James.galbraith

Oracle co-founder and chairman Larry Ellison said governments should consolidate all national data for consumption by AI models, calling this step the "missing link" for them to take full advantage of the technology. From a report: Fragmented sets of data about a population's health, agriculture, infrastructure, procurement and borders should be unified into a single, secure database that can be accessed by AI models, Ellison said in an on-stage interview with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the World Government Summit in Dubai. Countries with rich population data sets, such as the UK and United Arab Emirates, could cut costs and improve public services, particularly health care, with this approach, Ellison said. Upgrading government digital infrastructure could also help identify wastage and fraud, Ellison said. IT systems used by the US government are so primitive that it makes it difficult to identify "vast amounts of fraud," he added, pointing to efforts by Elon Musk's team at the Department of Government Efficiency to weed it out.

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Amid the flurry of changes to the face of American government—the president may or may not have the right to unilaterally eliminate agencies; engaging in insurrection has been decriminalized while prosecuting it has become grounds for termination; wars of conquest are now on the table—you could be forgiven for missing the news that bribery is basically legal now, as long as you support, or are, Donald Trump.

Consider the Trump administration’s actions yesterday alone: The president officially pardoned Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor who served eight years in prison for corruption, and his Department of Justice suspended its prosecution of New York Mayor Eric Adams for allegedly soliciting bribes from Turkey, despite extremely compelling evidence. (Adams has denied the allegations.) Trump fired the director of the Office of Government Ethics, the chief official making sure government employees comply with ethics requirements, including those concerning conflicts of interest. And he directed the Justice Department to cease enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prevents American businesses from bribing foreign officials.

Not bad for a day’s work—but Trump wasn’t done. Today, the administration told The New York Times that Elon Musk’s financial disclosures would not be made public, allowing the shadow president to direct vast swaths of government policy with enormous stakes for his personal fortune without the public knowing the precise areas of overlap.

A running joke in the first Trump term was “Infrastructure Week,” a recurring attempt by the administration to focus media attention on a subject (passing an infrastructure bill) that had no real policy meat to it. This time around, Trump has quietly put together a policy theme—call it “Corruption Week”—for which he has actually delivered the goods. Whether Trump did this intentionally or just had numerous pro-corruption initiatives coincidentally stacked up on his desk is hard to say. What seems clear, however, is that Trump genuinely believes in corruption as a normal and acceptable way to do business.

When he first ran for president, in 2016, Trump cast himself as a master of the system who had strategically donated to public officials in exchange for favors that would advance his business career. This was not mere bluster. Trump’s breakthrough experience in business came by working the corrupt nexis between real estate and politics in New York City. The late journalist Wayne Barrett, writing in The Village Voice, exhaustively detailed Trump’s wheeling and dealing to obtain a subsidized permit to develop a prized spot of land: the Commodore Hotel deal, which put Trump on the map and seeded his reputation as a symbol of capitalism.

[David A. Graham: Eric Adams’s totally predictable MAGA turn]

Trump recognized that design and construction had little to do with success in this project. The whole trick was to gain influence among the political brokers who controlled land permitting and could dole out lucrative tax abatements.

Trump’s winning bid for the coveted land “had nothing going for it but connections,” Barrett wrote. On top of being born rich, Trump displayed a genuine talent for finding and exploiting the soft spots in the system. He not only donated to the necessary public officials; he put the governor’s top fundraiser on his own payroll. Trump sought to influence Barrett’s reporting with a mix of threats, promises of some ongoing future relationship between them, and what sounded like a bribe. After discovering that Barrett lived in Brownsville, Trump proposed, “I could get you an apartment, you know. That must be an awfully tough neighborhood.”

As a politician, Trump positioned himself as standing above the corruption of the system. That pose was also a way of defining corruption as so endemic that it could not be identified as a discrete form of behavior. Trump calls everything he opposes “corrupt”: political opposition, news reports, judicial rulings, election results, and so on.

That tactic has worked. In part because the word has grown so ubiquitous during the period when Trump has dominated news coverage, it barely registers anymore. Trump was able to continue owning a private business during his first term while refusing to disclose his tax returns, at the time a stunning violation of anti-corruption norms. Early in his second term, he not only continued those practices but opened up a lucrative new business selling a crypto memecoin that serves both to exploit his own fans and to allow anyone anywhere in the world to enrich him directly.

The chance that any corrupt behavior on behalf of Trump, Musk, or any other member of his administration will be exposed is significantly dampened by Trump’s decision to fire inspectors general en masse. If, by chance, some corruption scandal still comes to light, Trump has stacked the Justice Department with loyalists who will almost certainly look the other way.

You can call this hypocritical, but a more realistic description is that it follows Trump’s understanding of how power works: The people running the system operate it for their own benefit. Smart people figure out how to get in on the corruption and get rich themselves. The people who get left out are suckers.

Trump’s cynical model of the world is not purely a matter of self-interest. His suspension of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is an actual policy agenda to enable American businesses to bribe officials overseas without violating American law. Trump himself has no need to grease anybody’s palms. He therefore appears to support this reform, as it were, because he genuinely believes in it. And unlike most of his flailing efforts to advance policy objectives, his pro-corruption agenda is comprehensive and well designed. How the rest of Trump’s presidency plays out is anyone’s guess. The consequences of legalizing corruption, however, will be utterly predictable.

Marko Elez, a staffer at Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Oversight, operated an anonymous X account that spewed out-and-out race hatred. He called on Americans to “normalize Indian hate,” said “you could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” and proudly declared that “I was racist before it was cool.”

After the Wall Street Journal outed Elez on Thursday, he resigned. By Friday afternoon, Musk reinstated him at the behest of Vice President JD Vance. “To err is human, to forgive is divine,” Musk posted on his platform.

Yet forgiveness requires contrition, and there’s no evidence Elez has any. He has not publicly apologized or even repudiated his ugly comments. In Trump’s America, you can engage in this kind of publicly performed cruelty without any real consequence.

This, for some, is actually the point of voting for Trump. New York’s Brock Colyar attended a swanky Trump party where one attendee said he voted for Trump because, in Colyar’s paraphrase, “he wanted the freedom to say ‘f**got’ and ‘r****ded.’” An anonymous “top banker” recently told the Financial Times that they felt “liberated” after Trump’s win because “we can say ‘r***rd’ and ‘p***y’ without the fear of getting canceled.” 

The new ethos of cruelty reminded me of a passage in the philosopher Richard Rorty’s 1998 book Achieving Our Country. Warning of the rise of a right-wing American strongman in the not-too-distant future, Rorty predicted that such a political shift would also herald an alarming new cultural era:

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ‘n****r’ and ‘k*ke’ will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

Somehow, Rorty anticipated our cultural moment nearly three decades prior. To understand why, you need to study with his broader argument in Achieving Our Country. It is a theory of the politics of right-wing backlash that’s mistaken on some key points — yet so prescient in others that we ignore it at our peril.

What Rorty got right — and wrong

In the book, Rorty’s primary concern is the long arc of the American left. In his view, the central focus of the left has shifted from economic to social inequalities, from class to race/gender/sexual orientation.

This change has carried with it an attendant shift in culture. The “reformist” left, which focused on reducing economic inequality through public policy, gave way to a “cultural” left focused primarily on “change in the way we treat one another.”

The shift from reformist to cultural left, he argues, was in part necessary. The old left had little interest in the concerns of women or Black people, let alone LGBTQ Americans. So long as the left kept those groups out of the aperture, it would never bring true equality.

But in his view, the rise of the cultural left came at a severe cost. In a post-Reagan moment when economic inequality was skyrocketing and globalization was eating American jobs, the left abandoned its commitment to addressing the concerns of the working class.

“It’s as if the American Left could not handle more than one initiative at a time — as if it either had to ignore stigma in order to concentrate on money, or vice versa,” he writes.

Rorty’s ultimate fear was that this inattention to rising inequality would allow a right-wing demagogue to rise to power. In a passage that was widely cited after Trump’s political victory in 2017, Rorty describes a series of events that sound eerily familiar:

Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.

The rise of this strongman, he predicts, is what will cause “sadism” to start “flooding back.” His election on a platform of vicious cultural warfare encouraging those people who were never comfortable with a more diverse America to start once again openly performing cruelty.

Rorty saw, more clearly than many of his peers, that the post-civil rights normative consensus in favor of social equality was far thinner than many expected. Not only did he foresee such a future, but he saw the precise vehicle through which it could be cracked — a right-wing demagogue who claimed to stand for the people against the liberal elites. Being able to predict such events at a moment where American politics seemed contained within (relatively) centrist bounds is nothing short of astonishing.

And yet, his forecast was also off in notable ways — most notably in its class analysis.

Rorty predicted that the base of the authoritarian movement will be those “left behind” by globalization. But that thesis has been repeatedly tested since Trump’s rise and found wanting. Trump’s base is primarily people who are less well educated but financially comfortable. The GOP’s inroads with non-college voters in recent elections are explained not by a backlash to free trade and offshoring, but rather a combination of short-term inflation, global anti-incumbent sentiment, and a sense that Democrats had moved too far to the cultural left (this last point Rorty did indeed anticipate).

You can see this, notably, in the kinds of people who are publicly performing cruelty right now. The examples we’ve looked at are not laid-off factory workers yelling slurs at the evening news. Rather, it’s computer programmers, bankers, and glitzy DC ball attendees — members of the elite class who use words like “r***rd,” “p***y,” and “f**got” to assert their cultural dominance in elite workplaces and on social media.

Their cruelty is not born of displaced pain, as Rorty predicted it would, but rather of power repressed: of people who felt like they couldn’t act on sadistically finally feeling “liberated” to do so, as the FT’s anonymous banker put it.

Understanding Trumpism’s true roots requires not only grappling with arguments like Rorty’s, but also with the increasingly clear evidence that the politics of status have a potency independent of class antagonism. That people want to be able to demean others not out of displaced rage at their own standing, but because they genuinely believe it is their right as social superiors to do so.  

It’s a phenomenon that the cultural left, for all its faults, can help us make sense of.

This story was adapted from the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.

In early February, a dataset tracking car crash deaths in the US curiously went missing from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) website.

Unlike other Donald Trump-ordered changes to government websites in which entire studies were removed and later court-ordered to be restored, only the most recent data on car crash deaths from 2022 was deleted from download files on NHTSA's website.

The odd removal sparked concerns that the Trump administration may be changing or possibly even ending the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS)—a collection of police-reported data from every state that has tracked car crash fatalities since 1975. The Health department has said the data is used to help reduce deaths from not wearing a seatbelt or deaths involving a drunk driver.

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Racist social media posts from Darren Beattie, President Donald Trump’s acting under secretary of state for public diplomacy, are resurfacing—underlining the U.S. government’s infiltration of white nationalist online trolls.

“Higher quality humans are subsidizing the fertility of lower quality humans. Foundational reality of social and political life in the post war west,” Beattie wrote on X in May 2024. 

The former Trump speechwriter subsequently responded to his own wretched thought, writing, “Population control? If only!”

This is just one of many hideous posts of Beattie’s promoting the racist science of eugenics, dug up and first reported on by NOTUS.org. 

“The horrific practice of 2nd trimester abortion is legal in some places and well within Overton window of public discourse,” he wrote on X in January 2023. “But idea of offering feral populations financial incentives for voluntary sterilization is completely taboo.”

That same year, Beattie responded to a right-wing shitpost about Black communities not wanting white cops in their neighborhoods.

“When a population gets feral, a little snip snip keeps things in control Could offer incentives (Air Jordans, etc.),” he wrote.

 Beattie is no stranger to swimming in the sump of white supremacist ideology. In 2018, Beattie was let go by the first Trump administration for attending an H.L. Mencken Club conference in 2016.

Beattie’s ascension during Trump’s second term is symptomatic of the racist pseudosciences that are front and center in the tech broligarchical capture of the U.S. government. His racism mirrors that of Vice President JD Vance and (seemingly actual president) Elon Musk. 

Whereas Trump at least attempted to obfuscate some of the glaring racism in his first term, this time he’s emboldened by Musk’s white supremacist powergrab using young simps with histories of espousing the same archaic bigotries who now have access to U.S. financial infrastructure.

“Low birthrate is under-appreciated as causal in the fall of civilizations. Rome was having birth rate issues even during the reign of Caesar,” Musk tweeted in April 2023.

“Birth quality matters too, arguably more than rare,” Beattie responded.

With those sort of “ideas,” Beattie is sure to fit in among the Musk/Trump administration.

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In a letter to Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, Senate Minority Whip and Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, accuses FBI pick Kash Patel of perjury. 

“Kash Patel has been personally directing the ongoing purge of career civil servants at the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he wrote in the letter.

If true, President Donald Trump’s favorite QAnon and Jan. 6 conspiracy theorist would’ve perjured himself under oath—a federal crime with a potential prison sentence of up to 5 years. 

According to “highly credible information from multiple sources, Mr. Patel is receiving information from within the FBI from a member of the [director’s advisory team],” Durbin wrote in the letter. “Mr. Patel then provides direction to Mr. [Stephen] Miller, who relays it to Acting Deputy Attorney General [Emil] Bove. Each DAT member had represented to one or more officials at the Bureau at some point before January 30 that they had been in direct contact with Mr. Patel.” 

“For example, several members of the DAT relayed that Mr. Patel personally interviewed them for the position,” he continued. “It is unacceptable for a nominee with no current role in government, much less at the FBI, to personally direct unjustified and potentially illegal adverse employment actions against senior career FBI leadership and other dedicated, nonpartisan law enforcement officers.”

As Durbin noted, it would be illegal to direct a federal agency as a “private citizen” with “no current role in government” due to the Senate not having voted on his confirmation.

Durbin's perjury allegation refers back to an interaction between Patel and Sen. Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, during his hearing on Jan. 30. 

"Are you aware of any plans or discussions to punish in any way, including termination, FBI agents or personnel associated with Trump investigations? Yes or no?" Booker asked. 

“I’m not aware of that, Senator. I don't know what's going on right now over there, but I'm committed to you, Senator, and your colleagues that I will honor the internal review process of the FBI,” Patel responded.

This is the latest in a slew of letters from Democrats citing concerns over Trump’s FBI pick.  

On Feb. 3, 10 Senate Democrats—including Durbin—posed “grave concerns” about Patel’s involvement in a dozen FBI and DOJ firings, which targeted people who worked on the Jan. 6 cases against Trump. A day later, 20 Democratic attorneys general cited national security concerns over the same firing spree.

Patel has also said he’d “come after” media that doesn’t bend the knee. 

The Senate vote on whether Patel will lead the FBI will​​ take place on Thursday, and if the vote goes along party lines—as it has so far—he will be confirmed. 

It’s unclear if Durbin's calls for an investigation into Patel will be ignored. So far, Trump’s cronies have proven that they care little about the U.S. Constitution, court orders, or democratic norms, so it’s not looking promising this time around.

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THE SPEED OF THE CRUELTY has been stunning.

In a matter of a few weeks, the Trump administration, led by Elon Musk, has decimated America’s main provider of global humanitarian aid, the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Founded in 1961, USAID has, until now, worked in more than 100 countries, promoting global health, fighting epidemics and starvation, providing treatment for people with HIV/AIDS, educating children and combatting child sex trafficking, resettling refugees and supplying shelter to displaced people across the globe, and supporting programs in maternal and child health and anti-corruption work.

USAID accounts for less than 1 percent of the federal budget. With those funds, it has been responsible for building field hospitals in war-ravaged Syria and removing land mines in Cambodia, funding vaccination programs in Nigeria and access to food, water, electricity, and basic health care for millions of people in eastern Congo. It contained a major outbreak of Ebola a decade ago and prevented massive famine in southern Africa in the 1990s. More than 3 million lives are saved every year through USAID immunization programs.

[Read: America can’t just unpause USAID]

People who have worked in international development for decades will tell you that there is not a single area of development and humanitarian assistance USAID has not been involved in.

On the day of his second inauguration, Donald Trump instituted a 90-day freeze on foreign assistance. Almost all USAID contractors and staff have since been fired or put on administrative leave, the website taken down and signage removed from its headquarters in Washington, D.C. On Friday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order, enjoining the administration from placing 2,200 USAID employees on leave, but the chaos has already generated a global humanitarian crisis.

Many small organizations that relied on USAID have shut down; even the largest ones have been severely weakened. One survey reports that about a quarter of nonprofits said they might last a month; more than half said they had enough reserves to survive for three months at most.

The New York Times reports that funding for treatment for infants born in Uganda with HIV has been stopped, while in South Africa, researchers were forced to end an HIV-prevention trial, leaving women with experimental implants inside their bodies and without ongoing medical oversight. A cholera-treatment trial has been abandoned in Bangladesh. Patients have been told to leave refugee hospitals in Thailand. Soup kitchens that feed hundreds of thousands of people in Sudan have been closed.

As Mitchell Warren, the executive director of the HIV-prevention organization AVAC, told the Times’ Apoorva Mandavilli, “You’ve gotten rid of all of the staff, all of the institutional memory, all of the trust and confidence, not only in the United States but in the dozens of countries in which U.S.A.I.D. works. Those things have taken decades to build up but two weeks to destroy.”

A humanitarian worker in Sudan told The Washington Post that their organization received a stop-work order for grants covering hundreds of millions of dollars. “It means that over 8 million people in extreme levels of hunger could die of starvation,” said the aid worker. “What’s next? What do we do?”

IT WAS NOT ENOUGH for Trump and Musk, the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, to unleash mass suffering and death with the stroke of a pen. They had to slander USAID and spread lies about the agency in the process.

Musk has called USAID “evil” and a “criminal organization.” It is, according to Musk, “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” The agency, Musk added, isn’t “an apple with a worm in it” but “a ball of worms.”

“Time for it to die,” Musk posted on X.

[Read: Paranoia is winning]

For his part, Trump said USAID is a “tremendous fraud” and claimed that the people in the agency “turned out to be radical left lunatics.”

In order to promote this calumny, Trump, Musk, and their acolytes have unleashed an avalanche of falsehoods and disinformation. Not that USAID should be above criticism: As the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff has argued, it can be overreliant on contractors, endlessly bureaucratic, and prone to paying consultants with money that could be better used elsewhere. But none of that matches up with the way Musk and Trump have described it. And authoritarian leaders from around the world are now celebrating the destruction of one of the most important humanitarian organizations in the world.

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing,” George Orwell wrote in 1984.

Six years ago, my colleague Adam Serwer wrote of Trump and his movement that “the cruelty is the point.” That has never been more clear than in the president’s decision to demolish USAID. The cost savings will be minimal; the carnage will be massive. And all of the agony that will be unleashed by this decision—the cries of pain that Trump will never hear, the tears of grief Musk will never see—is not accidental. It was done with malice. This is what Trump and MAGA represent, what lies at their moral core. To be silent in the face of this is to be complicit in what they are doing.

FOR THE PAST six years, Anne Linn has worked for the President’s Malaria Initiative, another U.S. program. But she lost her job earlier this month because of Trump and Musk’s actions. Her contract with PMI was canceled.

She’s proud of her work, and proud of the fact that in the 30 countries where PMI has been operating, the malaria mortality rate has been reduced by half since President George W. Bush launched the initiative, in 2006. (Malaria still kills more than half a million people each year, about three-quarters of whom are children under 5.)

Linn is aware that foreign assistance improves America’s image in the world and helps economies prosper. But that’s not why she’s doing what she’s doing.

“As a Christian,” Linn wrote in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, “I was compelled by the Gospel, the words of Jesus, to use my life to try to diminish suffering for the world’s most vulnerable.”

She was doing that until Trump and Musk set their sights on USAID. Now, she wrote, “children, children of God, will die unnecessarily.”

In an interview with Time, Linn put it this way: “I’m here to do what I can, to be the hands and feet of God in this world. Like, what can I do to alleviate the suffering of others, of my neighbors?”

She’s worried that their suffering will increase because bed nets used to protect people from malaria are still in the warehouse and the people contracted to deliver them have a stop-work order. She spoke of her fears for the pregnant mothers and the children under 5, whom malaria can kill. “Who can read the words of Jesus Christ and think this is okay?” she asked. “That is baffling to me. If we say that we are pro-life, we cannot be okay with this.”

Linn’s question—Who can read the words of Jesus Christ and think this is okay?—haunts me and many others like me. No group is more responsible for the reign of Trump than white evangelicals. In 2024, for the third time, they voted in overwhelming numbers for Trump. Most white evangelicals will not, under any circumstances, break with him. They are beholden to him.

[Read: Trump’s assault on USAID makes Project 2025 look like child’s play]

They read the same words of Jesus as Linn does, but whereas those words have led her to relieve suffering for the world’s most vulnerable, many white evangelicals have ended up in a different place. They are in lockstep with a man who is taking delight in destroying an agency whose decimation will dramatically increase suffering for the world’s most vulnerable.

It is a remarkable thing to witness. There are tens of millions of men and women who are regular churchgoers, who attend Bible studies and Sunday-school classes and listen to Christian worship music, and who would raise a ruckus if anyone in Church leadership interpreted the Bible in a way that deviated even slightly from their doctrine on any number of issues.

And yet, many of these same people insist that their faith commitments have led them to support a president for whom the cruelty is the point. As a result, there is, somewhere in Kenya right now, a mother of three asking, “If I die, who will take care of my children?” Donald Trump and Elon Musk don’t care. It turns out that millions and millions of people who claim to be followers of Jesus don’t, either.

On Monday, Trump Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that the Federal Aviation Administration will change the term “Notice to Air Missions” back to “Notice to Airmen”—a completely useless change that won't do anything to stop the spate of deadly plane crashes that's taken place since Donald Trump took office.

According to the FAA, a NOTAM is, "a notice containing information essential to personnel concerned with flight operations but not known far enough in advance to be publicized by other means." NOTAMs, "concern the establishment, condition, or change of any facility, service, procedure or hazard" in the National Airspace System.

During President Joe Biden's administration, NOTAMs were renamed to Notice to Air Missions, as not every pilot is a man.

In a column in General Aviation News about the name change at the time, commercial pilot William E. Dubois praised the new term.

“Personally, I think Notices to Air Mission is not only more accurate, but really cool-sounding,” Dubois wrote. “‘I’m not going on a $100 hamburger run, honey, I have an air mission to complete.’ Dare I say for those of us with the Y chromosome, that’s even more masculine? Heck, male pilots might actually start checking them. It’s also handy that it would allow us to update the sensitivity of the language without dumping the acronym NOTAM that we are all used to.”

Nevertheless, Duffy changed the term back to include the antiquated “Airmen” to adhere to Trump's demand that diversity, equity, and inclusion be erased from the federal government.

"In line with my commitment to restoring sanity to @USDOT, the FAA will resume using the term 'Notice to Airmen' instead of 'Notice to Air Missions,'" Duffy wrote in a post on X. "Also, pilot charts will now reference the Gulf of America and Mt. McKinley. Thanks to President Trump, we are taking back our language, our history, and our country."

Duffy made the announcement the same day yet another deadly aircraft accident took place in the United States, this time between two private jets in Scottsdale, Arizona. The accident left one person dead and three others injured, according to CNN.

The collision was the fourth deadly aircraft accident in the U.S. in the span of two weeks: there was the midair collision between a military helicopter and an American Airlines flight that killed 67 people, a medevac jet that crashed in Philadelphia that killed seven people, and a commuter flight crash in Alaska that killed 10.

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg mocked Duffy for making the name change.

"So after promising to focus on safety, they’ve gotten right down to work … on gender terminology?" Buttigieg wrote in a post on X.

Maybe Duffy should’ve taken a lesson from fellow Republican Ted Cruz, who in a Senate hearing on air traffic control systems and safety in December said the government should update the actual NOTAM system rather than changing the name of it.

“The most recent change to NOTAM was when the Biden administration changed Notice to Airmen to Notice to Air Missions,” Cruz said at the time. “I think the American people would have preferred the administration focus on modernizing the antiquated system over obsessing on gendered language.”

It appears gendered language is important to Republicans, assuming the gendered language is about men. 

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Donald Trump announced Monday that the US will impose a 25 percent tariff on all imports of steel and aluminum.

The president has a habit of declaring radical changes to trade policy, only to swiftly walk them back. Last week, Trump postponed his long-promised 25 percent tariffs on all imports from Mexico and Canada, after reaching agreements with both countries over border security. 

But there’s a reason to think that Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs will stick: He implemented a nearly identical policy during his first term.

In 2018, Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on imported steel and a 10 percent tariff on imported aluminum, exempting only a small number of countries. A little over a year later, Trump granted extended exemptions to two of America’s top steel providers, Canada and Mexico.

Trump’s commitment to re-running his experiment with large steel and aluminum tariffs is curious, since his first try yielded terrible results. 

It goes without saying that tariffs harm domestic consumers: Putting a tax on imported goods tends to make them more expensive. Sophisticated proponents of tariffs tend to acknowledge this, while insisting that the harm to consumers is outweighed by the policy’s benefits to domestic manufacturing and/or national security.

This might be true of certain tariffs. But the data suggest Trump’s steel and aluminum duties harmed America’s consumers and manufacturers alike, while providing no obvious benefit to national security.

According to one estimate from the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Trump’s metal tariffs — which were lifted by the Biden administration — were on track to cost American consumers and businesses roughly $11.5 billion per year. It is not entirely clear that this great sum bought the US significantly more steel jobs: Between January 2018 and October 2022, employment in America’s steel sector actually fell by 4.2 percent.

It’s possible that job losses in steel would have been even higher, had the tariffs not been in place. The Alliance for American Manufacturing — a group that supported the tariffs — claimed in 2019 that they had saved or created roughly 12,700 jobs. And yet, if one takes that figure (as well as Peterson’s cost estimate) as gospel, Americans may have paid about $900,000 per steel job, far more than it would have cost to directly pay the salaries of each affected steelworker. 

The bigger problem with metal tariffs, though, is that far more American companies manufacture things out of steel than produce steel itself. According to one estimate, the number of Americans who work in steel-using industries outstrip those who work in steel production by an 80-to-1 margin. For steel users, Trump’s metal tariffs were all harm and no benefit: By increasing the cost of a key input — and inspiring retaliatory tariffs against American goods — Trump’s policy reduced US manufacturing employment, according to a 2019 study from the Federal Reserve. The study implies that Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs cost the US about 75,000 manufacturing jobs. 

All this had little discernible benefit on national security. It is true that steel is a key input for military hardware and that China — a US adversary — produces more steel than we do. Yet the US imports about 80 percent of its steel from allied nations. And retaining the goodwill of such allies is likely more important (and realistic) than trying to domestically replicate the collective steel producing capacity of Canada, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, and the European Union combined.

In sum, if Trump is serious about his metal tariffs — and he certainly seems to be — Americans should steel themselves for rising prices and falling manufacturing employment.  

Connecticut's highest-ranking state legislator has proposed a bill requiring movie theaters to disclose both preview and feature film start times, setting up a clash with theater operators who say the measure threatens their advertising revenue. Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney's proposal aims to prevent moviegoers from sitting through up to 30 minutes of advertisements and trailers before features begin. The Democrat cited complaints from constituents about lengthy pre-show delays. Theater owners are pushing back, local outlet RegisterCitizen reports, with Avon Theatre's executive director Peter Gistelinck warning the measure could undermine their financial stability.

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"In-dash advertising is here and Stellantis, the parent company of Jeep, Dodge, Chrysler, and Ram, beat everyone to further enshittification," writes longtime Slashdot reader sinij. "Ads can be seen in this video." From a report: In a move that has left drivers both frustrated and bewildered, Stellantis has introduced full-screen pop-up ads on its infotainment systems. Specifically, Jeep owners have reported being bombarded with advertisements for Mopar's extended warranty service. The kicker? These ads appear every time the vehicle comes to a stop. Imagine pulling up to a red light, checking your GPS for directions, and suddenly, the entire screen is hijacked by an ad. That's the reality for some Stellantis owners. Instead of seamless functionality, drivers are now forced to manually close out of ads just to access basic vehicle functions. One Jeep 4xe owner recently shared their frustration on an online forum, detailing how these pop-ups disrupt the driving experience. Stellantis, responding through their "JeepCares" representative, confirmed that these ads are part of the contractual agreement with SiriusXM and suggested that users simply tap the "X" to dismiss them. While the company claims to be working on reducing the frequency of these interruptions, the damage to customer trust may already be done.

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On Friday, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a sudden change to how it handles the indirect costs of research—the money that pays for things like support services and facilities maintenance. These costs help pay universities and research centers to provide the environment and resources all their researchers need to get research done. Previously, these had been set through negotiations with the university and audits of the spending. These averaged roughly 30 percent of the value of the grant itself and would frequently exceed 50 percent.

The NIH announcement set the rate at 15 percent for every campus. The new rate would start today and apply retroactively to existing grants, meaning most research universities are currently finding themselves facing catastrophic budget shortfalls.

Today, a coalition of 22 states filed a suit that seeks to block the new policy, alleging it violated both a long-standing law and a budget rider that Congress had passed in response to a 2017 attempt by Trump to drastically cut indirect costs. The suit seeks to prevent the new policy or its equivalent from being applied—something that Judge Angel Kelley of the District of Massachusetts granted later in the day. While that injunction only applies to research centers located in the states that have joined the suit, a separate suit was filed in the same district by a group of medical organizations, some of them (such as the Association of American Medical Colleges), have members throughout the country. As a result, Judge Kelley issued a separate ruling that extended the injunction to the remaining states.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Two owners of Nvidia's new RTX 5090 Founders Edition GPUs have reported melted power connectors and damage to their PSUs. The images look identical to reports of RTX 4090 power cables burning or melting from two years ago. Nvidia blamed the issue on people not properly plugging the 12VHPWR power connection in fully and the PCI standards body blamed Nvidia. A Reddit poster upgraded from an RTX 4090 to an RTX 5090 and noticed "a burning smell playing Battlefield 5," before turning off their PC and finding the damage. The images show burnt plastic at both the PSU end of the power connector and the part that connects directly to the GPU. The cable is one from MODDIY, a popular manufacturer of custom cables, and the poster claims it was "securely fastened and clicked on both sides (GPU and PSU)." While it's tempting to blame the MODDIY cable, Spanish YouTuber Toro Tocho has experienced the same burnt cable (both at the GPU and PSU ends) with an RTX 5090 Founders Edition while using a cable supplied by PSU manufacturer FSP. Plastic has also melted into the PCIe 5.0 power connector on the power supply.

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We seem to be in the middle of 16 constitutional crises at once. President Donald Trump and his allies are trying to kill an entire provision of the Constitution, cut Congress out of the federal budgeting process, and cut off agencies’ control of their computer systems.

Let’s imagine that all six of the Supreme Court’s Republican justices wake up tomorrow and decide that their many, previous decisions enabling Trump were wrong, and each pledge to do everything in their power to rein in the seemingly out-of-control executive that they helped create.

Even in this world, where the federal courts could be counted on to aggressively enforce the Constitution and any statutes that are intended to constrain Trump, the United States would still face a constitutional crisis. 

The reason why is fairly basic: Courts are inherently reactive institutions. They do not preemptively tell the government how to operate, and they aren’t even allowed to advise the government on whether its planned actions are lawful. Rather, before a federal court can do anything at all, it must wait for the government to do something illegal, wait for a plaintiff to come along who is injured in some way by that illegal action, and then, if conditions are right, the court can intervene.

By the time that happens, permanent damage may already be done. To understand why, consider this example.

The Trump administration plans to essentially shutter the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Shutting down USAID is almost certainly illegal — the agency is funded by Congress, and the president cannot lawfully cut off congressional appropriations (including money set aside to run USAID) without legislative approval. Because of these facts, there’s also a lawsuit, known as American Foreign Service Association v. Trump, seeking to block these efforts to shut down USAID. And that lawsuit may ultimately succeed — the most recent development in that suit is a temporary court order blocking the Trump administration’s attempt to put USAID employees on leave.

By the time this lawsuit fully plays out, however, many of USAID’s employees may have already found new jobs. If the Supreme Court ultimately rules that the agency must continue to function, that decision could take months or years. And, by that point, the agency may have experienced such severe brain drain that it will be a shadow of its former self. (And that’s all assuming that Trump even complies with a court order reopening the agency.)

The Trump administration, in other words, will always be the first mover in a conflict between it and the courts. The federal judiciary can often stop someone who is already violating the law from continuing that behavior, but it can’t prevent the violation from happening in the first place. 

Thus, even if we could trust these courts to apply the law fairly and impartially to a Republican administration — and, in a world with Trump v. United States, the decision that said it’s okay for presidents to commit crimes, we simply cannot — Trump and his people can do extraordinary damage before any judge has a chance to even look at what they have done.

Standing, explained

The reactive nature of the federal judiciary is not an accident, it is an integral part of its design. Under Article III of the Constitution, federal courts may only hear disputes involving live “cases” or “controversies” between a defendant and a plaintiff who claims they’ve been injured in some way by that defendant. This requirement is known as “standing.”

As the Supreme Court held in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife (1992), no one may file a federal lawsuit challenging the government’s actions unless they have suffered an “injury in fact” that is “fairly traceable” to the action that they are challenging.

This means that the Trump administration gets to act first, before anyone can even file a lawsuit trying to stop them. Elon Musk and his cronies at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) could potentially crash the entire computer system used by air traffic controllers in the United States, and no court can do anything about it until someone whose flight is grounded — or, worse, someone whose loved one is killed in a plane collision — files a lawsuit alleging that they were hurt because of Musk’s actions.

Even after someone does have standing to file a lawsuit under Lujan, moreover, there’s no guarantee that this individual can obtain a court order that will meaningfully constrain the administration. That’s because the Supreme Court has placed even stricter restrictions on who is allowed to seek an injunction — a court order requiring the government to take a certain action or to cease an action it is already engaged in.

The seminal case is City of Los Angeles v. Lyons (1983). In that case, Los Angeles police officers pulled over Adolph Lyons for a broken taillight, and eventually placed him in a chokehold. Lyons sued, seeking an injunction forbidding the LAPD from using such a chokehold again “except in situations where the proposed victim of said control reasonably appears to be threatening the immediate use of deadly force.”

But a majority of the Court concluded that Lyons could not seek an injunction at all. “Past exposure to illegal conduct,” Justice Byron White wrote for the Court, does not permit someone to seek an injunction. Rather, “Lyons’ standing to seek the injunction requested depended on whether he was likely to suffer future injury from the use of the chokeholds by police officers.” 

It was not enough, in other words, for Lyons to show that he had been a past victim of an illegal chokehold. He had to show that the LAPD were likely to place him in another chokehold at some point in the future.

The implications of the Lyons decision for much of the Trump administration’s shenanigans are pretty obvious. 

Suppose, for example, that Musk introduces some glitch into the Treasury Department’s payment systems that causes it to randomly fail to make payments to 1 percent of all Social Security beneficiaries every year. Any one of those beneficiaries should be able to obtain a court order requiring the government to pay them what they are owed, but could they obtain an injunction seeking to undo Musk’s action? Probably not, because no one whose payments were cut off would be able to show that they are likely to have their payments cut off again a second time.

The courts may soon grow even weaker than they already are

There’s an ongoing debate with the courts about just how broadly any injunction can sweep. One uncertain question is whether the Supreme Court will continue to allow lower court judges to issue “nationwide injunctions” that attempt to shut down an illegal federal policy altogether.

In recent years, some lower court judges have claimed the power to enjoin the entire federal government when they believe it is acting illegally, effectively setting a new policy for the entire nation. Such injunctions, for example, were a particular thorn in former President Joe Biden’s side, as right-wing judges would often use them to block his immigration and other policies.

The upside of allowing a single trial judge to issue such an order is that, if the government’s action actually is illegal, it will be promptly shut down. The downside is that these nationwide injunctions are often issued by judges with idiosyncratic or highly partisan views, and can sabotage an administration that is not actually breaking any laws.

Some members of the Supreme Court, most notably Justice Neil Gorsuch, have railed against these nationwide injunctions — claiming that a single outlier judge should not have this kind of power. According to Gorsuch, injunctions are “meant to redress the injuries sustained by a particular plaintiff in a particular lawsuit,” not to allow one low-ranking judge to set national policy.

There are strong arguments in favor of Gorsuch’s position, but if Gorsuch ultimately prevails in this fight, it will mean that lower court judges will grow even more powerless against the Trump administration. They will still be able to issue narrower orders prohibiting the government from taking a particular action against a particular plaintiff. But they will no longer be able to order the Trump administration as a whole to abandon an illegal policy altogether. 

The courts typically depend upon voluntary compliance

Unlike lower courts, the Supreme Court clearly has the power to declare how the law should apply to the entire federal government. But there are also limits to the Supreme Court’s ability to enforce its decisions against non-parties to a particular lawsuit.

When the Supreme Court declares a particular action illegal, the government typically stops engaging in any similar actions because it knows that it will lose any lawsuit challenging those actions now that the justices have spoken. But what happens if the government decides to only narrowly comply with the Court’s decision?

Think of it this way. Suppose that John is a Social Security beneficiary whose benefits are illegally cut off by DOGE. Now suppose that John brings a case to the Supreme Court, and obtains a decision holding that DOGE’s action was illegal. Ordinarily, the government would also start paying benefits to people similarly situated to John, rather than making each of them file their own lawsuit.

But what if the government only narrowly complies with the Supreme Court’s order, paying benefits to John and John alone? Perhaps some of the other people whose Social Security benefits were cut off could join together in a class action lawsuit that would allow them all to present their case to a court at once. But that class action might only apply to people with lost Social Security benefits, and not to other individuals or businesses who had other payments cut off by DOGE.

The Trump administration, in other words, could attempt to grind down people hurt by its decisions by forcing them each to bring their own lawsuits, each of which could take months or even years to complete.

There is a very famous precedent for this kind of massive resistance to a Supreme Court decision. In the 10 years following Brown v. Board of Education (1954), public school desegregation almost completely stalled in much of the country. By 1964, just one in 85 Black students in the South attended an integrated school.

One of the biggest reasons why is that Southern school districts refused to voluntarily comply with Brown. Instead, they insisted that a Black student who wanted to attend an integrated school had to file a new lawsuit and obtain a court order letting them in. Terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan also helped ensure that few Black families were willing to be plaintiffs in such lawsuits.

In fairness, it is unlikely that DOGE will send roving bands of hooded terrorists to hound anyone who tries to sue them. But the fact remains that the Supreme Court cannot apply its orders to parties that are not already before it, at least until someone files a new lawsuit.

The “least dangerous” branch

Finally, there’s a question looming over everything Trump does: What if he simply refuses to comply with a Court order?

As Alexander Hamiltion famously wrote in the Federalist Papers, courts have no internal mechanism to enforce their decisions. They “may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.”

When a losing litigant refuses to comply with a federal court order, that order is enforced by the US Marshals Service, a law enforcement agency housed in the US Department of Justice. The Marshals, in other words, are executive branch officials subordinate to the president. So Trump could theoretically order them not to enforce a court decision against him.

If that happens, the United States is in truly uncharted waters. Congress could potentially impeach Trump for refusing to obey the court order, but given Republican control of both houses of Congress, impeachment is unlikely to succeed. Heck, impeachment failed even after Trump incited a mob to attack the US Capitol and threaten the lives of the members of Congress themselves. So it’s hard to imagine a Republican Congress standing in Trump’s way over something like refusal to follow a court order.

Even if we never have a showdown over whether Trump will follow the courts’ decisions, the judiciary only has limited power. Courts can block many of Trump’s illegal actions, but only after he and his subordinates have done considerable harm.

On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that a staffer at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) resigned after the paper inquired about some racist social media posts from an account linked to him.

The swift resignation was, at least at first, a breath of fresh air. President Donald Trump and his allies have repeatedly refused to adhere to basic societal norms or moral codes and have faced little to no consequences. Elon Musk refused to apologize for a gesture that, at the very least, appeared identical to a Nazi salute. A senior State Department official once tweeted that “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.” It could seem like public shaming no longer worked as a guardrail against corrupt or irresponsible governance. 

So when Marko Elez — the 25-year-old staffer who had gained access to the Treasury Department’s central payment system — felt enough pressure to quit, it looked like maybe there was still a line that Trump and his allies couldn’t cross. 

That is, until the following day, when Elon Musk, who leads DOGE, asked his followers on X to answer this poll: “Bring back @DOGE staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym?” 

Vice President JD Vance then shared Musk’s tweet. “I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” Vance wrote. “So I say bring him back.” By Friday afternoon, Musk announced that Elez will get his job back.

To put this all in perspective, here’s a sampling of the kinds of things Elez said online: 

• “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.” 
• “Normalize Indian hate.” 
• “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.”

The truth is everyone says something they will one day regret. And it’s reasonable to say that people shouldn’t be punished for things they said or did as a kid — especially if they’ve demonstrated that they’ve changed and matured. But Elez — an adult in a position of significant power — said all of these things within the past year. The idea that he shouldn’t face any consequences for making such offensive remarks, or that he should have access to people’s data, is on its face absurd. 

But this story is not really about Elez. It’s about what Republicans really mean when they say they believe in free speech. Musk styles himself as an outspoken supporter of the First Amendment, saying he initially invested in Twitter (which he renamed X) because he wanted it to be “the platform for free speech around the globe.” Vance, in a follow-up tweet, said that he didn’t want his children to worry about whether “a flippant comment or a wrong viewpoint will follow them around for the rest of their lives.”

In other words, our speech, however offensive, should not only be legal but socially permissible.

But the Republican Party doesn’t really believe in that absolutist ideal. In fact, the first few weeks of the Trump administration, and the Elez fiasco in particular, have exemplified the contradiction at the heart of the right’s free speech rallying cry. What they actually want is the freedom to say the most offensive, racist things without getting any pushback, while also using the power of the state to suppress speech that they personally don’t like.

The GOP’s conflicting messaging on free speech

The Republican Party is not, by any means, the party of free speech.

Over the past several years, the GOP has been the main party willing to wield government might to actually suppress or punish speech that it deems unacceptable. This ranges from banning books to retaliating against private companies for taking political stances to unleashing law enforcement agencies to squash protests. (To be sure, Democrats have also used similar tactics.)

The first three weeks of the Trump administration have also underscored how Republicans aren’t the free speech absolutists they claim to be. 

Just last week, for example, Trump issued an executive order that aims to deport foreign students who took part in pro-Palestinian protests last year. A fact sheet about the order says that it will target “Hamas sympathizers” and revoke student visas. “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” Trump said in a statement. “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

The Trump administration is taking tangible steps, in other words, to not just discourage some forms of speech but to actually deport people for attending a protest where people expressed opinions the administration finds offensive. So while someone who says “normalize Indian hate” can have a place in Trump’s government without facing significant professional consequences — because, apparently, kids say the darnedest things — people who have views or ideas that Republicans don’t like are not even welcome to enter the country.

This is not merely a case of the typical hypocrisy we expect from politicians. It is a coherent worldview coming into form: The Trump administration has been making clear that while it has plenty of tolerance for not just radical ideas but outright racist words and gestures, it has no room whatsoever for dissent or disagreement. 

As Vance and Musk prepare to bring Elez back to his post at DOGE, they might argue that he simply made a mistake and, like it or not, the First Amendment protects all kinds of speech. And they would be right — the First Amendment mostly does. 

But the Trump administration certainly does not, and the speech they’re personally choosing to protect should tell you everything about how they view the world.

After finalizing loan terms with the IMF, El Salvador's Legislative Assembly approved changes to the country's Bitcoin Law last week by a 55-2 vote, "effectively removing bitcoin's status as legal currency," reports Reason. Under the new rules, bitcoin is no longer considered "currency," though it remains "legal tender." Another change makes using bitcoin entirely voluntary. (Previously, the law mandated that businesses accept bitcoin for any goods or services they provided.) Additionally, bitcoin can no longer be used to pay taxes or settle government debts. The government is also stepping back from its involvement in Chivo Wallet, the state-backed digital wallet... The reforms come as part of a broader financial agreement between Bukele and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). One of the conditions for a proposed $1.4 billion Extended Fund Facility loan was that El Salvador mitigate "potential risks of the Bitcoin project." The IMF has been critical of the country's crypto policies since Bukele made bitcoin legal tender in 2021. "There are large risks associated with using Bitcoin as legal tender, especially given the high volatility of its price. We don't recommend it," the organization said in 2022. Despite these changes, the administration insists it remains committed to bitcoin. Milena Mayorga, El Salvador's ambassador to the United States, has said that El Salvador is still a "bitcoin country" and will maintain — and even expand — its bitcoin reserves. "You have to adapt to the current situation and this is the decision that was taken in the Assembly, but that does not mean that the country will stop having a bitcoin reserve," she explained. Government data suggests El Salvador now holds 6,072 Bitcoin worth $586,888,000.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Representative Ro Khanna has known Elon Musk for more than a decade, so he thought he should raise some concerns about the billionaire’s assault on the federal government where he would be sure to see them. Posting on the platform Musk owns, the California Democrat said yesterday that Musk should be hauled before Congress to explain himself. “Musk’s attacks on our institutions are unconstitutional,” Khanna wrote.

It took Musk just 16 minutes to reply: “Don’t be a dick.”

The two continued their conversation over text message, Khanna told me. In private, Musk displayed the same anger over Khanna’s criticism of his unrestrained efforts to root out supposed government waste and fraud. When Khanna again urged Musk to appear before Congress to recommend spending cuts—rather than carry them out by fiat—Musk replied by revealing that he had a very different vision of his job as chair of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. Khanna wouldn’t show me their exchange, but he described Musk’s reply this way: “I think his view is, ‘I didn’t come to Washington to give a report to Congress.’”

[Read: Elon Musk is president]

The banter between the pair used to be friendlier. When Trump appointed Musk to lead a team scouring the federal government for spending cuts, few Democrats reacted more positively than Khanna, who quickly offered to partner with Musk on slashing the defense budget.

Virtually alone among Democrats, Khanna has been willing to engage with and occasionally defend the billionaire owner of Tesla and SpaceX as Musk moved further to the right and became a Trump loyalist. Even now, Khanna can’t help but marvel at Musk’s success in business. “I always thought he was a remarkable entrepreneur,” Khanna told me. “He has an eccentric brilliance to him.”

Musk wrote a laudatory blurb for Khanna’s first book, and he would refer to the Silicon Valley Democrat, who twice backed Bernie Sanders for president, as “a sensible moderate.” Khanna, in turn, has connected Musk with members of Congress in both parties. In 2023, he persuaded a skeptical Musk to work with a Republican-led House committee investigating China. (Notably, Musk did not take another piece of advice Khanna offered him when he started getting involved in politics: “Stick to cars and Mars.”)

Like many people in Washington, Khanna assumed that Musk’s DOGE would hole up in an office for a few months and issue a report recommending cuts for Congress to consider. Musk, of course, has done much more than that. With Trump’s approval, he has ignored Congress and burrowed deep into federal departments, sidelining career civil servants, all but eviscerating USAID, and gaining access to the Treasury Department’s payment systems.

“Maybe I was naive,” Khanna told me. I had called to seek his insights on what Musk is doing and what he ultimately wants; Musk’s critics, both Democrats and Republicans, have speculated that his targets in the government are tied to his business interests. Khanna suggested that Musk’s motivation is more straightforward. Musk “is on a maniacal mission to save the country from fiscal collapse,” Khanna said, and thinks “that he is going to figure out all of the wasteful spending and all of the inefficiencies in a government that no one has been able to figure out.” Musk believes, Khanna said, “that people like me are in the way of what he thinks is in the American interest.”

[Read: Paranoia is winning]

To Musk’s critics—who now include Khanna—it’s not just people standing in his way but the Constitution. “We need to make sure that Elon Musk has an allegiance to the Constitution,” Khanna told me. Do you think he does? I asked him. “No, I don’t,” Khanna replied. “That’s why we need to push back on him.”

Musk’s assault on the government has complicated Khanna’s standing in the Democratic Party. Khanna has made no secret of his ambitions for higher office, and yesterday he delivered a speech in which he called on Americans to “stand up to the unholy alliance of wealth and power.” But nowhere in his address did he mention Musk, and some progressives see him as having vouched for a plutocrat who is now taking a sledgehammer to all they hold dear.

For weeks before Trump took office, Khanna extended his hand to work with Musk and DOGE on defense cuts. He told me that the offer remains—but only “if he committed to following the Constitution.” He added: “There’s a lot of trust that would have to be rebuilt at this point.”

He still seems to see himself as a potential bridge between Democrats and Musk. But if the past two weeks are an indication, any influence Khanna had with Musk might be gone. I asked Khanna whether, after all these years, he had misjudged Musk. He replied: “I underestimated how far he would go.”

Updated at 7:48 p.m. on February 7, 2025

Artists embarrassed Donald Trump when he first came to Washington. Now that Trump is back in power, he is determined not to let that happen again.

Trump plans to announce the dismissal of multiple members of the Kennedy Center board as soon as today, a group likely to include recent appointees of former President Joe Biden; among those on the current board are the Democratic political strategist Mike Donilon, former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and Democratic National Committee finance chair Chris Korge. The White House has also had discussions about having Trump himself installed as chair of the board, according to two people familiar with the purge, who requested anonymity to describe plans that are not yet public.

A White House spokesperson declined to comment.

(Several hours after this article published, Trump confirmed the news, writing on Truth Social that he planned to make the Kennedy Center “GREAT AGAIN” by terminating “multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees, including the Chairman, who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.” He wrote that he planned to announce a “new Board, with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP!” adding, “The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from all across our Nation. For the Kennedy Center, THE BEST IS YET TO COME!”)

“The Kennedy Center has received no formal notifications from the White House about what you’ve reported,” Eileen Andrews, the center’s vice president of public relations, told us before Trump put out his Truth Social post.

Trump never attended the Kennedy Center’s annual gala event during his first term, as artists protested his administration and threatened to boycott Kennedy Center events at the White House. Now Trump is making clear that he will not be sidelined again from the most celebrated cultural institution in Washington.

“The attitude is different this time. The attitude is Go fuck yourself,” said one of the people familiar with the planning. “It’s ridiculous for four years for Trump and Melania to say, ‘We’re not going to the Kennedy Center because Robert De Niro doesn’t like us.’” (De Niro was a Kennedy Center honoree in 2009 and spoke at the 2024 event.)

Trump’s relationship with the arts world has long been strained. During his first year in office, all 17 members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, a nonpartisan advisory body whose members at the time had been appointed by President Barack Obama, resigned over what they called Trump’s “hateful rhetoric” following the white-nationalist demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump later disbanded the group, rather than replace the committee, which was established by Ronald Reagan.  

Later that year, three of the five artists recognized at the annual Kennedy Center Honors said they would not attend or were considering a boycott of the traditional White House reception before the gala, citing various objections to Trump’s leadership. Trump, in response, canceled the reception and became the first sitting president not to attend the gala at any point in his term since its inception in 1978.

Trump showed a similar lack of interest in the National Medal of Arts, the government’s highest award for artists and arts patrons, which the president oversees. In his first term, Trump distributed just nine medals, including an award to the musicians of the U.S. military. Obama had awarded 76 medals over eight years, and Biden gave out 33 during his four-year term.

Trump was more circumspect about the Kennedy Center, alternately praising and criticizing federal funding for the institution. “They do need some funding. And I said, ‘Look, that was a Democrat request. That was not my request. But you got to give them something,” Trump said in 2020, when asked about a proposed $25 million in additional funding as part of a COVID-relief bill. “The Kennedy Center, they do a beautiful job—an incredible job.”

Weeks later, he changed his position. “I hated putting it in the bill because it’s just not appropriate,” he said of the funding.

If Trump became chair of the Kennedy Center board, he would replace the philanthropist David Rubenstein, who has held the post for 14 years but signaled that he will move on after September 2026. A week after Trump’s second inauguration, Kennedy Center President Deborah Rutter announced her own plans to step down at the end of the year.

For his second term, Trump is taking a more assertive approach to a range of cultural institutions. Within hours of his inauguration, he abolished the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, which Biden had revived in 2022, preempting any possibility of another mass resignation. He then moved to impose his own views on government-funded cultural projects.

Nine days into his second term, he signed an executive order restarting planning for an idea from his first term: a national “Garden of American Heroes,” location to be determined. Trump had previously named 244 honorees—52 of them women—who would get statues, including figures from science, sports, entertainment, politics, and business, as well as some of the nation’s founders. (The family of at least one would-be honoree, the anti-communist Whittaker Chambers, later asked that he not be included.)

Trump also moved quickly to impose his vision on plans for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—July 4, 2026, also known as the Semiquincentennial. He created a new advisory panel, called Task Force 250, that he will chair to support a congressionally funded organization that has already begun planning events.

During the presidential campaign, Trump said he wanted the Semiquincentennial celebrations to last more than a year, from Memorial Day 2025—just 15 weeks away—until July 4, 2026. He proposed a “Great American State Fair” in Iowa as one component, an homage to the state’s own summer fair tradition but featuring pavilions from each state. He also promised the creation of a new national high-school sporting contest, called the Patriot Games, to take place alongside the fair. “Together we will build it, and they will come,” he said in 2023.

Trump’s newfound interest in the arts represents a departure of sorts. In his first term, Trump repeatedly tried to pull funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, two major sources of support for arts and cultural programs around the country. But appropriators in Congress overruled him, and by the end of his term, annual funding was up slightly from the beginning of his term, sitting at more than $167 million for each agency. (The number rose to $207 million during Biden’s presidency.)

This time around, Trump has asked the chairs of both the arts and humanities endowments to join Task Force 250. Nina Ozlu Tunceli, the top lobbyist at the nonprofit Arts Action Fund, who has worked for decades with Congress to secure arts funding, told us she is hopeful that Trump’s interest in the 250th celebration will provide “a very good lifeline” for the endowments’ funding.

Still, Trump’s executive order calling for the “termination” of all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the federal government will become a source of tension—and another way for him to assert his will on the arts. In recent budgets under Biden, House appropriators praised the endowments for “addressing equity through the arts” and “diversity at the national endowment.” “The [Appropriations] Committee directs the NEA to continue prioritizing diversity in its work,” read a section of the budget for fiscal year 2023.

Given the changes that have already begun under Trump, Ozlu Tunceli said, “those programs will definitely be removed.”

Health officials in Texas are battling a growing measles outbreak in an area that has some of the state's lowest vaccination rates and highest non-medical exemptions.

On January 30, officials reported two measles cases in unvaccinated, school-age children in Gaines County, which sits at the border of New Mexico and is around 90 miles southwest of Lubbock, Texas. Both children were hospitalized in Lubbock and had been discharged.

As of midday February 7, the outbreak total reached nine confirmed measles cases in the South Plains Public Health District (SPPHD) that includes Gaines, according to Zach Holbrooks, executive director for SSPHD. In an interview with Ars, Holbrooks reported that there were three additional probable cases that are linked to the confirmed cases. These are cases in the same household or family—maybe a cousin or sibling—that are showing measles symptoms but haven't been tested yet or gotten their test results back yet, Holbrooks said. So far, there have been no other reports of hospitalizations besides those in the first two cases.

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio plans to blow off an upcoming G20 summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, blaming equality initiatives and South Africa’s “anti-Americanism.”

“I will NOT attend the G20 summit in Johannesburg,” Rubio said Wednesday in a post on X. “South Africa is doing very bad things. Expropriating private property. Using G20 to promote ‘solidarity, equality, & sustainability.’ In other words: DEI and climate change. My job is to advance America’s national interests, not waste taxpayer money or coddle anti-Americanism.“

Little Marco seemingly alluded to President Donald Trump’s recent evidence-free claim that “South Africa is confiscating land,” referring to the myth that white farmers in the country are having their land taken by the government.

“I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

At issue is the country’s new Expropriation Act, which ends apartheid-era laws around land distribution that were put in place by the white ruling minority. The new law seeks to mitigate some of the disparities following almost 50 years of apartheid in the country. 

Following Trump’s post, the South African President Cyril Ramaphosa denied Trump’s claims.

“South Africa is a constitutional democracy that is deeply rooted in the rule of law, justice and equality,” he wrote in a statement. “The South African Government has not confiscated any land.”

“We look forward to engaging with the Trump administration over our land reform policy and issues of bilateral interest. We are certain that out of those engagements, we will share a better and common understanding over these matters,” he added.

Trump’s puppet master, the South African-born billionaire Elon Musk, responded to Ramaphosa’s statement with an even more baseless claim, writing on X, “Why do you have openly racist ownership laws?”

Musk has previously accused Ramaphosa and his administration of allowing a “genocide” to happen to white farmers, a claim for which experts say there is no evidence. Around 20,000 murders are committed in the country every year, with just around 50 of them being white farmers, according to Reuters. The vast majority of victims are Black.

It is no surprise that Musk and Trump seem most interested in enacting a top-down caste society where a very small group of people gets to oppress the rest of the country.

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A brief spat between Elon Musk and the news organization Politico is making something quite obvious: The nation’s governance is increasingly at the whim of online conspiracy theorists.

This incident began with two unrelated events: On Tuesday, staffers at Politico reported that the company had missed payroll. Those issues were resolved later that day. Separately, Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency team were in the middle of gutting USAID, freezing its operations and spending under the guise of reviewing how money was being spent.

Posters on X, however, saw something more nefarious about both facts. It couldn’t just be a coincidence, they said, that Politico wasn’t paying its staff after USAID money stopped flowing. The more likely explanation, they concluded, was that the news organization was dependent on some kind of USAID money, and that federal funding had been funneled to mainstream news organizations for better coverage and to attack Trump and Musk.

Online sleuths did their own research (i.e., they looked up federal expenditures on the federal government’s open database USASpending.gov) and found something to support their claim. Federal agencies, including but not limited to USAID, had paid $8.2 million last year for subscriptions to the news organization’s Politico Pro service, a paywalled news, legislation, and research database that plenty of industry professionals, corporations, and government staffers find useful.

Those payments were everything the entire federal government had paid, and USAID’s expenditure was a tiny share of that overall amount (some $44,000 for a couple of subscriptions over two years). And they weren’t subsidies, grants, or gifts to exert editorial control; they were normal transactions — paying the subscription cost for the services Politico Pro provides.

And it’s not just Politico — all kinds of government users and agencies find the services and coverage that media organizations provide to be useful, and so pay for subscriptions to places like the New York Times, Axios, or the Associated Press, as the investigative journalist Byron Tau pointed out on Wednesday.

None of this seemed to matter to Musk, who quickly encountered these online conspiracies and responded that he’d shut down the payments. “Not an efficient use of taxpayer funds. This wasteful expenditure will be deleted,” he said in response to a post claiming employees at the Food and Drug Administration were paying $517,855 for Politico Pro subscriptions. The Tesla CEO spent much of the rest of the day on X reposting and amplifying posts about government payments to news organizations, NGOs, and nonprofits — and eventually, the conspiracies made their way to the White House. 

Speaking from the briefing room, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt addressed Politico directly, saying she “was made aware of the funding from USAID to media outlets including Politico who I know has a seat in this room” and said that “the more than $8 million in taxpayer dollars that have gone to essentially subsidizing subscriptions to Politico on the American taxpayers’ dime will no longer be happening.”

By Thursday morning, President Donald Trump had weighed in: “THE LEFT WING ‘RAG,’ KNOWN AS ‘POLITICO,’ SEEMS TO HAVE RECEIVED $8,000,000. Did the New York Times receive money??? Who else did??? THIS COULD BE THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF THEM ALL, PERHAPS THE BIGGEST IN HISTORY! THE DEMOCRATS CAN’T HIDE FROM THIS ONE. TOO BIG, TOO DIRTY!”

The whole incident is messy, but illuminates a few things. The federal government, and its agencies and departments, of course don’t have an obligation to subscribe to any news organizations. It’s within their rights to cancel subscriptions if they want to, just like I can cancel a subscription to Mubi after I’ve paid to watch The Substance.

But this media scrutiny and ensuing uproar began because of a handful of conservative influencers and average Joes just posting their thoughts and conspiratorial webs online, for Musk to see. All it took was a few posts for Musk, who now seems to wield limitless power in the federal bureaucracy, to launch a new crackdown, and now at least one federal department, the US Department of Agriculture, is complying and stopping payments, according to independent journalist Marisa Kabas. Another, the General Services Administration, is being ordered to cancel “every single media contract” the agency expenses, including Politico, its subsidiaries, and the BBC, per Axios.

For now, it’s just subscriptions to news services affected by these posters — those companies will surely take a financial hit, and more media layoffs may ensue.

But they also sum up the risks of Musk and DOGE’s frenzied drive to cut federal funding for a variety of other purposes. Not only is cutting-government-spending-by-conspiracy-theory risky — you’re relying on folks who preface their claims with “assuming this is accurate,” for one — it also opens up the real possibility that high-stakes decisions are made about important and valuable government services and programs without considering the negative, harmful effects they might have on everyday people.

Musk, at least, has signaled through posts on X that he’ll force cuts and audits at the Treasury Department, at the Pentagon, at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, and at the Social Security Administration; additional cuts are likely coming to departments of labor and education. Has every proposed reduction been scrutinized? Will specific cuts to programs or grants that can’t be undone happen because a random troll gets Musk’s — or Trump’s — attention? Are specific cuts there contingent just on what DOGE staff finds? Or can social media sleuths and conspirators now force specific government responses, all because Musk and Trump can see — and respond — to their theories?

Hours after being sworn in as the U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi sent a memo within the Department of Justice instructing lawyers within the agency’s Civil Rights Division to begin probing ways to prosecute companies for instituting diversity initiatives.

Since Trump was sworn in last month, he has attacked and blamed DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs, falsely alleging that they are the source of many of America’s problems—even plane crashes.

Slate reports that in a memo titled “ENDING ILLEGAL DEI AND DEIA DISCRIMINATION AND PREFERENCES,” DOJ lawyers have been told to create a plan that will include “specific steps or measures to deter the use of DEI and DEIA programs or principles” and to include “proposals for criminal investigations” against those organizations.

The memo marks a complete change of direction for the Civil Rights Division, which was created via the landmark 1957 Civil Rights Act. The division has traditionally enforced federal laws protecting equal rights and defending the right to vote. Now, under Trump and Bondi, it is being directed to undermine civil rights.

Trump has spent his first few weeks in office working to roll back the gains of the long civil rights struggle.

He has issued executive orders and directives within the federal government undoing long-standing policies against racism and discrimination, in one instance repealing an executive order meant to desegregate federal contracting. Trump’s policies have even led to the military ceasing efforts to recruit and train a diverse slate of fighters despite military experts who have said diversity increases fighting capability.

Bondi is pushing for these radical actions despite being Trump’s second choice for the job. She was nominated to be attorney general after Trump’s first pick, disgraced former Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, withdrew his nomination after allegations of him having sex with minors. Bondi also faced nearly unanimous Democratic opposition in the Senate, with Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman being the sole Democrat to support her nomination while the rest of the caucus opposed her.

At her swearing-in on Wednesday, Trump made it clear he would like Bondi to use her department to pursue action against Democrats and others who have opposed him.

“I know I'm supposed to say 'she's going to be totally impartial with respect to Democrats,' and I think she will be as impartial as a person can be,” he said, adding, “I'm not sure if there's a possibility of totally.”

That is a legitimate concern since Bondi also issued an early directive instructing the DOJ to create a task force to look into past actions to investigate and prosecute Trump for crimes. 

Bondi is also making a push to deemphasize prosecutions of white-collar crimes, purge diversity programs within the DOJ, reintroduce the federal death penalty, and to root out lawyers who aren’t willing to march in lockstep with Trump ideologically.

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Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky was pictured in a wheelchair Wednesday after reportedly falling twice at or near the U.S. Capitol.

He reportedly fell once when leaving the Senate chambers and again when entering a closed-door GOP meeting—the latest in a series of suspected spills and public medical events that McConnell has experienced over the past few years. 

“Senator McConnell is fine. The lingering effects of polio in his left leg will not disrupt his regular schedule of work,” a McConnell spokesperson said in a statement. 

McConnell, who turns 83 this month, recently stepped down from his leadership role, allowing the equally shameless Sen. John Thune of South Dakota to become the Senate majority leader.

Like some members of the GOP, McConnell maintained an antagonistic relationship with President Donald Trump during his first term, condemning the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection after undermining Democratic efforts to hold Trump accountable. 

McConnell has continued to criticize Trump’s while also enabling the president’s political power to fester in the GOP. 

“President Trump called you, among other things, a ‘sullen, unsmiling political hack,’” journalist Lesley Stahl told McConnell during their interview on “60 Minutes” Sunday. “You have said some pretty harsh things about him. You've said he's ‘nasty.’ You've said he's ‘not very smart.’ You said he's a ‘sleazeball.’”

“Well, that was—those were private comments,” McConnell replied, before Stahl reminded him that it was published in his biography.

After four decades in the Senate, McConnell has done little to help his home state of Kentucky, and he’s effectively ceded control of the GOP to someone whose tariff plans will wreak havoc on one of Kentucky’s top industries, whiskey.

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During the fourth quarter of 2024, AMD surpassed Intel in datacenter sales for the first time in history -- despite weaker-than-expected sales of its datacenter GPUs. Tom's Hardware reports: AMD's revenue in Q4 2024 totaled $7.658 billion, up 24% year-over-year. The company's gross margin hit 51%, whereas net income was $482 million. On the year basis, 2024 was AMD's best year ever as the company's revenue reached $25.8 billion, up 14% year-over-year. The company earned net income of $1.641 billion as its gross margin hit 49%. But while the company's annual results are impressive, there is something about Q4 results that AMD should be proud of. Datacenter business was the company's primary source of earnings, with net revenue reaching record $3.86 billion in Q4, marking a 69% year-over-year (YoY) increase and a 9% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) rise. Operating income also saw substantial improvement, surging 74% YoY to $1.16 billion. By contrast, Intel's datacenter and AI business unit posted $3.4 billion revenue, while its operating income reached $200 million. But while the quarter marked a milestone for AMD, market analysts expected AMD to sell more of its Instinct MI300-series GPUs for AI and HPC. You can view AMD's 2024 financial results here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The scorched earth approach of President Donald Trump and billionaire DOGE bro Elon Musk to dismantle the federal government in their image has reached the desks of America’s most-coveted national security operatives. 

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal broke the news that the administration sent a buyout offer to the entire workforce of the Central Intelligence Agency, asking employees to leave their jobs and receive eight months' severance. The CIA collects, analyzes, and disseminates information on economic, military, and political developments abroad to protect national security.

The offer was corroborated by a CNN report on Wednesday. Trump’s offer, up until Tuesday, had “not been made available to most national security roles in an apparent cognizance of their critical function to the security of the nation.” This is a stark departure from the other severance offers made to federal workers in January, which had sensibly excluded employees in crucial national security roles. 

Later on Wednesday, the CIA sent the White House an unclassified email list of all the CIA employees hired in the past two years. The list, according to reporting by The New York Times, included first names and the first initial of their last name. The list reportedly focused on young analysts and operatives who were hired to hone in on China. It requested that the spy agency comply with Trump’s executive order to shrink the federal government. 

The agency is also freezing hiring for potential employees who were already given conditional offers, and CIA aides say some offers to recruits will also be rescinded. 

A CIA spokeswoman told the Journal that the buyout was meant to “infuse the agency with renewed energy.” Meanwhile, an aide, who spoke anonymously, said to The New York Times that “the effort was meant to encourage some of the large group of officers who joined in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks to take an early retirement.”

Sen. Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, advised his constituents not to accept Trump’s buyout offer. In his Senate floor speech on Tuesday, he said his constituents represent 140,000 government workers in Arlington and Langley, Virginia, where the CIA and Pentagon are located. 

“There’s no statutory authority that I can see for the president making this offer,” Kaine said in an interview with the Journal. “You should not raise your hand.”

Director John Ratcliffe of the CIA was appointed by Trump and sworn in to lead the agency on Jan. 23. He has remained radio silent about the gutting so far. 

When Sen. Angus King, an Independent from Maine, asked about political “litmus” and “loyalty” tests during his January confirmation hearing, Ratcliffe promised to keep this kind of favor out of the agency he sought to lead. 

So much for that. 

This comes as foreign adversaries in Russia are rejoicing that unelected co-president Musk took over the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, infiltrating its offices and locking employees out of their computers. On Monday, Democratic lawmakers sent letters to the judiciary over “alarming reports” of Trump’s FBI pick, Kash Patel, calling for political retribution and for “grave concerns” over Trump’s removal from their posts of FBI and DOJ officials who investigated Jan. 6.

The implications are chilling. Trump’s moves aren’t just reckless, they’re potentially catastrophic for America’s national security at a time when its global security is becoming increasingly more fragile. As the CIA thins out its ranks, U.S. enemies are undoubtedly watching and celebrating. 

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