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.
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
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.