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      US Senate narrowly confirms Kash Patel as next FBI director

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      The US Senate has confirmed Kash Patel as the next FBI director, handing oversight of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency to an official who has declined to explicitly say whether he would use his position to pursue Donald Trump’s political opponents.Patel was narrowly confirmed on Thursday in a 51-49 vote, a reflection of the polarizing nature of his nomination and what Democrats see as his unwillingness to keep the bureau independent from partisan politics or resist politically charged requests from the president.Notably, at his confirmation hearing, Patel refused to commit that he would not use his position to investigate officials he portrayed as Trump’s adversaries in his book, and affirmed that he believed the FBI was answerable to the justice department and, ultimately, the White House.Patel’s responses suggest that his arrival at FBI headquarters will usher in a new chapter for the bureau as a result of his adherence to Trump’s vision of a unitary executive, where the president directs every agency, and willingness to prioritize the administration’s policy agenda.That objective to implement the Trump administration’s mandate has already taken hold at the justice department, which oversees the bureau and last week forced through the dismissal of corruption charges against Eric Adams, the New York mayor, in order to get his help to deport undocumented immigrants.The greatest challenge for recent FBI directors has been the delicate balance of retaining Trump’s confidence while resisting pressure to make public pronouncements or open criminal investigations that are politically motivated or that personally benefit the president.Patel is unlikely to have difficulties, such is his ideological alignment with Trump on a range of issues including the need to pursue retribution against any perceived enemies like former special counsel Jack Smith and others who investigated him during his first term.The new leadership at the FBI also comes as questions about the far-reaching nature of his loyalty to Trump remain unresolved. At his confirmation hearing, Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee tried in vain to elicit answers about his role as a witness in the criminal investigation into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents.During the investigation, Patel was subpoenaed to testify about whether the documents the FBI seized at Mar-a-Lago had been declassified under a “standing declassification order”, as he had represented in various public comments at the time.The Guardian reported at the time that Patel initially declined to appear, citing his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination. He later testified after the chief US district judge in Washington authorized Patel to have limited immunity from prosecution, which forced his testimony.That loyalty, to resist federal prosecutors, endeared him to Trump and is understood to have played a factor in him ultimately getting tapped for the FBI director position after Trump struggled for weeks to decide who he wanted at the bureau, a person familiar with the matter said.Patel ultimately clarified, in something of a partial admission under close questioning from senator Cory Booker, that although he witnessed Trump issue a declassification order for some documents, he did not actually know whether they applied to the documents found at Mar-a-Lago.Democrats have unanimously considered Patel’s track record in the first Trump administration, his incendiary remarks criticizing the bureau he was nominated to lead and more generally his role in the classified documents case to be disqualifying.When Trump tapped Patel last year, Democrats largely believed it would lead to a backlash that would sink his nomination. No resistance ever materialized, in part because Patel was less controversial than some of Trump’s other nominees, such as Pete Hegseth for defense secretary.Patel was formerly a public defender in Florida before joining the justice department in 2014 as a line prosecutor in the national security division.In 2017, Patel became a top Republican aide on the House intelligence committee, where he authored a politically charged memo accusing the FBI and the justice department of abusing surveillance powers to spy on a Trump adviser. The memo was criticized as misleading, though an inspector general later found errors with aspects of the surveillance.His efforts impressed Trump, who brought him into the administration and quickly elevated him to national security and defense roles. By the end of Trump’s first term, he was the chief of staff to defense secretary Chris Miller and briefly considered for CIA director.While John Durham, the special counsel appointed by Trump, found a catalog of mistakes by prosecutors in the Russia investigation, he found no evidence that officials had been motivated by political animus and brought no charges – contrary to claims by Trump and Patel. More

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      Friday essay: as the legacy media have dumbed down, The New Yorker has dumbed up

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      Like many, I entered The New Yorker through the cartoon door. The first cartoon I loved, and remember to this day, featured a New Yorker staple – two guys sitting in a bar – with one saying to the other: “I wish just once someone would say to me, ‘I read your latest ad, and I loved it’.”

      For someone whose first job after university was an unhappy stint in an advertising agency, the cartoon was a tonic. They are still the first thing I look at when the magazine arrives by mail or the daily newsletter by email, and the first thing shared with my family. There have been around 80,000 published since the magazine’s first issue on February 25 1925.

      I had discovered The New Yorker while studying literature at Monash University and writing an honours thesis on the playwright Tom Stoppard. The English drama critic Kenneth Tynan had written a long profile of Stoppard for the magazine in 1977, combining sharp insights into the plays, behind-the-curtains material from Tynan’s time as literary manager at the National Theatre (he bought the rights to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in 1966) and slices of Stoppard’s life.

      The most enticing of these was Tynan’s account of a Saturday afternoon cricket match between a team from The Guardian, comprising several no-nonsense typesetters and the paper’s industrial correspondent, and Harold Pinter’s XI, which was actually a IX owing to two late withdrawals, including the captain himself.

      Stoppard arrived in dazzlingly white whites but didn’t seem to take the game seriously, inadvertently dropping a smouldering cigarette butt between kneepad and trousers as he took the field. “Playwright Bursts into Flames at Wicket,” he called back to Tynan standing on the boundary.

      A younger Tom Stoppard.
      Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

      Once the game began, though, Stoppard was a revelation, first as wicket-keeper where his “elastic leaps and hair-trigger reflexes” saw him dismiss four players, and then as a batsman, when he smoothly drove and cut his way to the winning score.

      I had never read anything like this. It wasn’t academic literary criticism, which tended to assault the English language on a polysyllabic basis. It wasn’t the daily newspaper, which as Stoppard himself mocked, was terse, formal and leaned to the formulaic. It wasn’t a biography of someone long dead, but a “profile”, whatever that was, of a living, breathing person.

      I wanted more and so began looking out for the magazine but read it only intermittently. Released from advertising, I began working in journalism in 1981. The 1980s coincided with the final years of William Shawn’s 35-year editorship when The New Yorker almost collapsed under the weight of very long articles about very slight subjects and Shawn’s legendary prudishness. (Tynan once referred to a “pissoir”, which Shawn changed to “circular curbside construction”.)

      Shawn began working at The New Yorker as a fact-checker eight years after its founding in 1925 by Harold Ross, a former newspaperman, and his wife, reporter Jane Grant. Shawn took over as editor after Ross’s death in 1951, and was brilliant, encouraging writers such as Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Hannah Arendt and Truman Capote to do work better than even they expected.

      Truman Capote in 1959.
      Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

      More than 60 writers have dedicated books to Shawn that grew out of New Yorker articles, according to Ben Yagoda’s excellent 2000 history of the magazine.

      In Shawn’s later years, though, the weaknesses of his approach became dominant, and he could not bear to let go of the editorship. As John Bennet, a staff member trying to decipher Shawn’s gnomic utterances, said:

      Shawn ran the magazine the way Algerian terrorist cells were organised in the battle of Algiers – no one knew who anybody else was or what anybody else was doing.

      Yagoda writes the cornerstones of the magazine were:

      A belief in civility, a respect for privacy, a striving for clear and accurate prose, a determination to publish what one believes in, irrespective of public opinion and commercial concerns, and a sense that The New Yorker was something special, something other and somehow more important than just another magazine. These admirable values all had their origin in the Ross years. But under Shawn, such emotional energy was invested in each of them that they became obsessive and sometimes distorted and perverted, in the sense of being turned completely inward.

      The 1980s may have been a difficult period for the magazine, but it still produced some outstanding journalism, and it was the journalism I increasingly turned to, particularly that of Janet Malcolm. Today, readers know of her work through books such as In the Freud Archives, The Journalist and the Murderer and The Silent Woman, but all three, like most of her writing, originally appeared as long articles in the magazine.

      I can still recall the jolt I felt reading the famous opening paragraph of The Journalist and the Murderer (published in the magazine in 1989):

      Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

      Malcolm’s dissection of the relationship between Jeffrey MacDonald, a convicted murderer, and Joe McGinniss, a journalist convicted by her ice-cold, surgically precise prose, is by turns brilliant, thought-provoking, infuriating and incomplete. Well over three decades later, Malcolm’s book is one all journalists should read.

      Janet Malcolm pictured in 1993.
      George Nikitin/AAP

      To Malcolm, the relationship between journalists and their subjects was the “canker that lies at the heart of the rose of journalism”, which could not be rooted out. Hers was a long overdue wake-up call for an industry allergic to reflection and self-criticism. But in the end, for all the brilliance with which she opened up a difficult topic, Malcolm packed the journalist–subject relationship in too small a box.

      Among her colleagues at the magazine were many who carefully and ethically navigated the challenges of gaining a subject’s trust, then writing about them honestly, as I learnt when researching a PhD which became a book, Telling True Stories.

      One example is Lawrence Wright’s work for the magazine on the rise of Al-Qaeda, and the subsequent book The Loooming Tower. In a note on sources, Wright reflects on the questions of trust and friendship that haunt the journalist–subject relationship.

      Knowledge is seductive; the reporter wants to know, and the more he knows, the more interesting he becomes to the source. There are few forces in human nature more powerful than the desire to be understood; journalism couldn’t exist without it.

      By conspicuously placing a tape recorder between him and his interviewee, Wright tries to remind both parties “that there is a third party in the room, the eventual reader”.

      Outstanding journalists

      When I began teaching journalism, especially feature writing, at RMIT in the 1990s, I found myself drawn more and more to The New Yorker and to its history. The “comic paper” Ross originally envisaged had travelled a long way since 1925. The second world war impelled Ross and Shawn, then his deputy, to broaden and deepen the scope of their reporting.

      Most famously, after the dropping of two atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing the Japanese to surrender in 1945, they commissioned John Hersey to return to Japan, interview survivors and, as Hersey later put it, write about “what happened not to buildings but to human beings”. Ross set aside the cartoons and devoted the entire issue of August 31 1946 to Hersey’s 31,000-word article simply headlined “Hiroshima”.

      The mushroom cloud photographed from the ground during the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.
      Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum

      I still remember being deeply moved by “Hiroshima”, which I first read half a century after publication and half a world away while on a summer holiday in the bush. The backstory behind the article (ranked number one on the Best American Journalism of the 20th Century list), and its impact on journalism and the world, is well told in Lesley Blume’s 2020 book, Fallout.

      By the 1990s, when Tina Brown became the first woman to edit The New Yorker, it definitely needed a makeover. It still did not have a table of contents, nor run photographs. And, beyond a headline, it gave readers little idea what a story was about! She eased up on the copy editors’ notorious fussiness. As E.B. White, a longtime contributor, once said: “Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.”

      Brown lasted only marginally longer than her predecessor, Robert Gottlieb. Her editorship has been given a bad rap by New Yorker traditionalists, but she gave the magazine a much-needed electric shock, injecting fresh blood.

      A list of outstanding journalists she hired who remain at the magazine three decades later is illuminating: David Remnick (who followed her as editor, in 1998), Malcolm Gladwell, Jane Mayer, Lawrence Wright, Anthony Lane and John Lahr, among others.

      There’s going to be a lot of celebrating of the magazine’s 100th anniversary, including a Netflix documentary scheduled for release later in the year.

      Not many magazines reach such a milestone. One of The New Yorker’s early competitors, Time, which began two years before, was for many years one of the most widely read and respected magazines in the world. It continues today but has a thinner print product and a barely noticed online presence. (I say that as someone who once worked for three years in Time’s Australian office.)

      Time is far from alone in this. Magazines, like newspapers, have struggled to adapt to the digital world as the advertising revenue that once afforded them plump profits was funnelled into the big online technology companies, Google and Facebook.

      Yet The New Yorker has not only adapted to the digital age but thrived in it. It is one of few legacy media outlets whose prestige and influence have actually grown in the past two decades.

      As the internet arrived, the New Yorker’s paid circulation was 900,000. It exceeded a million, for the first time in the magazine’s history, in 2004. As of October last year it was 1,161,064 (for both the print and electronic edition). Subscribers to the magazine’s electronic edition have increased five-fold since it began in 2016 and now stand at 534,287. Yes, advertising revenue remains challenged, recently forcing some redundancies at the magazine, but nothing compared to other parts of the media industry.

      Apart from the weekly edition, a daily newsletter was introduced around 2015. The magazine has also expanded into audio, podcasting and documentary film, runs a well-attended annual festival, invites readers to try their hand at devising captions for cartoons and does a line of merchandising. All the astute branding on the part of the magazine and its owners, Condé Nast, would have Shawn rolling in his grave, but the core of the magazine’s editorial mission remains true.

      Why it succeeds

      The key reasons behind The New Yorker’s current success, in my view, are twofold. First, as the internet made a cornucopia of information available instantly anywhere, the magazine continued to produce material, especially journalism, that was distinctive and different.

      Journalist Jane Mayer.
      goodreads

      Think, for example, of the extraordinary disclosures made by Seymour Hersh and Jane Mayer during George W. Bush’s administration (2001–2009) about the torture by American soldiers of Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison and how rules about what constituted torture were changed to make almost anything short of death permissible.

      Both journalists later published their work in books: Hersh’s Chain of Command: the road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (2004) and Mayer’s The Dark Side: the inside story on how the war on terror turned into a war on American ideals (2008).

      A detainee in an outdoor solitary confinement cell talks with a military policeman at the Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad, Iraq, in 2004.
      John Moore/AAP

      Alongside the investigative journalism have been many examples of deep, productive dives into seemingly unpromising topics such as the packaged ice cube business (Peter Boyer, The Emperor of Ice, February 12 2001) and a movie dog (Susan Orlean, The Dog Star: the life and times of Rin Tin Tin, August 29 2011).

      In a world of information abundance, what remained scarce was the ability to make sense of chaotic events, knotty issues and complicated people, in prose that is almost always clear, alive to irony, elegant and sometimes profound. In other words, while most of the legacy media was dumbing down, The New Yorker was dumbing up.

      The second reason for the magazine’s continued success is that even as the internet’s information abundance has curdled into the chaos and cruelty of social media’s algorithm-driven world, The New Yorker has not wavered in its editorial mission.

      Just as Donald Trump doubled down on the Big Lie surrounding the 2020 election result and the January 6 2021 riots at the Capitol, so the magazine doubled down on reporting his actions since then and into his second presidency.

      Other media outlets, even The Washington Post, which did so much excellent reporting during the first Trump presidency, have kowtowed to Trump, or at least its proprietor appears to have. Jeff Bezos decided the newspaper should not run a pre-election endorsement editorial last year. The Amazon owner was placed front and centre with other heads of the big tech companies at Trump’s inauguration on January 20.

      Guests including (from left to right), Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk, arrive before the 60th presidential inauguration in Washington, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025.
      Julia Demaree Nikhinson, Pool/AAP

      By contrast, The New Yorker has published a steady stream of reporting and commentary about the outrageous and shocking actions of the Trump administration in its first month.

      The new administration has moved so quickly and on so many fronts that the import of its actions have overwhelmed the media, making it hard to keep up with reporting every development in the detail it might deserve.

      To take one example, The Washington Post reported that candidates for senior posts in intelligence and law enforcement were being asked so-called loyalty questions about whether the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” and the January 6 Capitol riots an “inside job”.

      Two individuals being considered for positions in intelligence “who did not give the desired straight “yes” answers, were not selected. It is not clear whether other factors contributed to the decision”.

      The report prompted media commentary, but not enough of it recognised the gravity of an attempt to rewrite history every bit as egregious as Stalinist Russia.

      The New Yorker has made its own statement, in response, by reprinting Luke Mogelson’s remarkable reporting from January 6 2021, with photography by Balasz Gardi and alarming footage from inside the capitol with the rioters.

      David Remnick, now in his 27th year as editor, was among ten media figures asked recently by The Washington Post how the second Trump administration should be reported. He said:

      To some degree, we should be self-critical, but we should stop apologizing for everything we do. I think that journalism during the first Trump administration achieved an enormous amount in terms of its investigative reporting. And if we’re going to go into a mode where we’re doing nothing but apologizing and falling into a faint and accepting a false picture of reality because we think that’s what fairness demands, then I think we’re making an enormous mistake. I just don’t think we should throw up our hands and accede to reality as it is seen through the lens of Donald Trump.

      Remnick’s argument is clear-eyed and courageous. You would hope it is heard by other parts of the news media that have long ceded editorial leadership to what was for many years categorised simply as a “general interest magazine”.

      Failing that, they could look at the cartoons. On February 14, the magazine published one by Brendan Loper featuring a drawing of Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster standing outside the Cookie Company factory where a spokesman said,

      Let me assure you that as an unpaid “special factory employee” Mr. Monster stands to personally gain nothing from this work.

      Here’s looking at you, Elon. More

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      ‘I feel betrayed’: federal health workers fired by Trump tell of ‘nightmare’

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      As protesters gathered outside the headquarters of US health agencies to call attention to mass layoffs devastating the federal service in recent days, more employees at health agencies were terminated on Wednesday, including employees with years of experience and stellar performance reviews who were not probationary.Thousands of terminated employees across the federal government are appealing the decision. Some former employees are struggling to apply for unemployment or understand when their benefits expire in the chaotic termination process.At the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the layoffs included all public health fellows stationed at state, local and regional health departments, as well as staff working on global health and outbreak response – even as the bird flu outbreak ramps up and the CDC suspends its seasonal flu vaccine campaign.The Guardian spoke to four employees at the CDC who were terminated in recent days. Three requested anonymity to avoid retribution from the Trump administration. All of them recently received satisfactory or outstanding performance reviews, and none of them had been placed on performance review plans.Mack Guthrie was part of the Public Health Associate Program at the CDC – until everyone in the program was let go over the weekend. He worked in Minneapolis public schools to help prevent STIs and unintended pregnancies by educating students, testing and counseling patients in clinics, and tracking STI rates and trends.All of these layoffs are “a major hit to America’s health infrastructure”, said Guthrie, who had an outstanding performance review so was stunned to see his performance listed as the reason for termination.While all of the public health fellows were told they were being laid off, some never received letters, Guthrie said, adding: “The whole process has been dominated by chaos and confusion.”The state, tribal, local and territorial departments where they were deployed “are already starting to feel the effect of our absence”, Guthrie said.“For some of my colleagues, they are filling gaps at host sites that would simply not get filled otherwise,” he said. “These organizations simply don’t have the funds to hire people.”When one CDC employee attempted to log into their laptop on Wednesday morning, they received an error message and realized they were locked out of the system, unable to communicate with their team or even say goodbye. They’d been laid off overnight and because they have not yet received a letter, they don’t know the reason for their termination. This employee had years of experience and excellent performance reviews, and was not probationary.Employees in probationary periods were especially hard-hit in this round of layoffs. That status has nothing to do with their performance, unlike employees who may be put on probation in the private sector. Rather, it usually means they have been in their current position for less than two years, and thus they don’t have the same legal protections as other federal workers.One terminated employee who has been in the same position for four and a half years was surprised to receive notice that their job was considered probationary and they were being let go, despite high praise on performance reviews. They are appealing the decision to human resources, but have not received responses yet.Form letters sent to terminated employees say that they “are not fit for continued employment” because their “ability, knowledge and skills do not fit the agency’s current needs”, and their performances have “not been adequate to justify further employment at the agency”.Former CDC employees told the Guardian they are now part of a class-action wrongful termination appeal to the US Merit Systems Protection Board – joining other federal employees represented by the Washington law firm James & Hoffman.The leader of the merit board was herself reinstated by a judge on Wednesday after the Trump administration tried to fire her.“If you’re going to terminate my position, don’t tell me it’s because of my performance,” said another employee who worked as a CDC contractor for four years before entering a probationary period after being hired permanently.View image in fullscreenEmployees who were locked out of their systems with little or no notice are now scrambling to collect their final paychecks, apply for unemployment, return equipment, and understand their benefits.The longtime employee who was locked out on Wednesday told the Guardian they were not given the proper documentation in order to apply for unemployment.“When I called HR, the team simply did not know what to do and I was left with, ‘Please call back tomorrow, we will have better guidance,’” the employee said. “Folks don’t even have essential documents to properly separate from the agency.”The employees said they haven’t been offered details on whether their annual leave will pay out, or even how long their health insurance will last.“I still need to communicate with my center in terms of what is happening with my final paycheck, how do I return my equipment, and I have no idea how they intend to do that,” said the employee who worked at the CDC for five years.The so-called “department of government efficiency,” known as Doge, has targeted certain agencies for layoffs in a purported bid to cut back on government spending, despite representing a very small portion of the federal budget.“They feel fake,” the employee said. “It seems like a giant scam that they were trying to see if it would work, and it did … I can’t believe that I lost my job as a result of this group of people.”The layoffs cap a stressful month for CDC staffers rushing to implement Trump’s flurry of executive orders.“We were working around the clock. If not working, I couldn’t sleep – for weeks, since the administration came in – thinking of all the things we had to do to meet those orders,” said the employee who was at the CDC for four and a half years.All the while, they were waiting to learn if they would keep their job – a “dream job” that has become “a nightmare”.“It was really part of my identity – I lived and ate it around the clock,” the employee said. “That was such a big part of my life … I feel betrayed.”The employee urged former supervisors and teammates to check in on the wellbeing of terminated staffers, some of whom report experiencing depression and anxiety.“All of us have always looked at CDC as being the final goalpost for a public career,” said the longtime employee.“It feels like I worked so hard to be where I’m at, only to look back and see an empty space. I know I did the work, but it’s rapidly being taken away.”Send us a tipIf you have information you’d like to share securely with the Guardian about the impact of cuts to federal programs or the federal workforce, please use a non-work device to contact us via the Signal messaging app at (646) 886-8761. More

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      It’s time for Americans to withhold their taxes | Judith Levine

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      Political power boils down to two things: votes and money. But when money buys presidents, senators and judges, votes are merely the sales receipts. What’s left is money, and the purpose of power is to get more of it.Trump’s non-billionaire followers appear thrilled that Elon Musk and his so-called “department of government efficiency” are burning down the government. “Imagine if Trump hadn’t met and talked with Elon Musk that all this progress on efficiency may not be taking place or at such a fast pace needed before the midterms,” comments holy666 on a Fox News story about the mass layoffs of federal employees.Firings at the IRS elicit particular glee. Writes EnemyCitizen: “A beautiful thing about Mr Trump’s approach is that internal revenue will slow down and Congress will have to sober up and stop passing appropriations bills that apply our hard-earned money to frivolous political agendas. No more blank checks, Congress!”In fact, what the megalomaniacal multibillionaire is destroying is everything – minus the policing functions, of course – that we pay taxes for, including such frivolous agendas as food inspection, flood mitigation and Medicare. This is how kleptocracies work. Taxes are collected from the hoi polloi. The more benign government functions – housing the poor, postponing climate apocalypse – are abolished. But the rest of these functions do not entirely disappear. Rather, it is farmed out to private enterprise, which undertakes what it’s paid to do with minimum expense and maximum profit (and we all know corporations never commit waste, fraud or abuse).Watchdogs are eliminated, bribery is legalized. The most corrupt carry off the greatest rewards. And bereft of revenue, social services wither, the infrastructure crumbles, and the prisons fill with the destitute and the resistant.Maga wants to starve the bureaucracy. But it still wants money. And with the wealthiest awaiting gigantic tax breaks, they need it from the rest of us. With the Internal Revenue Service in effect transformed into a shell corporation laundering the money of the ultra-rich, why should we pay taxes?The IRS is being speedily organized for this rerouting. Doge is axing as many as 15,000 law-abiding and knowledgeable civil servants. It is trying to coerce the agency to give Elon’s AI-wielding AV squad unfettered access to the system containing the personal and financial data of every American taxpayer, small business and non-profit.Not only would this arrangement provide an armory of intelligence to be deployed against the president’s enemies – according to a lawsuit filed by taxpayer advocates, unions and small business alliances, it would give Musk access to his rivals’ profit and loss statements, payrolls, tax records and information about IRS investigations into their (or his own) suspected tax fraud. “No other business owner on the planet has access to this kind of information on his competitors,” assert the plaintiffs, “and for good reason.”These are all good reasons to withhold your taxes.Can the tactic work? Is it right? Morally and politically motivated tax nonpayment has an honorable, if not always successful, history. After the Roman empire’s destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 AD Jewish people refused to pay Rome’s “temple tax”. Rome responded by destroying more temples. Gandhi’s salt tax protest, on the other hand, was the first step toward India’s independence from the British empire. The American Revolution was a tax revolt, and that worked – although some colonists resisted taxes levied by the revolutionaries and, after independence, the states as well.More recently, American opponents of wars, nukes and abortion have refused to pay all or portions of their taxes in protest. Many went to prison for it. In Civil Disobedience, Thoreau wrote of weighing the benefits and costs of any given action. He believed all taxation was illegitimate as long as the US condoned slavery. “If [the injustice] is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law,” he concluded.One of the diabolical features of an anti-state state like our current regime is its ability to turns acts of resistance against the state against themselves. Principled prosecutors and agency heads resign rather than carry out the president’s illegal orders – leaving only Maga flunkies in their places. Civil servants quit rather than pervert the services or science they’ve devoted their careers to – leaving the work unguarded and the workforce decimated, precisely as the wrecking crew intends.So it is with tax resistance. Every dollar that does not come into Washington’s coffers is justification to cut another dollar. You may remember that the vanguard of 21st century far right populism was the Tea party, an anti-tax movement.In the New Republic, Liza Featherstone points out that the destruction of popular government programs is not “a goofy misstep on this administration’s part. Rather, it’s exactly the point.” Whether firing park rangers, defunding daycare centers, or deep-sixing job-creating clean-energy projects in red states, the programs’ “popularity is precisely what the Trump-Musk administration dislikes about them. For anti-government ideologues, it’s important that people not have good experiences with the government.”And if people have bad experiences with the government – if they contract bird flu because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention no longer have the wherewithal to control and prevent disease; if bridges collapse because the funds to repair them are cut off – well, there’s proof that the government can’t do anything right, and deserves to be destroyed.In fact, after it outsources the government, the regime would be smart to keep calling it the government. When IRS.com loses a taxpayer’s refund and assigns a bot to sort out the problem, the taxpayer will blame IRS.gov.Thanks to intentional staff shortages at the IRS, your missing tax payment might go unnoticed, just as the Trump family’s multibillion-dollar fraud escaped the agency’s auditors for decades. But if tax evasion is a secretive act, tax resistance is civil disobedience, a public, political act. The reason to withhold your taxes is not to cheat the government of much-needed funds. It is not even to cheat the crooks now running the country, satisfying as that may be. It is to expose the criminality of what is being done – and not done – with the money the state has a legal and moral obligation to collect and then to distribute, to serve all the people.

      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books More

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      From weather apps to taxes: the trickle-down effects of Trump’s federal worker firings

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      You wake up to dark clouds outside, so you check the weather on your phone: a storm is coming.That weather app uses data from the National Weather Service, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a small organization which could see as much as 10% of its workforce cut this week.You grab food to make breakfast: eggs, meat, formula for your baby. The safety of your food is regulated and inspected by a host of federal employees, who flag and investigate when items shouldn’t be eaten.The former head of the Food and Drug Administration’s food division resigned this week because he thought firings and layoffs at the agency would hinder its work. “I didn’t want to spend the next six months of my career on activities that are fundamentally about dismantling an organization, as opposed to working on the stated agenda,” he told Stat News.You check your flight reservations for an upcoming trip to a national park. The safety of that flight is overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration, which experienced layoffs this month despite recent high-profile aviation accidents. The national park will probably see its staff gutted, leaving it more vulnerable to wildfires and without search and rescue capabilities. “I honestly can’t imagine how the parks will operate without my position,” a park ranger who was cut wrote on Instagram. “I mean, they just can’t. I am the only EMT at my park and the first responder for any emergency. This is flat-out reckless.”You keep an eye on the bird flu levels and a measles outbreak – the winter has been punishing for illnesses. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were hit with a first round of layoffs this week, which could affect outbreak response and reporting. The Epidemic Intelligence Service, a disease-detective training program, could be on the chopping block.Oh, and you’re working on your taxes – while thousands of Internal Revenue Service probationary employees are expected to be laid off during tax season.The government certainly has room for improvement – backlogs that should be cleared, investigations that should be more thorough, communication that should be sharper, actions that should be more transparent. But all of this work is done by the federal government and its millions of workers and contractors, whose daily jobs touch the lives of all Americans and many around the globe.In the first weeks of the Trump administration, the president and the billionaire Elon Musk, tasked with cutting government through the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), have waged war against federal workers. Musk and his team have moved from agency to agency, indiscriminately firing probationary employees and those whose work they say doesn’t align with the administration’s priorities, including many who work on diversity initiatives or in international development.The result is a hobbled and terrified federal workforce that is just at the beginning of the expected cuts – and an American public that is starting to experience the repercussions.“We’re playing Russian roulette, and basically you’re putting a whole bunch of more bullets in the chambers,” said Max Stier, the CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a non-profit that advocates for a strong civil service. “You can’t prevent all bad things from happening, but our federal government is, in a lot of ways, a manager of risk, and it does a pretty darn good job of managing that risk, even though it can be improved.”An email went out in January to millions of federal employees offering a deferred resignation, which the White House says about 75,000 people have accepted, although it’s unclear how many of the people who accepted are actually eligible.Joel Smith works at the Social Security Administration and is the president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3184, which covers more than 90 agency offices in parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Louisiana. He said the office of management and budget, which has coordinated the buyout program it’s calling a “fork in the road”, hasn’t communicated with the agencies about which employees accepted the buyout. Some employees didn’t show up the first day the program’s leave was supposed to begin, and the agency had to call them to figure out where they were, he said.“It’s just chaos on top of chaos, on top of terror, on top of employees that want to leave are being told they can’t leave. I’m trying to think of a good word for it. I don’t know if there is one, other than clusterfuck,” Smith said.Those that remain in their jobs worry about whether they’re next as they add to their workloads to cover for those who lost their jobs or quit. People eyeing next career moves will avoid civil service, previously seen as a stable career, to stay out of the current chaos.Many people take core functions of the federal government for granted, as it protects them from disasters or national security concerns, but might not otherwise affect them. But that could change after widespread firings. For example, layoffs in the Environmental Protection Agency mean that those remaining in their positions have less capacity to do their jobs.“That could come in the guise of someone not being able to respond to an environmental disaster,” said Nicole Cantello, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 704. “Or what about if there’s a facility illegally flaring air pollutants? We might not be as able to respond to something like that which could have health effects. There could be devastating effects to the American people.”If you or your loved ones use any direct services such as benefits programs, you could see the effects of a beleaguered federal workforce up close.Let’s say you’re helping your parents sign up for social security. The Social Security Administration is already understaffed, so losing any positions will make wait times longer for people who need to access benefits, Smith said.Smith’s father filed for retirement benefits in November to begin in February, but by February, his case hadn’t been processed – it was stuck in somebody’s backlog. A member of Congress had to intervene to bring attention to the delay, a frequent tactic to overcome stalled claims.“What people think they’re witnessing now and they’re complaining about now, in terms of delays, is going to be considered the good old days here in a year or two if this continues,” he said. “We already don’t have the people to do the work.”For federal workers and their families, the impact is heavy and immediate if they lose their livelihoods.“The way it’s working now is that the career civil servants are viewed as the villains,” said Rob Shriver, former acting director of the US office of personnel management who now works at Democracy Forward. “They’re viewed as people who are to be worked around and not worked with. They’re being deprived of the thing that’s most important to them, which is to contribute to the agency’s mission and bring their skills and expertise to the table to help inform decision makers.”Though many have focused on the disruption caused in Washington, federal workers live throughout the US and, in some cases, other parts of the world.“There’s a human aspect of it, which is these people are not just being fired, but they’re being fired in the worst way. No notice, no nothing. This is true across the board. There is zero humanity being demonstrated,” said Stier, of the Partnership for Public Service. “It is unbelievably costly to the individuals involved, and it’s costly to the system and to the American taxpayers. It’s going to cost the American taxpayer a ton of money. It is not going to save any money.”Send us a tipIf you have information you’d like to share securely with the Guardian about the impact of cuts to federal programs or the federal workforce, please use a non-work device to contact us via the Signal messaging app at (646) 886-8761. More

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      The little-known Gullah Geechee politician who pushed for the 14th amendment

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      After Donald Trump issued an executive order to limit birthright citizenship last month, Marilyn Hemingway, the CEO and president of the Gullah Geechee Chamber of Commerce, knew she had to do something. Based in Georgetown, South Carolina, the GGCC helps preserve the history of Gullah Geechee people, the Africans who were enslaved on the Sea Islands along the Atlantic coast, and their descendants. One such person was Joseph Hayne Rainey, a man born in Georgetown and enslaved until his father purchased his freedom when he was 10. Rainey is who Hemingway immediately thought of following Trump’s order.Rainey was the first Black person elected to the United States congress, where he was known for his support of the 14th amendment, which was ratified in 1868 and stated: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The amendment was necessary to give the roughly 4.5 million Black people in the country citizenship after emancipation, as a previous supreme court case, Dred Scott v Sandford, had denied citizenship to all people of African descent.Rainey’s support for the laws passed during Reconstruction was deeply informed by his life in enslavement. He spent much of his time in Congress fighting to protect Black Americans and to ensure the 14th and 15th amendments – the latter of which prohibited the federal government from denying a citizen the right to vote based on race, color or previous condition of servitude – were enforced.“The 14th amendment was passed and ratified because once those who were enslaved were emancipated, it was like they didn’t have standing,” Hemingway said. “Where were they in this world now? They were no longer enslaved, so they needed to be made citizens … [Rainey] went from an enslaved person to an emancipated person to a citizen. His personal story reflects the American story.”Now, the amendment that has long granted birthright citizenship is being used by the US president to deny citizenship to the children of recent immigrants. “The Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States,” his EO reads. It “has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’”.Trump’s executive order almost immediately faced several lawsuits from civil rights groups and Democratic attorneys generals, as well as a temporary restraining order from a federal judge. A federal appeals court has denied the administration’s request to reinstate a ban, but the threat still looms, especially as the president has said he expects the supreme court to side with him on the decision.“The first line of the 14th amendment is designed to say that anyone who was born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction of the United States is a citizen,” said Jamal Greene, a professor at Columbia Law School. “That doesn’t depend on their race or their ethnicity or anything else about them. The only question is whether they’re subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.”Trump’s administration has harped on the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States”, which was understood to refer to people who were not subject to US law, Greene said. That would have meant diplomats from other countries, Indigenous people, who are sovereign, and, potentially, an invading army. But now Trump is trying to use that language to apply to a wide group of people, including children whose parents were not lawfully in the US at the time of their birth.Greene said that those who support such an understanding of the law are suggesting that those people would not have an allegiance to the US. “But that interpretation is not consistent with how it would have been originally understood,” he said. “And it’s also not consistent with the language itself, since jurisdiction is not a reference to allegiance. It’s a reference to whether US laws apply to those people.”Some are also concerned about the order’s potential reach to citizens, such as Black Americans. The GGCC, for its part, argues that Trump’s order is an attempt to undo some of Rainey’s work. For Rainey, the 14th amendment was not just for Black Americans – it was for everyone. “To all people born unnaturalized into the United States, [the 14th amendment] is the first time in the history of the United States that it actually covered citizenship, including of formerly enslaved people,” Hemingway said. “They were the impetus for this, but it covered everyone. So we have to be very careful when we come and we start attacking it, because it’s not just going to remove citizenship of immigrants, it’s going to remove citizenship of everyone.”Though the restraining order blocks Trump’s plan, the future of birthright citizenship will be undecided until the supreme court hears the case. In the meantime, Hemingway is continuing to promote Rainey’s life and continue his fight.“This is why we speak out to make sure correct history is told … We still have to have the same fight for civil rights. [Rainey’s] actions inform our actions to this day. His story needs to be told more so that we could hold all of our elected officials accountable to the United States constitution. We are in a constitutional crisis. His life explains why we continue the fight.” More

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      Trump’s move to closer ties with Russia does not mean betrayal of Ukraine, yet – in his first term, Trump was pretty tough on Putin

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      The United States’ steadfast allegiance to Ukraine during that country’s three-year war against Russia appears to be quickly disintegrating under the Trump administration. President Donald Trump on Feb. 19, 2025, called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “a dictator” and falsely blamed him for the war that Russia initiated as part of a land grab in the countries’ border regions.

      Zelenskyy, meanwhile, said on Feb. 19 that Trump is trapped in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “disinformation space.”

      The intensifying bitterness comes as the U.S. and Russia started talks in Saudi Arabia, without including Ukraine, on how to end the conflict.

      The U.S. and Russia have long been adversaries, and the U.S., to date, has given Ukraine more than US$183 billion to help fight against Russia. But that funding came when Joe Biden was president. Trump does not appear to be similarly inclined toward Ukraine.

      Amy Lieberman, a politics editor at The Conversation U.S., spoke with Tatsiana Kulakevich, a scholar of Eastern European politics and international relations, to understand the implications of this sudden shift in U.S.-Russia policy under Trump.

      Kulakevich sees Trump’s moves that could be perceived as self-interested as instead part of a calculated strategy in preliminary discussions.

      An airplane passenger reads a Financial Times article about U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Feb. 19, 2025.
      Horacio Villalobos Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images

      Can you explain the current dynamic between the U.S., Ukraine and Russia?

      People should not panic because the U.S. and Russia are only holding exploratory talks. We should not call them peace talks, per se, at least not yet. It was to be expected that Ukraine was not invited to the talks in Saudi Arabia because there is nothing to talk about yet. We don’t know what the U.S. and Russia are actually discussing besides agreeing to restore the normal functioning of each other’s diplomatic missions.

      People are perceiving the U.S. and Russia as being in love. However, Trump’s Russia policy has been more hawkish than often portrayed in the media. Looking at the record from the previous Trump administration, we can see that if something is not in the interests of the U.S., that is not going to be done. Trump does not do favors.

      He approved anti-tank missile sales to Ukraine in 2019. That same year, Trump withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, an agreement with Russia that limited what weapons each country could purchase, over Russian violations.

      In 2019, Trump also issued economic sanctions against a Russian ship involved in building the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. These sanctions tried to block Russia’s direct gas exports to Germany – this connection between Russia and Germany was seen by Ukraine as an economic threat.

      Based on Trump’s talks with Russia and remarks against Ukraine, it could seem like the U.S. and Russia are no longer adversaries. How do you perceive this?

      There are no clear indications that Russia and the U.S. have ceased to be adversaries. Despite Trump’s occasional use of terms like “friends” in diplomacy, his rhetoric often serves as a tactical maneuver rather than a genuine shift in alliances. A key example is his engagement with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, where Trump alternated between flattery and threats to extract concessions.

      Even if the U.S. is meeting with Russia and the public narrative seems to say otherwise, strategically, abandoning Ukraine is not in the United States’ best interests. One reason why is because the U.S. turning away from Ukraine would make Russia happy and China happy. Trump has treated China as a primary threat to the U.S., and China has supported Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

      U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is also still saying that everyone, including Ukraine, will be at the table for eventual peace talks.

      The allegations that Russia was holding some information over Trump and blackmailing him started long before this presidential term and did not stop Trump from imposing countermeasures on Russia during his first term. The first Trump administration took more than 50 policy actions to counter Moscow, primarily in the form of public statements and sanctions.

      What does the U.S. gain from developing a diplomatic relationship with Russia?

      Trump is a transactional politician. American companies could profit from the U.S. aligning with Russia and Russian companies, as some Russian officials have said during the recent Saudi Arabia talks with the Trump administration. But the U.S. could also benefit economically from the Trump’s administration’s proposed deal with Ukraine to give the U.S. half of Ukraine’s estimated $11.5 trillion in rare earth minerals.

      Zelenskyy rejected that proposal this week, saying it does not come with the promise that the U.S. will continue to give security guarantees to Ukraine.

      Historically, since the Cold War, there has been a diplomatic triangle between the Soviet Union – later Russia – China and the U.S. And there has always been one side fighting against the two other sides. Trump trying to develop a better diplomatic relationship with Russia might mean he is trying to distance Russia from China.

      A similar dynamic is playing out between the U.S. and Belarus’ authoritarian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, a co-aggressor in the war in Ukraine. Lukashenko is close with both Russia and China. The U.S. administration is looking to relax sanctions on Belarusian banks and exports of potash, a key ingredient in fertilizer, in exchange for the release of Belarusian political opposition members who are imprisoned. There are over 1,200 political prisoners in Belarus. This U.S. foreign policy strategy is aimed at providing Lukashenko with room to grow less economically dependent on Russia and China.

      A worker clears snow from a cemetery in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, on Feb. 17, 2025. More than 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died in combat since Russia launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022.
      Pierre Crom/Getty Images

      Is this level of collaboration between the U.S. and Russia unprecedented?

      While U.S.-Russia relations are often defined by rivalry, history shows that pragmatic cooperation has occurred when both nations saw mutual benefits – whether this relates to arms control, space, counterterrorism, Arctic affairs or health.

      Moreover, the U.S. has always prioritized its own interests in its relationship with Russia. For example, the U.S. and its allies imposed sanctions on Russia’s uranium and nickel industries only in May 2024, over two years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. This was due to the United States’ strategic economic dependencies and concerns about market stability if it sanctioned uranium and nickel.

      Even after Russia invaded Crimea – an area of Ukraine that Russia claims as its own – in 2014 and provided support for Russian separatists in Ukraine’s Donbass region, the U.S. and other Western countries imposed largely symbolic sanctions. This included freezing assets of Russian individuals, restricting some financial transactions and limiting Russia’s access to Western technology.

      We should also notice that Trump in January 2025 promised to sanction Russia if it does not end the Ukraine war. The U.S. still has not removed any existing sanctions, which signals its commitment to a tough stance on Russia, despite perceptions of a close relationship between Trump and Putin.

      Given Trump’s transactional approach to foreign policy, his tough rhetoric on Zelenskyy could be a deliberate negotiation strategy aimed at pressuring Ukraine into making greater concessions in potential peace talks, rather than signaling abandonment. More