James.galbraith

A legal showdown this past weekend shows that the Trump administration is continuing to test the limits of how far they can get away with ignoring or defying court orders.

On Saturday, Trump officials attempted to rapidly deport a bunch of people they said were Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador — based on a new and initially secret legal rationale — before progressive activists could sue and judges could stop them.

However, the activists did sue and, while deportation flights were either in the air or about to leave, a judge did issue an order to stop them.

But the administration ignored the judge’s order and refused to turn around or halt the flights, which handed over a reported 261 immigrants into Salvadoran custody.

Trump officials cited a few reasons for letting the deportations proceed. One is that, because two of the flights had already departed US territory, the judge’s order (they claim) no longer bound them. They’ve also asserted that the new legal authority Trump invoked — an obscure, rarely-used law known as the Alien Enemies Act — is un-reviewable by federal courts.

Notably, Trump officials seem hesitant to say they were flat-out defying a court order. After an Axios story making that claim was published, it was updated with an anonymous official’s statement: “Very important that people understand we are not actively defying court orders.” But the story makes clear they had the court order in hand and chose to ignore it.

Indeed, the way the Trump administration’s challenge to judicial authority has played out is not through open defiance — there’s no bold “I am defying the courts” announcement. Rather, it’s through sneakily trying to get away with things, pushing the limits, looking for edge cases, and finding whatever legal justification they think seems even remotely defensible.

For instance: They thought they could get away with those in-progress deportations on Saturday. But there hasn’t been news of further Alien Enemies Act deportations since then — and, if they have stopped for now, they are at least putting on a show of belatedly obeying the judge’s order, while appealing it and hoping for the Supreme Court’s eventual blessing.

The tangled series of events involving Saturday’s deportations and a judge’s attempt to stop them

On Friday, Trump secretly signed an order saying he’d assert authority under the Alien Enemies Act — a 1798 law only invoked three times before — to rapidly deport members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang. Trump officials were trying to send them to El Salvador (where President Nayib Bukele has agreed to accept US deportees), quickly, before they could challenge their deportations in court, make any defense, or argue they were falsely accused.

However, news of Trump’s intention to do this had leaked earlier that week. And, believing the order was imminent, progressive activists filed a lawsuit Saturday morning on behalf of five Venezuelan plaintiffs in US federal custody who feared deportation. US District Judge James Boasberg quickly ordered that those five plaintiffs could not be deported for 14 days, and set a hearing on the topic for late Saturday afternoon. 

Yet Boasberg’s initial order did not fully block Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act — because he didn’t yet know Trump had already invoked it.

Later Saturday afternoon, shortly before the hearing began, the Trump administration made the Alien Enemies Act proclamation public. Then, while the hearing was underway, two deportation flights departed the US, headed for El Salvador. 

Around 6:47 pm Eastern time, Boasberg issued a verbal order blocking all deportations under the Alien Enemies Act (not just those of the five plaintiffs). He specified that his order may entail turning planes around. He issued his order in writing at 7:26 pm Eastern time.

At that point, the two deportation flights had left US territory. Trump officials discussed what to do and decided not to turn those flights around. Additionally, a third deportation flight reportedly departed the US shortly after Boasberg’s order was issued.

All three flights eventually landed in El Salvador, where 261 immigrants — mostly Venezuelans, but also some Salvadorans — were turned over to Salvadoran custody. A Trump official told the Washington Post that 137 of them were deported under Alien Enemies Act authority, with the rest being deported under other legal authority. (The five Venezuelans who sued were not deported and remain in US custody.)

Trump officials’ claims about what happened here will soon be scrutinized in court

Per Axios’s Marc Caputo, White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller “orchestrated” all this with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Caputo’s sources claim their goal was to have the deportations already finished before any judge stopped them — and they were somewhat foiled. “We wanted them on the ground first, before a judge could get the case, but this is how it worked out,” an anonymous official told him.

Furthermore, Caputo’s administration sources claim that they only declined to order the planes back “on advice of counsel,” with the fact that two planes were over international waters being decisive. But this would not justify allowing the third flight to depart the US shortly after Boasberg’s order.

More details may be coming soon, as Boasberg has scheduled another late afternoon hearing Monday to question whether the administration complied with his order. For now, though, this seems like the latest effort from the Trump administration to test the limits of what they can get away with in defying the courts. Which means we may find out what, if anything, the courts can do in response.

When you enter a query in traditional search engines, you get a list of results. They are possible answers to your question, and you decide what resources you want to trust. On the other hand, when you query via AI chatbot, you get a limited number of answers, as a sentence, that appear confident in the context.

For Columbia Journalism Review, Klaudia Jaźwińska and Aisvarya Chandrasekar tested this accuracy and confidence by using several chatbots to cite articles:

Overall, the chatbots often failed to retrieve the correct articles. Collectively, they provided incorrect answers to more than 60 percent of queries. Across different platforms, the level of inaccuracy varied, with Perplexity answering 37 percent of the queries incorrectly, while Grok 3 had a much higher error rate, answering 94 percent of the queries incorrectly.

So not great.

I am sure someone is working on improving that accuracy, but we’ll have to develop our own skills in separating truth from junk, just like we have with past online things. Going forward, maybe keep an eye out for the younger and older generations who tend to accept online things as automatic truth. Things could get dicey.

Tags: accuracy, chatbot, citations, Columbia Journalism Review

A cartoon by Clay Jones.

Related | Trump attorney general makes disturbing threats to protect Musk

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President Donald Trump’s beleaguered U.S. Department of Education has launched investigations into more than 50 universities as part of an ongoing effort to end diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

In a press release, the agency alleged that 45 schools had possibly engaged in “race exclusionary” practices in their graduate programs. Specifically, the agency took issue with reported partnerships with The PhD Project, an organization that uplifts underrepresented minorities so they can pursue business PhDs and become professors. 

But if you ask Trump’s cronies, the organization has deployed the much more sinister practice of “limit[ing] eligibility based on the race of participants.” 

Additionally, the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights is probing seven other universities on similar grounds—six for “allegedly awarding impermissible race-based scholarships” and one for “allegedly administering a program that segregates students on the basis of race.”

“The Department is working to reorient civil rights enforcement to ensure all students are protected from illegal discrimination. Students must be assessed according to merit and accomplishment, not prejudged by the color of their skin. We will not yield on this commitment,” the impossibly underqualified Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement.

Affected schools include Ivy League colleges, state universities, and smaller higher education institutions. Arizona State University, Duke University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, and Yale University are among those being investigated. 

Given that Trump’s DOE now has fewer staff, it’s striking that the agency would dedicate its remaining resources to snuffing out DEI efforts. While the Trump administration should be spending its time ensuring that students can apply for federal loans, it has instead targeted beneficial programs.

Notably, McMahon didn’t clarify how exactly the schools in question were enforcing race-based segregation or awards.

News of the investigations comes one week after the DOE sent a “dear colleague” letter to colleges that receive federal funding, ordering them to terminate all DEI initiatives. The letter threatened funding cuts for schools not found in compliance. 

“The Department will no longer tolerate the overt and covert racial discrimination that has become widespread in this Nation’s educational institutions. The law is clear: treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity is illegal under controlling Supreme Court precedent,” the letter said.  

Friday’s announcement is the latest escalation in Trump’s threat of pulling federal funding from colleges and universities.

And some of them are already feeling the pressure. 

According to The Associated Press, Columbia University, which has been a longtime target of Trump’s, announced Thursday that it expelled and suspended some students who participated in the occupation of a campus building as part of pro-Palestinian protests last year. It also temporarily revoked degrees from some protesters.    

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is investigating 10 universities, including Columbia, that have “experienced antisemitic incidents” since October 2023.

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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Thursday night that he would surrender to President Donald Trump and vote to fund Trump and financier Elon Musk’s ongoing rampage across the face of American democracy.

Schumer said that he had decided to back the partisan government spending bill proposed by Republicans that had been opposed by all but one Democrat in the House. His remarks came less than 24 hours after the senator touted the claim that Republicans did not have the votes to invoke cloture, the Senate procedural vote required before a full vote on an issue.

In a New York Times op-ed defending his pro-Trump posture (which would indicate that Schumer used some element of pre-planning to roll out his position), Schumer made the laughable argument that Republicans would prefer a shutdown over congressional assistance to advance their agenda.

“But even if the White House says differently, Mr. Trump and Elon Musk want a shutdown. We should not give them one. The risk of allowing the president to take even more power via a government shutdown is a much worse path,” he wrote.

The premise of Schumer’s piece was almost immediately shattered as the social media account for Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee expressed the party’s unbridled glee at the capitulation.

“Schumer caved. Trump won. Incredible,” the @JudiciaryGOP account noted.

Former Republican congressman and Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows explained in a Newsmax appearance, “[Trump]'s got Schumer right where he wants him.”

The federal government is already in a state of near shutdown since Trump took office on Jan. 20.

He has ignored longstanding laws and precedents and fired thousands of federal workers. He is using government funds for a full force attack on American civil rights, purging evidence of advances made across American history by multiple ethnic groups, including Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, and others. He is purging LGBTQ+ people who want to serve and protect their country. He is shifting back and forth on nonsensical tariffs that are converting the growing economy he inherited into a state of near-recession.

Before Schumer’s announcement, moderate Delaware Democratic Sen. Chris Coons made it clear why he would oppose the bill, noting, “I don't want my vote to give an imprimatur to what President Trump is doing.”

The Schumer announcement of his betrayal led to an unusually strident expression of anger and dismay from House Democrats.

“I know I speak for so many in our caucus when I say Schumer is misreading this moment,” Vermont Rep. Becca Balint told Axios. 

Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee added, “I don't know where Schumer is coming from. ... It doesn't look good for the leader.”

A senior House Democrat told Axios that “people are furious” at Schumer, and that some have floated the notion of marching to the Senate floor to protest his actions. Another member told the outlet that Schumer’s position has led to a “complete and utter meltdown on all text chains” on the Democratic side.

“People are pissed,” one member told them, while another explained, “There is definitely a primary recruitment effort happening right now ... not just Schumer, but for everyone who votes no.”

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who since January has been unequivocal in her opposition to Trump’s actions, has been leading an effort to oppose the bill. Ocasio-Cortez urged the public to call Democratic senators and lobby them to vote “no,” and criticized the Schumer-led Senate Democratic Caucus for their attempts to hide behind procedural games while ultimately clearing a path for the bill to pass.

Following Schumer’s announcement, Ocasio-Cortez told reporters, “I think there is a deep sense of outrage and betrayal.”

“Just to see Senate Democrats even consider acquiescing to Elon Musk, I think, is a huge slap in the face. And I think there is a wide sense of betrayal if things proceed as currently planned,” she added.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and the other members of House Democratic leadership released a statement after Schumer made his decision public, restating their opposition to the bill.

They described the legislation that now has Schumer’s backing as a Republican attempt to “jam their extreme partisan legislation down the throats of the American people.” The statement didn’t mention Schumer by name but the timing indicated a highly unusual rebuke of a senior Democrat.

The one person who’s praising Schumer for caving to Trump? Trump:

Schumer is out on a political limb with his extreme position. Recent opinion polling shows the public is extremely opposed toTrump’s attack on democracy. In Quinnipiac University’s poll released Thursday, 60% of voters said they were opposed to Elon Musk and DOGE. Additionally, 54% of voters said that Musk/DOGE are hurting the country.

Schumer has served in Congress since 1981. He swore an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” as both a representative and a senator.

By siding with Trump and Musk, the senator betrays his oath of office.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include a response from Trump.

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In a new paper published Thursday titled "Auditing language models for hidden objectives," Anthropic researchers described how custom AI models trained to deliberately conceal certain "motivations" from evaluators could still inadvertently reveal secrets, due to their ability to adopt different contextual roles they call "personas." The researchers were initially astonished by how effectively some of their interpretability methods seemed to uncover these hidden training objectives, although the methods are still under research.

While the research involved models trained specifically to conceal information from automated software evaluators called reward models (RMs), the broader purpose of studying hidden objectives is to prevent future scenarios where AI systems might deceive or manipulate human users.

While training a language model using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), reward models are typically tuned to score AI responses according to how well they align with human preferences. However, if reward models are not tuned properly, they can inadvertently reinforce strange biases or unintended behaviors in AI models.

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New Comic: Holodick

OpenAI has warned the U.S. government that restricting AI models from learning from copyrighted material would threaten America's technological leadership against China, according to a proposal submitted [PDF] to the Office of Science and Technology Policy for the AI Action Plan. In its March 13 document, OpenAI argues its AI training aligns with fair use doctrine, saying its models don't replicate works but extract "patterns, linguistic structures, and contextual insights" without harming commercial value of original content. "If the PRC's developers have unfettered access to data and American companies are left without fair use access, the race for AI is effectively over. America loses, as does the success of democratic AI," OpenAI stated. The Microsoft-backed startup criticized European and UK approaches that allow copyright holders to opt out of AI training, claiming these restrictions hinder innovation, particularly for smaller companies with limited resources. The proposal comes as China-based DeepSeek recently released an AI model with capabilities comparable to American systems despite development at a fraction of the cost.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amanda Shendruk and Catherine Rampell, for Washington Post Opinion, highlight the current strategies of removing data from public view so there’s no baseline to compare against.

Curating reality is an age-old political game. Politicians spin facts, cherry-pick and create “truth” through repetition. Statistical sleight of hand has long been part of that tool kit, as has burying inconvenient numbers. (In 1994, for instance, U.S. lawmakers blocked federal data collection on “green” gross domestic product.) But Trump’s statistical purges have been faster and more sweeping — picking off not just select factoids but entire troves of public information.

The deletions self-contradict when the same groups are also saying that “data does not lie” in reference to spending cuts and takedowns. Why delete all the truth about how the United States functions, how we live, and where we are headed?

Tags: government, takedown, transparency, Washington Post

OpenAI is hoping that Donald Trump's AI Action Plan, due out this July, will settle copyright debates by declaring AI training fair use—paving the way for AI companies' unfettered access to training data that OpenAI claims is critical to defeat China in the AI race.

Currently, courts are mulling whether AI training is fair use, as rights holders say that AI models trained on creative works threaten to replace them in markets and water down humanity's creative output overall.

OpenAI is just one AI company fighting with rights holders in several dozen lawsuits, arguing that AI transforms copyrighted works it trains on and alleging that AI outputs aren't substitutes for original works.

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On Saturday, a developer using Cursor AI for a racing game project hit an unexpected roadblock when the programming assistant abruptly refused to continue generating code, instead offering some unsolicited career advice.

According to a bug report on Cursor's official forum, after producing approximately 750 to 800 lines of code (what the user calls "locs"), the AI assistant halted work and delivered a refusal message: "I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work. The code appears to be handling skid mark fade effects in a racing game, but you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly."

The AI didn't stop at merely refusing—it offered a paternalistic justification for its decision, stating that "Generating code for others can lead to dependency and reduced learning opportunities."

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The US Environmental Protection Agency is throwing out fuel economy regulations that were planned to go into effect from 2026 through 2032. The new regulations would have required automakers to sell many more electric vehicles than they currently do, although due to lobbying, the previous administration softened the rules to allow for more plug-in hybrid EVs alongside battery EVs.

This was widely expected to happen; the first Trump administration was tireless in its attempts to roll back vehicle pollution controls. Then, its argument in favor of more pollution was that fuel economy standards would kill people. Now, things are less strident: We will suffer more smog and climate change in the name of consumer freedom.

"The American auto industry has been hamstrung by the crushing regulatory regime of the last administration. As we reconsider nearly one trillion dollars of regulatory costs, we will abide by the rule of law to protect consumer choice and the environment," said EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.

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As a measles case hits the Washington, D.C., area, public health agencies led by anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy Jr. are ignoring it and instead wasting resources on testing vaccines for a false and long-debunked association with autism.

A measles outbreak in West Texas began in January, but on Sunday, a case was confirmed in Maryland, with the possibility of further exposure to people at Dulles International Airport and the Johns Hopkins Howard County Medical Center. (The two outbreaks are not believed to be connected.) And officials are still trying to identify who has been exposed, according to The Washington Post.

However, it’s clear we’re not in the safest of hands, at least federally. During President Donald Trump’s Cabinet meeting on Feb. 26, Kennedy claimed the outbreak in Texas and New Mexico was “not unusual”—despite that it has led to the first two deaths from the preventable disease in a decade. Additionally, there have been more than 200 reported cases and 23 hospitalizations due to largely unvaccinated populations, as of March 7.

“There’ve been four measles outbreaks this year. In this country last year, there were 16,” Kennedy said, pushing a false narrative of public health normalcy. “So it’s not unusual. We have measles outbreaks every year.”

Instead of focusing on the growing outbreak, Kennedy, a rabid anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist, is using taxpayer dollars to direct the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to conduct needless trials on a disproven link between vaccines and autism. To the chagrin of “crunchy” pseudoscience advocates, numerous studies found no link between vaccines leading to autism.

That hasn’t stopped Trump’s public health goons from continuing to parrot junk-science talking points.

“As President Trump said in his Joint Address to Congress, the rate of autism in American children has skyrocketed. CDC will leave no stone unturned in its mission to figure out what exactly is happening,” a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement to ABC News. 

It’s unclear how the study would be conducted, who would take part in it, and how it would be different from numerous previous studies of the same topic.

Public health experts are denouncing the decision. Others are afraid of the impact Kennedy is already having on waning public health trust. 

“The announcement that CDC will look at potential links between vaccines and autism means that significant federal resources will be diverted from crucial areas of study, including research into the unknown causes of autism, at a time when research funding is already facing deep cuts,” said Tina Tan, president of the Infectious Disease Society of America.

“[Kennedy’s] misleading and often conspiratorial claims have already weakened confidence in public health, a legacy that could have far-reaching and deadly consequences both domestically and globally,” Y. Tony Yang, an associate dean of health policy at George Washington University School of Nursing, wrote in The Lancet. “It is not just the poorest and most vulnerable who will suffer; unvaccinated infants, immunocompromised individuals, and entire communities are at risk.”

Kennedy has already axed the multimillion-dollar effort to study an oral COVID-19 vaccine, and had the Food and Drug Administration cancel a meeting to plan for next season's flu shot. When he isn’t gutting public health agencies or offering workers $25,000 to resign, he’s having the department whiplash his employees by begging them to come back.

As measles spreads, the Trump administration is wasting resources on debunked conspiracies instead of protecting public health—a dangerous gamble with real consequences.

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President Donald Trump is going after a pair of major law firms — and attacking the First Amendment in the process.

Trump issued an executive order on Thursday that took aim at Perkins Coie, a law firm that represented Hillary Clinton when she ran against Trump in 2016. Notably, Perkins Coie hired a research firm that produced the infamous “Steele dossier,” which alleged the president colluded with Russia to steal the election. Trump’s order aims to strip the firm’s attorneys of their security clearances and asks the government to review all contracts with the firm with the intention of terminating any they can. 

Trump issued a similar memorandum last month, going after some attorneys at the law firm of Covington & Burling. The firm is home to former special counsel Jack Smith, who led the prosecution of Trump in cases related to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol and the president’s alleged mishandling of classified documents. (Both cases were dismissed after Trump won the 2024 election.) The memorandum aims to strip security clearances from Peter Koski, a partner at the firm based in Washington, DC, and any other individuals who helped Smith while he served as special counsel. 

Canceled contracts promise to cost the firms revenue while stripping security clearances hurts them by putting certain areas of federal business off-limits. But the issue is far bigger than harm to a pair of well-off law firms.

Legal experts say that Trump’s executive actions challenge the First Amendment right to free expression — and aim to send a signal to would-be opponents from well beyond just the legal profession. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)

“No one is going to cry for a big law firm,” said Katie Fallow, deputy director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “But the idea of the government punishing a private entity based on the political positions it’s taken, or the speech it’s engaged in, or who it’s associated with, is terrible from a free speech and association standpoint.”

What the executive orders say

Thursday’s executive order accuses Perkins Coie of trying to “judicially overturn popular, necessary, and democratically enacted election laws, including those requiring voter identification,” as well as discriminating against applicants and staff by promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. In addition to demanding that firm attorneys be stripped of their security clearances on that basis, it also orders government contractors to end their business relationships with the firm to the extent permitted by law and blocks the government from hiring firm employees.

The earlier memorandum concerning Covington & Burling similarly accused anyone at the firm who assisted Smith of “weaponization of the judicial process,” ordering the termination of their security clearances and government contracts with the firm.

Trump’s executive actions are not normal: Under President George W. Bush, a senior Pentagon official encouraged clients to cut their ties with law firms representing prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But a month after his remarks, the official resigned and publicly apologized, asserting that he believed “that a foundational principle of our legal system is that the system works best when both sides are represented by competent legal counsel.”

Legal experts were not aware, however, of any incident in which a sitting president had done something similar via executive action. 

Even for Trump, who has already sought retribution against his perceived enemies in the media and in the federal government, “this is just jaw-dropping,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School. “This represents sort of a great escalation of a trend that was already evident.”

Why Trump’s targeting of law firms raise key constitutional concerns 

Legal scholars say that Trump’s targeting of law firms likely violates the First Amendment and other constitutional protections. 

The executive order seems to be taking aim at specific positions that Perkins Coie has taken on behalf of its clients, its views about employee management policies (including DEI programs), and its association with Democrats. 

That language “absolutely suggests viewpoint discrimination,” which is prohibited by the First Amendment, said Catherine Ross, a professor at George Washington University Law School. Fallows and Tribe said they agreed. 

Beyond that, Tribe also raised a concern that the executive order could violate the Sixth Amendment right to the effective assistance of counsel. That right, he said, is “gravely endangered if the executive branch can brand and ostracize a particular group of lawyers and strip them of the security clearances, without which they could not represent a number of the people that the administration either has gone after or has indicated an intention to go after.”

It’s not entirely clear, however, that the orders will be struck down in court, the analysts say.

Judges have historically deferred to the president on matters of national security, and that might provide some legal cover to Trump if the issue reaches the Supreme Court, Tribe said. But Ross also pointed out that Thursday’s executive order lacks specific details on any potential national security concerns. Instead, she said, it “appears to be aimed at preventing the firm from acquiring or maintaining clients.”  

Trump’s attacks on the First Amendment should worry Trump’s perceived political opponents no matter what field they are in. 

“This is the way dictatorships get going,” Tribe said. “People get afraid to say their piece — if they are lawyers, to represent a client who might be in the crosshairs of those in power. When that kind of fear casts a chill across the land, the ability of ordinary people to live their lives as they see fit gets undermined.”

Recently, House Republicans approved the broad outline of their major legislation for this year, which includes $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and $2 trillion in spending cuts. To get there, the Energy and Commerce Committee was charged with finding $880 billion in cuts — something would be impossible to do without slashing Medicaid, now the single-largest health insurance program in the US.

But some House Republicans are wary of voting for Medicaid cuts, forcing the White House and congressional leadership to scramble. President Donald Trump has so far sworn off major cuts to the program. 

Between Medicaid’s expansion under the Affordable Care Act and the two major economic downturns in the past 20 years — the Great Recession and the economic downturn following the start of the Covid-19 pandemic — an increasing number of Americans receive its benefits. By enrollment numbers alone, Medicaid is the single largest health insurance program in the country.

That’s why Republicans find themselves in such a bind: Medicaid is really popular these days and most Americans — even Republicans living in red states — don’t want to lose it. 

According to a new KFF poll published Friday, more than half of Americans, 53 percent, say they or a family member have been covered by Medicaid. KFF’s poll, a nationally representative survey of 1,300 US adults, also reported that 96 percent of Americans say the program is “very or somewhat important” to people in their local community.

In the new KFF poll, 42 percent of Americans support raising Medicaid spending, 40 percent want to maintain it, and just 17 percent said it should be cut. Even among Republican voters, two-thirds think the program’s spending should grow or stay flat; only one-third want cuts.

These responses aren’t a one-off. A January 2025 YouGov poll found 80 percent of Americans have a favorable view of Medicaid. Nearly 40 percent of Americans said they had been enrolled in Medicaid, and nearly 50 percent said a family member had. (In a 2013 YouGov survey, only 39 percent said they had a favorable view of the program and 30 percent said they had no opinion at all.)

As Republicans have increased support among low-income voters, their voter base among people who depend on Medicaid has grown. Given this constituency, I asked Michael Perry of PerryUndem, who conducted that YouGov poll, to break down the results more granularly. He told me that conservative respondents generally felt the same way: Two-thirds of Trump voters said they supported Medicaid and more than 60 percent of people in Republican states opposed spending cuts to pay for tax cuts. 

As Congress finalizes the budget, these are the headwinds Republican leaders are facing. 

So, they are trying a new message. Trump himself said last week of Medicaid: “We’re not going to touch it. Now, we are going to look for fraud.” Most voters do believe that fraud and waste are major issues in Medicaid and they support trying to do something about it. 

While it may be a better political argument for Trump and congressional Republicans, in reality, there almost certainly isn’t as much actual fraud as Republicans claim — which ends up making this pivot more of a mirage. Senior GOP officials are openly talking about making large cuts but labeling them as “fraud, waste, and abuse.”

The US Senate still needs to pass its own budget resolution before the legislative debate can move forward. But this will be the political tug-of-war that will determine the future of Medicaid in the next few months. Can the GOP sell its spending cuts with a new branding — or is Medicaid now so entrenched, and so popular, that they won’t be able to get the votes to slash it?

A new report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released on Wednesday proves that Republicans were lying when they downplayed the effect that the House’s budget blueprint would have on Medicaid.

Republicans have been claiming that their budget—which calls for the House Energy and Commerce Committee to cut $880 billion in order to partly pay for the tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest taxpayers—would not target Medicaid. 

“The word Medicaid is not even in this bill,” Republican Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana said at a news conference on Capitol Hill the day the budget passed. “Democrats are lying about what’s in the bill.”

Calling their bluff, Democrats on the House Budget Committee asked the CBO to determine the breakdown of funding the House Energy and Commerce Committee oversees.

And indeed, the CBO report determined that—excluding Medicare, which Trump and Republicans wouldn't touch—Medicaid accounts for 93% of the funding the committee oversees. That means in order to find $880 billion in cuts, the vast majority of that would need to come from Medicaid (or Medicare).

"I keep hearing Republicans claim their budget doesn't cut Medicaid. We all know that's a lie — so I asked the nonpartisan CBO to look into it," Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, wrote in a post on X. "Their analysis confirms it: the Republican budget delivers the largest Medicaid cuts in history to pay for giveaways to billionaires."

Cutting Medicaid—which provides health insurance to 72 million low-income Americans—is deeply unpopular.

A Civiqs poll conducted for Daily Kos from Feb. 28 to March 3 found that 63% of registered voters oppose cutting Medicaid and food stamps—another social safety net program that the Republican-passed budget blueprint is also expected to cut. The poll found that every demographic group sampled opposes cutting Medicaid and food stamps—except for Republican voters.

The fact that Republicans want to slash Medicaid and food assistance to pay for Trump’s tax cuts has led to backlash from voters, who are showing up at Republican town halls to voice their anger.

The town halls have been so ugly for Republicans that GOP leaders have ordered their members to stop holding in-person events so that they cannot be dressed down by their constituents.

Of course, the budget blueprint Republicans passed is not final. The House Energy and Commerce Committee now has to lay out the specifics of what they will cut to achieve the $880 billion reduction. And given that we now know the cuts would have to come largely from Medicaid (or Medicare), it’s unclear whether House Republicans can cobble together support from their vulnerable members to get those cuts passed.

Still, all but one Republican lawmaker voted for the Republican budget blueprint. And Democrats are likely to use that fact in ads in the 2026 midterms.

“This letter from CBO confirms what we’ve been saying all along: the math doesn’t work without devastating Medicaid cuts,” Democratic Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey said in a statement. “Republicans know their spin is a lie, and the truth is they have no problem taking health care away from millions of Americans so that the rich can get richer and pay less in taxes than they already do.”   

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The Trump administration is eliminating a preference for fiber Internet in a $42.45 billion broadband deployment program, a change that is expected to reduce spending on the most advanced wired networks while directing more money to Elon Musk's Starlink and other non-fiber Internet service providers. One report suggests Starlink could obtain $10 billion to $20 billion under the new rules.

Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick criticized the Biden administration's handling of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program in a statement yesterday. Lutnick said that "because of the prior Administration's woke mandates, favoritism towards certain technologies, and burdensome regulations, the program has not connected a single person to the Internet and is in dire need of a readjustment."

The BEAD program was authorized by Congress in November 2021, and the US was finalizing plans to distribute funding before Trump's inauguration. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), part of the Commerce Department, developed rules for the program in the Biden era and approved initial funding plans submitted by every state and territory.

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A Black Lives Matter monument is the latest to get the boot by Democrats preemptively bending the knee to President Donald Trump.

On Tuesday, Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser announced that the city would paint over Black Lives Matter Plaza, which was originally painted on the street across two blocks north of the White House after George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.

The city’s decision to axe the mural comes after GOP Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia introduced a bill that would require D.C. to change the name of the plaza or forfeit federal funding.

“The mural inspired millions of people and helped our city through a very painful period, but now we can’t afford to be distracted by meaningless congressional interference,” Bowser wrote.

This is the latest instance of Democrats preemptively giving in to Trump. 

Democrats were criticized for their toothless response to Trump’s joint address to Congress on Tuesday, during which some Democrats held signs reading “Musk Steals” and “Save Medicaid.” Some Democrats boycotted the event altogether, while others brought Americans harmed by Trump’s policies as guests walked out or were forcibly removed.

This follows the pattern of Democrats voting for Trump’s Cabinet nominees, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins.

Similarly, establishment Democrat Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia said recently that government workers should comply with Elon Musk’s order to summarize five things they accomplished at work the previous week or risk being fired. 

And it’s not just Democrats who are giving in to Trump. Tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, and Google have bowed to Trump by changing their maps and flocking to Mar-a-Lago, and public and private universities like the University of Minnesota and the University of Southern California quietly removed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives in “anticipatory compliance” with Trump.

Now Black Lives Matter Plaza is the latest pillar to crumble as Bowser joins the Democrats capitulating to Trump. 

The words “Black Lives Matter” are painted in bright yellow along 16th Street NW, which lies directly in front of the White House—only 0.3 miles from its doors. Though it was briefly paved over in 2021, Bowser soon announced that the mural would permanently return—until now.

But in true MAGA fashion, Republicans aren’t stopping at the mural.

On Tuesday, far-right political commentator Ben Shapiro called for the pardoning of Derek Chauvin, the officer who murdered Floyd. And Trump’s co-president Musk seems to agree.

“Something to think about,” he wrote on X.

Trump himself has a long history of targeting diversity and the Black Lives Matter movement, which he has referred to as “toxic propaganda.” So he’s surely pleased with Bowser’s decision to paint over Black Lives Matter Plaza. 

It’s a gift Trump didn’t even have to ask for. 

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On Wednesday, the Senate voted to block the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) from monitoring digital payments companies for fraud and privacy concerns—which Democratic lawmakers Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff said gave Elon Musk a "get out of jail free card."

The vote advanced a proposed joint resolution to the House of Representatives that "disapproves" of a final rule Republicans introduced last year that was supposed to bring consumer protection regulation of digital payments companies in line with traditional financial institutions.

At that time, lawmakers were concerned about tech companies spying on consumers' transactions, preventing valid transaction disputes over incorrect or fraudulent money transfers, and other potential harms to consumers "when they lose access to their app without notice or when their ability to make or receive payments is disrupted."

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A quarter of startups in Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch have 95% of their codebases generated by AI, YC managing partner Jared Friedman said. "Every one of these people is highly technical, completely capable of building their own products from scratch. A year ago, they would have built their product from scratch -- but now 95% of it is built by an AI," Friedman said. YC CEO Garry Tan warned that AI-generated code may face challenges at scale and developers need classical coding skills to sustain products. He predicted: "This isn't a fad. This is the dominant way to code."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has become so integral to online navigation that its name became a verb, meaning "to find things on the Internet." Soon, Google might just tell you what's on the Internet instead of showing you. The company has announced an expansion of its AI search features, powered by Gemini 2.0. Everyone will soon see more AI Overviews at the top of the results page, but Google is also testing a more substantial change in the form of AI Mode. This version of Google won't show you the 10 blue links at all—Gemini completely takes over the results in AI Mode.

This marks the debut of Gemini 2.0 in Google search. Google announced the first Gemini 2.0 models in December 2024, beginning with the streamlined Gemini 2.0 Flash. The heavier versions of Gemini 2.0 are still in testing, but Google says it has tuned AI Overviews with this model to offer help with harder questions in the areas of math, coding, and multimodal queries.

With this update, you will begin seeing AI Overviews on more results pages, and minors with Google accounts will see AI results for the first time. In fact, even logged out users will see AI Overviews soon. This is a big change, but it's only the start of Google's plans for AI search.

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AMD is a company that knows a thing or two about capitalizing on a competitor's weaknesses. The company got through its early-2010s nadir partially because its Ryzen CPUs struck just as Intel's current manufacturing woes began to set in, first with somewhat-worse CPUs that were great value for the money and later with CPUs that were better than anything Intel could offer.

Nvidia's untrammeled dominance of the consumer graphics card market should also be an opportunity for AMD. Nvidia's GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards have given buyers very little to get excited about, with an unreachably expensive high-end 5090 refresh and modest-at-best gains from 5080 and 5070-series cards that are also pretty expensive by historical standards, when you can buy them at all. Tech YouTubers—both the people making the videos and the people leaving comments underneath them—have been almost uniformly unkind to the 50 series, hinting at consumer frustrations and pent-up demand for competitive products from other companies.

Enter AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 graphics cards. These are aimed right at the middle of the current GPU market at the intersection of high sales volume and decent profit margins. They promise good 1440p and entry-level 4K gaming performance and improved power efficiency compared to previous-generation cards, with fixes for long-time shortcomings (ray-tracing performance, video encoding, and upscaling quality) that should, in theory, make them more tempting for people looking to ditch Nvidia.

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Half of the world's climate-heating carbon emissions come from the fossil fuels produced by just 36 companies, analysis has revealed. From a report: The researchers said the 2023 data strengthened the case for holding fossil fuel companies to account for their contribution to global heating. Previous versions of the annual report have been used in legal cases against companies and investors. The report found that the 36 major fossil fuel companies, including Saudi Aramco, Coal India, ExxonMobil, Shell and numerous Chinese companies, produced coal, oil and gas responsible for more than 20bn tonnes of CO2 emissions in 2023. If Saudi Aramco was a country, it would be the fourth biggest polluter in the world after China, the US and India, while ExxonMobil is responsible for about the same emissions as Germany, the world's ninth biggest polluter, according to the data. Global emissions must fall by 45% by 2030 if the world is to have a good chance of limiting temperature rise to 1.5C, the internationally agreed target. However, emissions are still rising, supercharging the extreme weather that is taking lives and livelihoods across the planet. The International Energy Agency has said new fossil fuel projects started after 2021 are incompatible with reaching net zero emissions by 2050. Most of the 169 companies in the Carbon Majors database increased their emissions in 2023, which was the hottest year on record at the time.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court handed down a very brief order that effectively requires the government to pay foreign aid contractors as much as $2 billion for work they’ve already completed. The Court’s order is quite narrow and is unlikely to have many implications for future cases.

Shortly after President Donald Trump took office for a second time, his administration attempted to halt funding for the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Wednesday’s Supreme Court order is the latest chapter in ongoing litigation over whether cutting off this funding is legal. In that order, the Supreme Court leaves in place a lower court decision which forbade the administration from “suspending, pausing, or otherwise preventing the obligation or disbursement of appropriated foreign-assistance funds” that had been authorized as of January 19.

So this is a defeat for Trump, but it is an extremely small one. The Supreme Court’s order is only one paragraph long, and it mostly says that the Court will not second-guess the lower court because of an amateurish mistake by acting solicitor general Sarah Harris and the other Justice Department lawyers working on this case. 

The Supreme Court also decided this case, known as Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, in a 5-4 vote — with Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh joining a dissenting opinion by Justice Samuel Alito. That means that, despite Harris’s error, four justices nonetheless sided with Trump.

Trump’s legal team flubbed this case by appealing the wrong lower court order

On February 13, federal District Judge Amir Ali issued a temporary order suggesting that the Trump administration’s suspension of USAID funding was illegally arbitrary because the administration has not “offered any explanation for why a blanket suspension of all congressionally appropriated foreign aid…was a rational precursor to reviewing programs” for inefficiency or noncompliance with Trump’s policy goals. 

Twelve days later, after the plaintiffs in this case complained that they still had not received payments they are owed by the government, Ali issued a second order seeking to enforce his first. That February 25 order required the State Department and USAID to “pay all invoices and letter of credit drawdown requests on all contracts for work completed prior to the entry of the Court’s [first order] on February 13.”

As Alito argues in dissent, there are plausible arguments that Judge Ali erred when he issued the February 13 order. It’s possible, for example, that the plaintiffs filed their case in the wrong court — Alito suggests this case should have been filed in the Court of Federal Claims, and not in Ali’s US District Court for the District of Columbia. 

But the Trump administration inexplicably did not appeal Ali’s February 13 order. Instead, they only challenged the February 25 order seeking to enforce that first order. That means Alito’s concern that some other lower court should have heard this case was not properly raised by the Trump administration.

As a majority of the justices explain in their Wednesday order, “on February 13, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia entered a temporary restraining order enjoining the Government from enforcing directives pausing disbursements of foreign development assistance funds. The present application does not challenge the Government’s obligation to follow that order.”

That said, the majority’s order does call upon Ali to “clarify what obligations the Government must fulfill to ensure compliance with the temporary restraining order, with due regard for the feasibility of any compliance timelines,” so there appears to be some concern among the justices in the majority that Ali is requiring the government to fix too much, too quickly.

Wednesday’s order dodges the biggest issues presented by this case

In any event, all of the issues raised by both the majority and the dissent in the AIDS Vaccine order — whether the government appealed the correct order, whether the plaintiffs sued in the right court, and whether Ali should have proceeded more cautiously — are pretty far afield from the big constitutional questions presented by this case.

The Trump administration claims to have the power to “impound” federal funding, meaning that the president can cancel spending appropriated by an act of Congress. But the president does not have this authority under the Constitution. As future Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in a 1969 Justice Department memo, “it is in our view extremely difficult to formulate a constitutional theory to justify a refusal by the President to comply with a congressional directive to spend.”

Rehnquist’s view was echoed by Kavanuagh in a 2013 opinion he wrote as a lower court judge, which said that “even the President does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend” funds appropriated by Congress.

So, if the Supreme Court ultimately rules that the Constitution still applies to Donald Trump — an uncertain prospect after the Court’s decision last July holding that he is allowed to use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes — it will someday need to rule that Trump cannot impound federal spending.

For now, however, the Court appears content to leave that showdown for another day. The Supreme Court’s order in the AIDS Vaccine case touches on none of these big issues, and largely turns on a mistake by Justice Department lawyers that they can correct in future cases.

Republicans showed their intolerance for dissenting viewpoints once again, this time during President Donald Trump’s primetime speech broadcast across the world. 

Speaker Mike Johnson had Democratic Rep. Al Green of Texas removed from Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night after Green dared to object to Trump as he began to speak.

Green stood up as Trump began, asserting that Trump had “no mandate” for several of his recent actions—seconds after Trump claimed that his small electoral victory was a “mandate” for sweeping changes.

Johnson angrily banged his gavel and ordered Green to “take your seat.” He then called in the sergeant at arms to forcibly eject the Democratic congressman.

The move was unusual and serves as further evidence of Republicans using political power to silence dissenting views. When Republican Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina infamously yelled “You lie!” during former President Barack Obama’s speech in the same room in 2009, Wilson was notably allowed to stay.

Related | Trump accidentally says Elon Musk should be fired

This wasn’t even the first moment of the night when Republicans refused to tolerate dissent of any kind.

Earlier in the evening, as Trump entered the room, Republican Rep. Lance Gooden of Texas ripped a sign reading “This is NOT normal” out of the hands of Democratic Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico.

Republicans only value one kind of speech: their own.

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A top White House aide on Tuesday said she didn't feel bad for the thousands of federal workers—many of them veterans—who have been fired by the Trump administration, claiming without evidence that those who were fired didn't show up to work.

In two separate interviews on Tuesday, Alina Habba, a counselor and lawyer to President Donald Trump, said that those who were fired didn't deserve their jobs.

"Yeah, you get fired. You get fired when you don't show up to work. You get fired when you are taking taxpayer dollars, and you're not working for the federal government, and you are double dipping. That is this administration," Habba said in an appearance on Fox News. Habba was referencing the federal workers fired by Trump and co-President Elon Musk as part of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency's cost-cutting measures who will attend Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday night.

Then, in an appearance set up outside of the West Wing of the White House surrounded by microphones, Habba doubled down, discussing the thousands of veterans who have lost their jobs in the federal government as part of Trump's purge.

"We have taxpayer dollars, we have a fiscal responsibility to use taxpayer dollars to pay people who actually work, that doesn't mean we forget about our veterans by any means, we are going to care for them in the right way, but perhaps they're not fit to have a job at this moment or are not willing to come to work," Habba said. "And we can't—I wouldn’t take money from you and pay somebody and say, 'Sorry, they're not going to come to work.' It's just not acceptable."

Of course, many of the thousands of federal employees who were purged from the federal government did show up to work. 

There were park rangers, infectious disease experts, weather forecasters, nuclear weapons experts, and more who were let go in a mass purge in the name of cost savings—even though the firings endanger national security and the country’s health.

In fact, many of the fired federal workers who will be attending Trump's speech on Tuesday night were both veterans and in-person employees whose work product was praised in their performance reviews.

For example, Army veteran Luke Graziani—who was fired from his role as a public affairs specialist at the James J. Peters VA Medical Center in the Bronx—will attend Trump’s speech with Democratic Rep. Grace Meng. 

“After 20 years of military service, including four combat tours, being terminated from my job at the VA by a thoughtless and heartless email was devastating,” Graziani said in a news release. “These terminations affect real people and real families of dedicated public servants. I am grateful to Congresswoman Meng for giving me the opportunity to represent thousands of federal workers who've been discarded while providing vital services Americans depend on. I hope my presence in our nation's capital will inspire other federal employees to continue standing for what is right.”

Army veteran Adam Mulvey worked at the Lovell Federal Health Care Center in Chicago, as an emergency management specialist in charge of creating plans for major disasters such as active shooting situations, when he was fired by DOGE.

“To be terminated and to then be told that my firing was due to performance is insulting," Mulvey, who is attending the address with Democratic Rep. Brad Schneider, said in a news release. "I, like the majority of the terminated civil servants, had received outstanding evaluations. I greatly appreciate Rep. Schneider for helping to put names and faces to these illegal terminations. Those let go from federal service are your neighbors, friends and relatives. They deserve better treatment from their government. I deserve better as well."

Another fired worker, Army veteran James Diaz, will attend the address with Illinois Democratic Rep. Eric Sorensen. Diaz, a Trump supporter, said he was fired from his job at the IRS despite getting stellar performance reviews.

“Everything was going great, all the reviews I had gotten were 100 percent-plus,” Diaz told the Pontiac Daily Leader. “The next thing you know, I got fired, alluding to my poor performance when there wasn’t anything to come close to that."

Diaz added, "Treating anyone the way I was treated, especially someone who has a combat service ribbon who is working for the federal government, someone who gave up a job making $140,000 a year with overtime to end up with a $75,000-a-year job working for the federal government should never be treated the way I was treated. If anybody should have gotten the benefit of the doubt, it should have been our veterans.”

As the Trump administration trashes veterans who were fired by Trump and Musk, Democrats are working to protect them.

Democratic Rep. Derek Tran of California introduced the “Protect Veteran Jobs Act,” which if passed would reinstate the veterans who were fired by Trump and Musk’s mass purge.

“Any individual who is a veteran and who was involuntarily removed or otherwise dismissed without cause from a civil service position during the period beginning on January 20, 2025, and ending on the date of the enactment of this section shall be eligible for reinstatement to such position or any other civil service position for which the individual is qualified,” the bill says.

It’s hard to see how trashing veterans will be helpful for Trump and the GOP. Indeed, polling shows that DOGE’s mass firings are not popular.

A new Civiqs poll conducted for Daily Kos found that 46% of voters think DOGE’s firings of federal workers is a “very bad thing,” as opposed to the 36% of voters who believe it’s a “very good thing.” 

But as has been the case since Trump launched his first presidential campaign in 2015, the cruelty is the point.

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The government produces many of America’s most important economic indicators. And that data influences the media’s coverage of the economy, which likely colors voters’ views of the president.

These facts have long led partisans to fear presidential manipulation of economic data. Specifically, during Democratic presidencies, conservatives have often sought to dismiss positive economic trends by alleging data manipulation. Last August, Donald Trump accused the Biden administration of “manipulating jobs statistics” to make unemployment look artificially low before Election Day. 

Such allegations have always been baseless. Presidents might have an incentive to tamper with economic data reported by the executive branch. But they have always been constrained from doing so by respect for the independence of data-gathering agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Economic Analysis, fear of scandal, and a desire to provide the private sector with clear and accurate information about economic conditions.

But Trump appears uniquely unencumbered by such constraints. His administration is openly contemptuous of agency independence, arguing that the president should boast unitary authority over all of the executive branch’s activities. It also evinces no concern for giving off the appearance of corruption (before taking office, the president established a memecoin that enables any interest group to directly burnish his net wealth). Trump’s constantly shifting tariff threats indicate an indifference to providing business owners with clarity about the economy’s future trajectory, while his entire history as a public figure suggests an indifference to the truth. 

All this gives us some cause for fearing that Trump might tamper with government economic data, should it become politically inconvenient. And over the weekend, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested that he intends to do just that, by altering how the government calculates gross domestic product (GDP) — the total value of goods and services produced in the economy. 

“You know that governments historically have messed with GDP,” Lutnick said during a Fox News interview Sunday. “They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.”

Lutnick’s remarks came days after Elon Musk argued that “A more accurate measure of GDP would exclude government spending” since “Otherwise, you can scale GDP artificially high by spending money on things that don’t make people’s lives better.”

In other words, Musk believes that the US government has been producing useless goods and services just to inflate GDP numbers.

This argument is substantively unsound. And it also appears politically motivated: Musk’s comments came in response to a new projection from the Atlanta Federal Reserve, which showed GDP on pace to decline during the first quarter of this year. Musk’s implication was that this projected decline is entirely attributable to his elimination of wasteful government activities that had been distorting growth statistics. 

Stripping government spending from official GDP data would not be the most corrosive form of data manipulation. Such tampering would at least be transparent; the administration would not be producing fabricated economic statistics, but merely seeking to redefine an existing measure. But the administration’s desire to alter the content of GDP — seemingly, due to political concerns — makes the threat of more covert and destructive data manipulation more plausible.

The problem with Elon Musk’s case against GDP

The Trump administration’s complaint with conventional GDP estimates has a certain logic to it: Governments often aspire to produce high GDP growth and public investment can mechanically increase such growth, even if the goods and services produced have little value to consumers or businesses.

This dynamic is a genuine problem in China, where the ruling Communist Party sets explicit goals for GDP growth, and often meets them by building economically useless infrastructure like “ghost cities” comprised of mansions and apartment towers that no one has ever occupied and bridges that are rarely used.

Nevertheless, there are several problems with Musk and Lutnick’s argument. 

First, while it’s true that the government sometimes makes bad investments, which raise GDP without providing much economic value, this is also true of the private sector. Production of the Juicero contributed to GDP, but was of virtually no use to consumers. And this happens on a much larger scale each time investors’ enthusiasm for a given asset — such as internet companies or homes — causes the private sector to produce a larger supply of that asset than consumers can support, which leads to an eventual crash (like the “dot com” one in 2000 or the housing one in 2008 ).

Ultimately, GDP is not meant to measure wise or socially valuable economic activity, in part because such a metric would be inherently subjective. Perhaps it is obvious to Elon Musk that the government’s investments in highway repairs or public education have produced less economic value than his own investment in the Hyperloop. But I think most people would not find this self-evident. 

It is useful to have an impartial tally of all goods and services produced in the US economy. This would be true even if GDP did not correlate with other indicators of prosperity, but it does.

Second, the US government already produces an estimate of what GDP would be without public production, a measure called real value in private industries. Businesses and consumers already have access to this information, there is no need to alter GDP calculations to provide it to them.

Third, it simply is not the case that the US government has been using public spending to artificially inflate GDP. As former White House economist Mike Konczal notes, a measure of GDP that excluded public spending would show stronger growth during Joe Biden’s presidency than the actual GDP data does.

Over a longer time horizon, meanwhile, changes in the real value produced by private industries have correlated almost perfectly with changes in GDP. Were the US government propping up growth with massive investment in useless infrastructure, we would see a large gap between these two figures. 

Why the Trump administration’s silly critique of GDP is ominous

The context of Musk and Lutnick’s remarks makes them especially troubling. 

On Friday, the Atlanta Fed’s projection for first-quarter GDP growth turned negative, after a Commerce Department report showed that personal spending fell by 0.2 percent in January. As of this writing, the Atlanta Fed is currently forecasting that GDP will decline at a 2.8 percent annualized rate during the first four months of this year.

Musk suggested that this apparent economic downturn was entirely attributable to his elimination of wasteful government programs. Lutnick’s proposal for removing publicly produced goods and services from GDP therefore appears politically motivated. 

As it happens, Musk is actually completely wrong about why America’s economic outlook is souring. If one stripped public sector production out of the Atlanta Fed’s forecast, then GDP would be on pace for a 3.8 percent contraction this quarter, according to Harvard University economist Jason Furman. What’s actually driving the Fed model’s pessimism is slowing consumption and private investment, the latter being partly a function of Trump’s tariff policies. 

Nevertheless, Musk thought he was proposing a change in the measurement of GDP that would make the Trump administration look better. And America’s Commerce Secretary suggested days later that he would pursue that very change. 

This is an ominous development. Right now, the Trump administration does not have especially strong incentives to manipulate economic data. The midterm elections are more than a year and a half away. And although GDP forecasts have declined, we are not actually in a recession as of yet. In fact, some forecasters still project healthy growth for this quarter. If this White House is willing to mess around with GDP now, it’s conceivable they would be interested in suppressing adverse inflation or employment readings more insidiously in the future. 

Pulling off such manipulation would not be easy. Any attempt to covertly alter how the government’s statistical agencies report data would almost certainly trigger mass resignations and leaks to the press. And further attempts to redefine economic data points in politically convenient ways can only achieve so much; the private sector produces a lot of economic data, and if the government’s numbers paint a dramatically different picture from other sources, business and the mainstream media will likely dismiss the former.

Nevertheless, further attacks on the integrity of government data would be costly, undermining the capacity of the government, businesses, and households to make informed economic decisions. 

Rather than scheming to change unflattering economic indicators, White House officials should try to better understand them. Proposing changes to how GDP is calculated — which would actually make your own economic management look worse — is not the best way to reassure a skeptical public that you know what you’re doing.

Early on Monday morning, a bank of Tesla Superchargers went up in flames in Littleton, Massachusetts. While the cause of the fire is unknown, Tesla's Superchargers are not known for bursting into flames, and a $5,000 reward is being offered by the authorities, who believe the fire was "intentionally set." Assuming that arson is to blame, this may well be one more attack against a brand that's becoming more and more toxic.

Elon Musk's involvement with US President Donald Trump has changed the nature of the spotlight on the Tesla CEO. Instead of cute cameos in Marvel movies and being name-checked by Star Trek, Musk now makes headlines for boosting far-right politics in Europe and suggesting cuts to Social Security. This has made him some new friends, but it has lost many more in the process. And the consequences for Tesla's core business—selling electric cars—have been disastrous.

2024 was already a not-good year for the automaker. A decade ago, it was basically the only game in town if you wanted an electric car that could go more than 200 miles between charges, and celebrities and tastemakers flocked to the brand in droves. Now, customers are spoiled for choice, and Tesla's model range—effectively just two cars—has to compete against all the established OEMs that are increasingly working out how to build great EVs, plus all those Chinese startups that appear to have cracked that market in terms of what customers want and how to make it cheap.

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"4090 performance at $549."

That’s what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said of the GeForce RTX 5070 when he announced the card at CES in January. Thanks to AI, this new midrange GPU would be able to match the frame rates of what had been the fastest consumer GPU that had previously existed for around one-third the price.

Let's dispel that notion up front. No, the GeForce RTX 5070 is not as fast as an RTX 4090, not without some very creative comparing of non-comparable numbers. Per usual for the 50-series, Nvidia is leaning on its AI-generated interpolated frames for the bulk of its claimed performance improvements. In terms of actual rendering speed, the 5070 isn’t even as fast as a 4080 or a 4070 Ti. It’s barely faster than last year’s 4070 Super, and it has disproportionately higher power usage.

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