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      What does Maga-land look like? Let me show you America’s unbeautiful suburban sprawl | Alexander Hurst

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      In 1941 Dorothy Thompson, an American journalist who reported from Germany in the lead-up to the second world war, wrote an essay for Harper’s about the personality types most likely to be attracted to Nazism, headlined “Who Goes Nazi?” “Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t – whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi,” Thompson wrote.Talia Lavin, a US writer, recently gave Thompson’s idea an update on Substack with an essay of her own: “Who Goes Maga?”The essay has since been taken down (I’m not sure why), but in it Lavin reimagined Thompson’s original dinner party setting, with various archetypes in attendance, offering in one or two paragraphs a brief but empathetic explanation for why each person has or has not “gone Maga”.Eventually arriving at Mr I, an academic and a frequent traveller to France with family money, Lavin wrote: “Nonetheless, he will never go Maga and would spend his days in exile even if he got cut off from the family purse … because … he is a true devotee of beauty.” He finds in Maga “a hatred of things that are beautiful and strange, as all the things he loves are. Power holds no attraction for him, only beauty.”Of course, power often tries to use aesthetics, and its own definition of beauty, to further its own purposes. Fascists and authoritarians are deeply aware of the ability of art to propagate ideas or oppose them. From architecture to rallies, Hitler and Mussolini favoured a type of massiveness, an imposing nature and uniformity to evoke a sense of the imperial eternal. Soviet aesthetics – though meant to be futurist rather than focused on a glorified past – also fell back on the idea of massiveness and uniformity to subjugate the individual and elevate the state. And, of course, all three authoritarian regimes repressed art, artists and aesthetics that were dissident.Trumpism, too, has an aesthetic. Allow me to pretentiously, subjectively, declare it not beautiful. The aesthetic of Trumpism is sprawl – which had already infected the United States long before the Maga movement metastasised.Last September I drove nearly 2,000 miles in the US with a French friend, Guillaume, zigzagging our way from DC to New Orleans and tracing, in part, the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville. (“It might be our last opportunity to observe democracy in America,” I had said to him.) Through his non-American eyes, I saw even more poignantly the ways the physical manifestation of Hannah Arendt’s “atomisation” are scarred into the suburban and rural US landscape itself.Like fish in water, I wonder if Americans are even aware of how they swim in it. The hours-long stretches of chain stores in single-storey, flat-topped buildings. The cluster of gas stations, with functionally and aesthetically similar convenience stores selling rows and rows of sugary food and drinks. The big box chain stores, some of them matryoshka dolls that house other chains within – rectangular islands of stuff surrounded by parking lots leading to other little islands of fast food, also surrounded by parking lots, filled with rows and rows of the most enormous pickup trucks imaginable.And then, just as it starts to dwindle, another on-ramp/off-ramp, and the whole shebang starts all over again, until you’ve cycled through all of the possible chain permutations and you begin to repeat. Wherever there is grass, it will be impeccably mowed.No matter where you are in America’s 3.8m sq miles, with its 340 million inhabitants, the sprawl will have followed the same driving logic as the chains it hosts – an utterly nondescript, completely indistinguishable look, feel and experience. Somehow, there is always still traffic on these six-lane roads, a trailing line of enormous vehicles that require parking lots that spill out like muffin tops, and with double-wide parking spaces. Everything about sprawl slumps outwards, like warmed jelly that can no longer hold its shape. There is no height except for the height of the signs advertising the chains; those rise several storeys into the sky, enough to be visible from the highway.View image in fullscreenSomewhere along the line, the American Dream became to live alone, surrounded by all of this, rather than living in connection with other people.In somewhat cryptic lines, the poet Keats put forward a nexus that goes beyond the subjective nature of what we, individually, find aesthetically pleasing. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” he wrote. He was hardly the only one to interrogate the two at the same time. Plato and Plotinus sought to link beauty to an equally ineffable truth that lingered somewhere beyond our material reality; Kant, too, placed beauty beyond taste, as a disinterested thing that radiated outward. In theology, Saint Augustine and Hans Urs Von Balthasar draw the two back to the same divine origin, as critical components to any human attempt to understand the transcendent.And if that’s all too mystical for you, the British theoretical physicist Tom McLeish argues: “As indications of the road forward rather than destinations achieved, beautiful experiments and theoretical ideas can, and even must, be celebrated, their aesthetic appeal unashamedly enjoyed.”I would add a third vector to the one between beauty and truth: art, which in his 1934 book, Art As Experience, John Dewey sees as something that is inherent in the everyday experience of life rather than something necessarily pushed into museums. As long as that living is authentic. “Experience in the degree in which it is experience is heightened vitality,” writes Dewey.Perhaps there is something authentic to suburban sprawl when experienced as spectator and anthropologist. But as everyday life, sprawl is deadening, ugly, fake. Devoid of art, beauty and truth alike. The United States has long bought into the idea that freedom is endless expansion. But slouching across land simply because it is there uplifts neither the land nor the people on it. In this instance in particular, abundance did a disservice to the US by drawing it into an absence of experience. What surprise that a moribund ideology would take root in physical spaces that radiate the peculiar desolation of too much?Given the number of artists, photographers, cinematographers and architects who have been willing to serve nefarious political movements, it would be simplistic for me to claim that artists are somehow immune to them. But art is an attempt to capture – and convey – something true about the world, and the human emotional experience of it. When the rational world has committed itself to a path that leads to destruction, perhaps those dedicated to beauty can, with what Keats called a “negative capability” to perceive truth, bring us back to both.

      Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe correspondent More

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      Trump signs order to shift disaster preparations from Fema to state and local governments

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      Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order that seeks to shift responsibility for disaster preparations to state and local governments, deepening the president’s drive to overhaul the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).The order, first previewed by the White House on 10 March, calls for a review of all infrastructure, continuity and preparedness and response policies to update and simplify federal approaches.It said “common sense” investments by state and local governments to address risks ranging from wildfires to hurricanes and cyber attacks would enhance national security, but did not detail what they were or how they would be funded.“Preparedness is most effectively owned and managed at the state, local, and even individual levels, supported by a competent, accessible, and efficient federal government,” the order said. “When states are empowered to make smart infrastructure choices, taxpayers benefit.”The order calls for revising critical infrastructure policy to better reflect assessed risks instead of an “all-hazards approach”, the White House said in a fact sheet on the order.It creates a “National Risk Register” to identify, describe and measure risk to US national infrastructure and streamlines federal functions to help states work with Washington more easily.Trump in January ordered a review of Fema that stopped short of shuttering the country’s lead disaster response agency and a White House official said the latest order was not aimed at closing Fema.Rob Moore, the director of the flooding solutions team at the Natural Resources Defense Council, accused the Trump administration of systematically weakening US disaster readiness.“From day one, the Trump administration has been eroding the nation’s capacity to plan for, respond to, and recover from disasters,” Moore told Reuters.“They’ve overseen the dismissal of 1,000 Fema staff – who won’t be there to respond to a flood or wildfire – and are withholding funding from local and state governments who are doing risk reduction projects and more.“Shana Udvardy, a senior researcher at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said she was concerned the order marked “another dangerous step” that would leave communities with fewer resources to prepare for future disasters.“The executive order shifts most of the responsibility for disaster preparedness to state and local governments, asking them to make more expensive infrastructure investments without outlining the federal role in that,” she said. More

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      Trump releases thousands of pages on John F Kennedy assassination

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      The Trump administration on Tuesday released thousands of pages of files concerning the assassination of John F Kennedy, the 35th president who was shot dead in Dallas, Texas, in November 1963.“So people have been waiting decades for this,” Donald Trump told reporters on Monday while visiting the Kennedy Center, “and I’ve instructed my people that are responsible, lots of different people, put together by [director of national intelligence] Tulsi Gabbard, and that’s going to be released tomorrow.”Experts doubted the new trove of information will change the underlying facts of the case, that Lee Harvey Oswald opened fire at Kennedy from a window at a school book deposit warehouse as the presidential motorcade passed by Dealey Plaza in Dallas.The digital documents included PDFs of memos, including one with the heading “secret” that was a typed account with handwritten notes of a 1964 interview by a Warren Commission researcher who questioned Lee Wigren, a CIA employee, about inconsistencies in material provided to the commission by the state department and the CIA about marriages between Soviet women and American men.The documents also included references to various conspiracy theories suggesting that Oswald left the Soviet Union in 1962 intent on assassinating the popular young president.Department of Defense documents from 1963 covered the cold war of the early 1960s and the US involvement in Latin America, trying to thwart Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s support of communist forces in other countries.The documents suggest that Castro would not go so far as to provoke a war with the United States or escalate to the point “that would seriously and immediately endanger the Castro regime”.“It appears more likely that Castro might intensify his support of subversive forces in Latin America,” the document reads.Trump signed an order shortly after taking office in January related to the release, prompting the US Federal Bureau of Investigation to find thousands of new documents related to the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.“President Trump is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency,” Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said in a post on X.ABC News reported that Trump’s announcement prompted an all-night scramble at the justice department.John F Kennedy was killed during a motorcade through Dallas on 22 November 1963. Oswald was killed two days later by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner.Ever since, Kennedy’s death has been the subject of immense scholarship, cultural commentary and spiraling conspiracy theories.Files have been released before, including three releases in 2017, when Trump was first in power. One document released then was a 1975 CIA memo that said a thorough search of records showed Oswald was not in any way connected to the intelligence agency, as posited by numerous authors and hobbyists.Trump’s latest JFK files release comes weeks after the death at 93 of Clint Hill, a Secret Service agent who leapt onto Kennedy’s car, a moment of history famously captured on film by Abraham Zapruder, a home movie enthusiast.Trump survived an assassination attempt of his own in Pennsylvania last year, during a campaign event. In office, he has also promised to release files on the assassinations of Kennedy’s brother, the US attorney general and New York senator Robert F Kennedy, and the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, both in 1968.Robert F Kennedy’s son, Robert F Kennedy Jr, is now US health secretary. He has voiced conspiracy theories, including saying he thinks his father was probably killed by the CIA and his uncle, the president, certainly was.King’s family has expressed the fear that genuine FBI attempts to smear him will again be brought to the light.Last month, directed by Trump, the US justice department released files about Jeffrey Epstein, the financier, convicted sex offender and Trump associate who killed himself in prison in New York in 2019. Aggressively touted and targeted to rightwing social media influencers, the release proved a damp squib.On Monday, Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and the author of a book on Kennedy, told Reuters: “People expecting big things are almost certain to be disappointed” by the new files release.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Trump administration briefing: nearly 25,000 fired workers to be rehired; USAid shutdown likely violated constitution

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      Donald Trump’s presidential administration in court filings has for the first time acknowledged that it fired nearly 25,000 recently hired workers – and said agencies were working to bring all of them back after a judge ruled that their terminations were likely illegal.The filings made in Baltimore’s federal courthouse late Monday include statements from officials at 18 agencies, all of whom said the reinstated probationary workers were being placed on administrative leave at least temporarily.The mass firings, part of Trump’s broader purge of the federal workforce carried out by the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) led by billionaire businessman Elon Musk, were widely reported. But the court filings are the first full accounting of the terminations by the administration.Here are the key US politics story from Monday:Trump administration rehiring nearly 25,000 fired workers after court orderIn the filings late Monday, agency officials said they had either reinstated all of the fired employees or were working to do so – but warned that bringing back large numbers of workers had imposed significant burdens and caused confusion and turmoil.The officials also noted that an appeals court ruling reversing Bredar’s order would allow agencies to again fire the workers, subjecting them to multiple changes in their employment status in a matter of weeks.Read the full storyChief justice rebukes Trump for call to impeach judge hearing deportation caseJohn Roberts, the chief justice of the US supreme court, delivered a rare rebuke on Tuesday of Donald Trump after the US president demanded the impeachment of a federal judge who had issued an adverse ruling against the administration blocking the deportation of hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members.Read the full storyMusk and Doge’s USAid shutdown likely violated US constitution, judge rulesA federal judge on Tuesday ruled that Elon Musk and the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) likely violated the US constitution by shutting down USAid, ordering the Trump administration to reverse some of the actions it took to dismantle the agency.Read the full storyVladimir Putin agrees to 30-day halt to attacks on Ukraine’s energy gridVladimir Putin has agreed to a limited ceasefire that would stop Russia targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure after a high-stakes phone call with Donald Trump.But the Russian leader declined to commit to a 30-day full ceasefire, a plan pitched by Trump that Ukraine agreed to last week, denting the US president’s hope of bringing a quick end to hostilities.Read the full story‘I am a political prisoner’: Mahmoud Khalil says he’s being targeted for political beliefsIn his first public remarks since being detained by federal immigration authorities, Palestinian activist and recent Columbia graduate, Mahmoud Khalil, spoke out against the conditions facing immigrants in US detention and said he was being targeted by the Trump administration for his political beliefs.“I am a political prisoner,” he said in a statement provided exclusively to the Guardian.Read the full storyTrump waging ‘sickening’ psychological war, deported Venezuelan’s lawyer saysA lawyer for one of the Venezuelan immigrants sent from the US to a notorious mega prison in El Salvador has accused the Trump administration of waging a “sickening” campaign of psychological warfare against asylum seekers and migrants.Read the full storyTrump fires FTC’s only two Democrats Donald Trump fired the two Democratic commissioners on the US Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday, further blurring the lines of bipartisanship at regulatory agencies. The fired commissioners are confirmed to be Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. Bedoya confirmed his firing in a post on social media.“I’m a Commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission. The President just illegally fired me,” he wrote. “The FTC is an independent agency founded 111 years ago to fight fraudsters and monopolists, our staff is unafraid of the Martin Shkrelis and Jeff Bezos of the world. They take them to court and they win.“Now, the President wants the FTC to be a lap dog for his golfing buddies.”Read the full storyDemocrat vows to ‘stop Doge’s illegal power grab’ at non-profit peace instituteA senior Democratic congressman vowed to “stop Doge’s illegal power grab” after operatives from Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” gained entry to the US Institute of Peace in Washington – an independent organization established by Congress – and forced out its leaders.Read the full storyWhite House sparks uncertainty over fate of two major California national monumentsThe White House is fueling speculation over plans to eliminate two large national monuments in California established by former president Joe Biden. Questions about the monuments’ status arose on 15 March when a White House fact sheet dated 14 March removed references to them.Read the full storyTesla stake is no longer Elon Musk’s most valuable asset amid stock market sell-offElon Musk’s vast stake in Tesla is no longer his most valuable asset as the electric car company continues to endure a sharp stock market sell-off. His SpaceX stake is worth an estimated $147bn, about $20bn more than his shares in Tesla after the carmaker’s shares halved since December.Tesla has come under stark pressure on the market since Donald Trump’s inauguration, as it became clear that much of Musk’s attention is on his work at the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), and the new administration’s tariff policies injected uncertainty into the economy.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Trump escalated his rhetoric against the judicial branch, saying that a federal judge who attempted to block his deportation of suspected Venezuelan gang members should be impeached.

      Despite the rhetoric, impeaching and removing federal judges is exceedingly rare, and Republicans don’t appear to have the votes in the Senate.

      Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s president, asked the Trump administration not to deport their citizens to a third country, or detain them in Guantánamo Bay.

      More documents related to the assassination of John F Kennedy Jr should be released today, Trump told reporters on Monday. More

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      US judge blocks Trump’s ban on trans people serving in the military

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      A federal judge blocked Donald Trump’s executive order banning transgender people from military service on Tuesday.US district judge Ana Reyes in Washington DC ruled that the president’s order to exclude transgender troops from military service likely violates their constitutional rights.She delayed her order by three days to give the administration time to appeal.“The court knows that this opinion will lead to heated public debate and appeals. In a healthy democracy, both are positive outcomes,” Reyes wrote. “We should all agree, however, that every person who has answered the call to serve deserves our gratitude and respect.”The White House didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment.Army reserves 2nd Lt Nicolas Talbott, one of 14 transgender active-duty service members named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said he was holding his breath as he waited to find out if he would be separated from the military next week.“This is such a sigh of relief,” he said. “This is all I’ve ever wanted to do. This is my dream job, and I finally have it. And I was so terrified that I was about to lose it.”The judge issued a preliminary injunction requested by attorneys for six transgender people who are active-duty service members and two others seeking to join the military.On 27 January, Trump signed an executive order that claims the sexual identity of transgender service members “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life” and is harmful to military readiness.In response to the order, Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, issued a policy that presumptively disqualifies people with gender dysphoria from military service. Gender dysphoria is the distress that a person feels because their assigned gender and gender identity don’t match. The medical condition has been linked to depression and suicidal thoughts.Plaintiffs’ attorneys contend Trump’s order violates transgender people’s rights to equal protection under the fifth amendment.Government lawyers argue that military officials have broad discretion to decide how to assign and deploy service members without judicial interference.Reyes said she did not take lightly her decision to issue an injunction blocking Trump’s order, noting: “Judicial overreach is no less pernicious than executive overreach.” But, she said, it was also the responsibility of each branch of government to provide checks and balances for the others, and the court “therefore must act to uphold the equal protection rights that the military defends every day”.Thousands of transgender people serve in the military, but they represent less than 1% of the total number of active-duty service members.In 2016, a defense department policy permitted transgender people to serve openly in the military. During Trump’s first term in the White House, the Republican issued a directive to ban transgender service members. The supreme court allowed the ban to take effect. Former president Joe Biden, a Democrat, scrapped it when he took office.Hegseth’s 26 February policy says service members or applicants for military service who have “a current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria are incompatible with the high mental and physical standards necessary for military service”.The plaintiffs who sued to block Trump’s order include an army reserves platoon leader from Pennsylvania, an army major who was awarded a Bronze Star for service in Afghanistan, and a Sailor of the Year award winner serving in the navy.“The cruel irony is that thousands of transgender servicemembers have sacrificed – some risking their lives – to ensure for others the very equal protection rights the military ban seeks to deny them,” Reyes wrote.Their attorneys, from the National Center for Lesbian Rights and GLAD Law, said transgender troops “seek nothing more than the opportunity to continue dedicating their lives to defending the Nation”.“Yet these accomplished servicemembers are now subject to an order that says they must be separated from the military based on a characteristic that has no bearing on their proven ability to do the job,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote. “This is a stark and reckless reversal of policy that denigrates honorable transgender servicemembers, disrupts unit cohesion, and weakens our military.” More

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      Judge rules against Musk and Doge, finding USAid shutdown ‘likely violated’ constitution – US politics live

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      A federal judge has ordered Elon Musk and his “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to stop their dismantling of USAid, saying their move to rapidly shut down the agency tasked with managing foreign assistance was likely illegal.“The court finds that defendants actions taken to shut down USAid on an accelerated basis, including its apparent decision to permanently close USAid headquarters without the approval of a duly appointed USAid Officer, likely violated the United States constitution in multiple ways, and that these actions harmed not only Plaintiffs, but also the public interest, because they deprived the public’s elected representatives in Congress of their constitutional authority to decide whether, when, and how to close down an agency created by Congress,” wrote Maryland-based judge Theodore D. Chuang.He ordered Musk and Doge officials to halt any work meant to shut down USAid, reinstate email access for all USAid employees and contractors and not disclose any employees’ personal information publicly.He also said Musk and Doge have two weeks to either certify that USAid’s Washington DC headquarters has been reopened or have a top USAid official agree to close it down.The two Democratic commissioners at the US Federal Trade Commission, Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, both said on Tuesday that they were “illegally fired” by Donald Trump on Tuesday.Trump is already being sued for firing members of other independent regulatory agencies including the National Labor Relations Board.Bedoya posted a statement on X in which he said: “This is corruption plain and simple”.“The FTC is an independent agency founded 111 years ago to fight fraudsters and monopolists”, Bedoya wrote. “Now the president wants the FTC to be a lapdog for his golfing buddies”.Slaughter said in a statement to the American Prospect that Trump’s illegal action violated “the plain language of a statute and clear Supreme Court precedent”.As Deepak Gupta, former senior counsel at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, explained recently on Slate’s Amicus podcast, in the 1935 case Humphrey’s Executor v United States, the US supreme court upheld a law that permitted FTC commissioners to be fired only for good cause, such as neglecting their duties. That ruling shields a number of independent, bipartisan multi-member agencies from direct control by the White House.As Gupta noted, the idea that government needed independent agencies and people with experts to solve complex problems was introduced during the New Deal era, to replace what was known as “the spoils system”, in which the incoming president rewarded friends, campaign staffers and other supporters with appointments to federal government positions for which they had no qualifications or expertise.Ed Martin, the combative interim US attorney for the District of Columbia, and a 2020 election denier who helped lead the Stop the Steal movement, plans to use his office to investigate possible election law violations, according to an email seen by Bloomberg Law.Martin, who publicly called the 2020 “rigged” in 2021, said in the office-wide email that he had established a “Special Unit: Election Accountability,” or SUEA.The unit “has already begun one investigation and will continue to make sure that all the election laws of our nation are obeyed”, Martin wrote. “We have a special role at this important time.”David Becker, the director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, told Talking Points Memo that Martin “seems to be misunderstanding his jurisdiction and the federal laws around elections and voting, and without more information, it’s unclear what is being done here other than furthering conspiracy theories that he’s embraced in the past”.Martin is a veteran anti-abortion activist who has argued for a national ban without exceptions for rape or incest, falsely claimed that “no abortion is ever performed to save the life of the mother” and discussed the possibility of jailing doctors who perform abortions and women who get abortions.Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, has criticized the chief justice of the supreme court, John Roberts, for defending the federal judge who tried to block the government’s showy deportation of suspected Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador.After Donald Trump reacted to Judge James Boasberg’s ruling by calling for his impeachment, Roberts said in a statement: “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”Responding on X, the social network owned by Elon Musk, Lee wrote:
      Impeachment is a non-justiciable political question assigned by the Constitution to Congress—one of the two political branches of the U.S. government—and not to the courts
      Frankly, I’m surprised that Chief Justice Roberts is publicly opining on such matters
      Musk himself had posted a similar comment hours earlier. Lee, a former critic of Trump who had called on him to drop out of the 2016 campaign before becoming a public convert, also shared Musk’s comment and added, of the arch-conservative Roberts, “This isn’t the first time he’s treaded on legislative power”.Here is more from our colleagues Hugo Lowell and Joseph Gedeon on the Roberts intervention:Trump’s trade war has had an incredible impact on the popularity of Canada’s Liberal Party, as new polling suggests a stunning reversal of public opinion.For the first time, projection shows the Liberals with a 55% chance of a majority government, according to the closely watched website 338Canada, which tracks and aggregates national polls, converting those figures into projected election results. In January, these odds stood at less than 1%.The shifting polls reflect the outsized role played by a teetering and unpredictable US president, and it underscores the incentives for newly minted prime minister Mark Carney to call a snap election in the coming days.Read more about it here:Of all that Donald Trump has done since being sworn in on 20 January, there’s a good argument to be made that dismantling USAid was the most impactful, though not necessarily within the United States. The Guardian’s Katy Lay has a look at how the global fight against HIV has suffered from USAid’s stripping:This year the world should have been “talking about the virtual elimination of HIV” in the near future. “Within five years,” says Prof Sharon Lewin, a leading researcher in the field. “Now that’s all very uncertain.”Scientific advances had allowed doctors and campaigners to feel optimistic that the end of HIV as a public health threat was just around the corner.Then came the Trump administration’s abrupt cuts to US aid funding. Now the picture is one of a return to the drugs rationing of decades ago, and of rising infections and deaths.But experts are also talking about building a new approach that would make health services, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, less vulnerable to the whims of a foreign power.The US has cancelled 83% of its foreign aid contracts and dismantled USAid, the agency responsible for coordinating most of them.Many fell under the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) programme, which has been the backbone of global efforts to tackle HIV and Aids, investing more than $110bn (£85bn) since it was founded in 2003 and credited with saving 26 million lives and preventing millions more new infections. In some African countries it covered almost all HIV spending.Judge Theodore D Chuang’s ruling that the dismantling of USAid was likely unconstitutional landed just as top officials at the agency were planning for it to be completely shut down by the end of September, the Bulwark reports.Employees at USAid were informed that their jobs will likely be wrapped into other federal departments, while workers overseas will be sent back to the United States. Chuang’s ruling could disrupt these plans, though the Trump administration could also appeal it.Here’s more from the Bulwark of what was planned for USAid’s final months:
      Tim Meisburger, the head of USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, recently briefed staff about plans and pegged a final day for the agency’s existence at September 30, 2025 (notably, when the just-struck government funding deal runs out). According to notes of the briefing, which were obtained by The Bulwark, Meisburger expected that the agency would have a new structure, new names for subsections, and that there would be a “minimal overseas footprint,” with the possibility to expand in the future. They’d be incorporated into the State Department and officials had to “mentally prepare” to go from being agency leaders to senior staffers.
      “Most of the madness is behind us,” Meisburger said, according to the notes. It was time to “make lemonade out of lemons.”
      But what if you can’t get the lemons home? That’s one of the problems USAID is currently confronting.
      Last week, Jason Gray, who was serving as acting administrator for USAID, sent an email to staffers outlining the process for overseas officials to use the agency portal to come back to the United States. According to one person familiar with those concerns, the American Foreign Service Association is seeking information about the use of the portal. As of now, some USAID employees stationed abroad face a Catch-22. Some fear that if they relocate voluntarily, they may not be eligible for all the reimbursements associated with relocation costs (such as the shipment of personal effects). Other overseas employees worry that if they don’t voluntarily return to the United States, they could be fired. But at least that would potentially make the government liable to cover more of the end-of-contract relocation costs (assuming the current administration doesn’t just choose to leave fired employees abroad).
      A federal judge has ordered Elon Musk and his “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to stop their dismantling of USAid, saying their move to rapidly shut down the agency tasked with managing foreign assistance was likely illegal.“The court finds that defendants actions taken to shut down USAid on an accelerated basis, including its apparent decision to permanently close USAid headquarters without the approval of a duly appointed USAid Officer, likely violated the United States constitution in multiple ways, and that these actions harmed not only Plaintiffs, but also the public interest, because they deprived the public’s elected representatives in Congress of their constitutional authority to decide whether, when, and how to close down an agency created by Congress,” wrote Maryland-based judge Theodore D. Chuang.He ordered Musk and Doge officials to halt any work meant to shut down USAid, reinstate email access for all USAid employees and contractors and not disclose any employees’ personal information publicly.He also said Musk and Doge have two weeks to either certify that USAid’s Washington DC headquarters has been reopened or have a top USAid official agree to close it down.Federal judge James Boasberg has given the Trump administration until noon tomorrow to provide answers to specific questions about three flights carrying suspected Venezuelan gang members that left the United States despite his order preventing their departure.Boasberg informed the justice department they have until 12pm ET tomorrow to answer the following questions:
      1) What time did the plane take off from U.S. soil and from where? 2) What time did it leave U.S. airspace? 3) What time did it land in which foreign country (including if it made more than one stop)? 4) What time were individuals subject solely to the Proclamation transferred out of U.S. custody? and 5) How many people were aboard solely on the basis of the Proclamation?
      The government, which has cited national security concerns in refusing to answer Boasberg’s questions, is allowed to reply under seal.The Pentagon said that fewer than 21,000 employees have accepted voluntary resignations after they announced plans to cut up to 60,000 civilian jobs, the Associated Press reports.The defense department announced last month that it would fire 5-8% of its civilian workforce, with layoffs of 5,400 probationary workers. The defense department is the largest government agency, with the Government Accountability Office finding in 2023 that it had more than 700,000 full-time civilian workers.A man accused of battling police with a baseball bat and shield during the January 6 riot at the US Capitol has announced a run for the US Senate in Florida.Jake Lang, a prominent January 6 defendant, has announced on social media that he is seeking the seat recently vacated by the current secretary of state Marco Rubio in 2026.“WE ARE TAKING OVER THE CAPITOL AGAIN,” Lang wrote in a post on X.Lang continued to be politically active during his time in the DC jail, reportedly attempting to organize a militia and creating fundraisers for the January 6 defendants.Lang did not stand trial for charges related to his role in the insurrection due to continuous delays. He was pardoned alongside about 1,600 others who participated in the Capitol attack when Donald Trump took office.Read more about it here:The Trump administration has moved to reinstate at least 24,500 recently fired probationary workers following a pair of orders from federal judges last week.The reinstatements were outlined in a filing by the Justice Department in federal court in Maryland on Monday.US District Judge James Bredar, an appointee of former President Obama, previously ordered the mass reinstatement of fired probationary workers at 18 federal agencies. He determined that the government’s claims that the terminations were because of performance issues “isn’t true”.The majority of the reinstated employees were placed on paid administrative leave, according to the Washington Post. According to the filings, some workers were fully reinstated with pay, and some were reinstated without pay if they had been on unpaid leave before their termination.Voters in Wisconsin are casting the first ballots in a pivotal state supreme court race that will decide whether liberal or conservative justices control the highest court in the state.The first day of early voting comes two weeks before the April 1 election between the Republican-supported Brad Schimel and Democratic-supported Susan Crawford.The race, which is in an important presidential battleground state, can be seen as a barometer of public opinion early in Trump’s presidency. The outcome will have far-reaching implications for a court that faces cases over abortion and reproductive rights, the strength of public sector unions, voting rules and congressional district boundaries.The White House said in a statement that Trump and Putin “spoke about the need for peace and a ceasefire in the Ukraine war” in a phone call that lasted over an hour.
      “Both leaders agreed this conflict needs to end with a lasting peace,” reads the statement. “The leaders agreed that the movement to peace will begin with an energy and infrastructure ceasefire, as well as technical negotiations on implementation of a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea, full ceasefire and permanent peace.”
      Putin and Trump also discussed the Middle East, the “need to stop” the proliferation of strategic weapons, and Iran, according to the statement.The justice department told the judge considering the legality of deporting suspected Venezuelan gang members that they did not violate his order to stop the planes from departing, but refused to immediately offer more details of their itinerary.The filings came after judge James Boasberg yesterday gave the administration a deadline of today at noon to share details of how the three planes were allowed to fly to El Salvador even though he ordered that they not depart, and turn back if they were in the air.In response, Robert L. Cerna, an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) official based in Texas, said that two of the planes had already left US airspace by the time that Boasberg issued his order, while the third carried migrants who had been ordered deported through the typical legal process – not the Alien Enemies Act, which is at issue in the case Boasberg is considering.From Cerna’s filing:
      On March 15, 2025, after the Proclamation was publicly posted and took effect, three planes carrying aliens departed the United States for El Salvador International Airport (SAL). Two of those planes departed U.S. territory and airspace before 7:25 PM EDT. The third plane departed after that time, but all individuals on that third plane had Title 8 final removal orders and thus were not removed solely on the basis of the Proclamation at issue. To avoid any doubt, no one on any flight departing the United States after 7:25 PM EDT on March 15, 2025, was removed solely on the basis of the Proclamation at issue.
      Separately, attorney general Pam Bondi and other top justice department officials signed a notice to Boasberg in response to his demand for details about the planes and their departure time, essentially refusing to provide him with what he wanted:
      The Court also ordered the Government to address the form in which it can provide further details about flights that left the United States before 7:25 PM. The Government maintains that there is no justification to order the provision of additional information, and that doing so would be inappropriate, because even accepting Plaintiffs’ account of the facts, there was no violation of the Court’s written order (since the relevant flights left U.S. airspace, and so their occupants were “removed,” before the order issued), and the Court’s earlier oral statements were not independently enforceable as injunctions. The Government stands on those arguments.
      Here’s more on the legal wrangling over the deportations, and Donald Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act: More

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      Musk and Doge’s USAid shutdown likely violated US constitution, judge rules

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      A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that Elon Musk and the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) likely violated the US constitution by shutting down USAid, ordering the Trump administration to reverse some of the actions it took to dismantle the agency.The decision by US district judge Theodore Chuang was sweeping in its scope and marked a major setback for the administration’s signature takedown in its effort to bulldoze through the federal government.As part of an injunction that directed the Trump administration to reverse course, the judge halted efforts to terminate USAid officials and contractors, and reinstate former employees’ access to their government email, security and payment systems.The judge also compelled the administration to allow USAid to return to its currently shuttered headquarters at the Ronald Regan building in the event that the underlying case challenging the closure of the agency was successful. The administration is expected to appeal the ruling.At issue in the lawsuit, brought by more than two dozen unnamed former USAid employees in federal district court in Maryland, was Musk’s role in overseeing the deletion of the USAid website and the shut down of its headquarters.Chuang wrote in his 68-page opinion that Musk had likely violated the appointments clause of the constitution by effectively acting with the far-reaching powers of an “officer of the United States”, a designation that requires Senate confirmation.“If a president could escape appointments clause scrutiny by having advisers go beyond the traditional role of White House advisors who communicate the president’s priority to agency heads,” Chuang wrote, “the appointments clause would be reduced to nothing more than a technical formality.”The Trump administration has said for weeks that the moves to dismantle USAid were carried out by the agency’s leaders – currently secretary of state Marco Rubio and acting administrator Pete Marocco – who were implementing recommendations from Musk.But Chuang rejected that contention with respect to the closure of USAid headquarters and the erasure of its website, saying that the administration provided no evidence that they were formally authorized by a USAid official.“Under these circumstances, the evidence presently favors the conclusion that contrary to defendants’ sweeping claim that Musk acted only as an advisor, Musk made the decisions to shutdown USAID’s headquarters and website even though he ‘lacked the authority to make that decision,’” Chuang wrote.The injunction follows six weeks of unprecedented turmoil at USAid, where 5,200 of 6,200 global programs were abruptly terminated, staff were locked out of facilities and systems, and employees reportedly received directives to destroy classified documents using shredders and “burn bags”.The agency’s workforce has been decimated from over 10,000 to just 611 employees, with Rubio characterizing the remaining programs as “set for absorption” by the state department – what he recently praised as “overdue and historic reform”.USAid’s headquarters became central to the controversy when multiple staffers told the Guardian in February that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials had been conducting extensive “walkthrough” tours to potentially take over the facility while agency employees remained barred entry.Politico later reported that CBP had officially taken over the office space and signed a lease agreement, according to a CBP spokesperson. The court order’s 14-day deadline for the administration to confirm USAid could return to its building suggested the space may have already been reallocated.The injunction also prohibits Doge from publishing unredacted personal information of USAid contractors and halts further dismantling actions, including terminations, contract cancellations, and permanent deletion of electronic records.That may already be a serious exposure problem for Musk and the rest of Doge, as an internal email obtained by the Guardian revealed how staff had been instructed to spend the day destroying classified “SECRET” documents – potentially breaking compliance with the Federal Records Act, which prohibits destroying government records before their designated retention period, which is typically two years. More

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      Russia will ‘undoubtedly’ discuss future Mars flights with Musk, Putin envoy says

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      Russian officials expect to hold talks with Elon Musk soon about space travel to Mars, Vladimir Putin’s international cooperation envoy said on Tuesday. The envoy’s comments, which Musk has not confirmed, also stated that Russia wanted to expand its cooperation with the US on space projects.“I think that there will undoubtedly be a discussion with Musk [about Mars flights] in the near future,” Kirill Dmitriev said at a business forum in Moscow, going on to praise Musk’s efforts to push the boundaries of human achievement.The proposed talks would once again put Musk, the world’s richest man and a senior adviser to Trump, in an outsized and largely unaccountable role in international politics. Musk has joined in on White House calls with international leaders since Donald Trump’s reelection, and prior to his new role in the administration reportedly was in regular contact with Putin.Musk’s ownership of SpaceX and control of the Starlink satellite communications system have increasingly allowed him to take on the role of power broker in space travel and international telecommunications. In the US, Nasa has come to rely on SpaceX for the majority of its launches, and recently fired workers have raised alarms about his growing sway over the agency. Musk has also used his leverage over international telecoms to assert his political influence, including limiting Ukraine’s military use of Starlink during the Russia-Ukraine war and recently clashing with Poland’s foreign minister over the technology.Dmitriev, who was named by Putin last month as his special envoy on international economic and investment cooperation, also claimed on Tuesday that Russia’s “enemies” were trying to derail Trump’s efforts to restore a dialogue with Russia. His remarks came as Trump held a call with Putin on Tuesday to discuss a potential ceasefire in Ukraine and eventual end to hostilities after Russia invaded the country in 2022.Dmitriev said Russia wanted to work with Musk as part of Moscow’s efforts to strengthen and develop Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, and state nuclear corporation Rosatom. Dmitriev stated he was in touch with Roscosmos, Russian businesses and the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRussia said in 2022 it would start work on its own Mars mission after the European Space Agency (ESA) suspended a joint project in the wake of Putin’s decision to send tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine. More