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    We’ve never seen a more error-prone, incompetent presidency | Moustafa Bayoumi

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    As we pass the 100-day mark of Donald Trump’s second term, it’s time to take note of a key element of how this administration governs: by mistake. I’m being serious. Have we ever seen a more error-prone, incompetent and fumbling presidency? In their rush to implement a barely concealed authoritarian agenda, this administration is producing a litany of blunders, gaffes and slip-ups. At times, they’ll seek to hide those mistakes by projecting a shield of authoritarianism. At other times, they’ll claim the mistake as a method of walking back an unpopular authoritarian agenda item. Either way, it’s a unique style of rule, one that I call “rule by error”.On 11 April, for example, the White House’s taskforce on antisemitism sent Harvard University a letter detailing a laundry list of actions that Harvard would have to undertake if the university wanted to avoid having over $2bn of multiyear federal grants frozen by the government. But the actions were extreme and would have resulted in the end of Harvard’s intellectual independence. Days later, Harvard wrote back: “Nah, I’m good,” they told Trump’s people. (More precisely, they wrote that the university is “not prepared to agree to demands that go beyond the lawful authority of this or any administration”.)Harvard’s response garnered much popular support against a bullying Trump administration, including a photo caption in the Onion that read: “Nation Can’t Believe It’s On Harvard’s Side.” Then, a few days later, several unnamed officials told the New York Times that the Trump administration’s letter, which had been signed by three officials from the administration and sent on official letterhead from an official email account, had been sent to Harvard by mistake. Oops.Maybe it was sent in error, which frankly still speaks poorly of this administration, but it’s also possible that as the wind began blowing favorably in Harvard’s direction, some in the administration were looking for a way out of the trap they had set for themselves.But that’s hardly the only error this administration has admitted to, nor is it the worst, not by a long shot. Kilmar Ábrego García, an Salvadorian man who lived in Maryland with his wife and five-year-old child, was grabbed by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents on 12 March and deported three days later to El Salvador, despite having a deportation protection order forbidding him from being sent there. In a 7 April court filing, Robert Cerna, the acting Ice field office director, admitted that Ábrego García’s deportation was an “administrative error”.Did owning up to this error result in the return of Ábrego García? Absolutely not. Trump’s administration continues to this day to defy the courts while doubling down on its own failures. During a recent Oval Office meeting between the US president and Salvadorian president, Nayib Bukele, White House aide Stephen Miller disputed even the existence of an error, despite all the evidence. “The only mistake that was made is a lawyer put an incorrect line in a legal filing that since has been relieved of duty,” Miller said, presumably referring in his tortured English to the fact that the administration fired Erez Reuveni, a career justice department attorney who represented the government in court during the Ábrego García case. The lesson here? You’re better off shooting the messenger than correcting your own mistake.If those errors aren’t enough evidence to constitute a philosophy of error, there’s still plenty more. What about the official notice the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sent to some Ukrainian refugees in the United States. More than 240,000 Ukrainians have been settled in the United States under a program titled “U4U” that began under Joe Biden’s presidency. On 3 April, some Ukrainians, it’s unclear how many, received a notice telling them: “DHS is now exercising its discretion to terminate your parole,” referring to their legal status to stay in the country. “Unless it expires sooner, your parole will terminate 7 days from the date of this notice,” the email said. Then it warned its recipients: “Do not attempt to remain in the United States–the federal government will find you. Please depart the United States immediately.”This would unquestionably be a terrifying communication to receive. When CBS News, which first reported the story, asked DHS about the notice, the government replied: “A message was sent in error to some Ukrainians under the U4U program. The U4U parole program has not been terminated.” Sorry!Or how about the time when Nicole Micheroni, a US-born American citizen and immigration lawyer received an email from the Trump administration telling her to self-deport. “It is time for you to leave the United States,” the email read. “If you do not depart the United States immediately you will be subject to potential law enforcement actions that will result in your removal from the United States.” Oops! They did it again.Or what about using the messaging app Signal to plan a bombing campaign, and then adding a journalist to this top-secret chat? Who hasn’t made this mistake before! And then done it again!How about the widely accepted fact that the calculation the administration has used to determine their outrageous and misguided tariff policy is just plain wrong. The American Enterprise Institute, a center-right thinktank, looked into Trump math and found that it inflates the tariffs that Trump assumes countries are levying on the US by four times. Then again, who cares!Remember when they told us that the US government was sending $50m of condoms to Gaza? The aid was actually sent to a province in Mozambique named Gaza and was earmarked for HIV and tuberculosis prevention. No condoms were part of the aid. Asked about the error, Elon Musk said: “Some of the things I say will be incorrect and should be corrected,” but then he repeated part of the lie by saying: “I’m not sure we should be sending $50m worth of condoms to anywhere, frankly.”There are plenty more mistakes (tariffs on penguins, anyone?), but you get the point. Trump constantly complains about the existence of some shadowy “deep state”, when in reality he and his entire administration ought to be in a deep state of shame, considering the constant stream of errors and blunders that constitute their rule. No wonder Trump’s job approval rating at the 100-day mark is at a piddly 42%, the second lowest of any president in the last 80 years, according to a new NPR/PBS/Marist News poll. (The lowest? Trump in his first term, by a single point.)People on the right often view Trump as some sort of political genius. Michael Moore, on the other hand, once labeled Trump an “evil genius”. But all I see is a man and an administration who use mistakes to cover up evil practices and use evil practices to excuse mistakes. That’s not genius. It’s dangerous. And if we don’t understand “rule by error” and how to dismantle it, we will all be doomed to live out its mistakes.

    Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York More

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      Private firms are trying to fill research gaps, but their ‘puny’ budgets are no match for federal funds

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      The federal government has slashed research since Donald Trump took office – hacking away at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its grants, staff and long-held partnerships with academia.Now, some private companies said they want to pick up strands of research that might have otherwise been funded by the federal government. The effort has stoked little optimism among experts, who caution that private efforts cannot remotely replicate the breadth, depth or public service provided by federal funding.“We can’t wait four years to do any women’s health research,” said Priyanka Jain, co-founder and the CEO of the startup Evvy. The company sells at-home vaginal microbiome tests – a product the company argues can help women better understand common conditions such as bacterial vaginosis.Jain said Evvy is funding a small trial to identify biomarkers, or physical indicators, of how the vaginal microbiome can impact in vitro fertilization (IVF) success rates.“There are companies like Evvy raising venture dollars and doing the work the government is not doing,” said Jain. “Women step up and actually solve this problem.”In contrast, health policy insiders such as Sean Tipton, the chief policy officer at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, said the many small projects that hope to keep research alive cannot remotely match the retreat of federal government research.“It is absolutely not realistic to think that the resources of the federal government can be replaced through some combination of philanthropic and for-profit entities trying to fill the gap,” said Tipton.The NIH is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical and behavioral research. When Trump took office, the agency had a $48bn budget and funded projects into nearly every area of medicine imaginable – including administration bugbears such as fluoride and vaccine safety.In the first few months of the administration, the health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr and billionaire Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency” have fired 1,300 NIH employees, canceled $2bn in grants, and slowed new grant approval by nearly one-third, pumping $2.3bn less into research.View image in fullscreenA leaked budget proposal would further shrink the NIH by 40% – or tens of billions less that will not go into research. HHS has also canceled more than $11bn in state grants and frozen billions in grants slated for research at Ivy league colleges such as Harvard University. In the latest move, the National Science Foundation, which finances basic research in areas such as astronomy and quantum computing, canceled $2bn more in funding.“In the research space, my organization is proud because we’re now spending in excess of $3m a year on research grants – that is literally a rounding error compared to what the federal government spends,” Tipton said. “We’re very proud of that, and worked very hard to get it up to that level, and that level is puny and inadequate.”The federal government’s backing of scientific research has been fundamental to modern drug discovery. NIH research contributed to 354 of 356 of the drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) between 2010-2019, a JAMA Health Forum study found.That money has gone to advance blockbuster drugs such as Wegovy and Ozempic – first identified by an NIH-funded researcher and isolated from gila monster saliva by Veterans Affairs researchers – and to the hundreds lesser known FDA-approved treatments.“Tell taxpayers we’re studying gila monsters in a lab – they’ll laugh you out of town, but the first GLP-1 was exenatide, which is a gila monster protein,” said Dr Fred Ledley, the author of the JAMA Health Forum study. Ledley’s favorite example of basic research comes from worms – publicly funded studies of their intestinal development led to the discovery of a trigger of cell death, which now underpins nearly one-third of the new cancer drugs on the market.His research found that for every “first in class” innovative drug brought to market, the NIH funded roughly $1.4bn in research. If government investment was calculated as industry calculates its investment – to include failure and the cost of capital – it is closer to $2.8bn in public funding, or about the equivalent of what industry spends to bring an innovative drug to market.Without NIH’s basic research, there is little hope that the private market will pick up the tab, said Ledley.“It’s too expensive for them,” Ledley said. “What you’ll see industry do is develop more ‘me too’ drugs,’” and “incremental tweaking … This is not what the public wants”.“The public wants something to treat Alzheimer’s with, they want something to prevent diabetes in the first place, and they desperately need better treatments for cancer and heart disease – still the number one killer,” said Ledley.Another indicator of the low likelihood of the industry picking up basic research is in job listings. Since 1 January, listings for research and development positions have fallen 25% based on a “before times” baseline of January 2020 baseline, according to data from job hiring site Indeed. Instead, the private health sector is dominated by demand for services – such as nurses and surgeons.“The government can step in and correct that kind of market failure when something is going to be positive for the society but not necessarily profitable in the market,” said economist Allison Shrivastava, an economist with Indeed. “A lot of this research falls into that category.”Put another way by the Democratic US senator Patty Murray at a recent press conference: “Our public health folks who go out and track measles or track whooping cough or track a new pandemic aren’t going to work for a private company … There isn’t a profit-making course in this.”“In last year’s world we were hoping to get funding” from the federal government for her company’s study, said Jain. She noted that women’s health research has been especially hard-hit by cuts, a victim of “diversity, equity and inclusion” cancellations.“I personally don’t think we should have to raise venture capital money to do this study – that is not the typical use of venture capital money,” said Jain. “Our hope is we survive another four years and the tides turn.” More

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      ‘A ruthless agenda’: charting 100 days of Trump’s onslaught on the environment

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      Donald Trump has never been mistaken for an environmentalist, having long called the climate crisis a “giant hoax” and repeatedly lauding the supposed virtues of fossil fuels.But the US president’s onslaught upon the natural world in this administration’s first 100 days has surprised even those who closely charted his first term, in which he rolled back environmental rules and tore the US from the Paris climate agreement.This time, the mantra “drill, baby, drill” has been used to justify a hyperactive series of actions to reverse rules designed to protect clean air and water, open up vast tracts of land, ocean and even the seabed to mining, fire federal scientists en masse and downgrade the federal response to the disasters that stem from a warming world.Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is attempting to roll back toxic regulations that were calculated to save an estimated 200,000 Americans’ lives in the years ahead, his Department of the Interior is looking to shrink national monuments and his scientific agencies are degrading the basic data collection required for climate assessments and even weather forecasts.This burst of activity faces a barrage of legal action, with the courts already taking a dim view of the administration’s attempts to skirt usual practice in its haste to deregulate. Even with a rightwing-dominated supreme court, many of these executive orders are expected to founder.However, the US must accelerate efforts to cut emissions if climate goals are to be met, half of Americans still have to endure unsafe air and endangered species and public lands face pressure from a changing climate. The next few years will see little remedy to these growing problems from the White House.“The pace of announcements may slow at some point but the pressure on our regulatory system and our democracy will not only continue, but ramp up,” said Michael Burger, a climate law expert at Columbia University.“The result will be fewer environmental protections and more people suffering the public health consequences of more pollution. It’s that straightforward.” Oliver MilmanHistoric rollbacks of environmental regulations What has the administration done:

      Taken more than 140 actions to roll back environmental rules and push for greater use of fossil fuels.

      Set about rewriting regulations that limit pollution from cars, trucks and power plants.

      Officially reconsidering whether greenhouse gases actually cause harm to public health.

      Legally targeted states that have their own laws on tackling the climate crisis.

      Speeded up environmental reviews of drilling projects, from years to just a few weeks.

      Winding back water efficiency standards for showers and toilets and halting a phase-out of plastic straws
      View image in fullscreenAnalysis and reaction: When campaigning for president, Donald Trump promised to torch environmental regulations if fossil fuel companies were able to donate enough money to propel him to the White House. He has set about fulfilling this pledge in dizzying fashion.By the Guardian’s count, Trump’s administration has taken more than 140 actions to weaken or rescind environmental rules and to escalate the use of fossil fuels in his first 100 days – more than all of the rollbacks of his entire first term.The drumbeat of this effort, largely via a blizzard of executive orders and agency memos, to eviscerate rules designed to protect Americans’ air, water and a livable climate, has been relentless. “What we’ve seen in this first 100 days is unprecedented – the deregulatory ambition of this administration is mind-blowing,” said Burger of Columbia University.In a single day in March, Trump’s EPA launched 31 different actions to refashion pollution laws for cars, trucks and power plants and even re-evaluate whether greenhouse gases harm public health – a key finding that underpins US climate laws. It was a “dagger to the heart of the climate religion”, according to Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator.Zeldin has repeatedly touted the EPA’s record during the first 100 days, with the agency publishing a list of 100 environmental actions, including the cleanup of toxic waste and the testing of chemicals.But the administration has also sought to ease restrictions upon coal plants dumping their toxic ash and mercury and to scale back a plan to prevent states from wafting their pollution to their neighbors. Consideration of the climate crisis has been removed from federal spending decisions and disaster recovery, pipeline safety standards are to be relaxed and environmental permit approvals speeded up from years to just weeks.Places of refuge for nature and carbon storage, such as oceans and national forests, will be opened up for the extraction of fish and timber while endangered species laws are set to be upended and, if the administration gets its way, essentially neutered.Not content with the reorientation of the federal government’s response to the climate crisis, Trump has ordered his Department of Justice to target states that have their own climate laws. He has also ordered the expiration of environment and energy regulations across 25 different laws, usually a responsibility of Congress.Trump has even used the power of his office to attend to his own fixations around shower water pressure, which he considers too weak, and paper straws, which he dislikes compared with the plastic alternative. “There doesn’t seem to be any strategy to this but I feel like I have policy whiplash,” said Gina McCarthy, who was Joe Biden’s top climate adviser.“We see an administration that doesn’t care about these things and is all about the whims of President Trump. Executive orders are not laws, though, and we spend a great deal of time focusing on them when most of them are highly illegal and won’t go anywhere.” Oliver MilmanTrump’s ‘drill, baby, drill’ agendaWhat the administration has done:

      Trump signed executive orders to ease restrictions on fossil fuel extraction and exports, pledging to “unleash American energy”.

      He tapped fossil fuel-supporting appointees to head up crucial federal agencies, including Chris Wright, a former fracking CEO, for energy secretary; Doug Burgum, former Republican governor of North Dakota – the third largest oil and natural gas producer in the country – to lead the interior department (DOI); and Lee Zeldin, a former Republican congressperson to head the EPA.

      Trump offered the fossil fuel industry – which lavished record levels of donations on him and Congress – an exemption from the tariffs he presented in April (and which he placed on pause shortly thereafter).
      Analysis and reaction: Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the youth-led environmental justice group Sunrise Movement said: “Donald Trump’s actions on climate are part of a ruthless agenda to prop up big oil and reward the billionaires bankrolling his campaigns. Big oil’s bribe paid off.”Trump’s loyalty to the fossil fuel industry has not, however, shielded fossil fuel companies from the fallout of his erratic policymaking. The domestic oil industry is currently facing the some of the lowest prices for crude it has seen in years. The Dow Jones’s US Oil and Gas Index, which tracks 42 fossil fuel companies, plummeted by more than 15% since Trump announced the tariffs on 2 April, sinking to its lowest level since 2022, before a slow, partial rebound.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, Trump’s tariffs have already begun driving up the costs of oil production, with new taxes on steel and aluminum inflating the costs of building fossil fuel infrastructure. And his calls to “drill, baby, drill” have raised concerns about oil demand, since an increase in supply could push down prices, thereby limiting profit.Though the oil industry has publicly praised Trump, they have quietly showed they are anxious about the economic implications of his policies. In a recent anonymized survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, for instance, fossil fuel executives brazenly criticized Trump. “The administration’s chaos is a disaster for the commodity markets,” one oil boss said. “‘Drill, baby, drill’ is nothing short of a myth and populist rallying cry. Tariff policy is impossible for us to predict and doesn’t have a clear goal. We want more stability.”At a major Texas oil and gas conference in May, fossil fuel top brass echoed these criticisms.Though the Trump administration has not ended the chaos created by its policies, it has given big oil other gifts. In recent weeks, for instance, Trump signed an executive order instructing the Department of Justice to “stop the enforcement” of state climate laws forcing polluting companies to pay for climate damages, and also targeting dozens of lawsuits that accuse big oil of intentionally covering up the climate risks of their products. Dharna NoorHollowing out agencies including Noaa, Fema and DOIWhat has the administration done

      Sweeping cuts to federal agencies on the forefront of the climate crisis, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), the DOI and the Department of Agriculture (USDA), and widespread firings of climate scientists and regulation experts.

      Withdrawal from contracts and canceled grant funding; datasets pulled from public-facing websites; funding for regional climate centers suspended.

      National Climate Assessment contract canceled; hundreds of experts dismissed.

      Executive order to expedite deep-sea mining for minerals.

      Plans to dismantle a key Fema disaster preparedness program.

      Weather balloon launches stopped due to staff shortages.

      Censorship of climate-related words, flagged in studies, contracts and agency documents/websites.

      Plans to drain funding for climate, weather and ocean laboratories.
      Analysis and reaction: Trump wasted no time before he unleashed an all-out assault on environmental science, gutting the federal agencies positioned on the frontlines of the climate crisis, firing hundreds of researchers, staffers and forecasters and pulling public access to critical resources and data.Vital work to understand, prepare and respond to changes caused by global heating has slowed or stopped as teams try to navigate the chaos, while the threat of more severe budget cuts and political crackdowns lingers. The moves largely bypassed input or oversight from Congress as Trump used executive orders and actions undertaken by the billionaire Elon Musk-led “department of government efficiency”, even on budget issues typically governed by the legislative branch.View image in fullscreenThousands of federal workers were culled from the ranks across the country’s premier scientific agencies – including at Noaa and Nasa – and in roles across the government that typically facilitate regulatory process or research. Many of those fired were probationary employees, a classification applied to the first year, or sometimes two, in a position.The widespread firings were challenged in court, forcing the administration to rehire workers and put them on administrative leave, only to fire them again when legally in the clear. In the end, at least 121,000 federal workers were fired, leaving significant holes in their wake.Thousands more workers have opted to take offers of early retirement or voluntary separations. At Noaa alone, roughly 27,000 years of collective experience was lost, according to Craig McLean, the former director of Noaa research.“We lost our promising new talent in the probationary firings and now we’ve lost our institutional knowledge,” a Noaa employee said of the resignations, asking for anonymity out of fear of retribution.While the losses are expected to have a profound effect on the American public, the impact will be felt globally too.Among the hundreds of positions lost were workers who track El Niño-La Niña weather patterns around the world, people who model severe storm risks, and scientists contributing to global understanding of what could happen as the world warms.“I want to emphasize that this blunt smashing of federal agencies is limiting the ability of our nation to respond not only now, but in the future,” said Dr Gretchen Goldman, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s dismantling the very infrastructure by which we collect data, foster expertise and collaboration, and have the people and processes in place to take action.”Already, the staff shortages have hampered data collection and field offices have had to stop deploying tools that gather essential intel.“The effects may not be obvious until there is a major tornado outbreak, or a hurricane landfall downwind, that doesn’t go so well,” said climate scientist Daniel Swain, who spoke about the gravity of this issue during a recent broadcast on YouTube. But, he said, the actions taken in the first 100 days were just the beginning.“What we have seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said, noting recently leaked budget documents that outline the president’s plans to continue gutting climate science-focused federal work. If the administration has its way, he said, “it would probably spell the end of most publicly funded climate research in the United States”. Gabrielle CanonPublic lands targetedWhat has the administration done

      Rescinded protections for hundreds of millions of acres of federal waters.

      Initiated major changes to National Environmental Policy Act (Nepa) regulations that require federal projects consider environmental impacts and enable public oversight/comment, severely reducing the often years-long environmental impact process to 28 days.

      Ordered the end of American Climate Corps jobs that create climate and public lands-supporting positions.

      Plans to fast-track controversial deep-sea mining and accelerating approvals for mining, drilling, and fossil fuels extraction on public lands..

      Proposed rolling back protections in the Endangered Species Act.

      Plans to rescind Bureau of Land Management rules that protect millions of acres in Alaska and across the US west; planned repeal of BLM Public Lands Rule.

      Emergency situation determination issued by the USDA to open logging on more than 100m acres of national forests and an executive orders to increase and accelerate logging on federal lands. And revoked a Biden order that protected old-growth forests.

      Joint taskforce between DOI and the Department of Housing and Urban Development to examine federal lands for housing development as the administration pushes for the sell-off of public lands.
      Analysis and reaction: Trump may be one of the very few Americans who doesn’t cherish the country’s public lands. Voter support for these roughly 640m acres – forests and deserts, parks and monuments among them – is stalwart and one of the few issues bridged by an otherwise vast political divide.But even with broad popularity and a rapidly escalating interest in outdoor recreation that’s fueled both local economies and international tourism, the administration has made it a priority to shrink land management agencies, reduce protections once governed by them and possibly even diminish the holdings of lands under federal jurisdiction.View image in fullscreenThousands of employees were fired or took deals to leave, and agencies are struggling to hire seasonal employees who typically run operations during the busiest seasons. Still, more cuts are being planned as Trump seeks to reshape the federal government. Reports found the Department of Interior has plans to cull roughly 25% of its workforce, and employees at the US Forest Service are bracing for a broad reduction in force that has yet to be detailed. The National Park Service alone has suffered a 13% reduction in staff already.Sweeping firings left behind gaping holes in an already short-staffed workforce at parks and forests, leaving some departments with workforce levels typically seen during government shutdowns according to some experts.Toilets, trash and overgrown trails may become a common feature in highly trafficked areas, along with increasing risks of trampled conservation areas, a lack of capacity for the study of threatened plants and animals, and lost support that ensures safety measures are followed. Visitation has surged in recent years, adding new strains on ageing infrastructure and more opportunities for injuries and wildlife conflicts, as dangers from extreme conditions fueled by the climate crisis continue to mount.“Scientists who should be doing their job tracking the wildlife and the ecosystems in these parks, are being told they have to take restroom cleaning shifts,” said Aaron Weiss, the deputy director for the Center for Western Priorities. “That’s incredibly important in parks,” he added, “but we shouldn’t be assigning those jobs to scientists because Doge has fired all the custodial staff.”It’s not just about recreation, though. The administration has also made moves to open the country’s holdings of conservation areas, protected habitats and wilderness to extraction and development. There have been a series of orders from the administration that call for increased logging, fossil fuels leases, and mining as Trump pushes for expanding industry access.Ben Vizzachero, a federal worker who initially lost his job during the federal firing spree but who was later brought into his position said the outlook still remained bleak for US public lands. “The Trump administration is waging a campaign of bullying and harassment, trying to shrink the federal workforce by any means,” he said, noting that removing regulators and regulations will “open lands for mining, logging, drilling, and other destruction”.These sweeping changes and the threats to public lands come as they continue to be widely supported and cherished by the American people. “The fight to protect our public lands is embedded within the fight for our democracy itself.” Gabrielle CanonCancelling environmental justice schemes, and hitting US farmers What has the administration done

      Trump immediately rescinded a slew of executive orders that directed federal agencies to prioritize tackling environmental racism and other injustices – including one dating back more than 30 years.

      A separate executive order focused on ending government-sponsored diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and so-called “illegal DEI” efforts in the private sector also targeted environmental justice by wrongly conflating the two. This called for the closures of all environmental justice offices and positions in the federal government – including the office of environmental justice and external civil rights which was created to support EPA efforts to help improve access to clean water, air and land in communities disproportionately affected by environmental pollution, as well as enforce federal civil rights laws.

      Mass layoffs in the EPA, USDA and health and human services department which will disproportionately hit access to adequate, clean and affordable food, water, air and energy for low-income and rural communities.

      Freezing the Biden-era Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund – more than $20bn of competitive grants available to states, cities, tribes and other eligible groups to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution, particularly in areas most affected by climate crisis and excluded from mainstream finance.

      Terminating climate and conservation grants to US farmers including the Biden-era five-year $3.2bn real-life study into the effectiveness of conservation practices such as cover cropping for commodity farms.
      View image in fullscreenAnalysis and reaction: From day one of Trump 2.0, the president has revealed his intention to willfully conflate environmental justice – efforts to acknowledge and correct decades of harm caused by placing polluting factories, landfills, fossil fuel infrastructure and highways in low-income and Indigenous people and communities of color – with what he and his allies believe to be woke, anti-white DEI policies that proliferated in response to the BLM movement.Citing Trump’s crusade against DEI, the justice department terminated a two-year investigation into a petrochemical plant in LePlace, Louisiana, accused of emitting extraordinarily high levels of the cancer-causing chemical chloroprene into the majority Black community. Then, in an unprecedented move, his justice department terminated a 2023 landmark settlement with the state of Alabama requiring health authorities to provide the majority-Black Lowndes county with basic sewage and sanitation services – which an earlier investigation found had been denied for decades due to environmental racism. Several other consent decrees involving egregious polluters are feared to be under threat.Not to be outdone, Robert F Kennedy Jr, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), dismantled the office and fired the entire staff at the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (Liheap). States were still waiting for about $380m to be disbursed this year, when the bipartisan program that helps low-income Americans struggling to pay energy bills so they don’t die from the extreme heat or cold was disbanded. In a leaked HHS budget for 2026 seen by the Guardian, Liheap was terminated – which unless revived will increase heat and cold deaths in the richest country in the world.The $20bn Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, and the portal, has been frozen on and off since February, causing chaos and uncertainty for recipients as this makes its way through the courts. The money was appropriated by Congress through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and finalized before the election, and it is widely agreed (outside Trump world) that the fund cannot legally be cancelled without legislation. The fear is that the Republican-majority Congress will succeed in pushing this through in the continuing resolution for the 2025 budget, which should be passed in May.“The administration is trying to make it so difficult that people will give up, but our quest for environmental justice [has been waged] for 40 years and we will not stop now,” said one veteran environmental justice leader who asked not to be named in fear that his organization, a recipient of the fund, would be targeted. “The climate crisis is real; environmental racism is real. Those are the facts.” Nina LakhaniTearing up US global climate pledgesWhat has the administration done

      Pulled out of the 2015 Paris accords, which the Biden administration rejoined in 2021 – four years after Trump first withdrew the US from the global climate mitigation pact.

      Withdrew the US from the loss and damage fund – a global agreement under which the developed countries most responsible for the climate crisis pledged to partly compensate developing countries for irreversible harms caused by global heating.

      The EPA missed the annual 15 April deadline to submit data on US greenhouse gas emissions to the United Nations – the first time in 30 years.
      Analysis and reaction: The US is currently the second biggest greenhouse gas emitter, so withdrawing from the Paris agreement and its legally binding commitment to reduce emissions will further weaken global efforts to slow global heating – with catastrophic consequences for communities vulnerable to climate shocks in the US and globally. It takes a year for the withdrawal to go into effect, but missing the 15 April emissions reporting deadline, which never happened even during Trump’s first term, has raised suspicion that this administration is willing to violate international rules and could be preparing to exit from the entire UNFCCC.View image in fullscreenAnother major concern is climate finance. As the world’s biggest economy (and worst historical polluter), the US has been a major, albeit inadequate, contributor to global climate funds to help developing countries that are not responsible for global heating in their climate mitigation and adaptation efforts. It has already pulled out of the loss and damage fund, adopted at the Cop28 UN summit in 2023 after years of diplomatic and grassroots advocacy – and despite US efforts to block it. The US has long obstructed progress on global climate action and had pledged a measly $17.5m (£13.5m) to the fund; the cynical move to withdraw from loss and damage efforts – while bolstering fossil fuel production – was widely condemned by the global south.Harjeet Singh, a climate activist and founding director of the India-based Satat Sampada Climate Foundation, said: “As the largest historical emitter, the United States bears a significant share of the blame for the climate adversities affecting vulnerable populations worldwide. The decision by the Trump administration exemplifies a longstanding pattern of obstruction by the US government in securing necessary finance for addressing climate impacts, [and] undermines global efforts to deliver climate justice.” Nina Lakhani More

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      Move fast and destroy things: 100 chaotic days of Elon Musk in the White House

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      One hundred days after Elon Musk entered the White House as Donald Trump’s senior adviser and the de facto leader of the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), the Tesla CEO has left little of the federal government unscathed. Over the course of just a few months, he has gutted agencies and public services that took decades to build while accumulating immense political power.Musk’s role in the Trump administration is without modern precedent. Never before has the world’s richest person been deputized by the US president to cull the very agencies that oversee his businesses. Musk’s attempts to radically dismantle government bureaus have won him sprawling influence. His team has embedded its members in key roles across federal agencies, gained access to personal data on millions of Americans and fired tens of thousands of workers. SpaceX, where he is CEO, is now poised to take over potential government contracts worth billions. He has left a trail of chaos while seeding the government with his allies, who will likely help him profit and preserve his newfound power.The billionaire’s newfound sway has not come without pushback and a cost. Doge’s blitz through the government has sparked furious nationwide backlash, as well as dozens of lawsuits challenging Musk’s mass firings and accusing his task force of violating numerous laws. Musk’s personal popularity has sunk to record lows, and Tesla’s profits have tanked.A look back at the first 100 days of the Trump administration shows the extent to which Musk’s efforts have changed the US government. It also shows that what Musk framed as a cost-cutting task initiative is failing to meet its ostensible goal of finding $1tn in fraud or waste, but it is succeeding in reshaping federal agencies along ideological grounds, paving the way for private companies to fill the resulting vacuum of public services.Musk has recently stopped physically working from the White House and stated he plans to pivot away from his government position soon, but has entrenched himself as one of the world’s most divisive political figures and gives no sign he is willing to fully give up his influence. Instead, the first 100 days of Doge shows that the scope of Musk’s ambition extends to remaking how the government deals with everything from humanitarian aid to the rule of law.Doge sweeps through agenciesOn the same day Trump was sworn into office, the president issued an executive order that created Musk’s “department of government efficiency” by renaming the US Digital Service agency, which previously handled governmental tech issues. Trump’s order included only a vague mandate to modernize government technology and increase efficiency, but within days it would become clear that Musk and his team had far more expansive aims.In the months leading up to the executive order, Musk had been hiring a team of staffers that included a mix of young engineers, tech world executives and longtime lieutenants from his private companies. Running the day-to-day operations was Steve Davis, who had worked with Musk at various companies, including SpaceX and the Boring Company, for more than 20 years. Davis was known as an exacting boss – Musk once compared him to chemotherapy. Others had far less experience, including 19-year-old Edward Coristine, who had worked for several months at Musk’s Neuralink company. The teenager had been fired from a previous internship for leaking information and went by the username “big balls” in online profiles.Doge’s early days made headlines for targeting masses of government workers with layoffs and pushing others to resign, with more than 2 million employees receiving an email on 28 January titled “Fork in the road” that encouraged staffers to take a buyout. The emails, which asked: “What did you accomplish this week?” would become a signature of Musk and his new bureau, sent again and again whenever staff began to prey on a new herd of government employees.Shortly after Trump’s executive order created Doge, Musk’s team quickly began popping up in the offices of numerous agencies. One of the first was the General Services Administration, which oversees digital technology and government buildings. Doge staffers appeared on Zoom calls with no introduction and hidden last names, questioning federal employees about what they did for work and refusing to answer questions. They also began to show up in person, taking over conference rooms and moving Ikea beds on to the sixth floor of the GSA to sleep overnight. Perplexed government workers at numerous agencies described Doge’s actions as a hostile takeover, where a goon squad would appear and demand rapid changes to systems they knew little about.“They’ve only fired people and turned things off,” said a current federal employee, who agreed to speak anonymously for fear of retribution.Simultaneously, Doge staffers were aggressively gaining access to key data systems that controlled the flow of payments to federal workers and funding for government contracts. In one striking incident, Doge team members clashed with the highest ranking career official at the treasury department over access to a payment system that controls $6tn in annual funds. The fight ended with the official, David Lebryk, being put on administrative leave before he ultimately resigned. Doge staff obtained the access they wanted.Pushback against Doge from other officials resulted in similar punishments. As Doge staffers stormed into the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in early February, they found themselves in a heated standoff with security officials who tried to bar them from accessing a secure room which held sensitive and confidential data. The confrontation ended with USAID’s top security official being put on administrative leave, while Doge gained access to its systems. With no one to stop them, Doge staffers then began the process of hollowing out the agency that had once been the world’s largest single supplier of humanitarian aid. More than 5,600 USAID workers around the world would be fired in the ensuing weeks.“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk boasted days later on X, his social media platform.Musk moves to gut the governmentDoge’s targeting of USAID turned out to be a blueprint for how Musk and company would go after other parts of the government. In early February, Musk’s team had established a presence across federal agencies and placed itself at the fulcrum of government employment systems. The next step was mass layoffs.“We do need to delete entire agencies,” Musk told attendees at a World Governments Summit in Dubai on 13 February. “If we don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back.”The same day as Musk’s remarks, the Trump administration ordered agencies to fire thousands of probationary workers – a designation that applies to employees who have been at their jobs for less than a year, including those who may have been recently promoted. Other workers soon received an email from Doge that demanded they list five things that they did last week or face termination, a chaotic request that also turned out to be an empty threat. Cabinet officials privately deemed it nonsensical.Amid the widespread cuts, Musk began reveling in his new powers both on X and in public appearances. At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on 23 February he stood on stage in a black Maga hat, sunglasses and gold chain, gleefully wielding a chainsaw that was gifted to him by Javier Milei, the rightwing populist Argentinian president.“This chainsaw is for bureaucracy!” he said. “I am become meme.”While Musk celebrated his first cuts, Doge began going after entire offices and agencies it viewed as politically progressive or opposed to its goals. The GSA’s 18F office, which helped build software projects such as the IRS’s free tax filing service, was one of the first targets. On 3 February, Musk told a rightwing influencer on X that the office was “deleted” in response to an inaccurate post accusing the group of being radical leftists. Employees at the 18F office asked their new Musk-allied leadership what “deleted” meant, former workers said, but received no further clarification. The employees continued working for weeks under a cloud of confusion and tension with their new leaders, until the middle of the night on Saturday 1 March, when they received an email saying they were going to be laid off en masse.“We were living proof that the talking points of this administration were false. Government services can be efficient,” Lindsay Young, the former executive director of 18F, said in a post on LinkedIn. “This made us a target.”Doge’s influence soon extended beyond government tech offices into major agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services, which announced in March that it was cutting 10,000 jobs to align with Trump’s executive order on Doge. In a display of the chaos that Doge had inspired, US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr weeks later admitted that around 2,000 of those workers were fired in error and would need to be reinstated.Musk fights the judicial systemAs soon as Trump issued the executive order to create Doge, watchdog and labor groups filed lawsuits challenging its legality. More lawsuits piled on as Doge accessed sensitive data systems, fired workers and refused to respond to public records requests. Altogether, there have now been more than two dozen cases targeting the agency.At first, Doge and Musk seemed to move faster than the judicial system could respond as they slashed and burned government agencies. Around the start of March, however, many of the court cases began to produce rulings that curtailed Doge’s layoffs and temporarily blocked its staff’s access to data. Judges ruled that the Trump administration needed to reinstate probationary workers that they fired, limited some Doge access to databases at agencies such as the Social Security Administration and ordered Musk’s team to turn over internal records it had been seeking to keep private.Musk’s reaction was a constant stream of attacks against the judicial system on X, which included demands that lawmakers “impeach the judges” and claims that there was a “judicial coup” under way against Trump. Musk repeatedly amplified far-right influencers saying that the US should emulate El Salvador’s strongman president, Nayib Bukele, whose party ousted supreme court judges in 2021 in a slide toward authoritarianism.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhile Musk campaigned against federal judges that were increasing oversight and forcing more transparency on Doge, he also began plowing money into a Wisconsin supreme court race that would have tipped the state’s judicial body conservative. The billionaire and the groups he funded put more than $20m toward electing a conservative judge, which he claimed was crucial to “the future of civilization”.The attempt to influence the Wisconsin vote followed his blueprint from the presidential race. His Super Pac offered $100 to voters willing to sign a petition stating their opposition to “activist judges”, and he held a campaign rally where he gave out $1m dollar checks on stage. Musk’s effort failed to convince voters, with his preferred candidate losing by 10 percentage points.The outcome of the Wisconsin supreme court race proved to be the first in a series of setbacks that tested the limits of Musk’s political influence and the toxicity of his personal brand. As the billionaire embraced his new role as a Republican mega-donor and placed himself often literally at center stage, it became clear that his routine did not always play well outside of the insulated bubbles of Maga rallies and Tesla product launches. While people saw more and more of Musk, polls showed that the public liked him less and less.Protests boom against Musk and TeslaAs Musk’s association with Trump and the international far right became too prominent to ignore over the past year, there has been a rising social stigma against associating with his products. The most tangible symbol of Musk’s empire, Tesla, has become the focus of an international protest movement since the creation of Doge. SpaceX, the second-largest source of Musk’s wealth, has seemed insulated from the vicissitudes of consumer sentiment and increased its role in US space operations.Protests at Tesla dealerships, as well as vandalism against individual cars, started small in the weeks after inauguration, with gatherings of a few dozen people in cities including New York City and San Francisco. Some Tesla owners sold their cars due to the association with Musk or placed “I bought this before we knew Elon was crazy” bumper stickers on their vehicles. The demonstrations quickly escalated to more cities, though, organizing under the banner of “Tesla Takedown” protests that targeted showrooms around the country.By mid-March, a fully fledged international protest movement against Tesla and Musk had formed and brought about mass protests. Thousands of people gathered at showrooms from Sydney to San Francisco on 30 March in a day of action, with organizers stating that “hurting Tesla is stopping Musk”. Vandalism against Tesla dealerships, charging stations and cars also intensified around the world, including multiple molotov cocktail attacks and incidents of arson. Trump and Musk called the attacks domestic terrorism, while Pam Bondi, the attorney general, vowed to crack down on anyone targeting Tesla.The pressure on Tesla represented a real threat to the company, which was already dealing with an overall sluggish market for electric vehicles and increased competition from Chinese automakers. As protests spread, Musk leaned on his status in Maga world to attempt to revitalize the brand. Trump appeared on the White House driveway in front of several parked Teslas, telling reporters that he was going to buy one of them and praising Musk as a “patriot”. Others in Trump’s orbit, including Fox News host Sean Hannity, also posted sales pitches for the automaker.Despite praise from Trump and Musk’s assurances to workers and investors that they should not sell Tesla stock, analysts reported that the protests along with other economic issues were nevertheless taking a toll. A stock selloff has resulted in Tesla’s share price falling around 25% since the start of the year, wiping billions of dollars from Musk’s net worth. A first-quarter earnings call on 22 April revealed Tesla’s performance was even worse than expectations, with a 71% drop in profits and 9% drop in revenue year over year.Musk announced on the call that he would spend significantly less time working on Doge starting sometime in May.Musk eyes an exit, but Doge remainsMusk’s declaration that he would pare back his time with Doge to one or two days a week gave a more definitive sense of his exit after weeks of speculation about when and how he would leave the White House. Although Trump has remained adamant that Musk is doing a good job and remains welcome in the administration, a growing chorus of top officials have either openly feuded with him or privately griped about his presence throughout his first 100 days.Musk has had intense clashes with secretary of state Marco Rubio, transportation secretary Sean Duffy and several other top Trump staffers. He reportedly got into a near-physical shouting match with treasury secretary Scott Bessent in recent weeks, and has publicly called chief trade adviser Peter Navarro, the architect of Trump’s tariff policies, “dumber than a sack of bricks”.The power struggles between Musk and administration officials leave it unclear how much say Doge will have without Musk constantly placed at the right hand of the president, but his allies are still spread throughout the government and actively working on carrying out his mission. Doge has continued to target agencies throughout April, gutting smaller groups such as an agency that coordinates government policy on homelessness, and eyeing others including the Peace Corps for mass layoffs.Some of Doge’s cuts have directly targeted agencies that oversee Musk’s companies, including at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that regulates and investigates the risks of self-driving cars. Shifts in priorities and leadership at agencies such as Nasa and the Pentagon also put SpaceX in a position to potentially make billions off of new contracts, while former government employees say it is likely Doge already has access to confidential business data on SpaceX’s competitors.While part of the Doge team is still finding workers to fire, other members have begun accessing even more data systems and are starting to put them to work. One target has been immigration, where Doge staff have accessed personal information that includes therapy records for unaccompanied migrant children, housing information and biometric data. The goal, multiple outlets have reported, is to create a master database that could be used to enforce the Trump administration’s deportations and other anti-immigration maneuvers.Mission accomplished?As Doge’s purpose has become more amorphous over its first three months, its initially advertised goal of cutting $1-2tn from the budget has moved further from view. Musk has instead shifted the goal posts, saying that he expects to find $150bn in savings this year – a fraction of his original goal and a small dent in the overall federal budget. That number may also be an illusion, as Doge’s tally of its savings has been filled with constant errors and miscalculations. Much of Doge’s savings could also be erased by the costs of defending itself in court and losses associated with its mass layoffs.The real effects of Doge’s first 100 days are still playing out. Dismantling USAID is projected to cause around 176,000 excess deaths, more than half of them children, according to a Boston University tracking project. Cuts to agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association and Federal Emergency Management Agency could imperil natural disaster forecasting and relief. Agencies such as Veterans Affairs that provide public services may deteriorate, while cuts to research and education programs may be felt for decades to come.“The amazing thing is that they haven’t actually done anything constructive whatsoever. Literally all they’ve done is destroy things,” a current federal employee said of Doge. “People are going to miss the federal government that they had.” More

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      Tesla denies report claiming board looked to replace Elon Musk

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      Tesla has denied a report that its board sought to replace Elon Musk as its chief executive amid a backlash against his rightwing politics and declining car sales.Robyn Denholm, the chair of the board at the electric carmaker, said in a statement on Tesla’s social media account on X: “Earlier today, there was a media report erroneously claiming that the Tesla Board had contacted recruitment firms to initiate a CEO search at the company.“This is absolutely false (and this was communicated to the media before the report was published). The CEO of Tesla is Elon Musk and the Board is highly confident in his ability to continue executing on the exciting growth plan ahead.”View image in fullscreenIt followed a Wall Street Journal story published on Wednesday that claimed “board members” had contacted headhunters to recruit a successor about a month ago.The reported move came as tensions grew at Tesla around falling profits and criticism of Musk for spending much of his time in Washington, where he has been helping Donald Trump slash federal spending as de facto head of the “department of government efficiency” (Doge).It is unclear in the report whether these members were acting on behalf of the board as a collective, or if it was only some of them taking steps to find a new chief executive. The Tesla board is made up of eight people, including Elon Musk himself, his brother, Kimbal Musk, and James Murdoch, son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch.Tesla has been hit by a widespread backlash against Musk’s recent political activity, not only against his Doge work, but also his public support for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party before German national elections in February. Sales of the electric car have dropped in some of its biggest markets and there have been political protests at some of its showrooms.Last week, the company reported that profits had dropped by 71% in the first quarter of this year to $409m (£307m), compared with $1.39bn in the same period in 2024. Meanwhile, Tesla’s stock has suffered, with the company losing about a quarter of its market value this year.Musk told investors that starting from May he would be “allocating far more of my time to Tesla”. He is scheduled to leave his government role on 30 May, according to a strict 130-day cap on his service as a special government employee.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere have long been concerns around the demands on Musk’s time. As well as Tesla, he oversees four other companies, including the space exploration company SpaceX and the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.Musk denounced the Wall Street Journal report on X on Thursday. He wrote: “It is an EXTREMELY BAD BREACH OF ETHICS that the @WSJ would publish a DELIBERATELY FALSE ARTICLE and fail to include an unequivocal denial beforehand by the Tesla board of directors!” More

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      The uniting theme of Trump’s presidency? Ineptitude | Robert Reich

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      Some Democrats fear they’re playing into Donald Trump’s hands by fighting his mass deportations rather than focusing on his failures on bread-and-butter issues like the cost of living.But it’s not either-or. The theme that unites Trump’s inept handling of deportations, his trampling on human and civil rights, his rejection of the rule of law, his dictatorial centralization of power, and his utterly inept handling of the economy is the ineptness itself.In his first term, not only did his advisers and cabinet officials put guardrails around his crazier tendencies, but they also provided his first administration a degree of stability and focus. Now, it’s mayhem.A sampling from recent weeks:1. The Pete Hegseth disaster. The defense secretary didn’t just mistakenly share the military’s plans with the editor of the Atlantic; we now know he shared them with a second Signal group, including his wife, brother and personal lawyer.He’s a walking disaster. John Ullyot, who resigned last week as Pentagon spokesperson, penned an op-ed in Politico that began: “It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon.” Last Friday, Hegseth fired three of his senior staffers. His chief of staff is leaving. As Ullyot wrote, it’s “very likely” that “even bigger bombshell stories” will come soon. The defense department “is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership”.It’s not just the defense department. Much of the federal government is in disarray.2. The Harvard debacle. A Trump official is now claiming that a letter full of demands about university policy sent to Harvard on 11 April was “unauthorized”. What does this even mean?As Harvard pointed out, the letter “was signed by three federal officials, placed on official letterhead, was sent from the email inbox of a senior federal official and was sent on April 11 as promised. Recipients of such correspondence from the US government – even when it contains sweeping demands that are astonishing in their overreach – do not question its authenticity or seriousness.”Even though it was “unauthorized”, the Trump regime is standing by the letter, which has now prompted Harvard to sue.3. The tariff travesty. No sooner had Trump imposed “retaliatory” tariffs on almost all of the US’s trading partners – based on a formula that has made no sense to anyone – than the US stock and bond markets began crashing.To stop the selloff, Trump declared a 90-day pause on the retaliatory tariffs but raised his tariffs on China to 145% – causing markets to plummet once again.Presumably to stem the impending economic crisis, he declared an exemption to the China tariffs for smartphones and computer equipment. By doing so, Trump essentially admitted what he had before denied: that importers and consumers bear the cost of tariffs.Now, Trump is saying that even his China tariffs aren’t really real. Following warnings from Walmart, Target and Home Depot that the tariffs would spike prices, Trump termed the tariffs he imposed on China “very high” and promised they “will come down substantially. But it won’t be zero.”Markets soared on the news. But where in the world are we heading?4. The attack on the Fed chair fiasco. When Trump renewed his attacks on Jerome H Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve – calling him “a major loser” and demanding that the Fed cut interest rates – Trump unnerved already anxious investors who understand the importance of the Fed’s independence and feared that a politicized Fed wouldn’t be able to credibly fight inflation.Then, in another about-face, Trump said on Wednesday he had “no intention” of firing Powell, which also helped lift markets.An economy needs predictability. Investors won’t invest, consumers won’t buy, and producers won’t produce if everything continues to change. But Trump doesn’t think ahead. He responds only to immediate threats and problems.Who’s profiting from all this tumult? Anyone with inside knowledge of what Trump is about to do: most likely, Trump and his family.5. The Kilmar Ábrego García calamity. After the Trump regime admitted an “administrative error” in sending Ábrego García to a brutal Salvadoran torture prison, in violation of a federal court order, Trump then virtually ignored a 9-0 supreme court order to facilitate his return.To the contrary, with cameras rolling in the Oval Office, Trump embraced Nayib Bukele – who governs El Salvador in a permanent state of emergency and has himself imprisoned 83,000 people in brutal dungeons, mostly without due process. Trump then speculated about using Bukele’s prisons for “homegrown” (ie, American-born) criminals or dissidents.Meanwhile, after the Trump regime deported another group of immigrants to the Salvadoran prison under a rarely invoked 18th-century wartime law, the supreme court blocked it from deporting any more people under the measure.6. Ice’s blunderbuss. Further illustrating the chaos of the Trump regime, immigration officials have been detaining US citizens. One American was held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in Arizona for 10 days until his relatives produced papers proving his citizenship, because, according to his girlfriend’s aunt, Ice didn’t believe he was American.Last week, the Trump regime abruptly took action to restore the legal status of thousands of international students who had been told in recent weeks that their right to study in the United States had been rescinded, but officials reserved the right to terminate their legal status at any time. What?Freedom depends on the rule of law. The rule of law depends on predictability. Just like Trump’s wildly inconsistent economic policies, his policies on immigration are threatening everyone.7. Musk’s ‘Doge’ disaster. Musk’s claims of government savings have been shown to be ludicrously exaggerated.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRemember the claim that taxpayers funded $50m in condoms in Gaza? This was supposed to be the first big “gotcha” from the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), but as we know now, it was a lie. The US government buys condoms for about 5 cents apiece, which means $50m would buy 1bn condoms or roughly 467 for every resident of Gaza. Besides, according to a federal 2024 report, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) didn’t provide or fund any condoms in the entire Middle East in the 2021, 2022 or 2023 fiscal years.Then there have been the frantic callbacks of fired federal workers, such as up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration who work on sensitive jobs such as reassembling warheads. Four days after Doge fired them, the agency’s acting director rescinded the firings and asked them back. Similar callbacks have occurred throughout the government.Trump and Musk are threatening the safety and security of Americans – for almost no real savings.8. Measles mayhem. As measles breaks out across the country, sickening hundreds and killing at least two children so far, Trump’s secretary for health and human services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, continues to claim that the measles vaccine “causes deaths every year … and all the illnesses that measles itself causes, encephalitis and blindness, et cetera”.In fact, the measles vaccine is safe, and its risks are lower than the risks of complications from measles. Most people who get the measles vaccine have no serious problems from it, the CDC says. There have been no documented deaths from the vaccine in healthy, non-immunocompromised people, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America.Kennedy also says: “We’re always going to have measles, no matter what happens, as the [measles] vaccine wanes very quickly.” In fact, the measles vaccine is highly protective and lasts a lifetime for most people. Two doses of the vaccine are 97% effective against the virus, according to the CDC and medical experts worldwide. The US saw 3m to 4m cases a year before the vaccine. Today it’s typically fewer than 200.9. Student debt snafu. After a five-year pause on penalizing borrowers for not making student loan payments, the Trump regime is about to require households to resume payments. This could cause credit scores to plunge and slow the economy.Many of the households required to resume paying on their student loans are also struggling with credit card debt at near-record interest rates and high-rate mortgages they thought they would be able to refinance at a lower rate but haven’t. Instead of increasing education department staffing to handle a work surge and clarifying the often shifting rules of its many repayment programs, the Trump regime has done the opposite and cut staff.10. Who’s in charge? In the span of a single week, the IRS had three different leaders. Three days after Gary Shapley was named acting commissioner, it was announced that the deputy treasury secretary, Michael Faulkender, would replace Shapley. That was the same day, not incidentally, that the IRS cut access to the agency for Doge’s top representative.What happened? The treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, told Trump that Musk had evaded him to install Shapley.Meanwhile, the Trump regime is cutting the IRS in half – starting with 6,700 layoffs and gutting the division that audits people with excessive wealth. These are the people meant to keep billionaires accountable. Without them, the federal government will not take in billions of dollars owed.At the same time, the trade adviser Peter Navarro has entered into a public spat with Musk, accusing him of not being a “car manufacturer” but a “car assembler” because Tesla relies on parts from around the world. This prompted Musk to call Navarro a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks” in a post on X, later posting that he wanted to “apologize to bricks”.The state department has been torn apart by the firing of Peter Marocco, the official who was dismantling USAID, by Marco Rubio, the secretary of state. Career officials charged that Marocco, a Maga loyalist, was destroying the agency; Trump’s Maga followers view Marocco’s firing as a sign that Rubio is part of the establishment they want to destroy.Worse yet, Trump has fired more than a half-dozen national security officials after meeting with the far-right agitator Lara Loomer, who was granted access to the Oval Office and gave Trump a list of officials she deemed disloyal.Bottom line: no one is in charge. Trump is holding court but has the attention span of a fruit fly. This is causing chaos across the federal government, as rival sycophants compete for his limited attention.Incompetence is everywhere. The regime can’t keep military secrets. It can’t maintain financial stability. It can’t protect children from measles. It cannot protect America.While we need to continue to resist Trump’s authoritarianism, we also need to highlight his utter inability to govern America.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Musk’s companies got billions from the government. Now he’s pulling up the ladder behind him | Christopher Marquis

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      “Pulling up the ladder after you’ve climbed it” refers to a familiar social pattern: achieving success thanks to certain advantages – then working to dismantle those very structures, denying others the same opportunities. Many have cited immigrant Trump voters as an example; some who have benefited from relatively open immigration policies now advocate for stricter border controls and cuts to legal immigration. The American upper middle class have been dubbed “dream hoarders” who, after achieving success, work to keep the bottom 80% down with a variety of subtle barriers, such as legacy college admissions and exclusionary zoning. Few individuals embody ladder-pulling more starkly than Elon Musk. Though he has been lauded as a self-made innovator and visionary entrepreneur, Musk’s empire only exists thanks to the support of massive public investment. Yet as leader of the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), he has directed and overseen the dismantling of the very government programs, regulations and subsidies that enabled his rise. Musk’s companies, particularly Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity, have benefited from an estimated $38bn in public support, including government loans, tax credits and federal contracts. In 2010, Tesla received a $465m low-interest loan from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) program. That funding was critical to keeping Tesla alive – without it, insiders later told the Washington Post, the company would have gone under. The success of Tesla’s flagship Model S, the expansion of its manufacturing base, and even the illusion of its early profitability were all bolstered by public money.Zero-emission vehicle credits and the $7,500 federal EV tax credit were equally pivotal. Tesla earned billions by selling regulatory credits to legacy automakers struggling to meet emissions standards. In the first nine months of 2024 alone, 43% of Tesla’s net income came from these credits. The company also profited from California’s emissions credit system through a scheme involving phantom battery-swapping infrastructure – credits that provided hundreds of millions in additional income.Despite this, Musk now derides subsidies and regulations as government overreach and has used Doge to slash many of the same types of programs – such as renewable energy incentives and federal climate investments – that once saved his own companies from bankruptcy. These were essential to Tesla’s success, and now he wants to limit other entrepreneurs and businesses from the same opportunities. While Musk claims he aims to eliminate “waste”, his companies continue to benefit from government contracts. SpaceX has received more than $17bn in federal awards since 2015, including lucrative Nasa contracts and taxpayer-funded Starlink deployments in Ukraine. The irony could not be more profound: Musk attacks the legitimacy of public spending even as his empire remains one of its top beneficiaries.The craven self-interest that drives this behavior is particularly on display when considering Musk’s newfound advocacy for policy built on climate denial. Tesla was conceived in the shadow of climate change – and succeeded largely because US federal and state governments treated climate as an emergency. Regulatory frameworks created demand for EVs. Emissions credit markets made Tesla profitable. Yet Musk has now aligned himself with climate deniers like Vivek Ramaswamy and Donald Trump, dismissed environmental, social and governance (ESG) concerns as “the devil”, and supported deregulation plans that could allow polluting industries to ignore environmental rules altogether and make it harder for other EV companies to grow. This is not just hypocrisy – it’s a calculated repositioning: he made his fortune as a climate-focused entrepreneur, and now he aims to protect his personal and political power through climate skepticism. Elon Musk did not succeed in a vacuum. In America, we are inclined to celebrate the heroic individual entrepreneur while ignoring – and even downplaying – that massive public support was the foundation of their success. Consider the iPhone: nearly all of its core technologies, from GPS and touchscreen displays to the internet itself, were publicly funded. Covid vaccines and the pharmaceutical industry, too, have relied heavily on NIH-funded research. And yet, Musk, Steve Jobs and other tech titans are cast as heroic innovators, while the state is derided as inefficient or meddlesome – even as it continues to underwrite the very innovations that fuel the economy. Further, while the risks of developing these innovations are mitigated by public funding, the profits they create are almost entirely privatized. If American taxpayers had taken equity in Tesla for their $465m investment, it is estimated such a stake would be worth over $300bn today. Instead, it is Musk alone who has enjoyed such wealth.To deny that is to erase the role of taxpayers, government scientists and policy architects who built the foundation upon which Tesla, SpaceX and many innovative industries rest. But Musk’s recent efforts – whether gutting climate policy, leading anti-regulatory initiatives, or supporting anti-democratic actors – represent not just a betrayal of that legacy, but a systemic effort to pull up the ladder and rewrite the rules to benefit only himself.Ultimately Musk’s story is a warning: those who climb the ladder with public help are inclined to later destroy the mechanisms that led to their success. For Musk to admit that he had substantial help to become the world’s richest man would undermine the lone genius narrative that has granted him astonishing power with impunity. By pulling up the ladder, “lone geniuses” don’t just block others from the same opportunities, but also undermine the very idea of collective progress and investment in the public good. The outcome will be the erosion of future innovation and, ultimately, a well-functioning society.

      Christopher Marquis is the Sinyi professor of management at the University of Cambridge and author of The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs. More

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      Trump 100 days: delusions of monarchy coupled with fundamental ineptitude

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      He has blinged it with gold cherubim, gold eagles, gold medallions, gold figurines and gilded rococo mirrors. He has crammed its walls with gold-framed paintings of great men from US history. In 100 days Donald Trump has turned the Oval Office into a gilded cage.The portraits of Andrew Jackson, Ronald Reagan and other past presidents gaze down from a past that the 47th seems determined to erase. Trump is seeking to remake the US in his image at frightening speed. The shock and awe of his second term has challenged many Americans’ understanding of who they are.In three months Trump has shoved the world’s oldest continuous democracy towards authoritarianism at a pace that tyrants overseas would envy. He has used executive power to take aim at Congress, the law, the media, culture and public health. Still aggrieved by his 2020 election defeat and 2024 criminal conviction, his regime of retribution has targeted perceived enemies and proved that no grudge is too small.Historically such strongmen have offered the populace a grand bargain: if they will surrender some liberties, he will make the trains run on time. But Trump’s delusions of monarchy have been coupled with a fundamental ineptitude.His trade war injected chaos into the economy, undermining a campaign promise to lower prices and raising the spectre of recession; his ally Elon Musk wreaked havoc on the federal government, threatening health and welfare benefits for millions; his foreign policy turned the world upside down, making friends of adversaries and turning allies into foes.Having promised so much winning, Trump is losing. Just 39% of respondents approve of how he is handling his job as president, according to an opinion poll by ABC News, the Washington Post newspaper and Ipsos, while 55% disapprove. For the first time Trump is even under water on his signature issue of immigration.“Donald Trump’s first 100 days as president have been 100 days from hell for the American people,” Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, wrote in a letter to Senate colleagues. “His first 100 days have been the worst for any president in modern history, and unsurprisingly, he has the lowest 100-day job approval any president has seen in 80 years.”The scale of the disaster is hard to comprehend for anyone who expected a repeat of Trump’s first term. His first 100 days in 2017 were consequential enough: a travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries, an order for construction of a wall along the US-Mexico border and the firing of his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, over undisclosed contacts with Russia. But while America’s guardrails bent, they did not break.View image in fullscreenFrom the moment he was sworn in on 20 January 2025, with the tech oligarchs Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg looking on, it was clear that Trump’s second presidency would be of a different magnitude. Instead of the conservative stalwart Mike Pence as vice-president, there is the Maga isolationist JD Vance. Instead of the retired four-star general Jim Mattis as defence secretary, there is the former Fox News weekend host Pete Hegseth.And instead of experienced hands ready to curb Trump’s impulses, there is a cabinet of sycophants eager to indulge them, including in ostentatious displays for the TV cameras. Trump, 78, told the Atlantic magazine: “The first time, I had two things to do – run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys. And the second time, I run the country and the world.”Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and White House chief of staff, said: “In the first term there were some guardrails and individuals that were able to restrain him before he took action. In the second term he doesn’t have any guardrails and deliberately selected a cabinet in which loyalty was the primary quality that he was after.“The problem is that he goes ahead and takes actions that can cause tremendous disruption. The only check that I can see is when something he does could very well lead to an economic disaster of one kind or another. It’s only when that seems clear that he basically pulls back.”Trump and his allies had four years in political exile to plot and plan a disruptive agenda laid out in Project 2025, a set of proposals by the rightwing Heritage Foundation thinktank in Washington. Yet its execution has been undermined by the president’s mercurial nature, cabinet infighting and leaks, especially at the Pentagon, reportedly now in disarray.Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “I’m struck by this weird combination of a focused and very well-planned agenda on the one hand and reckless incompetence on the other. You have Russ Vought [director of the office of management and budget] and the Project 2025 folks who clearly had a blueprint for action ready to go and yet you also see this pattern of dysfunction running through agencies like the Department of Justice and Department of Defense.”For Trump’s diehard supporters, his key strength is his success as a businessman and promise to run the economy accordingly. As president he has imposed tariffs on trading partners including Mexico, Canada and China, with Chinese goods facing a combined tax of 145%.The impact has been profound, with consumer confidence plummeting, stock markets convulsing and investors losing confidence in the credibility of Trump’s policies. In the ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll, 72% said they thought it was very or somewhat likely that his economic policies would cause a recession in the short term.View image in fullscreenTrump, who promised be a dictator only on “day one”, has signed more than 135 executive orders, well ahead of any other president in their first 100 days, bypassing Congress. He tapped Musk to lead the “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, aimed at reducing government waste with a Silicon Valley-inspired “move fast and break things” mentality.Doge has been slashing programmes, jobs and entire agencies, including the Department of Education, that by law receive funding under the purview of Congress. Musk and his team have combed through tax, social security and health records, putting private data at risk. While Musk initially aimed for $1tn in budget cuts, analysts predict that he will fall dramatically short.Doge has caused turmoil in medical research by firing doctors and scientists working to cure diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s. It has frozen funding for military veterans’ facilities and fired critical workers at hospitals serving disabled veterans. Musk has also described health and social welfare programmes as “the big ones to eliminate” and social security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time”.Even long-term political observers are aghast at Trump’s acts of self-sabotage. Paul Begala, a former White House adviser and Democratic strategist, said: “I expected him to be stupid. I expected him to be chaotic. I expected his team to be a bunch of sycophants and nincompoops. I expected the tariffs and trade war.“Here’s what I didn’t expect. For me, the defining word of these 100 days has been betrayal. A good politician takes office and tries to expand beyond his base; an average politician tries to reward his base; Trump is the first politician who’s screwing his base, betraying his base. I honestly don’t understand it.”View image in fullscreenIn keeping with his campaign promise, Trump has implemented some of the hardest-line immigration policies in the nation’s history, driving a sharp decline in illegal border crossings.He invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport immigrants without due process, including sending alleged Venezuelan gang members to a mega-prison in El Salvador in defiance of a court order. The action was met with legal challenges and judicial rebuke. Trump also pledged to end birthright citizenship and proposed “gold cards” for millionaires to buy US citizenship.Another defining theme of the first 100 days is retribution. On his first day in office, Trump pardoned virtually everyone who took part in the 6 January 2021 insurrection. He has actively targeted prosecutors who investigated him, former officials who criticised him and universities whose policies he disliked. He ordered the justice department to investigate Christopher Krebs, a cybersecurity director who refuted unfounded claims of election fraud in 2020.Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “This will truly be known as the administration of revenge and retribution. No one’s ever done these things before. Even Richard Nixon, who kept an enemies list and was full of anger and resentment, couldn’t hold a candle to Trump.“It’s frightening and has the effect of intimidating people. He loves to bully and he has done more than any other president, certainly in a short period of time. There’s just nothing like this in all of American history. I’ve had so many people my age say, can I survive this? Because it’s stressful.”Trump’s executive orders have faced more than 150 lawsuits and judges have blocked the administration numerous times. The president called for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against him, prompting a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts. Last week agents arrested Hannah Dugan, a Milwaukee judge accused of helping a man evade immigration authorities at her courtroom.Trump is also waging a culture war. Funding for arts and cultural institutions has been cut, and leaders ousted, with the president declaring them fronts for a “woke” agenda. The administration has gone after the media, fighting against news organisations in court and seeking to dismantle the Voice of America broadcaster. Access for some outlets has been restricted while “Maga media” have been platformed.PEN America, which defends writers worldwide against autocratic regimes, said the opening weeks of the Trump White House were unlike anything seen since the red scare McCarthy era of the 1950s. It warned of a “five-alarm fire” for free speech, education, the right to protest and a war against ideas and language themselves.The events – along with outlandish statements about annexing Greenland, retaking the Panama canal and making Canada the 51st state – have hurt America’s reputation around the globe.View image in fullscreenPatrick Gaspard, a former official in the Barack Obama administration, said: “Donald Trump has been radically successful in demonstrating that in 100 days you can destroy a brand that’s been built up over nearly 250 years. If that’s a success then congratulations.”He added: “We’re in DefCon 1 in a democracy where the president is radically consolidating power, politicising non-partisan agencies, attacking civil society and private firms, and literally disappearing people from our streets. Tragically, those with influence only seem to be moved by the volatility in the stock market because of tariffs, failing to see that the entire edifice that makes their success possible is being dismantled.”Trump’s political honeymoon appears to be over. Even among Republicans, polling shows that there is ambivalence about his priorities, with only about half saying he has focused on the right things. Street protests are growing across the country, judges continue to hand him defeats and Harvard University stood its ground against him. As the Democratic party tries to regroup, Trump could find his second 100 days heavier going than his first.In 2021 Sabato, the University of Virginia political scientist, told the Guardian that history would remember Trump as by far the worst president ever on the basis of his first term. “I was wrong,” he acknowledged last week. “This is the worst presidency in American history.“The ignorance was actually our ally in the first Trump term. He didn’t know what he was doing and now, unfortunately, while he still doesn’t know what he’s doing, he knows more than he did. Trump believes he is infallible. He’s going to burn out with the public long before the end of this term.” More

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      Peace Corps to undergo ‘significant’ cuts after Doge review

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      The Peace Corps is offering staff a second “fork in the road” buyout, according to a source familiar with the matter. Allison Greene, the chief executive of Peace Corps, sent an email to staff on Monday with an update about the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) assessment of the agency.Greene said to expect “significant restructuring efforts” at Peace Corps headquarters, according to the email seen by the Guardian. Starting on 28 April and going through 6 May, direct hire and expert staff are being offered a second deferred resignation program, what Elon Musk’s Doge has referred to as a “fork in the road” buyout. Greene referred to this offer as “DRP 2.0”.Eligible staff will hear from human resources and “are strongly encouraged to consider this option”, Greene wrote. The offer applies to employees both domestically and overseas.Peace Corps will “continue to recruit, place, and train volunteers”, Greene said, indicating that the cuts are specifically for agency staff and will not affect volunteers.A Peace Corps spokesperson confirmed that Doge began the cuts on Monday.“The agency will remain operational and continue to recruit, place, and train volunteers, while continuing to support their health, safety and security, and effective service,” the spokesperson said.Since Donald Trump was inaugurated and tapped Musk to head the unofficial government agency Doge, the secretive group has steadily worked to slash budgets and lay off workers in federal agencies.With the mission to identify “waste, fraud and abuse”, it has targeted nearly two dozen agencies and fired hundreds of workers. Doge has especially focused on agencies involved in foreign aid and development, such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID).Doge started its work at Peace Corps headquarters in the beginning of April, according to two people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity. A Doge representative, Bridget Youngs, visited the agency headquarters at that time and asked for access to the agency’s financial records. Doge workers have continued to work in the building over the following weeks.Peace Corps staffers were told to cooperate with Doge and “if data from the system is requested, confirm what is required to meet their needs (data, format, etc)”. Staff were additionally told that “under all circumstances, ensure that clear records are kept on what is requested and provided”.It’s unclear how many Peace Corps jobs will be cut or if Doge will direct the agency to do more than this new round of buyouts. In a separate email sent by the Peace Corps office of human resources on Monday and seen by the Guardian, the agency wrote: “At this time, we cannot give you full assurance which positions will remain – or where they will be located – after an anticipated workforce restructuring.”The Peace Corps sends volunteers to countries around the world to work for two years on public health, economic development and education projects. It was created in 1961 by John F Kennedy and has sent more than 240,000 volunteers abroad. It currently has around 3,000 volunteers working in 60 different countries. More