Music: Bremer/McCoy — ‘Vågner’
At least five IGs investigating Elon Musk’s companies were fired by the Trump-Musk administration
The New Republic: “Five inspector generals that were looking into Elon Musk’s companies were fired by the Trump-Musk administration,” said Texas Representative Greg Casar. “These inspector generals, who are independent, protected by law; they are the people that find the waste, fraud, and abuse … fired because they were looking into Elon Musk.” “You know what Elon Musk doesn’t seem to be looking into?” Casar continued. “His own contracts.” “Just last year, Elon Musk was promised $3 billion from…
Noah Feldman specifies the tipping point for a constitutional crisis
The Trump administration has seen several of its executive orders frozen — from its campaign to end birthright citizenship to the destruction of USAID. Now a judge in Rhode Island has become the first to declare that the White House has disobeyed a court order. Could this signal the start of a constitutional crisis? Harvard law professor and Bloomberg columnist Noah Feldman joins Walter Isaacson to discuss.
Never before has a corporate executive been handed so much power over government operations
The New York Times reports: President Trump has been in office less than a month, and Elon Musk’s vast business empire is already benefiting — or is now in a decidedly better position to benefit. Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man who has been given enormous power by the president, have been dismantling federal agencies across the government. Mr. Trump has fired top officials and pushed out career employees. Many of them were leading investigations, enforcement matters…
This obscure law is one reason Trump’s agenda keeps losing in court
Lawrence Hurley writes: Lawyers challenging President Donald Trump’s aggressive use of executive power in the courts are turning to a familiar weapon in their armory: an obscure but routinely invoked federal law called the Administrative Procedure Act. While lawsuits challenging such provocative plans as ending birthright citizenship and dismantling federal agencies raise weighty constitutional issues, they also claim Trump failed to follow the correct procedures as required under the wonky 1946 statute. Trump fell afoul of the law in some…
Trump administration illegally allowed DOGE to access workers’ data, lawsuit alleges
The Verge reports: The Trump administration breached a federal privacy law by letting workers from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access information on millions of government workers, privacy advocates including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) allege in a new lawsuit filed on behalf of two labor unions and a group of current and former federal employees. The groups allege that DOGE and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) violated the Privacy Act of 1974, which protects information maintained…
Trump wants to ‘promote the resettlement’ of white South Africans
Adam Serwer writes: Hours after being sworn in, President Donald Trump began targeting migrants seeking refuge or asylum. He brought the entire refugee system to a halt, preventing the resettlement of tens of thousands of already screened refugees and stopping the admission of thousands of Afghan refugees. He also ended humanitarian parole for immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, “leaving more than 500,000 already living here in legal limbo,” according to ProPublica. But there’s one group of “refugees” Trump…
Naomi Klein on Trump, Gaza and the end of the ‘liberal order’
Democracy in Exile reports: “The end of the bombs does not mean the end of the genocide, unfortunately,” award-winning author and journalist Naomi Klein says of the cease-fire struck on January 15 between Israel and Hamas. “Gaza is a crime scene. I think that there’s still going to be a great deal of effort to suppress an honest examination of what has happened in Gaza and what is ongoing.” In a wide-ranging interview with Democracy in Exile, Klein discusses Donald…
Music: Bremer/McCoy — ‘Vega’
Remembering JFK on the arts as Trump takes over the Kennedy Center
In a speech delivered at Amherst College on October 26, 1963, President John F Kennedy said: If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the…
The staffers helping Musk dismantle and downsize the U.S. government, one agency at a time
By Christopher Bing and Annie Waldman This story was originally published by ProPublica The Trump administration is not even a month old, but billionaire Elon Musk has already brought in dozens of staffers to help him change the face of the U.S. government. ProPublica has learned the names of nine additional employees connected to Musk’s government overhaul, adding to a tracker the news organization published last week. The additional names help reveal Musk’s sudden and far-reaching influence across government, as…
One agency tried to regulate SpaceX. Now its fate could be in Elon Musk’s hands
By Heather Vogell This story was originally published by ProPublica When SpaceX’s Starship exploded in January, raining debris over the Caribbean, the Federal Aviation Administration temporarily grounded the rocket program and ordered an investigation. The move was the latest in a series of actions taken by the agency against the world’s leading commercial space company. “Safety drives everything we do at the FAA,” the agency’s chief counsel said in September, after proposing $633,000 in fines for alleged violations related to…
Project 2025 is gutting medical funding that helped Russell Vought’s own daughter
Mother Jones reports: The National Institutes of Health, the federal government’s leading medical research agency, came under attack by Project 2025 well before its architect, Russell Vought, was confirmed to Donald Trump’s second-term cabinet as head of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought’s pet project—the playbook for the Trump presidency—asserts that “funding for scientific research should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid and unaccountable insiders” and encourages “more modest federal funding through” NIH. Last Friday,…
Inside the Israeli movement to recolonize Gaza
Joshua Leifer writes: Daniella Weiss, the 79-year-old leader of the far-right settler organization Nachala, stepped out of her white Mitsubishi SUV and into the parking lot of the Sderot train station, a mere three kilometers from the Gaza Strip. It was Dec. 26, the second night of Hanukkah, and for weeks Nachala had been aggressively promoting a celebratory “procession to Gaza” and candle-lighting ceremony in a closed military zone by the border. The event was to be the next step…
Palestinian Authority forces are openly helping Israel fight its West Bank war
Jesse Rosenfeld reports: The circling drones buzz overhead as explosions echo. Bursts of gunfire between Israeli soldiers and fighters from the Palestinian refugee camp ring out. Israeli military jeeps patrol bulldozed roads outside the government hospital. Displaced camp resident, 29 year-old Noureddine Jarbou, sits in the courtyard watching the unending Israeli assault, his catheter bag attached to the side of his wheelchair. Paralyzed from the waist down during an Israeli raid on the camp three years ago and then taken…
Architect of so-called Generals’ Plan admits Israel’s ‘absolute failure’ in Gaza
Middle East Eye reports: The architect of Israel’s so-called Generals’ Plan to depopulate northern Gaza has described the country’s war in the enclave as an “absolute failure”. The original plan, also known as the Eiland Plan after its creator Giora Eiland, a retired major general and former head of the Israeli National Security Council, was seen by Palestinians and rights groups as part of a long-term project of ethnic cleansing that would result in the restablishment of Jewish settlements in…