS OF HISTORIC FAILURE
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
America has seen ruinous periods, but never when the president was the one knowingly causing the ruin. By any reasonable measure, President Donald Trump’s first 100 days will be judged an epic failure.
He has been a legislative failure. He has signed only five bills into law, none of them major, making this the worst performance at the start of a new president’s term in more than a century.
He has been an economic failure. On his watch, growth has slowed, consumer and business confidence has cratered, and markets have plunged, along with Americans’ wealth. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday that “growth has slowed in the first quarter of this year from last year’s solid pace” and that Trump’s tariffs will result in higher inflation and slower growth.
He has been a foreign-policy failure. He said he would end wars in Gaza and Ukraine. But fighting has resumed in Gaza after the demise of the ceasefire negotiated by his predecessor, and Russia continues to brutalize Ukraine, making a mockery of Trump’s naive overtures to Vladimir Putin.
He has been a failure in the eyes of friends, having launched a trade war against Canada, Mexico, Europe and Japan; enraged Canada with talk of annexation; threatened Greenland and Panama; and cleaved the NATO alliance.
He has been a failure in the eyes of foes, as an emboldened China menaces Taiwan, punches back hard in the trade war and spreads its global influence to fill the vacuum left by Trump’s retreat from the world.
He has been a constitutional failure. His executive actions, brazen in their disregard for the law, have been slapped down more than 80 times already by judges, including those appointed by Republicans. He is flagrantly defying a unanimous Supreme Court, and his appointees are facing contempt proceedings for their abuse of the legal system.
He has been a failure in public opinion. This week’s Economist/YouGov poll finds 42 percent approving his performance and 52 percent disapproving — a 16-point swing for the worse since the start of his term. Majorities say the country is on the wrong track and out of control.
Even his few “successes” amount to less than meets the eye. Border crossings are down from already low levels, but despite all the administration’s bravado, there’s little evidence of an increase in deportations. Hopes for cost-cutting under the U.S. DOGE Service, which Elon Musk originally projected at $1 trillion this year, have been scaled back to just $150 billion — and much of that appears to be based on made-up numbers.
But Trump, whose 100th day in office is April 30, has achieved one thing that is truly remarkable: He has introduced a level of chaos and destruction so high that historians are hard-pressed to find its equal in our history.
He has upended global structures that kept the peace for generations. He has aligned America with the world’s despots. He has slashed the federal workforce and impaired the government’s ability to collect taxes, administer Social Security and fund medical research, among many other things. He has abused his power in startling ways, using the government for personal vengeance and retribution against perceived opponents, harassing law firms, universities and the free press with an authoritarian flourish. He has shattered the guardrails that limit executive power, ignoring laws, eliminating inspectors general and other mechanisms for accountability and oversight. He has displayed gratuitous cruelty in the treatment of migrants and government workers alike. He has used the government to undertake breathtaking schemes of self-enrichment. And he has left a large number of his countrymen angry and frightened.
To put this failure in context, I called two of my favorite historians, David Greenberg of Rutgers University and Douglas Brinkley of Rice University. They told me that there had been similar bursts of activity from an executive before, most notably under Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose productivity at the start of his presidency in 1933 created the 100-day benchmark by which his successors have been measured. There have been similar power grabs before: Andrew Jackson, who claimed the 1824 election was stolen from him, attacking the nation’s elites after he won in 1828 and ignoring the Supreme Court’s ruling against seizing tribal land; the imperialist William McKinley, Trump’s new fave, taking over Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines and pushing Spain out of Cuba; FDR attempting to pack the Supreme Court at the start of his second term; Richard M. Nixon’s lawlessness, justified by his belief that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
There have been ruinous periods before: the Quasi-War with France and the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 made it appear that the fledgling United States had failed; the period between Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election and his inauguration, when Southern states seceded and formed the Confederacy; the days after the 1929 crash, when it appeared that capitalism had failed; and the political violence of 1968. There were massive restructurings of the federal government under Theodore Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and Ronald Reagan — and Bill Clinton presided over cuts of 250,000 federal jobs.
But what Trump has done is different.
Previous restructurings of government were done with careful planning and with bipartisan congressional support. But Trump “doesn’t come in as a reformer as much as a wrecking ball,” Brinkley says. “What we’re witnessing with Trump is just raw vengeance and belittling fellow Americans and creating a tinderbox situation that makes people feel we’re in a neo civil war that could go sideways at any moment.” Brinkley also notes that previous attempts at executive overreach — FDR’s court packing, Nixon’s abuses — were repelled by members of each president’s own party. But now, Republicans are silent. “That’s the missing ingredient of our time,” he says.
Another key difference: We have been through ruinous periods before, but never when the president was the one actively and knowingly causing the ruin. During past upheaval, there “wasn’t this sense that the White House, the president, is directing the destruction of 250-year-old American values,” Greenberg says. He also notes that, because of the expansion of the executive powers over the past century, particularly during the New Deal and the Cold War, Trump has more ability to cause destruction than his predecessors did. “I don’t think we’ve ever had the combination of such a vast and extensive executive apparatus and at the same time an attempt to eliminate the built-in safeguards,” he says.
Some executive orders have a proud place in our history because they had noble aims or produced lofty accomplishments: the Emancipation Proclamation. The Manhattan Project. Enforcing school desegregation in Little Rock. But Trump’s orders are more likely to be remembered alongside those establishing Japanese internment and Operation Wetback because they are based in cruelty and in his insatiable lust for vengeance. “It’s not hyperbole to say this is the weirdest 100 days of any president in American history,” says Brinkley, “because, at its root, it is pathological narcissism.”
In the end, Trump’s 100 days, and his presidency generally, will be judged harshly for what they were not. “We remember great civilizations for their great achievements,” Greenberg says. Scientific advancement. Contributions to arts and letters. Human progress. Trump is reversing them all.
Each week of Trump’s 100 days has felt like a year to many Americans, which is his aim, because it keeps the opposition off-balance. Let’s consider the year that transpired over the past week.
Trump thumbed his nose at the Supreme Court’s 9-0 ruling saying the administration must “facilitate” the return of a migrant deported to a Salvadoran prison in violation of a court order. Instead, Trump hosted El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, the self-described “world’s coolest dictator,” who said the notion of returning the man is “preposterous.”
Reviews by CBS News and the New York Times found that the vast majority of migrants deported had no criminal records — but they are now imprisoned without due process in inhumane conditions. And now, Trump says he wants to send American citizens to the notorious prison in El Salvador. “Home-growns are next,” he told Bukele. “You’ve got to build about five more places” to imprison them. Trump and aides have lied about the Supreme Court ruling, saying that they “won” the case. Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission’s chief, Brendan Carr, threatened Comcast’s broadcasting licenses because he didn’t like what MSNBC was reporting about the dispute.
In another case, that of a Tufts University student abducted by masked federal agents and held for deportation, The Post’s John Hudson reports that the State Department determined that it did not have evidence that she engaged in antisemitic activities or supported a terrorist organization, as the government claims. And, in the latest attempted invasion of Americans’ privacy, DOGE is seeking access to a sensitive Medicare database as part of a scheme to find undocumented immigrants.
Harvard University said it would not surrender to the Trump administration’s demands that it give up its academic freedom (Trump officials had demanded changes to the school’s governance, hiring and treatment of foreign students), saying the demands “go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.” In response to Harvard’s defiance, detailed in a letter by two conservative lawyers, the administration froze $2.2 billion in grants and contracts to the school — forcing the school to halt research to fight Lou Gehrig’s disease, radiation sickness and tuberculosis.
At the same time, the administration is planning an even more devastating blow to medical research: a 40 percent cut to the National Institutes of Health, The Post reports, part of a one-third cut to the Department of Health and Human Services. The administration eliminated 43 of about 200 experts from boards overseeing such research, and, in case you wonder what motivates such cuts, it turns out 38 of the 43 were female, Black or Hispanic.
The administration also is threatening to block Harvard from enrolling any foreign students, and it has asked the IRS to take the outrageous step of revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status; Trump is now expressly embracing the sort of viewpoint discrimination that furious conservatives alleged the IRS did a decade ago, when lower-level officials subjected tax-exempt applications from mostly conservative groups to lengthy scrutiny. Trump’s IRS will likely look favorably on his request. It has promoted a political hack, Gary Shapley (a former midlevel official who gained prominence as the Hunter Biden “whistleblower”), to be the agency’s acting chief.
As the IRS becomes another partisan weapon for Trump, it is planning to cut its staff in half and slash compliance enforcement. The administration continues hacking away at the federal government. It is now illegally dismantling AmeriCorps, following similar moves at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Voice of America and National Endowment for the Humanities, among many others.
After a (Trump-appointed) federal judge ordered the administration to stop its violation of the Associated Press’s First Amendment rights and return the news organization to the White House “pool” rotation, the White House this week responded by eliminating the slot for all news wires, including Reuters and Bloomberg. It is moving toward an arrangement where, in briefings and in Q&A sessions with Trump, most of the questioning will be done by right-wing outlets. Separately, Trump, unhappy with reporting on him by “60 Minutes” on Sunday, called for CBS to have its license revoked.
The administration’s losing streak in court continues apace. Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg opened contempt proceedings after the administration defied his order blocking certain deportations; other judges continue to block Trump’s deportations conducted without due process. A fourth law firm, Susman Godfrey, won an order blocking Trump’s punitive targeting, which the judge called “a shocking abuse of power.” Another judge stopped the administration from “unlawfully” terminating climate grants, and still another judge directed agencies to release the funds.
In Ukraine, Russia has stepped up its attacks, despite Trump’s attempts to force a settlement on Ukraine that would be favorable to Putin. Trump continued to blame the victim in the conflict: “You don’t start a war against somebody that’s 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.” The Post’s Spencer Hsu and Aaron Schaffer report that Trump’s interim U.S. attorney for D.C., Ed Martin, provided commentary more than 150 times on the Russian government’s propaganda outlets RT and Sputnik between 2016 and 2024, often echoing Russian talking points; he failed to report the appearances to Congress, as required for his nomination.
Stock markets kept up their wild swings as they tried to adjust to the chaos of Trump’s trade war. One Fed governor, Christopher Waller, on Monday called Trump’s tariffs “one of the biggest shocks to affect the U.S. economy in many decades.” After the Fed’s chair, Powell, warned that the tariffs would hurt growth and inflation, Trump on Thursday morning posted on Truth Social that “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!” Federal law prevents Trump from sacking Powell — but legality has not been a barrier to Trump so far.
In an apparent tariff climbdown, the administration said in a statement that it would make an “exception” and exempt consumer electronics from a massive tariff on Chinese goods — only for Trump to say “there was no Tariff ‘exception’ announced.” China has retaliated by suspending the export of rare earth minerals — essential for advanced technology — that the United States relies upon for 90 percent of its supply. As China tries to win over disaffected American allies, Trump continues to alienate them: The White House press secretary continued to taunt Canada, saying Wednesday the country “would benefit greatly from becoming the 51st state.”
Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, and his family were the victims of an arson attack during Passover by a suspect who said it was because of what Shapiro, who is Jewish, “wants to do to the Palestinian people.” But the administration, so concerned about phony antisemitism on campuses, was not troubled by the real thing. Attorney General Pam Bondi declined to label it domestic terrorism. And Trump saw it only in selfish terms: “The attacker was not a fan of Trump, I understand.”
The administration’s bizarre behaviors remained on vivid display. Vice President JD Vance broke the NCAA football trophy during an event at the White House. The Wall Street Journal reported on Musk’s self-described “legion” of at least 14 children by four women, though “sources close to the tech entrepreneur said they believe the true number of Musk’s children is much higher.” Trump Media launched a new attempt to monetize his presidency: branded investment accounts meant to benefit from Trump’s policies. And the White House physician, after Trump’s annual examination, credited Trump’s fine health to his “active lifestyle,” which includes “frequent victories in golf events.”
Is the good doctor unaware that Trump “wins” only on courses he owns?
On one hand, Trump’s lawlessness is terrifying: This is what happens when a government is run not by the rule of law but by the whim of one man. On the other, it is an admission of weakness: He doesn’t have the power to achieve his aims through legitimate means, so he’s trying to attain them illegally. Happily, the backlash is building.
Harvard’s fresh resistance to Trump’s attacks on academic freedom has stiffened the spine of Columbia University and others. Law firms that reached settlements with Trump to avoid punishment because of his personal vendettas are rethinking their arrangements. They are discovering, as other corporate leaders hopefully now realize, that there is no appeasing Trump, because he will always demand more. California has sued Trump over his tariffs. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) have been playing to huge crowds in deep-red parts of the country.
On the Republican side, figures such as Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa), Rep. Brian Mast (Florida) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia) have encountered angry constituents at town-hall meetings during the congressional recess. Two protesters at Greene’s event were hit with stun guns. A dozen nervous House Republicans sent a letter to their leadership warning that they would oppose Trump’s major tax-and-spending bill if it “includes any reduction in Medicaid coverage for vulnerable populations.” That’s awkward, because the budget outline for the bill, which these same lawmakers supported, requires some $800 billion in such cuts.
The pressure on Trump and his enablers — from the public, the courts, the states, universities, advocates, businesses and the media — should only increase from here, and it must. This is what will prevent the next 1,360 days from being as disastrous as the first 100.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
America has seen ruinous periods, but never when the president was the one knowingly causing the ruin. By any reasonable measure, President Donald Trump’s first 100 days will be judged an epic failure.
He has been a legislative failure. He has signed only five bills into law, none of them major, making this the worst performance at the start of a new president’s term in more than a century.
He has been an economic failure. On his watch, growth has slowed, consumer and business confidence has cratered, and markets have plunged, along with Americans’ wealth. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday that “growth has slowed in the first quarter of this year from last year’s solid pace” and that Trump’s tariffs will result in higher inflation and slower growth.
He has been a foreign-policy failure. He said he would end wars in Gaza and Ukraine. But fighting has resumed in Gaza after the demise of the ceasefire negotiated by his predecessor, and Russia continues to brutalize Ukraine, making a mockery of Trump’s naive overtures to Vladimir Putin.
He has been a failure in the eyes of friends, having launched a trade war against Canada, Mexico, Europe and Japan; enraged Canada with talk of annexation; threatened Greenland and Panama; and cleaved the NATO alliance.
He has been a failure in the eyes of foes, as an emboldened China menaces Taiwan, punches back hard in the trade war and spreads its global influence to fill the vacuum left by Trump’s retreat from the world.
He has been a constitutional failure. His executive actions, brazen in their disregard for the law, have been slapped down more than 80 times already by judges, including those appointed by Republicans. He is flagrantly defying a unanimous Supreme Court, and his appointees are facing contempt proceedings for their abuse of the legal system.
He has been a failure in public opinion. This week’s Economist/YouGov poll finds 42 percent approving his performance and 52 percent disapproving — a 16-point swing for the worse since the start of his term. Majorities say the country is on the wrong track and out of control.
Even his few “successes” amount to less than meets the eye. Border crossings are down from already low levels, but despite all the administration’s bravado, there’s little evidence of an increase in deportations. Hopes for cost-cutting under the U.S. DOGE Service, which Elon Musk originally projected at $1 trillion this year, have been scaled back to just $150 billion — and much of that appears to be based on made-up numbers.
But Trump, whose 100th day in office is April 30, has achieved one thing that is truly remarkable: He has introduced a level of chaos and destruction so high that historians are hard-pressed to find its equal in our history.
He has upended global structures that kept the peace for generations. He has aligned America with the world’s despots. He has slashed the federal workforce and impaired the government’s ability to collect taxes, administer Social Security and fund medical research, among many other things. He has abused his power in startling ways, using the government for personal vengeance and retribution against perceived opponents, harassing law firms, universities and the free press with an authoritarian flourish. He has shattered the guardrails that limit executive power, ignoring laws, eliminating inspectors general and other mechanisms for accountability and oversight. He has displayed gratuitous cruelty in the treatment of migrants and government workers alike. He has used the government to undertake breathtaking schemes of self-enrichment. And he has left a large number of his countrymen angry and frightened.
To put this failure in context, I called two of my favorite historians, David Greenberg of Rutgers University and Douglas Brinkley of Rice University. They told me that there had been similar bursts of activity from an executive before, most notably under Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose productivity at the start of his presidency in 1933 created the 100-day benchmark by which his successors have been measured. There have been similar power grabs before: Andrew Jackson, who claimed the 1824 election was stolen from him, attacking the nation’s elites after he won in 1828 and ignoring the Supreme Court’s ruling against seizing tribal land; the imperialist William McKinley, Trump’s new fave, taking over Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines and pushing Spain out of Cuba; FDR attempting to pack the Supreme Court at the start of his second term; Richard M. Nixon’s lawlessness, justified by his belief that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
There have been ruinous periods before: the Quasi-War with France and the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 made it appear that the fledgling United States had failed; the period between Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election and his inauguration, when Southern states seceded and formed the Confederacy; the days after the 1929 crash, when it appeared that capitalism had failed; and the political violence of 1968. There were massive restructurings of the federal government under Theodore Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and Ronald Reagan — and Bill Clinton presided over cuts of 250,000 federal jobs.
But what Trump has done is different.
Previous restructurings of government were done with careful planning and with bipartisan congressional support. But Trump “doesn’t come in as a reformer as much as a wrecking ball,” Brinkley says. “What we’re witnessing with Trump is just raw vengeance and belittling fellow Americans and creating a tinderbox situation that makes people feel we’re in a neo civil war that could go sideways at any moment.” Brinkley also notes that previous attempts at executive overreach — FDR’s court packing, Nixon’s abuses — were repelled by members of each president’s own party. But now, Republicans are silent. “That’s the missing ingredient of our time,” he says.
Another key difference: We have been through ruinous periods before, but never when the president was the one actively and knowingly causing the ruin. During past upheaval, there “wasn’t this sense that the White House, the president, is directing the destruction of 250-year-old American values,” Greenberg says. He also notes that, because of the expansion of the executive powers over the past century, particularly during the New Deal and the Cold War, Trump has more ability to cause destruction than his predecessors did. “I don’t think we’ve ever had the combination of such a vast and extensive executive apparatus and at the same time an attempt to eliminate the built-in safeguards,” he says.
Some executive orders have a proud place in our history because they had noble aims or produced lofty accomplishments: the Emancipation Proclamation. The Manhattan Project. Enforcing school desegregation in Little Rock. But Trump’s orders are more likely to be remembered alongside those establishing Japanese internment and Operation Wetback because they are based in cruelty and in his insatiable lust for vengeance. “It’s not hyperbole to say this is the weirdest 100 days of any president in American history,” says Brinkley, “because, at its root, it is pathological narcissism.”
In the end, Trump’s 100 days, and his presidency generally, will be judged harshly for what they were not. “We remember great civilizations for their great achievements,” Greenberg says. Scientific advancement. Contributions to arts and letters. Human progress. Trump is reversing them all.
Each week of Trump’s 100 days has felt like a year to many Americans, which is his aim, because it keeps the opposition off-balance. Let’s consider the year that transpired over the past week.
Trump thumbed his nose at the Supreme Court’s 9-0 ruling saying the administration must “facilitate” the return of a migrant deported to a Salvadoran prison in violation of a court order. Instead, Trump hosted El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, the self-described “world’s coolest dictator,” who said the notion of returning the man is “preposterous.”
Reviews by CBS News and the New York Times found that the vast majority of migrants deported had no criminal records — but they are now imprisoned without due process in inhumane conditions. And now, Trump says he wants to send American citizens to the notorious prison in El Salvador. “Home-growns are next,” he told Bukele. “You’ve got to build about five more places” to imprison them. Trump and aides have lied about the Supreme Court ruling, saying that they “won” the case. Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission’s chief, Brendan Carr, threatened Comcast’s broadcasting licenses because he didn’t like what MSNBC was reporting about the dispute.
In another case, that of a Tufts University student abducted by masked federal agents and held for deportation, The Post’s John Hudson reports that the State Department determined that it did not have evidence that she engaged in antisemitic activities or supported a terrorist organization, as the government claims. And, in the latest attempted invasion of Americans’ privacy, DOGE is seeking access to a sensitive Medicare database as part of a scheme to find undocumented immigrants.
Harvard University said it would not surrender to the Trump administration’s demands that it give up its academic freedom (Trump officials had demanded changes to the school’s governance, hiring and treatment of foreign students), saying the demands “go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration.” In response to Harvard’s defiance, detailed in a letter by two conservative lawyers, the administration froze $2.2 billion in grants and contracts to the school — forcing the school to halt research to fight Lou Gehrig’s disease, radiation sickness and tuberculosis.
At the same time, the administration is planning an even more devastating blow to medical research: a 40 percent cut to the National Institutes of Health, The Post reports, part of a one-third cut to the Department of Health and Human Services. The administration eliminated 43 of about 200 experts from boards overseeing such research, and, in case you wonder what motivates such cuts, it turns out 38 of the 43 were female, Black or Hispanic.
The administration also is threatening to block Harvard from enrolling any foreign students, and it has asked the IRS to take the outrageous step of revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status; Trump is now expressly embracing the sort of viewpoint discrimination that furious conservatives alleged the IRS did a decade ago, when lower-level officials subjected tax-exempt applications from mostly conservative groups to lengthy scrutiny. Trump’s IRS will likely look favorably on his request. It has promoted a political hack, Gary Shapley (a former midlevel official who gained prominence as the Hunter Biden “whistleblower”), to be the agency’s acting chief.
As the IRS becomes another partisan weapon for Trump, it is planning to cut its staff in half and slash compliance enforcement. The administration continues hacking away at the federal government. It is now illegally dismantling AmeriCorps, following similar moves at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Voice of America and National Endowment for the Humanities, among many others.
After a (Trump-appointed) federal judge ordered the administration to stop its violation of the Associated Press’s First Amendment rights and return the news organization to the White House “pool” rotation, the White House this week responded by eliminating the slot for all news wires, including Reuters and Bloomberg. It is moving toward an arrangement where, in briefings and in Q&A sessions with Trump, most of the questioning will be done by right-wing outlets. Separately, Trump, unhappy with reporting on him by “60 Minutes” on Sunday, called for CBS to have its license revoked.
The administration’s losing streak in court continues apace. Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg opened contempt proceedings after the administration defied his order blocking certain deportations; other judges continue to block Trump’s deportations conducted without due process. A fourth law firm, Susman Godfrey, won an order blocking Trump’s punitive targeting, which the judge called “a shocking abuse of power.” Another judge stopped the administration from “unlawfully” terminating climate grants, and still another judge directed agencies to release the funds.
In Ukraine, Russia has stepped up its attacks, despite Trump’s attempts to force a settlement on Ukraine that would be favorable to Putin. Trump continued to blame the victim in the conflict: “You don’t start a war against somebody that’s 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.” The Post’s Spencer Hsu and Aaron Schaffer report that Trump’s interim U.S. attorney for D.C., Ed Martin, provided commentary more than 150 times on the Russian government’s propaganda outlets RT and Sputnik between 2016 and 2024, often echoing Russian talking points; he failed to report the appearances to Congress, as required for his nomination.
Stock markets kept up their wild swings as they tried to adjust to the chaos of Trump’s trade war. One Fed governor, Christopher Waller, on Monday called Trump’s tariffs “one of the biggest shocks to affect the U.S. economy in many decades.” After the Fed’s chair, Powell, warned that the tariffs would hurt growth and inflation, Trump on Thursday morning posted on Truth Social that “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!” Federal law prevents Trump from sacking Powell — but legality has not been a barrier to Trump so far.
In an apparent tariff climbdown, the administration said in a statement that it would make an “exception” and exempt consumer electronics from a massive tariff on Chinese goods — only for Trump to say “there was no Tariff ‘exception’ announced.” China has retaliated by suspending the export of rare earth minerals — essential for advanced technology — that the United States relies upon for 90 percent of its supply. As China tries to win over disaffected American allies, Trump continues to alienate them: The White House press secretary continued to taunt Canada, saying Wednesday the country “would benefit greatly from becoming the 51st state.”
Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, and his family were the victims of an arson attack during Passover by a suspect who said it was because of what Shapiro, who is Jewish, “wants to do to the Palestinian people.” But the administration, so concerned about phony antisemitism on campuses, was not troubled by the real thing. Attorney General Pam Bondi declined to label it domestic terrorism. And Trump saw it only in selfish terms: “The attacker was not a fan of Trump, I understand.”
The administration’s bizarre behaviors remained on vivid display. Vice President JD Vance broke the NCAA football trophy during an event at the White House. The Wall Street Journal reported on Musk’s self-described “legion” of at least 14 children by four women, though “sources close to the tech entrepreneur said they believe the true number of Musk’s children is much higher.” Trump Media launched a new attempt to monetize his presidency: branded investment accounts meant to benefit from Trump’s policies. And the White House physician, after Trump’s annual examination, credited Trump’s fine health to his “active lifestyle,” which includes “frequent victories in golf events.”
Is the good doctor unaware that Trump “wins” only on courses he owns?
On one hand, Trump’s lawlessness is terrifying: This is what happens when a government is run not by the rule of law but by the whim of one man. On the other, it is an admission of weakness: He doesn’t have the power to achieve his aims through legitimate means, so he’s trying to attain them illegally. Happily, the backlash is building.
Harvard’s fresh resistance to Trump’s attacks on academic freedom has stiffened the spine of Columbia University and others. Law firms that reached settlements with Trump to avoid punishment because of his personal vendettas are rethinking their arrangements. They are discovering, as other corporate leaders hopefully now realize, that there is no appeasing Trump, because he will always demand more. California has sued Trump over his tariffs. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) have been playing to huge crowds in deep-red parts of the country.
On the Republican side, figures such as Sen. Chuck Grassley (Iowa), Rep. Brian Mast (Florida) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia) have encountered angry constituents at town-hall meetings during the congressional recess. Two protesters at Greene’s event were hit with stun guns. A dozen nervous House Republicans sent a letter to their leadership warning that they would oppose Trump’s major tax-and-spending bill if it “includes any reduction in Medicaid coverage for vulnerable populations.” That’s awkward, because the budget outline for the bill, which these same lawmakers supported, requires some $800 billion in such cuts.
The pressure on Trump and his enablers — from the public, the courts, the states, universities, advocates, businesses and the media — should only increase from here, and it must. This is what will prevent the next 1,360 days from being as disastrous as the first 100.
DONALD TRUMP’S WAR ON CHILDREN
The administration is divesting from future generations. It will cost America dearly.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
They’ve persecuted immigrants, transgender people and scientists. They’ve targeted the rule of law and free speech. Now, they’re coming for your children, too.
It’s been largely lost in the cacophony over President Donald Trump’s tariffs and vendettas against universities, but administration officials have been gutting services that keep children alive and well. These include programs that feed kids, teach them the alphabet, provide them medical care, guarantee their rights and shield them from abuse.
Destroying these programs is not only cruel and contrary to the far-right’s allegedly pro-family agenda; it’s also tremendously wasteful. Research shows that government dollars spent on kids — especially on low-income kids’ health and education — offer some of the highest returns on investment.
This week, for instance, a leaked document revealed the administration’s plans to eliminate federal funding for Head Start. This comes after officials kneecapped the 60-year-old pre-K program by temporarily freezing funding for its care providers; firing its Washington-based employees en masse; and permanently closing half its regional offices around the country. (Just coincidentally, they only closed offices in blue states.)
Staff in these regional offices were given no prior notice before closing, so some local pre-K programs that have been waiting for local Head Start officials to approve grants don’t know whether they can stay open.
Head Start, which serves low-income children from birth to age 5, began as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty but has received bipartisan support through the decades since. It’s no wonder why: These programs provide educational, nutritional, health and psychological support to poor children and their families. And states get to decide how to administer the programs.
Head Start spending also provides enormous bang for the buck by improving long-term educational outcomes and economic self-sufficiency. In fact, one recent study found the program “pays for itself”: Over their lifetimes, children in Head Start end up making more money, paying more in taxes and needing fewer safety-net benefits. These returns more than offset the up-front cost of enrollment, so the government saves money by paying to educate and care for these kids.
In other words, Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency” is, once again, making government less efficient.
Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laid off everyone in its lead-poisoning group last week, just as Milwaukee schools beg for federal help with a lead-poisoning crisis. Funding to help states replace lead pipes has also been frozen or delayed.
As the CDC itself acknowledges, childhood exposure to lead is astronomically bad — both for kids affected and for society. It has been shown to severely damage children’s cognitive development, increase antisocial behaviors and generally worsen life outcomes. It’s also linked to higher crime rates in adulthood. There is no universe in which slashing efforts to remediate this toxin makes any fiscal sense.
When not busy firing public health experts, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been sowing doubts in some of their greatest achievements. Specifically: childhood vaccines.
A national measles outbreak has already killed two unvaccinated children. But Kennedy continues to amplify anti-vaccine quacks and falsely claim that the shots are “not safety tested.” He has told families that the (at times lethal) measles virus can be easily treated with vitamin A supplements — advice that has led some Texas children to overdose on the nutrient.
And while Republicans in Congress design severe cuts to public health and nutritional programs that millions of children depend on, the Trump administration has already begun the budgetary bloodletting.
The Agriculture Department, for instance, slashed programs that provide $1 billion for food banks and school lunch programs to purchase food from local farmers and ranchers. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins called this spending “nonessential.” Citing similar reasons, Education Secretary Linda McMahon shuttered most of her department, laying off the employees tasked with measuring whether kids can add or read.
Unsurprisingly, Trump has reserved his greatest vitriol for noncitizen children and kids born in the United States to immigrants. He has tried to deny them birthright citizenship, Constitution be damned. He has given immigration authorities blanket permission to raid schools and day-care centers, so-called “sensitive sites” that once required advance written permission for enforcement actions. This has led some families to keep their children home from school.
Unaccompanied immigrant children are being denied legal representation, despite court orders. Young victims of child sex-trafficking and other forms of abuse are facing judges alone. Hostility toward immigrants has had other unexpected knock-on effects on children’s well-being. For example, Florida lawmakers are now trying to loosen their state’s child labor laws to fill jobs vacated by undocumented immigrants. Apparently Florida’s middle-schoolers are too young to learn where babies come from but old enough to work overnight shifts. The Trump administration has also cut programs that fight child labor beyond our borders.
Perhaps it all makes sense: Why feed, immunize and educate young children in the hopes of turning them into healthier and more productive adults in the future, when you could simply enlist them in hard labor today?
The administration is divesting from future generations. It will cost America dearly.
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
They’ve persecuted immigrants, transgender people and scientists. They’ve targeted the rule of law and free speech. Now, they’re coming for your children, too.
It’s been largely lost in the cacophony over President Donald Trump’s tariffs and vendettas against universities, but administration officials have been gutting services that keep children alive and well. These include programs that feed kids, teach them the alphabet, provide them medical care, guarantee their rights and shield them from abuse.
Destroying these programs is not only cruel and contrary to the far-right’s allegedly pro-family agenda; it’s also tremendously wasteful. Research shows that government dollars spent on kids — especially on low-income kids’ health and education — offer some of the highest returns on investment.
This week, for instance, a leaked document revealed the administration’s plans to eliminate federal funding for Head Start. This comes after officials kneecapped the 60-year-old pre-K program by temporarily freezing funding for its care providers; firing its Washington-based employees en masse; and permanently closing half its regional offices around the country. (Just coincidentally, they only closed offices in blue states.)
Staff in these regional offices were given no prior notice before closing, so some local pre-K programs that have been waiting for local Head Start officials to approve grants don’t know whether they can stay open.
Head Start, which serves low-income children from birth to age 5, began as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty but has received bipartisan support through the decades since. It’s no wonder why: These programs provide educational, nutritional, health and psychological support to poor children and their families. And states get to decide how to administer the programs.
Head Start spending also provides enormous bang for the buck by improving long-term educational outcomes and economic self-sufficiency. In fact, one recent study found the program “pays for itself”: Over their lifetimes, children in Head Start end up making more money, paying more in taxes and needing fewer safety-net benefits. These returns more than offset the up-front cost of enrollment, so the government saves money by paying to educate and care for these kids.
In other words, Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency” is, once again, making government less efficient.
Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laid off everyone in its lead-poisoning group last week, just as Milwaukee schools beg for federal help with a lead-poisoning crisis. Funding to help states replace lead pipes has also been frozen or delayed.
As the CDC itself acknowledges, childhood exposure to lead is astronomically bad — both for kids affected and for society. It has been shown to severely damage children’s cognitive development, increase antisocial behaviors and generally worsen life outcomes. It’s also linked to higher crime rates in adulthood. There is no universe in which slashing efforts to remediate this toxin makes any fiscal sense.
When not busy firing public health experts, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been sowing doubts in some of their greatest achievements. Specifically: childhood vaccines.
A national measles outbreak has already killed two unvaccinated children. But Kennedy continues to amplify anti-vaccine quacks and falsely claim that the shots are “not safety tested.” He has told families that the (at times lethal) measles virus can be easily treated with vitamin A supplements — advice that has led some Texas children to overdose on the nutrient.
And while Republicans in Congress design severe cuts to public health and nutritional programs that millions of children depend on, the Trump administration has already begun the budgetary bloodletting.
The Agriculture Department, for instance, slashed programs that provide $1 billion for food banks and school lunch programs to purchase food from local farmers and ranchers. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins called this spending “nonessential.” Citing similar reasons, Education Secretary Linda McMahon shuttered most of her department, laying off the employees tasked with measuring whether kids can add or read.
Unsurprisingly, Trump has reserved his greatest vitriol for noncitizen children and kids born in the United States to immigrants. He has tried to deny them birthright citizenship, Constitution be damned. He has given immigration authorities blanket permission to raid schools and day-care centers, so-called “sensitive sites” that once required advance written permission for enforcement actions. This has led some families to keep their children home from school.
Unaccompanied immigrant children are being denied legal representation, despite court orders. Young victims of child sex-trafficking and other forms of abuse are facing judges alone. Hostility toward immigrants has had other unexpected knock-on effects on children’s well-being. For example, Florida lawmakers are now trying to loosen their state’s child labor laws to fill jobs vacated by undocumented immigrants. Apparently Florida’s middle-schoolers are too young to learn where babies come from but old enough to work overnight shifts. The Trump administration has also cut programs that fight child labor beyond our borders.
Perhaps it all makes sense: Why feed, immunize and educate young children in the hopes of turning them into healthier and more productive adults in the future, when you could simply enlist them in hard labor today?
IT’S TIME TO PROTECT AMERICA FROM AMERICA’S PRESIDENT
By Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times
t
America has periodically faced great national tests. The Civil War and Reconstruction. The Great Depression. McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. And now we face another great test — of our Constitution, our institutions, our citizens — as President Trump ignores courts and sabotages universities and his officers grab people off the street.
I’ve spent much of my career covering authoritarianism in other countries, and I’ve seen all this before. The chummy scene in the White House this week with Trump and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador was telling. “Trump and Bukele Bond Over Human Rights Abuses in Oval Office Meeting,” read Rolling Stone’s headline, which seemed about right.
With chilling indifference, they discussed the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a father of three who is married to an American citizen and who in 2019 was ordered protected from deportation by an immigration judge. The Trump administration nonetheless deported Abrego Garcia as a result of what it eventually acknowledged was an “administrative error,” and he now languishes in a brutal Salvadoran prison — even though, in contrast to Trump, he has no criminal record.
This is a challenge to our constitutional system, for the principal lawbreaking here appears to have been committed not by Abrego Garcia but by the Trump administration. Appellate judges in the case warned that the administration’s position represented a “path of perfect lawlessness” and would mean “the government could send any of us to a Salvadoran prison without due process.”
Then the Supreme Court ruled that Trump must obey the district judge’s instruction to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. Trump and Bukele effectively mocked our federal courts by making it clear that they had no intention of bringing Abrego Garcia home.
Trump prides himself on his ability to free hostages held in foreign prisons, yet he presents himself as helpless when it comes to bringing back Abrego Garcia — even though we are paying El Salvador to imprison deportees.
A remarkable Times investigation found that of the 238 migrants dispatched to the Salvadoran prison, most did not have criminal records and few were found to have ties to gangs. Officials appear to have selected their targets in part based on tattoos and a misunderstanding of their significance.
This is the same administration that marked for deletion a photo of the World War II bomber Enola Gay, seemingly because it thought it had something to do with gay people. But this ineptitude is intertwined with brutality. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said that those sent to the Salvadoran prison “should stay there for the rest of their lives.”
Trump’s border “czar,” Tom Homan, suggested that governors of sanctuary states should be prosecuted and perhaps imprisoned. “It’s coming,” he said.
Much of this echoes what I’ve seen abroad. In China, the government has cracked down on elite universities, crushed freethinking journalism, suppressed lawyers and forced intellectuals to parrot the party line. One university lecturer recalled how an ancient historian, Sima Qian, had spoken up for a disgraced general and been punished with castration: “Most Chinese intellectuals still feel castrated, in that we don’t dare stand up for what is right,” the lecturer told me — and I suspect some American university presidents feel that way today.
In Communist Poland, in Venezuela, in Russia, in Bangladesh and in China, I’ve seen rulers cultivate personality cults and claim to follow laws that they concocted out of thin air. “We are a nation of laws,” a Chinese state security official once told me as he detained me for, um, committing journalism. In North Korea, officials hailed Kim Jong-il’s book, “The Great Teacher of Journalists,” less in hopes of improving my writing than as a demonstration of utter fealty to the boss. Trump’s cabinet members can sometimes sound the same.
Trump’s defiance of the courts comes in the wider context of his attacks on law firms, universities and news organizations. The White House this week appeared to ignore a separate court by blocking Associated Press journalists from a White House event.
In the face of this onslaught, many powerful institutions have caved. Nine law firms have surrendered and agreed to provide nearly $1 billion in pro bono work for the administration’s preferred causes. Columbia University rolled over.
We needed a dollop of hope, and this week it came from Harvard University. Facing absurd demands from the administration, it delivered a resolute no, standing fast even as Trump then halted $2.2 billion in federal funding and threatened the university’s tax-exempt status. (A conflict alert: I’m a former member of Harvard’s board of overseers, and my wife is a current member.)
Like autocrats in China, Hungary and Russia, Trump’s trying to crush independent universities that might challenge his misrule. One difference is that China, while repressing universities, at least has been smart enough to protect and boost academic scientific research because it recognizes that this work benefits the entire nation.
I hope voters understand that Trump’s retaliatory funding freeze primarily strikes not Harvard’s main campus but researchers affiliated with Harvard Medical School. The university has 162 Nobel Prize winners, and scientists there are working on cancer immunotherapy, brain tumors, organ transplants, diabetes and more. It was a Harvard researcher who discovered the molecule that is the basis for the GLP-1 weight-loss medications that have revolutionized obesity care.
Programs now facing funding cuts address pediatric cancer and treatment for veterans. The federal government already issued a “stop-work order” on Harvard research on Lou Gehrig’s disease. The upshot is that Trump’s lust for power and vengeance may one day be measured by more Americans dying of cancer, heart disease and other ailments.
All this illuminates an administration that is not only authoritarian but also reckless; this is vandalism of the American project. That is why this moment is a test of our ability to step up and protect our national greatness from our national leader.
By Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times
t
America has periodically faced great national tests. The Civil War and Reconstruction. The Great Depression. McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. And now we face another great test — of our Constitution, our institutions, our citizens — as President Trump ignores courts and sabotages universities and his officers grab people off the street.
I’ve spent much of my career covering authoritarianism in other countries, and I’ve seen all this before. The chummy scene in the White House this week with Trump and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador was telling. “Trump and Bukele Bond Over Human Rights Abuses in Oval Office Meeting,” read Rolling Stone’s headline, which seemed about right.
With chilling indifference, they discussed the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a father of three who is married to an American citizen and who in 2019 was ordered protected from deportation by an immigration judge. The Trump administration nonetheless deported Abrego Garcia as a result of what it eventually acknowledged was an “administrative error,” and he now languishes in a brutal Salvadoran prison — even though, in contrast to Trump, he has no criminal record.
This is a challenge to our constitutional system, for the principal lawbreaking here appears to have been committed not by Abrego Garcia but by the Trump administration. Appellate judges in the case warned that the administration’s position represented a “path of perfect lawlessness” and would mean “the government could send any of us to a Salvadoran prison without due process.”
Then the Supreme Court ruled that Trump must obey the district judge’s instruction to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. Trump and Bukele effectively mocked our federal courts by making it clear that they had no intention of bringing Abrego Garcia home.
Trump prides himself on his ability to free hostages held in foreign prisons, yet he presents himself as helpless when it comes to bringing back Abrego Garcia — even though we are paying El Salvador to imprison deportees.
A remarkable Times investigation found that of the 238 migrants dispatched to the Salvadoran prison, most did not have criminal records and few were found to have ties to gangs. Officials appear to have selected their targets in part based on tattoos and a misunderstanding of their significance.
This is the same administration that marked for deletion a photo of the World War II bomber Enola Gay, seemingly because it thought it had something to do with gay people. But this ineptitude is intertwined with brutality. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said that those sent to the Salvadoran prison “should stay there for the rest of their lives.”
Trump’s border “czar,” Tom Homan, suggested that governors of sanctuary states should be prosecuted and perhaps imprisoned. “It’s coming,” he said.
Much of this echoes what I’ve seen abroad. In China, the government has cracked down on elite universities, crushed freethinking journalism, suppressed lawyers and forced intellectuals to parrot the party line. One university lecturer recalled how an ancient historian, Sima Qian, had spoken up for a disgraced general and been punished with castration: “Most Chinese intellectuals still feel castrated, in that we don’t dare stand up for what is right,” the lecturer told me — and I suspect some American university presidents feel that way today.
In Communist Poland, in Venezuela, in Russia, in Bangladesh and in China, I’ve seen rulers cultivate personality cults and claim to follow laws that they concocted out of thin air. “We are a nation of laws,” a Chinese state security official once told me as he detained me for, um, committing journalism. In North Korea, officials hailed Kim Jong-il’s book, “The Great Teacher of Journalists,” less in hopes of improving my writing than as a demonstration of utter fealty to the boss. Trump’s cabinet members can sometimes sound the same.
Trump’s defiance of the courts comes in the wider context of his attacks on law firms, universities and news organizations. The White House this week appeared to ignore a separate court by blocking Associated Press journalists from a White House event.
In the face of this onslaught, many powerful institutions have caved. Nine law firms have surrendered and agreed to provide nearly $1 billion in pro bono work for the administration’s preferred causes. Columbia University rolled over.
We needed a dollop of hope, and this week it came from Harvard University. Facing absurd demands from the administration, it delivered a resolute no, standing fast even as Trump then halted $2.2 billion in federal funding and threatened the university’s tax-exempt status. (A conflict alert: I’m a former member of Harvard’s board of overseers, and my wife is a current member.)
Like autocrats in China, Hungary and Russia, Trump’s trying to crush independent universities that might challenge his misrule. One difference is that China, while repressing universities, at least has been smart enough to protect and boost academic scientific research because it recognizes that this work benefits the entire nation.
I hope voters understand that Trump’s retaliatory funding freeze primarily strikes not Harvard’s main campus but researchers affiliated with Harvard Medical School. The university has 162 Nobel Prize winners, and scientists there are working on cancer immunotherapy, brain tumors, organ transplants, diabetes and more. It was a Harvard researcher who discovered the molecule that is the basis for the GLP-1 weight-loss medications that have revolutionized obesity care.
Programs now facing funding cuts address pediatric cancer and treatment for veterans. The federal government already issued a “stop-work order” on Harvard research on Lou Gehrig’s disease. The upshot is that Trump’s lust for power and vengeance may one day be measured by more Americans dying of cancer, heart disease and other ailments.
All this illuminates an administration that is not only authoritarian but also reckless; this is vandalism of the American project. That is why this moment is a test of our ability to step up and protect our national greatness from our national leader.
THE KING WE OVERTHREW — AND THE KING SOME NOW WANT
Americans need to reconnect with their innate dislike of arbitrary rule.
By Philip Bump, The Washington Post
Sometime before dawn on April 19, 1775, a group of several dozen farmers and tradesmen got out of bed, grabbed muskets and made their way to an open space at the center of Lexington, Massachusetts. Their intent was almost unbelievably optimistic: They hoped to confront — if not deter! — a well-trained detachment from the most powerful military in the world.
They had every reason to assume there would be no actual conflict, given past encounters with British army regulars. But that morning, in that place, the building tension between the colonists and the British was released like an earthquake. A minor earthquake; eight colonists were killed, and the British contingent continued on to Concord almost entirely intact. Still: With one shot, fired by a still-unidentified weapon, the Revolutionary War had begun.
That skirmish occurred 250 years ago this Saturday. Lexington, now a prosperous suburb of Boston, is preparing a series of events to commemorate the occasion, as small towns that earn mentions in history books are wont to do. But what five years ago might have been a relatively rote celebration of those events now carries an unexpected subtext: Here we are, remembering America’s emergence from under the thumb of a capricious king, as the elected president of the United States does his best to build a kind of monarchy of his own.
Previewing this weekend’s commemoration, Monami Roy, vice chair of the anniversary committee, presented the familiar, romantic image of the Lexington fight and its participants. A longtime resident of the town, she also presented the Battle Green — the site of the skirmish — as something more than a historical space set aside as a backdrop for tourist photos. It’s also a town square, an integrated element of a democratic community. “Lexington Battle Green has had a long history of protest — the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement,” she explained. “So, the Green is not only associated with the first shots of the American Revolution, but really with protest in general.”
Protests are planned for this weekend, in fact, organized by a group called Lexington Alarm that hopes to highlight “the values the Lexington Militia fought for” — specifically that “sovereignty flows from the people, not kings or unelected billionaires.”
So we arrive at the current tension, between a president who fancies himself a monarch and a burbling opposition to his seizure of power. Though, as University of Cambridge professor Nicholas Guyatt explained, the parallel isn’t that neat.
Obviously, Guyatt said, President Donald Trump does manifest king-like behavior, such as his affection for “gold fittings and furnishings.” What’s more important, though, is how Trump is approaching his authority. “I think arbitrary power and executive power is a much closer point of contact between that moment and this one,” Guyatt said. “If you think for a moment about those two things really being laid out in this agenda by Trump of, in a sense, governing the entire nation by executive order, there is a very close correlation in my mind between that practice of government and — not necessarily what King George III himself was doing, but what patriots said he was doing in this period from the summer of 1775, certainly through until the Declaration of Independence.”
“Americans, through their long tradition of representative government in the colonial system, are very familiar with the idea that power shouldn’t be arbitrary,” Guyatt said of the colonists. “They’re very familiar with the idea that executive power should be balanced and checked by some form of legislative or assembly power. They know all of that, which means there is a big reservoir of potential resentment which the patriots can tap into in trying to persuade other colonists to join the cause in ’75 and in ’76.”
What unfolded at Lexington and in the months that followed — months that led up to the Declaration of Independence — was, as Guyatt put it, a “crystallization” of the idea that what had been presented as a unified British nation was, in reality, two nations divided by the Atlantic Ocean. “The big difference between then and now,” he said, “is that it was very clear to a whole number of different people what the route out of this would be back in 1775” — namely, American independence. “The solution back then doesn’t seem to me to be of that much use to us now in thinking about possible responses to what Trump’s up to.”
It’s worth noting that Roy, who is helping lead the commemoration of that pivotal moment, is the child of immigrants to the United States. (“This is not the country he was born in,” she said of her father. “This is the country that he chose.”) Roy sees in the Lexington anniversary not just the history of her parents’ adopted country but the spirit of the country itself. “I don’t believe that most Americans want a king. What I do think is that a lot of people feel that they want someone to come in and fix their problems,” she said. “And the truth is, we have to be our own heroes. There’s no one person or one party or one government that’s going to actually fix our problems. One of the great things about Lexington and our story, whether it’s from the beginning to now, is that we really try to lean into the idea that we are the solution to our own problems, if we come together and work together.”
Guyatt is not an American but (fittingly enough) a Brit. He studied in the United States, however, and has visited some 100 times, by his estimation. And as a historian, he has noticed a trend: Americans have become less familiar with our own history. “I do think that it’s something that the U.S. is losing,” Guyatt said. This, he added, “makes a massive difference because it means that people are much more vulnerable to a packaging of history by leaders from whatever political party or part of the spectrum, which actually either isn’t true or really distorts the past.”
Roy and the residents of Lexington hope to change that, presenting the brief conflict at Battle Green in the context of the present as well as the past. “250 years ago, we started this journey, this experiment toward a more perfect union. When we think about our founding ideals — liberty, representation, resisting tyranny — it’s still a work in progress,” Roy said. “It’s particularly poignant because we can do both. We can honor the sacrifices of the Minutemen on the field; we can also recognize that what they fought for was the right to speak up.”
“Dissent,” she added, “is part of patriotism.”
Americans need to reconnect with their innate dislike of arbitrary rule.
By Philip Bump, The Washington Post
Sometime before dawn on April 19, 1775, a group of several dozen farmers and tradesmen got out of bed, grabbed muskets and made their way to an open space at the center of Lexington, Massachusetts. Their intent was almost unbelievably optimistic: They hoped to confront — if not deter! — a well-trained detachment from the most powerful military in the world.
They had every reason to assume there would be no actual conflict, given past encounters with British army regulars. But that morning, in that place, the building tension between the colonists and the British was released like an earthquake. A minor earthquake; eight colonists were killed, and the British contingent continued on to Concord almost entirely intact. Still: With one shot, fired by a still-unidentified weapon, the Revolutionary War had begun.
That skirmish occurred 250 years ago this Saturday. Lexington, now a prosperous suburb of Boston, is preparing a series of events to commemorate the occasion, as small towns that earn mentions in history books are wont to do. But what five years ago might have been a relatively rote celebration of those events now carries an unexpected subtext: Here we are, remembering America’s emergence from under the thumb of a capricious king, as the elected president of the United States does his best to build a kind of monarchy of his own.
Previewing this weekend’s commemoration, Monami Roy, vice chair of the anniversary committee, presented the familiar, romantic image of the Lexington fight and its participants. A longtime resident of the town, she also presented the Battle Green — the site of the skirmish — as something more than a historical space set aside as a backdrop for tourist photos. It’s also a town square, an integrated element of a democratic community. “Lexington Battle Green has had a long history of protest — the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement,” she explained. “So, the Green is not only associated with the first shots of the American Revolution, but really with protest in general.”
Protests are planned for this weekend, in fact, organized by a group called Lexington Alarm that hopes to highlight “the values the Lexington Militia fought for” — specifically that “sovereignty flows from the people, not kings or unelected billionaires.”
So we arrive at the current tension, between a president who fancies himself a monarch and a burbling opposition to his seizure of power. Though, as University of Cambridge professor Nicholas Guyatt explained, the parallel isn’t that neat.
Obviously, Guyatt said, President Donald Trump does manifest king-like behavior, such as his affection for “gold fittings and furnishings.” What’s more important, though, is how Trump is approaching his authority. “I think arbitrary power and executive power is a much closer point of contact between that moment and this one,” Guyatt said. “If you think for a moment about those two things really being laid out in this agenda by Trump of, in a sense, governing the entire nation by executive order, there is a very close correlation in my mind between that practice of government and — not necessarily what King George III himself was doing, but what patriots said he was doing in this period from the summer of 1775, certainly through until the Declaration of Independence.”
“Americans, through their long tradition of representative government in the colonial system, are very familiar with the idea that power shouldn’t be arbitrary,” Guyatt said of the colonists. “They’re very familiar with the idea that executive power should be balanced and checked by some form of legislative or assembly power. They know all of that, which means there is a big reservoir of potential resentment which the patriots can tap into in trying to persuade other colonists to join the cause in ’75 and in ’76.”
What unfolded at Lexington and in the months that followed — months that led up to the Declaration of Independence — was, as Guyatt put it, a “crystallization” of the idea that what had been presented as a unified British nation was, in reality, two nations divided by the Atlantic Ocean. “The big difference between then and now,” he said, “is that it was very clear to a whole number of different people what the route out of this would be back in 1775” — namely, American independence. “The solution back then doesn’t seem to me to be of that much use to us now in thinking about possible responses to what Trump’s up to.”
It’s worth noting that Roy, who is helping lead the commemoration of that pivotal moment, is the child of immigrants to the United States. (“This is not the country he was born in,” she said of her father. “This is the country that he chose.”) Roy sees in the Lexington anniversary not just the history of her parents’ adopted country but the spirit of the country itself. “I don’t believe that most Americans want a king. What I do think is that a lot of people feel that they want someone to come in and fix their problems,” she said. “And the truth is, we have to be our own heroes. There’s no one person or one party or one government that’s going to actually fix our problems. One of the great things about Lexington and our story, whether it’s from the beginning to now, is that we really try to lean into the idea that we are the solution to our own problems, if we come together and work together.”
Guyatt is not an American but (fittingly enough) a Brit. He studied in the United States, however, and has visited some 100 times, by his estimation. And as a historian, he has noticed a trend: Americans have become less familiar with our own history. “I do think that it’s something that the U.S. is losing,” Guyatt said. This, he added, “makes a massive difference because it means that people are much more vulnerable to a packaging of history by leaders from whatever political party or part of the spectrum, which actually either isn’t true or really distorts the past.”
Roy and the residents of Lexington hope to change that, presenting the brief conflict at Battle Green in the context of the present as well as the past. “250 years ago, we started this journey, this experiment toward a more perfect union. When we think about our founding ideals — liberty, representation, resisting tyranny — it’s still a work in progress,” Roy said. “It’s particularly poignant because we can do both. We can honor the sacrifices of the Minutemen on the field; we can also recognize that what they fought for was the right to speak up.”
“Dissent,” she added, “is part of patriotism.”
I HAVE NEVER BEEN MORE AFRAID FOR MY COUNTRY’S FUTURE
By Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times
So much crazy happens with the Trump administration every day that some downright weird but incredibly telling stuff gets lost in the noise. A recent example was the scene on April 8 at the White House where, in the middle of his raging trade war, our president decided it was the perfect time to sign an executive order to bolster coal mining.
“We’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned,” said President Trump, surrounded by coal miners in hard hats, members of a work force that has declined to about 40,000 from 70,000 over the last decade, according to Reuters. “We’re going to put the miners back to work.” For good measure, Trump added about these miners: “You could give them a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and a different kind of a job and they’d be unhappy. They want to mine coal; that’s what they love to do.”
It’s commendable that the president honors men and women who work with their hands. But when he singles out coal miners for praise while he tries to zero out development of clean-tech jobs from his budget — in 2023, the U.S. wind energy industry employed approximately 130,000 workers, while the solar industry employed 280,000 — it suggests that Trump is trapped in a right-wing woke ideology that doesn’t recognize green manufacturing jobs as “real” jobs. How is that going to make us stronger?
This whole Trump II administration is a cruel farce. Trump ran for another term not because he had any clue how to transform America for the 21st century. He ran in order to stay out of jail and to get revenge on those who, with real evidence, had tried to hold him accountable to the law. I doubt he has ever spent five minutes studying the work force of the future.
He then returned to the White House, his head still filled with ideas out of the 1970s. There he launched a trade war with no allies and no serious preparation — which is why he changes his tariffs almost every day — and no understanding of how much the global economy is now a complex ecosystem in which products are assembled from components from multiple countries. And then he has this war carried out by a commerce secretary who thinks millions of Americans are dying to replace Chinese workers “screwing in little screws to make iPhones.”
But this farce is about to touch every American. By attacking our closest allies — Canada, Mexico, Japan, South Korea and the European Union — and our biggest rival, China, at the same time he makes clear he favors Russia over Ukraine and prefers climate-destroying energy industries over future-oriented ones, the planet be damned, Trump is triggering a serious loss of global confidence in America.
The world is now seeing Trump’s America for exactly what it is becoming: a rogue state led by an impulsive strongman disconnected from the rule of law and other constitutional American principles and values. And do you know what our democratic allies do with rogue states? Let’s connect some dots.
First, they don’t buy Treasury bills as much as they used to. So America has to offer them higher rates of interest to do so — which will ripple through our entire economy, from car payments to home mortgages to the cost of servicing our national debt at the expense of everything else.
“Are President Trump’s herky-jerky decision-making and border taxes causing the world’s investors to shy away from the dollar and U.S. Treasuries?” asked The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page on Sunday under the headline, “Is There a New U.S. Risk Premium?” Too soon to say, but not too soon to ask, as bond yields keep spiking and the dollar keeps weakening — classic signs of a loss of confidence that does not have to be large to have a large impact on our whole economy.
The second thing is that our allies lose faith in our institutions. The Financial Times reported Monday that the European Union’s governing “commission is issuing burner phones and basic laptops to some U.S.-bound staff to avoid the risk of espionage, a measure traditionally reserved for trips to China.” It doesn’t trust the rule of law in America anymore.
The third thing people overseas do is tell themselves and their children — and I heard this repeatedly in China a few weeks ago — that maybe it’s not a good idea any longer to study in America. The reason: They don’t know when their kids might be arbitrarily arrested, when their family members might get deported to Salvadoran prisons.
Is this irreversible? All I know for sure today is that somewhere out there, as you read this, is someone like Steve Jobs’s Syrian birth father, who came to our shores in the 1950s to get a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, someone who was planning to study in America but is now looking to go to Canada or Europe instead. You shrink all those things — our ability to attract the world’s most energetic and entrepreneurial immigrants, which allowed us to be the world’s center for innovation; our power to draw in a disproportionate share of the world’s savings, which allowed us to live beyond our means for decades; and our reputation for upholding the rule of law — and over time you end up with an America that will be less prosperous, less respected and increasingly isolated.
Wait, wait, you say, but isn’t China also still digging coal? Yes, it is, but with a long-term plan to phase it out and to use robots to do the dangerous and health-sapping work of miners. And that’s the point. While Trump is doing his “weave” — rambling about whatever strikes him at the moment as good policy — China is weaving long-term plans.
In 2015, a year before Trump became president, China’s prime minister at the time, Li Keqiang, unveiled a forward-looking growth plan called “Made in China 2025.” It began by asking, what will be the growth engine for the 21st century? Beijing then made huge investments in the elements of that engine’s components so Chinese companies could dominate them at home and abroad. We’re talking clean energy, batteries, electric vehicles and autonomous cars, robots, new materials, machine tools, drones, quantum computing and artificial intelligence. The most recent Nature Index shows that China has become “the leading country globally for research output in the database in chemistry, earth and environmental sciences and physical sciences, and is second for biological sciences and health sciences.”
But Trump’s constant bluster and his wild on-and-off imposition of tariffs are not a strategy — not when you are taking on China on the 10th anniversary of Made in China 2025. If Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent really believes what he foolishly said, that Beijing is just “playing with a pair of twos,” then somebody please let me know when it’s poker night at the White House, because I want to buy in. China has built an economic engine that gives it options.
The question for Beijing — and the rest of the world — is: How will China use all the surpluses it has generated? Will it invest them in making a more menacing military? Will it invest them in more high-speed rail lines and six-lane highways to cities that don’t need them? Or will it invest in more domestic consumption and services while offering to build the next generation of Chinese factories and supply lines in America and Europe with 50-50 ownership structures? We need to encourage China to make the right choices. But at least China has choices.
Compare that with the choices Trump is making. He is undermining our sacred rule of law, he is tossing away our allies, he is undermining the value of the dollar and he is shredding any hope of national unity. He’s even got Canadians now boycotting Las Vegas because they don’t like to be told we will soon own them.
So, you tell me who’s playing with a pair of twos. If Trump doesn’t stop his rogue behavior, he’s going to destroy all the things that made America strong, respected and prosperous. I have never been more afraid for America’s future in my life.
By Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times
So much crazy happens with the Trump administration every day that some downright weird but incredibly telling stuff gets lost in the noise. A recent example was the scene on April 8 at the White House where, in the middle of his raging trade war, our president decided it was the perfect time to sign an executive order to bolster coal mining.
“We’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned,” said President Trump, surrounded by coal miners in hard hats, members of a work force that has declined to about 40,000 from 70,000 over the last decade, according to Reuters. “We’re going to put the miners back to work.” For good measure, Trump added about these miners: “You could give them a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and a different kind of a job and they’d be unhappy. They want to mine coal; that’s what they love to do.”
It’s commendable that the president honors men and women who work with their hands. But when he singles out coal miners for praise while he tries to zero out development of clean-tech jobs from his budget — in 2023, the U.S. wind energy industry employed approximately 130,000 workers, while the solar industry employed 280,000 — it suggests that Trump is trapped in a right-wing woke ideology that doesn’t recognize green manufacturing jobs as “real” jobs. How is that going to make us stronger?
This whole Trump II administration is a cruel farce. Trump ran for another term not because he had any clue how to transform America for the 21st century. He ran in order to stay out of jail and to get revenge on those who, with real evidence, had tried to hold him accountable to the law. I doubt he has ever spent five minutes studying the work force of the future.
He then returned to the White House, his head still filled with ideas out of the 1970s. There he launched a trade war with no allies and no serious preparation — which is why he changes his tariffs almost every day — and no understanding of how much the global economy is now a complex ecosystem in which products are assembled from components from multiple countries. And then he has this war carried out by a commerce secretary who thinks millions of Americans are dying to replace Chinese workers “screwing in little screws to make iPhones.”
But this farce is about to touch every American. By attacking our closest allies — Canada, Mexico, Japan, South Korea and the European Union — and our biggest rival, China, at the same time he makes clear he favors Russia over Ukraine and prefers climate-destroying energy industries over future-oriented ones, the planet be damned, Trump is triggering a serious loss of global confidence in America.
The world is now seeing Trump’s America for exactly what it is becoming: a rogue state led by an impulsive strongman disconnected from the rule of law and other constitutional American principles and values. And do you know what our democratic allies do with rogue states? Let’s connect some dots.
First, they don’t buy Treasury bills as much as they used to. So America has to offer them higher rates of interest to do so — which will ripple through our entire economy, from car payments to home mortgages to the cost of servicing our national debt at the expense of everything else.
“Are President Trump’s herky-jerky decision-making and border taxes causing the world’s investors to shy away from the dollar and U.S. Treasuries?” asked The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page on Sunday under the headline, “Is There a New U.S. Risk Premium?” Too soon to say, but not too soon to ask, as bond yields keep spiking and the dollar keeps weakening — classic signs of a loss of confidence that does not have to be large to have a large impact on our whole economy.
The second thing is that our allies lose faith in our institutions. The Financial Times reported Monday that the European Union’s governing “commission is issuing burner phones and basic laptops to some U.S.-bound staff to avoid the risk of espionage, a measure traditionally reserved for trips to China.” It doesn’t trust the rule of law in America anymore.
The third thing people overseas do is tell themselves and their children — and I heard this repeatedly in China a few weeks ago — that maybe it’s not a good idea any longer to study in America. The reason: They don’t know when their kids might be arbitrarily arrested, when their family members might get deported to Salvadoran prisons.
Is this irreversible? All I know for sure today is that somewhere out there, as you read this, is someone like Steve Jobs’s Syrian birth father, who came to our shores in the 1950s to get a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, someone who was planning to study in America but is now looking to go to Canada or Europe instead. You shrink all those things — our ability to attract the world’s most energetic and entrepreneurial immigrants, which allowed us to be the world’s center for innovation; our power to draw in a disproportionate share of the world’s savings, which allowed us to live beyond our means for decades; and our reputation for upholding the rule of law — and over time you end up with an America that will be less prosperous, less respected and increasingly isolated.
Wait, wait, you say, but isn’t China also still digging coal? Yes, it is, but with a long-term plan to phase it out and to use robots to do the dangerous and health-sapping work of miners. And that’s the point. While Trump is doing his “weave” — rambling about whatever strikes him at the moment as good policy — China is weaving long-term plans.
In 2015, a year before Trump became president, China’s prime minister at the time, Li Keqiang, unveiled a forward-looking growth plan called “Made in China 2025.” It began by asking, what will be the growth engine for the 21st century? Beijing then made huge investments in the elements of that engine’s components so Chinese companies could dominate them at home and abroad. We’re talking clean energy, batteries, electric vehicles and autonomous cars, robots, new materials, machine tools, drones, quantum computing and artificial intelligence. The most recent Nature Index shows that China has become “the leading country globally for research output in the database in chemistry, earth and environmental sciences and physical sciences, and is second for biological sciences and health sciences.”
But Trump’s constant bluster and his wild on-and-off imposition of tariffs are not a strategy — not when you are taking on China on the 10th anniversary of Made in China 2025. If Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent really believes what he foolishly said, that Beijing is just “playing with a pair of twos,” then somebody please let me know when it’s poker night at the White House, because I want to buy in. China has built an economic engine that gives it options.
The question for Beijing — and the rest of the world — is: How will China use all the surpluses it has generated? Will it invest them in making a more menacing military? Will it invest them in more high-speed rail lines and six-lane highways to cities that don’t need them? Or will it invest in more domestic consumption and services while offering to build the next generation of Chinese factories and supply lines in America and Europe with 50-50 ownership structures? We need to encourage China to make the right choices. But at least China has choices.
Compare that with the choices Trump is making. He is undermining our sacred rule of law, he is tossing away our allies, he is undermining the value of the dollar and he is shredding any hope of national unity. He’s even got Canadians now boycotting Las Vegas because they don’t like to be told we will soon own them.
So, you tell me who’s playing with a pair of twos. If Trump doesn’t stop his rogue behavior, he’s going to destroy all the things that made America strong, respected and prosperous. I have never been more afraid for America’s future in my life.
THE MANY WAYS KENNEDY IS ALREADY UNDERMINING VACCINES
The health secretary has chipped away at the idea that immunizing children against measles and other diseases is a public health good.
By Apoorva Mandavilli, The New York Times
During his Senate confirmation hearings to be health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presented himself as a supporter of vaccines. But in office, he and the agencies he leads have taken far-reaching, sometimes subtle steps to undermine confidence in vaccine efficacy and safety.
The National Institutes of Health halted funding for researchers who study vaccine hesitancy and hoped to find ways to overcome it. It also canceled programs intended to discover new vaccines to prevent future pandemics.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shelved an advertising campaign for the flu shot. Mr. Kennedy has said inaccurately that the scientists who advise the C.D.C. on vaccines have “severe, severe conflicts of interest” in promoting the products and cannot be trusted.
The Health and Human Services Department cut billions of dollars to state health agencies, including funds needed to modernize state programs for childhood immunization. Mr. Kennedy said in a televised interview on Wednesday that he was unaware of this widely reported development.
The Food and Drug Administration canceled an open meeting on flu vaccines with scientific advisers, later holding it behind closed doors. A top official paused the agency’s review of Novavax’s Covid vaccine. In a televised interview last week, Mr. Kennedy said falsely that similarly created vaccines don’t work against respiratory viruses.
Some scientists said they saw a pattern: an effort to erode support for routine vaccination, and for the scientists who have long held it up as a public health goal. “This is a simultaneous process of increasing the likelihood that you will hear his voice and decreasing the likelihood that you’ll hear other voices,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, said of Mr. Kennedy. He is “decertifying other voices of authority,” she said.
After attending the funeral of an unvaccinated child who died of measles in West Texas on Sunday, Mr. Kennedy endorsed the measles vaccine on X as “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles.” But he has also described vaccination as a personal choice with poorly understood risks and suggested that miracle treatments were readily available. On Sunday, he praised two local doctors on social media who have promoted dubious, potentially harmful, treatments for measles.
Even as cases of measles in the United States have surged past 600 in 22 jurisdictions, Mr. Kennedy has claimed in a recent interview that the measles vaccine causes deaths every year (untrue); that it causes encephalitis, blindness and “all the illnesses that measles itself causes” (untrue); and that the vaccine’s effect wanes so dramatically that older adults are “essentially unvaccinated” (untrue).
According to an email obtained by The New York Times, H.H.S. intends to revise its web pages to include statements like “The decision to vaccinate is a personal one” and “People should also be informed about the potential adverse events associated with vaccines.” (Vaccines are already administered only after patients provide informed consent, as required by law.)
Tensions with mainstream experts came into sharp focus last week, when Dr. Peter Marks, the top vaccine regulator, resigned under pressure from the F.D.A. “It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Dr. Marks said in his resignation letter.
Mr. Kennedy’s position on vaccines has raised alarm for decades. But it has become particularly notable now, against a backdrop of rising skepticism of vaccines and worsening outbreaks of measles and bird flu, experts said. The M.M.R. vaccine — a combination product to prevent measles, mumps and rubella that has been available since 1971 — has long been a target of anti-vaccine campaigns because of the disproved theory that it can cause autism. Mr. Kennedy has said that he would like to revisit the issue, in part to assuage parents’ fears that the vaccines are unsafe.
But he has hired David Geier to re-examine the data. Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, a doctor and the chairman of the Senate Health Committee, has sharply criticized the decision to spend tax dollars testing a discredited hypothesis even as the administration is cutting billions for other research. “If we’re pissing away money over here,” he said last month, “that’s less money that we have to actually go after the true reason.”
The refusal to accept scientific consensus is “disturbing, because then we get into very strange territory where it’s somebody’s hunch that this does or doesn’t happen, or does or doesn’t work,” said Stephen Jameson, president of the American Association of Immunologists. In interviews, Mr. Kennedy has downplayed risks of measles and emphasized what he sees as the benefits of infection. “Everybody got measles, and measles gave you protected lifetime protection against measles infection — the vaccine doesn’t do that,” he said in an interview on Fox News.
Measles kills roughly 1 in every 1,000 infected people, and 11 percent of those infected this year have been hospitalized, many of them children under 5, according to the C.D.C. Two girls, ages 6 and 8, died in West Texas.
The health secretary has chipped away at the idea that immunizing children against measles and other diseases is a public health good.
By Apoorva Mandavilli, The New York Times
During his Senate confirmation hearings to be health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presented himself as a supporter of vaccines. But in office, he and the agencies he leads have taken far-reaching, sometimes subtle steps to undermine confidence in vaccine efficacy and safety.
The National Institutes of Health halted funding for researchers who study vaccine hesitancy and hoped to find ways to overcome it. It also canceled programs intended to discover new vaccines to prevent future pandemics.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shelved an advertising campaign for the flu shot. Mr. Kennedy has said inaccurately that the scientists who advise the C.D.C. on vaccines have “severe, severe conflicts of interest” in promoting the products and cannot be trusted.
The Health and Human Services Department cut billions of dollars to state health agencies, including funds needed to modernize state programs for childhood immunization. Mr. Kennedy said in a televised interview on Wednesday that he was unaware of this widely reported development.
The Food and Drug Administration canceled an open meeting on flu vaccines with scientific advisers, later holding it behind closed doors. A top official paused the agency’s review of Novavax’s Covid vaccine. In a televised interview last week, Mr. Kennedy said falsely that similarly created vaccines don’t work against respiratory viruses.
Some scientists said they saw a pattern: an effort to erode support for routine vaccination, and for the scientists who have long held it up as a public health goal. “This is a simultaneous process of increasing the likelihood that you will hear his voice and decreasing the likelihood that you’ll hear other voices,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, said of Mr. Kennedy. He is “decertifying other voices of authority,” she said.
After attending the funeral of an unvaccinated child who died of measles in West Texas on Sunday, Mr. Kennedy endorsed the measles vaccine on X as “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles.” But he has also described vaccination as a personal choice with poorly understood risks and suggested that miracle treatments were readily available. On Sunday, he praised two local doctors on social media who have promoted dubious, potentially harmful, treatments for measles.
Even as cases of measles in the United States have surged past 600 in 22 jurisdictions, Mr. Kennedy has claimed in a recent interview that the measles vaccine causes deaths every year (untrue); that it causes encephalitis, blindness and “all the illnesses that measles itself causes” (untrue); and that the vaccine’s effect wanes so dramatically that older adults are “essentially unvaccinated” (untrue).
According to an email obtained by The New York Times, H.H.S. intends to revise its web pages to include statements like “The decision to vaccinate is a personal one” and “People should also be informed about the potential adverse events associated with vaccines.” (Vaccines are already administered only after patients provide informed consent, as required by law.)
Tensions with mainstream experts came into sharp focus last week, when Dr. Peter Marks, the top vaccine regulator, resigned under pressure from the F.D.A. “It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Dr. Marks said in his resignation letter.
Mr. Kennedy’s position on vaccines has raised alarm for decades. But it has become particularly notable now, against a backdrop of rising skepticism of vaccines and worsening outbreaks of measles and bird flu, experts said. The M.M.R. vaccine — a combination product to prevent measles, mumps and rubella that has been available since 1971 — has long been a target of anti-vaccine campaigns because of the disproved theory that it can cause autism. Mr. Kennedy has said that he would like to revisit the issue, in part to assuage parents’ fears that the vaccines are unsafe.
But he has hired David Geier to re-examine the data. Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, a doctor and the chairman of the Senate Health Committee, has sharply criticized the decision to spend tax dollars testing a discredited hypothesis even as the administration is cutting billions for other research. “If we’re pissing away money over here,” he said last month, “that’s less money that we have to actually go after the true reason.”
The refusal to accept scientific consensus is “disturbing, because then we get into very strange territory where it’s somebody’s hunch that this does or doesn’t happen, or does or doesn’t work,” said Stephen Jameson, president of the American Association of Immunologists. In interviews, Mr. Kennedy has downplayed risks of measles and emphasized what he sees as the benefits of infection. “Everybody got measles, and measles gave you protected lifetime protection against measles infection — the vaccine doesn’t do that,” he said in an interview on Fox News.
Measles kills roughly 1 in every 1,000 infected people, and 11 percent of those infected this year have been hospitalized, many of them children under 5, according to the C.D.C. Two girls, ages 6 and 8, died in West Texas.
IT’S NOT JUST TARIFFS. TRUMP IS CREATING CHAOS WITH TAXES, TOO.
Gutting the Internal Revenue Service enables more people to cheat the system.
By Natasha Sarin, and Danny Werfel
Natasha Sarin is a Post contributing columnist and a former deputy assistant secretary for economic policy and counselor to Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen. Danny Werfel was IRS commissioner from 2023 to 2025.
We are learning in real time that President Donald Trump’s significant swings in U.S. tariff policy do not create the type of stability corporations — and American consumers — need. But there’s another story unfolding that is equally detrimental to the nation’s future but isn’t getting much attention: The gutting of the Internal Revenue Service.
Today is April 15, known widely as Tax Day. Though few people enjoy paying taxes, they want a fair system. It’s the same for companies. Corporations might seek tax cuts from Trump, but they do not want the chaos that would ensue if the United States no longer had an effectively functioning tax authority. That’s a real danger right now.
The IRS workforce has already undergone significant cuts since January: More than 4,000 employees accepted deferred resignation offers, and 7,000 probationary employees were let go in February (court rulings calling for their reinstatement have been overturned or paused). And the agency plans to cut its workforce by another 20,000 workers in the next round of layoffs. If these measures are additive, they would decrease the size of the IRS by about 30 percent to staffing levels not seen since the 1970s, when the U.S. population was far lower.
We have already seen how drastic cuts to the federal government hurt Americans. Reductions to the Social Security Administration are harming beneficiaries by causing service delays and long-lasting online outages. The Education Department’s staff cuts are negatively impacting the systems that disburse student loans and grants. Despite the recent focus on tariffs, Customs and Border Protection experienced its own technical glitch last week that caused it to lose out on tariff revenue.
By taking a chain saw to the government without regard to the impact on operations, we are impeding its capacity to collect the revenue and provide the services that citizens depend on. When it comes to the IRS — where workforce reductions have been coupled with the departures of numerous senior leaders — chief financial officers, senior accountants and senior lawyers across many industries have one central question: What will this mean for the future of tax compliance?
As a recent IRS commissioner and a former senior Treasury Department official in tax policy, we are fielding lots of calls from many different types of companies asking us what to make of the dramatic reductions in IRS capacity. Here is what we know from firsthand experience: Most corporations want to play by the rules. But a weaker IRS risks your competitors being more inclined to evade their responsibilities, use the proceeds to undercut your margins and gain an unfair advantage. In other words, an extremely diminished IRS could unlock a race to the bottom and create an evasion advantage for those who are comfortable skirting their tax bills.
. A tax cut can be compared to a change in the speed limit on the highway. Corporations might want to see that speed limit go from 60 mph to 70 mph. And the planned tax cuts might give them their wish. But do they want no enforcement of the new 70 mph zone? How safe and predictable will highway traffic patterns be if everyone suddenly believes there are no repercussions for driving 80 mph, or 90 mph, or even 100 mph?
Corporations can plan for tax cuts or increases. It is much harder to plan for a tax system with unprecedented changes in accountability.
This Tax Day, as you file your taxes and fulfill your civic duty, we’re sure you’re thinking that if you pay what you owe, shouldn’t others, too? We agree. And that happens only with an IRS that is functional.
Without it, we all lose. An estimated $700 billion in taxes due this year won’t be collected, as individuals and companies fail to pay what they owe. It’s possible this tax gap is already growing — and it will grow even more with fewer and fewer traffic cops on the IRS beat. As the amount owed that is not collected grows, so does uncertainty across industries. And so does your share of the burden, as an honest taxpayer, to funding our government.
Gutting the Internal Revenue Service enables more people to cheat the system.
By Natasha Sarin, and Danny Werfel
Natasha Sarin is a Post contributing columnist and a former deputy assistant secretary for economic policy and counselor to Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen. Danny Werfel was IRS commissioner from 2023 to 2025.
We are learning in real time that President Donald Trump’s significant swings in U.S. tariff policy do not create the type of stability corporations — and American consumers — need. But there’s another story unfolding that is equally detrimental to the nation’s future but isn’t getting much attention: The gutting of the Internal Revenue Service.
Today is April 15, known widely as Tax Day. Though few people enjoy paying taxes, they want a fair system. It’s the same for companies. Corporations might seek tax cuts from Trump, but they do not want the chaos that would ensue if the United States no longer had an effectively functioning tax authority. That’s a real danger right now.
The IRS workforce has already undergone significant cuts since January: More than 4,000 employees accepted deferred resignation offers, and 7,000 probationary employees were let go in February (court rulings calling for their reinstatement have been overturned or paused). And the agency plans to cut its workforce by another 20,000 workers in the next round of layoffs. If these measures are additive, they would decrease the size of the IRS by about 30 percent to staffing levels not seen since the 1970s, when the U.S. population was far lower.
We have already seen how drastic cuts to the federal government hurt Americans. Reductions to the Social Security Administration are harming beneficiaries by causing service delays and long-lasting online outages. The Education Department’s staff cuts are negatively impacting the systems that disburse student loans and grants. Despite the recent focus on tariffs, Customs and Border Protection experienced its own technical glitch last week that caused it to lose out on tariff revenue.
By taking a chain saw to the government without regard to the impact on operations, we are impeding its capacity to collect the revenue and provide the services that citizens depend on. When it comes to the IRS — where workforce reductions have been coupled with the departures of numerous senior leaders — chief financial officers, senior accountants and senior lawyers across many industries have one central question: What will this mean for the future of tax compliance?
As a recent IRS commissioner and a former senior Treasury Department official in tax policy, we are fielding lots of calls from many different types of companies asking us what to make of the dramatic reductions in IRS capacity. Here is what we know from firsthand experience: Most corporations want to play by the rules. But a weaker IRS risks your competitors being more inclined to evade their responsibilities, use the proceeds to undercut your margins and gain an unfair advantage. In other words, an extremely diminished IRS could unlock a race to the bottom and create an evasion advantage for those who are comfortable skirting their tax bills.
. A tax cut can be compared to a change in the speed limit on the highway. Corporations might want to see that speed limit go from 60 mph to 70 mph. And the planned tax cuts might give them their wish. But do they want no enforcement of the new 70 mph zone? How safe and predictable will highway traffic patterns be if everyone suddenly believes there are no repercussions for driving 80 mph, or 90 mph, or even 100 mph?
Corporations can plan for tax cuts or increases. It is much harder to plan for a tax system with unprecedented changes in accountability.
This Tax Day, as you file your taxes and fulfill your civic duty, we’re sure you’re thinking that if you pay what you owe, shouldn’t others, too? We agree. And that happens only with an IRS that is functional.
Without it, we all lose. An estimated $700 billion in taxes due this year won’t be collected, as individuals and companies fail to pay what they owe. It’s possible this tax gap is already growing — and it will grow even more with fewer and fewer traffic cops on the IRS beat. As the amount owed that is not collected grows, so does uncertainty across industries. And so does your share of the burden, as an honest taxpayer, to funding our government.
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION OVERRODE SOCIAL SECURITY STAFF TO LIST IMMIGRANTS AS DEAD
A senior executive who objected was marched out of his office and put on leave, while earlier warnings about the agency’s deaths database were ignored.
By Hannah Natanson, Lisa Rein, and Meryl Kornfield
Two days after the Social Security Administration purposely and falsely labeled 6,100 living immigrants as dead, security guards arrived at the office of a well-regarded senior executive in the agency’s Woodlawn, Maryland, headquarters.
Greg Pearre, who oversaw a staff of hundreds of technology experts, had pushed back on the Trump administration’s plan to move the migrants’ names into a Social Security death database, eliminating their ability to legally earn wages and, officials hoped, spurring them to leave the country. In particular, Pearre had clashed with Scott Coulter, the new chief information officer installed by Elon Musk. Pearre told Coulter that the plan was illegal, cruel and risked declaring the wrong people dead, according to three people familiar with the events. But his objections did not go over well with Trump political appointees. And so on Thursday, the security guards in Pearre’s office told him it was time to leave.
They walked Pearre out of the building, capping a momentous internal battle over the novel strategy — pushed by Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service and the Department of Homeland Security — to add thousands of immigrants ranging in age from teenagers to octogenarians to the agency’s Death Master File. The dataset is used by government agencies, employers, banks and landlords to check the status of employees, residents, clients and others.
The episode also followed earlier warnings from senior Social Security officials that the database was insecure and could be easily edited without proof of death — a vulnerability, staffers say, that the Trump administration has now exploited.
The warnings and Pearre’s removal have not previously been reported. This account of how the Trump administration pushed Social Security to wrongly declare thousands of living immigrants dead is based on interviews with 15 people, including current and former Social Security officials, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, as well as more than two dozen pages of records obtained by The Washington Post.
Experts in government, consumer rights and immigration law said the administration’s action is illegal. Labeling people dead strips them of the privacy protections granted to living individuals — and knowingly classifying living people as dead counts as falsifying government records, they said. This is in addition to the harm inflicted on those suddenly declared dead, who become unable to legally earn a living wage or draw benefits they may be eligible for. Social Security itself has acknowledged that an incorrect death declaration is a “devastating” blow.
“This is an unprecedented step,” said Devin O’Connor, a senior fellow on the federal fiscal policy team for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank. “The administration seems to basically be saying they have the right to essentially declare people equivalent to dead who have not died. That’s a hard concept to believe, but it brings enormous risks and consequences.”
Staffers at Social Security began raising the alarm about the urgent need to address a flaw in the agency’s deaths database in February, according to a person familiar with the matter and records obtained by The Post.
Anybody granted the appropriate permissions within Social Security could mark someone as dead, employees had realized, without having to prove their demise in any way — for example by referencing medical records or a death certificate. In emails and meetings that rose up the management chain, employees warned that the dataset was vulnerable to manipulation, according to the person and the records.
Employees’ fear was partly that a bad actor who gained access to government credentials could label groups of living individuals as dead to target them for punishment, according to the person and the records. Some of those raising the alarm worried specifically that the Trump administration might try to use the database to go after people the president dislikes, the person said.
Management indicated they were looking into the matter and exploring a proposed solution that would have required some additional proof of death before placing them into the Death Master File, according to the person and the records. But no solution was enacted.
Entry into the Death Master File has potentially severe consequences, effectively erasing a person’s ability to live and draw wages in the U.S., according to Jim Francis, a consumer law attorney. Francis — who recently sued Social Security for mistakenly labeling a Maryland woman dead — noted that the agency sells its death information to creditors, pension companies, life insurers and credit reporting firms. “It’s the source of that data that the whole world uses, which is why, if it’s inaccurate, it has such devastating impacts on people,” Francis said. “Overnight you literally become financially paralyzed.”
Tom Kind, a 90-year-old retiree who lives in Denver, recently experienced the “nightmare” himself when he was wrongly added to the deaths database without his knowledge. He lost his health-care coverage and Social Security benefits and struggled to navigate a bureaucratic maze, learning he needed to prove he was still alive to the agency by completing an in-person interview at a field office. “That’s not any fun,” he said.
Around the same time Social Security staff were warning that the agency’s powerful ability to declare deaths could be exploited, the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. DOGE Service arrived at the agency. Soon, representatives of both groups were hunting for ways to repurpose the agency’s databases to identify and deport illegal immigrants.
A staff of fewer than a dozen career employees was assigned to work with Musk’s team on the project, according to a senior official who left the agency around that time. Career employees were concerned that they might be facilitating something illegal, asking themselves if they were at risk of going to jail for the work they were doing, the official said.
By March, DOGE’s focus on immigration issues was clear, according to two people with knowledge of the team’s activities. DOGE representatives were asking a lot of questions about which kinds of address, wage and tax data they could access, and how that information could be used to determine citizenship status, the people said. One official chose to resign rather than remain involved in what he saw as an illegal attempt to repurpose the agency for immigration enforcement.
Homeland Security, meanwhile, at first made less intrusive requests, according to the senior official and records obtained by The Post. DHS agents spent much of February and March trawling through years of records in E-Verify, the Homeland Security employment verification program, to identify potentially fraudulent Social Security numbers, according to the records. Agents then reached out to Social Security asking for help preventing this type of fraud, the records show.
Homeland Security also requested that Social Security staff turn over the addresses of undocumented immigrants so Immigration and Customs Enforcement could track them down for deportation, the former senior official said.
It was not the first time that Trump officials sought to make Social Security hand over some of the government’s most sensitive personally identifiable information to facilitate deportations. During Trump’s first term, a White House aide requested the names and Social Security numbers of employers thought to have hired undocumented immigrants, the former official said.
At the time, the general counsel’s office at Social Security said no. They had determined such a search would be a fishing expedition, the former official said, and would break the law — so the issue was dropped. No such resistance emerged this time.
In recent weeks, Homeland Security’s requests shifted, according to the former senior Social Security official. Immigration agents began meeting with DOGE representatives at the agency to discuss how they could achieve their larger goal of pushing out tens of thousands of migrants that ICE was struggling to apprehend and deport, the official said. That request soon morphed into the idea of placing immigrants into the deaths database, the official said.
Leland Dudek — the acting commissioner who was elevated from a low-level position after displaying public loyalty to DOGE — had qualms about the task, according to two people with knowledge of his thinking. He thought it was illegal, the people said. Then Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem intervened — and Dudek agreed to move forward.
On Monday, according to four people familiar with the matter, Dudek signed two memorandums with Noem allowing the database action. Dudek declined to comment on the episode.
The next day, 6,100 mostly Hispanic names and their attached Social Security numbers were added to the Death Master File, according to records reviewed by The Post.
The White House told The Post that the roughly 6,000 immigrants all have links to either terrorist activity or criminal records. The official did not provide evidence of the alleged crimes or terrorist ties but said some are included on an FBI terror watch list.
The immigrants added to the death database include a 13-year-old, a 14-year-old and two 16-year-olds — as well as one person in their 80s and a handful in their 70s, according to records obtained by The Post.
Some agency staff have since checked the names and Social Security numbers of some of the youngest immigrants against data the agency typically uses to search for criminal history and found no evidence of crimes or law enforcement interactions, staffers said.
Within Social Security, the general counsel’s office is preparing an opinion that will find the Trump administration’s unprecedented use of the death database a violation of privacy law, according to one person with knowledge of the upcoming declaration. The opinion will take issue with the agency knowingly and falsely declaring that living people are dead, the person said.
On Friday, a group of unions and an advocacy organization suing the Social Security Administration argued in a new court filing that the agency had violated a temporary restraining order blocking DOGE from the agency’s systems with personally identifiable information by adding names to the deaths database.
Meanwhile, the effort to move immigrants who are alive into the deaths database is proceeding. On Thursday, Social Security added 102 names, records show.
A senior executive who objected was marched out of his office and put on leave, while earlier warnings about the agency’s deaths database were ignored.
By Hannah Natanson, Lisa Rein, and Meryl Kornfield
Two days after the Social Security Administration purposely and falsely labeled 6,100 living immigrants as dead, security guards arrived at the office of a well-regarded senior executive in the agency’s Woodlawn, Maryland, headquarters.
Greg Pearre, who oversaw a staff of hundreds of technology experts, had pushed back on the Trump administration’s plan to move the migrants’ names into a Social Security death database, eliminating their ability to legally earn wages and, officials hoped, spurring them to leave the country. In particular, Pearre had clashed with Scott Coulter, the new chief information officer installed by Elon Musk. Pearre told Coulter that the plan was illegal, cruel and risked declaring the wrong people dead, according to three people familiar with the events. But his objections did not go over well with Trump political appointees. And so on Thursday, the security guards in Pearre’s office told him it was time to leave.
They walked Pearre out of the building, capping a momentous internal battle over the novel strategy — pushed by Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service and the Department of Homeland Security — to add thousands of immigrants ranging in age from teenagers to octogenarians to the agency’s Death Master File. The dataset is used by government agencies, employers, banks and landlords to check the status of employees, residents, clients and others.
The episode also followed earlier warnings from senior Social Security officials that the database was insecure and could be easily edited without proof of death — a vulnerability, staffers say, that the Trump administration has now exploited.
The warnings and Pearre’s removal have not previously been reported. This account of how the Trump administration pushed Social Security to wrongly declare thousands of living immigrants dead is based on interviews with 15 people, including current and former Social Security officials, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, as well as more than two dozen pages of records obtained by The Washington Post.
Experts in government, consumer rights and immigration law said the administration’s action is illegal. Labeling people dead strips them of the privacy protections granted to living individuals — and knowingly classifying living people as dead counts as falsifying government records, they said. This is in addition to the harm inflicted on those suddenly declared dead, who become unable to legally earn a living wage or draw benefits they may be eligible for. Social Security itself has acknowledged that an incorrect death declaration is a “devastating” blow.
“This is an unprecedented step,” said Devin O’Connor, a senior fellow on the federal fiscal policy team for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank. “The administration seems to basically be saying they have the right to essentially declare people equivalent to dead who have not died. That’s a hard concept to believe, but it brings enormous risks and consequences.”
Staffers at Social Security began raising the alarm about the urgent need to address a flaw in the agency’s deaths database in February, according to a person familiar with the matter and records obtained by The Post.
Anybody granted the appropriate permissions within Social Security could mark someone as dead, employees had realized, without having to prove their demise in any way — for example by referencing medical records or a death certificate. In emails and meetings that rose up the management chain, employees warned that the dataset was vulnerable to manipulation, according to the person and the records.
Employees’ fear was partly that a bad actor who gained access to government credentials could label groups of living individuals as dead to target them for punishment, according to the person and the records. Some of those raising the alarm worried specifically that the Trump administration might try to use the database to go after people the president dislikes, the person said.
Management indicated they were looking into the matter and exploring a proposed solution that would have required some additional proof of death before placing them into the Death Master File, according to the person and the records. But no solution was enacted.
Entry into the Death Master File has potentially severe consequences, effectively erasing a person’s ability to live and draw wages in the U.S., according to Jim Francis, a consumer law attorney. Francis — who recently sued Social Security for mistakenly labeling a Maryland woman dead — noted that the agency sells its death information to creditors, pension companies, life insurers and credit reporting firms. “It’s the source of that data that the whole world uses, which is why, if it’s inaccurate, it has such devastating impacts on people,” Francis said. “Overnight you literally become financially paralyzed.”
Tom Kind, a 90-year-old retiree who lives in Denver, recently experienced the “nightmare” himself when he was wrongly added to the deaths database without his knowledge. He lost his health-care coverage and Social Security benefits and struggled to navigate a bureaucratic maze, learning he needed to prove he was still alive to the agency by completing an in-person interview at a field office. “That’s not any fun,” he said.
Around the same time Social Security staff were warning that the agency’s powerful ability to declare deaths could be exploited, the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. DOGE Service arrived at the agency. Soon, representatives of both groups were hunting for ways to repurpose the agency’s databases to identify and deport illegal immigrants.
A staff of fewer than a dozen career employees was assigned to work with Musk’s team on the project, according to a senior official who left the agency around that time. Career employees were concerned that they might be facilitating something illegal, asking themselves if they were at risk of going to jail for the work they were doing, the official said.
By March, DOGE’s focus on immigration issues was clear, according to two people with knowledge of the team’s activities. DOGE representatives were asking a lot of questions about which kinds of address, wage and tax data they could access, and how that information could be used to determine citizenship status, the people said. One official chose to resign rather than remain involved in what he saw as an illegal attempt to repurpose the agency for immigration enforcement.
Homeland Security, meanwhile, at first made less intrusive requests, according to the senior official and records obtained by The Post. DHS agents spent much of February and March trawling through years of records in E-Verify, the Homeland Security employment verification program, to identify potentially fraudulent Social Security numbers, according to the records. Agents then reached out to Social Security asking for help preventing this type of fraud, the records show.
Homeland Security also requested that Social Security staff turn over the addresses of undocumented immigrants so Immigration and Customs Enforcement could track them down for deportation, the former senior official said.
It was not the first time that Trump officials sought to make Social Security hand over some of the government’s most sensitive personally identifiable information to facilitate deportations. During Trump’s first term, a White House aide requested the names and Social Security numbers of employers thought to have hired undocumented immigrants, the former official said.
At the time, the general counsel’s office at Social Security said no. They had determined such a search would be a fishing expedition, the former official said, and would break the law — so the issue was dropped. No such resistance emerged this time.
In recent weeks, Homeland Security’s requests shifted, according to the former senior Social Security official. Immigration agents began meeting with DOGE representatives at the agency to discuss how they could achieve their larger goal of pushing out tens of thousands of migrants that ICE was struggling to apprehend and deport, the official said. That request soon morphed into the idea of placing immigrants into the deaths database, the official said.
Leland Dudek — the acting commissioner who was elevated from a low-level position after displaying public loyalty to DOGE — had qualms about the task, according to two people with knowledge of his thinking. He thought it was illegal, the people said. Then Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem intervened — and Dudek agreed to move forward.
On Monday, according to four people familiar with the matter, Dudek signed two memorandums with Noem allowing the database action. Dudek declined to comment on the episode.
The next day, 6,100 mostly Hispanic names and their attached Social Security numbers were added to the Death Master File, according to records reviewed by The Post.
The White House told The Post that the roughly 6,000 immigrants all have links to either terrorist activity or criminal records. The official did not provide evidence of the alleged crimes or terrorist ties but said some are included on an FBI terror watch list.
The immigrants added to the death database include a 13-year-old, a 14-year-old and two 16-year-olds — as well as one person in their 80s and a handful in their 70s, according to records obtained by The Post.
Some agency staff have since checked the names and Social Security numbers of some of the youngest immigrants against data the agency typically uses to search for criminal history and found no evidence of crimes or law enforcement interactions, staffers said.
Within Social Security, the general counsel’s office is preparing an opinion that will find the Trump administration’s unprecedented use of the death database a violation of privacy law, according to one person with knowledge of the upcoming declaration. The opinion will take issue with the agency knowingly and falsely declaring that living people are dead, the person said.
On Friday, a group of unions and an advocacy organization suing the Social Security Administration argued in a new court filing that the agency had violated a temporary restraining order blocking DOGE from the agency’s systems with personally identifiable information by adding names to the deaths database.
Meanwhile, the effort to move immigrants who are alive into the deaths database is proceeding. On Thursday, Social Security added 102 names, records show.
A LOT ABOUT TRUMP DOESN’T ADD UP
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
You have to give it to Donald Trump. The man is a marvel at multitasking. In one sensational swoop, President Trump was able to set the global economy reeling, shatter our alliances, shred our standing in the world, tank consumer confidence, scupper the Kennedy Center and tart up the Oval Office, turning it into Caesars Palace on the Potomac.
And yet he still managed to find time to brag about winning his Jupiter golf club’s championship and sign an executive order relaxing restrictions on water pressure from shower heads — “I like to take a nice shower to take care of my beautiful hair,” the president cooed. He also ordered an investigation of an election security official he had fired four years ago for having the temerity to acknowledge that the 2020 election was not stolen.
“We’re living in a bizarro world where heroes are being targeted and scoundrels are in a position to target them,” David Axelrod told me.
Trump is also consumed with terms of surrender for top law firms and Ivy League universities in his quest to get even with those he feels went after him unfairly or embraced wokeness too avidly.
My Netflix algorithm searches for “revenge,” “lives ruined” and “mayhem.” But I don’t want that in my government.
Trump is engaging the full power of the presidency to settle scores. The White House was not meant for petty tyrants on revenge tours. In the biggest job in the world, Trump seems like a very small man.
“Revenge is the oxygen that keeps him afloat,” said Tim O’Brien, the Trump biographer. And he has surrounded himself with small people who elaborately flatter him and puff him up in risible cabinet meetings. Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, even has a Maoist golden Trump head on his lapel. Barack Obama’s White House portrait was nudged aside for one of Trump pumping his fist after the assassination attempt.
The Emperor of Chaos told us to “BE COOL!” as markets cratered and people got “yippy,” as Trump put it. But how is that possible when everything is so unstable?
Trump may even turn into the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Jami Warner, the executive director of the American Christmas Tree Association, warned on CNN Friday that the holiday may be difficult for a lot of families accustomed to getting their cheap artificial trees, lights and ornaments from China, not to mention presents.
I had to go to summer school for algebra, but I don’t want a government that’s bad at math. O’Brien wrote in Bloomberg News that Trump’s “tragicomic ‘formula’” for tariffs “somehow positioned Cambodia and Thailand at the top of the heap of countries posing major economic threats to the U.S. and also caused tariffs to be imposed on uninhabited islands near Antarctica.”
The Republicans’ math on the budget bill is also fuzzy. You can’t give trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy and pretend it won’t cost anything.
Even before Trump opened a Pandora’s box of economic woe, we knew numbers weren’t his strong suit. He had six bankruptcies, and his father had to buy $3.4 million in chips to save one of his casinos.
Trump should be alarmed that investors are skittish about buying U.S. government bonds, usually considered safe assets. “And guess who owns a lot of U.S. debt?” O’Brien said. “China, Japan, Europe. Are they feeling good about us right now?”
As everyone else gets yippy — JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon warned of a recession — the president seems to be enjoying center stage, toying with the strings like a cat. “All of this unnecessary, orchestrated dissent and doubt and damage for his own amusement,” O’Brien told me. “He’s the kid in the garage with matches standing next to the gasoline tank.”
Now that Trump’s tariff scheme has gone horribly awry — and the administration’s attempt to spin it as an “Art of the Deal” victory has fallen flat — it remains to be seen if this will be a “Wizard of Oz” moment when the curtain gets pulled back on the con man.
Will the global chaos puncture the sense of mastery that Trump has projected?
“This is not a reality show,” Axelrod said. “This is reality.”
He continued: “People like the idea of cutting waste and fraud and abuse until it means that the Social Security office in your hometown or veterans’ health programs close down, or there are measles outbreaks, because they don’t know what they’re doing. Do these add up so, at some point, people say: ‘You know what? This isn’t really working for me’”?
The former casino owner in the White House brags that he has never gambled. But he is gambling with Americans’ lives and futures. How strange, as even the dollar loses its allure, that a man long considered a branding savant has so badly mucked up the U.S. brand.
By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times
You have to give it to Donald Trump. The man is a marvel at multitasking. In one sensational swoop, President Trump was able to set the global economy reeling, shatter our alliances, shred our standing in the world, tank consumer confidence, scupper the Kennedy Center and tart up the Oval Office, turning it into Caesars Palace on the Potomac.
And yet he still managed to find time to brag about winning his Jupiter golf club’s championship and sign an executive order relaxing restrictions on water pressure from shower heads — “I like to take a nice shower to take care of my beautiful hair,” the president cooed. He also ordered an investigation of an election security official he had fired four years ago for having the temerity to acknowledge that the 2020 election was not stolen.
“We’re living in a bizarro world where heroes are being targeted and scoundrels are in a position to target them,” David Axelrod told me.
Trump is also consumed with terms of surrender for top law firms and Ivy League universities in his quest to get even with those he feels went after him unfairly or embraced wokeness too avidly.
My Netflix algorithm searches for “revenge,” “lives ruined” and “mayhem.” But I don’t want that in my government.
Trump is engaging the full power of the presidency to settle scores. The White House was not meant for petty tyrants on revenge tours. In the biggest job in the world, Trump seems like a very small man.
“Revenge is the oxygen that keeps him afloat,” said Tim O’Brien, the Trump biographer. And he has surrounded himself with small people who elaborately flatter him and puff him up in risible cabinet meetings. Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, even has a Maoist golden Trump head on his lapel. Barack Obama’s White House portrait was nudged aside for one of Trump pumping his fist after the assassination attempt.
The Emperor of Chaos told us to “BE COOL!” as markets cratered and people got “yippy,” as Trump put it. But how is that possible when everything is so unstable?
Trump may even turn into the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Jami Warner, the executive director of the American Christmas Tree Association, warned on CNN Friday that the holiday may be difficult for a lot of families accustomed to getting their cheap artificial trees, lights and ornaments from China, not to mention presents.
I had to go to summer school for algebra, but I don’t want a government that’s bad at math. O’Brien wrote in Bloomberg News that Trump’s “tragicomic ‘formula’” for tariffs “somehow positioned Cambodia and Thailand at the top of the heap of countries posing major economic threats to the U.S. and also caused tariffs to be imposed on uninhabited islands near Antarctica.”
The Republicans’ math on the budget bill is also fuzzy. You can’t give trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy and pretend it won’t cost anything.
Even before Trump opened a Pandora’s box of economic woe, we knew numbers weren’t his strong suit. He had six bankruptcies, and his father had to buy $3.4 million in chips to save one of his casinos.
Trump should be alarmed that investors are skittish about buying U.S. government bonds, usually considered safe assets. “And guess who owns a lot of U.S. debt?” O’Brien said. “China, Japan, Europe. Are they feeling good about us right now?”
As everyone else gets yippy — JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon warned of a recession — the president seems to be enjoying center stage, toying with the strings like a cat. “All of this unnecessary, orchestrated dissent and doubt and damage for his own amusement,” O’Brien told me. “He’s the kid in the garage with matches standing next to the gasoline tank.”
Now that Trump’s tariff scheme has gone horribly awry — and the administration’s attempt to spin it as an “Art of the Deal” victory has fallen flat — it remains to be seen if this will be a “Wizard of Oz” moment when the curtain gets pulled back on the con man.
Will the global chaos puncture the sense of mastery that Trump has projected?
“This is not a reality show,” Axelrod said. “This is reality.”
He continued: “People like the idea of cutting waste and fraud and abuse until it means that the Social Security office in your hometown or veterans’ health programs close down, or there are measles outbreaks, because they don’t know what they’re doing. Do these add up so, at some point, people say: ‘You know what? This isn’t really working for me’”?
The former casino owner in the White House brags that he has never gambled. But he is gambling with Americans’ lives and futures. How strange, as even the dollar loses its allure, that a man long considered a branding savant has so badly mucked up the U.S. brand.
WHAT TRUMP JUST COST AMERICA
By Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times
I have many reactions to President Trump’s largely caving on his harebrained plan to tariff the world, but overall, one reaction just keeps coming back to me: If you hire clowns, you should expect a circus. And my fellow Americans, we have hired a group of clowns.
Think of what Trump; his chief knucklehead, Howard Lutnick (the commerce secretary); his assistant chief knucklehead, Scott Bessent (the Treasury secretary); and his deputy assistant chief knucklehead, Peter Navarro (the top trade adviser), have told us repeatedly for the past weeks: Trump won’t back off on these tariffs because — take your choice — he needs them to keep fentanyl from killing our kids, he needs them to raise revenue to pay for future tax cuts, and he needs them to pressure the world to buy more stuff from us. And he couldn’t care less what his rich pals on Wall Street say about their stock market losses.
After creating havoc in the markets standing on these steadfast “principles” — undoubtedly prompting many Americans to sell low out of fear — Trump reversed much of it on Wednesday, announcing a 90-day pause on certain tariffs to most countries, excluding China.
Message to the world — and to the Chinese: “I couldn’t take the heat.” If it were a book it would be called “The Art of the Squeal.”
But don’t think for a second that all that’s been lost is money. A whole pile of invaluable trust just went up in smoke as well. In the last few weeks, we have told our closest friends in the world — countries that stood shoulder to shoulder with us after Sept. 11, in Iraq and in Afghanistan — that none of them were any different from China or Russia. They were all going to get tariffed under the same formula — no friends-and-family discounts allowed.
Do you think these former close U.S. allies are ever going to trust getting into a trench with this administration again? Trump just put us into a no-win war.
How so? We do have a trade imbalance with China that does need to be addressed. Trump is right about that. China now controls one-third of global manufacturing and has the industrial engines to pretty much make everything for everyone one day if it is allowed to. That is not good for us, for Europe or for many developing countries. It is not even good for China, given the fact that by putting so many resources into export industries it is ignoring the meager social safety net it offers its people and its even more threadbare public health care system.
But when you have a country as big as China — 1.4 billion people — with the talent, infrastructure and savings it has, the only way to negotiate is with leverage on our side of the table. And the best way to get leverage would have been for Trump to enlist our allies in the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Brazil, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico, India, Australia and Indonesia into a united front. Make it a negotiation of the whole world versus China.
Then you say to Beijing: All of us will gradually raise our tariffs on your exports over the next two years to pressure you to shift from your export economy to a more domestic-oriented one. But we will also invite you to build factories and supply chains in our countries — 50-50 joint ventures — to transfer your expertise back to us the way you compelled us to do for you. We don’t want a bifurcated world. It will be less prosperous for all and less stable.
But instead of making it the whole industrial world against China, Trump made it America against the whole industrial world and China.
Now, Beijing knows that Trump not only blinked, but he so alienated our allies, so demonstrated that his word cannot be trusted for a second, that many of them may never align with us against China in the same way. They may, instead, see China as a better, more stable long-term partner than us.
What a pathetic, shameful performance. Happy Liberation Day.
By Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times
I have many reactions to President Trump’s largely caving on his harebrained plan to tariff the world, but overall, one reaction just keeps coming back to me: If you hire clowns, you should expect a circus. And my fellow Americans, we have hired a group of clowns.
Think of what Trump; his chief knucklehead, Howard Lutnick (the commerce secretary); his assistant chief knucklehead, Scott Bessent (the Treasury secretary); and his deputy assistant chief knucklehead, Peter Navarro (the top trade adviser), have told us repeatedly for the past weeks: Trump won’t back off on these tariffs because — take your choice — he needs them to keep fentanyl from killing our kids, he needs them to raise revenue to pay for future tax cuts, and he needs them to pressure the world to buy more stuff from us. And he couldn’t care less what his rich pals on Wall Street say about their stock market losses.
After creating havoc in the markets standing on these steadfast “principles” — undoubtedly prompting many Americans to sell low out of fear — Trump reversed much of it on Wednesday, announcing a 90-day pause on certain tariffs to most countries, excluding China.
Message to the world — and to the Chinese: “I couldn’t take the heat.” If it were a book it would be called “The Art of the Squeal.”
But don’t think for a second that all that’s been lost is money. A whole pile of invaluable trust just went up in smoke as well. In the last few weeks, we have told our closest friends in the world — countries that stood shoulder to shoulder with us after Sept. 11, in Iraq and in Afghanistan — that none of them were any different from China or Russia. They were all going to get tariffed under the same formula — no friends-and-family discounts allowed.
Do you think these former close U.S. allies are ever going to trust getting into a trench with this administration again? Trump just put us into a no-win war.
How so? We do have a trade imbalance with China that does need to be addressed. Trump is right about that. China now controls one-third of global manufacturing and has the industrial engines to pretty much make everything for everyone one day if it is allowed to. That is not good for us, for Europe or for many developing countries. It is not even good for China, given the fact that by putting so many resources into export industries it is ignoring the meager social safety net it offers its people and its even more threadbare public health care system.
But when you have a country as big as China — 1.4 billion people — with the talent, infrastructure and savings it has, the only way to negotiate is with leverage on our side of the table. And the best way to get leverage would have been for Trump to enlist our allies in the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Brazil, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico, India, Australia and Indonesia into a united front. Make it a negotiation of the whole world versus China.
Then you say to Beijing: All of us will gradually raise our tariffs on your exports over the next two years to pressure you to shift from your export economy to a more domestic-oriented one. But we will also invite you to build factories and supply chains in our countries — 50-50 joint ventures — to transfer your expertise back to us the way you compelled us to do for you. We don’t want a bifurcated world. It will be less prosperous for all and less stable.
But instead of making it the whole industrial world against China, Trump made it America against the whole industrial world and China.
Now, Beijing knows that Trump not only blinked, but he so alienated our allies, so demonstrated that his word cannot be trusted for a second, that many of them may never align with us against China in the same way. They may, instead, see China as a better, more stable long-term partner than us.
What a pathetic, shameful performance. Happy Liberation Day.
TRUMP BLINKED. DANGER REMAINS.
The Washington Post Editorial Board
The bond market forced the president’s hand, as did his need for allies against China.
During the week after he announced his many tariffs, President Donald Trump behaved like the fabled King Canute — placing his throne on the beach and commanding the tide to halt. One week later, with his legs soaked and the water still rising, Trump grabbed a life preserver. In announcing a 90-day pause on most tariffs for every country except China, he acknowledged, however reluctantly, the harsh realities of economics, foreign policy and domestic politics. Let’s take these one at a time.
1. The bond markets forced Trump’s hand. By moving their money out of dollars and selling U.S. Treasury bonds, investors told Trump what his closest advisers would not about the perils of starting trade wars with all other countries at once. Trillions in value were wiped out in equity markets, and the financial system blinked red with indicators of contagion.
Finally, bond yields began to forecast calamity — especially the alarming sell-off of 10-year Treasurys. In times of panic, these bonds usually attract investors. Their failure to do so this time reflected declining confidence that the U.S. government would repay its debts.
Leaders underestimate at their peril the power of markets to destroy their standing with the public. When the money goes bad, politicians are vulnerable. A cautionary tale came in 2022 when British Prime Minister Liz Truss jammed tax cuts through Parliament amid inflation and said she would pay for them by taking on debt. When markets tanked, she rescinded the cuts within days. But the Conservative Party ousted her after only seven weeks in power.
2. Trump realized the United States needs allies to counter China. After China retaliated against last week’s tariffs, imposing an 84 percent duty on all U.S. goods, Trump raised his duties on Chinese imports to 125 percent. Facing off against the world’s second-largest economy in a sustained trade war requires alternative and reliable suppliers.
Initially, it seems, administration officials believed, foolishly, that Trump could cut deals with traditional partners such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan to team up against their shared adversary in Beijing. But Trump’s unexpectedly aggressive levies against allies, including an irrational 46 percent tariff on Vietnam, spooked these countries. China has been looking to capitalize on any rifts, dispatching its foreign minister to meet with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts.
3. Trump failed to build political consensus to remake the U.S. economy. Although he won the 2024 election, he received just less than 50 percent of the popular vote. While he campaigned on imposing tariffs, his biggest supporters and donors did not take his protectionist rhetoric as seriously as they clearly should have. They expected only modest and targeted tariffs, more akin to what he did in his first term.
By Wednesday, political gravity had its effect on the president. An Economist-YouGov poll showed Trump’s approval rating had fallen to 43 percent from 48 percent two weeks ago, with 80 percent of Americans expecting the tariffs to raise prices for things they buy. Privately, Republicans had also started to warn White House aides that, if the president didn’t pause the tariffs, Democrats would win the House in the 2026 midterm elections and the fight for control of the Senate might suddenly become competitive.
After Trump finally announced the tariff pause, the S&P 500 closed up 9.5 percent and the tech-heavy Nasdaq gained 12 percent. The news is indeed worth rejoicing. But keep in mind that the 90-day pause will last only until July 8, and in the meantime the trade war with China might continue to escalate. In other words, investors, business and consumers will still be living with uncertainty. For the long term, Trump and his team are well advised to come up with a less volatile economic strategy.
The Washington Post Editorial Board
The bond market forced the president’s hand, as did his need for allies against China.
During the week after he announced his many tariffs, President Donald Trump behaved like the fabled King Canute — placing his throne on the beach and commanding the tide to halt. One week later, with his legs soaked and the water still rising, Trump grabbed a life preserver. In announcing a 90-day pause on most tariffs for every country except China, he acknowledged, however reluctantly, the harsh realities of economics, foreign policy and domestic politics. Let’s take these one at a time.
1. The bond markets forced Trump’s hand. By moving their money out of dollars and selling U.S. Treasury bonds, investors told Trump what his closest advisers would not about the perils of starting trade wars with all other countries at once. Trillions in value were wiped out in equity markets, and the financial system blinked red with indicators of contagion.
Finally, bond yields began to forecast calamity — especially the alarming sell-off of 10-year Treasurys. In times of panic, these bonds usually attract investors. Their failure to do so this time reflected declining confidence that the U.S. government would repay its debts.
Leaders underestimate at their peril the power of markets to destroy their standing with the public. When the money goes bad, politicians are vulnerable. A cautionary tale came in 2022 when British Prime Minister Liz Truss jammed tax cuts through Parliament amid inflation and said she would pay for them by taking on debt. When markets tanked, she rescinded the cuts within days. But the Conservative Party ousted her after only seven weeks in power.
2. Trump realized the United States needs allies to counter China. After China retaliated against last week’s tariffs, imposing an 84 percent duty on all U.S. goods, Trump raised his duties on Chinese imports to 125 percent. Facing off against the world’s second-largest economy in a sustained trade war requires alternative and reliable suppliers.
Initially, it seems, administration officials believed, foolishly, that Trump could cut deals with traditional partners such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan to team up against their shared adversary in Beijing. But Trump’s unexpectedly aggressive levies against allies, including an irrational 46 percent tariff on Vietnam, spooked these countries. China has been looking to capitalize on any rifts, dispatching its foreign minister to meet with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts.
3. Trump failed to build political consensus to remake the U.S. economy. Although he won the 2024 election, he received just less than 50 percent of the popular vote. While he campaigned on imposing tariffs, his biggest supporters and donors did not take his protectionist rhetoric as seriously as they clearly should have. They expected only modest and targeted tariffs, more akin to what he did in his first term.
By Wednesday, political gravity had its effect on the president. An Economist-YouGov poll showed Trump’s approval rating had fallen to 43 percent from 48 percent two weeks ago, with 80 percent of Americans expecting the tariffs to raise prices for things they buy. Privately, Republicans had also started to warn White House aides that, if the president didn’t pause the tariffs, Democrats would win the House in the 2026 midterm elections and the fight for control of the Senate might suddenly become competitive.
After Trump finally announced the tariff pause, the S&P 500 closed up 9.5 percent and the tech-heavy Nasdaq gained 12 percent. The news is indeed worth rejoicing. But keep in mind that the 90-day pause will last only until July 8, and in the meantime the trade war with China might continue to escalate. In other words, investors, business and consumers will still be living with uncertainty. For the long term, Trump and his team are well advised to come up with a less volatile economic strategy.
SOCIAL SECURITY WEBSITE KEEPS CRASHING, AS DOGE DEMANDS CUTS TO IT STAFF
The worsening problems come as Elon Musk’s DOGE team pushes for more cuts at the agency, including in the department that oversees the website. By Lisa Rein, Hannah Natanson, and Elizabeth Dwoskin, The Washington Post
Retirees and disabled people are facing chronic website outages and other access problems as they attempt to log in to their online Social Security accounts, even as they are being directed to do more of their business with the agency online.
The website has crashed repeatedly in recent weeks, with outages lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to almost a day, according to six current and former officials with knowledge of the issues. Even when the site is back online, many customers have not been able to sign in to their accounts — or have logged in only to find information missing. For others, access to the system has been slow, requiring repeated tries to get in.
The problems come as the Trump administration’s cost-cutting team, led by Elon Musk, has imposed a downsizing that’s led to 7,000 job cuts and is preparing to push out thousands more employees at an agency that serves 73 million Americans. The new demands from Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service include a 50 percent cut to the technology division responsible for the website and other electronic access.
Many of the network outages appear to be caused by an expanded fraud check system imposed by the DOGE team, current and former officials said. The technology staff did not test the new software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, these officials said.
The technology issues have been particularly alarming for some of the most vulnerable Social Security customers. For almost two days last week, for example, many of the 7.4 million adults and children receiving monthly benefits under the anti-poverty program known as Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, confronted a jarring message that claimed they were “currently not receiving payments,” agency officials acknowledged in an internal email to staff.
The error messages set off widespread panic until recipients discovered that their monthly checks had still been deposited in their bank accounts. Another breakdown disabled the SSI system for much of the day on Friday, prompting claims staff to cancel appointments because they could not enter new disability claims in the system and blocking some already receiving benefits from gaining access to their accounts.
“Social Security’s response has been, ‘Oops,’” said Darcy Milburn, director of Social Security and health-care policy at the Arc, a national nonprofit that advocates for people with disabilities. The group fielded dozens of calls last week from nervous clients who saw the inaccurate message and assumed their monthly check, usually paid on the first of the month, would not arrive. “It’s woefully insufficient when we’re talking about a government agency that’s holding someone’s lifeline in their hands,” Milburn said.
The disruptions are occurring as acting commissioner Leland Dudek and the DOGE team move to lay off large swaths of the workforce in a new phase of downsizing. Thousands of employees already have been pushed out — many in customer-facing roles, others with expertise in the agency’s cumbersome technology systems. At least 800 of the 3,000 employees left in the division that manages all of the Social Security databases face layoffs, a senior official said on Friday. The newly named chief information officer, Scott Coulter, a Musk-aligned private equity analyst, has demanded a cut of 50 percent, the official said.
The network outages are one in a cascade of blows to customer service that also have hobbled phone systems and field office operations as the workforce shrinks.
A surge in visitors to the website is overwhelming the computer system as customers — nervous that the rapid changes at the agency will compromise their benefits — download their benefit and earnings statements and attempt to file claims. President Donald Trump has said that his administration will not reduce Social Security benefits.
The chaos could accelerate starting April 14, when new identification measures are set to take effect that will require millions of customers applying for benefits to authenticate their identity online, part of the administration’s campaign to root out allegedly fraudulent claims. “We’re just spiking like crazy,” said one senior official, who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about agency operations. “It’s people who are terrified that DOGE is messing with our systems. It’s the sheer massive volume of freaked-out people.”
The Social Security press office said in a statement that officials are “actively investigating the root cause” of the incidents, which they called “brief disruptions” averaging about 20 minutes each with the exception of the SSI error message. But on several occasions, including during an outage last Monday, customers were shut out of the website for hours. The system was back online last Monday after two hours, but lingering issues lasted through the afternoon while all backlogged queries were processed, current and former officials said. And a system upgrade on a Saturday in late March took several hours longer than anticipated and knocked out the network.
A person attending a town hall for federal workers holds up a sign in support of the Social Security Administration, at Woodlawn High School in Woodlawn, Maryland, on Thursday. Three times in a recent 10-day stretch, the online systems the field office staff rely on to serve the public have crashed, said one employee in an Indiana office.
The downed programs included tools employees use to schedule visits, to see who has booked an appointment and to check who has arrived, the employee said. It is unheard-of for the system to fail this often, and each outage has led to chaos, they said.
Suddenly forced offline as they were taking claims, the staff members scribbled down clients’ information, then had to wait until later to load it into the computer, doubling or tripling the amount of time and work involved, the employee said.
In other instances, managers or security guards improvised a solution after the online scheduling system failed, the employee said. They walked out to the reception area, wrote down numbers on paper slips and started handing them out to people waiting in line.
The network crashes appear to be caused by an expansion initiated by the Trump team of an existing contract with a credit-reporting agency that tracks names, addresses and other personal information to verify customers’ identities. The enhanced fraud checks are now done earlier in the claims process and have resulted in a boost to the volume of customers who must pass the checks.
But the technology staff did not test the software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, current and former officials said. Connectivity issues and bugs with the expanded system have caused the portal that manages log-ins and authentication for many Social Security applications to go down, officials said.
At a weekly operations meeting on March 28 that was made public last week, Wayne Lemon, deputy chief information officer for infrastructure and IT operations, acknowledged the network crashes and said, “While they’ve been brief, we prefer no outages.” He said the outages were under investigation and may involve “challenges we’ve experienced with a number of partners.” Part of the problem may be that the outages have occurred during “high volume use of the network.” “Is there a spike in demand or something in the environment causing the issues?” Lemon said.
Customers, meanwhile, are growing more frustrated. In Upland, California, 72-year-old Kathy Stecher began trying to apply for retirement benefits more than a week ago. One of her first steps was to visit the Social Security website to book a required appointment at her local field office, because she believed she had to authenticate her identity in person first.
But over several days stretching from last week through Wednesday, the website wouldn’t let Stecher schedule a visit. The site displayed a small bar reading, “Make an appointment,” she said, but whenever she clicked on it, nothing happened.
When she finally reached someone on the phone, the website’s booking tool wasn’t working, she said. The employee sighed and told her that similar problems have become routine, forcing customers to wait on hold for hours. So much was changing so fast at the agency, the employee said.
In recent weeks, Robert Raniolo, 67, a retired financial analyst in New York, found himself stuck when he tried to update his emergency contact by designating his niece instead of his wife, who has dementia.
Since he began receiving retirement benefits five years ago, Raniolo has never missed a payment or had trouble getting online, he said. But this time he got an error message — and kept getting them. “Bad Request,” read one notification, according to a screenshot he provided to The Washington Post. “There has been an unexpected system error,” read another.
He was directed to try again during “regular service hours” on the East Coast. So Raniolo kept trying — three to five times a day, every day, for the next five days. He tried at different times. He tried using his phone instead of his Chromebook. He tried different internet browsers: Chrome, Edge, DuckDuckGo. Technology issues on the Social Security website have alarmed some of the most vulnerable people who receive benefits. Nothing worked. By last Monday evening, he still had not managed to get into his account to change his emergency contact.
He has begun to imagine the worst. What if something happens to him overnight, leaving his wife the only person authorized to communicate with Social Security on his behalf? She probably wouldn’t know to call 911 if he collapsed on the floor, Raniolo said. She certainly wouldn’t understand how to manage or consider financial matters. “If you were to call her right now, she wouldn’t know how to answer the phone,” Raniolo said. “That’s why it’s so frustrating to me I can’t make a simple transaction on the Social Security website.”
In Westborough, Massachusetts, outside Boston, last Monday, Chris Hubbard checked the Facebook feed where the statewide community of parents of disabled children receiving SSI benefits posts news and information and saw that a friend logging in to the Social Security website was notified that her child was not receiving benefits. Hubbard and her husband, Tom, have a profoundly autistic son. The monthly check to pay for the group home where he lives was ready to go into the mail the next morning, the first of the month, when his SSI check always hits his bank accounts. When Hubbard logged in, her son’s account also showed “no history of payments.”
“My mind was racing,” she recalled. She envisioned going through the agonizing process of reapplying for benefits for her son. She couldn’t sleep and continued to check the website until 2:30 a.m. Same message.
On Tuesday, the check had finally been deposited by 9 a.m. But the message, now clearly an error, was still up on the website until that afternoon. “The whole thing was very alarming,” Hubbard said.
The worsening problems come as Elon Musk’s DOGE team pushes for more cuts at the agency, including in the department that oversees the website. By Lisa Rein, Hannah Natanson, and Elizabeth Dwoskin, The Washington Post
Retirees and disabled people are facing chronic website outages and other access problems as they attempt to log in to their online Social Security accounts, even as they are being directed to do more of their business with the agency online.
The website has crashed repeatedly in recent weeks, with outages lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to almost a day, according to six current and former officials with knowledge of the issues. Even when the site is back online, many customers have not been able to sign in to their accounts — or have logged in only to find information missing. For others, access to the system has been slow, requiring repeated tries to get in.
The problems come as the Trump administration’s cost-cutting team, led by Elon Musk, has imposed a downsizing that’s led to 7,000 job cuts and is preparing to push out thousands more employees at an agency that serves 73 million Americans. The new demands from Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service include a 50 percent cut to the technology division responsible for the website and other electronic access.
Many of the network outages appear to be caused by an expanded fraud check system imposed by the DOGE team, current and former officials said. The technology staff did not test the new software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, these officials said.
The technology issues have been particularly alarming for some of the most vulnerable Social Security customers. For almost two days last week, for example, many of the 7.4 million adults and children receiving monthly benefits under the anti-poverty program known as Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, confronted a jarring message that claimed they were “currently not receiving payments,” agency officials acknowledged in an internal email to staff.
The error messages set off widespread panic until recipients discovered that their monthly checks had still been deposited in their bank accounts. Another breakdown disabled the SSI system for much of the day on Friday, prompting claims staff to cancel appointments because they could not enter new disability claims in the system and blocking some already receiving benefits from gaining access to their accounts.
“Social Security’s response has been, ‘Oops,’” said Darcy Milburn, director of Social Security and health-care policy at the Arc, a national nonprofit that advocates for people with disabilities. The group fielded dozens of calls last week from nervous clients who saw the inaccurate message and assumed their monthly check, usually paid on the first of the month, would not arrive. “It’s woefully insufficient when we’re talking about a government agency that’s holding someone’s lifeline in their hands,” Milburn said.
The disruptions are occurring as acting commissioner Leland Dudek and the DOGE team move to lay off large swaths of the workforce in a new phase of downsizing. Thousands of employees already have been pushed out — many in customer-facing roles, others with expertise in the agency’s cumbersome technology systems. At least 800 of the 3,000 employees left in the division that manages all of the Social Security databases face layoffs, a senior official said on Friday. The newly named chief information officer, Scott Coulter, a Musk-aligned private equity analyst, has demanded a cut of 50 percent, the official said.
The network outages are one in a cascade of blows to customer service that also have hobbled phone systems and field office operations as the workforce shrinks.
A surge in visitors to the website is overwhelming the computer system as customers — nervous that the rapid changes at the agency will compromise their benefits — download their benefit and earnings statements and attempt to file claims. President Donald Trump has said that his administration will not reduce Social Security benefits.
The chaos could accelerate starting April 14, when new identification measures are set to take effect that will require millions of customers applying for benefits to authenticate their identity online, part of the administration’s campaign to root out allegedly fraudulent claims. “We’re just spiking like crazy,” said one senior official, who, like others in this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about agency operations. “It’s people who are terrified that DOGE is messing with our systems. It’s the sheer massive volume of freaked-out people.”
The Social Security press office said in a statement that officials are “actively investigating the root cause” of the incidents, which they called “brief disruptions” averaging about 20 minutes each with the exception of the SSI error message. But on several occasions, including during an outage last Monday, customers were shut out of the website for hours. The system was back online last Monday after two hours, but lingering issues lasted through the afternoon while all backlogged queries were processed, current and former officials said. And a system upgrade on a Saturday in late March took several hours longer than anticipated and knocked out the network.
A person attending a town hall for federal workers holds up a sign in support of the Social Security Administration, at Woodlawn High School in Woodlawn, Maryland, on Thursday. Three times in a recent 10-day stretch, the online systems the field office staff rely on to serve the public have crashed, said one employee in an Indiana office.
The downed programs included tools employees use to schedule visits, to see who has booked an appointment and to check who has arrived, the employee said. It is unheard-of for the system to fail this often, and each outage has led to chaos, they said.
Suddenly forced offline as they were taking claims, the staff members scribbled down clients’ information, then had to wait until later to load it into the computer, doubling or tripling the amount of time and work involved, the employee said.
In other instances, managers or security guards improvised a solution after the online scheduling system failed, the employee said. They walked out to the reception area, wrote down numbers on paper slips and started handing them out to people waiting in line.
The network crashes appear to be caused by an expansion initiated by the Trump team of an existing contract with a credit-reporting agency that tracks names, addresses and other personal information to verify customers’ identities. The enhanced fraud checks are now done earlier in the claims process and have resulted in a boost to the volume of customers who must pass the checks.
But the technology staff did not test the software against a high volume of users to see if the servers could handle the rush, current and former officials said. Connectivity issues and bugs with the expanded system have caused the portal that manages log-ins and authentication for many Social Security applications to go down, officials said.
At a weekly operations meeting on March 28 that was made public last week, Wayne Lemon, deputy chief information officer for infrastructure and IT operations, acknowledged the network crashes and said, “While they’ve been brief, we prefer no outages.” He said the outages were under investigation and may involve “challenges we’ve experienced with a number of partners.” Part of the problem may be that the outages have occurred during “high volume use of the network.” “Is there a spike in demand or something in the environment causing the issues?” Lemon said.
Customers, meanwhile, are growing more frustrated. In Upland, California, 72-year-old Kathy Stecher began trying to apply for retirement benefits more than a week ago. One of her first steps was to visit the Social Security website to book a required appointment at her local field office, because she believed she had to authenticate her identity in person first.
But over several days stretching from last week through Wednesday, the website wouldn’t let Stecher schedule a visit. The site displayed a small bar reading, “Make an appointment,” she said, but whenever she clicked on it, nothing happened.
When she finally reached someone on the phone, the website’s booking tool wasn’t working, she said. The employee sighed and told her that similar problems have become routine, forcing customers to wait on hold for hours. So much was changing so fast at the agency, the employee said.
In recent weeks, Robert Raniolo, 67, a retired financial analyst in New York, found himself stuck when he tried to update his emergency contact by designating his niece instead of his wife, who has dementia.
Since he began receiving retirement benefits five years ago, Raniolo has never missed a payment or had trouble getting online, he said. But this time he got an error message — and kept getting them. “Bad Request,” read one notification, according to a screenshot he provided to The Washington Post. “There has been an unexpected system error,” read another.
He was directed to try again during “regular service hours” on the East Coast. So Raniolo kept trying — three to five times a day, every day, for the next five days. He tried at different times. He tried using his phone instead of his Chromebook. He tried different internet browsers: Chrome, Edge, DuckDuckGo. Technology issues on the Social Security website have alarmed some of the most vulnerable people who receive benefits. Nothing worked. By last Monday evening, he still had not managed to get into his account to change his emergency contact.
He has begun to imagine the worst. What if something happens to him overnight, leaving his wife the only person authorized to communicate with Social Security on his behalf? She probably wouldn’t know to call 911 if he collapsed on the floor, Raniolo said. She certainly wouldn’t understand how to manage or consider financial matters. “If you were to call her right now, she wouldn’t know how to answer the phone,” Raniolo said. “That’s why it’s so frustrating to me I can’t make a simple transaction on the Social Security website.”
In Westborough, Massachusetts, outside Boston, last Monday, Chris Hubbard checked the Facebook feed where the statewide community of parents of disabled children receiving SSI benefits posts news and information and saw that a friend logging in to the Social Security website was notified that her child was not receiving benefits. Hubbard and her husband, Tom, have a profoundly autistic son. The monthly check to pay for the group home where he lives was ready to go into the mail the next morning, the first of the month, when his SSI check always hits his bank accounts. When Hubbard logged in, her son’s account also showed “no history of payments.”
“My mind was racing,” she recalled. She envisioned going through the agonizing process of reapplying for benefits for her son. She couldn’t sleep and continued to check the website until 2:30 a.m. Same message.
On Tuesday, the check had finally been deposited by 9 a.m. But the message, now clearly an error, was still up on the website until that afternoon. “The whole thing was very alarming,” Hubbard said.
YOUR LIFE WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AFTER THESE TARIFFS
By Justin Wolfers, professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan.
These tariffs are going to hurt. A lot. By my calculations, this round of tariffs may be 50 times as painful as the ones Donald Trump instituted in his first term. That means they are going to reshape your life in much more fundamental ways.
To illustrate how, let’s look at a prosaic example: your washing machine. In 2018, Mr. Trump’s relatively modest tariffs caused washing machine prices to rise by nearly $100. As a result, many families elected to stick with their aging machines longer than they otherwise would have. But that choice incurred a new set of costs: late-night thuds from unbalanced loads, wads of scrunched cloth still dripping wet after a cycle and higher energy and water bills.
In other words, the total cost of a tariff isn’t just what comes out of your checking account. The time you spend to rearrange the stuff in your washer is a cost. The time you spend wringing out sopping wet T-shirts is a cost. Tariffs are costly not just because they raise prices but because they force you to make different decisions that will extract a different kind of cost from you over time.
Small tariffs create small problems. Big tariffs create huge ones. Take Mr. Trump’s 25 percent tariff on vehicles, which is expected to raise their prices by roughly $4,000. Many families, like mine, will probably decide not to buy a second car. That creates far bigger problems than an aging washer. Now, we’re constantly juggling how to get our kids to all their activities, and ourselves to work, with only one set of wheels.
And it’s not just cars. These are across-the-board tariffs, so they will distort virtually every purchase you make. In each case you’ll have to stop your baked-in calculations, recalibrate and find a way to make do — perhaps substituting frozen vegetables for fresh vegetables, a less effective medication for a higher-priced import, or corn syrup for sugar. And in each case, you’re worse off.
By the way, tariffs don’t distort just your buying decisions, they also distort what businesses make. Just as tariffs lead you to buy less desirable alternatives, they lead businesses to channel labor and capital into less desirable — that is, less productive — activities.
The tariffs announced on Wednesday are roughly 10 times as high as most other industrialized countries, and higher than the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariffs (of Great Depression fame).
Mr. Trump’s latest tariffs will lead folks to rethink not only whether to replace their washing machine — as they did in 2018 — but also their dryers, refrigerators, stoves, groceries, clothes, cars and even everyday essentials.
Many of the substitutions we’ll make will be quite painful. If a 1 percent tariff leads you to switch from real guacamole to a pea-based alternative, then you really didn’t care about guac all that much. But if it takes a 20 percent tariff to get you to switch, that’s a sure sign that going without the real thing is a serious hardship. And this is why higher tariffs generate a far greater amount of pain. These forces aren’t independent of each other. They interact. Or in math, they multiply, which means their costs rise in the square of the tariff rate. That leads to some pretty painful arithmetic.
The average tariff rate was about 1.5 percent just before Mr. Trump’s election in 2016. He subsequently raised tariffs on steel, aluminum, washing machines, solar panels and many goods from China, but left much of the rest of the economy untouched. All told, by 2019 he roughly doubled the tariff rate, to around 3 percent — and so effectively quadrupled whatever pain the 2016 tariffs were causing. (Yes, two times two is four.).
Joe Biden kept some of these tariffs, but Mr. Trump’s latest round pushes our current rate to around 15 times its 2016 level, and so squaring that, it’s 225 times more painful. That’s more than 50 times as large than the cost of Mr. Trump’s first term tariff increase.
Perhaps voters pulled the lever for Mr. Trump with warm memories of the good economic times. But the reality of his first term is that there was a lot more tariff talk than action. They were barely more than a bump in the road. This time, they’re a mountain. And so the impact will be more like a crash than last time’s comfortable jolt.
By Justin Wolfers, professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan.
These tariffs are going to hurt. A lot. By my calculations, this round of tariffs may be 50 times as painful as the ones Donald Trump instituted in his first term. That means they are going to reshape your life in much more fundamental ways.
To illustrate how, let’s look at a prosaic example: your washing machine. In 2018, Mr. Trump’s relatively modest tariffs caused washing machine prices to rise by nearly $100. As a result, many families elected to stick with their aging machines longer than they otherwise would have. But that choice incurred a new set of costs: late-night thuds from unbalanced loads, wads of scrunched cloth still dripping wet after a cycle and higher energy and water bills.
In other words, the total cost of a tariff isn’t just what comes out of your checking account. The time you spend to rearrange the stuff in your washer is a cost. The time you spend wringing out sopping wet T-shirts is a cost. Tariffs are costly not just because they raise prices but because they force you to make different decisions that will extract a different kind of cost from you over time.
Small tariffs create small problems. Big tariffs create huge ones. Take Mr. Trump’s 25 percent tariff on vehicles, which is expected to raise their prices by roughly $4,000. Many families, like mine, will probably decide not to buy a second car. That creates far bigger problems than an aging washer. Now, we’re constantly juggling how to get our kids to all their activities, and ourselves to work, with only one set of wheels.
And it’s not just cars. These are across-the-board tariffs, so they will distort virtually every purchase you make. In each case you’ll have to stop your baked-in calculations, recalibrate and find a way to make do — perhaps substituting frozen vegetables for fresh vegetables, a less effective medication for a higher-priced import, or corn syrup for sugar. And in each case, you’re worse off.
By the way, tariffs don’t distort just your buying decisions, they also distort what businesses make. Just as tariffs lead you to buy less desirable alternatives, they lead businesses to channel labor and capital into less desirable — that is, less productive — activities.
The tariffs announced on Wednesday are roughly 10 times as high as most other industrialized countries, and higher than the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariffs (of Great Depression fame).
Mr. Trump’s latest tariffs will lead folks to rethink not only whether to replace their washing machine — as they did in 2018 — but also their dryers, refrigerators, stoves, groceries, clothes, cars and even everyday essentials.
Many of the substitutions we’ll make will be quite painful. If a 1 percent tariff leads you to switch from real guacamole to a pea-based alternative, then you really didn’t care about guac all that much. But if it takes a 20 percent tariff to get you to switch, that’s a sure sign that going without the real thing is a serious hardship. And this is why higher tariffs generate a far greater amount of pain. These forces aren’t independent of each other. They interact. Or in math, they multiply, which means their costs rise in the square of the tariff rate. That leads to some pretty painful arithmetic.
The average tariff rate was about 1.5 percent just before Mr. Trump’s election in 2016. He subsequently raised tariffs on steel, aluminum, washing machines, solar panels and many goods from China, but left much of the rest of the economy untouched. All told, by 2019 he roughly doubled the tariff rate, to around 3 percent — and so effectively quadrupled whatever pain the 2016 tariffs were causing. (Yes, two times two is four.).
Joe Biden kept some of these tariffs, but Mr. Trump’s latest round pushes our current rate to around 15 times its 2016 level, and so squaring that, it’s 225 times more painful. That’s more than 50 times as large than the cost of Mr. Trump’s first term tariff increase.
Perhaps voters pulled the lever for Mr. Trump with warm memories of the good economic times. But the reality of his first term is that there was a lot more tariff talk than action. They were barely more than a bump in the road. This time, they’re a mountain. And so the impact will be more like a crash than last time’s comfortable jolt.
WHAT EXACTLY IS TRUMP TRYING TO ACHIEVE WITH HIS TARIFFS?
The president’s justifications for high tariffs are flawed. Showmanship, chaos make it worse.
By Megan McArdle, The Washington Post
Happy “Liberation Day” to readers of The Post! I hope you spent it gathered with friends and family, savoring the last of your cheap imported wine and cheese. (Though it might have been smarter to put them in the 401(k), in lieu of rapidly depreciating mutual funds.)
Myself, I spent the twilight hours goggling at the Trump administration’s new tariff schedule, trying to grasp its logic. For example, the tariffs on the Heard and McDonald islands, which have populations of zero, except for the penguins and assorted other animals. I mean, I’m glad that the rapacious waddlers will no longer fleece American consumers by dumping their shoddy goods on our markets. But still the thing vexed me … what do penguins export? Besides nature documentaries, I mean.
Obviously someone at the White House, possibly a soon-to-be-ex intern, pulled up a list of territories without checking whether those territories were, you know, inhabited. Then they, or someone else, applied a ham-fisted formula, possibly one spat out by an AI. And voilà, 10 percent tariffs on penguins.
This is, of course, hilarious, but we shouldn’t make too much of it — most major policy shifts are marred by at least one silly mistake. What’s really got me confused is the stuff that’s intentional. What exactly is the administration trying to do?
Trump and his supporters have offered many justifications for high tariffs, which can be boiled down to four broad arguments. One idea is that these are a negotiating tool, to be used to force other countries to lower their trade barriers. Another is that they will restore our manufacturing base and turn us into the superpower exporter we used to be. A third explanation is that we are trying to halt China’s rise into a geostrategic rival. And the best argument is that we need to rebuild our manufacturing capacity for vital goods such as semiconductors, in case of another pandemic, or a war.
These tariffs, however, suit none of these theories.
If you were trying to use tariffs to compel other countries to lower their trade barriers, you’d impose levies in proportion to the tariffs they impose on us. Yet Israel, which just announced it was dropping all tariffs on U.S. goods, got hit with 17 percent tariffs anyway, because the new duties were calculated based on relative trade flows, not the size of trade barriers. While the level of trade barriers obviously influences how much you trade, the relationship is not 1:1 — it’s pretty easy to cut back on your consumption of imported wine, but it’s much harder to do without coffee or semiconductors.
That brings us to theory two: The idea is to eliminate trade deficits and rebalance our economy toward manufacturing. Even if you think that’s a worthwhile goal, you’d want tariffs that achieve that globally, not with each individual country — for the same reason that you don’t spend your entire salary on your employer’s products, or demand that the grocery store give you a part-time job with a wage equal to your food bill. You don’t necessarily want to buy exactly as much from a trading partner as they want to buy from you. That’s why we use money instead of bartering, and let markets balance things out.
The other problem with this theory is that much of what we buy from other countries is inputs for our own manufacturing industries. It’s hard to stand up a globally competitive manufacturing sector without parts or raw materials.
How about containing China, then? Well, if you were trying to do that, you’d want to build up your relationships with regional allies who will be at your side in any fight, such as Japan … which the administration slapped with 24 percent tariffs. You’d also want to encourage the growth of export industries in countries such as Vietnam, which competes with China … and just got hit with a 46 percent tariff rate.
As for reshoring strategically vital goods, these tariffs exempt some of the most critical, such as semiconductors, steel, aluminum and pharmaceuticals(for now, at least; the White House may impose sector-specific duties on them later). On one level that’s smart, because a sudden shortage of any of these would be catastrophic. On another level, what exactly are we trying to protect, again? The nation’s strategic toaster reserve?
None of these theories work, and that’s because Trump doesn’t really have a theory of tariffs. What he has is a series of intuitions: that exports make you strong and imports make you weak and dependent; that America was a better place when manufacturing formed the core of our economy; and that manufacturing tended to be strong when tariffs were high. Combine those intuitions with a penchant for showmanship and a chaotic approach to administration, and what you get is, well, just ask the penguins.
The president’s justifications for high tariffs are flawed. Showmanship, chaos make it worse.
By Megan McArdle, The Washington Post
Happy “Liberation Day” to readers of The Post! I hope you spent it gathered with friends and family, savoring the last of your cheap imported wine and cheese. (Though it might have been smarter to put them in the 401(k), in lieu of rapidly depreciating mutual funds.)
Myself, I spent the twilight hours goggling at the Trump administration’s new tariff schedule, trying to grasp its logic. For example, the tariffs on the Heard and McDonald islands, which have populations of zero, except for the penguins and assorted other animals. I mean, I’m glad that the rapacious waddlers will no longer fleece American consumers by dumping their shoddy goods on our markets. But still the thing vexed me … what do penguins export? Besides nature documentaries, I mean.
Obviously someone at the White House, possibly a soon-to-be-ex intern, pulled up a list of territories without checking whether those territories were, you know, inhabited. Then they, or someone else, applied a ham-fisted formula, possibly one spat out by an AI. And voilà, 10 percent tariffs on penguins.
This is, of course, hilarious, but we shouldn’t make too much of it — most major policy shifts are marred by at least one silly mistake. What’s really got me confused is the stuff that’s intentional. What exactly is the administration trying to do?
Trump and his supporters have offered many justifications for high tariffs, which can be boiled down to four broad arguments. One idea is that these are a negotiating tool, to be used to force other countries to lower their trade barriers. Another is that they will restore our manufacturing base and turn us into the superpower exporter we used to be. A third explanation is that we are trying to halt China’s rise into a geostrategic rival. And the best argument is that we need to rebuild our manufacturing capacity for vital goods such as semiconductors, in case of another pandemic, or a war.
These tariffs, however, suit none of these theories.
If you were trying to use tariffs to compel other countries to lower their trade barriers, you’d impose levies in proportion to the tariffs they impose on us. Yet Israel, which just announced it was dropping all tariffs on U.S. goods, got hit with 17 percent tariffs anyway, because the new duties were calculated based on relative trade flows, not the size of trade barriers. While the level of trade barriers obviously influences how much you trade, the relationship is not 1:1 — it’s pretty easy to cut back on your consumption of imported wine, but it’s much harder to do without coffee or semiconductors.
That brings us to theory two: The idea is to eliminate trade deficits and rebalance our economy toward manufacturing. Even if you think that’s a worthwhile goal, you’d want tariffs that achieve that globally, not with each individual country — for the same reason that you don’t spend your entire salary on your employer’s products, or demand that the grocery store give you a part-time job with a wage equal to your food bill. You don’t necessarily want to buy exactly as much from a trading partner as they want to buy from you. That’s why we use money instead of bartering, and let markets balance things out.
The other problem with this theory is that much of what we buy from other countries is inputs for our own manufacturing industries. It’s hard to stand up a globally competitive manufacturing sector without parts or raw materials.
How about containing China, then? Well, if you were trying to do that, you’d want to build up your relationships with regional allies who will be at your side in any fight, such as Japan … which the administration slapped with 24 percent tariffs. You’d also want to encourage the growth of export industries in countries such as Vietnam, which competes with China … and just got hit with a 46 percent tariff rate.
As for reshoring strategically vital goods, these tariffs exempt some of the most critical, such as semiconductors, steel, aluminum and pharmaceuticals(for now, at least; the White House may impose sector-specific duties on them later). On one level that’s smart, because a sudden shortage of any of these would be catastrophic. On another level, what exactly are we trying to protect, again? The nation’s strategic toaster reserve?
None of these theories work, and that’s because Trump doesn’t really have a theory of tariffs. What he has is a series of intuitions: that exports make you strong and imports make you weak and dependent; that America was a better place when manufacturing formed the core of our economy; and that manufacturing tended to be strong when tariffs were high. Combine those intuitions with a penchant for showmanship and a chaotic approach to administration, and what you get is, well, just ask the penguins.
TRUMP WILL TELL YOU WHEN HE’S DONE
By Frank Bruni, The New York Times
It was easy to miss amid the tragicomedy of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s security breach, President Trump’s musings about an unconstitutional third term and the sensory assault that is Elon Musk, but last week Trump signed an executive order as potentially chilling as any of the many others.
It concerned elections. More accurately, it concerned his determination to shape them in his favor. And it reaffirmed what has been clear since his prophylactic claims of a “rigged” process in 2016, but becomes more glaringly obvious all the time: He will seize and hold on to power however he must, with no shame about the means.
So while we try to fathom the magnitude of damage Trump is doing — these splenetic, vengeful, bonkers tariffs aren’t even the half of it — we must reckon with a specter every bit as scary: Trump’s resistance to any real referendum on his feral version of governing. He wants to rule. In his mind, he deserves to rule. Democracy is a pretty word but a pesky encumbrance. Best to take it out of the equation.
Then you don’t have to sweat the spasms of the stock market, which plummeted in the first hours of trading today, with the S&P 500 dropping by 4 percent. You can brush off top economists’ utter bafflement about your math and your path. You can survive the pain you’ve inflicted, be it fleeting or forever.
The executive order mandates many changes for federal elections, including, most conspicuously, a requirement that mail-in ballots be received rather than just postmarked by Election Day and that all voters provide not merely a photo identification but proof of citizenship. It’s no coincidence that those revisions align with Republicans’ past concerns that voting by mail hurt them and with a belief that fewer Democratic voters have multiple forms of ID. Trump isn’t after safer, fairer elections. He’s intent on depressing the number of ballots that might not go his and other Republicans’ way.
He’s doing that as he has done so much since his inauguration: in possible defiance of the law, without regard for the prior limits of his position. “The Constitution gives the president no explicit authority to regulate elections,” Nick Corasaniti explained in The Times. “Instead, it gives states the power to set the ‘times, places and manner’ of elections.” Congress can override state legislation. It did precisely that with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
But Trump, of course, won’t be relegated to the sidelines. He demands the ball. His order would withhold federal funding from states that don’t follow his new, dubiously legal dictates on federal elections. Oh, it would also give DOGE access to state voter rolls to monitor compliance. Nothing good can come from that.
The Democratic Party has rightly moved to block the order; on Monday, it filed a 70-page lawsuit in the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C. But the order is only a part of Trump’s larger scheme, which is to inoculate himself against failure and insulate himself from accountability. He has already gone to great lengths to invalidate or intimidate government watchdogs, journalists, scientists, lawyers and pretty much anyone who ever looked at him the wrong way. Eliminating possible rebukes from the ballot box is but a few baby steps from that.
And rebukes are indeed possible. That was one takeaway from the Tuesday results of two special House elections in Florida, where the Republican winners in solidly red districts fell far short of Trump’s victory margins there just five months ago. And it was the clear, bold message of what happened on the same day in Wisconsin, where Susan Crawford, the Democratic candidate in a state Supreme Court election, prevailed by 10 percentage points despite Musk’s infusion of $25 million on behalf of her Republican opponent and his assertive campaigning against her.
Maybe voters have already had quite enough of Musk. Maybe they’ve noticed that his boasts of efficiency belie a reality of bedlam. Maybe they’ve realized that while stock prices have dropped, grocery prices haven’t, and that Trump isn’t standing up for America but junking America’s standing — by replacing sensible trade relations with made-for-television tantrums, threatening invasions, bullying erstwhile allies and cavalierly deporting people to a hellhole in El Salvador, due process be damned. Sloppiness, stupidity and savagery define the Trump administration. They could also be the seeds of a midterm comeuppance.
If he allows it. And if he accepts it. Remember that even after he won the presidency in 2016, he was so irked by Hillary Clinton’s sizable popular-vote advantage that he attributed it to illegal votes from undocumented immigrants and set up a commission that was supposed to find evidence of such widespread fraud (and failed to). Recall that after he lost to Joe Biden in 2020, he rejected the results, pressured various officials to overturn them and fired up the hellions who invaded the Capitol. And ask yourself whether, since then, the inner autocrat in Trump has bloomed or withered.
I’m going with bloomed. And I’m basing that on his evisceration of federal agencies and functions without any assent from Congress, which is supposed to decide such matters; on executive orders so audacious that they seem to invite a showdown with the courts; on the free rein he has given Musk, at least so far; and on those third-term reveries, which are wholly consistent with his contempt for constraints and his grandiose self-image.
Ask yourself, too, whether his fellow Republicans have grown more or less likely to contain him. Yes, there are sudden rumblings of upset about the tariffs among Republican senators, but that meek crew waved even Trump’s most preposterous cabinet members on through. That’s a sign of a system that’s not working. And Trump’s furious assault on it isn’t anywhere close to over.
By Frank Bruni, The New York Times
It was easy to miss amid the tragicomedy of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s security breach, President Trump’s musings about an unconstitutional third term and the sensory assault that is Elon Musk, but last week Trump signed an executive order as potentially chilling as any of the many others.
It concerned elections. More accurately, it concerned his determination to shape them in his favor. And it reaffirmed what has been clear since his prophylactic claims of a “rigged” process in 2016, but becomes more glaringly obvious all the time: He will seize and hold on to power however he must, with no shame about the means.
So while we try to fathom the magnitude of damage Trump is doing — these splenetic, vengeful, bonkers tariffs aren’t even the half of it — we must reckon with a specter every bit as scary: Trump’s resistance to any real referendum on his feral version of governing. He wants to rule. In his mind, he deserves to rule. Democracy is a pretty word but a pesky encumbrance. Best to take it out of the equation.
Then you don’t have to sweat the spasms of the stock market, which plummeted in the first hours of trading today, with the S&P 500 dropping by 4 percent. You can brush off top economists’ utter bafflement about your math and your path. You can survive the pain you’ve inflicted, be it fleeting or forever.
The executive order mandates many changes for federal elections, including, most conspicuously, a requirement that mail-in ballots be received rather than just postmarked by Election Day and that all voters provide not merely a photo identification but proof of citizenship. It’s no coincidence that those revisions align with Republicans’ past concerns that voting by mail hurt them and with a belief that fewer Democratic voters have multiple forms of ID. Trump isn’t after safer, fairer elections. He’s intent on depressing the number of ballots that might not go his and other Republicans’ way.
He’s doing that as he has done so much since his inauguration: in possible defiance of the law, without regard for the prior limits of his position. “The Constitution gives the president no explicit authority to regulate elections,” Nick Corasaniti explained in The Times. “Instead, it gives states the power to set the ‘times, places and manner’ of elections.” Congress can override state legislation. It did precisely that with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
But Trump, of course, won’t be relegated to the sidelines. He demands the ball. His order would withhold federal funding from states that don’t follow his new, dubiously legal dictates on federal elections. Oh, it would also give DOGE access to state voter rolls to monitor compliance. Nothing good can come from that.
The Democratic Party has rightly moved to block the order; on Monday, it filed a 70-page lawsuit in the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C. But the order is only a part of Trump’s larger scheme, which is to inoculate himself against failure and insulate himself from accountability. He has already gone to great lengths to invalidate or intimidate government watchdogs, journalists, scientists, lawyers and pretty much anyone who ever looked at him the wrong way. Eliminating possible rebukes from the ballot box is but a few baby steps from that.
And rebukes are indeed possible. That was one takeaway from the Tuesday results of two special House elections in Florida, where the Republican winners in solidly red districts fell far short of Trump’s victory margins there just five months ago. And it was the clear, bold message of what happened on the same day in Wisconsin, where Susan Crawford, the Democratic candidate in a state Supreme Court election, prevailed by 10 percentage points despite Musk’s infusion of $25 million on behalf of her Republican opponent and his assertive campaigning against her.
Maybe voters have already had quite enough of Musk. Maybe they’ve noticed that his boasts of efficiency belie a reality of bedlam. Maybe they’ve realized that while stock prices have dropped, grocery prices haven’t, and that Trump isn’t standing up for America but junking America’s standing — by replacing sensible trade relations with made-for-television tantrums, threatening invasions, bullying erstwhile allies and cavalierly deporting people to a hellhole in El Salvador, due process be damned. Sloppiness, stupidity and savagery define the Trump administration. They could also be the seeds of a midterm comeuppance.
If he allows it. And if he accepts it. Remember that even after he won the presidency in 2016, he was so irked by Hillary Clinton’s sizable popular-vote advantage that he attributed it to illegal votes from undocumented immigrants and set up a commission that was supposed to find evidence of such widespread fraud (and failed to). Recall that after he lost to Joe Biden in 2020, he rejected the results, pressured various officials to overturn them and fired up the hellions who invaded the Capitol. And ask yourself whether, since then, the inner autocrat in Trump has bloomed or withered.
I’m going with bloomed. And I’m basing that on his evisceration of federal agencies and functions without any assent from Congress, which is supposed to decide such matters; on executive orders so audacious that they seem to invite a showdown with the courts; on the free rein he has given Musk, at least so far; and on those third-term reveries, which are wholly consistent with his contempt for constraints and his grandiose self-image.
Ask yourself, too, whether his fellow Republicans have grown more or less likely to contain him. Yes, there are sudden rumblings of upset about the tariffs among Republican senators, but that meek crew waved even Trump’s most preposterous cabinet members on through. That’s a sign of a system that’s not working. And Trump’s furious assault on it isn’t anywhere close to over.
C.D.C. CUTS THREATEN TO SET BACK THE NATION’S HEALTH, CRITICS SAY
The reorganization that began on Tuesday will scale back an agency that has been a public health model around the world.
By Apoorva Mandavilli and Roni Caryn Rabin, The New York Times
The extensive layoffs of federal health workers that began on Tuesday will greatly curtail the scope and influence of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the world’s premier public health agency, an outcome long sought by conservatives critical of its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. The reorganization of the Department of Health and Human Services shrinks the C.D.C. by 2,400 employees, or roughly 18 percent of its work force, and strips away some of its core functions.
Some Democrats in Congress described the reorganization throughout H.H.S. as flatly illegal. “You cannot decimate and restructure H.H.S. without Congress,” said Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, and a member of the Senate health committee. “This is not only unlawful but seriously harmful — they are putting Americans’ health and well-being on the line,” she added.
According to information gathered by The New York Times from dozens of workers, the reductions were broadly targeted. Scientists focused on environmental health and asthma, injuries, lead poisoning, smoking and climate change were dismissed. Researchers studying blood disorders, violence prevention and access to vaccines were let go. The agency’s center on H.I.V. and sexually transmitted diseases was among the hardest hit, losing about 27 percent of its staff.
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which makes recommendations on how to keep workers safe, was all but dissolved. What remains is a hobbled C.D.C., with a smaller global footprint, devoting fewer resources to environmental health, occupational health and disease prevention, public health experts said. Instead, the agency will be trained more narrowly on domestic disease outbreaks. Communications will be centralized at H.H.S. in Washington.
Critics predicted the move would prevent scientists from speaking frankly about public health. “American taxpayers provide the resources for C.D.C.’s specialists and have the right to hear directly from them without interference by politicians,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who led the agency from 2009 to 2017.
The sweeping reductions arrive as the nation confronts an outbreak of measles in Texas and elsewhere, a spreading bird flu epidemic on poultry and dairy farms, and a raft of new questions about public health measures like water fluoridation and school vaccine requirements. “What we seem to be seeing is a dismantling rather than a restructuring” of the public health system, said Dr. Richard Besser, chief executive of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a former acting director of the C.D.C.
On Capitol Hill, the Senate health committee, which recommended confirmation of Mr. Kennedy as secretary, scheduled a hearing on the reorganization of H.H.S., citing the possible impacts on public health.
Society’s most vulnerable — the poor, Black, Latino and Native American people, rural Americans with less access to health care, the disabled and those at highest risk for illness — are likely to be hit hardest, experts said. “These communities rely on public health to a larger extent than wealthy communities do,” Dr. Besser said.
For decades, public health and medical research drew support across the political spectrum. But the C.D.C. has been in the political cross hairs since the first Trump administration, when the White House muzzled the agency’s communications, meddled with its publications and blamed its scientists for bungling the pandemic response.
Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for reshaping the federal government, described the C.D.C. as “perhaps the most incompetent and arrogant” federal agency, and called on Congress to curb its powers. Through staffing cuts, the administration reduced critical divisions of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, and employees studying how to prevent gun violence, child abuse and elder abuse were fired.
Injuries are the leading cause of death among Americans under 45. About 47,000 Americans are killed by firearms each year, more than half of them suicides. But gun violence is a politically fraught topic. Pressure from the National Rifle Association and conservative politicians led to a ban on using federal funds to study gun violence for almost 25 years. Funding was restored in 2019.
The injury center studied ways to improve gun safety and promoted the use of gun locks, particularly in homes where children live. “People think of gun violence as a question for law enforcement, but the public health approach has made a big difference,” said Dr. Mark Rosenberg, a former center director.
Pregnant women and newborns die in the United States at a far higher rate than in other industrialized nations. In recent years, the C.D.C. focused on stark racial health disparities that put Black American women at nearly three times the risk of dying of pregnancy complications than white women. But the Trump administration has been defunding studies of health disparities in racial, ethnic and gender minorities, saying they do not align with the president’s executive orders ending diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Mr. Kennedy said last week that the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which makes recommendations for preventing work-related injuries and illnesses, would be absorbed into the health department. But on Tuesday, most of its divisions were eliminated, among them offices dedicated to protecting workers in various industries, including mine inspectors.
Even one of the agency’s most essential functions, infectious disease research, was affected. On Tuesday, teams leading H.I.V. surveillance and research within that division were laid off. It was unclear whether some of those functions would be recreated elsewhere. (A team in the global health center working on preventing mother-to-child transmission of H.I.V. was also cut.) Until now, the C.D.C. provided funds to states and territories for responding to and preventing H.I.V. outbreaks. Roughly one in four new diagnoses of H.I.V. is made with agency funds. Some H.I.V. experts warned that the move could lead to a rise in H.I.V. infections among Americans. “H.I.V. prevention is a lot more than just giving out condoms,” said Dr. John Brooks, who served as chief medical officer for the division of H.I.V. prevention until last year. “It saves lives, averts illness and produces enormous cost savings.”
Broadly, the reorganization aligns with Mr. Kennedy’s preferred emphasis on research into chronic diseases; federal research has been far too focused on infectious diseases, he has said. But the line between them is not always clear, said Dr. Anne Schuchat, former principal deputy director of the C.D.C. Research that seems disconnected from outbreak response may also be a key for fighting pathogens. “For Zika, we needed experts in birth defects, entomology and vector control, virologists and environmental health experts,” she said. “Emerging threats don’t respect borders of C.D.C. organizational units.”
The reorganization risks choking the talent pipeline for public health, said Ursula Bauer, former director of the agency’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. “Once you decimate an agency like C.D.C., which is full of high-caliber highly trained individuals, building back is going to be incredibly difficult,” she said. “It will take two to three times as long to undo the damage as it took to inflict it.”
The cuts also will take a toll on the agency’s ability to gather and analyze data, which are keys to identifying trends and developing interventions, Dr. Phil Huang, director of Dallas County Health and Human Services, said at a news briefing. “You take away those systems, and it takes away the ability to see the impact of all these cuts,” he added.
The reorganization that began on Tuesday will scale back an agency that has been a public health model around the world.
By Apoorva Mandavilli and Roni Caryn Rabin, The New York Times
The extensive layoffs of federal health workers that began on Tuesday will greatly curtail the scope and influence of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the world’s premier public health agency, an outcome long sought by conservatives critical of its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. The reorganization of the Department of Health and Human Services shrinks the C.D.C. by 2,400 employees, or roughly 18 percent of its work force, and strips away some of its core functions.
Some Democrats in Congress described the reorganization throughout H.H.S. as flatly illegal. “You cannot decimate and restructure H.H.S. without Congress,” said Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, and a member of the Senate health committee. “This is not only unlawful but seriously harmful — they are putting Americans’ health and well-being on the line,” she added.
According to information gathered by The New York Times from dozens of workers, the reductions were broadly targeted. Scientists focused on environmental health and asthma, injuries, lead poisoning, smoking and climate change were dismissed. Researchers studying blood disorders, violence prevention and access to vaccines were let go. The agency’s center on H.I.V. and sexually transmitted diseases was among the hardest hit, losing about 27 percent of its staff.
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which makes recommendations on how to keep workers safe, was all but dissolved. What remains is a hobbled C.D.C., with a smaller global footprint, devoting fewer resources to environmental health, occupational health and disease prevention, public health experts said. Instead, the agency will be trained more narrowly on domestic disease outbreaks. Communications will be centralized at H.H.S. in Washington.
Critics predicted the move would prevent scientists from speaking frankly about public health. “American taxpayers provide the resources for C.D.C.’s specialists and have the right to hear directly from them without interference by politicians,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who led the agency from 2009 to 2017.
The sweeping reductions arrive as the nation confronts an outbreak of measles in Texas and elsewhere, a spreading bird flu epidemic on poultry and dairy farms, and a raft of new questions about public health measures like water fluoridation and school vaccine requirements. “What we seem to be seeing is a dismantling rather than a restructuring” of the public health system, said Dr. Richard Besser, chief executive of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a former acting director of the C.D.C.
On Capitol Hill, the Senate health committee, which recommended confirmation of Mr. Kennedy as secretary, scheduled a hearing on the reorganization of H.H.S., citing the possible impacts on public health.
Society’s most vulnerable — the poor, Black, Latino and Native American people, rural Americans with less access to health care, the disabled and those at highest risk for illness — are likely to be hit hardest, experts said. “These communities rely on public health to a larger extent than wealthy communities do,” Dr. Besser said.
For decades, public health and medical research drew support across the political spectrum. But the C.D.C. has been in the political cross hairs since the first Trump administration, when the White House muzzled the agency’s communications, meddled with its publications and blamed its scientists for bungling the pandemic response.
Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for reshaping the federal government, described the C.D.C. as “perhaps the most incompetent and arrogant” federal agency, and called on Congress to curb its powers. Through staffing cuts, the administration reduced critical divisions of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, and employees studying how to prevent gun violence, child abuse and elder abuse were fired.
Injuries are the leading cause of death among Americans under 45. About 47,000 Americans are killed by firearms each year, more than half of them suicides. But gun violence is a politically fraught topic. Pressure from the National Rifle Association and conservative politicians led to a ban on using federal funds to study gun violence for almost 25 years. Funding was restored in 2019.
The injury center studied ways to improve gun safety and promoted the use of gun locks, particularly in homes where children live. “People think of gun violence as a question for law enforcement, but the public health approach has made a big difference,” said Dr. Mark Rosenberg, a former center director.
Pregnant women and newborns die in the United States at a far higher rate than in other industrialized nations. In recent years, the C.D.C. focused on stark racial health disparities that put Black American women at nearly three times the risk of dying of pregnancy complications than white women. But the Trump administration has been defunding studies of health disparities in racial, ethnic and gender minorities, saying they do not align with the president’s executive orders ending diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Mr. Kennedy said last week that the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which makes recommendations for preventing work-related injuries and illnesses, would be absorbed into the health department. But on Tuesday, most of its divisions were eliminated, among them offices dedicated to protecting workers in various industries, including mine inspectors.
Even one of the agency’s most essential functions, infectious disease research, was affected. On Tuesday, teams leading H.I.V. surveillance and research within that division were laid off. It was unclear whether some of those functions would be recreated elsewhere. (A team in the global health center working on preventing mother-to-child transmission of H.I.V. was also cut.) Until now, the C.D.C. provided funds to states and territories for responding to and preventing H.I.V. outbreaks. Roughly one in four new diagnoses of H.I.V. is made with agency funds. Some H.I.V. experts warned that the move could lead to a rise in H.I.V. infections among Americans. “H.I.V. prevention is a lot more than just giving out condoms,” said Dr. John Brooks, who served as chief medical officer for the division of H.I.V. prevention until last year. “It saves lives, averts illness and produces enormous cost savings.”
Broadly, the reorganization aligns with Mr. Kennedy’s preferred emphasis on research into chronic diseases; federal research has been far too focused on infectious diseases, he has said. But the line between them is not always clear, said Dr. Anne Schuchat, former principal deputy director of the C.D.C. Research that seems disconnected from outbreak response may also be a key for fighting pathogens. “For Zika, we needed experts in birth defects, entomology and vector control, virologists and environmental health experts,” she said. “Emerging threats don’t respect borders of C.D.C. organizational units.”
The reorganization risks choking the talent pipeline for public health, said Ursula Bauer, former director of the agency’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. “Once you decimate an agency like C.D.C., which is full of high-caliber highly trained individuals, building back is going to be incredibly difficult,” she said. “It will take two to three times as long to undo the damage as it took to inflict it.”
The cuts also will take a toll on the agency’s ability to gather and analyze data, which are keys to identifying trends and developing interventions, Dr. Phil Huang, director of Dallas County Health and Human Services, said at a news briefing. “You take away those systems, and it takes away the ability to see the impact of all these cuts,” he added.
HILLARY CLINTON: HOW MUCH DUMBER WILL THIS GET?
It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity. We’re all shocked — shocked! — that President Trump and his team don’t actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws. But we knew that already. What’s much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.
This is the latest in a string of self-inflicted wounds by the new administration that are squandering America’s strength and threatening our national security. Firing hundreds of federal workers charged with protecting our nation’s nuclear weapons is also dumb. So is shutting down efforts to fight pandemics just as a deadly Ebola outbreak is spreading in Africa. It makes no sense to purge talented generals, diplomats and spies at a time when rivals like China and Russia are trying to expand their global reach.
In a dangerous and complex world, it’s not enough to be strong. You must also be smart. As secretary of state during the Obama administration, I argued for smart power, integrating the hard power of our military with the soft power of our diplomacy, development assistance, economic might and cultural influence. None of those tools can do the job alone. Together, they make America a superpower. The Trump approach is dumb power. Instead of a strong America using all our strengths to lead the world and confront our adversaries, Mr. Trump’s America will be increasingly blind and blundering, feeble and friendless.
Let’s start with the military, because that’s what he claims to care about. Don’t let the swagger fool you. Mr. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (of group chat fame) are apparently more focused on performative fights over wokeness than preparing for real fights with America’s adversaries. Does anyone really think deleting tributes to the Tuskegee Airmen makes us more safe? The Trump Pentagon purged images of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb that ended World War II because its name is the Enola Gay. Dumb.
Instead of working with Congress to modernize the military’s budget to reflect changing threats, the president is firing top generals without credible justification. Five former secretaries of defense, Republicans and Democrats, rightly warned that this would “undermine our all-volunteer force and weaken our national security.” Mass layoffs are also hitting the intelligence agencies. As one former senior spy put it, “We’re shooting ourselves in the head, not the foot.” Not smart.
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If they’re this reckless with America’s hard power, it’s no surprise that they’re shredding our soft power. As a former secretary of state, I am particularly alarmed by the administration’s plan to close embassies and consulates, fire diplomats and destroy the U.S. Agency for International Development. Let me explain why this matters, because it’s less widely understood than the importance of tanks and fighter jets.
I visited 112 countries and traveled nearly one million miles as America’s top diplomat, and I have seen how valuable it is for our country to be represented on the ground in far-flung places. The U.S. military has long understood that our forces must be forward deployed in order to project American power and respond quickly to crises. The same is true of our diplomats. Our embassies are our eyes and ears informing policy decisions back home. They are launchpads for operations that keep us safe and prosperous, from training foreign counterterrorism forces to helping U.S. companies enter new markets.
China understands the value of forward-deployed diplomacy, which is why it has opened new embassies and consulates around the world and now has more than the United States. The Trump administration’s retreat would leave the field open for Beijing to spread its influence uncontested.
Diplomats win America friends so we don’t have to go it alone in a competitive world. That’s how my colleagues and I were able to rally the United Nations to impose crippling sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program and ultimately force Tehran to stop its progress toward a bomb — something Mr. Trump’s bluster has failed to do. (He actually defunded inspectors keeping an eye on Iranian research sites. Dumb.)
Diplomacy is cost-effective, especially compared with military action. Preventing wars is cheaper than fighting them. Mr. Trump’s own former secretary of defense Jim Mattis, a retired Marine Corps four-star general, told Congress, “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.”
Our development assistance has always been a small portion of the federal budget, but it also has an outsize impact on international stability, especially paired with effective diplomacy. When American aid dollars help stop a famine or an outbreak, when we respond to a natural disaster or open schools, we win hearts and minds that might otherwise go to terrorists or rivals like China. We reduce the flow of migrants and refugees. We strengthen friendly governments that might otherwise collapse.
I don’t want to pretend that any of this is easy or that American foreign policy hasn’t been plagued by mistakes. Leadership is hard. But our best chance to get it right and to keep our country safe is to strengthen our government, not weaken it. We should invest in the patriots who serve our nation, not insult them.
Smart reforms could make federal agencies, including the State Department and U.S.A.I.D., more efficient and effective. During the Clinton administration, my husband’s Reinventing Government initiative, led by Vice President Al Gore, worked with Congress to thoughtfully streamline bureaucracy, modernize the work force and save billions of dollars. In many ways it was the opposite of the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn approach. Today they are not reinventing government; they’re wrecking it.
All of this is both dumb and dangerous. And I haven’t even gotten to the damage Mr. Trump is doing by cozying up to dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, blowing up our alliances — force multipliers that extend our reach and share our burdens — and trashing our moral influence by undermining the rule of law at home. Or how he’s tanking our economy and blowing up our national debt. Propagandists in Beijing and Moscow know we are in a global debate about competing systems of governance. People and leaders around the world are watching to see if democracy can still deliver peace and prosperity or even function. If America is ruled like a banana republic, with flagrant corruption and a leader who puts himself above the law, we lose that argument. We also lose the qualities that have made America exceptional and indispensable.
If there’s a grand strategy at work here, I don’t know what it is. Maybe Mr. Trump wants to return to 19th-century spheres of influence. Maybe he’s just driven by personal grudges and is in way over his head. As a businessman, he bankrupted his Atlantic City casinos. Now he’s gambling with the national security of the United States. If this continues, a group chat foul will be the least of our concerns, and all the fist and flag emojis in the world won’t save us.
It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me; it’s the stupidity. We’re all shocked — shocked! — that President Trump and his team don’t actually care about protecting classified information or federal record retention laws. But we knew that already. What’s much worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.
This is the latest in a string of self-inflicted wounds by the new administration that are squandering America’s strength and threatening our national security. Firing hundreds of federal workers charged with protecting our nation’s nuclear weapons is also dumb. So is shutting down efforts to fight pandemics just as a deadly Ebola outbreak is spreading in Africa. It makes no sense to purge talented generals, diplomats and spies at a time when rivals like China and Russia are trying to expand their global reach.
In a dangerous and complex world, it’s not enough to be strong. You must also be smart. As secretary of state during the Obama administration, I argued for smart power, integrating the hard power of our military with the soft power of our diplomacy, development assistance, economic might and cultural influence. None of those tools can do the job alone. Together, they make America a superpower. The Trump approach is dumb power. Instead of a strong America using all our strengths to lead the world and confront our adversaries, Mr. Trump’s America will be increasingly blind and blundering, feeble and friendless.
Let’s start with the military, because that’s what he claims to care about. Don’t let the swagger fool you. Mr. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (of group chat fame) are apparently more focused on performative fights over wokeness than preparing for real fights with America’s adversaries. Does anyone really think deleting tributes to the Tuskegee Airmen makes us more safe? The Trump Pentagon purged images of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb that ended World War II because its name is the Enola Gay. Dumb.
Instead of working with Congress to modernize the military’s budget to reflect changing threats, the president is firing top generals without credible justification. Five former secretaries of defense, Republicans and Democrats, rightly warned that this would “undermine our all-volunteer force and weaken our national security.” Mass layoffs are also hitting the intelligence agencies. As one former senior spy put it, “We’re shooting ourselves in the head, not the foot.” Not smart.
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If they’re this reckless with America’s hard power, it’s no surprise that they’re shredding our soft power. As a former secretary of state, I am particularly alarmed by the administration’s plan to close embassies and consulates, fire diplomats and destroy the U.S. Agency for International Development. Let me explain why this matters, because it’s less widely understood than the importance of tanks and fighter jets.
I visited 112 countries and traveled nearly one million miles as America’s top diplomat, and I have seen how valuable it is for our country to be represented on the ground in far-flung places. The U.S. military has long understood that our forces must be forward deployed in order to project American power and respond quickly to crises. The same is true of our diplomats. Our embassies are our eyes and ears informing policy decisions back home. They are launchpads for operations that keep us safe and prosperous, from training foreign counterterrorism forces to helping U.S. companies enter new markets.
China understands the value of forward-deployed diplomacy, which is why it has opened new embassies and consulates around the world and now has more than the United States. The Trump administration’s retreat would leave the field open for Beijing to spread its influence uncontested.
Diplomats win America friends so we don’t have to go it alone in a competitive world. That’s how my colleagues and I were able to rally the United Nations to impose crippling sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program and ultimately force Tehran to stop its progress toward a bomb — something Mr. Trump’s bluster has failed to do. (He actually defunded inspectors keeping an eye on Iranian research sites. Dumb.)
Diplomacy is cost-effective, especially compared with military action. Preventing wars is cheaper than fighting them. Mr. Trump’s own former secretary of defense Jim Mattis, a retired Marine Corps four-star general, told Congress, “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.”
Our development assistance has always been a small portion of the federal budget, but it also has an outsize impact on international stability, especially paired with effective diplomacy. When American aid dollars help stop a famine or an outbreak, when we respond to a natural disaster or open schools, we win hearts and minds that might otherwise go to terrorists or rivals like China. We reduce the flow of migrants and refugees. We strengthen friendly governments that might otherwise collapse.
I don’t want to pretend that any of this is easy or that American foreign policy hasn’t been plagued by mistakes. Leadership is hard. But our best chance to get it right and to keep our country safe is to strengthen our government, not weaken it. We should invest in the patriots who serve our nation, not insult them.
Smart reforms could make federal agencies, including the State Department and U.S.A.I.D., more efficient and effective. During the Clinton administration, my husband’s Reinventing Government initiative, led by Vice President Al Gore, worked with Congress to thoughtfully streamline bureaucracy, modernize the work force and save billions of dollars. In many ways it was the opposite of the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn approach. Today they are not reinventing government; they’re wrecking it.
All of this is both dumb and dangerous. And I haven’t even gotten to the damage Mr. Trump is doing by cozying up to dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, blowing up our alliances — force multipliers that extend our reach and share our burdens — and trashing our moral influence by undermining the rule of law at home. Or how he’s tanking our economy and blowing up our national debt. Propagandists in Beijing and Moscow know we are in a global debate about competing systems of governance. People and leaders around the world are watching to see if democracy can still deliver peace and prosperity or even function. If America is ruled like a banana republic, with flagrant corruption and a leader who puts himself above the law, we lose that argument. We also lose the qualities that have made America exceptional and indispensable.
If there’s a grand strategy at work here, I don’t know what it is. Maybe Mr. Trump wants to return to 19th-century spheres of influence. Maybe he’s just driven by personal grudges and is in way over his head. As a businessman, he bankrupted his Atlantic City casinos. Now he’s gambling with the national security of the United States. If this continues, a group chat foul will be the least of our concerns, and all the fist and flag emojis in the world won’t save us.
AS TRUMP MAYHEM SPREADS, MAGA UNITY CRACKS
From the Wall Street Journal editorial board to Fox News, capitulation is on the way out.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
Wednesday found White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt doing what she does every other day of the week. “This is classic Fake News,” she announced, in her briefing and in a social media post, from a news outlet that doesn’t “care ... about the truth” and is instead “running these lies,” which are “absolutely false” and “erroneous.”
The only unusual thing this time was the diatribe was directed at the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal. And not just any part of the Journal but its editorial board, which has been a clarion voice of the right in the United States for 135 years. Now, it is using that voice to defend its longtime motto — “free markets and free people” — by becoming a daily scold of the Trump administration for its constant violations of both.
Leavitt’s particular objection was over a minor point, about whether an adviser to President Donald Trump was on the now-infamous Signal group chat while in Moscow, but the White House was no doubt stung by Wednesday’s editorial overall, which criticized “JD Vance’s contempt for allies” and the vice president’s apparent willingness “to let the Houthis shut down shipping to spite the Europeans.” The editorial suggested Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had been “cavalier about the details of incoming military strikes” and was “silly” to try to “shift the blame for the fiasco on the journalist who was put on the chat.” It suggested Trump negotiator Steve Witkoff “is out of his depth in dealing with world crises,” and it warned that “America’s allies may conclude they can no longer trust the U.S. in a crisis.”
After Leavitt’s rebuke, the Journal came back at the administration even harder in Thursday’s paper. “The White House won’t let bad enough alone when it comes to the Signal app fiasco,” it thundered. While conceding the White House’s point about the adviser’s phone, it blasted the administration’s “defensive insistence that the chat didn’t disclose any ‘war plans,’ which is a weak attempt at obfuscation.” Criticizing Hegseth for trying to dismiss the flap as a hoax, it concluded that the administration “seems to think it can bully its way through anything by shouting Fake News and attacking the press” but should instead “take the loss.”
The Journal paired this with another editorial in Thursday’s paper on Republicans’ “shock” loss of a special election in a heavily Republican area of Pennsylvania. “Even voters who like the GOP’s policy agenda could be jolted by the impression of chaos in Washington, plus Mr. Trump’s recent focus on retribution,” it wrote, warning against following “out-of-touch leaders down ideological rabbit holes.” The day before, the Journal denounced the “dumb-and-dumber trade war” and Trump’s desire to “sabotage America with protectionism.”
We have seen entirely too much cowering and capitulation in the face of Trump’s threats: by the Paul Weiss law firm and Columbia University, by Meta and much of Silicon Valley, by Big Pharma and other industries, by mostly supine congressional Republicans, by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (in the eyes of many on the left), and by media outlets. But in a crisis, courage can be found in unexpected places. This is why it’s heartening to see some on the right (beyond the usual never-Trumpers) beginning to speak out about Trump’s overreach. We might be seeing the first cracks in MAGA unity, which Trump has maintained by threats and fear.
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Alabama), who lead the Senate and House Armed Services committees, respectively, pushed back firmly against the administration’s plans to restructure the military and retreat from Europe, saying they “will not accept” changes without congressional approval. Wicker has also said he is directing the administration to preserve documents in the Signal group chat matter, as his committee begins an inquiry into the fiasco. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota), Sen. Mike Rounds (R-South Dakota), Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-North Dakota) and others pushed back firmly against the administration in the Signal screwup, directing them to “own it and fix it,” as Thune put it. A Republican Jewish Coalition board member and GOP fundraiser called on Trump’s lead peace negotiator, Steve Witkoff, to resign for his “utter incompetence” in dealing with Vladimir Putin and with Hamas.
Some in the MAGA echo chamber are likewise pushing back. Fox News host Laura Ingraham was skeptical of national security adviser Michael Waltz as he tried to explain how he added Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s number to his group chat (“Somehow it gets sucked in”). Fox News’s chief national security correspondent said her sources told her “what was shared may have been FAR MORE sensitive” than the term “war plans” conveys. Broadcaster Piers Morgan pointed out that if “this had happened on [Joe] Biden’s watch, Republicans would have rightly gone berserk.” The (Murdoch-owned) New York Post branded the flap “OPERATION OVERSHARE,” and Fox News contributor Andrew McCarthy wrote a piece for the paper arguing: “It is undeniable, or at least it should be, that ‘information providing advance warning that the US or its allies are preparing an attack’ is to be classified as ‘top secret.’”
The courts have risen to the occasion in restraining Trump, from dozens of trial judges across the country to the chief justice. When an appeals court this week rejected the administration’s appeal of Judge James Boasberg’s order in the Venezuelan deportation case, Judge Karen Henderson, a George H.W. Bush appointee, wrote in her opinion that the administration was “incorrect” to claim that it was immune from judicial review and that the lower-court judge’s order was written “for a quintessentially valid purpose.”
The Journal’s editorial board has been tough on Trump from the start of his term. But lately, it has run one editorial after the other excoriating his positions on trade, national security and the law. It blasted “the administration’s propensity to fall for Russian propaganda,” warning that it might be following in Neville Chamberlain’s footsteps when it comes to Ukraine. It admonished that “Taunting John Roberts is a lousy strategy,” that Trump “can’t defy court orders” and that Trump’s military reorganization “sounds more like an American retreat.” It said the calls to impeach “judges who rule against Trump are a corrosive stunt.” And it righteously declared, “Mr. Trump’s decision to use government power to punish [law] firms for representing clients breaks a cornerstone principle of American justice going back to John Adams and the Founders.”
Amen.
The administration has richly earned condemnation from right, left and center for its fast-and-loose handling of the government and the law. Let’s consider this week’s parade of horribles.
Trump and senior advisers called the Signal scandal a “hoax,” a “witch hunt” and “bulls---,” while blaming the “scumbags” at the Atlantic and a “defective” Signal app, while maintaining the ludicrous position that no classified information was shared in the chat. (“1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package). ... 1536: F-18 2nd Strike Starts — also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.”
Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on cars and threatened to impose 25 percent across-the-board tariffs next week against China and other countries that buy oil or gas from Venezuela. Trump said he will also impose sweeping “reciprocal tariffs” next week against a broad range of countries. Amid the turmoil, the Conference Board reported that consumer confidence fell in March for the fourth-straight month, to the lowest in more than four years.
Trump publicly agreed with Vance in disparaging European allies: “Yeah, I think they’ve been freeloading.” Vance’s wife, Usha, had to abandon plans to make a public visit to Greenland with Waltz, after furious reaction from Greenlanders over the Americans’ “highly aggressive” effort to “demonstrate power over us.” The Vances will instead visit a U.S. military base on the island. Danish media reports that shopkeepers and residents refused when “Americans” over the last week “knocked on doors and rang doorbells” to ask whether Greenlanders would meet with Usha Vance: “They have been told no, no, no, no, no, every time they [the Americans] have asked if they would like the vice president’s wife to visit.”
Witkoff gave a stunning interview to Tucker Carlson in which he said that Putin was “straight up” and not a “bad guy.” Witkoff accused Britain and France of “a posture and a pose” in their pro-Ukraine positions and said he was “100 percent” certain that Russia “doesn’t want to overrun Europe,” while embracing the Russian claim that people in the seized Ukrainian territory “want to be under Russian rule.” Witkoff recounted how “President Putin had commissioned a beautiful portrait of President Trump from the leading Russian artist” and how “when the president was shot, he went to his local church and met with his priest and prayed for the president.” (National intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard, meanwhile, testified to Congress that it was her “First Amendment right” to repost a social media message from a contributor to RT, a Russian propaganda outlet.)
The administration’s slash-first-ask-questions-later approach to the federal government hit the Department of Health and Human Services, which is reportedly cutting 20,000 jobs and dramatically scaling back the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at a time when measles is spreading and avian flu is threatening. The White House has canceled funding for studies of antiviral drugs and vaccines to fight future pandemics, as well as grants to track infectious diseases. It has hired a man who promotes the false claim that immunization causes autism to do a study on the topic. This comes as the administration is cutting off payments by paper checks to Social Security recipients, even as it backs away from its plans to cut phone services because of a fierce backlash. Its cuts to the IRS have been so severe that Treasury Department and IRS officials predict a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax revenue — or more than $500 billion — the Post’s Jacob Bogage reports.
In the rule-of-law category, Trump attacked the “Rigged System” of the federal judiciary, alleging “Corruption and Radicalism” in federal courts in New York and D.C. He linked to an article from a conspiracy site arguing that judges who oppose him could be guilty of “Sedition and Treason.” He issued an order attempting to destroy another law firm, Jenner & Block, by seeking to deny it security clearances and access to federal buildings and contracts because it once employed a lawyer who worked on a Justice Department probe of Trump during his first term. The president issued an order mandating proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections, seizing a power the Constitution assigns to the states and Congress. He mulled offering financial compensation to those convicted (and pardoned by Trump) for their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. And his cryptocurrency business launched a new coin to further enrich him and his family.
Finally, under the heading of miscellaneous weirdness, Trump expressed his wish at a Women’s History Month event to “be known as the fertilization president.” He complained that a portrait of him in the Colorado state capitol was “purposefully distorted.” And, hours after the first reports that four U.S. soldiers had gone missing during a NATO exercise in Lithuania near the border of Belarus, Trump appeared unaware. Asked by reporters whether he had been briefed, he replied, “No, I haven’t.”
When it comes to opposing Trump’s overreach, courage hasn’t been lacking. The law firm Perkins Coie, represented by Williams & Connolly, is fighting back against Trump’s vindictiveness. The Associated Press took the administration to court on Thursday over Trump’s banishment of the news organization from the Oval Office and Air Force One. Countless Americans have stood up to Trump — in court, on the streets, at town-hall events and rallies.
Still, the resistance from his natural allies appears to sting Trump in particular. Last week, he attacked the “absolutely terrible” work of Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich, apparently because she asked on air about the propriety of Trump hosting a Tesla marketing event at the White House. Brit Hume and others at the network came to her defense.
Trump has likewise seethed over Wall Street Journal editorials. When one argued late last month that his tariffs would “harm U.S. auto workers and Republican prospects in Michigan,” Trump fired off a post saying he “greatly appreciate[s]” when the Journal sides with him, “but then they come out with some real CLINKERS, like today’s Editorial. … They are sooo WRONG.”
When the Journal condemned Trump’s proposed tariffs against Mexico and Canada in late January as “the dumbest trade war in history” and an “economic assault on our neighbors,” the White House issued a statement saying the “Journal’s editorial page has supported America Last policies such as open borders and outsourcing for years now.” Days later, Trump denounced the “Globalist, and always wrong, Wall Street Journal” for supporting the “RIPOFF OF AMERICA.”
But the editorials keep coming. Politicizing the judiciary is a “disreputable racket.” Trump must act “within the bounds of American law.” The administration is pursuing the “Fool’s Gold of a Crypto Reserve.” Hegseth shut down the Pentagon’s internal think tank “for no good reason.” Trump’s “willy-nilly” tariffs “Whack Trump Voters” and “someone should sue” him for claiming emergency powers. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is “dangerous to public health.” Ending Secret Service protection for former aides facing threats from Iran is a “vindictive whim” and a “new low.” The Oval Office showdown with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Vance instigated “only helps Russia’s dictator.” The administration’s “rehabilitation of Vladimir Putin is especially hard to take.” Witkoff “parroted one specious Russian talking point after another.” Vance promotes an “abandon Ukraine strategy”; Trump “won’t tell the truth about which country started the war”; and the president’s vision is “less a brave new world than a reversion to a dangerous old one.”
When Trump pardoned the Jan. 6 offenders, the Journal denounced this “rotten message from a president about political violence done on his behalf. ... What happened that day is a stain on Mr. Trump’s legacy. By setting free the cop beaters, the president adds another.”
If the Journal’s editorialists can keep saying all this while neither fearing the wrath of Trump nor feeling the hammer of Murdoch, there might yet be hope for us all.
From the Wall Street Journal editorial board to Fox News, capitulation is on the way out.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
Wednesday found White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt doing what she does every other day of the week. “This is classic Fake News,” she announced, in her briefing and in a social media post, from a news outlet that doesn’t “care ... about the truth” and is instead “running these lies,” which are “absolutely false” and “erroneous.”
The only unusual thing this time was the diatribe was directed at the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal. And not just any part of the Journal but its editorial board, which has been a clarion voice of the right in the United States for 135 years. Now, it is using that voice to defend its longtime motto — “free markets and free people” — by becoming a daily scold of the Trump administration for its constant violations of both.
Leavitt’s particular objection was over a minor point, about whether an adviser to President Donald Trump was on the now-infamous Signal group chat while in Moscow, but the White House was no doubt stung by Wednesday’s editorial overall, which criticized “JD Vance’s contempt for allies” and the vice president’s apparent willingness “to let the Houthis shut down shipping to spite the Europeans.” The editorial suggested Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had been “cavalier about the details of incoming military strikes” and was “silly” to try to “shift the blame for the fiasco on the journalist who was put on the chat.” It suggested Trump negotiator Steve Witkoff “is out of his depth in dealing with world crises,” and it warned that “America’s allies may conclude they can no longer trust the U.S. in a crisis.”
After Leavitt’s rebuke, the Journal came back at the administration even harder in Thursday’s paper. “The White House won’t let bad enough alone when it comes to the Signal app fiasco,” it thundered. While conceding the White House’s point about the adviser’s phone, it blasted the administration’s “defensive insistence that the chat didn’t disclose any ‘war plans,’ which is a weak attempt at obfuscation.” Criticizing Hegseth for trying to dismiss the flap as a hoax, it concluded that the administration “seems to think it can bully its way through anything by shouting Fake News and attacking the press” but should instead “take the loss.”
The Journal paired this with another editorial in Thursday’s paper on Republicans’ “shock” loss of a special election in a heavily Republican area of Pennsylvania. “Even voters who like the GOP’s policy agenda could be jolted by the impression of chaos in Washington, plus Mr. Trump’s recent focus on retribution,” it wrote, warning against following “out-of-touch leaders down ideological rabbit holes.” The day before, the Journal denounced the “dumb-and-dumber trade war” and Trump’s desire to “sabotage America with protectionism.”
We have seen entirely too much cowering and capitulation in the face of Trump’s threats: by the Paul Weiss law firm and Columbia University, by Meta and much of Silicon Valley, by Big Pharma and other industries, by mostly supine congressional Republicans, by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (in the eyes of many on the left), and by media outlets. But in a crisis, courage can be found in unexpected places. This is why it’s heartening to see some on the right (beyond the usual never-Trumpers) beginning to speak out about Trump’s overreach. We might be seeing the first cracks in MAGA unity, which Trump has maintained by threats and fear.
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Alabama), who lead the Senate and House Armed Services committees, respectively, pushed back firmly against the administration’s plans to restructure the military and retreat from Europe, saying they “will not accept” changes without congressional approval. Wicker has also said he is directing the administration to preserve documents in the Signal group chat matter, as his committee begins an inquiry into the fiasco. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota), Sen. Mike Rounds (R-South Dakota), Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-North Dakota) and others pushed back firmly against the administration in the Signal screwup, directing them to “own it and fix it,” as Thune put it. A Republican Jewish Coalition board member and GOP fundraiser called on Trump’s lead peace negotiator, Steve Witkoff, to resign for his “utter incompetence” in dealing with Vladimir Putin and with Hamas.
Some in the MAGA echo chamber are likewise pushing back. Fox News host Laura Ingraham was skeptical of national security adviser Michael Waltz as he tried to explain how he added Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s number to his group chat (“Somehow it gets sucked in”). Fox News’s chief national security correspondent said her sources told her “what was shared may have been FAR MORE sensitive” than the term “war plans” conveys. Broadcaster Piers Morgan pointed out that if “this had happened on [Joe] Biden’s watch, Republicans would have rightly gone berserk.” The (Murdoch-owned) New York Post branded the flap “OPERATION OVERSHARE,” and Fox News contributor Andrew McCarthy wrote a piece for the paper arguing: “It is undeniable, or at least it should be, that ‘information providing advance warning that the US or its allies are preparing an attack’ is to be classified as ‘top secret.’”
The courts have risen to the occasion in restraining Trump, from dozens of trial judges across the country to the chief justice. When an appeals court this week rejected the administration’s appeal of Judge James Boasberg’s order in the Venezuelan deportation case, Judge Karen Henderson, a George H.W. Bush appointee, wrote in her opinion that the administration was “incorrect” to claim that it was immune from judicial review and that the lower-court judge’s order was written “for a quintessentially valid purpose.”
The Journal’s editorial board has been tough on Trump from the start of his term. But lately, it has run one editorial after the other excoriating his positions on trade, national security and the law. It blasted “the administration’s propensity to fall for Russian propaganda,” warning that it might be following in Neville Chamberlain’s footsteps when it comes to Ukraine. It admonished that “Taunting John Roberts is a lousy strategy,” that Trump “can’t defy court orders” and that Trump’s military reorganization “sounds more like an American retreat.” It said the calls to impeach “judges who rule against Trump are a corrosive stunt.” And it righteously declared, “Mr. Trump’s decision to use government power to punish [law] firms for representing clients breaks a cornerstone principle of American justice going back to John Adams and the Founders.”
Amen.
The administration has richly earned condemnation from right, left and center for its fast-and-loose handling of the government and the law. Let’s consider this week’s parade of horribles.
Trump and senior advisers called the Signal scandal a “hoax,” a “witch hunt” and “bulls---,” while blaming the “scumbags” at the Atlantic and a “defective” Signal app, while maintaining the ludicrous position that no classified information was shared in the chat. (“1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package). ... 1536: F-18 2nd Strike Starts — also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.”
Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on cars and threatened to impose 25 percent across-the-board tariffs next week against China and other countries that buy oil or gas from Venezuela. Trump said he will also impose sweeping “reciprocal tariffs” next week against a broad range of countries. Amid the turmoil, the Conference Board reported that consumer confidence fell in March for the fourth-straight month, to the lowest in more than four years.
Trump publicly agreed with Vance in disparaging European allies: “Yeah, I think they’ve been freeloading.” Vance’s wife, Usha, had to abandon plans to make a public visit to Greenland with Waltz, after furious reaction from Greenlanders over the Americans’ “highly aggressive” effort to “demonstrate power over us.” The Vances will instead visit a U.S. military base on the island. Danish media reports that shopkeepers and residents refused when “Americans” over the last week “knocked on doors and rang doorbells” to ask whether Greenlanders would meet with Usha Vance: “They have been told no, no, no, no, no, every time they [the Americans] have asked if they would like the vice president’s wife to visit.”
Witkoff gave a stunning interview to Tucker Carlson in which he said that Putin was “straight up” and not a “bad guy.” Witkoff accused Britain and France of “a posture and a pose” in their pro-Ukraine positions and said he was “100 percent” certain that Russia “doesn’t want to overrun Europe,” while embracing the Russian claim that people in the seized Ukrainian territory “want to be under Russian rule.” Witkoff recounted how “President Putin had commissioned a beautiful portrait of President Trump from the leading Russian artist” and how “when the president was shot, he went to his local church and met with his priest and prayed for the president.” (National intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard, meanwhile, testified to Congress that it was her “First Amendment right” to repost a social media message from a contributor to RT, a Russian propaganda outlet.)
The administration’s slash-first-ask-questions-later approach to the federal government hit the Department of Health and Human Services, which is reportedly cutting 20,000 jobs and dramatically scaling back the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at a time when measles is spreading and avian flu is threatening. The White House has canceled funding for studies of antiviral drugs and vaccines to fight future pandemics, as well as grants to track infectious diseases. It has hired a man who promotes the false claim that immunization causes autism to do a study on the topic. This comes as the administration is cutting off payments by paper checks to Social Security recipients, even as it backs away from its plans to cut phone services because of a fierce backlash. Its cuts to the IRS have been so severe that Treasury Department and IRS officials predict a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax revenue — or more than $500 billion — the Post’s Jacob Bogage reports.
In the rule-of-law category, Trump attacked the “Rigged System” of the federal judiciary, alleging “Corruption and Radicalism” in federal courts in New York and D.C. He linked to an article from a conspiracy site arguing that judges who oppose him could be guilty of “Sedition and Treason.” He issued an order attempting to destroy another law firm, Jenner & Block, by seeking to deny it security clearances and access to federal buildings and contracts because it once employed a lawyer who worked on a Justice Department probe of Trump during his first term. The president issued an order mandating proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections, seizing a power the Constitution assigns to the states and Congress. He mulled offering financial compensation to those convicted (and pardoned by Trump) for their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. And his cryptocurrency business launched a new coin to further enrich him and his family.
Finally, under the heading of miscellaneous weirdness, Trump expressed his wish at a Women’s History Month event to “be known as the fertilization president.” He complained that a portrait of him in the Colorado state capitol was “purposefully distorted.” And, hours after the first reports that four U.S. soldiers had gone missing during a NATO exercise in Lithuania near the border of Belarus, Trump appeared unaware. Asked by reporters whether he had been briefed, he replied, “No, I haven’t.”
When it comes to opposing Trump’s overreach, courage hasn’t been lacking. The law firm Perkins Coie, represented by Williams & Connolly, is fighting back against Trump’s vindictiveness. The Associated Press took the administration to court on Thursday over Trump’s banishment of the news organization from the Oval Office and Air Force One. Countless Americans have stood up to Trump — in court, on the streets, at town-hall events and rallies.
Still, the resistance from his natural allies appears to sting Trump in particular. Last week, he attacked the “absolutely terrible” work of Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich, apparently because she asked on air about the propriety of Trump hosting a Tesla marketing event at the White House. Brit Hume and others at the network came to her defense.
Trump has likewise seethed over Wall Street Journal editorials. When one argued late last month that his tariffs would “harm U.S. auto workers and Republican prospects in Michigan,” Trump fired off a post saying he “greatly appreciate[s]” when the Journal sides with him, “but then they come out with some real CLINKERS, like today’s Editorial. … They are sooo WRONG.”
When the Journal condemned Trump’s proposed tariffs against Mexico and Canada in late January as “the dumbest trade war in history” and an “economic assault on our neighbors,” the White House issued a statement saying the “Journal’s editorial page has supported America Last policies such as open borders and outsourcing for years now.” Days later, Trump denounced the “Globalist, and always wrong, Wall Street Journal” for supporting the “RIPOFF OF AMERICA.”
But the editorials keep coming. Politicizing the judiciary is a “disreputable racket.” Trump must act “within the bounds of American law.” The administration is pursuing the “Fool’s Gold of a Crypto Reserve.” Hegseth shut down the Pentagon’s internal think tank “for no good reason.” Trump’s “willy-nilly” tariffs “Whack Trump Voters” and “someone should sue” him for claiming emergency powers. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is “dangerous to public health.” Ending Secret Service protection for former aides facing threats from Iran is a “vindictive whim” and a “new low.” The Oval Office showdown with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Vance instigated “only helps Russia’s dictator.” The administration’s “rehabilitation of Vladimir Putin is especially hard to take.” Witkoff “parroted one specious Russian talking point after another.” Vance promotes an “abandon Ukraine strategy”; Trump “won’t tell the truth about which country started the war”; and the president’s vision is “less a brave new world than a reversion to a dangerous old one.”
When Trump pardoned the Jan. 6 offenders, the Journal denounced this “rotten message from a president about political violence done on his behalf. ... What happened that day is a stain on Mr. Trump’s legacy. By setting free the cop beaters, the president adds another.”
If the Journal’s editorialists can keep saying all this while neither fearing the wrath of Trump nor feeling the hammer of Murdoch, there might yet be hope for us all.
LONG WAITS, WAVES OF CALLS, WEBSITE CRASHES: SOCIAL SECURITY IS BREAKING DOWN
A flood of cuts led by Elon Musk has sent the agency into chaos as a new commissioner prepares to take charge.
By Lisa Rein, and, Hannah Natanson, The Washington Post
The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in 10 days this month because the servers were overloaded, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from logging in to their online accounts. In the field, office managers have resorted to answering phones in place of receptionists because so many employees have been pushed out. Amid all this, the agency no longer has a system to monitor customer experience because that office was eliminated as part of the cost-cutting efforts led by Elon Musk. And the phones keep ringing. And ringing.
The federal agency that delivers $1.5 trillion a year in earned benefits to 73 million retired workers, their survivors, and poor and disabled Americans is engulfed in crisis — further undermining the already struggling organization’s ability to provide reliable and quick service to vulnerable customers, according to internal documents and more than two dozen current and former agency employees and officials, customers and others who interact with Social Security.
Financial services executive Frank Bisignano is scheduled to face lawmakers Tuesday at a Senate confirmation hearing as President Donald Trump’s nominee to become the permanent commissioner. For now, the agency is run by a caretaker leader in his sixth week on the job who has raced to push out more than 12 percent of the staff of 57,000. He has conceded that the agency’s phone service “sucks” and acknowledged that Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is really in charge, pushing a single-minded mission to find benefits fraud despite vast evidence that the problem is overstated.
The turmoil is leaving many retirees, disabled claimants, and legal immigrants needing Social Security cards with less access or shut out of the system altogether, according to those familiar with the problems.
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“What’s going on is the destruction of the agency from the inside out, and it’s accelerating,” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said in an interview. “I have people approaching me all the time in their 70s and 80s, and they’re beside themselves. They don’t know what’s coming.”
Leland Dudek, who became acting commissioner after he fed data to Musk’s team behind his bosses’ backs, has issued a series of rapid-fire policy changes that have created chaos for front-line staff. Under pressure from the secretive Musk team, Dudek has pushed out dozens of officials with years of expertise in running Social Security’s complex benefit and information technology systems. Others have left in disgust.
The moves have upended an agency that, despite the popularity of its programs, has been underfunded for years, faces potential insolvency in a decade and has been led by four commissioners in five months — just one of them Senate-confirmed. The latest controversy came last week when Dudek threatened to shut down operations in response to a federal judge’s ruling against DOGE that he claimed would leave no one in the agency with access to beneficiaries’ personal information.
Alarmed lawmakers are straining to answer questions back home from angry constituents. Calls have flooded into congressional offices. AARP announced Monday that more than 2,000 people a week have called the retiree organization since early February — double the usual number — with concerns about whether benefits they paid for during their working careers will continue. Social Security is the primary source of income for about 40 percent of older Americans.
Trump has said repeatedly that the administration “won’t touch” Social Security, a promise that aides say applies to benefit levels that can be adjusted only by Congress. But in just six weeks, the cuts to staffing and offices have already taken a toll on access to benefits, officials and advocates say.
With aging technology systems and a $15 billion budget that has stayed relatively flat over a decade, Social Security was already struggling to serve the public amid an explosion of retiring baby boomers. The staff that reviews claims for two disability programs was on life support following massive pandemic turnover — and still takes 233 days on average to review an initial claim.
But current and former officials, advocates and others who interact with the agency — many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution — said Social Security has been damaged even further by the rapid cuts and chaos of Trump’s first two months in office. Many current and former officials fear the push is part of a long-sought effort by conservatives to privatize all or part of the agency. “They’re creating a fire to require them to come and put it out,” said one high-ranking official who took early retirement this month.
Dudek, who was elevated from a mid-level data analyst in the anti-fraud office, hurried to cut costs when he took over in mid-February, canceling research contracts, offering early-retirement incentives and buyouts across the agency, and consolidating programs and regional offices. Entire offices, including those handling civil rights and modernization, were driven out. The 10 regional offices that oversee field operations were slashed to four.
At first, the DOGE team was obsessed by false claims that millions of deceased people were receiving benefits. Then came new mandates designed to address alleged fraud: Direct-deposit transactions and identity authentication, operations that affect almost everyone receiving benefits, will no longer be able to be done by phone. Customers with computers will go through the process online; those without will wait in line at their local field office. A change announced internally last week will require legal immigrants with authorization to work in the United States and newly naturalized citizens to apply for or update their Social Security cards in person, eliminating a long-standing practice that sent the cards automatically through the mail. “We realize this is a significant change and there will be a significant impact to customers,” Doris Diaz, deputy commissioner of operations, told the field staff Monday during a briefing on the changes, a recording of which was obtained by The Washington Post. She said the agency was “working on a process” for homeless and homebound customers who cannot use computers or come into an office — and acknowledged that service levels will decline.
In the weeks before that briefing, phone calls to Social Security surged — with questions from anxious customers wondering whether their benefits had been or would be cut and desperate to get an in-person field office appointment. That is, if they could get through to a live person. Depending on the time of day, a recorded message tells callers their wait on hold will last more than 120 minutes or 180 minutes. Some callers report being on hold for four or five hours. A callback function was available only three out of 12 times a Post reporter called the toll-free line last week, presumably because the queue that day was so long that the call would not be returned by close of business.
The recording that 66-year-old Kathy Martinez heard when she called the toll-free number two weeks ago from the San Francisco Bay Area said her hold time would be more than three hours — she was calling to ask what her retirement benefits would come to if she filed for them now or waited until she turned 70. She hung up and tried again last week at 7 a.m. Pacific time. The wait was more than 120 minutes, but she was offered a callback option, and in two hours she spoke with a “phenomenally kind person who called me,” she said. Martinez said she wants to wait to file for benefits to maximize her check. But “I’m kind of thinking, I wonder if I should take it now. When I apply, I will do it over the phone. But will there still be a phone system?”
Aging, inefficient phone systems have dogged Social Security for years. A modernization contract with Verizon begun under the first Trump administration suffered multiple delays, system crashes and other problems. As commissioner in the last year of the Biden administration, former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley moved the project to a new contractor, Amazon Web Services, and data shows that the average wait time for the toll-free line was down to 50 minutes, half of today’s average. But O’Malley ran out of time to switch the new system to field office phones, he said.
Now a perfect storm has overtaken the system. Turnover that’s normally higher than 10 percent has worsened at the 24 call centers across the country. Some employees took early retirement and buyout offers — a number that Dudek said was “not huge” but that current and former officials estimate could be significant.
Asked about worsening phone service, Dudek told reporters in a call last week that “a 24 percent answer rate is not acceptable.” “I want people who want to get to a person to get to a person,” he said, adding that “all options are on the table” to improve phone service, including outsourcing some call center work.
The new limits on phone transactions take effect at the end of the month, but field offices have been deluged for weeks, even as DOGE is targeting an unspecified number of field and hearing offices for closure over the next three years.
Another employee in a regional office said the staff was told at a recent briefing that field offices across the country are seeing “exponential growth” in foot traffic. The elderly are not only calling but showing up at bricks-and-mortar buildings to ask about the DOGE-led changes.
Scammers are already taking advantage of the chaotic moment, according to internal emails obtained by The Post. Last week, employees in several offices were warned that seniors were reporting receiving emails from accounts pretending to be linked to Social Security. The messages asked recipients to verify their identity to keep receiving benefits. “Sounds like scammers are jumping on this press release to trick the elderly,” one Social Security staffer wrote to colleagues Thursday, referring to the agency’s announcement of the in-person verification program.
In Baltimore, an employee who works on critical payment systems said nearly a quarter of his team is already gone or will soon be out the door as a result of resignations and retirements. Talented software developers and analysts were quick to secure high-paying jobs in the private sector, he said — and the reduction in highly skilled staff is already having consequences.
His office is supposed to complete several software updates and modernization processes required by law within the next few weeks and months, he said. But with the departures, it seems increasingly likely that it will miss those deadlines. His team is also called on to fix complicated technology glitches that stop payments. But many of the experts who make those fixes are exiting. “That has to get cleaned up on a case-by-case basis, and the experts in how to do that are leaving,” the Baltimore employee said. “We will have cases that get stuck, and they’re not going to be able to get fixed. People could be out of benefits for months.”
Meanwhile, a DOGE-imposed spending freeze has left many field offices without paper, pens and phone headsets — at the exact moment phone calls are spiking, the employee in Indiana said. The freeze drove all federal credit cards to a $1 limit, and purchasers for the agency were reduced to about a dozen people for 1,300 offices, said one employee in the Northeast.
The service issues keep bubbling up to members of Congress. Hundreds of Maryland residents turned out for a town hall meeting last week hosted by Baltimore County Council member Pat Young about a mile from Social Security headquarters. Asked by one retiree in the audience to provide “a little bit of hope” that his Social Security benefits would not be cut, Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Maryland) conceded, “The truth of the matter is that we don’t know what they intend.”
A flood of cuts led by Elon Musk has sent the agency into chaos as a new commissioner prepares to take charge.
By Lisa Rein, and, Hannah Natanson, The Washington Post
The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in 10 days this month because the servers were overloaded, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from logging in to their online accounts. In the field, office managers have resorted to answering phones in place of receptionists because so many employees have been pushed out. Amid all this, the agency no longer has a system to monitor customer experience because that office was eliminated as part of the cost-cutting efforts led by Elon Musk. And the phones keep ringing. And ringing.
The federal agency that delivers $1.5 trillion a year in earned benefits to 73 million retired workers, their survivors, and poor and disabled Americans is engulfed in crisis — further undermining the already struggling organization’s ability to provide reliable and quick service to vulnerable customers, according to internal documents and more than two dozen current and former agency employees and officials, customers and others who interact with Social Security.
Financial services executive Frank Bisignano is scheduled to face lawmakers Tuesday at a Senate confirmation hearing as President Donald Trump’s nominee to become the permanent commissioner. For now, the agency is run by a caretaker leader in his sixth week on the job who has raced to push out more than 12 percent of the staff of 57,000. He has conceded that the agency’s phone service “sucks” and acknowledged that Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service is really in charge, pushing a single-minded mission to find benefits fraud despite vast evidence that the problem is overstated.
The turmoil is leaving many retirees, disabled claimants, and legal immigrants needing Social Security cards with less access or shut out of the system altogether, according to those familiar with the problems.
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“What’s going on is the destruction of the agency from the inside out, and it’s accelerating,” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said in an interview. “I have people approaching me all the time in their 70s and 80s, and they’re beside themselves. They don’t know what’s coming.”
Leland Dudek, who became acting commissioner after he fed data to Musk’s team behind his bosses’ backs, has issued a series of rapid-fire policy changes that have created chaos for front-line staff. Under pressure from the secretive Musk team, Dudek has pushed out dozens of officials with years of expertise in running Social Security’s complex benefit and information technology systems. Others have left in disgust.
The moves have upended an agency that, despite the popularity of its programs, has been underfunded for years, faces potential insolvency in a decade and has been led by four commissioners in five months — just one of them Senate-confirmed. The latest controversy came last week when Dudek threatened to shut down operations in response to a federal judge’s ruling against DOGE that he claimed would leave no one in the agency with access to beneficiaries’ personal information.
Alarmed lawmakers are straining to answer questions back home from angry constituents. Calls have flooded into congressional offices. AARP announced Monday that more than 2,000 people a week have called the retiree organization since early February — double the usual number — with concerns about whether benefits they paid for during their working careers will continue. Social Security is the primary source of income for about 40 percent of older Americans.
Trump has said repeatedly that the administration “won’t touch” Social Security, a promise that aides say applies to benefit levels that can be adjusted only by Congress. But in just six weeks, the cuts to staffing and offices have already taken a toll on access to benefits, officials and advocates say.
With aging technology systems and a $15 billion budget that has stayed relatively flat over a decade, Social Security was already struggling to serve the public amid an explosion of retiring baby boomers. The staff that reviews claims for two disability programs was on life support following massive pandemic turnover — and still takes 233 days on average to review an initial claim.
But current and former officials, advocates and others who interact with the agency — many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution — said Social Security has been damaged even further by the rapid cuts and chaos of Trump’s first two months in office. Many current and former officials fear the push is part of a long-sought effort by conservatives to privatize all or part of the agency. “They’re creating a fire to require them to come and put it out,” said one high-ranking official who took early retirement this month.
Dudek, who was elevated from a mid-level data analyst in the anti-fraud office, hurried to cut costs when he took over in mid-February, canceling research contracts, offering early-retirement incentives and buyouts across the agency, and consolidating programs and regional offices. Entire offices, including those handling civil rights and modernization, were driven out. The 10 regional offices that oversee field operations were slashed to four.
At first, the DOGE team was obsessed by false claims that millions of deceased people were receiving benefits. Then came new mandates designed to address alleged fraud: Direct-deposit transactions and identity authentication, operations that affect almost everyone receiving benefits, will no longer be able to be done by phone. Customers with computers will go through the process online; those without will wait in line at their local field office. A change announced internally last week will require legal immigrants with authorization to work in the United States and newly naturalized citizens to apply for or update their Social Security cards in person, eliminating a long-standing practice that sent the cards automatically through the mail. “We realize this is a significant change and there will be a significant impact to customers,” Doris Diaz, deputy commissioner of operations, told the field staff Monday during a briefing on the changes, a recording of which was obtained by The Washington Post. She said the agency was “working on a process” for homeless and homebound customers who cannot use computers or come into an office — and acknowledged that service levels will decline.
In the weeks before that briefing, phone calls to Social Security surged — with questions from anxious customers wondering whether their benefits had been or would be cut and desperate to get an in-person field office appointment. That is, if they could get through to a live person. Depending on the time of day, a recorded message tells callers their wait on hold will last more than 120 minutes or 180 minutes. Some callers report being on hold for four or five hours. A callback function was available only three out of 12 times a Post reporter called the toll-free line last week, presumably because the queue that day was so long that the call would not be returned by close of business.
The recording that 66-year-old Kathy Martinez heard when she called the toll-free number two weeks ago from the San Francisco Bay Area said her hold time would be more than three hours — she was calling to ask what her retirement benefits would come to if she filed for them now or waited until she turned 70. She hung up and tried again last week at 7 a.m. Pacific time. The wait was more than 120 minutes, but she was offered a callback option, and in two hours she spoke with a “phenomenally kind person who called me,” she said. Martinez said she wants to wait to file for benefits to maximize her check. But “I’m kind of thinking, I wonder if I should take it now. When I apply, I will do it over the phone. But will there still be a phone system?”
Aging, inefficient phone systems have dogged Social Security for years. A modernization contract with Verizon begun under the first Trump administration suffered multiple delays, system crashes and other problems. As commissioner in the last year of the Biden administration, former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley moved the project to a new contractor, Amazon Web Services, and data shows that the average wait time for the toll-free line was down to 50 minutes, half of today’s average. But O’Malley ran out of time to switch the new system to field office phones, he said.
Now a perfect storm has overtaken the system. Turnover that’s normally higher than 10 percent has worsened at the 24 call centers across the country. Some employees took early retirement and buyout offers — a number that Dudek said was “not huge” but that current and former officials estimate could be significant.
Asked about worsening phone service, Dudek told reporters in a call last week that “a 24 percent answer rate is not acceptable.” “I want people who want to get to a person to get to a person,” he said, adding that “all options are on the table” to improve phone service, including outsourcing some call center work.
The new limits on phone transactions take effect at the end of the month, but field offices have been deluged for weeks, even as DOGE is targeting an unspecified number of field and hearing offices for closure over the next three years.
Another employee in a regional office said the staff was told at a recent briefing that field offices across the country are seeing “exponential growth” in foot traffic. The elderly are not only calling but showing up at bricks-and-mortar buildings to ask about the DOGE-led changes.
Scammers are already taking advantage of the chaotic moment, according to internal emails obtained by The Post. Last week, employees in several offices were warned that seniors were reporting receiving emails from accounts pretending to be linked to Social Security. The messages asked recipients to verify their identity to keep receiving benefits. “Sounds like scammers are jumping on this press release to trick the elderly,” one Social Security staffer wrote to colleagues Thursday, referring to the agency’s announcement of the in-person verification program.
In Baltimore, an employee who works on critical payment systems said nearly a quarter of his team is already gone or will soon be out the door as a result of resignations and retirements. Talented software developers and analysts were quick to secure high-paying jobs in the private sector, he said — and the reduction in highly skilled staff is already having consequences.
His office is supposed to complete several software updates and modernization processes required by law within the next few weeks and months, he said. But with the departures, it seems increasingly likely that it will miss those deadlines. His team is also called on to fix complicated technology glitches that stop payments. But many of the experts who make those fixes are exiting. “That has to get cleaned up on a case-by-case basis, and the experts in how to do that are leaving,” the Baltimore employee said. “We will have cases that get stuck, and they’re not going to be able to get fixed. People could be out of benefits for months.”
Meanwhile, a DOGE-imposed spending freeze has left many field offices without paper, pens and phone headsets — at the exact moment phone calls are spiking, the employee in Indiana said. The freeze drove all federal credit cards to a $1 limit, and purchasers for the agency were reduced to about a dozen people for 1,300 offices, said one employee in the Northeast.
The service issues keep bubbling up to members of Congress. Hundreds of Maryland residents turned out for a town hall meeting last week hosted by Baltimore County Council member Pat Young about a mile from Social Security headquarters. Asked by one retiree in the audience to provide “a little bit of hope” that his Social Security benefits would not be cut, Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Maryland) conceded, “The truth of the matter is that we don’t know what they intend.”
OFFICIALS IN LEAKED CHAT HAD CRITICIZED CLINTON’S USE OF PRIVATE EMAIL SERVER
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who disclosed war plans in a Signal group with a journalist, condemned Mrs. Clinton’s actions in November 2016.
By Karoun Demirjian, The New York Times
Top defense officials who mistakenly included a journalist in an encrypted group chat about airstrikes in Yemen engaged in what officials have described as a devastating breach of national security. But just a few years ago, several members of that group chat criticized Hillary Clinton for using a private email server to conduct official business when she was secretary of state under President Barack Obama.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who disclosed the war plans in the chat this month, condemned Mrs. Clinton’s actions during a Fox News segment in November 2016.
“Any security professional — military, government or otherwise — would be fired on the spot for this type of conduct and criminally prosecuted for being so reckless with this kind of information,” he said.
Mr. Hegseth was also adamant that anyone engaging in similar acts should be summarily punished. “People have gone to jail for one one-hundredth of what, even one one-thousandth of what Hillary Clinton did,” he said during a Fox Business segment that same month.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, another participant in the encrypted group chat, also voiced those sentiments in a Fox News appearance in 2016, when he was running for president. “People are going to be held accountable if they broke the laws of this country,” he said. He added that “nobody is above the law, not even Hillary Clinton.”
Several Defense Department officials said on Monday that by putting U.S. war plans into a commercial chat app, Mr. Hegseth risked compromising national security — and had potentially violated the Espionage Act, a law that governs how national security information is handled.
Mr. Waltz had reached out to Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, shortly before Mr. Goldberg was added to the group of officials discussing the planned strikes on Yemen this month, Mr. Goldberg wrote in an article published on Monday.
Using a commercial app to plan and coordinate military operations would be a violation of rules dictating that sensitive operations should be discussed only on secure lines and officially approved platforms to reduce the risk of adversaries spying on communications that could compromise national security.
The officials who participated in the Signal chat have tried to downplay their actions since the Atlantic article was published.
Mrs. Clinton weighed in on social media on Monday with a screenshot of the top of the Atlantic article and an emoji of a pair of eyes. “You have got to be kidding me,” she wrote.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who disclosed war plans in a Signal group with a journalist, condemned Mrs. Clinton’s actions in November 2016.
By Karoun Demirjian, The New York Times
Top defense officials who mistakenly included a journalist in an encrypted group chat about airstrikes in Yemen engaged in what officials have described as a devastating breach of national security. But just a few years ago, several members of that group chat criticized Hillary Clinton for using a private email server to conduct official business when she was secretary of state under President Barack Obama.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who disclosed the war plans in the chat this month, condemned Mrs. Clinton’s actions during a Fox News segment in November 2016.
“Any security professional — military, government or otherwise — would be fired on the spot for this type of conduct and criminally prosecuted for being so reckless with this kind of information,” he said.
Mr. Hegseth was also adamant that anyone engaging in similar acts should be summarily punished. “People have gone to jail for one one-hundredth of what, even one one-thousandth of what Hillary Clinton did,” he said during a Fox Business segment that same month.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, another participant in the encrypted group chat, also voiced those sentiments in a Fox News appearance in 2016, when he was running for president. “People are going to be held accountable if they broke the laws of this country,” he said. He added that “nobody is above the law, not even Hillary Clinton.”
Several Defense Department officials said on Monday that by putting U.S. war plans into a commercial chat app, Mr. Hegseth risked compromising national security — and had potentially violated the Espionage Act, a law that governs how national security information is handled.
Mr. Waltz had reached out to Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, shortly before Mr. Goldberg was added to the group of officials discussing the planned strikes on Yemen this month, Mr. Goldberg wrote in an article published on Monday.
Using a commercial app to plan and coordinate military operations would be a violation of rules dictating that sensitive operations should be discussed only on secure lines and officially approved platforms to reduce the risk of adversaries spying on communications that could compromise national security.
The officials who participated in the Signal chat have tried to downplay their actions since the Atlantic article was published.
Mrs. Clinton weighed in on social media on Monday with a screenshot of the top of the Atlantic article and an emoji of a pair of eyes. “You have got to be kidding me,” she wrote.
HOW DOGE IS MAKING GOVERNMENT ALMOST COMICALLY INEFFICIENT
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
It’s as though “efficiency” isn’t the actual goal.
A senior aide to President Donald Trump once said the administration hoped to traumatize civil servants, an objective it has handily accomplished through arbitrary layoffs and other indignities. But government workers are not the only victims.
Taxpayer dollars are being abused, too, as the “Department of Government Efficiency” makes the federal government almost comically inefficient.
For example, many have been diverted away from their usual responsibilities in order to scrub forbidden words from agency documents, as part of Trump’s crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
“All this talk of warfighter ethos, and our ‘priority’ is making sure there are no three-year-old tweets with the word ‘diversity’ in them,” said a Pentagon employee. “Crazy town.”
What counts as DEI wrongthink also changes almost daily, meaning employees must perform the same word-cleansing tasks repeatedly.
One NASA employee said they were asked multiple times to scour performance plans and contracts for offending terms. The first sanitization came shortly after Trump’s Day 1 executive order regarding DEI, and resulted in deleting references to “diversity” and “equity.” Weeks later, more banned words (“environmental justice,” “socioeconomic”) were identified, and the scrubbing began anew. Mere hours after that, someone in upper management emailed staff again to say those new deletion orders were “not NASA policy and should not be used,” and told workers to simply check the contracts for compliance with the executive order.
Whatever that means. Meanwhile, NASA’s real work languishes.
Another Kafkaesque executive order requires agency heads to send the White House a list, within 60 days, of their agency’s “unconstitutional regulations” — the ultimate “When did you stop beating your wife?”-style directive.
“Obviously, no agency is going to say, ‘Whoops! You caught me! I wrote that unconstitutional regulation and had it approved through [the Office of Management and Budget] before you asked me. Sorry!’” a Department of Health and Human Services employee told me. Agencies are weighing whether to affirm everything on their books as being constitutional or offer up some token regulations as tribute. Both options could attract further retaliation.
Meanwhile, some federal payments have stopped. Credit cards used for routine purchases have been canceled or had their limits shrunk to $1. Contracts are being arbitrarily canceled midway through. DOGE officials appear to wrongly believe this saves money.
But there are costs to, say, not feeding the Transportation Security Administration’s bomb-sniffing dogs. And if contracts lapse when they could have been easily extended, projects must restart the time-consuming and expensive bid process. Again, this stops other critical work, costing both the government and the public.
At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, no contracts may be initiated or extended without sign-off from the commerce secretary, creating a bottleneck. One NOAA contract that expires soon is for maintenance and repair of the all-hazards weather radio network, which broadcasts tornado warnings and watches, among other life-and-death alerts. The contract has been stuck in limbo, just as an already-deadly tornado season is getting underway.
“They’re like a kid in a nuclear power plant running around hitting buttons,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service (which actually focuses on government efficiency), when asked about DOGE’s measures. “They have no sense of the cascade of consequences they’re causing.”
These new directives are not only wasting government manpower and taxpayer dollars. They’re also resulting in worse services for Americans.
The Social Security Administration announced on Tuesday that it will require millions of people to visit their regional office in person to file claims (or use an online system that retirees might have trouble navigating) rather than by phone, as beneficiaries had been able to do. Meanwhile, the agency is laying off workers and closing those field offices. If you’re one of the unlucky Americans whom the agency has prematurely labeled “dead,” good luck getting your benefits reinstated.
The IRS, meanwhile, is deleting all non-English forms and notices, employees were told this week. This will mean less taxpayer compliance and more work for employees. Lose-lose, if you’re trying to keep the government efficiently run.
These days, that’s a big “if.”
By Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post
It’s as though “efficiency” isn’t the actual goal.
A senior aide to President Donald Trump once said the administration hoped to traumatize civil servants, an objective it has handily accomplished through arbitrary layoffs and other indignities. But government workers are not the only victims.
Taxpayer dollars are being abused, too, as the “Department of Government Efficiency” makes the federal government almost comically inefficient.
- At the IRS, employees spend Mondays queued up at shared computers to submit their DOGE-mandated “five things I did last week” emails. Meanwhile, taxpayer customer service calls go unanswered.
- At the Bureau of Land Management, federal surveyors are no longer permitted to buy replacement equipment. So, when a shovel breaks at a field site, they can’t just drive to the nearest town or hardware store. Instead, work stops as employees track down one of the few managers nationwide authorized to file an official procurement form and order new parts.
- At the Food and Drug Administration, leadership canceled the agency’s subscription to LexisNexis, an online reference tool that employees need to conduct regulatory research. Some workers might not have noticed this loss yet, however, because the agency’s incompetently planned return-to-office order this week left them too busy hunting for insufficient parking and toilet paper. (Multiple bathrooms have run out of bath tissue, employees report.)
For example, many have been diverted away from their usual responsibilities in order to scrub forbidden words from agency documents, as part of Trump’s crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
“All this talk of warfighter ethos, and our ‘priority’ is making sure there are no three-year-old tweets with the word ‘diversity’ in them,” said a Pentagon employee. “Crazy town.”
What counts as DEI wrongthink also changes almost daily, meaning employees must perform the same word-cleansing tasks repeatedly.
One NASA employee said they were asked multiple times to scour performance plans and contracts for offending terms. The first sanitization came shortly after Trump’s Day 1 executive order regarding DEI, and resulted in deleting references to “diversity” and “equity.” Weeks later, more banned words (“environmental justice,” “socioeconomic”) were identified, and the scrubbing began anew. Mere hours after that, someone in upper management emailed staff again to say those new deletion orders were “not NASA policy and should not be used,” and told workers to simply check the contracts for compliance with the executive order.
Whatever that means. Meanwhile, NASA’s real work languishes.
Another Kafkaesque executive order requires agency heads to send the White House a list, within 60 days, of their agency’s “unconstitutional regulations” — the ultimate “When did you stop beating your wife?”-style directive.
“Obviously, no agency is going to say, ‘Whoops! You caught me! I wrote that unconstitutional regulation and had it approved through [the Office of Management and Budget] before you asked me. Sorry!’” a Department of Health and Human Services employee told me. Agencies are weighing whether to affirm everything on their books as being constitutional or offer up some token regulations as tribute. Both options could attract further retaliation.
Meanwhile, some federal payments have stopped. Credit cards used for routine purchases have been canceled or had their limits shrunk to $1. Contracts are being arbitrarily canceled midway through. DOGE officials appear to wrongly believe this saves money.
But there are costs to, say, not feeding the Transportation Security Administration’s bomb-sniffing dogs. And if contracts lapse when they could have been easily extended, projects must restart the time-consuming and expensive bid process. Again, this stops other critical work, costing both the government and the public.
At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, no contracts may be initiated or extended without sign-off from the commerce secretary, creating a bottleneck. One NOAA contract that expires soon is for maintenance and repair of the all-hazards weather radio network, which broadcasts tornado warnings and watches, among other life-and-death alerts. The contract has been stuck in limbo, just as an already-deadly tornado season is getting underway.
“They’re like a kid in a nuclear power plant running around hitting buttons,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service (which actually focuses on government efficiency), when asked about DOGE’s measures. “They have no sense of the cascade of consequences they’re causing.”
These new directives are not only wasting government manpower and taxpayer dollars. They’re also resulting in worse services for Americans.
The Social Security Administration announced on Tuesday that it will require millions of people to visit their regional office in person to file claims (or use an online system that retirees might have trouble navigating) rather than by phone, as beneficiaries had been able to do. Meanwhile, the agency is laying off workers and closing those field offices. If you’re one of the unlucky Americans whom the agency has prematurely labeled “dead,” good luck getting your benefits reinstated.
The IRS, meanwhile, is deleting all non-English forms and notices, employees were told this week. This will mean less taxpayer compliance and more work for employees. Lose-lose, if you’re trying to keep the government efficiently run.
These days, that’s a big “if.”
DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY? I’M HERE FOR YOU, ELON MUSK.
‘Due process’ might sound technical, but it was elemental to our founding.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
The man President Donald Trump put in charge of taking a chain saw to federal agencies showed once again this week that he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the government he is dismembering.
“This is a judicial coup,” Elon Musk proclaimed, reacting to the growing list of federal judges who have moved to halt the Trump administration’s headfirst plunge into lawlessness. “We need 60 senators to impeach the judges and restore rule of the people.”
How did this guy pass his citizenship test?
As the framers wrote in the Constitution, it is the House, not the Senate, that has “the sole power of impeachment.” And the Senate needs “the concurrence of two thirds of the members present” — 67, assuming full attendance, not 60 — to convict.
More important, the framers wrote that judges hold their offices for life “during good behavior” — which has been understood to mean they can only be impeached for corruption. That is how it has been since the 1805 impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, when Chief Justice John Marshall, himself a Founding Father, convinced the Senate to abandon the idea that “a judge giving a legal opinion contrary to the will of the legislature is liable to impeachment.”
Musk, growing up in apartheid-era South Africa, probably wasn’t taught to revere constitutional democracy. But what’s the excuse of his colleagues in the Trump administration?
They have issued scores of executive orders that flatly contradict the Constitution and the laws of the land. Apparently, they are hoping a submissive Supreme Court will reimagine the Constitution to suit Trump’s whims — and federal judges have reacted as they should, by slapping down these lawless power grabs. As such, the administration is on a prodigious losing streak in court. Judges, in preliminary rulings, have already blocked the administration more than 50 times. Over the past week alone, judges:
There’s an obvious reason Trump is getting swatted down so often: He’s breaking the law. Instead of changing course, the administration is now trying to discredit the courts — and the rule of law. White House adviser Stephen Miller denounced “insane edicts of radical rogue judges” and declared that a judge had “no authority” to stop Trump. Border czar Tom Homan went full-on authoritarian on Fox News: “We’re not stopping,” he said of the deportation flights a judge had temporarily halted. “I don’t care what the judges think.”
Trump called the U.S. district judge in the case, James Boasberg (appointed to the bench by George W. Bush and elevated by Barack Obama) a “radical left lunatic,” who, “like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” This drew a quick rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts (in case Musk doesn’t know this, he’s also a Bush appointee), who reminded Trump: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.” Trump later told Fox News that he “can’t” defy a court order — welcome news, except he apparently had done exactly that in more than one case — while arguing that something had to be done “when you have a rogue judge.”
Someone has gone rogue here, but it isn’t the judge. Boasberg’s actions are squarely within the best tradition of the judiciary, for they are in defense of principle, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, that no person in this country, citizen or alien, may be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” This is precisely what the Trump administration denied to those it deported and imprisoned.
People hold signs during in a pro-government march in defense of Venezuelan migrants in Caracas, Venezuela, on March 18. (Ronald Pena R/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Violations of due process have been alleged in dozens of the cases against Trump’s executive actions: terminating workers and programs; eliminating grants; violating union contracts; denying care to transgender people; banning the Associated Press from the White House; abolishing civil rights enforcement and everything else the administration calls “DEI”; harassing law firms; and summarily deporting migrants. All of these were done without notice, without recourse, without adjudication and without clarity about which laws give the president the power to do these things.
“Due process” might sound technical, but it was elemental to our founding and remains at the heart of our legal system. Trump’s flagrant denial of due process is so radical that it isn’t only at odds with 200 years of U.S. law — it’s also contrary to another 600 years of English law before that. For the benefit of Musk (who doesn’t seem to know about such things) and his colleagues (who don’t seem to care), perhaps a refresher is in order.
For this, I called Jeffrey Rosen, who runs the nonpartisan National Constitution Center, which finds consensus between conservative and liberal scholars. The concept of due process, he explained, is in the Magna Carta, which in 1215 asserted that “no free man shall be arrested or imprisoned ... except by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” Britain’s 1628 Petition of Right, written during parliament’s struggle against the dictatorial Charles I, holds that “no man ... should be put out of his land or tenement nor taken nor imprisoned nor disherited nor put to death without being brought to answer by due process of law.” The king, who imposed forced loans on his subjects and imprisoned people without trials, was beheaded during the English civil war.
“That example completely inspired the American Revolution,” Rosen explained. “They compared the tyranny of George III to the arbitrary rule of Charles I, saying George III was violating due process of law by insisting that patriots are tried in England rather than in local courts, that they can be put in jail without trial and their liberty is at the whim of the king.” During the revolution, due-process provisions appeared in the constitutions of Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, North Carolina and Vermont. Similar language was included in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, then eventually repeated in the 14th Amendment to apply to all states.
“The very foundation of constitutionalism, which means a government according to law rather than autocratic whim, is the due process of law,” Rosen told me. “What distinguishes a constitutional officeholder from an absolute monarch or a tyrant is that he is bound by the Constitution and by laws.” Without due process, there is no free market, because private property can be taken without justification or explanation. Without due process, there are no civil liberties, for a person’s freedom can be taken for any reason, or none at all.
Without due process, you have what we see today: a leader using a wartime statute in peacetime to declare certain people to be dangerous gang members without providing any evidence, then imprisoning them without charges and finally denying the authority of the courts and defying a court order requiring the leader to obey the laws as written. It is no exaggeration to say that this is the road to despotism.
The Trump administration’s attempt to upend 800 years of settled law is staggering, but it is easily lost in all the other chaos the president is spreading. The Federal Reserve this week said that it expects slower growth and higher inflation than it did before Trump took office, in large part because of his tariffs, while falling confidence among consumers and businesses has raised the danger of recession.
In foreign affairs, Israel has restarted the war in Gaza, and Trump has launched a military campaign to see the Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen “completely annihilated.” Trump failed to get Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine, despite Trump’s bullying of Ukraine and his termination of efforts to document Russian war crimes — including the kidnapping of Ukrainian children. Trump silenced the Voice of America, to the benefit and delight of China, Russia and Iran. Even the annual visit of the Irish prime minister to the White House for St. Patrick’s Day became mired in controversy when MMA fighter Conor McGregor, given the podium in the White House briefing room, proclaimed that “Ireland is at the cusp of potentially losing its Irishness” because illegal migrants are “running ravage on the country.” Responded the prime minister: “Conor McGregor’s remarks are wrong, and do not reflect the spirit of St Patrick’s Day, or the views of the people of Ireland.”
The new administration’s bows to white nationalism continue apace. It removed, at least temporarily, thousands of pages from the Pentagon website and others that celebrated the integration of the armed forces and the contributions of people of color: a Native American who helped hoist the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima, the Navajo code talkers of World War II, the native American who drafted the Confederacy’s terms of surrender, baseball great Jackie Robinson, and a Black Vietnam veteran, on whose page the URL was changed to “deimedal-of-honor.” Trump, meanwhile, reiterated his offer to give “safe refuge” to White South Africans, while at the same time expelling the South African ambassador. The administration has restored the names of Fort Benning and Fort Bragg, which honored Confederates -- getting around a law prohibiting this by technically renaming the bases for other people with the surnames “Benning” and “Bragg.”
The Forward, a Jewish newspaper, reported this week that the head of Trump’s antisemitism task force shared a post on X on March 14 from a white-supremacist leader asserting that “Trump has the ability to revoke someone’s Jew card.” (The aide apparently later unshared the post, whose author led a group that called on Trump supporters to become “racially aware and Jew Wise.”)
The sabotage of the federal government continues, as recklessly as before: dramatically cutting Social Security staff, offices and phone support while simultaneously requiring millions more of the elderly and disabled to apply for benefits in person rather than online; slashing the taxpayer help staff at the IRS and calling off audits; scaling back scientific research at the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health. Paul Dans, the former chief of Project 2025, told Politico that there “is almost no difference between Project 2025 and what Trump was planning all along and is now implementing.”
Trump appointed conspiracy theorist Michael Flynn, Sean Spicer, Steve Bannon’s daughter and the former White House valet to boards overseeing the U.S. military academies. He took time to visit the Kennedy Center, where he has fired the leadership — and used the visit to share “personal stories and anecdotes, including about the first time he saw ‘Cats’ and which members of the cast he found attractive,” as The Post’s Travis Andrews reported. The administration ordered the release of files on the John F. Kennedy assassination before bothering to remove the Social Security numbers of some people who are still alive.
Trump and his cronies continue to use the federal government for personal gain. Following last week’s promotional event for Musk’s Tesla at the White House, the commerce secretary recommended people buy Tesla stock, and the White House has installed Musk’s Starlink service despite security concerns. At the same time, Trump’s crypto project released a second crypto coin, raising $250 million to bring its total to $550 million — and 75 percent of the earnings go into the Trump family’s pockets. All of this is about as on the level as Trump’s golf game. “I just won the Golf Club Championship ... at Trump International Golf Club,” he announced on Sunday, as storms and tornadoes ravaged a swath of the country. “Such a great honor!”
The most ominous development, though, is Trump’s expanding abuse of power to silence critics and disable political opponents. He went to the Justice Department last week and delivered a speech attacking lawyers who opposed him, such as Jack Smith, Andrew Weissmann, Norman Eisen and Marc Elias, as “scum” and “bad people” — and the administration has revoked the security clearances of many such lawyers. After issuing executive orders seeking to destroy three law firms because of their ties to Trump’s opponents, the administration has gone after 20 more law firms over their supposed DEI programs.
After a reporter asked the president whether he would cut off Secret Service protection for former president Joe Biden’s children, Trump did exactly that. His acting head of the Social Security Administration admitted that he had canceled contracts with the state of Maine because he was “upset” at Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, for not being “respectful” of Trump during a public exchange they had. Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, have asked Trump’s FBI to probe the main Democratic fundraising platform, saying it “has advanced the financial interests of terror.”
Trump cut off $175 million of government funds going to the University of Pennsylvania because of its policy on trans athletes, following the White House’s suspension of $400 million of funds to Columbia University over Gaza protests there and its demand that the school change its discipline and admissions policies. More than 50 other universities are under investigation. Trump’s acting U.S. attorney for D.C., Ed Martin, threatened to punish Georgetown Law School if it doesn’t change its curriculum, calling it “unacceptable” for the school to “teach DEI.”
Trump, in his appearance at DOJ, said negative coverage of him on CNN and MSNBC “has to be illegal.” He proclaimed that Biden’s use of the pardon, a constitutional power, to preemptively protect members of the House Jan. 6 committee from Trump’s harassment was “null and void.” He fired the two Democratic commissioners from the Federal Trade Commission, his latest defiance of federal statutes protecting independent commissions. His administration fired the board of the independent U.S. Institute of Peace and seized control of its building, physically removing its president and threatening prosecution.
Then there are the summary deportations of people that Trump finds undesirable. The administration has arrested and is seeking to deport a Columbia graduate student who is a green card holder with no criminal record because of his role in Gaza protests. It deported a Brown University doctor even though a judge had issued an order requiring 48 hours’ notice before her deportation.
In the case of the alleged Venezuelan gang members, administration officials and allies are celebrating their defiance of the court. President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, which the Trump administration is paying to jail deported migrants at its infamous, 40,000-inmate prison, responded on X to Judge Boasberg’s order by saying “Oopsie ... too late,” with a laugh-cry emoji. Secretary of State Marco Rubio retweeted it and Musk added his own laughing emoji. And Attorney General Pam Bondi outrageously claimed “a DC trial judge supported Tren de Aragua terrorists over the safety of Americans” — even though the migrants would not have been released under the court order, which only delayed their deportation.
In the House, Trump’s allies raced to obey his instructions, filing impeachment articles against Boasberg on Tuesday. Freshman Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) submitted the articles, joined by five others. House Republicans have also moved to impeach four other federal judges over disagreements with their rulings.
Thus are Trump and his allies ignoring 215 years of precedent, going back to Samuel Chase, that objections to courts’ opinions are to be resolved through the appeals process, not impeachment.
Thus are Trump and his allies turning their back on 810 years of precedent, going back to the Magna Carta, in which we protect ourselves from tyranny through the due process of law.
But this is where we are. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, in a delectable Freudian slip, proclaimed in a briefing this week that “we want to restore the Department of Justice to an institution that focuses on fighting law and order.”
If that is the goal, the Trump administration is to be congratulated on a job well done.
‘Due process’ might sound technical, but it was elemental to our founding.
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
The man President Donald Trump put in charge of taking a chain saw to federal agencies showed once again this week that he lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the government he is dismembering.
“This is a judicial coup,” Elon Musk proclaimed, reacting to the growing list of federal judges who have moved to halt the Trump administration’s headfirst plunge into lawlessness. “We need 60 senators to impeach the judges and restore rule of the people.”
How did this guy pass his citizenship test?
As the framers wrote in the Constitution, it is the House, not the Senate, that has “the sole power of impeachment.” And the Senate needs “the concurrence of two thirds of the members present” — 67, assuming full attendance, not 60 — to convict.
More important, the framers wrote that judges hold their offices for life “during good behavior” — which has been understood to mean they can only be impeached for corruption. That is how it has been since the 1805 impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, when Chief Justice John Marshall, himself a Founding Father, convinced the Senate to abandon the idea that “a judge giving a legal opinion contrary to the will of the legislature is liable to impeachment.”
Musk, growing up in apartheid-era South Africa, probably wasn’t taught to revere constitutional democracy. But what’s the excuse of his colleagues in the Trump administration?
They have issued scores of executive orders that flatly contradict the Constitution and the laws of the land. Apparently, they are hoping a submissive Supreme Court will reimagine the Constitution to suit Trump’s whims — and federal judges have reacted as they should, by slapping down these lawless power grabs. As such, the administration is on a prodigious losing streak in court. Judges, in preliminary rulings, have already blocked the administration more than 50 times. Over the past week alone, judges:
- Ended Musk’s access to the private Social Security data of millions of Americans for a “fishing expedition.”
- Halted Musk’s continued destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
- Blocked enforcement of Trump’s executive order banning transgender people from military service.
- Stopped the administration from terminating $20 billion in grants from a congressionally approved climate program.
- Ordered the Education Department to restore $600 million in grants to place teachers in struggling schools.
- And, most visibly, required the administration to halt the deportation flights of Venezuelan migrants to a Salvadoran prison without any judicial review — an order the administration evidently defied.
There’s an obvious reason Trump is getting swatted down so often: He’s breaking the law. Instead of changing course, the administration is now trying to discredit the courts — and the rule of law. White House adviser Stephen Miller denounced “insane edicts of radical rogue judges” and declared that a judge had “no authority” to stop Trump. Border czar Tom Homan went full-on authoritarian on Fox News: “We’re not stopping,” he said of the deportation flights a judge had temporarily halted. “I don’t care what the judges think.”
Trump called the U.S. district judge in the case, James Boasberg (appointed to the bench by George W. Bush and elevated by Barack Obama) a “radical left lunatic,” who, “like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” This drew a quick rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts (in case Musk doesn’t know this, he’s also a Bush appointee), who reminded Trump: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.” Trump later told Fox News that he “can’t” defy a court order — welcome news, except he apparently had done exactly that in more than one case — while arguing that something had to be done “when you have a rogue judge.”
Someone has gone rogue here, but it isn’t the judge. Boasberg’s actions are squarely within the best tradition of the judiciary, for they are in defense of principle, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, that no person in this country, citizen or alien, may be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” This is precisely what the Trump administration denied to those it deported and imprisoned.
People hold signs during in a pro-government march in defense of Venezuelan migrants in Caracas, Venezuela, on March 18. (Ronald Pena R/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Violations of due process have been alleged in dozens of the cases against Trump’s executive actions: terminating workers and programs; eliminating grants; violating union contracts; denying care to transgender people; banning the Associated Press from the White House; abolishing civil rights enforcement and everything else the administration calls “DEI”; harassing law firms; and summarily deporting migrants. All of these were done without notice, without recourse, without adjudication and without clarity about which laws give the president the power to do these things.
“Due process” might sound technical, but it was elemental to our founding and remains at the heart of our legal system. Trump’s flagrant denial of due process is so radical that it isn’t only at odds with 200 years of U.S. law — it’s also contrary to another 600 years of English law before that. For the benefit of Musk (who doesn’t seem to know about such things) and his colleagues (who don’t seem to care), perhaps a refresher is in order.
For this, I called Jeffrey Rosen, who runs the nonpartisan National Constitution Center, which finds consensus between conservative and liberal scholars. The concept of due process, he explained, is in the Magna Carta, which in 1215 asserted that “no free man shall be arrested or imprisoned ... except by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” Britain’s 1628 Petition of Right, written during parliament’s struggle against the dictatorial Charles I, holds that “no man ... should be put out of his land or tenement nor taken nor imprisoned nor disherited nor put to death without being brought to answer by due process of law.” The king, who imposed forced loans on his subjects and imprisoned people without trials, was beheaded during the English civil war.
“That example completely inspired the American Revolution,” Rosen explained. “They compared the tyranny of George III to the arbitrary rule of Charles I, saying George III was violating due process of law by insisting that patriots are tried in England rather than in local courts, that they can be put in jail without trial and their liberty is at the whim of the king.” During the revolution, due-process provisions appeared in the constitutions of Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, North Carolina and Vermont. Similar language was included in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, then eventually repeated in the 14th Amendment to apply to all states.
“The very foundation of constitutionalism, which means a government according to law rather than autocratic whim, is the due process of law,” Rosen told me. “What distinguishes a constitutional officeholder from an absolute monarch or a tyrant is that he is bound by the Constitution and by laws.” Without due process, there is no free market, because private property can be taken without justification or explanation. Without due process, there are no civil liberties, for a person’s freedom can be taken for any reason, or none at all.
Without due process, you have what we see today: a leader using a wartime statute in peacetime to declare certain people to be dangerous gang members without providing any evidence, then imprisoning them without charges and finally denying the authority of the courts and defying a court order requiring the leader to obey the laws as written. It is no exaggeration to say that this is the road to despotism.
The Trump administration’s attempt to upend 800 years of settled law is staggering, but it is easily lost in all the other chaos the president is spreading. The Federal Reserve this week said that it expects slower growth and higher inflation than it did before Trump took office, in large part because of his tariffs, while falling confidence among consumers and businesses has raised the danger of recession.
In foreign affairs, Israel has restarted the war in Gaza, and Trump has launched a military campaign to see the Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen “completely annihilated.” Trump failed to get Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine, despite Trump’s bullying of Ukraine and his termination of efforts to document Russian war crimes — including the kidnapping of Ukrainian children. Trump silenced the Voice of America, to the benefit and delight of China, Russia and Iran. Even the annual visit of the Irish prime minister to the White House for St. Patrick’s Day became mired in controversy when MMA fighter Conor McGregor, given the podium in the White House briefing room, proclaimed that “Ireland is at the cusp of potentially losing its Irishness” because illegal migrants are “running ravage on the country.” Responded the prime minister: “Conor McGregor’s remarks are wrong, and do not reflect the spirit of St Patrick’s Day, or the views of the people of Ireland.”
The new administration’s bows to white nationalism continue apace. It removed, at least temporarily, thousands of pages from the Pentagon website and others that celebrated the integration of the armed forces and the contributions of people of color: a Native American who helped hoist the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima, the Navajo code talkers of World War II, the native American who drafted the Confederacy’s terms of surrender, baseball great Jackie Robinson, and a Black Vietnam veteran, on whose page the URL was changed to “deimedal-of-honor.” Trump, meanwhile, reiterated his offer to give “safe refuge” to White South Africans, while at the same time expelling the South African ambassador. The administration has restored the names of Fort Benning and Fort Bragg, which honored Confederates -- getting around a law prohibiting this by technically renaming the bases for other people with the surnames “Benning” and “Bragg.”
The Forward, a Jewish newspaper, reported this week that the head of Trump’s antisemitism task force shared a post on X on March 14 from a white-supremacist leader asserting that “Trump has the ability to revoke someone’s Jew card.” (The aide apparently later unshared the post, whose author led a group that called on Trump supporters to become “racially aware and Jew Wise.”)
The sabotage of the federal government continues, as recklessly as before: dramatically cutting Social Security staff, offices and phone support while simultaneously requiring millions more of the elderly and disabled to apply for benefits in person rather than online; slashing the taxpayer help staff at the IRS and calling off audits; scaling back scientific research at the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health. Paul Dans, the former chief of Project 2025, told Politico that there “is almost no difference between Project 2025 and what Trump was planning all along and is now implementing.”
Trump appointed conspiracy theorist Michael Flynn, Sean Spicer, Steve Bannon’s daughter and the former White House valet to boards overseeing the U.S. military academies. He took time to visit the Kennedy Center, where he has fired the leadership — and used the visit to share “personal stories and anecdotes, including about the first time he saw ‘Cats’ and which members of the cast he found attractive,” as The Post’s Travis Andrews reported. The administration ordered the release of files on the John F. Kennedy assassination before bothering to remove the Social Security numbers of some people who are still alive.
Trump and his cronies continue to use the federal government for personal gain. Following last week’s promotional event for Musk’s Tesla at the White House, the commerce secretary recommended people buy Tesla stock, and the White House has installed Musk’s Starlink service despite security concerns. At the same time, Trump’s crypto project released a second crypto coin, raising $250 million to bring its total to $550 million — and 75 percent of the earnings go into the Trump family’s pockets. All of this is about as on the level as Trump’s golf game. “I just won the Golf Club Championship ... at Trump International Golf Club,” he announced on Sunday, as storms and tornadoes ravaged a swath of the country. “Such a great honor!”
The most ominous development, though, is Trump’s expanding abuse of power to silence critics and disable political opponents. He went to the Justice Department last week and delivered a speech attacking lawyers who opposed him, such as Jack Smith, Andrew Weissmann, Norman Eisen and Marc Elias, as “scum” and “bad people” — and the administration has revoked the security clearances of many such lawyers. After issuing executive orders seeking to destroy three law firms because of their ties to Trump’s opponents, the administration has gone after 20 more law firms over their supposed DEI programs.
After a reporter asked the president whether he would cut off Secret Service protection for former president Joe Biden’s children, Trump did exactly that. His acting head of the Social Security Administration admitted that he had canceled contracts with the state of Maine because he was “upset” at Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, for not being “respectful” of Trump during a public exchange they had. Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, have asked Trump’s FBI to probe the main Democratic fundraising platform, saying it “has advanced the financial interests of terror.”
Trump cut off $175 million of government funds going to the University of Pennsylvania because of its policy on trans athletes, following the White House’s suspension of $400 million of funds to Columbia University over Gaza protests there and its demand that the school change its discipline and admissions policies. More than 50 other universities are under investigation. Trump’s acting U.S. attorney for D.C., Ed Martin, threatened to punish Georgetown Law School if it doesn’t change its curriculum, calling it “unacceptable” for the school to “teach DEI.”
Trump, in his appearance at DOJ, said negative coverage of him on CNN and MSNBC “has to be illegal.” He proclaimed that Biden’s use of the pardon, a constitutional power, to preemptively protect members of the House Jan. 6 committee from Trump’s harassment was “null and void.” He fired the two Democratic commissioners from the Federal Trade Commission, his latest defiance of federal statutes protecting independent commissions. His administration fired the board of the independent U.S. Institute of Peace and seized control of its building, physically removing its president and threatening prosecution.
Then there are the summary deportations of people that Trump finds undesirable. The administration has arrested and is seeking to deport a Columbia graduate student who is a green card holder with no criminal record because of his role in Gaza protests. It deported a Brown University doctor even though a judge had issued an order requiring 48 hours’ notice before her deportation.
In the case of the alleged Venezuelan gang members, administration officials and allies are celebrating their defiance of the court. President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, which the Trump administration is paying to jail deported migrants at its infamous, 40,000-inmate prison, responded on X to Judge Boasberg’s order by saying “Oopsie ... too late,” with a laugh-cry emoji. Secretary of State Marco Rubio retweeted it and Musk added his own laughing emoji. And Attorney General Pam Bondi outrageously claimed “a DC trial judge supported Tren de Aragua terrorists over the safety of Americans” — even though the migrants would not have been released under the court order, which only delayed their deportation.
In the House, Trump’s allies raced to obey his instructions, filing impeachment articles against Boasberg on Tuesday. Freshman Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) submitted the articles, joined by five others. House Republicans have also moved to impeach four other federal judges over disagreements with their rulings.
Thus are Trump and his allies ignoring 215 years of precedent, going back to Samuel Chase, that objections to courts’ opinions are to be resolved through the appeals process, not impeachment.
Thus are Trump and his allies turning their back on 810 years of precedent, going back to the Magna Carta, in which we protect ourselves from tyranny through the due process of law.
But this is where we are. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, in a delectable Freudian slip, proclaimed in a briefing this week that “we want to restore the Department of Justice to an institution that focuses on fighting law and order.”
If that is the goal, the Trump administration is to be congratulated on a job well done.