What's Past is Prologue..."
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/02/imperial-presidency-in-waiting-am
https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2024/07/welcome-to-fascist-america-part-2.html
(Originally posted on July 3, 2024):
Politics & Policy
Imperial presidency in waiting
by Mike Allen
July 3, 2024
AXIOS
Former President Trump, if re-elected, plans to immediately test the boundaries of presidential and governing power, knowing the restraints of Congress and the courts are dramatically looser than during his first term, his advisers tell Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen for a Behind the Curtain column.
Why it matters: It's not just the Supreme Court ruling on Monday that presidents enjoy substantial legal immunity for actions in office. Trump would come to office with a cabinet and staff pre-vetted for loyalty, and a fully compliant Republican coalition in Congress — devoid of critics in positions of real power.That's a big reason many Democrats worry President Biden is making one of the biggest gambles in U.S. history by staying in the race amid acute concerns about his age.
The big picture: Trump promises an unabashedly imperial presidency — one that would turn the Justice Department against critics, deport millions of people in the U.S. illegally, slap 10% tariffs on thousands of products, and fire perhaps tens of thousands of government staff deemed insufficiently loyal.He'd stretch the powers of the presidency in ways not seen in our lifetime. He says this consistently and clearly — so it's not conjecture. You might like this or loathe this. But it's coming, fast and furious, if he's elected.
Thanks to yesterday's Supreme Court ruling, Trump could pursue his plans without fear of punishment or restraint.
In Washington, Trump would move to fire potentially tens of thousands of civil servants using a controversial interpretation of law and procedure. He'd replace many of them with pre-vetted loyalists.
He'd centralize power over the Justice Department, historically an independent check on presidential power. He plans to nominate a trusted loyalist for attorney general, and has threatened to target and even imprison critics. He could demand the federal cases against him cease immediately.
Many of the Jan. 6 convicts could be pardoned — a promise Trump has made at campaign rallies, where he hails them as patriots, not criminals. Investigations of the Bidens would begin.
Trump says he'd slap 10% tariffs on most imported goods, igniting a possible trade war and risking short-term inflation. He argues this would give him leverage to create better trade terms to benefit consumers.
Conversation would intensify about when Justices Clarence Thomas, 76, and Sam Alito, 74, would retire. Lists of potential successors are already drawn up. President Biden said last month that "the next president is likely to have two new Supreme Court nominees." If Trump were to win and the two oldest justices retired, five of the nine justices would have been handpicked by Trump.
https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2024/07/welcome-to-fascist-america.html
FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
(Originally posted on July 2, 2024):
Monday, July 1, 2024
WELCOME TO FASCIST AMERICA
All,
This absolutely criminal and fiercely antidemocratic decision today on the ‘constitutional’ and now “legal” parameters of presidential power in granting absolute immunity to any/all of a president’s “official acts” while in office by what is clearly the most corrupt and ideologically reactionary, as well as morally and ethically bankrupt Supreme Court in modern American history (i.e. since 1900) is the first major structural, systemic, and institutional indication that this country has already opened the floodgates to asserting fascism as not merely a massive aspirational desire in the United States (after all 74 million citizens—80% of them white Americans!—gave their national fascist leader their vote in 2020 which was the second highest total of votes that any presidential candidate from either party has ever received in American history) but a now flatout super judicial endorsement and assertion of executive branch governmental power whether it’s “lawful" or not.
What this all means of course is that we no longer have even a modicum of a democratic political, judicial, or legislative system and have clearly devolved—whether we like it or not!—into a society and a government that no longer is “immune” to “official” fascist rule that at least half of the country and civil society in general now fervently supports, advocates, and defends no matter what and actively votes in favor of throughout the nation. To say we are “in very deep trouble” is a massive understatement and is frankly an infantile and ultimately braindead assessment of what is actually happening (and has been for at least a half century now (remember 1968?). Stay tuned because not only is this all going to become much worse very soon and will determine what the November 5, 2024 election really means no matter who is elected or what so-called “political party” crawls into power…It’s now 1933 (see: Reich, Third) all over again only it's our turn this time around and we are clearly the Weimar Republic of the 21st century. Guess what’s next…Don’t believe me?—WATCH AND SEE...
Kofi
https://truthout.org/articles/behind-trump-tariffs-is-capitals-warfare-against-the-working-class/
Trump’s tariffs will escalate exploitation and desperation of US workers. That’s the point.
by William I. Robinson
February 17, 2025
Truthout
Demonstrators gather outside of the Office of Personnel Management to protest federal layoffs and demand the termination of Elon Musk from the "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) in Washington, D.C., on February 7, 2025. Bryan Dozier / Middle East Images / Middle East Images via AFP What is behind the tariff war that Donald Trump has launched against Mexico, Canada and China, with a promise to extend the war to the world as a whole? Moving beyond the smoke and mirrors, we must step back and focus on three things. First, the tariff war is a response to the rapidly deepening crisis of global capitalism. Second, it is one component of a radical escalation of class warfare from above against the U.S. and the global working class. And third, the tariff policy is riddled with so many contradictions that it will end up aggravating the crisis and contributing to the unraveling of the Trump coalition.
The crisis of global capitalism is both economic and political. Economically, the system faces a structural crisis of overaccumulation and chronic stagnation that generates turbulence in global financial markets as it heightens international and geopolitical conflict. Over the past half-century, every country has become integrated into a global system of production, finance and services. Nationalist and populist movements of both the left and the right may wish to extricate their countries from this global economy, but withdrawal is impossible — or at least not possible without massive disruption that would generate chaos and collapse. The 2020 COVID-19 shutdown that interrupted global supply chains, for instance, triggered an economic meltdown and social catastrophe unmatched since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Trump’s tariff war will aggravate the economic turbulence, but the system also faces a spiraling political crisis of state legitimacy, capitalist hegemony and mass social discontent. These political dimensions of the crisis reflect a fundamental contradiction in the organization of global capitalism: the disjuncture between a globally integrated economy and a nation-state-based system of political authority. Despite our economic interdependence, political authority is divided up among over 200 individual nation-states. These capitalist states have a contradictory mandate. On the one hand, each individual state needs to achieve political legitimacy among its respective population and stabilize its own national social order. On the other hand, it must promote transnational capital accumulation in its territory in competition with other states and secure the inflow of resources and raw materials that this capital needs.
The transnational capitalist class (TCC) is not tethered to particular nation-states. Its members will welcome any incentive offered by a state if it enhances profit-making opportunities and will invest wherever they find the best conditions to accumulate. As the crisis has deepened, each state seeks to reduce risks to its internal economy in the face of global financial turmoil and political instability by doubling down on policies that incentivize or oblige transnational corporations to invest in its domestic economy.
These two functions of the capitalist state — the accumulation function and the legitimation function — are incompatible with one another and are played out in protectionist wars and other forms of interstate competition. Attracting transnational investment requires providing capital with incentives such as low wages and labor discipline, a lax regulatory environment, tax concessions, investment subsidies, privatization, deregulation, and so on — precisely the neoliberal policies that have been pursued worldwide since the onset of globalization. The result is rising inequality, impoverishment and insecurity for working and popular classes — precisely the conditions that throw states into crises of legitimacy, destabilize national political systems, jeopardize elite control and give impetus to the rise of a neofascist right.
Enter Trump
This is the larger context for the rise of Trumpism, which must be seen as a far right, neofascist response to the social and economic crisis of the U.S. working class and to the crisis of state legitimacy that it has produced. The working class has experienced an ongoing destabilization of its living conditions over this past half-century, with a particularly sharp deterioration since the financial collapse of 2008 and in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. It faces increasing precarity, job instability, widespread and rising un- and underemployment, poverty wages, marginalization and social decomposition, food insecurity, and crises of health care, substandard housing and homelessness.
Trump managed to get elected for a second term through a populist, nationalist, racist and neofascist discourse that spoke to this rising socioeconomic insecurity and mass social anxiety. He manipulated mass discontent with the Democratic Party and with the status quo, above all with a false promise to solve the socioeconomic problems of the masses. Hypernationalism has always been a key ideological weapon of the ruling classes to channel mass disaffection away from its source in the system, especially during times of crisis and rising class struggle, and toward scapegoated groups such as immigrants and “foreign enemies.”
Far from stabilizing global capitalism, the Trump project will aggravate the contradictions that are tearing it apart.
Trump has now escalated his “America first” rhetoric by slapping 25 percent tariffs — temporarily suspended — on Mexico and Canada, 10 percent tariffs on China, and promising to impose tariffs on the European Union (EU) and on all U.S. imports. In fact, well before Trump took office, successive U.S. administrations in the 21st century have pursued subsidies, tax credits and tariffs to entice transnational investors, triggering ongoing subsidy and protectionist conflicts among the United States, the EU and China. State protectionist measures offer the TCC incentives to invest inside rather than outside the borders of a particular country. Beyond the United States, state subsidies, tariffs, and other nationalist economic policies have been on the rise around the world with the aim of attracting transnational capital in search of investment opportunities in the face of chronic stagnation. Governments worldwide adopted over 1,500 policies in the early 2020s to promote specific industries in their territories compared to almost none in the 2010s.
Unlike the protectionism that countries imposed in the early part of the 20th century, which was intended to keep out foreign capitalists and cultivate domestic industry, this new protectionism has not been directed at keeping out “foreign capital” but at attracting transnational corporate and financial investors. “America is open for business,” Trump declared to these investors during his first term, at the 2018 meeting of the global elite for the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, shortly before imposing tariffs on China, the EU, and other countries. “Now is the perfect time to bring your business, your jobs and your investments to the United States.”
Fast forward to 2025. Just two days after his inauguration, Trump told this year’s WEF gathering: “If you don’t make your product in America, which is your prerogative, then very simply you will have to pay a tariff.”
Trumpism 2.0, hence, represents not a break from but a radical escalation of recent trends. If one part of the equation involves tariffs and other protectionist measures to attract TCC investment, the other part is an all-out escalation of class warfare against the U.S. and global working class as the dictatorship of the TCC consolidates and ruling groups around the world turn to more openly authoritarian and fascist political dispensations.
The Trump program is following the script laid out in the notorious Project 2025 drafted by the Heritage Foundation, which was founded in 1973, at the start of capitalist globalization and the neoliberal counterrevolution. That script calls for smashing what remains of the regulatory state; privatizing the final remnants of the public sphere; massively cutting social spending, including the threat to cut and to privatize Social Security; reducing taxes on capital and the rich; expanding the state apparatus of repression and surveillance; and forcing all this through by overriding the few remaining mechanisms of democratic accountability.
Trumpism’s goal is to radically degrade U.S.-based labor, already facing a severe crisis. Transnational corporate investors are to be punished with tariffs if they are located outside of the United States, but enticed to relocate inside U.S. borders by the incentive of a mass of labor thrown onto the defensive and available for exploitation. Trumpism proposes to offer the TCC a desperate and readily exploitable working class, making this class’s exploitability competitive with the exploitability of the working classes in other countries. As many have noted, tariffs will hurt not capital but workers. Corporations will pass off the cost of tariffs through higher prices. This rise in prices will contract working-class consumption. It is a calculated strategy to weaken labor by dividing and immiserating workers at a time of mass discontent and rising class struggle.
Beyond the deceptive rhetoric, the war on immigrants and the threat of mass deportation is an attack on the entire multiethnic, multinational working class, intended to generate fear and chaos in labor markets and social institutions at a time when strike activity, protests and organizing drives have spread among workers in both old and new sectors of the economy. Historically, hypernationalism such as that now wielded by Trumpism serves to undermine working-class unity and to pit workers of different countries against each other. Racism must also be inflamed, whether by scapegoating immigrants or doing away with diversity, equity and inclusion, in order to divide and disorganize the working class.
The Dictatorship of Transnational Capital
Trumpism seeks to profoundly restructure state power into a more direct instrument of capitalist domination under fascist leadership, involving a vast expansion and concentration of presidential power. The goal is to expunge the remaining elements of the “great class compromise” that emerged during the Great Depression of the 1930s and resulted in the New Deal, or the social democratic welfare state. Under Trump, U.S. members of the TCC have seized even more direct control of the state. Trump has tapped an unprecedented 13 billionaires for his administration and appointed the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, as unelected co-president. Corporations and billionaires — especially from the tech, financial and energy sectors — funneled unprecedented millions into the Trump Inaugural Committee in order to ensure that their interests would be represented.
The stock market soared after Trump was elected, and then spiked even further in the days leading up to his inauguration, reflecting the giddy confidence that transnational capital has placed in his government’s ability to represent its interests and to further discipline and control the working class. Just days before Trump took office, banks reported near-record profits. JPMorgan Chase posted a stunning record annual profit of $54 billion for 2024. Fossil fuel billionaires increased their wealth by $3 billion following Trump’s inauguration. The stock value of GEO Group, one of two corporations that run private, for-profit immigrant prisons, soared by 32 percent immediately after Trump was elected in November, while that of the other, CoreCivic, rose by over 30 percent.
Nonetheless, Trumpism 2.0 is a fundamentally contradictory program. Trump is a Frankenstein, a monster conjured up by transnational capital’s reliance on the state to keep mass discontent under control and to resolve the problem of chronic stagnation. The TCC wants to have its cake and eat it too. It may embrace Trumpism for its plans to compress wages and control workers, to deregulate and cut taxes on capital and the rich. But it is doubtful that Trump’s trade wars will actually succeed in convincing transnational capitalists to relocate production to U.S. territory. The TCC has consistently opposed protectionism and state interference in accumulation strategies. Capital’s rationale for going global was to escape any national constraints on its worldwide freedoms and it has no intention of returning to the confines of the nation-state.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Retail Federation, and other corporate bodies have opposed U.S. tariffs and other measures against China. Almost immediately after Trump announced his tariffs on Mexico and Canada, major business groups came out in opposition. The case of Elon Musk’s Tesla corporation is instructive. Musk may serve as a shadow co-president, but he has been quietly fighting against any state interference in his global business empire. In January, for instance, Tesla sued the European Union over tariffs it had placed on Chinese-made electric vehicles. Tesla was joined in the suit by the Germany-based BMW and several China-based firms. Tesla, BMW and the Chinese firms may have a home base in a particular country, but they operate through vast intertwined global production and distribution chains that are impeded by tariffs or any other obstacles imposed by nation-states.
Trump’s hardcore base lies in the far right, organized into racist and neofascist organizations and militias, such as those that stormed the capital on January 6, 2021. But he has also managed to construct a mass base in a significant sector of the working class, especially but not exclusively white workers. These workers are expecting that Trump will improve their economic situation, but this will not happen. His government cannot represent the interests of workers and of capital, and he has no intention whatsoever of abandoning capital. To the contrary, if Trump’s agenda is successful, the lot of workers will deteriorate further. Moreover, even if some corporations were to reshore manufacturing to the United States, this would not result in any significant increase in manufacturing jobs or higher wages, as artificial intelligence and other digital technologies are already leading to the rapid automation of manufacturing sequences and to the deskilling of many tech and professional jobs.
The Trump coalition will unravel as disillusion sets in, and eventually his mass base will break up. There will be escalating social and political conflict. Trump will take advantage of the chaos generated by his program to unleash the full fury of the police state against popular resistance. These are the conditions for a popular left alternative to develop, but they are also conditions under which the fascist tendency could consolidate into more open 21st-century fascism.
Far from stabilizing global capitalism, the Trump project will aggravate the contradictions that are tearing it apart. Global elites are divided and increasingly fragmented as the post-WWII international order cracks up and geopolitical confrontation escalates. The WEF released its annual Global Risks Report on the eve of Trump’s inauguration. “As we enter 2025, the global outlook is increasingly fractured across geopolitical, environmental, societal, economic and technological domains,” it warned. The world faces “a bleak outlook across all three time horizons — current, short-term and long-term.”
Trump’s tariff war, his threat to annex Canada and Greenland to seize their resources, his attacks on U.S. allies and his withdrawal from multilateral organizations will rapidly undermine longstanding international alliances and fragment the global economy, driving the world closer to World War III. The breakdown of global order and the threat of world war spring from the underlying contradictions of a global capitalism in intractable crisis, just as fascism and the world wars of the 20th century were outcomes of world capitalist crises. We cannot turn to the ruling classes to avoid catastrophe; our salvation lies in the mass resistance of the working and popular classes.
The Targeted Chaos of Trump’s Attacks Against International Human Rights Law and Justice
Donald Trump has positioned his administration to launch one of the most abusive and aggressive assaults on human rights in U.S. presidential history.
by Jamil Dakwar
Director, Human Rights Program
February 13, 2025
ACLU
In just one week, President Donald Trump has launched the most systemic and aggressive assault on human rights in U.S. presidential history.
Already, his administration has disengaged with the United Nations Human Rights Council — even though the U.S. is not a current member — defunded a UN refugee agency the U.S. long supported, ordered sanctions against the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, ordered to review ratified U.S. treaties that are the law of the land, and threatened to commit ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
While the first Trump administration made similar attempts to hinder human rights, including when it withdrew from the Human Rights Council in 2018 and sanctioned ICC officials in 2020, the second Trump administration has been far more drastic, aggressive, and concentrated in its actions. There is no doubt that the larger goal is to dismantle – or at least severely disrupt – international human rights and global justice frameworks that have, for decades, protected our collective, universal rights and provided avenues for accountability.
In 2018, partly in response to a damning UN expert visit and report on extreme poverty in the U.S., the Trump administration decided to pull out of the Human Rights Council, calling it “cesspool of political bias,” and stopped cooperating with other UN human rights experts. However, in 2020, the Trump administration participated in the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), which scrutinized the United States’ human rights record and held it accountable on a global level. The next UPR session is scheduled in November of this year. It remains unclear, and unlikely, that the administration will participate.
Sadat v. Trump - Challenge to Trump's International Criminal Court’s Sanctions Regime
In 2020, Trump’s sanctions against ICC officials were widely condemned and challenged in federal courts, including by the ACLU. A federal court blocked the government from enforcing the order against academics and scholars, who challenged its unconstitutionality on First Amendment grounds. President Joe Biden eventually rescinded Trump's order in 2021. This year, however, shortly after taking office, Trump issued an executive order again targeting the ICC with new sanctions. The new executive order is an affront to international global justice and raises serious First Amendment concerns because it creates a serious chilling effect on people in the United States for among other things helping the court identify and investigate atrocities that fall within its jurisdiction.
Seventy-nine countries issued a statement defending the Court and warning that “such measures increase the risk of impunity for the most serious crimes and threaten to erode the international rule of law, which is crucial for promoting global order and security.” Earlier this week, 17 independent UN human rights experts released a statement expressing grave concern over Trump’s new executive order calling it “an attack on global rule of law and strikes at the very heart of the international criminal justice system.”
The Trump administration’s efforts are part of a broader anti-rights agenda that organizations like the Heritage Foundation – the mastermind behind Project 2025 – promote as a way to weaken international human rights and entrench the use of national security and sovereignty as pretexts to evade accountability for gross violations of these rights. For example, the Trump administration previously established the Commission on Unalienable Rights, which attempted to redefine and weaken international human rights through a new hierarchy of rights that would elevate religion and property over basic human rights. More recently, the Heritage Foundation published an article echoing this stance, citing former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s 60-page draft report in its call to roll back decades of progress in international human rights law.
The new Trump administration’s actions, however, are notably more audacious and dangerous because they aim to unilaterally undermine ratified human rights treaties that, according to our Constitution, are the law of the land. For instance, Trump’s executive order issued earlier this month calls for a “review of all international intergovernmental organizations of which the United States is a member and provides any type of funding or other support, and all conventions and treaties to which the United States is a party.” This order seeks to determine which organizations, conventions, and treaties are contrary to U.S. interests and whether such organizations, conventions, or treaties can be reformed. The review also requires recommendations regarding whether the U.S. should withdraw from any such organizations, conventions, or treaties. Trump’s review of these international organizations and agreements may lead to defunding critical human rights mechanisms — including the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the UN special procedures, and treaty bodies that effectively monitor and investigate human rights violations worldwide – that have been cornerstones of the modern human rights system.
In just one week, President Donald Trump has launched the most systemic and aggressive assault on human rights in U.S. presidential history.
Already, his administration has disengaged with the United Nations Human Rights Council — even though the U.S. is not a current member — defunded a UN refugee agency the U.S. long supported, ordered sanctions against the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, ordered to review ratified U.S. treaties that are the law of the land, and threatened to commit ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
While the first Trump administration made similar attempts to hinder human rights, including when it withdrew from the Human Rights Council in 2018 and sanctioned ICC officials in 2020, the second Trump administration has been far more drastic, aggressive, and concentrated in its actions. There is no doubt that the larger goal is to dismantle – or at least severely disrupt – international human rights and global justice frameworks that have, for decades, protected our collective, universal rights and provided avenues for accountability.
In 2018, partly in response to a damning UN expert visit and report on extreme poverty in the U.S., the Trump administration decided to pull out of the Human Rights Council, calling it “cesspool of political bias,” and stopped cooperating with other UN human rights experts. However, in 2020, the Trump administration participated in the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), which scrutinized the United States’ human rights record and held it accountable on a global level. The next UPR session is scheduled in November of this year. It remains unclear, and unlikely, that the administration will participate.
In 2020, Trump’s sanctions against ICC officials were widely condemned and challenged in federal courts, including by the ACLU. A federal court blocked the government from enforcing the order against academics and scholars, who challenged its unconstitutionality on First Amendment grounds. President Joe Biden eventually rescinded Trump's order in 2021. This year, however, shortly after taking office, Trump issued an executive order again targeting the ICC with new sanctions. The new executive order is an affront to international global justice and raises serious First Amendment concerns because it creates a serious chilling effect on people in the United States for among other things helping the court identify and investigate atrocities that fall within its jurisdiction.
Seventy-nine countries issued a statement defending the Court and warning that “such measures increase the risk of impunity for the most serious crimes and threaten to erode the international rule of law, which is crucial for promoting global order and security.” Earlier this week, 17 independent UN human rights experts released a statement expressing grave concern over Trump’s new executive order calling it “an attack on global rule of law and strikes at the very heart of the international criminal justice system.”
The Trump administration’s efforts are part of a broader anti-rights agenda that organizations like the Heritage Foundation – the mastermind behind Project 2025 – promote as a way to weaken international human rights and entrench the use of national security and sovereignty as pretexts to evade accountability for gross violations of these rights. For example, the Trump administration previously established the Commission on Unalienable Rights, which attempted to redefine and weaken international human rights through a new hierarchy of rights that would elevate religion and property over basic human rights. More recently, the Heritage Foundation published an article echoing this stance, citing former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s 60-page draft report in its call to roll back decades of progress in international human rights law.
The new Trump administration’s actions, however, are notably more audacious and dangerous because they aim to unilaterally undermine ratified human rights treaties that, according to our Constitution, are the law of the land. For instance, Trump’s executive order issued earlier this month calls for a “review of all international intergovernmental organizations of which the United States is a member and provides any type of funding or other support, and all conventions and treaties to which the United States is a party.” This order seeks to determine which organizations, conventions, and treaties are contrary to U.S. interests and whether such organizations, conventions, or treaties can be reformed. The review also requires recommendations regarding whether the U.S. should withdraw from any such organizations, conventions, or treaties. Trump’s review of these international organizations and agreements may lead to defunding critical human rights mechanisms — including the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the UN special procedures, and treaty bodies that effectively monitor and investigate human rights violations worldwide – that have been cornerstones of the modern human rights system. 
Issue
Treaty Ratification
The ACLU works in courts, legislatures, and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and the... Treaty Ratification
Importantly, the United States has only ratified three treaties out of nine core international human rights conventions that have been negotiated and adopted since World War II. The treaties that were ratified in the early 1990s — the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR); the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT); and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) – were subject to reservations from the Senate. These reservations, and an ever increasing anti-human rights agenda, meant that the treaties have never been incorporated through legislation, rendering them significantly less impactful and enforceable domestically.
Now, the second Trump administration is ordering a review that would further weaken these treaties and decimate our nation’s human rights obligations. Civil society organizations and experts have also cautioned that these increasing attacks against both domestic and international human rights will embolden global authoritarianism and make the world less safe, especially for historically -marginalized communities.
This week, 16 former and current American UN experts released a statement criticizing the Trump administration’s executive orders, stating, “[this] assault on the rule of law fails to advance any conceivable American national interest, which lies in a worldwide system founded on principles of human rights, the non-use of force, collaboration to solve global problems, and the sovereign equality of states. The administration’s actions betray each of these well-established international principles.”
Trump’s attacks against international human rights bodies mirror the regressive, despotic measures taken against domestic entities and public servants, especially those who have been involved in acting as government watchdogs or pursuing accountability for civil and human rights abuses. These anti-human rights orders aim to significantly weaken accountability for violating international law, neutralize opposition to his dangerous agenda, and potentially usurp congressional powers.
Trump’s efforts to erode our universal human rights must be stopped. Weakening domestic and international human rights and justice will only cause severe harms, instability, and more violence at home and globally.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
William I. Robinson
William I. Robinson is a distinguished professor of sociology, global studies and Latin American studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His most recent book is Can Global Capitalism Endure? (Clarity Press). He is also the author of Global Civil War: Capitalism Post-Pandemic (PM Press).
Acting Social Security Commissioner Resigns Amid Pressure From “DOGE”
“There is no way to overstate how serious a breach this is,” one critic of “DOGE’s” work said.
The acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration has resigned from her post, after serving the agency for over three decades, in opposition to Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (“DOGE”) attempting to gain access to sensitive data.
The exact nature of what is included within “DOGE’s” search is as yet unknown, but experts have stated that it could be very intrusive of the personal information of millions of Americans.
Michelle King, who was selected by the Trump administration to serve as acting commissioner, refused a request from “DOGE” to access the data, and resigned from her position in protest of their actions. She was replaced by Leland Dudek, a manager at the agency in charge of its anti-fraud office.
Dudek was chosen ahead of dozens of individuals higher up in the chain of command within the agency, perhaps an indication that his selection was based more on loyalty to President Donald Trump and/or Elon Musk than it was on merit, as resignations in other departments within the Trump administration have embarrassingly resulted in next-in-line figures also refusing to go along with the White House’s demands, most notably within the Justice Department last week.
“DOGE” has torn through a number of government agencies and departments, and has breached numerous secure systems, including by gaining access to “top-secret” systems in the Treasury Department.
Critics of “DOGE’s” attempts to enter similar systems within the Social Security office are suggesting that the questionably legal “department” has likely already accessed them.
“There is no way to overstate how serious a breach this is,” said Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, an organization that advocates on behalf of preserving the agency and its work.
Altman added that, given the numerous examples of the Trump administration taking a retributional approach to some of the president’s political opponents, access to Social Security files is incredibly alarming.
“If there is an intent to punish perceived enemies, someone could erase your earnings record, making it impossible to collect the Social Security and Medicare benefits you have earned,” Altman said.
Martin O’Malley, a former Social Security Administration commissioner (as well as former governor of Maryland), also criticized “DOGE’s” actions within the agency, warning that Musk’s team could interrupt the payment service that millions of Americans rely on.
“At this rate, [‘DOGE’] will break it. And they will break it fast, and there will be an interruption of benefits,” O’Malley said to The Washington Post.
“DOGE’s” breach of the Social Security Administration isn’t exactly a surprise — during the 2024 presidential campaign, now-Vice President J.D. Vance indicated that Elon Musk could lead a task force to purportedly audit the agency.
As head of “DOGE,” Musk has already made unfounded claims about Social Security, making attacks against how it’s being managed, which suggests cuts to the program could be coming. For example, during a press conference in the Oval Office last week, Musk said a “cursory examination of Social Security” discovered that there were people receiving benefits from the program that are 150 years old.
“Now, do you know anyone that’s 150? I don’t,” Musk said. “They should be in the Guinness Book of World Records. … So that’s a case where I think they’re probably dead.”
But Musk’s claims disregard how the agency is run, and may be more indicative of his and the “DOGE” staff’s ignorance about coding systems used by the Social Security Administration, which utilizes a reference point dating back to 1875 in cases where a specific date may be unknown, a fact-check from Wired noted. Indeed, the agency automatically disenrolls recipients who are over the age of 115, a failsafe to prevent fraud from happening.
Speaking to that publication, former NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake blasted Musk and “DOGE” for failing to take the time to understand systems they’re unfamiliar with.
“DOGE going into all these agencies with largely unfettered access with a wrecking ball and no understanding of the business logic and structure behind the code, database and configured business logic, related payment systems, and integrated decision trees, poses real risks to the privacy and persona-level data of millions of people across all of those records,” Drake said.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/02/18/us/trump-news#elon-musk-doge-lawsuit-agencies
Live
Updated
February 18, 2025
Trump Administration Live Updates:
Judge Declines to Block Musk Team’s Foray Into Federal Agencies
Elon Musk with President Trump in the Oval Office last week. Credit: Eric Lee/The New York Times
Where Things Stand
Musk order denied: A federal judge in Washington declined to grant a request by 14 state attorneys general to temporarily bar Elon Musk and his associates from accessing data at seven federal agencies and moving forward with their efforts to slash the federal work force. The judge said the states had not shown specific examples of how the work of Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency could cause the states irreparable harm. Read more ›
Prosecutor resigns: A top federal prosecutor in Washington resigned rather than use the power of the Justice Department to freeze the bank accounts of a government contractor, according to her resignation letter. People familiar with the matter said the resignation of Denise Cheung, who oversaw the office’s criminal division, appeared to be connected to a push by the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency to claw back money from clean energy and other projects. Read more ›
Federal turmoil: The Trump administration fired 168 probationary workers at the National Science Foundation, a spokesman. That cuts more than 10 percent of the work force at the agency, which along with the National Institutes of Health is a cornerstone of public research funding in the United States. Separately, Jim Jones, the director of the Food and Drug Administration’s food division, resigned on Monday, citing what he called “indiscriminate” layoffs that would make it “fruitless for him to continue.”
Pinned
Updated
February 18, 2025
by Zach Montague
Reporting from Washington
A coalition of states had sought to place limits on Elon Musk’s operatives.
A federal judge in Washington gave President Trump a victory for now when she declined on Tuesday to bar Elon Musk and his associates from having access to data at seven federal agencies or involvement in mass firings.
In an order on Tuesday, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan in Federal District Court in Washington, wrote that a coalition of 14 state attorneys general had failed in seeking an emergency halt to show specific examples of how Mr. Musk’s team’s sweeping data collection efforts could cause those states imminent or irreparable harm.
“The court is aware that DOGE’s unpredictable actions have resulted in considerable uncertainty and confusion for plaintiffs and many of their agencies and residents,” Judge Chutkan wrote, referring to the Department of Government Efficiency tasked with carrying out Mr. Musk’s vision. “But the ‘possibility’ that defendants may take actions that irreparably harm plaintiffs ‘is not enough.’”
The ruling by Judge Chutkan reflected the atmosphere of confusion surrounding the purpose and goals of Mr. Musk’s team, which judges in a number of court cases have repeatedly and unsuccessfully asked government lawyers to clarify.
It also reflected what Judge Chutkan described as the considerable uncertainty about what future cuts and layoffs could result from Mr. Musk’s effort to shrink the federal work force, which has resulted in the termination of hundreds of federal contracts and thousands of workers in recent weeks.
“The court can’t act based on media reports,” she said. “We can’t do that.”
The coalition of 14 states had argued in the case that Mr. Musk is essentially informing his process on the fly, steering decisions about how to reshape federal agencies based on the data his team was actively extracting.
“The way in which DOGE and Mr. Musk have identified how to make cuts is through use and analysis of the agency data,” Anjana Samant, a deputy counsel at the New Mexico Department of Justice, said on Monday. “I don’t see how defendants can dispute that.”
The states had sought a temporary restraining order to prevent Elon Musk or anyone at the “Department of Government Efficiency” from combing through data at seven agencies: the Office of Personnel Management and the departments of Education, Labor, Health and Human Services, Energy, Transportation, and Commerce. It also sought to prevent Mr. Musk’s operatives from “terminating, furloughing, or otherwise placing on involuntary leave” any employees at that work at those agencies.
Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which is not a department but a small team housed within the executive office of the president, regularly spotlights obscure grants and contracts on its website as examples of runaway spending that President Trump gave a greenlight to slash. But in the process, it has also pushed billions of dollars in cuts without explanation, and spurred personnel changes, including the firing or suspension of thousands of workers.
Feb. 18, 2025, 5:06 p.m. ET33 minutes ago
Kate Selig
The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston is temporarily closed, according to a notice posted to its website. The notice did not provide a reason for the closure, but a social media post from Jack Schlossberg, J.F.K.’s grandson, said Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency had fired members of its staff. The library is administered by the National Archives and Records Administration, a federal agency that manages presidential libraries across the country.
Credit: Simon Simard for The New York Times
Feb. 18, 2025, 5:04 p.m. ET35 minutes ago
Luke Broadwater
It’s worth noting that Trump’s statement regarding millions of deceased Americans remaining in a Social Security database has been the focus of several audits, including this one by the agency’s inspector general in 2023.
While millions of likely deceased Americans remain in the database, only a smaller subset of those — 44,000 at last count — actually received payments, the audit found. It’s not that there isn’t a real issue here; it’s just that it’s neither new nor at the scale the president indicated.
Feb. 18, 2025, 5:02 p.m. ET37 minutes ago
Jonathan Swan
Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.
Trump mostly avoided my question about Musk’s conflicts of interest but said he would not be involved in anything to do with space. Already, DOGE is directly involved in agencies like the Pentagon and F.A.A., that either have billions of dollars in contracts with Musk’s companies or that directly regulate them.
Feb. 18, 2025, 5:02 p.m. ET38 minutes ago
Jonathan Swan
Reporting from Palm Beach, Fla.
Just leaving Mar-a-Lago now after that news conference. We already knew that Trump felt more warmly toward Putin than Zelensky, but it was revealing to see him effectively blame Zelensky for the invasion of his country. The contempt was stark, trashing his approval rating and questioning his leadership.
Feb. 18, 2025, 5:02 p.m. ET38 minutes ago
Jeanna Smialek
Brussels bureau chief
Trump said early in this news conference that the E.U. “did, already, as I understand it, reduce their car tariff.” The E.U. has been looking into cutting its car tariff, which stands at 10 percent, but put a fact sheet out today making it clear that “no specific offer on reducing tariffs has been made by either side.”
Feb. 18, 2025, 4:55 p.m. ET45 minutes ago
Chris Cameron
Reporting from Washington
The National Science Foundation fires over 10 percent of its workers on Trump’s orders.
Protests broke out on Monday in Washington against government layoffs. Trump administration officials advised agencies last week to terminate most of an estimated 200,000 government workers on probation. Credit: Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times
The Trump administration on Tuesday cut more than 10 percent of the work force at the National Science Foundation, an independent agency that supports cutting-edge scientific research, adding to the widespread purge of federal workerswith probationary status that began last week.
Michael England, a spokesman for the foundation, said in a statement that the agency fired 168 probationary employees, and that it “had approximately 1,450 career employees prior to the cuts.”
“We thank these employees for their service to N.S.F. and their contributions to advance the agency mission,” he said.
The Trump administration ordered agencies last week to terminate most of an estimated 200,000 government workers on probation, and mass firings began to cascade through the government, with some departments laying off more than a thousand employees at a time. Other agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, are still preparing to lay off thousands more employees this week.
Over the weekend, cuts targeting scientists and public health officials rattled through the civil service. An estimated 1,200 employees at the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s premier biomedical research agency, have already been dismissed. Employees at the N.S.F. were told earlier this month to expect a total reduction in its work force of 25 to 50 percent, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the plans publicly.
Workers on probation do not receive the same protections that many other federal employees have. Probationary periods tend to last a year, but they can be longer for certain positions.
The N.S.F. and the N.I.H. are the two cornerstones of public research funding in the United States. The N.S.F. focuses on nonmedical scientific research, supporting advanced research on quantum computing, artificial intelligence, observation of outer space, and the creation of new advanced materials used in electronics.
The list of scientific breakthroughs accomplished with N.S.F. funding is expansive, but the foundation has supported the development of society-changing inventions like the internet, smartphones, M.R.I. scanning, LASIK eye surgery, 3-D printing, kidney transplants, lithium-ion batteries, radar, LED lights and even the language learning app Duolingo.
Coral Davenport contributed reporting.
Feb. 18, 2025
Peter Baker
Trump, talking to reporters, continues to provide false accounts of how much aid has been provided to Ukraine, asserting that the U.S. has sent three times as much as Europe. In fact, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, which tracks this, Europe has allocated $138 billion compared to $119 billion from the United States.
Feb. 18, 2025
Peter Baker
He also gives false information about President Volodymyr Zelensky’s support in Ukraine. Zelensky’s approval ratinghas fallen to around 50 percent, not 4 percent, as Trump claimed.
Credit: Necati Savas/EPA, via Shutterstock
Feb. 18, 2025
Maggie Haberman
Our colleague Jonathan Swan asks Trump about how Musk’s DOGE having a SpaceX team at the F.A.A. is not a form of conflict of interest that Trump says he’s barring — the agency has investigated and fined Musk’s company. Trump says that anything having to do with space “we won’t let Elon partake in that,” without acknowledging the workers now advising the F.A.A..
Feb. 18, 2025, 4:46 p.m. ET1 hour ago
Maggie Haberman
Trump says he is “not at all” concerned about some of the specifics involving the terminations of probationary workers who were let go by the tens of thousands in the last few days.
Feb. 18, 2025, 4:44 p.m. ET1 hour ago
Peter Baker
Once again, Trump conflates spending he disfavors with corruption. “This is fraud,” he says of spending projects that are not at all criminal or corrupt even in his own description.
Feb. 18, 2025, 4:45 p.m. ET1 hour ago
Peter Baker
He cites projects such as encouraging democracy and voter turnout in India or teaching enterprise in other countries. Policymakers can disagree with those and say they are not high priority, but they are not by definition “fraud.”
Feb. 18, 2025, 4:42 p.m. ET1 hour ago
Luke Broadwater
Trump says he could have ended Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by giving up some of Ukraine’s land to Russia. “I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land. Almost all of the land.”
Feb. 18, 2025, 4:40 p.m. ET1 hour ago
Alan Rappeport
Trump said that he is considering imposing 25 percent tariffs on imports of cars, semiconductors and pharmaceuticals.
Credit: Ian Willms for The New York Times
Feb. 18, 2025, 4:44 p.m. ET1 hour ago
Jeanna Smialek
Brussels bureau chief
Tariffs that big on cars would be seriously bad news for European industry. Analysts at the research firm Oxford Economics have estimated that a 25 percent tariff on E.U. car exports could hit Germany and Italy especially hard, since they export many vehicles to the United States: German automotive exports could fall by 7.1 percent, and Italian by 6.6 percent.
Feb. 18, 2025
Minho Kim
A federal judge in Washington temporarily reinstated the head of the Merit Systems Protection Board at least until March 3, nullifying President Trump’s letter that fired her five days ago. Judge Rudolph Contreras, an Obama appointee, prohibited White House officials from obstructing the work of Cathy A. Harris, the chairwoman of the little-known but critical board that adjudicates federal employee discipline.
Feb. 18, 2025
Peter Baker
Trump also speaks as if the Ukraine war only started after he left office. In fact, Russia first invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014 and was at war with Ukraine all four years of Trump’s first term, before its full-fledged invasion in 2022.
Feb. 18, 2025, 4:40 p.m. ET1 hour ago
Maggie Haberman
In fact, Trump sounded sanguine about Russian’s annexation of Crimea when he first campaigned in 2015.
to go with what the law is and what is taking place.
Feb. 18, 2025
Austyn Gaffney
Trump’s cuts could make parks and forests more dangerous, employees say.
Public lands in the United States have long been considered a national treasure.
But, since Thursday, at least 3,000 employees have been laid off across the United States Forest Service and the National Park Service, part of a wave of Trump administration cuts to the federal work force. Together, these agencies oversee 278 million acres of land, roughly the size of Texas and Montana combined.
With whole teams slashed and fewer staff to provide basic functions like cleaning up trails, emptying pit toilets, carrying out trash and staffing visitors centers, employees say these vast public lands are in danger of falling into disarray.
Current and former employees of these agencies say their departments were already underfunded and understaffed before the job cuts, particularly as climate change has begun to significantly transform America’s natural areas.
Over the weekend, I spoke to nearly a dozen employees who were terminated or saw their job offers rescinded, along with managers forced to deliver those notices from the Forest Service and the National Park Service. Most had been employed by the federal government for years or even decades.
Some of the cuts could threaten the local economies and safety of nearby towns, the employees say. Among those whose jobs were eliminated were river and wilderness rangers, scientists who help keep forests healthy to minimize fire danger, analysts, attorneys and administrators. Many were trained to assist firefighters, possessing skills that are required each summer as climate change causes bigger and more severe fires.
The workers had a lot in common: Most lived in small towns, most had no backup plan when they were let go and all expressed that they had worked for these agencies because they loved public lands and wanted to be of service to their communities.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Agriculture Department, which oversees the Forest Service, said the agency made “the difficult decision to release about 2,000 probationary, nonfirefighting employees.”
Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, “is committed to preserving essential safety positions and will ensure that critical services remain uninterrupted,” the spokesperson said. The Park Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
U.S. Forest Service workers hanging a “No Entry” sign last June in the Los Padres National Forest after an evacuation order was issued northwest of Los Angeles.Credit: Philip Cheung for The New York Times
Kate White, 29, lost her position as a wilderness ranger outside Seattle on Saturday after six years of seasonal work and 20 months of permanent employment with the U.S. Forest Service. She and her six co-workers took care of 500 miles of popular trails crisscrossing the Cascade Mountains. In a single season, she said, they monitored 70 backcountry toilets, carried out 600 pounds of trash and disposed of more than a thousand piles of human waste.
This weekend, most of her co-workers also lost their jobs. Just one is left, which means just one staff member has the primary duty of patrolling 340,000 acres of wilderness, White said.
Many workers in these agencies, outside of full-time firefighting, carry what’s called a red card, which means they’re trained to assist in wildland firefighting. Without those personnel, it will be more challenging to manage the increased risk of wildfire under climate change.
Another employee who had a job offer rescinded at Mount Rainier National Park worried over visitor safety in the mountains. “Large areas of the alpine terrain are going to be unstaffed and inaccessible for long periods of time,” the employee said.
An employee at a national forest in California said the cuts, plus unfilled roles, meant their particular forest would go into the summer with 80 percent fewer staff members overall, not including full-time firefighters. Both employees asked to remain anonymous out of fear of being terminated or not being rehired by the U.S. government.
Search and rescue
On Friday morning, Stacy Ramsey, 49, was monitoring a section of the Buffalo National River, a 135-mile waterway in northern Arkansas managed by the National Park Service, when she saw an email pop up on her phone with a headline that included the word “termination.”
She was still in shock when, minutes later, she received a text to return to headquarters. There, the division chiefs, some crying, gathered in a conference room to tell her the firing was effective immediately.
“They looked like someone had died,” Ramsey recalled the next day. She’d spent three years in a contract position, working weekends while holding down a second full-time job just to get her foot in the door. She’d become the park’s only year-round river ranger last March.
Ramsey had grown up along the Buffalo in Searcy County, one of the poorest parts of Arkansas. She made $39,000 a year, a pay cut from her previous job teaching middle school, but just enough to cover her mortgage and bills.
In the last few years, Ramsey noticed the river was changing, which she attributed to more extreme weather under a warming planet. Last summer, an extended drought caused four miles of the river to dry up, killing hundreds of fish. Major floods have become more common, eroding the banks and making the river wider and shallower. Floods also wash in trees, creating dangerous culverts called strainers. She said these events can increase dangers for park visitors.
Her job as a river ranger was to keep them safe: She monitored the waterway, talked to visitors and issued warnings for parts of the river that could put them at risk.
“If no one is there to educate, it increases the risk of someone getting hurt on the river,” Ramsey said.
A National Park ranger swept a sidewalk at the Jimmy Carter National Historical Park in Plains, Ga., last month. Credit: Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters
Safety and education
Workers I spoke with said there will be simply be fewer people to educate visitors about the wilderness.
In 2022, Jillian Greene, a 24-year-old wilderness ranger, moved to Montana for a seasonal position with the U.S. Forest Service. She fell in love with the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, a region of steep peaks draped in rapidly melting glaciers. She lost her job last week.
In her position, she spent five to eight days at a time backpacking into high elevations to clear trails and clean up campsites. A decade ago, five wilderness rangers covered roughly a third of the nearly one million acre wilderness over the summer season; last year there were two, including Greene. This year, unless staff are rehired, there won’t be any.
Greene said she worried about an increase in potentially dangerous encounters between visitors and bears and about fewer hands to put out untended campfires. “I’m so scared for the future of public lands,” Greene said. “It’s been a really emotional weekend.”
Read more:
A National Park Guide Was Flying Home From a Work Trip. She Was Fired Midair.
Forest Service Layoffs and Frozen Funds Increase the Risk From Wildfires.
As Trump targets research, scientists share grief and resolve to fight
At the annual gathering in Boston this past week of one of America’s oldest scientific societies, the discussions touched on threats to humankind: runaway artificial intelligence, toxic “forever chemicals,” the eventual end of the universe.
But the most urgent threats for many scientists were the ones aimed at them, as the Trump administration slashes the federal scientific work force and cuts back on billions of dollars in funding for research at universities. — Raymond Zhong
Read the full story here.
Texas county declares an emergency over toxic fertilizer
A Texas county is taking steps to declare a state of emergency and seek federal assistance over farmland contaminated with harmful “forever chemicals,” as concerns grow over the safety of fertilizer made from sewage.
Johnson County, south of Fort Worth, has been roiled since county investigators found high levels of chemicals called PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, at two cattle ranches in the county in 2023.
The county says the PFAS, also known as forever chemicals because they don’t break down in the environment, came from contaminated fertilizer used on a neighboring farm.
PFAS, which are used in everyday items like nonstick cookware and stain-resistant carpets, have been found to increase the risk of certain types of cancer and can cause birth defects, developmental delays in children and other health harms. —Hiroko Tabuchi
Read the full story here.
https://truthout.org/articles/washington-post-refuses-to-run-ad-demanding-donald-trump-fire-elon-musk/
Washington Post Refuses to Run Ad Demanding Donald Trump Fire Elon Musk
The ad had been scheduled to be delivered to members of Congress as well as subscribers at the Pentagon and White House.
Critics of the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post are targeting the newspaper over its “gutless” refusal to run a paid wrap-around advertisement that makes a prominent demand for President Donald Trump to fire mega-billionaire Elon Musk from his cohort of inner-most advisers.
The special ad, at a cost of $115,000, was orchestrated by the pro-democracy watchdog Common Cause, a progressive advocacy group and had been scheduled to be delivered to members of Congress as well as subscribers at the Pentagon and White House on Tuesday. On Friday, however, the group was notified by the newspaper that it was backing out of the arrangement.
“Elon Musk is attempting to run our government like one of his companies, and it’s hurting the American people,” reads some of the language of the campaign on which the ad is based. “Even more concerning is that President Donald Trump is allowing it to happen. It’s time to say enough and FIRE Elon Musk from any role within our government.”
The campaign, like the ad refused by the Post, points people to an online petition where they can back the demand Musk be fired and information to contact their members of Congress.
“Our elected officials are totally abandoning their duty to their constituents while Elon Musk does as he pleases,” reads the call to action. “Whether your senators are on the right, on the left, or in the center, they ALL need to hear from everyday Americans like us today.”
The Hill, given an exclusive for the story, reports that one of the ironies of the situation is that when the Post gave Common Cause a sample look at how the advertisement would appear, the example was a previously run ad by the the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), an industry lobby group, highlighting the new president’s promise to “end the electric vehicle mandate on Day 1,” which included an image of a smiling Trump with his thumbs up.
“They gave us some sample art to show us what it would look like,” Kase Solomón, president of Common Cause, explained. “It was a thank-you Donald Trump piece of art.”
According to The Hill:
The ad’s design features a large picture of Musk with his head tilted back, laughing, along with a cutout image of the White House and large white text: “Who’s running this country: Donald Trump or Elon Musk?”
Lower down on the page it features smaller font text stating: “Since day one, Elon has created chaos and confusion and put our livelihoods at risk. And he is accountable to no one but himself.”
“The Constitution only allows for one president at a time. Call your senators and tell them it’s time Donald Trump fire Elon Musk,” it says, followed by the URL FireMusk.org.
Solomón said it was not clear why the newspaper made its decision, but it seemed very much to do with the nature of the ad’s content and possibly to with the political leanings of the Post’s owner, the second-richest man in the world after Musk himself. Both men have major business interests that could be injured if they run afoul of President Trump.
“Is it because we’re critical of what’s happening with Elon Musk?” asked Solomón. “Is it only okay to run things in The Post now that won’t anger the president or won’t have him calling Jeff Bezos asking why this was allowed?”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
DEFEAT FASCISM BEFORE FASCISM DEFEATS YOU
https://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2024/07/welcome-to-fascist-america-part-2.html
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/inside-project-2025s-plan-to-reprogram-the-government/
Inside Project 2025
Backed by the Heritage Foundation, the initiative seeks to undermine longstanding safeguards against abuses of executive power.
July 1, 2024
Boston Review
The week after taking office in 2017, Donald Trump announced his administration’s signature policy on the administrative state—the constellation of agencies, institutions, and procedures that Congress has created to help the president implement the laws it passes—when he signed Executive Order 13771. The directive purported to create a “regulatory budget” scheme that prohibited agencies from issuing a new rule unless they first repealed two existing rules and ensured that the resulting cost savings offset any costs the new rule might impose.
The effort failed. While federal agencies reduced their regulatory output during the Trump administration, they made little lasting progress in repealing existing rules. The Administrative Procedure Act, which governs much of how the administrative state operates, makes it hard to do so. Most of the Trump administration’s repeal attempts were met with rejection by federal courts for failing to abide by basic procedural requirements.
Still, Executive Order 13771 perfectly encapsulated conservative thinking about regulatory policy at the time. The goal was to bring about the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” as former Trump advisor Steve Bannon famously put it. This view was in keeping with decades of conservative hostility for this arm of government, which the right has long tarred as an economic and constitutional disaster.
But that was then. In the years since, the conservative movement has coalesced around a very different way of thinking about the administrative state—one that sees it as a vehicle for advancing the conservative movement’s agenda, particularly on social issues, and thus embraces policy changes that would strengthen many aspects of its governing apparatus. There’s still plenty of room for deconstruction in this vision, particularly when it comes to issues like worker rights and environmental protection. Indeed, the Supreme Court’s conservatives demonstrated their continued commitment to the deconstruction project with their decision last week striking down the four-decade-old Chevron deference doctrine—a move that will make it easier for conservative federal judges to strike down rules they oppose on ideological grounds. But these goals are now presented alongside calls for things like enhanced agency enforcement capacity and strategies for evading congressional oversight—priorities that would have been unthinkable for a conservative regulatory agenda just a few years ago.
The best example of this shift is Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation–led “presidential transition” attack plan that would guide a second Trump administration should he win this November. The effort was spearheaded by Heritage president Kevin Roberts in 2022; a 920-page document called Mandate for Leadership, published in April last year, sets out a comprehensive blueprint in technocratic detail. The product of a broad coalition of ultra-right-wing think tanks and advocacy organizations, the plan has contributions from the Center for Renewing America (an organization committed to promoting Christian nationalism), Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America (a prominent group fighting reproductive rights), and FreedomWorks (the Koch-founded organization responsible for mainstreaming the Tea Party agenda, which has since dissolved but nevertheless helped lay the foundation for the conservative movement’s evolution in thinking on matters of regulatory policy). It covers nearly every policy issue you can think of, from defense budgets to bank regulation to highway construction. (For his part, Bannon has expressed general support for the initiative, but it is unclear whether he appreciates—or even cares about—the shift it represents.)
Project 2025 is candid about its ultimate goal: to reprogram the U.S. administrative state to support and sustain archconservative rule for decades to come. The distinguishing features of this regime would include a far more politicized bureaucracy, immunity against meaningful public or congressional oversight, abusive deployment of agency enforcement capabilities as a tool of political retribution, and aggressive manipulation of federal program implementation in the image of Christian nationalism, white supremacy, and economic inequality.
One of the Mandate’s prevailing themes is that the administrative state has become a major platform from which the radical left is able to smuggle its “woke” agenda into nearly every nook and cranny of our society. In light of this alleged shift, Project 2025 concludes that deconstruction is no longer the right strategy. Instead, the administrative state must be aggressively harnessed and then redirected. This is not a brand-new idea; conservatives have weaponized the administrative state to fight culture wars in the past, including putting arbitrary regulations on abortion clinics and introducing stringent eligibility requirements for food assistance programs. But these experiments have largely been episodic and disjointed. Project 2025’s novelty lies in the fact that it wants to make them, for the first time, into a comprehensive strategy.
Russell Vought, Trump’s former Director of the Office of Management Budget (OMB), succinctly describes this new strategy in a chapter he wrote for Mandate for Leadership: “The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power—including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people.” Doing so, the Mandate argues, requires giving a second Trump administration nearly unchecked power over the machinery by which the administrative state operates: the institutions, the procedures, the resources, and the personnel.
Project 2025 is clearly designed to avoid the pitfalls that doomed Executive Order 13771. In many ways, Mandate for Leadership can be read as an instruction manual for undermining the safeguards meant to prevent governing officials from engaging in the abuses of power Project 2025 wants to encourage. Replete with methodical detail and technocratic jargon, it offers future political leadership across all the federal administrative agencies a full taxonomy of tactics they can deploy to either exploit the weak points in these safeguards or bypass them altogether.
One of the Mandate’s central tactics concerns rules around staffing. Currently, agencies hire professional career staff with specialized training and expertise. All must swear an oath to follow the Constitution in carrying out their duties—even and especially if that means disobeying the orders of someone higher up in the bureaucratic hierarchy. As such, these career staff provide perhaps the most important line of defense against an autocratic presidential regime. But through a policy called Schedule F, the Mandate seeks to sideline or even purge them. Derived from another of Trump’s executive orders, the proposal would reclassify the thousands of career government employees who play some role in policy formation outside of the competitive service—the federal personnel category that includes rigorous, merit-based requirements for hiring, firing, and promotion decisions. Stripped of these basic protections, which have been in place for over 140 years, many employees would become “at will,” fireable for any reason—or no reason at all. The intent is obvious: to encourage public servants to obey their political bosses, even when that means going against the law and their own expertise. Were it to take effect, workers who refuse to toe the line could be summarily terminated.
And to buttress the effect of Schedule F, Mandate for Leadership includes several more targeted methods for isolating recalcitrant public servants. Its chapter on the intelligence community, for instance, describes policy changes that would make it easier to suspend or revoke security clearances for career staff at national security–related agencies. Without their security clearances, these individuals would no longer be able to perform their jobs—and that, of course, is the point. Other sections contemplate taking similarly hostile actions against members of the Senior Executive Service, a special band within the civil service created to serve as a bridge between political appointees and lower-line career staff by providing management support and expertise. Members who step out of line might find themselves being relocated to far-flung geographic locations or reassigned to positions unrelated to their area of expertise.
The flip side of silencing or firing career public servants is to empower extremists and amplify outlier viewpoints—a move Mandate for Leadership has plenty of ideas about how to accomplish. One of these is simply to point Schedule F and security clearance abuses in the opposite direction. Unburdened by the competitive hiring process, agencies could hire whomever they wanted for career civil service positions. Project 2025 makes clear that unquestioned loyalty to the president, as opposed to professionalism and expertise, is the only real qualification that matters. Similarly, political appointees would have a freer hand to assign security clearances, ensuring loyal voices are heard loud and clear when it comes to conducting intelligence assessments to inform national security decisions.
Mandate for Leadership at times even directly requires consideration of outlier views. One of its recommendations to “improve” the President’s Daily Briefing (PDB) on national security issues is to create a mechanism that ensures the inclusion of “properly channeled dissent.” Mandate fails to specify what constitutes a proper channel, but the broader context of the recommendation indicates a hostility toward the independent viewpoints of career intelligence officers as well as a desire to transform these documents from objective analyses into advocacy documents.
Another group of proposed tactics builds on the longstanding conservative tradition of outsourcing critical government functions to the private sector. Even here, though, the goal isn’t simply to shrink government but to advance Project 2025’s broader ideological agenda as well. The chapter on the Department of Energy, for instance, urges consideration of outsourcing the functions of the Energy Information Administration (EIA), a small statistical agency charged with gathering and analyzing data regarding U.S. energy systems. The information products that the EIA generates are crucial for informing energy-related policymaking and investments by the electricity and oil and gas sectors; it is perhaps best known for the different “outlooks” it publishes that forecast future energy trends. While conceding that the EIA’s products are generally “neutral”—if anything, the agency’s outlooks have been criticized for being too pessimistic about renewable energy—Mandate still suggests that the reform could be beneficial overall by reducing the costs of government. Previous experience with privatization casts doubt on this prediction. More troubling still, businesses interested in securing future lucrative contracts might deliberately produce analyses that align with the president’s preferred policy positions on energy. A future president opposed to urgent climate action, for instance, might be able to use biased analyses to oppose policies aimed at promoting renewable energy development.
Mandate for Leadership elsewhere calls for dismantling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) lifesaving weather forecasting capabilities and outsourcing them to private companies. Such a move could exacerbate economic and racial inequity if the private company were to put those forecasts—which are now freely available to everyone—behind a paywall that might be unaffordable for many families. More ominously still, a company responding to profit incentives might create what amounts to a two-tier forecasting system, with more accurate forecasts available only for wealthier parts of the country. Low-quality forecasts in poorer areas would leave residents unable to plan for the kind of extreme weather conditions that are becoming more prevalent with climate change, putting their lives and property at risk of unnecessary harm.
Alongside its calls for expanded privatization, Mandate for Leadership advocates for politicizing existing relationships with contractors. Its chapter on the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), for instance, recommends that the agency end its reliance on “global [non-governmental organizations]” such as Oxfam International for distributing humanitarian assistance, and instead turn the work over to “faith-based organizations,” including both local churches as well as larger U.S.-based organizations such as Catholic Relief Services and Knights of Columbus—the perfect vehicles for indoctrinating aid recipients in the conservative Christian ideology that is at Project 2025’s core.
Previously, the Trump administration used these humanitarian assistance programs as leverage to induce recipient countries to join the infamous Geneva Consensus Declaration on Women’s Health and Protection of the Family (GCD). The international agreement, developed outside of any recognized international governance structures such as the United Nations, binds signatory countries in adopting domestic and foreign policies that oppose abortion. Consistent with these neocolonial aspirations, Mandate for Leadership strongly embraces the GCD, envisioning the use of humanitarian aid programs implemented by faith-based organization contractors to expand its reach to new countries.
More generally, Mandate for Leadership calls for weaponizing contractor policy against companies with “woke” policies. Come 2025, a company that has adopted certain kinds of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (DEIJ) programs might find itself ineligible for many federal grant opportunities. The chapter on the Department of Education would prohibit public schools that receive federal assistance from entering contracts with companies that recognize transgender people’s pronouns—a set of policies that would complement recently adopted legislation in conservative states that prohibit DEIJ programs in public institutions of higher education.
Mandate for Leadership also contains several recommendations for how agencies could weaponize federal grantmaking to advance conservative policy objectives. For instance, the chapter on the Department of Health and Human Services recommends that the Teen Pregnancy Prevention and Personal Responsibility Education programs prioritize grants for abstinence-only programs. The chapter on the Environmental Protection Agency calls for radically overhauling that agency’s grants program, which distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in discretionary grants every year. Mandate would end the practice of career staff making these grant determinations and instead assign this task to a “political appointee.”
Perhaps the most disquieting category of tactics in Mandate for Leadership involves the aggressive, politicized use of agency enforcement powers.
The chapter on the Department of Justice (DOJ) proposes overhauling the agency to eliminate its longstanding tradition of political insulation from the White House. In theory, this insulation follows from the idea that the job of the DOJ’s head, the attorney general, is to represent the U.S. government and not the president. Institutional mechanisms have been used to ensure the agency’s independence and to guard against both the perception and reality of conflicts of interest, including, most notably, the use of a special counsel to investigate and prosecute the president or certain administration officials. As was demonstrated during the first Trump term, though, the actual independence of a special counsel can be limited. Mandate would seek to further degrade the DOJ’s independence by injecting greater presidential control into questions of litigation strategy, even raising the disturbing specter of the president targeting political enemies with enforcement actions.
Likewise, in its chapter on the Department of Homeland Security, the document outlines various proposals aimed consolidating and strengthening enforcement policies at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. These include giving individual agents greater leeway to arrest immigrants with suspected criminal records and expanding the geographic scope of Expedited Removal procedures—the summary removal of noncitizens without a hearing. Mandate would permit these procedures to be applied to individuals more than 100 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, which was the traditional limit, with no apparent bright-line geographic restrictions.
Project 2025 also envisions expanded use of the Insurrection Act of 1807, which authorizes the president to use the military for domestic law enforcement purposes under rare, extreme circumstances. In 2020 Trump threatened to use this authority to quell the Black Lives Matter protests that took place in the wake of George Floyd’s murder before being discouraged from doing so by his advisors. Mandate for Leadership, while not citing the law by name, does appear to endorse its use as part of its broader border control strategy, recommending calling in “active-duty military personnel and National Guardsmen to assist in arrest operations along the border—something that has not yet been done.” Citing internal documents and an anonymous source, the Washington Post has reported that key personnel involved in Project 2025 have plans to use the Insurrection Act even beyond what Mandate for Leadership lays out for it.
Mandate for Leadership’s final set of tactics for hijacking the administrative state have to do with limiting or evading congressional oversight. Several chapters, for instance, describe how the administration can manipulate the Federal Vacancies Reform Act by installing political appointees in key agency leadership positions—a gambit whose practical effect is to enable politically loyal personnel to carry out official agency business without being subjected to the lengthy, and potentially embarrassing, Senate confirmation process.
Other chapters recommend giving the president greater control over communications between agencies and committees of jurisdictions with Congress, with the apparent aim of controlling the flow of information that members of Congress and their staff receive. Instituting these changes would clearly undermine Congress’s ability to conduct meaningful oversight for these agencies. The chapter on the DHS, for example, calls for the president to demand that only one committee in each chamber serve as an authorizing committee for the agency (currently there are at least six authorizing committees in the House and four more in the Senate). If congressional leadership refuses to accept this arrangement, then it recommends that the agency’s Office of Legislative Affairs select one and restrict its communications to only that committee. Similarly, the chapter on the Department of State recommends that agencies defer to the White House on relevant communications with Congress—meaning that in practice, discussions on certain issues of agency business would have to first go through the president.
Congress and the federal judiciary have long been ripe for capture by elite minority factions to serve and sustain their rule. But the administrative state, which is of a much more recent vintage, was supposed to be different.
In the years following the Civil War, and then later during the Progressive Era, reformers and advocates sought to build a governing institution that would be more inclusive and democratically responsive. The Interstate Commerce Commission and other early experiments in federal regulatory governance demonstrated that the administrative state could stand up to powerful economic interests and ensure a fairer marketplace for consumers and small businesses while protecting democracy against ever-evolving oligarchic threats. Meanwhile, rapid industrialization and urbanization laid bare the limitations of using civil lawsuits to address harms from dangerous business practices. Agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, first created in 1906, offered the promise of using standards developed and implemented by scientists and other experts to prevent such harms from occurring in the first place. These and other regulatory frameworks created by Congress established a new model in which agencies would be empowered to continually respond to new and emerging threats.
The genius of the administrative state’s design was that it would provide a permanent forum in which public input and professional expertise could be leveraged to solve the people’s problems in ways that elected officials would, or could, not. Scholars of U.S. democracy have long recognized its potential to serve as a platform for building and sustaining true, durable public power. At its best, they argue, it can provide ordinary citizens with a locus of countervailing power in the political marketplace. It’s clear, then, why the modern conservative movement has come to see it as such a threat.
And that is the real import of Project 2025: it seeks to corrupt the administrative state by transforming it from a dynamic base of democratic power into a fierce weapon of social and economic conservatism. What will happen if it succeeds? Once the damage has been done, the task of sustaining minority rule for decades to come would be much easier for the conservative movement. Degrading the institutions of Congress and the federal judiciary were important first steps toward rebuilding the United States in line with its vision of Christian nationalist principles, white supremacy, and economic inequality. Seizing control of the administrative state would be the real prize.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
James Goodwin is Policy Director at the Center for Progressive Reform.
