Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 46
March 24, 2025
March 24, 2025
Today the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, dropped the story that senior members of the Trump administration planned the March 15 U.S. attack on the Houthis in Yemen over Signal, a widely available encrypted app that is most decidedly not part of the United States national security system. The decision to steer around government systems was possibly an attempt to hide conversations, since the app was set to erase some messages after a week and others after four weeks. By law, government communications must be archived.
According to Goldberg, the use of Signal may also have violated the Espionage Act, which establishes how officials must handle information about the national defense. The app is not approved for national security use, and officials are supposed either to discuss military activity in a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, or to use approved government equipment.
The use of Signal to plan a military attack on Yemen was itself an astonishingly dangerous breach, but what comes next is simply mind-boggling: the reason Goldberg could report on the conversation is that the person setting it up included Goldberg—a reporter without security clearance—in it.
Goldberg reports that on March 11 he received a connection request from someone named Michael Waltz, although he did not believe the actual Michael Waltz, who is Trump’s national security advisor, would be writing to him. He thought it was likely someone trying to entrap him, although he thought perhaps it could be the real Waltz with some information. Two days later, he was included in the “Houthi PC small group,” along with a message that the chat would be for “a principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis.”
As Goldberg reports, a “principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.”
The other names on the app were those of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President J.D. Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Brian McCormack from the National Security Council, Central Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe, Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine negotiator Steve Witkoff, White House chief of staff Suzy Wiles, perhaps White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and Trump’s nominee for head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent.
Goldberg assumed the chat was fake, some sort of disinformation campaign, although he was concerned when Ratcliffe provided the full name of a CIA operative in this unsecure channel. But on March 14, as Vance, for example, took a strong stand against Europe—“I just hate bailing Europe out again”—and as Hegseth emphasized that their messaging must be that “Biden failed,” Goldberg started to think the chat might be real. Those in the chat talked of finding a way to make Europe pay the costs for the U.S. attack, and of “minimiz[ing] risk to Saudi oil facilities.”
And then, on March 15, the messages told of the forthcoming attack. “I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts,” Goldberg writes. “The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”
On the chat, reactions to the military strikes were emojis of a fist, an American flag, fire, praying hands, a flexed bicep, and “Good Job Pete and your team!!,” “Kudos to all…. Really great. God Bless,” and “Great work and effects!”
In the messages, with a reporter on the line, Hegseth promised his colleagues he would “do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC,” or operations security. In a message to the team outlining the forthcoming attack, Hegseth wrote: “We are currently clean on OPSEC.”
Two hours after Goldberg wrote to the officials on the chat and alerted them to his presence on it by asking questions about it, National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes responded: “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials.”
When asked about the breach, Trump responded: “I don't know anything about it. I'm not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me, it's a magazine that's going out of business. I think it’s not much of a magazine. But I know nothing about it. You're saying that they had what?” There is nothing that the administration could say to make the situation better, but this made it worse. As national security specialist Tom Nichols noted: “If the President is telling the truth and no one’s briefed him about this yet, that’s another story in itself. In any other administration, [the chief of staff] would have been in the Oval [Office] within nanoseconds of learning about something like this.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is evidently going to try to bully his way out of this disaster. When asked about it, he began to yell at a reporter that Goldberg is a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.” Hegseth looked directly at the camera and said: “Nobody was texting war plans.” But Goldberg has receipts. The chat had “the specific time of a future attack. Specific targets, including human targets…weapons systems…precise detail…a long section on sequencing…. He can say that it wasn’t a war plan, but it was a minute-by-minute accounting of what was about to happen.”
Zachary B. Wolf of CNN noted that “Trump intentionally hired amateurs for top jobs. This is their most dramatic blunder.” Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) told Brian Tyler Cohen: “My first reaction... was 'what absolute clowns.' Total amateur hour, reckless, dangerous…. [T]his is what happens when you have basically Fox News personalities cosplaying as government officials.” Foreign policy scholar Timothy Snyder posted: “These guys inherited one of the most functional state apparatus in the history of the world and they are inhabiting it like a crack house.”
Many observers have noted that all of these national security officials knew that using Signal in this way was against the law, and their comfort with jumping onto the commercial app to plan a military strike suggests they are using Signal more generally. “How many Signal chats with sensitive information about military operations are ongoing within the Pentagon right now?” Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) posted. “Where else are war plans being shared with such abject disregard for our national security? We need answers. Right now.”
National security journalists and officials are aghast. Former commanding general of United States Army Europe and the Seventh Army Mark Hertling called the story “staggering.” Former CIA officer Matt Castelli posted: “This is more than ‘loose lips sink ships’, this is a criminally negligent breach of classified information and war planning involving VP, SecDef, D[irector of the] CIA, National Security Advisor—all putting troops at risk. America is not safe.” Former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, who spent seven years as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve, posted: “From an operational security perspective, this is the highest level of f**kup imaginable. These people cannot keep America safe.”
Rhode Island senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said: "If true, this story represents one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen. The carelessness shown by President Trump's cabinet is stunning and dangerous. I will be seeking answers from the Administration immediately." Armed Services Committee member Don Bacon (R-NE), a former Air Force brigadier general, told Axios that “sending this info over non-secure networks” was “unconscionable.” “Russia and China are surely monitoring his unclassified phone.”
That the most senior members of Trump’s administration were sharing national security secrets on unsecure channels is especially galling since the people on the call have used alleged breaches of national security to hammer Democrats. Sarah Longwell and J.V. Last of The Bulwark compiled a series of video clips of Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, Tulsi Gabbard, John Ratcliffe, and especially Pete Hegseth talking about the seriousness of handling secret information and the need for accountability for those who mishandle it. When they were accusing then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton of such a breach, they called for firings, accountability, and perhaps criminal charges. Indeed, Trump rose to power in 2016 with the charge that Clinton should be sent to prison for using a private email server. “Lock her up!” became the chant at his rallies.
Today, for her part, Clinton posted a link to the story along with an eyes emoji and wrote: “You have got to be kidding me.”
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Notes:
Bluesky:
markhertling.bsky.social/post/3ll5ntkgkos2y
schiff.senate.gov/post/3ll5l3v4e7c2x
briantylercohen.bsky.social/post/3ll6agcqcrc2h
natsechobbyist.bsky.social/post/3ll5o4v34b22s
petebuttigieg.bsky.social/post/3ll5ky5hqlc2f
paleofuture.bsky.social/post/3ll5wbhkiqs2c
craigbrittain.com/post/3ll6443bis22h
alwaysvote.bsky.social/post/3ll67oluqkc2v
timothysnyder.bsky.social/post/3ll5hgxla6c2d
kylegriffin1.bsky.social/post/3ll5j52sofk2j
X:
CastelliMatt/status/1904318972964556956
radiofreetom/status/1904244986998124622
HillaryClinton/status/1904263639605084512
YouTube:
March 23, 2025
March 23, 2025
Fifteen years ago today, President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare, into law. In addition to making healthcare more affordable, the law eliminated lifetime limits on benefits, prohibits discrimination because of pre-existing conditions, and allows young people to stay on their parents’ health insurance policies until they are 26. In 2024, about 24 million people signed up for Obamacare coverage for 2025, while another 21 million adults were covered by the law’s expansion of Medicaid. The ACA has increased the number of Americans covered by health insurance and slowed the rise of health care costs across the board.
Republicans immediately vowed to get rid of the ACA because they object to government regulation of business, provision of a basic social safety net, and promotion of infrastructure. Such a government, Republicans argue, is essentially socialism: it prohibits individuals’ ability to control their businesses without government interference, and it redistributes wealth from the haves to the have-nots through taxes.
This is a modern-day stance, by the way: it was actually Republican president Theodore Roosevelt who first proposed universal healthcare at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Republican president Dwight Eisenhower who first tried to muscle such a program into being with the help of the new department created under him: the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which in 1979 became the Department of Health and Human Services. Its declared mission was “improving the health, safety, and well-being of America.” In contrast to their forebears, today’s Republicans do not believe the government has such a role to play.
In 2014, Fox News Channel personality Bill O’Reilly explained Republicans' opposition to the law, saying: “Obamacare is a pure income redistribution play. That means President Obama and the Democratic Party want to put as much money into the hands of the poor and less affluent as they can and the healthcare subsidies are a great way to do just that. And of course, the funds for those subsidies are taken from businesses and affluent Americans who have the cash…. Income redistribution is a hallmark of socialism and we, in America, are now moving in that direction. That has angered the Republican Party and many conservative Americans who do not believe our capitalistic system was set up to provide cradle to grave entitlements…. Obamacare is much more than providing medical assets to the poor. It's about capitalism versus socialism.”
In contrast, in 2022, former president Obama explained why the Democrats worked so hard to begin the process of getting healthcare coverage for Americans. “[W]e’re not supposed to do this just to occupy a seat or to hang on to power,” he said. “We’re supposed to do this because it’s making a difference in the lives of the people who sent us here.”
The ACA shows, he said, that “if you are driven by the core idea that, together, we can improve the lives of this generation and the next, and if you’re persistent—if you stay with it and are willing to work through the obstacles and the criticism and continually improve where you fall short, you can make America better—you can have an impact on millions of lives.”
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Notes:
https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/medicaid-expansion-is-a-red-and-blue-state-issue/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/06/opinion/theodore-roosevelt-health-care-progressive.html
Fox News Channel transcript, “Bill O’Reilly: ObamaCare and Socialism,” July 23, 2014.
March 22, 2025
March 22, 2025
Perhaps in response to the growing outcry over last weekend’s rendition of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador under a legal justification a federal judge has found questionable, President Donald Trump last night told reporters that he didn’t sign the proclamation that set that legal process in motion.
When asked when he signed the proclamation invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, by which Trump claimed that Venezuela is invading the United States by sending alleged gang members over the border, Trump answered: “I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it.” Trump was on his way to his golf club in New Jersey, and seemed to be handing off responsibility for the declaration to someone else, perhaps Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “Other people handled it,” he said. “But Marco Rubio’s done a great job. And he wanted them out, and we go along with that. We want to get criminals out of our country.”
But, as Matt Viser said in the Washington Post today, on Friday White House communications director Steven Cheung said Trump personally signed the proclamation, and his signature appears on the document in the Federal Register of official government documents. The gap between the two versions of events raises questions about who is in charge of White House policy.
Trump’s habit of deflection might explain last night's statement, and his habit of distraction might explain today’s social media post, in which the president returned to an exchange of words between him and Maine governor Janet Mills, a Democrat, more than three weeks ago. At a meeting of the nation’s governors at the White House on February 21, in a rambling speech in which he was wandering through his false campaign stories about transgender athletes, Trump turned to his notes and suddenly appeared to remember his executive order banning transgender student athletes from playing on girls sports teams.
The body that governs sports in Maine, the Maine Principals’ Association, ruled that it would continue to allow transgender students to compete despite Trump's executive order because the Maine state Human Rights Law prohibits discrimination on the grounds of gender identity. Trump asked if the governor of Maine was in the room.
“Yeah, I’m here,” replied Governor Mills.
“Are you not going to comply with it?” Trump asked.
“I’m complying with state and federal laws,” she said.
“We are the federal law,” Trump said. “You better do it because you’re not going to get any federal funding at all if you don’t….”
“We’re going to follow the law,” she said.
“You’d better comply because otherwise you’re not getting any federal funding,” he said.
Mills answered: “See you in court.”
As Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing of Politico recounted today, after the exchange between Trump and Governor Mills at the White House the administration opened investigations by the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and Agriculture into Maine’s policies. The Department of Agriculture temporarily paused funding for the University of Maine, then restored it and cleared the university system of Title IX violations, saying it had “clearly communicated its compliance.” The University of Maine system said it was “relieved” and added that it had never violated Title IX compliance.
On March 11 the Department of Education abolished more than half of the offices in its Civil Rights Division, getting rid of more than half of the division's employees. Last Wednesday it said it had concluded its investigation into the Maine Department of Education and had determined that the state was violating Title IX by permitting transgender youth to play in the boys’ or girls’ sports that conform to their gender identity. It gave the state ten days to follow the administration’s interpretation of the law.
This morning, the president posted on social media: “While the State of Maine has apologized for the Governor’s strong, but totally incorrect, statement about men playing in women’s sports while at the White House Governor’s Conference, we have not heard from the Governor herself, and she is that one that matters in such cases. Therefore, we need a full throated apology from the Governor herself, and a statement that she will never make such an unlawful challenge to the Federal Government again, before this case can be settled. I’m sure she will be able to do that quite easily. Thank you for your attention to this matter and, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!! DJT.”
Mills was a former state attorney general, and her position is that it is her job as governor to follow state and federal law. But Trump seems to be trying to make his fight with her personal. So long as she is willing to kowtow to him, the “case” can be “settled.” Exactly what she is supposed to be apologizing to him for is unclear, unless it is that she stood up to him, a rare enough event that at the time, Shawn McCreesh of the New York Times noted: “Something happened at the White House Friday afternoon that almost never happens these days. Somebody defied President Trump. Right to his face.”
At the White House, Governor Mills was not only reinforcing the rule of law in the face of an authoritarian who is working to shatter that principle; she was standing up to a bully who claims to be protecting women and girls but who has bragged about sexual assault, been found guilty of sexually assaulting writer E. Jean Carroll, and barged in on teenaged girls dressing in the Miss Teen USA changing room.
Trump’s political stances have also belied his claim to protect women. He has worked to deny women and girls access to health care, including the right not to die needlessly from a miscarriage. He has undermined women’s right to control their own bodies and defunded or stopped the programs that protect their right to be safe from domestic violence and sexual assault. He has ended programs designed to protect women’s employment and has fired women from positions of authority.
Mills stands in dramatic contrast to Trump. Her career has focused on helping women and girls to overcome domestic violence, the threat of sexual assault, and inequities in the workplace. As a district attorney—the first woman elected as a DA in New England—she grew frustrated with the ways in which the criminal justice system failed victims of domestic violence. She co-founded the Maine Women’s Lobby to advocate for battered and abused women, which then led to her election to the Maine legislature and from there to state attorney general and then to the governorship.
While Trump’s demand that Mills make a “full throated apology” to him is in keeping with his habitual attempts to dominate women, Mills follows in a tradition of women from Maine who stood up for the principles of American democracy against bullies who would destroy it.
In a similar moment, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, of Skowhegan, Maine, stood up to Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy. McCarthy and his supporters were hoping to gain votes in the 1950 midterm elections by stoking fear that the communists who had recently taken control of China threatened the U.S. On February 9, 1950, during a speech to a group gathered in Wheeling, West Virginia, to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, McCarthy, a Republican, claimed that he had a list of 205 communists working for the State Department and that the Democrats refused to investigate these “traitors in the government.”
Sympathetic newspapers trumpeted McCarthy’s charges—which kept changing, and for which he never offered proof—and many of his colleagues cheered him on, while Republicans who disapproved of his tactics kept their heads down to avoid becoming the target of his attacks.
All but one of them did, that is. Senator Smith recognized the damage McCarthy and his ilk were doing to the nation. On June 1, 1950, with McCarthy sitting two rows behind her, Smith stood up in the Senate to speak. “Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism,” she said. Americans have the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to think for themselves, she said. She condemned those trying to stifle dissent.
“I do not want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear,” she said. “As an American, I condemn a Republican Fascist just as much as I condemn a Democrat Communist. They are equally dangerous to you and me and to our country. As an American, I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of ourselves.”
Senator Smith ended with a warning: “It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques—techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.”
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Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/22/trump-deportations-autopen/
https://www.ed.gov/media/document/letter-of-finding-maine-doe-109602.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/us/politics/trump-maine-governor-transgender-athletes.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/22/donald-trump-trans-athletes-maine-00003871
https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/SmithDeclaration.pdf
https://apnews.com/article/trump-rape-carroll-trial-fe68259a4b98bb3947d42af9ec83d7db
https://www.maine.gov/governor/mills/about
Bluesky:
March 21, 2025
March 21, 2025
These days, I keep coming back to the quotation recorded by journalist Ron Suskind in a New York Times Magazine article in 2004. A senior advisor to President George W. Bush told Suskind that people like Suskind lived in “the reality-based community”: they believed people could find solutions based on their observations and careful study of discernible reality. But, the aide continued, such a worldview was obsolete. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore…. We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
In 2004 that quotation seemed a reflection on how members of an administration hoped to shape the globe and public perceptions of their actions. Twenty-one years later, it seems we are seeing what happens when members of an administration believe they can shape not just perceptions but reality itself, and discover that reality is stubborn.
After news broke last night that the Pentagon was preparing a top-secret presentation for billionaire Elon Musk on plans for fighting a potential war with China, members of the administration denied that Musk’s visit to the Pentagon would include such a meeting. This morning, Musk posted on social media that the “leakers” “will be found.” “I look forward to the prosecutions of those at the Pentagon who are leaking maliciously false information to NYT,” he posted.
Aside from appearing to confirm the story—one can’t “leak” a false story—Sophia Cai, Danny Nguyen, Daniel Payne, Amy MacKinnon, and Eli Stokols of Politico suggest that Musk’s threat has backfired. “We are public servants, not Elon’s servants,” one Food and Drug Administration employee told the reporters, adding, “[t]he public deserves to know how dysfunctional, destructive, and deceptive all of this has been and continues to be.”
A senior Federal Aviation Administration official said, referring to Musk, “He IS A LEAKER. When you put hard drives on data systems at government agencies you are creating the biggest security breaches we have seen in years and years. Possibly ever.” A Department of Agriculture staffer said: “If the Biden administration or Obama had acted like this, no one would have tolerated it. The Trump administration doesn’t get a pass.”
Those angry at Musk and the cuts his Department of Government Efficiency team has made to the government have demonstrated their anger by launching a grassroots movement called “TeslaTakedown” that protests peacefully at Tesla dealerships. Law enforcement officers and experts in domestic extremism say they have found no evidence that acts of vandalism against cars, charging stations, and dealerships—there have been at least ten such instances—are coordinated.
Trump tried to shore up the brand with a sales pitch for Teslas at the White House on March 11, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Wednesday urged the Fox News Channel audience to buy Tesla stock, an endorsement that violated federal ethics rules but did nothing to prop up the stock price.
On Tuesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi called vandalism of Teslas “domestic terrorism,” and today President Donald Trump insisted that the vandalism of Tesla products is far more serious than the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol when rioters tried to stop the counting of electoral votes and thus overturn the will of American voters. Trump issued a blanket pardon for those rioters, including those convicted of violence against law enforcement officers, but today he posted about Tesla vandals on social media: “I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla. Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!”
At the Social Security Administration, acting commissioner Leland Dudek is threatening to shut down the agency in response to the temporary restraining order issued yesterday by U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander. In that order, Hollander noted that the “Department of Government Efficiency” was “essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion,” and “never identified or articulated even a single reason for which the DOGE Team needs unlimited access to SSA’s entire record systems.”
She prohibited Social Security officials from sharing with DOGE any personally identifiable information (PII) that would make it possible to identify specific individuals. Dudek suggested that Hollander’s order could apply to all SSA employees because the administration has ordered them to cooperate with DOGE. “Everything in this agency is PII,” he said. “Unless I get a clarification, I’ll just start to shut it down. I don’t have much of a choice here.”
Dudek was a mid-level staffer at SSA until he won his position atop the agency by secretly cooperating with DOGE’s demands to review sensitive records after SSA’s head, Michelle King, stood in the way. “I confess. I bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
SSA oversees Social Security benefits for nearly 70 million people and, according to the agency, was expected to distribute about $1.6 trillion in benefits in 2025. For many people, that check is vital to survival. But billionaire Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick suggested that concerns about a stoppage in checks were overblown. He told billionaire podcast host Chamath Palihapitiya: “Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling, and complaining.”
Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, disagreed: “For almost 90 years, Social Security has never missed a paycheck—but 60 days into this administration, Social Security is now on the brink…. Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek has proven again that he is in way over his head, compromising the privacy of millions of Americans, shutting down services that senior citizens rely on and planning debilitating layoffs, all in service to Elon Musk’s lies.”
Hollander responded to Dudek’s threat by calling his interpretation of the order “inaccurate” and specifying that SSA employees who are not members of DOGE or working on DOGE’s agenda are not subject to the order. “Moreover, any suggestion that the Order may require the delay or suspension of benefit payments is incorrect.” After Dudek continued to insist that SSA employees and DOGE are intertwined, Hollander issued another clarification tonight, saying that if that is the case, she “was misled by counsel for the government,” who said that just ten people at SSA are working for DOGE.
“More to the point,” she added, “in my earlier letter today…I directed the government to contact [the Court] immediately if there is any need for clarification of the [order]. As I write this letter, it is well after 6:00 p.m. and the government has yet to contact the Court.”
Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post observed today that “the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ [is making] the federal government almost comically inefficient.” She wrote that Internal Revenue Service employees line up at shared computers on Mondays to submit their “five things I did last week” emails to DOGE while taxpayer service calls go unanswered. Federal surveyors at the Bureau of Land Management are no longer allowed to buy replacement equipment, so when a shovel breaks they can’t simply replace it; they have to locate a manager authorized to file an official procurement form and order one. Many have had to ignore their actual jobs in order to scrub words from official documents.
After interviewing frustrated civil servants for weeks, Rampell said, she has learned that “routine tasks take longer to complete, grinding down worker productivity,” while DOGE bogs workers down with “meaningless busywork, which sets them up to be punished for neglecting their actual duties.”
“All this talk of warfighter ethos, and our ‘priority’ is making sure there are no three-year-old tweets with the word ‘diversity’ in them,” one Pentagon staffer told Rampell. “Crazy town.”
Administration officials are discovering that their idea of slashing through government might not have adequately considered how actual people might react to that destruction. As constituents erupt with anger, Republican lawmakers are refusing to hold town hall meetings. Yesterday, Representative Harriet Hageman (R-WY) responded to boos and heckling by saying: “It’s so bizarre to me how obsessed you are with federal government…. [Y]our hysteria is just really over the top.” When protesters dressed as chickens to goad Representative James Comer (R-KY) into holding a town hall, he issued a statement: “Congressman Comer does not plan on holding therapy sessions for left-wing activists suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
In place of Republican town halls, Democrats are holding their own packed events in Republican districts. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are on a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour across the country because, as Sanders says, people are “profoundly disgusted with what is going on here in Washington, D.C.”
Today, 11,000 people turned out to hear Sanders and AOC in Republican-led Greeley, Colorado. Another 34,000 turned out in Denver.
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Notes:
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/social-security-commissioner-leland-dudek-doge-343d3f5e
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/21/musk-leakers-government-trump-doge-00243208
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/21/social-security-benefits-trump-doge/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/21/doge-government-efficiency-federal-workers/
Ron Suskind, "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush," New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/11/business/tesla-stock-trump-white-house/index.html
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/20/nx-s1-5333315/tesla-attacks-ag-bondi-domestic-terrorism-trump-musk
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/elon-musk/tesla-vandalism-not-coordinated-trump-musk-claims-rcna197369
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5207665-trump-tesla-jan-6-capitol-riot/
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-suggests-tesla-vandals-prison-el-salvador/story?id=120019715
https://www.axios.com/2025/03/21/social-security-lutnick-doge-checks
https://www.denverpost.com/2025/03/14/denver-rally-bernie-sanders-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-trump/
Bluesky:
jojofromjerz.bsky.social/post/3lkvfsyljrk2i
aoc.bsky.social/post/3lkwlajfsbs24
aoc.bsky.social/post/3lkw5ii4g5c24
lincolnproject.us/post/3lkvwb5if3c2h
March 20, 2025
It seems as if the Trump administration is rushing to tear apart as much as it can as opponents of its wholesale destruction of the United States government organize to stop them.
Today, members of the “Department of Government Efficiency” team showed up at the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which helps to fund libraries and museums across the country and whose elimination Trump called for in an executive order last week. They sent employees home, swore in a new acting director in the lobby, and proceeded to cancel contracts and grants.
Even as this dismantling was going on, District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander was blocking the Department of Government Efficiency from accessing data at the Social Security Administration and ordering them to destroy copies of any personal information they have already accessed. “The DOGE Team is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion,” Hollander wrote. “It has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack.”
Also today, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who said the government could not use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to justify sending migrants to a prison in El Salvador, appeared to be out of patience with the government’s obfuscation of what actually happened in the process of that rendition last weekend. Boasberg’s order today laid out that he had repeatedly asked the government to provide information about the flights but that the government had “evaded its obligations,” providing only general information about the flights and appearing to cast about for further delays.
“This is woefully insufficient,” Boasberg wrote. He required that the government explain by March 25 why its failure to return the flights as ordered did not violate the court order to do so. Far from backing down, the administration appears to be considering escalating its fight with the courts. Devlin Barrett of the New York Times reported today that lawyers in the Trump administration believe the 1798 Alien Enemies Act Trump used to deport migrants also permits federal agents to enter people’s homes without a warrant, an assault on the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
The Trump White House and its MAGA supporters appear to be trying to cement their power to control the government by undermining the rule of law and the judges who are defending it. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt yesterday called Judge Boasberg a “Democrat activist,” although he was originally appointed by President George W. Bush, and badly misrepresented Boasberg’s order. She also attacked Boasberg’s wife for her political donations.
In Talking Points Memo this morning, David Kurtz recorded how MAGA supporters Elon Musk and Laura Loomer have attacked Boasberg’s daughter, and in Rolling Stone, Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng noted that that the Attorney General of the United States, Pam Bondi, accused Boasberg of “attempting to meddle in national security,” adding: “This one federal judge thinks he can control foreign policy for the entire country, and he cannot.”
Last month, Vice President J.D. Vance wrote that “[j]udges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” trying to obscure that it is the role of courts to determine whether or not the power the executive is claiming is, in fact, legitimate. On the Fox News Channel, “border czar” Tom Homan said: “I don’t care what the judges think.”
Kurtz noted that Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, has promised hearings on the many injunctions against the Trump administration. Kurtz also noted that angry Trump supporters have called in bomb threats against judges who have stood against Trump’s excesses, including Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and have sent anonymous pizza deliveries to the homes of judges and their relatives as a way to demonstrate that “we know where you live.”
Perez and Suebsaeng reported that the White House’s strategy is to “move fast” before courts can stop them. In the end, one source close to the president told them that the president’s ultimate power over judges comes from the fact that they do not command an army, while he does. “Are they going to come and arrest him?” the advisor asked, apparently confident that the answer is no.
The attack of Trump and his MAGA supporters on the courts and the rule of law has illustrated how quickly the United States is sliding from democracy to authoritarianism. “Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky told Amanda Taub of the New York Times. Along with his colleague Daniel Ziblatt, Levitsky wrote How Democracies Die. “We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse,” Levitsky said. “These first two months have been much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding.”
President Donald Trump’s attempt to undermine the courts, and thus the country’s legal system, appears to have kicked the alarm about the dismantling of the U.S. government into a new phase. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times ran op-eds today from law professors detailing the lawlessness of the Trump administration and warning that the courts will not be able to stop Trump and his administration from their authoritarian takeover of the government.
In the New York Times, Georgetown University professor of law Stephen Vladeck has faith that the courts will try to rein Trump in, while in the Washington Post, Harvard Law School professor Ryan Doerfler and Yale University professor of law and history Samuel Moyn are less convinced that the judges Trump himself appointed will stand against him, but all three of them warn that stopping Trump will require the people to demand “far more aggressive oversight from members of Congress,” as Vladeck puts it. Doerfler and Moyn wrote that “real resistance must take place in Congress, at government workplaces, and in the streets.”
That the courts are in the position of trying to stop a president who is ignoring the Constitution reflects that Republicans in Congress appear to have taken off the table impeachment, the political remedy the Constitution’s framers put into our system for such a crisis.
There has been remarkably little pushback from Republicans about the changes being made to the country in their names, but the news that dropped on March 18 that the administration is considering giving up a key role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has sparked public objection from Republicans who care about the nation’s global role. Since NATO organized, the role of NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, known as the SACEUR, has been filled by an American.
Now the Trump administration is considering relinquishing that position as part of a massive restructuring plan that could save up to $270 million of the Defense Department’s $850 billion annual budget, or about 0.03% of it. The U.S. is also considering stopping its expansion and modernization of U.S. Forces Japan, which would save about $1.18 billion, according to Courtney Kube and Gordon Lubold of NBC News, but would weaken the cooperation designed to counter China.
“For the United States to give up the role of supreme allied commander of NATO would be seen in Europe as a significant signal of walking away from the alliance,” retired Admiral James Stavridis, who served as SACEUR and head of European Command from 2009 to 2013, wrote to Kube and Lubold. “It would be a political mistake of epic proportion, and once we give it up, they are not going to give it back. We would lose an enormous amount of influence within NATO, and this would be seen, correctly, as probably the first step toward leaving the Alliance altogether.”
House Armed Services Committee chair Mike Rogers (R-AL) and Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) issued a joint statement saying they are “very concerned about reports that claim [the Department of Defense] is considering unilateral changes on major strategic issues, including significant reductions to U.S. forces stationed abroad, absent coordination with the White House and Congress. We…will not accept significant changes to our warfighting structure that are made without a rigorous interagency process, coordination with combatant commanders and the Joint Staff, and collaboration with Congress,” they wrote. “Such moves risk undermining American deterrence around the globe and detracting from our negotiating positions with America’s adversaries.”
Their concerns about protecting their power to have a say in U.S. foreign policy and to make sure that policy serves the American people are unlikely to be assuaged by events tonight.
Eric Schmitt, Eric Lipton, Julian E. Barnes, Ryan Mac, and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that the Pentagon has scheduled a briefing tomorrow for billionaire Elon Musk on the U.S. military’s top-secret plans for any potential war with China. As the reporters noted, this information includes “some of the nation's most closely guarded military secrets.” Musk’s largest Tesla factory is located in China—Chinese lenders contributed $2.8 billion to it—and as Joshua Keating of Vox explained two days ago, China is the only EV market where Tesla sales are continuing to increase. Keating also pointed to a Financial Times report that Chinese investors have been funneling money into Musk’s other businesses.
After the New York Times story broke, chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said: “The Defense Department is excited to welcome Elon Musk to the Pentagon on Friday. He was invited by Secretary Hegseth and is just visiting.” About an hour later, the reporters note, he posted on X: “This is 100% Fake News. Just brazenly & maliciously wrong. Elon Musk is a patriot. We are proud to have him at the Pentagon.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth chimed in: “This is NOT a meeting about ‘top secret China war plans.’ It’s an informal meeting about innovation, efficiencies & smarter production. Gonna be great!”
Then Trump added: “The Fake News is at it again, this time the Failing New York Times. They said, incorrectly, that Elon Musk is going to the Pentagon tomorrow to be briefed on any potential ‘war with China.’ How ridiculous?’ China will not be even mentioned or discussed. How disgraceful it is that the discredited media can make up such lies. Anyway, the story is completely untrue.”
Shortly after Trump posted, Alexander Ward and Nancy A. Youssef of the Wall Street Journal confirmed the story, adding that their sources told them that Musk had asked for the briefing. They also reminded readers that Musk “has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a close partner of China, the country that has supported Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Minnesota governor Tim Walz told Rachel Maddow tonight he was “speechless.” “I don’t know how to convey…how far out of the norm this is…. These are closely guarded secrets because our national and our global defense depends upon them…. I don’t understand where…are the Republicans? Where are Lindsay Grahams? Where are these people who know how this works? To not be terrified of where this is at…. Sharing our most guarded secrets on global conflict with a truly unstable private citizen who has no authority…. This is chilling…. Republican senators need to put a stop to this and pull this back.”
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Notes:
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/20/nx-s1-5335600/library-museum-funding-doge-sonderling
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/us/politics/trump-alien-enemies-immigration-agents.html
https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/musk-doge-social-security-access-blocked/
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.577321/gov.uscourts.mdd.577321.49.0.pdf
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5203530-white-house-trump-deportation-judge-attack/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/doge-hits-the-institute-of-museum-and-library-services
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.278436/gov.uscourts.dcd.278436.47.0_1.pdf
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/maga-is-raging-hard-against-the-judges-who-get-in-its-way
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/world/europe/trump-courts-defiance-autocrats-playbook.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/opinion/trump-courts-disrupt-break.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/20/supremecourt-trump-democracy-crisis/
https://armedservices.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=5018
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/us/politics/trump-alien-enemies-immigration-agents.html
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fourth_amendment
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/20/defense-senate-house-republicans-nato
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/404621/elon-musk-china-tesla-trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/us/politics/musk-pentagon-briefing-china-war-plan.html
MSNBC:
Bluesky:
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March 20, 2025
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