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My simple blog of pictures of travel, friends, activities and the Universe we live in as we go slowly around the Sun.



March 17, 2025

Nazi marchs on to destroy america...

‘How gratifying’: Cheers in China as Trump dismantles Voice of America

By Nectar Gan

One nationalist influencer called it “truly gratifying.” Another said he was laughing his head off. And a state-media editorial hailed the demise of what it called the “lie factory.”

For years, the Chinese government and its propaganda apparatus have relentlessly attacked VOA and RFA for their critical coverage of China, particularly on human rights and religious freedom.

Chinese nationalists and state media could hardly contain their schadenfreude after President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday to dismantle Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Asia (RFA) and other US government-funded media organizations that broadcast to authoritarian regimes.

And now, the Trump administration is silencing the very institutions that Beijing has long sought to undermine – at a time when China is spending lavishly to expand the global footprint of its own state media.

In an editorial Monday, the Global Times, a pugnacious Communist Party-run newspaper, denounced VOA as a “lie factory” with an “appalling track record” on China reporting.

From its coverage of alleged human rights abuses in the far western Xinjiang region to reporting on South China Sea disputes, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the coronavirus pandemic and the Chinese economy, “almost every malicious falsehood about China has VOA’s fingerprints all over it,” the editorial claimed.

“As more Americans begin to break through their information cocoons and see a real world and a multidimensional China, the demonizing narratives propagated by VOA will ultimately become a laughingstock of the times,” it added.

VOA’s China coverage stretches back decades. During the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy protests, its Chinese-language radio broadcasts became a critical source of uncensored information for the Chinese people. (VOA discontinued its Chinese radio broadcasts in 2011 but its Chinese language website remained online as of Monday.)

RFA, founded in 1996, broadcasts to China in English, Chinese, Uyghur and Tibetan-language services, catering to ethnic minorities whose freedoms the Chinese government has long been accused of suppressing.

RFA CEO Bay Fang called the US grant cutoff “a reward to dictators and despots, including the Chinese Communist Party, who would like nothing better than to have their influence go unchecked in the information space.”

On Chinese social media, nationalist influencers celebrated the demise of VOA, which has placed all 1,300 staff on administrative leave, and of RFA, which said it may cease operations following the termination of federal grants.

“Voice of America has been paralyzed! And so has Radio Free Asia, which is just as malicious toward China. How truly gratifying!” wrote Hu Xijin, a former editor-in-chief of the Global Times and prominent nationalist commentator.

“Almost all Chinese people know the Voice of America, as it is a symbolic tool of US ideological infiltration into China,” Hu wrote in a post on microblogging site Weibo, where he has nearly 25 million followers. “(I) believe that Chinese people are more than happy to see America’s anti-China ideological stronghold crumble from within, scattering like a flock of startled birds.”

Another nationalist commentator accused VOA and RFA of being “notorious propaganda machines for color revolutions,” referring to protests of the 2000s that toppled governments in the former Soviet Union and the Balkans.

“I’m laughing my head off!” they said.

Others cheered Trump, who during his first term in office was nicknamed “Chuan Jianguo,” or “Trump, the (Chinese) nation builder” by the Chinese internet, in a mocking suggestion that the US president’s isolationist foreign policy and divisive domestic agenda was helping Beijing to overtake Washington on the global stage.

“Thank you, Comrade Chuan Jianguo and Elon Musk, please take care and stay safe,” a Weibo user said on Monday.

Musk, the billionaire adviser to Trump who has been spearheading sweeping cuts to the US government, has used his social media platform X to call for VOA to be shut down.

“This news marks the end of an era,” said another comment on Weibo on Sunday.

The White House defended Trump’s executive order in a statement Saturday, claiming it “will ensure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda.”

But as the US-funded stations dial down, China is busy amplifying its own messages to the world.

Under leader Xi Jinping, China has drastically expanded the reach and influence of its state media outlets as part of its push to gain “discourse power” in a world it sees as unfairly dominated by the Western narrative.

In 2018, Beijing announced the creation of a giant media conglomerate by merging three existing state-run networks aimed at overseas audiences to better combine resources. Its name? Voice of China.

Inflicting serious economic damage

Trump’s tariffs are inflicting serious economic damage and reigniting inflation, OECD says

By David Goldman

President Donald Trump’s tariff policies are slowing economic growth in the United States and around the world while sending prices higher again, creating a toxic stew for the global economy that could grow even worse if tensions escalate, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said Monday.

The quarterly report is the first sweeping attempt by global economists to document and forecast the damage from Trump’s policies to the economies of America and its trading partners. The OECD report shows what US markets have been signaling for several weeks as they’ve rapidly tumbled into correction territory: Trump’s tariffs could choke the global economy and reignite inflation at a precarious time.

Massive new import taxes on a variety of goods from a range of countries imposed by the Trump administration have been met with instant retaliation from some of America’s biggest trading partners. Threats of new tariffs and Trump’s on-again, off-again levies have led to growing uncertainty for businesses around the world, preventing them from making investments that can drive economic growth, the OECD said. Meanwhile, fears of rebounding inflation from tariffs have dragged down consumer sentiment and spending, cutting off fuel for the US and global economies.

“If the announced trade policy actions persist, as assumed in the projections, the new bilateral tariff rates will raise revenues for the governments imposing them but will be a drag on global activity, incomes and regular tax revenues,” the OECD said. “They also add to trade costs, raising the price of covered imported final goods for consumers and intermediate inputs for businesses.”

Gloomier outlook

The group of 38 mostly wealthy nations made new economic forecasts that are noticeably worse than its previous predictions. The OECD predicted US economic growth would slow dramatically this year and next, to 2.2% in 2025 and just 1.6% in 2026. America’s economy grew at a 2.8% rate last year. The global economy is expected to grow 3.1% this year and 3% next year, down from 3.2% growth in 2024.

Meanwhile, US inflation will pick up this year, the OECD predicted. Prices are expected to rise 2.8% in 2025, up from 2.5% last year. They’ll continue to be elevated in 2026, rising 2.6%, the OECD forecast.

Both growth and inflation forecasts are worse than in the previous quarterly report. The OECD previously expected US inflation to be just 2.1% this year, and it predicted US economic growth would be 2.4% in 2025. Global economic growth was expected to rise to 3.3% this year.

But Canada and particularly Mexico will fare significantly worse than the United States in the budding trade war. Trump has promised 25% across-the-board tariffs on America’s neighbors and two of its three biggest trading partners – a move that could plunge both economies into a recession.

The OECD believes Canada’s economic growth will be just 0.7% this year and next, far less than the prediction of 2% growth in the December report. And Mexico’s economy is expected to shrink 1.3% this year and 0.6% in 2026 – a dramatic turn from the previous report, which predicted a 1.2% expansion in 2025 and 1.6% growth next year.

However, China, another direct target of Trump’s tariff policies, will prove more insulated than Mexico and Canada, the OECD predicts. The government, for example, just announced a wide-ranging “special action plan” to promote domestic spending, to counter the economic impact of Trump’s tariffs.

Central banks will have their work cut out for them. Although many around the world have been cutting interest rates to fuel growth after the inflation crisis has subsided, the OECD believes the inflation that tariffs will reignite means central banks will have to keep rates higher for longer, causing prolonged pain for businesses and consumers.

6 light-years from Earth

Four planets found orbiting a star 6 light-years from Earth

By Ashley Strickland

After decades of searching, astronomers have uncovered some of the strongest evidence yet of exoplanets orbiting Barnard’s Star, the nearest single star system to Earth. The four planets are classified as sub-Earths because each one is about 19% to 34% the mass of Earth, according to new research.

“It’s a really exciting find — Barnard’s Star is our cosmic neighbor, and yet we know so little about it,” said lead study author Ritvik Basant, doctoral student of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, in a statement. “It’s signaling a breakthrough with the precision of these new instruments from previous generations.”

Barnard’s Star, discovered by American astronomer E.E. Barnard in 1916, is a low-mass red dwarf, one of the most common types of stars. Over the past decade, astronomers have found that many of these stars have multiple rocky planets orbiting them.

Enter MAROON-X, an instrument mounted on the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii that’s designed to search for exoplanets orbiting red dwarfs. The instrument seeks out planets by detecting the subtle wobble of stars as the gravity of orbiting planets tug on their stellar hosts, known as the radial velocity technique.

Using MAROON-X, the study team spotted the least massive exoplanet ever found, and it hopes the find will lead to the discovery of more sub-Earth exoplanets across the cosmos.

Astronomers believe smaller exoplanets may be more varied in composition than the larger exoplanets detected so far. Finding more minuscule worlds with the latest, highly sensitive instruments could open up a new way of understanding how planets form — and which ones could be habitable for life.

A study detailing the findings was published March 11 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Four tiny worlds

The planets are so small that they are more analogous to Mars, according to Basant.

“When compared to our solar system, each of the four planets are inside the distance of Mercury’s orbit,” Basant said.

The planets closely orbit Barnard’s Star, zipping around their stellar host in a matter of days, compared with the year it takes Earth to complete one orbit around the sun. The outermost planet takes less than seven days to complete one orbit, while the innermost planet has an orbital period of less than three days, Basant said.

Proximity at a price

The planets are so close to the star that their surfaces are likely too hot to be habitable. That means the foursome are also not within the habitable zone of the star, or just the right distance from the star where liquid water can stably exist on the surface of the planet.

“When Barnard’s star was young and active … the star blasted these small planets with X-UV radiation, frequent flares, and dense winds,” said Edward Guinan, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, in an email. “Because of this, these sub-Earth size planets probably don’t have atmospheres, water, and life.”

Guinan was not involved in the new study but has previously searched for planets around Barnard’s Star.

Planets of this size are largely unexplored beyond our solar system, making it a significant step forward as astronomers search for Earth-mass planets around sun-like stars, Basant said.

“A lot of what we do can be incremental, and it’s sometimes hard to see the bigger picture,” said study coauthor Jacob Bean, a professor in the University of Chicago’s department of astronomy and astrophysics. “But we found something that humanity will hopefully know forever. That sense of discovery is incredible.”

The search for nearby planets

While the Proxima Centauri system is the closest to our solar system at a distance of 4.25 light-years away, it comprises three stars circling one another, making Barnard’s Star the nearest single star system.

Now, astronomers know that planets orbit the two closest star systems to our solar system.

Barnard’s Star has served as a kind of white whale for astronomers over the decades as they have tried to find evidence of planets orbiting it, only to be disproven as false positives later, “likely due to the limited sensitivity of earlier instruments,” Basant said.

Many exoplanets have been discovered as they transit, or pass in front of, their host star, creating an observable dip in starlight suggesting the presence of a planet.

But the elusive planets orbiting Barnard’s Star do not transit, meaning they don’t pass in front of their star from the perspective of telescopes on Earth and can’t be detected with powerful space observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope.

The research team, led by Bean, captured data from Barnard’s Star over the course of 112 nights spanning a period of three years. The data showed evidence for three planets orbiting Barnard’s Star, two of which had been previously suggested as potential planets.

The researchers then combined their findings with data captured using the ESPRESSO instrument on the Very Large Telescope in Chile by a different team that authored an October 2024 study. The combined dataset confirmed the existence of a fourth exoplanet.

“We observed at different times of night on different days. They’re in Chile; we’re in Hawaii. Our teams didn’t coordinate with each other at all,” Basant said. “That gives us a lot of assurance that these aren’t phantoms in the data. It’s thrilling to witness the precision of next-generation spectrographs like MAROON-X and ESPRESSO. Their ability to detect sub-Earth mass planets for the first time feels like unlocking a new level in a game, filled with unknown possibilities.”

MAROON-X, which began as a temporary “visitor” instrument, is now being converted to a permanent one after its detections.

“I am very happy to see that new MAROON-X data provide an independent confirmation of the planet b and candidates c and d, and together with the ESPRESSO data, the analysis makes the detection significantly more robust,” said Jonay González Hernández, lead author of the October 2024 paper and a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain. He was not involved in the new study.

Guinan said the planets described within the study “look like a firm discovery.”

“Finally, real planets have been discovered around Barnard’s Star after several false alarms over the past (50 years),” Guinan said.

SUVs now rule the road

Small electric cars were said to be the future – but SUVs now rule the road

Navin Singh Khadka

Across the globe more and more Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs) are being spotted on – and off – the roads.

This is despite predictions from the United Nations of an inevitable pivot towards smaller and more environmentally friendly vehicles because of the urgency of the climate crisis and the rising cost of living.

That pivot has not materialised: globally, 54% of the cars sold in 2024 were SUVs, including petrol, diesel, hybrids and electric makes. This is an increase of three percentage points from 2023 and five percentage points from the year before, according to GlobalData.

Of the SUVs which are now on the road – both new and older models – 95% are burning fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Manufacturers, however, say their new fleets of such cars are increasingly becoming electric, and that not all SUVs now being sold cause an increase in emissions.

SUVs are hard to miss. They are heavy and larger with spacious interiors, higher ground clearance and a high driving position with a better view of the road, although smaller versions are also on the market.

Environmental campaigners such as Greenpeace see SUVs as one of the villains of the climate crisis and argue that their manufacturing consumes significant resources given their size.

Experts also say they require larger batteries to power their electric versions, which then further increases the demand for critical minerals, putting even more pressure on the planet.

Momentum was thought to be with smaller, energy-efficient electric vehicles. But the sales of standard-sized electric vehicles (EVs) has actually decreased in major markets such as Japan and Germany, and their sales growth has slowed in India.

And in Europe, sales of SUVs have outpaced those of EVs despite indications more than half a decade ago of an opposite trend. In Europe in 2018, 3.27 million small hatchbacks – both those powered by fossil fuels and those by electricity – were sold while 2.13 million were sold in 2024, according to GlobalData.

Its sales forecast manager Sammy Chan said: "This is partly because of the SUV alternatives being offered in smaller [sizes] whose sales in Europe have now grown to nearly to 2.5 million in 2024 from 1.5 million in 2018."

China saw the largest sales of nearly 11.6 million SUVs in 2024 followed by the US, India and Germany, according to GlobalData.

What is driving this SUV growth?

Industry experts say people's purchasing power has been improving in many fast-emerging economies, making SUVs the likelier choice of car.

"Manufacturers respond to consumer demand and, increasingly, drivers are attracted to dual purpose vehicles given their practicality, comfort and good view of the road," said Mike Hawes who is the chief executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).

Automobile industry analysts also say that manufacturers are attracted to high profit margins from SUVs: they can make more money from SUVs even though they make fewer vehicles.

"It is the industry that has driven the demand through huge marketing and advertising campaigns in recent years," said Dudley Curtis, the communications manager at the European Transport Safety Council.

"SUVs offered the industry a simple way of charging more for a vehicle that does the same thing [as others]," he said.

Are SUVs an issue?

Because of the robust growth in SUVs sales, the IEA says oil consumption of these vehicles has increased by 600,000 barrels per day globally between 2022 and 2023, accounting for more than a quarter of the total annual rise in global oil demand.

"If ranked among countries, the global fleet of SUVs would be the world's fifth largest emitter of CO2, exceeding the emissions of Japan and various other major economies," said Apostolous Petropolous, an energy modeller with the IEA.

The agency says that even when compared to medium-sized cars that run on petrol and diesel, SUVs burn 20% more of such fuels as they weigh up to 300 kg more on average.

In fact, road transport is responsible for more than 12% of global carbon emissions which is the main driver of global warming. Scientists say all sectors must rapidly decarbonise if we are to avoid a climate catastrophe.

But industry representatives say in response that not all SUVs now being sold cause an increase in emissions.

"Around two in five of these [new] vehicle models are zero emission as their body type lends itself well to electrification with longer battery range that can reassure consumers concerned about charging accessibility," said Hawes, from the SMMT.

"This has led to the average CO2 emissions of new dual purpose cars more than halving since 2000, helping the segment lead the decarbonisation of UK road mobility."

Although the vast majority of new SUVs still burn fossil fuels, IEA officials have said that over 20% of SUVs sold in 2023 were fully electric, up from 2% in 2018.

As for hybrids that can run on both electricity and fossil fuels, a study in Europe by the International Council on Clean Transportation in 2022 found only around 30% of the total distance driven by plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (all types including SUVs) was in electric mode on average.

Similar results were found in other major economies such as the US and China.

Overall, the back-gear towards SUVs, some experts say, has caused a significant setback in the decarbonisation of the transport sector.

"The trend toward heavier and less efficient vehicles such as SUVs (in countries where it is happening) has largely nullified the improvements in energy consumption and emissions achieved elsewhere in the world's passenger car fleet," said the IEA.

The UK Parliament's climate change committee had a similar finding in its 2024 report on decarbonisation in the country.

Deportations to El Salvador

White House denies defying judge's order over deportations to El Salvador

James FitzGerald

The White House has denied an accusation from rights groups that it flouted due process by defying a judge's order while carrying out deportations at the weekend.

A group of 238 alleged Venezuelan gang members, plus 23 alleged members of the international MS-13 gang, were sent from the US to a prison in El Salvador. Some were removed from the country under a law not used since World War Two.

The move came despite a temporary block issued by a judge. The White House said the judge's order itself was not lawful and was issued after the group was deported.

Neither the US government nor El Salvador has identified the detainees, or provided details of their alleged criminality or gang membership.

Announcing the move on Saturday, Trump accused Tren de Aragua (TdA) of "perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States".

He invoked the Alien Enemies Act - a piece of legislation that dates to 1798, which was designed to allow non-citizens to be deported in times of war or invasion. Campaigners have questioned Trump's justification.

The act was used to process 137 of the total of 261 people who were deported, a senior administration official told CBS News, the BBC's US partner.

The basis on which the other deportees were removed from the US remains unclear, and details of the group as a whole have not been disclosed.

Several relatives of men believed to be among the group told the New York Times that their loved ones did not have gang ties.

The order to halt the deportations came from US District Judge James Boasberg on Saturday evening, who demanded a 14-day pause pending further legal arguments.

After lawyers told him that planes with deportees had already taken off, the judge reportedly gave a verbal order for the flights to turn back, although that directive did not form part of his written ruling.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied the court ruling had been broken. "The administration did not 'refuse to comply' with a court order," she said.

"The order, which had no lawful basis, was issued after terrorist TdA [Tren de Aragua] aliens had already been removed from US territory."

The justice department echoed Leavitt, saying the deportees had already left before the judge's ruling - which it has appealed against.

The case raises constitutional questions since, under the US system of checks and balances, government agencies are expected to comply with a federal judge's ruling.

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele confirmed the arrival of deportees. "Oopsie... Too late," he said of the judge's order, writing on social media. His team also published footage of some of the men inside one of its mega-jails.

Rights groups accused Trump of using a 227-year-old law to circumvent due process.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) questioned Trump's use of a sweeping wartime authority which allows fast-track deportations. "I think we're in very dangerous territory here in the United States with the invocation of this law," said Lee Gelernt from the organisation.

The Alien Enemies Act only allowed deportations when the US was in a declared war with that foreign government, or was being invaded, Mr Gelernt said. "A gang is not invading," he told BBC News.

The act was last used during World War Two to intern Japanese-American civilians.

Making matters worse was the fact "the administration is saying nobody can review what they're doing", Mr Gelernt added.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International USA said the deportations were "yet another example of the Trump administration's racist targeting" of Venezuelans "based on sweeping claims of gang affiliation".

Venezuela itself criticised Trump, saying he "unjustly criminalises Venezuelan migration".

The latest deportations under Trump's second term are part of the president's long-running campaign against illegal immigration.

The US president has also moved to strengthen ties with El Salvador.

The two gangs targeted with the weekend deportations were declared "foreign terrorist organisations" by Trump after returning to the White House in January.

Good luck without FEMA........

Residents survey the aftermath of deadly weekend storms across the southern U.S.

Emma Bowman

Residents in large swaths of the southern U.S. on Sunday took stock of the devastation left in the wake of tornadoes, strong winds and dust storms over the weekend.

The severe weather left at least 37 people dead, and destroyed scores of homes.

This bout of storms was forecast to clear the East Coast by Sunday night, according to the National Weather Service.

In Missouri, where 12 people died, first responders and road crews worked to clear debris, restore power to homes, and distribute recovery supplies.

Gov. Mike Kehoe's office said Sunday that hundreds of homes, schools and businesses were destroyed of severely damaged, with some burned from wildfires aggravated by high winds.

"The scale of devastation across our state is staggering," Gov. Kehoe said. "While we grieve the lives of those lost, we are also focused on action."

In Butler County, a man was killed after a tornado ripped through his home. Coroner Jim Akers told the AP that the twister left his home "unrecognizable" with "just a debris field."

Hurricane force winds in Oklahoma, fueled deadly wildfires and dust storms. Residents there spent Saturday surveying fire damage, after more than 170,000 acres burned.

By Sunday afternoon, an early assessment from local officials identified more than 400 homes damaged statewide. Four people died and 142 others were injured due to the fires and winds, officials said.

Cheryl Rabet of Stillwater lost her home in the blazes, as well as two RVs she rented out, reported KOSU's Lionel Ramos.

"We didn't have a chance to grab anything," she said, including their 16-year-old cat Momo. "We grabbed one of our cats and that was about it."

The Red Cross and other relief efforts have been providing food and other resources for shelters across parts of Oklahoma and other affected regions.

Brady Moore, Stillwater city manager, warned that it may still be unsafe for residents to return to neighborhoods in the path of destruction, while crews work to repair downed powerlines and shut off water and gas lines.

Damage assessments in the majority of Alabama counties continued on Sunday, said Gov. Kay Ivey. Three people died in the state, she said.

In Troy, Ala., where a tornado flipped an 18-wheeler truck, about 200 people took shelter at a recreation center, reported local CBS station WAKA News.

"Right as the last people got in, the storm passed over, blowing out windows in cars in the parking lot, and tearing off part of the gymnasium roof," said Dan Smith, the director of the city's parks and recreation department. "Our sports complex, including the baseball and softball park, also suffered major damage. But we're very fortunate—it could've been a lot worse."

There were no injuries.

In Texas on Sunday, fire crews were battling a 9,500-acres blaze in Fredericksburg, in central Texas. The grass fire was more than half contained as of Sunday evening, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service.

Across the state, more than 42,000 acres were burning from 36 fires on Sunday night, the service said.

The threat of fires was expected to continue into the week, with a red flag warning – signaling a high risk of wildfire conditions -- was expected to be reinstated for South Central Texas on Monday, as Texas Public Radio reported.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Sunday that the state was granted federal assistance to help fight the fires.

"Texas is working around the clock to provide all necessary resources to local officials fighting wildfires in Gray and Gillespie counties," he said.

Reimagine the university........

Trump’s attacks on higher ed could provide a chance to reimagine the university

Academia runs on underpaid, overworked PhD students. It doesn’t have to.

by Celia Ford

On Monday, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) posted on X that it would terminate over 400 grants, adding up to some $250 million in funding, to Columbia University over its response to pro-Palestinian protests. The following day, the Trump administration pulled $800 million in USAID-related grants from Johns Hopkins University, academia’s biggest research and development spender.

These cuts come on top of last month’s announcement of major rollbacks to what are known as indirect costs — money the NIH gives research institutions on top of project-specific grants to cover necessary expenses like building maintenance, utilities, and administrative staff salaries. Many universities — both large and small, public and private — rely on the NIH to sustain a lot of their day-to-day operations.

Any threat to that funding poses an existential threat to higher education. Without the jobs, medical research, and technological developments made possible by these institutions, people outside of academia could miss out on breakthrough treatments for diseases like cancer, and will be more vulnerable to public health crises. As a result, the US will likely lose its technological competitiveness on a global scale, which could damage the economy in the long run.

The indirect cost cuts have been temporarily blocked by a federal judge, but the chaos still compelled many universities to preemptively tighten their belts. Some institutions are paring back on graduate programs: freezing new faculty hires and PhD student applications, accepting fewer students than usual, or even rescinding existing offer letters. The UMass Chan Medical School pulled back on all of its admissions offers for the fall 2025 term, blaming funding uncertainty for biomedical research.

Why exactly has the Trump administration seemingly declared war on academic biomedical research? In theory, depriving future researchers of places in academia could push them toward the private sector, which potentially aligns with a conservative pro-business approach. But the antipathy goes deeper than that.

Vice President JD Vance has said that “the universities are the enemy.” Attacking science and higher education, whether under the guise of reducing taxpayer waste or punishing antisemitism, was always part of this administration’s plan. But its haphazard destabilization of the scientific enterprise won’t automatically funnel would-be biomedical PhDs into pharmaceutical or biotech companies, especially when there already aren’t enough jobs in those industries now to absorb the flood of highly educated people applying for them. If turned away from grad school, it’s more likely that young scientists will take their talents to other countries, or leave the field altogether.

While the headlines have been about STEM funding, academic departments that fall far outside the NIH’s purview — like history, or comparative literature — are also being affected. That’s because research groups in STEM departments bring in the big federal grants universities depend on, while arts and humanities research largely rely on money the university pulls from endowments, tuition, and state funding. Without the NIH’s money, universities may be forced to divert funds from humanities to STEM departments, where research facilities and equipment are way more expensive.

As a result, when well-resourced STEM departments fall, they take humanities down with them. And when graduate programs downsize, universities lose the PhD students that keep research and undergraduate education afloat. And without grad student labor, the whole academic system crumbles.

Academics are terrified, and they should be. There’s only so much instability that young scholars can stomach to chase careers that the government is actively destroying. We risk losing an entire generation of future experts, and the potential harm that could cause is incalculable.

And yet, even academia’s stoutest defenders would acknowledge there were serious problems with STEM graduate education even before Trump took office again. If done intentionally, downsizing PhD training programs could be a good thing. While the way these sudden funding cuts are being carried out cause far more chaos than positive change, universities do need fewer PhD students — and to take better care of those they admit.

We have too many grad students

For most of American history, higher education was limited to the privileged few. That changed after World War II, when the GI Bill made universities dramatically more accessible. Cold War-era investments, many of them motivated by post-Sputnik competition with the Soviet Union, subsidized the growth of PhD programs in STEM fields, all aiming to advance the nation’s strategic interests in science and military readiness. And those fields kept growing.

Today, the pool of potential PhD candidates across all disciplines is much larger than it was during the Cold War. Roughly 40 percent of Americans over 25 are college graduates, and over 8.5 million of them have a doctorate or professional degree. Earning a medical, law, or business administration degree often equips students for high-earning careers (and, in many cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt).

But the academic job market is bleak for newly minted PhDs, and it has been for decades. In STEM fields, it’s not uncommon for PhD grads to spend at least five years in postdoctoral positions, earning under $60,000 annually, all with no guarantee of ever landing a faculty job. And while STEM grads who can’t find a home in academia can often turn to jobs in biopharma or engineering, humanities graduates are much more dependent on academic employment — and those jobs are increasingly scarce. In 2020, fewer than half of new humanities PhDs had a job lined up at graduation.

When much of what you’re producing can’t find a market, it’s a good sign you’re oversupplying. But while the glut of PhDs is bad for recent graduates, it is convenient for universities that use grad students as a cheap, talented, and highly motivated workforce. Because they are often defined as “trainees,” universities often get away with treating early-career academics like apprentices, rather than workers.

More grad students means more research and teaching for a fraction of the cost of hiring full-time professors to do the same. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, unionization efforts among grad students are generally met with hostility from administration and faculty, who fear stalled scientific progress and undergraduate education.)

As universities are forced to pare down on graduate admissions in light of Trump’s attacks on science and higher education, they’ll have to reckon with the consequences of losing the people who do the bulk of academia’s dirty work. With fewer junior scientists, research groups will produce less data and publish fewer papers, potentially jeopardizing the careers of young professors who rely on trainees and publications to earn tenure. Fewer graduate student instructors will also mean inflated class sizes for undergraduates.

It’s easy to dismiss cuts to PhD programs as problems confined to ivory towers. I spent six years earning a neuroscience PhD, and it’s difficult to garner sympathy for someone who voluntarily sacrificed the bulk of her twenties studying the intricacies of the orbitofrontal cortex. But the truth is that academic research lays the groundwork for virtually every innovation and advancement that comes from private corporations. Fundamental research — even that which doesn’t have any obvious market value — drives progress. When universities lose part of their academic workforce, the costs extend far beyond campus.

The question isn’t whether we need researchers — we do. It’s how we can sustainably support knowledge production while treating academic workers with the dignity they deserve.

PhD programs have no choice but to focus on quality, not quantity

“As long as I’ve been in the profession, science has run on a series of strange cultural practices that rely on uncompensated labor,” C. Brandon Ogbunu, an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale, wrote in Undark last week.

Generations of researchers have accepted these conditions as part of the job, but they’re not. Exploitative systems can — and should — be dismantled and rebuilt. Not through the chaos and confusion of Trump’s cuts, but through gradual admissions reductions and strategic cuts to brand-boosting money pits (like sports).

There is an opportunity to envision a better academia — one that values, adequately trains, and fairly compensates young scholars. When researchers aren’t scrambling to make ends meet or anxious about their career prospects, they can devote more mental energy to their work. Properly supported scholars take bigger intellectual risks, and are more likely to pursue ambitious, potentially groundbreaking work. And, quite simply, all workers deserve a living wage.

Ranking systems, which are used to recruit students and establish a reputation, often include ratios of doctoral students to total students or faculty in their calculations. NIH grants also require applicants to prove they’ve trained and retained PhD students, incentivizing universities to produce more PhDs — whether those graduates have job prospects or not. One potential fix: admit fewer grad students, pay each student more, and measure success in terms of individual job placements, mentorship quality, and research impact. Long-term positions for senior scientists and lecturers can pick up the slack, and maintain institutional memory better than a transient workforce-in-training ever could.

Without these incentives, departments won’t be punished by funders for reducing graduate program admissions or for supporting students in leaving if grad school ends up being a poor fit. With fewer students to support, universities could afford to increase PhD stipends, many of which currently fall well below the cost of living, especially in humanities departments. (PhD stipends usually range between $20,000 and $45,000 per year, with many universities paying humanities and social science students thousands less than that.)

As the foreign aid community comes to terms with the fact that it needs to be ruthless about prioritizing what it can do with fewer resources, academia may need to do the same. As devastating as these cuts to higher education are, it may be the shock the system needs to make much-needed changes. Pulling the rug out from under hopeful PhD applicants was not the way to downsize academia — but we do have too many PhDs. On the other side of this chaos, if there’s anything left at all, could be a pared-down system that prioritizes quality over quantity.

The Economist published a cynical take on grad school back in 2010: “Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done,” they write. “Few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else.”

But producing specialized knowledge creators and expert researchers is a good deal for any country trying to solve big societal problems, and devaluing it risks driving smart people out of the US, where their work is under attack. While PhD programs often fail to teach students how to teach, communicate with regular people, or navigate corporate politics, they do train people to read deeply, plan challenging projects, and execute them with discipline. We need that now more than ever.

Implicit digs.....

Canada’s Carney starts first trip abroad with implicit digs at Trump

The new prime minister dubbed Canada “the most European of non-European countries” while speaking alongside French President Emmanuel Macron.

By Victor Goury-Laffont

New Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney began his first trip overseas since taking office by saying his country needed to work with "reliable allies," a clear shot at U.S. President Donald Trump.

"It's more important than ever that Canada reinforces its ties with our reliable allies like France," Carney said while appearing alongside French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris at the Elysée Palace. "We know that economic collaboration, not confrontation, is the way to build strong economies."

Carney appeared to emphasize the word "reliable," looking directly at Macron as he said the word in French. The former Canadian and English central banker's grasp of French, an official language in Canada, has been a point of debate in domestic political circles. While he speaks French well, he is not natively bilingual.

Carney, who was sworn in as prime minister on Friday, is traveling to France and the United Kingdom on Monday to shore up transatlantic support for Ottawa as it faces tariffs and annexation threats from Washington. Trump has slapped duties on several imports coming from U.S. trading partners like the European Union and Canada, most notably on steel and aluminum. Canada has hit back with retaliatory measures, while the European Commission has said it is ready to do so.

"I want to ensure that France and all of Europe work enthusiastically with Canada — the most European of non-European countries," Carney said in what appeared to be a nod to suggestions that Canada should join the EU.

A recent survey from Canadian pollster Abacus data found that 44 percent of Canadian respondents believe their country should join the EU, while only 34 percent oppose the idea — although EU membership is reserved to European countries.

Macron stressed that he and Carney shared a belief that "fair trade that respects international rules is good for everyone's prosperity. Certainly more effective than inflation-creating tariffs that damage production chains and the integration of our economies."

Both Carney and Macron underlined the shared economic opportunities for their countries in fields including AI and quantum technology. Earlier in the day, Carney visited the reconstructed Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris and met with the Canadian ambassador and former Liberal leader Stéphane Dion.

Later on Monday, he will travel to the U.K. to meet with Prime Minister Keir Starmer and King Charles III.

It is unclear whether Carney will have more opportunities for trips abroad as prime minister, as he is expected to call for new elections as early as this month.

Wipe Out Years of Progress

Trump Prepares to Wipe Out Years of Progress on Gun Violence

An executive order threatens “ghost gun” regulations, red flag laws, and more.

Mark Follman

By the time Joe Biden became president in January 2021, guns were the top killer of children and teens in America, overtaking car crashes and cancer as the leading cause of death. As that trend continued, the Biden White House responded with gun safety policies to enforce existing laws and bolster gun-violence prevention programs. In June 2022, following mass shootings at a grocery store in Buffalo, NY, and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, Congress passed gun legislation for the first time in three decades. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act strengthened background checks for some gun buyers and prohibitions for domestic abusers, and it dedicated about $15 billion for states to build mental health and violence intervention programs. The Biden White House later established the Office of Gun Violence Prevention and an initiative to help states implement “red flag” laws that allow for removing guns from troubled people who pose a danger to themselves or others.

These policies at a broad level have coincided with a reduction in gun violence nationally: By 2024, shooting homicides overall were in steady decline throughout the country. Mass shootings also declined, both by conservative and broader measures of the problem.

Now, President Donald Trump has moved quickly to undo the progress made with gun safety policies. He shut down the Office of Gun Violence Prevention immediately after taking office. And on Feb. 7, he signed an executive order directing US Attorney General Pam Bondi to “examine all orders, regulations, guidance, plans, international agreements, and other actions of executive departments and agencies” from Biden’s term, to assess whether those “infringe on the Second Amendment rights” of Americans. Within 30 days, Bondi is to give Trump “a plan of action.”

Trump made clear during his 2024 campaign what that plan is likely to do. At the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in Dallas last May, he vowed to “roll back every Biden attack on the Second Amendment.”

Areas at risk could include efforts to combat the emerging danger from untraceable firearms that are made from kits or using 3-D printers, known as “ghost guns.” Trump has a history from his first term in office of undermining regulation of these weapons. When Biden became president, crime involving ghost guns was skyrocketing. Biden moved to make such firearms subject to serial numbers and background checks, and later established an ATF task force to focus on the problem. (A gun industry-backed challenge to Biden’s ghost gun policy is currently at the Supreme Court.) By 2023, crimes using ghost guns began declining nationally.

The problem of ghost guns came back into stark view in December, when a disgruntled 26-year-old man allegedly used one to execute UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a street in New York City. That attack apparently was the first time a ghost gun was used for a high-profile assassination.

Red flag laws, which have strong bipartisan support among voters and spread to nearly half of all states in recent years, are also vulnerable under Trump. In early 2024, then-Vice President Kamala Harris announced a new center based at Johns Hopkins University to provide technical and training support to states implementing the laws, an initiative funded with a grant from the US Justice Department. Studies in California and elsewhere have shown that these laws— which allow a civil court judge to remove guns temporarily based on evidence that a person poses a threat—are effective for preventing suicide and mass shootings.

Trump in fact openly supported red flag laws following a spate of gun massacres in summer 2019. But in 2022, he blasted the bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which provided states with funding for red flag laws, painting it as a nefarious gun grab by “Radical Left Democrats” and “RINO” senators including Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn.

Demagoguery from Trump and the firearms industry about government “gun grabs” is disconnected from the reality in the United States. There are more than 400 million guns in circulation today, far surpassing the total population. Americans buy more than a million guns every month, and in many states there are few restrictions on doing so. The number of civilian-owned AR-15s—a popular rifle that was designed for maximum killing in war and became a profit center for the industry—has ballooned to well over 20 million. In recent years those became the weapon of choice for mass shooters, too.

Trump’s supporters in the gun industry now anticipate a big political payoff.

“NRA members were instrumental, turning out in record numbers to secure his victory, and he is proving worthy of their votes, faith, and confidence in his first days in office,” NRA CEO Doug Hamlin said in a statement after Trump’s executive order.

“Gun owners fought hard to elect a president who would take a sledgehammer to Biden’s unconstitutional gun control policies, and today, President Trump proved he’s serious about that fight,” Aidan Johnston, a director for Gun Owners of America, said in a statement. “We hope that this executive order is just the first of many victories reestablishing our Second Amendment rights during the Trump administration.”

Gun safety advocates are sounding the alarm, including those galvanized by the devastating high school massacre that took place seven years ago Friday in Parkland, Florida.

“Trump’s priorities couldn’t be more clear. Spoiler: it’s not protecting kids. Gun deaths finally went down last year, and Trump just moved to undo the rules and laws that helped make that happen,” said Natalie Fall, Executive Director of March For Our Lives, in a statement. “He is going to get Americans killed in his thirst for vengeance and eagerness to please the gun lobby and rally armed extremists. Remember the next time that a mass shooting happens, Trump did everything in his power to enable it, not prevent it.”

Horrific Details

The Horrific Details of Mahmoud Khalil’s Detainment

Khalil’s lawyers “have reason to believe” the White House is involved.

Sophie Hurwitz

Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate who is Palestinian, was detained by the Department of Homeland Security almost one week ago. Since then, Khalil, who is in the United States on a green card, has still not been charged with a crime. And representatives from Columbia University remain markedly silent on his case. On Friday morning, the university said the Trump administration sent ICE agents to raid Columbia dorms. 

Amid the crackdown, the arrest has sparked large protests—both for Khalil’s individual freedom, and for the Palestinian cause he publicly championed on Columbia’s campus.

“He has no connections to Hamas whatsoever. His one and only goal was to get Columbia University to divest from its complicity in Israeli government crimes in Gaza and the West Bank.” 

For many days, it was unclear how Khalil was being detained, as lawyers struggled to talk to their client. We now have a better idea of the horrific conditions Khalil has gone through since his arrest. The former Columbia student’s legal team released an updated filing on Thursday, detailing the circumstances of his case. They also held a press conference today, further elucidating what has happened to Khalil.

Here are some key details: 

Unclear Legality of Detainment

The legal logic for Khalil’s deportation is obscure. The case against him rests on a little-used provision of the law that allows the Secretary of State to determine whether he is someone whose “presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious foreign policy consequences for the United States.” Per Khalil’s lawyers, “Secretary Rubio made this determination based on Mr. Khalil’s lawful activity protected by the First Amendment: his participation in protests and his statements regarding Palestine and Israel.” However, Secretary Rubio cannot just unilaterally revoke Khalil’s green card without process, his lawyers say. Amy Belsher of NYCLU said such claims are “extremely misleading,” and that the state still must “prove in immigration court that he is deportable under the Immigration and Nationality Act.” 

Lawyers Say White House Was Possibly Involved in Khalil’s Arrest

The White House, Khalil’s lawyers say, may be directly involved in their clinet’s detainment. “During his transport, Mahmoud was transferred through various state lines…during that process, he was surrounded by many people he believed to be DHS agents. He believes that he heard one of them say that the White House wants an update on what’s going on,” Samah Sisay, of the Center for Constitutional Rights said. “We have reason to believe that many people within the executive branch of the government were involved, including the White House.” 

DHS Official Implied “Pro-Palestine Activity” Is a Criminal Act

When pressed as to what Khalil’s “activities with serious foreign policy consequences” are, DHS has been oblique. One official, Troy Edgar, recently went on NPR’s Morning Edition. When questioned on why Khalil was arrested, he had few answers and conflated “pro-Palestine activity” with a criminal act. One of Khalil’s lawyers, Ramzi Kassem of CUNY’s CLEAR law project, said that while Trump administration officials have accused Khalil of “distributing pro-Hamas fliers” outside of court, the state has introduced no such evidence. “As we are all sadly all too familiar, the White House makes all kinds of claims about all kinds of subjects, and this is no exception,” Kassem said. “They have not introduced any fliers in court, and Mr. Khalil vehemently denies doing anything like that. He has no connections to Hamas whatsoever. His one and only goal was to get Columbia University to divest from its complicity in Israeli government crimes in Gaza and the West Bank.” 

Khalil Is Being Held In a Private Prison in Louisiana

Khalil is being held at the LaSalle Detention Facility in Jena, Louisiana, a GEO Group-owned private prison that houses thousands of immigrants and is notorious for poor conditions. In 2023, over 300 detainees at the facility attempted a hunger strike to protest medical neglect, inadequate personal hygiene items, and long waits for immigration hearings.

The Trump Administration Reportedly Threatened Columbia to Crackdown

On Thursday, the Trump administration sent a letter to Columbia University, demanding that the school comply with MAGA political priorities in order for $400 million of its federal funding to be restored. The letter called for a full on-campus mask ban, the expulsion of student activists, further authority to arrest students on campus, and that the Middle East, South Asian, and Africa Studies department be placed under external supervision. 

Khalil Asked Columbia for Protection

The night before DHS agents arrested him at his university-owned apartment building, Khalil sent Columbia an email asking for protection from potential retaliation by the Trump administration. “I urgently need legal support, and I urge you to intervene and provide the necessary protections to prevent further harm,” Khalil wrote. 

Pro-Israeli Groups Pushed American Politicians to Target Khalil

Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania) reportedly worked with Ross Glick of the fascist-influenced pro-Israel organization Betar to escalate the matter of Khalil’s address to the highest levels of the Trump administration. Betar claims to have submitted “thousands of names” of student activists to the government. 

Khalil and Other Students Sued Columbia University

Another lawsuit, filed by Khalil and a group of anonymous Columbia students, accuses the university of collaborating with the Trump administration by illegally sharing student disciplinary records with Congress and other third parties. 

Khalil Compared His Detention to Kidnapping Experienced in Syria

Khalil will likely remain at the LaSalle/Jena facility in Louisiana until at least March 17th. His first child is due within the month. His wife, being eight months pregnant, is unable to fly to Louisiana. 

In the legal briefing, Khalil said the arrest by DHS felt like he was being “kidnapped.” It reminded him, the briefing says, of “fleeing arbitrary detention in Syria and forced disappearance of his friends in Syria in 2013.”

Another Columbia Student Has Been Arrested

Another Palestinian Columbia student, Leqaa Kordia, who is originally from the West Bank, was arrested March 14th for overstaying her student visa, according to DHS. DHS secretary Kristi Noem alleged in a statement that Kordia “advocate[d] for violence,” but did not elaborate on that claim. 

Plan to Protect Us??????

The Framers Had a Plan to Protect Us From Elon Musk

“If Trump gets away with doing this, we’re going back to the 18th century.”

Pema Levy

In an extraordinary show of the power that Elon Musk now exercises over the United States government, last week he joined a cabinet meeting in which he delivered a tongue-lashing to Marco Rubio. On paper, Rubio is the Senate-confirmed Secretary of State, while Musk is a mere adviser to the president without any power. But according to an account of the meeting in the New York Times, Musk is the one who has been in charge. Rubio tussled with Musk in the meeting, reportedly angry that Musk and his DOGE team had essentially shuttered the US Agency for International Development (USAID) that is technically under Rubio’s control. 

President Donald Trump reportedly called the meeting last Thursday to settle power struggles between Musk and the cabinet secretaries, and answer a question: who, exactly, is in charge? Ask Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who the Times says complained about DOGE’s push to lay off air traffic controllers as he tries to deal with multiple plane crashes. In the same meeting, Duffy reportedly told Musk that he had stopped the layoffs, an indication that Duffy remains at least partially in charge of his agency. Musk informed Duffy that he had his phone number and could call him if Duffy encountered any problems with what DOGE was doing. That sounds like Musk is in charge. According to the Times, Trump clarified at the meeting that Musk can no longer boss around cabinet members—an indication that for nearly two months Musk has had such power and, despite Trump’s new rule, may well continue to.

While this drama is spilling out in the press, it’s legally relevant. Multiple challenges to Musk and the actions of his Department of Government Efficiency allege his vast authority violates the Appointments Clause, one of the Constitutions key anti-corruption measures. Under this clause, which the framers crafted to prevent the kingly practice of handing jobs and authority to unaccountable allies, any officer of the United States must be formally nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Moreover, such appointees must fill a role created by Congress. Musk’s exercise of vast authority, at least four lawsuits allege, is unconstitutional, as he was neither confirmed by the Senate nor is he serving in any role Congress created. “You don’t have to stretch the text very far to see that there is a problem under [the Appointments Clause in] Article Two,” says Jed Shugerman, a law professor and historian at Boston University School of Law.

The cases—including one from current and former USAID officials, one by multiple states (in which a district judge on Wednesday ordered the goverment to turn over documents as part of the discovery process), one filed by the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center on behalf of an array of nonprofits, and one by the head of the United States African Development Foundation—will force the Supreme Court, perhaps sooner rather than later, to decide whether the president can empower random people with vast discretion outside of any Congressional control. It’s a question that may prove tricky for the court’s GOP-appointed majority, which, while it has been steadily increasing the power of the president, usually justifies this empowerment by claiming it increases democratic accountability.

“If it turns out that, as Donald Trump has continuously said, Musk is actually exercising significant government power…that allows him to overrule or countermand cabinet level officers,” says Noah Rosenblum, a professor at New York University School of Law, “then there are definitely questions about what position he has been appointed to and whether the authority he is exercising is consistent with the method of appointment.” 

As the cabinet meeting demonstrated, it’s not just litigants but also agency heads who believe Musk’s unfettered authority has become a problem. According to news reports, Musk’s own social media posts, the reports of other lawmakers, and even Donald Trump’s own words, Elon Musk is leading the Department of Government Efficiency. This so-called department is filled with Musks’ longtime loyalists, who for years have helped run his companies, as well as former interns from his companies, red-pilled young men now empowered to seize control of federal agencies. DOGE exerts its control, in part, by entering the sensitive payment systems of federal agencies, including the Treasury Department, Social Security Administration, and USAID, exercising a blueprint for a government takeover that Musk envisioned before Trump was even re-elected. 

The ultimate question in these legal challenges is whether Musk is indeed fulfilling a position subject to the process laid out in the Appointments Clause. The Constitution requires officers to be nominated and confirmed; another class of inferior officer can simply be appointed by the president or other officials. But the administration contends that Musk is neither kind of officer, with government lawyers insisting in court that he is merely an employee and adviser. So the question becomes, is Musk truly wielding the kind of power we are all witnessing—a legal version of the Marx brothers line, Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? 

The Supreme Court has established multiple criteria for discerning which positions are inferior and which are non-inferior officers. One indicator that according to precedent can make someone a non-inferior officer—which the court calls a principal officer—is whether the role wields “significant authority” by, for example, “determining the eligibility of funds” and making decisions regarding contracts or purchases. Musk has that in spades.

To assess Musk according to this test, consider the case of USAID, and specifically, how DOGE overrode not just Congress’ spending power but also Rubio’s authority. First, Congress appropriated money for foreign aid. This appropriation is spending required by law. After the Trump administration attempted to unilaterally halt it, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a department head confirmed by the Senate, announced that some humanitarian aid, including for HIV treatments in Africa, would proceed. USAID staff then prepared to distribute these funds. 

But, according to an account in the Washington Post, this authorized funding was blocked by two young DOGE staffers through USAID’s payment system. At first, this process required them, as the Post reported, to “manually check boxes in the payment system one at a time, the same tedious way you probably pay your bills online.” Eventually, the DOGE bros seized control of the system entirely: “They became the only people who could even see the payments waiting to be approved. Hardly any of the essential funding promised by Rubio had been processed as of last week.” No wonder Rubio was pissed.

“Stopping payments from going through, that’s executive power,” says Shugerman. “That’s why he’s a principal officer.” 

As part of the public clean-up effort after the Cabinet meeting, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick took the latest talking points to NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. When asked whether he or Musk runs his agency, Lutnick wouldn’t confirm that he was in charge. “Elon Musk is your partner,” he said. “He’s your partner in technology, he’s your partner in thought, he’s your partner in doing. What President Trump made clear, is that Elon is your partner.” Lutnick was confirmed by the Senate. His partner was not.

The courts will eventually decide if Musk is an employee, an inferior officer, or a principal officer; a finding he is either type of officer would raise constitutional problems, because his position was not created by Congress.

The Supreme Court has offered guidance on how to make this determination, including in recent cases handed down under Chief Justice John Roberts. In 2018, the court held in Lucia v. SEC that the Securities and Exchange Commission was wrong to insist its administrative law judges were employees, finding that they were instead officers subject to the Appointments Clause. The case reaffirmed that no matter the job title of an employee, courts can assess that their role is that of an officer subject to the Appointments Clause. 

“If you act like a principal officer, and you walk like a principal officer, you quack like a principal officer, that is exactly how the Roberts Court has analyzed being a principal officer,” says Shugerman.

In 2021, Chief Justice John Roberts penned the decision in United States v. Arthrex, a case concerning administrative patent judges within the Commerce Department. The ruling held that the decisions of inferior officers cannot be binding, but must be reviewable by principal officers. Roberts’ clear goal in this opinion was to consolidate decision-making authority directly under the president and those who report to him, eliminating independent authority within the executive branch. In this way, it was an effort to realize the theory of the unitary executive, the idea, popular in conservative legal circles, that all executive power belongs to the president alone. Trump is now relying upon unitary executive theory to back his decisions to remove commissioners across the government and take over the decision-making of independent agencies. If Arthrex‘s holding on the Appointment Clause becomes a vehicle for reining in Musk, it would be an ironic consequence of an effort by the court’s conservatives to empower the president.

Roberts has argued that consolidating power under the president boosts democratic accountability. “It’s the idea that the government needs to be organized in such a way that the people know who to blame for what it does, and that the democratic legitimacy that inheres in the presidency can be connected to all of the acts that the government does,” explains NYU’s Rosenblum. Roberts is explicit about this in Arthrex: the power of government officials “acquires its legitimacy and accountability to the public through ‘a clear and effective chain of command’ down from the President, on whom all the people vote,” the chief justice wrote. 

But this idea of a clear chain of command underpinning the legitimacy of executive branch actions “only works,” Rosenblum warns, “if the people who are actually exercising government power have been publicly appointed to their positions by the president of the United States, and if there’s a clear understanding of what authority they exercise, and the public is able to scrutinize the authority they exercise, and the president is responsible for having explicitly placed that authority in the people who exercise it.” That doesn’t sound like Musk.

“What’s at stake in the Appointments Clause cases in general is this question of presidential responsibility—and what’s at stake in this question of what authority Elon Musk is exercising is actually the same principle of democratic responsibility,” Rosenblum continues. “Is the President of the United States running the government? Or some unaccountable private citizen with opaque responsibilities who has no democratic mandate—is that person the one who’s really the president and really running the government?”

Not only does Musk’s current role fail the logic of Roberts’ opinions justifying the unitary executive theory, it also fails the practical tests of the Roberts courts’ decisions reaffirming that anyone who exercises significant authority is an officer, and that inferior officers’ decisions must be reviewable by a principal officer. If the Supreme Court were to ultimately greenlight Musk’s position directing DOGE, it would take significant contortions on the part of Roberts and most of his GOP-appointed colleagues. It would create the absurd result that a decision over a patent requires reviewability by a superior officer but the decision to gut an agency created by Congress—despite opposition from the department’s head—does not. Put another way, it would mean a patent judge near the bottom of the Commerce Department’s organizational chart is an officer, but the guy acting as a “partner” to the Secretary of Commerce in “technology,” “thought,” and “doing,” in the words of the current commerce secretary, is a mere employee. 

The Appointments Clause was not dropped into the Constitution without significant thought, and it’s no accident its become a vehicle to stop Musk and DOGE—because that is why it’s there in the first place.

In crafting the Constitution, the Framers were fearful of recreating what they saw as the pervasive corruption in the British system they had overthrown—not just a monarchy, but one in which the parliament’s power had been curbed by the handing out of official titles. The situation meant that rather than check the king, members of parliament had joined his payroll. “I admire many parts of the British constitution and government, but I detest their corruption,” George Mason said in Philadelphia in 1787. “Why has the power of the crown so remarkably increased the last century? A stranger, by reading their laws, would suppose it considerably diminished; and yet, by the sole power of appointing the increased officers of government, corruption pervades every town and village in the kingdom.” During the 18th century, as University of Maryland economic historian John Joseph Wallis explained to me, “about half of the members of parliament were on the payroll of the king in various ways.”

Zephyr Teachout, the constitutional scholar, argues the Framers were “obsessed with corruption,” which they saw as perhaps the fledgling nation’s greatest threat, and defending against it infused the entire Constitution. The Appointments Clause was no exception. As one convention delegate later recalled, the “power of appointing to office was brought down by placing a part of it in the Legislature.” This, Teachout says, combined with a prohibition on members of Congress simultaneously holding an executive branch office, addressed the “avenues by which corruption was most likely to enter.”

Musk, in his amorphous and all-powerful role, is a throwback to just the kind of situation the Framers sought to avoid. “In the 1700s, the king appointing somebody like Musk would not at all be unusual,” says Wallis. “The political development of both the United States and Britain at the end of the 18th and beginning in the 19th century was essentially, ‘We can’t run the government this way anymore,’ Parliament saying or Congress saying, ‘No, you can’t just appoint whoever you want to do whatever you want.’” 

“If Trump gets away with doing this,” Wallis adds, “we’re going back to the 18th century.”

The Supreme Court has already made many moves that place the president above the law, including its decision last year to exempt him from almost all criminal prosecution. In a series of cases, including Arthrex, the Roberts court has helped to consolidate presidential power over federal agencies. The legality of Musk’s appointment is bound up in these questions, but also challenges the Supreme Court to disregard its own stated justification for these changes. “The most important, powerful offices need to be confirmed by the Senate, and checks and balances is a central part of this entire vision,” says Rosenblum. “The two ways in which accountability happens, according to the Supreme Court, are election of the president and the need for the most powerful, important offices to be confirmed by the Senate.” 

But Musk and DOGE present a monarchical option that sidesteps those underlying principles. “The DOGE-like model of governance undermines the constitutional vision of accountability that the Supreme Court has elaborated by breaking these chains of command and eliminating the checks and balances that the Supreme Court has said are central to the structure of government,” says Rosenblum.

This sounds like the corruption that the Framers sought to ban in their new constitution—not just the corruption of profit-seeking officials but the corrupting of our Constitution’s very structure.

Could Prove Very Deadly

The Gutting of US Weather Forecasting Abilities Could Prove Very Deadly

A veteran meteorologist rains on Donald Trump’s destructive charade.

John Morales

This isn’t what I had in mind when I studied Edward Lorenz’s chaos theory.

Lorenz was a mathematician and meteorologist perhaps most famous for his description of the “butterfly effect,” which poses that small changes in initial conditions can produce large changes in long-term results. This became evident to him when running numerical weather forecasting models, in which even the rounding of a variable from six digits to three digits would lead to vastly different predicted outcomes in the atmosphere. His work led to great leaps in weather forecasting, and today’s era of ensemble forecasting in which multiple weather predictions are generated from the same set of different yet similar initial meteorological conditions.

The butterfly effect came to mind when I read that upper air weather observations were being temporarily halted by the National Weather Service in parts of Alaska, New York, and Maine due to staffing shortages. The Trump regime’s chaotic approach to so-called efficiency in the federal workforce has wreaked havoc upon civil service, including at NWS and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

NWS was already short-staffed before the new administration came into power. I have firsthand knowledge of Meteorologists in Charge, the title for the director at each NWS office, forced to cover operational shifts (including overnights) several weeks a year to be able to keep their offices functioning.

Now hundreds more NOAA and NWS employees have been fired.

With offices running on skeleton crews, the NWS Weather Forecast Offices in Kotzebue, Alaska; Albany, New York; and Gray, Maine; simply can’t spare the man-hours to launch their radiosondes. These instrument packages are attached to weather balloons that lift them through the troposphere, or the lowest layer of the atmosphere within which all the weather happens.

Temperature, humidity, pressure, and wind data collected by the radiosondes allow meteorologists to determine the profile and stability of the atmosphere twice a day over specific, strategically selected locations. It also feeds into the dynamical weather models that have so impressively advanced in their capability to forecast the weather since the Lorenz era.

On the days these atmospheric profiles go missing, weather forecast quality will suffer. It’s worse than Lorenz’s rounding of variables—it’s holes that will lead to less granularity in data being ingested into the models that will inevitably lead to poorer predictions. And while that may be fine on a 30 degree Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) summer day in which, perhaps, it ends up partly sunny instead of mostly sunny, it’s a whole different story when we’re talking about knowing whether a future Sandy-like superstorm takes a left turn into New York City or not.

Balloon-launch gaps are only one example of critical meteorological information that is on track to go missing in 2025. Two flight directors and an electronic engineer from NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters were fired too. The flight directors’ job was to evaluate weather conditions in tropical cyclones to ensure the safety of the mission from a meteorological perspective. Understandably, every reconnaissance flight must have a flight director on board.

Now, some flights this hurricane season are in jeopardy because they may not have a flight director available. While the Air Force Reserve 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron also flies into storms, any reduction in the combined number of NOAA and Air Force flights into fledgling tropical storms could lead to disaster.

This is no exaggeration. Two recent major disasters in Mexico’s Pacific coast came without warning because of the lack of hurricane hunter data: Hurricanes Otis in 2023 and John in 2024. Aircraft reconnaissance simply isn’t flown as often in the eastern Pacific as it is in the Atlantic for reasons that are beyond the scope of this article. The data gaps in 2023-24 resulted in Acapulco and nearby areas being devastated by storms that were first forecast by the NWS’s National Hurricane Center (NHC) to be relatively benign.

Both Otis and John underwent extremely rapid intensification that turned them from modest tropical storms into major destructive hurricanes in the span of about a day. NHC’s methods for remotely estimating storm intensity were insufficient and imprecise compared to the direct measurements that hurricane hunters provide.

In the case of Hurricane Otis, this lack of information turned into a “nightmare” underestimation of its intensity which left those in its path with very little time to prepare. Based on satellite imagery, NHC was estimating Otis to be either a strong tropical storm or a category 1 or 2 hurricane on the Saffir Simpson scale when the only reconnaissance mission flown into the cyclone arrived. The Air Force crew recorded windspeeds already at category 3, and the hurricane continued to intensify all the way until it made landfall near Acapulco causing death and widespread destruction.

I’m confident that NHC forecasters suffered through some sleepless nights thinking of how just one more hurricane hunter flight may have saved lives. After all, NWS and its NHC branch are two of several US government agencies that pursue the most noble of goals: to save lives. In its mission statement, NWS states that it exists “for the protection of life and property and the enhancement of the national economy.” In the United States, life and property are considered so sacrosanct that their protection is enshrined in 5th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution.

Speaking of property, think for a moment about why NOAA sits within the Department of Commerce? Weather can impact the economy in many ways, and when it becomes extreme, monetary losses can spread regionally to a majority of businesses. The United States has sustained hundreds of weather and climate disasters since 1980 in which overall costs reached at least $1 billion. Added together, the total cost of these 403 events from 1980 to 2024 approaches $3 trillion (with a “T”).

Yet when it comes to protecting the economy and our people from clear and present dangers like disease (the work of agencies such as NIH, CDC, FDA, USDA, USAID), environmental degradation (e.g. EPA, Dept. of Interior), and severe weather (e.g. NOAA/NWS), the new administration is throwing caution to the wind and allowed the DOGE wrecking ball to swing wildly and indiscriminately.

Shortly after coming into power in January, the administration concocted a “deferred resignation” program to start thinning out the federal ranks. According to the White House, about 75,000 federal employees signed up. That was followed in February by broad firings of federal workers during their probationary period—generally one or two years into their new jobs. As of March 7, more than 100,000 employees have been fired or offered buyouts.

Many of the fired civil servants on probation were not new hires fresh out of college. I know of very experienced and valuable NOAA employees that were two decades into their careers but had recently been promoted. Because every government promotion comes with probationary status, they’ve now lost their jobs.

Or have they?

Part of the chaos we’re living through is that the president and advisers—maybe deliberately—can’t seem to make up their minds. The second weekend in March, the termination of probationary staff at NWS was apparently rescinded. At the same time, it was reported that NOAA needs to prepare for another round of firings that would lead to the loss of another 1,000 workers. We can’t lose sight of the fact that the dismantling of NOAA is an integral part of Project 2025 because, according to the Heritage Foundation, it is a source of “climate alarmism.”

All signs point to the dismemberment of the national meteorological and hydrological service (NMHS) that had been the envy of the world. Whether it is by hitting it with a sledgehammer or delivering death by 1,000 cuts, NOAA and NWS staff are already spread thin and demoralized. The ability to observe, forecast, and warn of impactful weather is being degraded. This is putting American lives and the American economy in danger.

I may be known for my hurricane acumen, but I cannot do my job without NOAA. I may be the voice of reason in a storm, but the NWS serves as my vocal cords. The American public needs to relentlessly continue contacting their elected representatives to save NOAA and NWS, and more broadly, to save science, which is under siege in this country.

Because without the National Weather Service, there is no Jim Cantore, no Al Roker, and no John Morales.

Gutting Seven More Federal Agencies

Donald Trump Just Signed an Order Gutting Seven More Federal Agencies

The order targets the funding for Voice of America, which has been in the Trump administration’s crosshairs in recent weeks.

Anna Merlan

In an executive order signed late Friday, Donald Trump effectively dismantled seven more federal agencies, this time with cuts that will impact work on homelessness, libraries, support for minority-owned businesses, and the US Agency for Global Media, which funds Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia. The cuts are expected to leave thousands more federal workers unemployed; in the case of VOA, it furthers a specific vendetta Trump has had since his first term.  

The order will affect the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the United States Agency for Global Media, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian Institution, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, and the Minority Business Development Agency. It instructs the head of each agency to submit a report to the Office of Management and Budget “explaining which components or functions of the governmental entity, if any, are statutorily required and to what extent.” In practice, as has happened with other federal agencies in recent weeks, it’s expected to leave these agencies a shell of themselves and fundamentally nonexistent; in the case of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness, it destroys the only federal agency solely focused on addressing the homelessness crisis.

The move against the US Agency for Global Media has attracted the most attention, and could have the largest implications abroad. VOA specifically has been active since the 1940s, where it broadcast stories into Germany that were meant to counter Nazi propaganda. During his first term, Trump called VOA’s reporting “disgraceful.” This time around, he placed Trump loyalist and 2020 election denier Kari Lake as a “special advisor” to the agency. In December, he wrote that she would “ensure that the American values of Freedom and Liberty are broadcast around the World FAIRLY and ACCURATELY, unlike the lies spread by the Fake News Media.”

Lake made it immediately clear that she wouldn’t respect VOA’s editorial independence, telling a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference, “VOA has been telling America’s story to the world for 83 years this Monday. Sometimes the coverage has been incredible, and sometimes it’s been pitiful. We are fighting an information war, and there’s no better weapon than the truth, and I believe VOA could be that weapon.” 

VOA made other efforts to appease Trump, including placing leading journalist Steve Herman on leave for supposedly anti-Trump comments. Under Lake, the organization also canceled millions of dollars in contracts with other news agencies, including the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse.  

Some of the seven agencies that were just gutted could challenge the order in court; the US Agency for Global Media, for instance, was founded by a congressional charter and could argue that it can’t be dismantled by an executive order. The authority of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to make the staggering cuts they’ve already made to government agencies is also being challenged in numerous lawsuits.

Disputes Over Hunting and Trapping

Colorado Has Become a Battleground for Disputes Over Hunting and Trapping

Activists and conservationists are taking aim at practices the precede the nation.

Roque Planas

The agenda for Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission’s March 5 meeting included few controversial issues—mall alterations to grouse hunting regulations, tweaks to the big game draw and, perhaps most contentiously, an update to the state’s wolf reintroduction program.

But when general public comment opened, those topics were quickly overshadowed. The commission spent the next few hours getting an earful from carnivore advocates demanding limits on the trapping of bobcats, foxes, coyotesm and other furbearers.

“The public needs to understand that you do not support this killing spree that sees wildlife as commodities,” advocate Rainer Gerbatsch said. “Glorifying trapping as conservation is a slap in the face of evolution.”

Colorado has emerged in recent years as one of the key battlegrounds for the future of wildlife management, with a growing movement of activists aiming to swap the state’s emphasis on maximizing deer and elk for hunters with a more holistic approach that prioritizes ecosystem health. 

The movement scored one of its biggest wins in 2020, when a referendum to reintroduce gray wolves squeaked through on a 51 to 49 percent vote, over the impassioned objections of ranchers and outfitters on the western slope who saw wolves as a threat to their livelihoods. But a separate vote last year that would have banned mountain lion hunting and bobcat trapping failed by a wider-than-expected margin, 55 to 45, leaving activists struggling to find their footing. 

“People tell me that we’re extirpating populations and they have no idea what is harvested nor any idea of what is sold.”

While they have yet to unify behind a single demand, the movement is taking aim at trapping as its next major target. “Unlimited trapping is not aligned with the public’s values,” Samantha Miller, senior carnivore campaigner with the Center for Biological Diversity, told Public Domain. “This just flies in the face of responsible wildlife management.” 

Those who spoke out against trapping at the hearing objected to killing animals to sell their pelts. Some asked the commission to end trapping entirely. Others suggested a reasonable limit for all 16 furbearers, whose populations vary widely, might be two specimens per species. Several raised concern that non-target animals like eagles or the state-endangered lynx might perish in traps. 

A few questioned the wisdom of indiscriminately trapping beavers , given that the ponds they create can help mitigate wildfires, or swift foxes, which the state had until recently classified as a Tier II species of greatest conservation need.

And many described the lack of trapping limits as a conservation threat to bobcats specifically, with several denouncing the use of strangulation to kill them, at times in gory detail. 

At least three commission members expressed concern about strangling bobcats to death. But current state regulations already prohibit it, Colorado Parks and Wildlife Assistant Director for Field Services Ty Petersburg later told them, though it wasn’t easy to understand from the convoluted descriptions in the regulations. 

CPW plans to field focus groups later this year and identify stakeholders in response to strong public interest in trapping. A spokesperson acknowledged beavers’ beneficial impact on groundwater recharge and wildfire mitigation, but noted that low levels of harvest, about 600 on public land last year, was unlikely to have a major impact. Swift fox populations have remained stable for 20 years under current management, he added.

Trappers say the activists’ concerns are overblown, noting that the state already passed a referendum in 1996 outlawing snares and foothold traps, leaving only the most passionate hobbyists in the field. 

“We’ve got box traps and that’s it—it pretty much gutted the entire trapping community as a whole,” Colorado Trappers and Predator Hunters Association President Dan Gates told Public Domain. “This is an anti-hunting campaign… They don’t want you to harvest anything, period.”

“I let go a couple of bobcats this year because they were young…I’m not in the business of trying to wipe them out.”

With trappers limited to expensive and less-effective cage traps, they are less likely than hunters to kill several species of furbearers, according to Gates. Hunters have accounted for at least 40 percent of the annual bobcat kill since 2019, state data show.

Only 212 of the 1,524 coyotes sold at the Colorado Trappers and Predators Association’s fur auction last year had been killed in the state of Colorado, Gates said. An even smaller portion of bobcats, 14 out of 145, came from within the state. Many of the Coloradan animals made their way into the auction after getting trapped at the request of landowners to deal with nuisance animals or control damage. The most common requests came from industrial firms like airports and power plants, or suburban homes. 

“People tell me that we’re extirpating populations and they have no idea what is harvested nor any idea of what is sold,” Gates said. “Nobody goes out and traps skunks for the hell of it. They do it for damage and they do it for nuisance.”

Box traps make by-catch a non-issue, said Adam Warren, the organization’s vice president. One time he caught a mountain lion in a trap intended for a bobcat. He simply opened the door and let it scamper away. 

“I let go a couple of bobcats this year because they were young,” Warren said. “I’m not in the business of trying to wipe them out. I want to conserve the population—I don’t want to destroy it.”

CPW says bobcats do not face conservation concerns, though the state does not survey the population. A pending citizen petition asks CPW to collect more robust data, Director Jeff Davis said.

Hunters and trappers killed fewer than 1,000 annually in recent years over a three-month season running from December to February, according to CPW. About 20,000 people bought a Colorado license to hunt or trap furbearers in the 2023-24 season, the most recent for which the state has published data. By contrast, the state sold more than 200,000 licenses to pursue big game like deer and elk. 

Still, many wildlife activists view fur trapping as the lowest-hanging fruit for a movement pushing for more carnivore-friendly policies. 

Trapping to sell pelts conflicts with one of the basic tenets of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, which uses hunting and fishing license sales and excise taxes on firearm and ammunition to finance wildlife management and habitat restoration. The hunter-conservationists who developed the model early last century aimed to eliminate the profit motive from wildlife management, after unregulated hunting to feed urban markets for meat, hide and feathers pushed virtually every animal with commercial value to the brink of extirpation or outright extinction. 

But unfettered fur trapping for profit lingered on, largely because it focused on animals widely viewed as pests, or carnivores that prey on ungulate species prized by hunters, like deer and elk—though in practice, pelts do not fetch high enough prices to employ many full time trappers, especially with Colorado’s limitations. 

Some carnivore activists want to revise the state’s endorsement of the North American model. House Bill 25-1258, authored by Democratic Colorado Reps. Tammy Story and Elizabeth Velasco, proposed nixing a statute that commits the state “to utilize hunting, trapping, and fishing as the primary methods of effecting necessary wildlife harvests.”

Instead, the bill proposed that the state “may authorize hunting, trapping, and fishing in accordance with the best available wildlife and ecological science to benefit wildlife, whole ecosystem health, and all Coloradans.”  

“This is not an attack on hunting,” Rep. Velasco told the committee during last week’s meeting. “We’re not restricting or limiting hunting in any way. But we do want to make sure that the science is up to par and science is being utilized wherever we are managing our public spaces.” 

Supporters viewed the short bill as a new, more holistic mission statement for the agency. Some of them used the committee hearing to air grievances about furbearer trapping specifically. Two children testified, trading verses for the committee: “Trapping is cruel—please vote yes,” they said. “I feel sad that an unlimited amount of bobcats can be trapped each year in Colorado.”

But several commenters saw the bill as an attack on hunting that threatened to create new problems without solving any. Liz Rose of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a conservation group, told the committee that she had asked the authors to provide evidence of how the law might help the state address a practical conservation problem. She said they didn’t provide any.   

And etching the impossible-to-define standard “best-available science” into statute would pave the way for legal challenges to virtually any wildlife commission decision, according to former CPW Commissioner Gaspar Perricone. 

“I don’t perceive this bill as offering any additional tools to the agency that they don’t currently possess,” Perricone told the committee. “What is the necessity of this legislation at this point in time?” 

The committee voted the measure down, with only three members supporting it—including the two authors.