The huge banner of a glaring Trump in front of the USDA is a literal sign the U.S. has lost its democracy
John Casey – May 16, 2025
Donald Trump official presidential portrait
A colossal, brooding image of Donald Trump now looms over the U.S. Department of Agriculture headquarters in Washington, D.C. The banner is unmistakably authoritarian in both style and scale. It features a stone-faced Trump gazing down upon the capital like a watchful overlord.
This is not a campaign advertisement. It is a signal. A warning. A literal and metaphorical sign that democracy in America is no longer functioning as intended.
Historically, such displays of obnoxiousness have not heralded democratic renewal. Quite the opposite. They’ve marked the entrenchment of dictatorship. Authoritarian regimes the world over have relied on these massive visual monuments to instill fear, demand obedience, and project omnipresence.
For decades, and most especially during World War II, Stalin’s steel-eyed portraits towered over Soviet streets and public buildings, reminding citizens that the state saw everything. Mao Zedong’s image hung from Tiananmen Gate like a secular deity watching over the masses. It was massive, larger than life, eternal, aloof for a reason..
History books and other visions etched in my memory bring images of Kim Jong Un of North Korea, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, Fidel Castro of Cuba, and of course Hitler, who all followed the same playbook. They saturate public space with the leader’s face and saturate your mind with the leader’s authority.
Imagine, for a moment, if Franklin Delano Roosevelt had plastered massive banners of his face across Washington during World War II. Hanging a 30-foot portrait from the Treasury Building or looming over war bond posters with cold, impassive eyes. The public would have been outraged. Congress would have rebelled. Even amid war, Roosevelt respected the distinction between democratic leadership and personal cult.
Trump has now joined this visual canon of despots with his banner brooding over a government institution. It is not just “deeply creepy,” as some observers have said. It is the textbook behavior of a man who believes the state belongs to him. It is fascist iconography, domesticated.
This chilling banner didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Since being sworn in for his second term on January 20, Trump has governed not as a president but as a ruler unbound by law, or at least he thinks he’s unbound by law.
His Department of Justice has been purged of independence, its prosecutors reassigned or fired if they resisted Trump’s will. And don’t even get me started about the “yes, yes, yes” attorney general, Pam Bondi, who is a perfect lackey for the wannabe dictator. No to Trump in not in her vocabulary.
Trump’s suggestion that he should be allowed a third term because one was supposedly “stolen,” is no longer a fringe fantasy. It’s a real and present threat, floated not only at rallies and interviews but by White House aides and conservative media outlets that now function more like state-run propaganda than independent journalism.
He has declared that federal workers must show “personal loyalty” to him. Inspectors general and career civil servants have been removed en masse and replaced with unqualified loyalists. Programs that support education, public health, and environmental protection have been gutted in favor of funding massive security forces that answer directly to the Executive Branch.
Meanwhile, efforts to erase and rewrite history are accelerating. Trump’s allies are systematically removing references to slavery and civil rights from textbooks, recasting the January 6 insurrectionists as “patriots,” and purging LGBTQ+ references from public libraries. This is not governing. It’s regime-building, complete with a giant portrait.
As Trump’s face stares down from the side of a federal agency building, it’s a 30-foot reminder of who is in charge, who is watching, and who cannot be questioned.
This use of personal imagery as a weapon of psychological control is not just about ego, and it’s a key mechanism of authoritarian rule. During Stalin’s Great Purge, his image became synonymous with the state itself. To criticize Stalin, even in private, was to invite arrest, or worse.
Saddam Hussein commissioned thousands of portraits of himself, placing them in every school, airport, and office in Iraq. The size and frequency of his image sent a clear message that this country was his.
So too with Kim Il Sung, his son Kim Jong il, and his son Kim Jong Un. whose portraits are reportedly required in every home in North Korea, and most people clean them on a regular basis. Disrespecting the image is a punishable offense.
These leaders understood something simple but potent: Symbols shape reality. And control of the visual environment is control of the collective psyche.
The USDA banner is not just gaudy or excessive. It’s strategic. It’s authoritarian. It’s a message not just to the public but to the bureaucracy itself that loyalty flows up, power flows down, and both are enforced with fear.
Democracy depends on a humble, limited executive, and while we’ve had some egomaniacs as president here in the U.S. (think Richard Nixon), we’ve been fortunate not to have one who plasters banners of himself outside of government buildings.
Our presidents have been elected, not enthroned. They serve, not rule. The placement of a massive Trump banner on a government building reveals that this line has been crossed, and we are no longer a republic. We are living under the cult of one man.
When the government starts using public property to display the ruler’s image, when dissent is criminalized, when history is rewritten and power is centralized, we are not looking at the future. Instead, we are seeing the end of something. The end of accountability. The end of democratic pretense. The end of America as we knew it.
The banner may yet come down. But the damage it represents is already done.
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(NewsNation) — The Trump administration faced another loss this week after a federal judge blocked an executive order allowing mass firings of federal employees and delayed any current layoffs until May 23.
In March, a different judge ruled that probationary workers laid off by DOGE had to be rehired. While many of those workers are back on payroll, many are not working due to other cuts.
Overall, the numbers show DOGE has not been successful in its efforts to reduce spending. The department claims to have saved $170 billion, mostly by cutting government contracts, grants and leases.
The cuts have also not brought down the national deficit.
In fact, the government spent $20 billion more in President Donald Trump’s first three months than the Biden administration spent over that same time frame last year.
The deficit has grown from $840 billion in January to more than a trillion dollars today, according to the U.S. Treasury — a $290 billion increase in the past year, partly due to tax cuts that Trump wants to make permanent in his “big, beautiful” budget bill.
Some Republicans are raising the alarm about growing debt.
“We have to get back to weeding out the fraud, the waste, abuse. We are careening towards a sovereign debt crisis, and if we don’t get our spending under control, all of this doesn’t really matter because the dollar won’t mean anything anymore,” said Rep. Greg Murphy, R-N.C.
DOGE said 40% of the Social Security Agency’s calls were ‘fraudulent.’ Data suggests it was actually less than 1%
Irina Ivanova – May 16, 2025
Elon Musk, here seen on Capitol Hill on Dec. 5, 2024, has called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”
An oft-repeated claim that 40% of Social Security calls are fraudulent is wildly overstated, according to a report, which found that less than 1% of calls have any possible link to fraud. However, changes the administration made to combat the alleged problem have led to payment delays and a “degradation” in service, the report found.
Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency is moving to overhaul Social Security on the pretext that the government’s premier safety-net program is losing massive amounts of money to fraud. Musk has claimed his engineers have found $100 billion a week in fraudulent entitlement payments, a situation the Tesla CEO called “utterly insane.”
DOGE made similar claims in an April interview with Fox News. DOGE engineer and Musk employee Aram Moghaddassi told Bret Baier that 40% of calls to Social Security trying to change direct-deposit information are from fraudsters.
“So when you want to change your bank account, you can call Social Security. We learned 40% of the calls that they get are from fraudsters,” Moghaddassi told Fox.
Even Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested in a podcast appearance that the only people complaining about missing payments are fraudsters.
“The easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen, cause whoever screams is the one stealing,” he told All-In, using his 94-year-old mother-in-law as an example of someone who wouldn’t call in.
‘No significant fraud‘
But the true rate of phone fraud, according to a news outlet that covers government technology, is just a fraction of 1%.
Nextgov/FCW, which obtained an internal SSA document, reported that just two Social Security claims out of 110,000 had a high probability of being fraudulent. Fewer than 1% of claims had any potential for fraud at all, according to Nextgov.
“No significant fraud has been detected from the flagged cases,” the internal document said, according to the site.
The SSA’s own justification for changing the benefits process in March said that roughly “40 percent of Social Security direct deposit fraud is associated with someone calling SSA to change direct deposit bank information,” not that 40% of all calls are fraudulent.
DOGE did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
A Social Security spokesperson told Fortune that, between March 29 and April 26, SSA’s new fraud detection tools flagged 20,000 distinct social security numbers where “a direct deposit change was requested over the phone and failed a security measure,” and said its fraud measures helped the office avoid $19.9 million in losses.
The office “continues to refine the anti-fraud algorithm to flag only the claims with the highest probability of fraud,” the spokesperson said in an email.
‘Delays’ and ‘degradation‘
However, the changes have also created a “degradation of public service,” according to Nextgov. In addition to requiring ID checks, the SSA put an automatic delay on new benefit claims so it could run fraud checks, Nextgov reported. The move “delays payments and benefits to customers, despite an extremely low risk of fraud,” the document noted, according to Nextgov.
An Inspector General report from February found that, in fiscal year 2023, 0.6% of all payments made across Social Security’s old-age and disability programs were “overpayments.” That term includes payments made in the wrong amounts when people don’t update their earnings information or other information that would change their eligibility, such as living in a nursing home.
In March, Social Security announced that no benefits claims could be made by phone, before reversing the policy amid outrage. It has added more requirements for people changing their bank information, requiring beneficiaries to either visit a Social Security office in person or use two-factor authentication to confirm their identity.
The SAVE Act would require anyone registering to vote in federal elections to first “provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship” in person, like a passport or birth certificate.
The House already passed an identical bill in July 2024, also along partisan lines, with the GOP largely supporting the legislation. At that time, the Senate killed the bill. With a now GOP-controlled Senate, and a Republican in the White House, the SAVE Act could become law before 2025 ends.
Voting rights experts and advocacy organizations have detailed how the legislationcould suppress voting. In part, they say it would particularly create barriers in low-income and minority communities. People in such communities often lack the forms of ID acceptable under the SAVE Act for a variety of reasons, including socioeconomic factors.
As of now, at least 9% of voting-age American citizens – approximately 21 million people – do not even have driver’s licenses, let alone proof of citizenship. In spite of this, many legislators support the bill as a means of eliminating noncitizen voting in elections.
As a legal scholar who studies, among other things, foreign interferencein elections, I find considerations about the potential effects of the SAVE Act important, especially given how rare it is that a noncitizen actually votes in federal elections.
Yet, it is equally crucial to consider a more fundamental question: is the SAVE Act even constitutional?
The SAVE Act would forbid state election officials from registering an individual to vote in federal elections unless this person “provides documentary proof of United States citizenship.”
So, should the SAVE Act become law, if a person turns 18 or moves between states and wishes to register to vote in federal elections in their new home, they would likely be turned away if they do not have any such documents readily available. At best, they could still fill out a registration form, but would need to mail in acceptable proof of citizenship.
For married people with changed last names, among others, questions remain about whether birth certificates could even count as acceptable proof of citizenship for them.
The Constitution says little about voting rights
Despite the national conversation the SAVE Act has sparked, it is unclear whether Congress even has the power to enact it. This is the key constitutional question.
The U.S. Constitution imposes no citizenship requirement when it comes to voting. The original text of the Constitution, in fact, said very little about the right to vote. It was not until legislators passed subsequent amendments, starting after the Civil War up through the 1970s, that the Constitution even explicitly prohibited voting laws that discriminate on account of race, sex or age.
Who, then, gets to decide whether someone is qualified to vote? No matter the election, the answer is always the same – the states.
Indeed, by constitutional design, the states are tasked with setting voter-eligibility requirements – a product of our federalist system. For state and local elections, the 10th Amendment grants states the power to regulate their internal elections as they see fit.
States also get to decide who may vote in federal elections, which include both presidential and congressional elections.
When it comes to presidential elections, for instance, states have – as I have previously written – exclusive power under the Constitution’s Electors Clause to decide how to conduct presidential elections within their borders, including who gets to vote in them.
The states wield similar authority for congressional elections. Namely, according to Article I of the Constitution and the Constitution’s 17th Amendment, if someone can vote in their state’s legislative elections, they are entitled to vote in its congressional elections, too.
Conversely, the Constitution provides Congress zero authority to govern voter-eligibility requirements in federal elections. Indeed, in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling on the Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council case, the court asserted that nothing in the Constitution “lends itself to the view that voting qualifications in federal elections are to be set by Congress.”
Is the SAVE Act constitutional?
The SAVE Act presents a constitutional dilemma. By requiring individuals to show documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register for federal elections, the SAVE Act is implicitly saying that someone must be a U.S. citizen to vote in federal elections.
In other words, Congress would be instituting a qualification to vote, a power that the Constitution leaves exclusively to the states.
Indeed, while all states currently limit voting rights to citizens, legal noncitizen voting is not without precedent. As multiplescholarshave noted, at least 19 states extended voting rights to free male “inhabitants,” including noncitizens, starting from our country’s founding up to and throughout the 19th century.
Today, over 20 municipalities across the country, as well as the District of Columbia, allow permanent noncitizen residents to vote in local elections.
Any state these days could similarly extend the right to vote in state and federal elections to permanent noncitizen residents. This is within their constitutional prerogative. And if this were to happen, there could be a conflict between that state’s voter-eligibility laws and the SAVE Act.
Yet, in this instance, where Congress has no actual authority to implement voter qualifications, the SAVE Act would seem to have no constitutional leg on which to stand.
When it comes to the constitutionality of the SAVE Act, though, proponents simply assert that Congress is acting within its purview.
Specifically, many proponents have cited the Constitution’s Elections Clause, which gives Congress the power to regulate the “Times, Places and Manner” of congressional elections, as support for that assertion. Sen. Mike Lee, for example, explicitly referenced the Elections Clause when defending the SAVE Act earlier in 2025.
But the Elections Clause only grants Congress authority to regulate election procedures, not voter qualifications. The Supreme Court explicitly stated this in the Inter Tribal Council ruling.
Congress can, for instance, require states to adopt a uniform federal voter registration form, and even include a citizenship question on said form. What it cannot do, however, is implement a non-negotiable mandate that effectively tells the states they can never allow any noncitizen to vote in a federal election.
For now, the SAVE Act is simply legislation. Should the Senate pass it, President Donald Trump will almost assuredly sign it into law, given, among other factors, his March 2025 executive order that says prospective voters need to show proof of citizenship before they register to vote in federal elections. Once that happens, the courts will have to reckon with the SAVE Act’s legitimacy within the country’s constitutional design.
Can voters use Real ID to satisfy SAVE Act voting rules, as Byron Daniels said?
Grace Abels – April 21, 2025
Even Rep. Byron Donalds’ state of Florida does not show citizenship on its Real ID driver’s licenses, so they wouldn’t provide the proof of citizenship that would be needed to register to vote under the proposed SAVE Act.
Byron Donald’sStatement: Under the SAVE Act, “as long as you have a Real ID … it should be easy for you to register to vote.”
Responding to concerns about a bill that would require proof of citizenship to vote, some Republicans have said an eligible voter needs only a Real ID.
But in 44 states, that’s not a solution.
The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, passed the U.S. House on April 10 by a 220-208 vote. A priority of House Speaker Mike Johnson and President Donald Trump, it would require in-person proof of citizenship, such as a U.S. passport or a combination of a driver’s license and birth certificate, to register to vote.Republicans say the SAVE Act — which has a high 60-vote hurdle to clear in the Senate — is necessary to ensure that noncitizens don’t vote in U.S. elections. Federal laws already prohibit noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and cases of noncitizens voting are extremely rare.
Democrats denounced the bill as a threat to voting rights, criticizing the required paperwork as burdensome; about half of Americans don’t have passports, for example. Republicans accused Democrats of exaggerating the burden.
“To the people who are concerned about married women being able to register (to vote) there’s this thing in the United States, every state does it now, called Real ID,” said Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., in an April 10 NewsNation interview. “As long as you have a Real ID, which virtually every American has to have today, it should be easy for you to register to vote.”
Real IDs are federally compliant, state-issued driver’s licenses or identification cards that require documentation including a Social Security card and proof of citizenship or legal immigration status to obtain. Congress passed a 2005 law requiring state-issued IDs to meet federal minimum security standards following a 9/11 Commission recommendation.
A Real ID card is typically marked with a black or gold star. About 56% of American IDs were Real ID compliant in January 2024, but many people are rushing to get Real IDs before a May 7 deadline after which a non-Real ID driver’s license, for example, won’t be sufficient to board domestic flights. (Some states, such as Illinois, are saying “Real ID can wait” because of high demand.)
However, not every Real ID meets SAVE Act requirements to prove citizenship. The SAVE Act accepts only Real IDs that indicate whether a person is a citizen, which most do not.
Further, Real IDs can be issued to noncitizens with lawful status, including permanent residence, temporary protected status, refugees, asylum applicants and people in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, the Homeland Security Department’s website says.
Five states — Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Vermont and Washington — offer a version of Real ID that indicates whether a person is a U.S. citizen, called an enhanced driver’s license. These licenses are offered at an additional fee, so not every Real ID in those states is compliant with the SAVE Act. Homeland Security officials have been working since 2008 to bring the enhanced ID program to all states.
Another state, Idaho, in 2023 began offering IDs with an optional citizenship marker, although it’s unclear whether all are Real ID compliant.
PolitiFact found no evidence that the remaining states issue Real IDs that comply with the citizenship proof required by the SAVE Act.
Thirty-six states already have some form of voter ID law requiring identity verification at the polls, but the SAVE Act would implement hurdles in every state at an earlier step — voter registration. For most states, that is new terrain.
“There is only one state in the U.S., Arizona, that has experience with proof-of-citizenship to register to vote,” said Lori Minnite, a Rutgers University political science professor and expert on voter fraud.
For state and local elections, Arizona accepts state IDs as proof of citizenship after comparing the driver’s license number to existing information in its Department of Transportation database. The physical IDs are no different than those issued to noncitizens. It is unclear whether such an ID, only distinguishable from a noncitizen ID when referenced against internal state data, would count as “indicating” citizenship under the SAVE Act.
The SAVE Act’s author, Central Texas GOP Rep. Chip Roy acknowledged in a recent hearing that only a few states offer compliant licenses, and he hoped more would follow: “We believe, right, that the structure is put in place now that allow — I think there’s at least five states that do have the citizenship status as part of the Real ID — encourage more states to do so, right? That would be part of the goal here.”
In 2023, Ohio passed a law to offer enhanced driver’s licenses, but it is not yet accepting applications. Iowa and Montana are considering bills to add a citizenship marker on IDs.
Neither Donalds nor Roy responded to requests for comment.
Beyond Real ID, other ways to verify identity pose challenges
For the majority of Americans who don’t live in Idaho or one of the few states with enhanced IDs, the SAVE Act says they can prove citizenship with a valid U.S. passport; a military ID card and a military service record showing place of birth; or a government issued photo-ID that shows place of birth.Those documents, or a Real ID that indicates citizenship, are the only ones that can prove citizenship on their own under the bill. Without one of those, a person must show a driver’s license or identification along with another document showing birthplace, such as a birth certificate, naturalization certificate, consular report of birth abroad or final adoption decree.
All documents must be presented in person.
Any mismatch between documents and someone’s current identification cards could disrupt voter registration. Mismatches are common for people who change their names following marriage.
In the same hearing, Roy said the SAVE Act would not affect people currently registered to vote.
He added: “If they have an intervening event or if the states want to clean the rolls, people would come forward to register to demonstrate their citizenship so we could convert our system over some reasonable time to a citizenship-based registration system.”
Jonathan Diaz, director of voting, advocacy and partnerships at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan organization that supports voting rights, said he believes the SAVE Act would apply to any updates to current registration or reregistration.
As prominentDemocrats warned that the billwouldmake voting harder formillions of married women, SAVE Act supporters said the bill addresses the needs of people with name changes by leaving it up to the states to decide what documentation would be required to resolve document discrepancies. It directs each state to “establish a process under which an applicant can provide such additional documentation” to establish citizenship if the person’s documents don’t include matching information.
Minnite called this language ambiguous: “Could a married woman who does not have a passport and who changed her name use a marriage certificate to prove her citizenship? The SAVE Act is not clear.”Diaz said, “Different states could have different standards and different degrees of proof needed, which will be really hard for voters to navigate.”
PolitiFact’s ruling
Donalds said under the SAVE Act, “as long as you have a Real ID … it should be easy for you to register to vote.” Most Real IDs are not compliant with the citizenship proof required under the SAVE Act. PolitiFact identified just six states that offer Real IDs that show citizenship, and five of them require an additional fee for that.
People in the remaining 44 states would need other forms of documentation to register to vote under the SAVE Act, such as a U.S. passport, a military service ID and record, or a birth certificate with a driver’s license.
Donalds’ statement has an element of truth because in a handful of states, people have access to Real IDs that would be sufficient to register to vote under the SAVE Act. But he ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, so we rate the statement Mostly False.
PolitiFact staff researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
Musk’s DOGE Goons Hit With a Major Blow in Bid to Raid Social Security Secrets
Tom Sanders – April 18, 2025
Andrew Harnik / Getty Images
Elon Musk’s DOGE efforts to burrow into the private data of millions of Americans has been thwarted after a judge issued a temporary injunction banning the billionaire’s goons from getting “unfettered access” to Social Security servers.
The case, brought against DOGE by two labor unions and an advocacy group for retirees, accused the Musk lackeys of accessing sensitive personal information in a way that could cause “irreparable harm” to individuals if mishandled.
Government attorneys argued that the way DOGE accesses private information does not deviate significantly from Social Security Administration (SSA) employees, who are routinely allowed to search its databases.
But plaintiffs argued the way DOGE employees have acted signals a “sea change” in how the agency handles sensitive data, which includes information on mental health, children, physical disabilities, and “issues that are not only sensitive but might carry a stigma.”
Granting DOGE unfettered access to this information is a privacy violation that “causes an objectively reasonable unease,” argued Alethea Anne Swift, an attorney for the legal group Democracy Forward, which filed the lawsuit.
U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander, who is overseeing the case, agreed with the plaintiffs that DOGE had failed to demonstrate why it needed “unprecedented, unfettered access” to SSA servers, and issued a temporary injunction against the agency extending a ban on them from accessing personal information.
Demonstrators gathered in front of the Social Security administration building to protest DOGE’s attempts to cut social security(Photo by Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu via Getty Images) / Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu via Getty ImagesMore
The ruling follows a temporary restraining order previously imposed by Hollander in March that was set to expire Thursday.
The judge asked, “What it is we’re doing that needs all of that information?” DOGE argued it was necessary to root out instances of Social Security fraud.
Hollander asked whether the sensitive data could be anonymized, which government attorneys argued was technically possible but would significantly slow down their cost-cutting efforts.
Delivering her order, Hollander said the injunction was necessary to protect against privacy violations and that the plaintiffs would likely be victorious in any further claims brought against DOGE.
“For some 90 years, SSA has been guided by the foundational principle of an expectation of privacy with respect to its records. This case exposes a wide fissure in the foundation,” she wrote in her 145-page ruling, Reuters reports.
A judge ruled that allowing DOGE access to Social Security servers was a violation of privacy (Photo by Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu via Getty Images) / Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu via Getty Images
Justice Department attorney Bradley Humphreys responded by telling the court that the ruling was starting to “feel like a policy disagreement.”
But Hollander admonished him, saying, “I do take offense at your comment because I’m just trying to understand the system.”
The ruling was met with cheers outside the courthouse, where demonstrators had gathered to protest what they say is an overreach of DOGE’s authority that threatened the future of Social Security benefits, according to CBS.
Democracy Forward said the injunction marked an important step in its case, with president Skye Perryman calling the ruling “a significant relief for the millions of people who depend on the Social Security Administration to safeguard their most personal and sensitive information.”
Nearly 300 scientists apply for French academic program amid Trump cuts in U.S.
Alana Wise – April 18, 2025
Students, researchers and demonstrators rally during a protest against the Trump administration’s funding cuts on research, health and higher education at the University of California Los Angeles on April 8.Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images
More than 2,500 scientists fled russia after putin invaded Ukraine.
A French university courting U.S.-basedacademics said it has already received nearly 300 applications for researchers seeking “refugee status” amid President Trump’s elimination of funding for several scientific programs.
Last month, Aix-Marseille University, one of the country’s oldest and largest universities, announced it was accepting applications for its Safe Place For Science program, which it said offers “a safe and stimulating environment for scientists wishing to pursue their research in complete freedom.”
This week, Aix-Marseille said it had received 298 applications, and 242 of them are eligible and currently up for review. Of the eligible applicants, 135 are American, 45 have a dual nationality, 17 are French and 45 are from other countries, the university said.Sponsor Message
“I am pleased that this request for the creation of scientific refugee status has found both media and political traction,”university President Éric Berton said in a statement.
The public research university said there is an even split between male and female applicants, with backgrounds from various prestigious U.S. institutions including Johns Hopkins University, NASA, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Yale and Stanford. About 20 Americans will be accepted into the program to begin in June.
“We at Aix-Marseille University are convinced that mobilization to address the challenges facing scientific research must be collective in France and Europe,” Berton said.
The Trump administration has prioritized aggressive spending cuts and federal workforce reduction, leading to a battle for America’s best and brightest.
Already, for example, universities and medical research facilities are set to lose billions in federal funding under the National Institutes of Health. And rollbacks on federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs have compromised research ranging from climate change to biomedical research.
Aix-Marseille is not the only European institution hoping to capitalize on America’s brain drain.
Last month, France’s CentraleSupélec announced a $3.2 million grant to help finance American research that had been halted in the states. And Netherlands Minister of Education, Culture and Science Eppo Bruins wrote in a letter to parliament that he requested to set up a fund aimed at bringing top international scientists to the Netherlands.
There is some evidence that these entreaties are reaching curious ears.
Last month in the journal Nature, more than 1,200 respondents identifying as scientists cited Trump’s funding cuts as reasons they were considering moving to Canada or Europe.
Thousands of federal workers would be easier to fire under Trump rule change
Shannon Bond – April 18, 2025
President Trump speaks in the Oval Office on Friday.Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
The Trump administration is moving forward with efforts to make it easier to fire some federal workers from their jobs, as part of its push to both shrink the federal government and exert more control over it.
On Friday the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) proposed a rule reclassifying tens of thousands of career civil servants as “at-will” employees, the White House announced in a statement. Removing civil service protections would make workers easier to fire.
The White House said the proposed rule would address “unaccountable, policy-determining federal employees who put their own interests ahead of the American people’s.”
President Trump and his allies, including billionaire Elon Musk, have said they want to “dismantle government bureaucracy,” which they criticize as a “deep state,” and root out what Trump has called “rogue bureaucrats.” They’ve claimed, without presenting evidence, that the government is rife with corrupt employees and non-existent workers. Trump has long argued that his administration should have greater flexibility in appointing people who will faithfully carry out his agenda and firing those who won’t.
“If these government workers refuse to advance the policy interests of the President, or are engaging in corrupt behavior, they should no longer have a job,” Trump wrote in a post about the proposed rule on his Truth Social platform on Friday.
The effort to strip civil service protections from some workers began on Trump’s first day back in office, with an executive order reinstating an order Trump signed at the end of his first term, in 2020. (That order was rescinded by then-President Biden days after he took office.) The latest Trump order creates a new category of political appointees in the federal workforce, originally called Schedule F.
OPM estimates 50,000 positions, or about 2% of federal workers, will be reclassified under the new rule, which renames Schedule F as Schedule Policy/Career. According to the White House statement, it would apply to “career employees with important policy-determining, policy-making, policy-advocating, or confidential duties.” It said once OPM issues its final rule, another executive order would actually reclassify specific positions as Schedule Policy/Career.
“This rule empowers federal agencies to swiftly remove employees in policy-influencing roles for poor performance, misconduct, corruption, or subversion of Presidential directives, without lengthy procedural hurdles,” the White House statement said.
It added that Schedule Policy/Career jobs “are not required to personally or politically support the President, but must faithfully implement the law and the administration’s policies.” They will continue to be filled by “existing nonpartisan, merit-based hiring processes,” the White House said.
The American Federation of Government Employees has sued the administration to protect civil service workers, and in a statement Friday its president, Everett Kelley, said that this latest action “will erode the government’s merit-based hiring system and undermine the professional civil service that Americans rely on.”
Friday’s proposed rule comes as Trump continues making sweeping changes to the federal government, shuttering some agencies and moving ahead with mass firings.
How DOGE may have improperly used Social Security data to push voter fraud narratives
Stephen Fowler – April 11, 2025
Investor Antonio Gracias at a town hall rally held by Elon Musk in Green Bay, Wis., on March 30. Gracias, who is part of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team, has been working at the Social Security Administration. Scott Olson/Getty Images
One of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency lieutenants working in the Social Security Administration has been pushing dubious claims about noncitizens voting, apparently using access to data that court records suggest DOGE isn’t supposed to have.
The staffer, Antonio Gracias, made the claims as part of larger misleading statements about the SSA’s enumeration-beyond-entry, or EBE program, which streamlines the process for granting Social Security cards to certain categories of eligible immigrants.
Gracias said in an April 2 appearance on Fox and Friends that “5-plus million” noncitizens who “came to the country as illegals” received Social Security numbers “through an automatic system” and proceeded to “get into our benefit systems.”Sponsor Message
“And just because we were curious, we then looked to see if they were on the voter rolls. And we found in a handful of cooperative states that there were thousands of them on the voter rolls and that many of them had voted,” Gracias said.
State-levelaudits of voter data have found few examples of noncitizens voting, which is a federal crime punishable with prison and deportation.
Later that week, Gracias furthered his claims on a podcast. “I think this was a move to import voters,” he said, echoing a conspiracy theory that Donald Trump and Musk elevated during the 2024 campaign season and Republican lawmakers are invoking to push for stricter voting policies.
While Musk and some Republican lawmakers are now amplifying Gracias’ claims online, experts familiar with Social Security say Gracias is mischaracterizing the program, and voter registration experts say they doubt the accuracy of his claims about noncitizens voting.
From “no access granted” to data shared by Musk
Using Social Security data to imply that noncitizens are breaking the law also could have violated a court order that prevents DOGE staffers from handling sensitive SSA systems.
It’s the latest example of concerns among privacy activists that DOGE’s sweeping access to personal and financial information of millions of Americans may violate privacy laws and may be used for inappropriate purposes.
It does not mention his analysis of how noncitizens are given Social Security numbers. Gracias is also not supposed to see or share personally identifiable information, or PII, within agency data, according to earlier court filings.
“Appointee shall not share any Personally Identifiable Information accessed or obtained through the use of SSA systems or work performed for SSA, with any external entity, organization, or agency federal or state,” an addendum to his appointment request reads.
A sign in front of the entrance of the Social Security Administration’s main campus in Woodlawn, Md.Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
In a March 12 declaration from the SSA’s then-Chief Information Officer Michael Russo, Gracias is one of two SSA DOGE employees listed as not having access to sensitive databases or PII.
“No SSA data or personally identifiable information access, or access to systems containing such information, has been granted to Employee 6 and Employee 4,” the document reads. Employee 6, listed in the record as a “Growth Equity Vice President,” appears to be Jon Koval, an associate of Gracias at his venture capital firm, who is also detailed to DOGE.Sponsor Message
On March 20, a federal judge in Maryland issued a temporary restraining order blocking DOGE employees from accessing SSA data. Gracias first publicized his claims alongside Musk at a rally in Wisconsin on March 30, ahead of the state’s special Supreme Court election.
A federal appeals court dismissed the Trump administration’s effort to lift that temporary restraining order April 1.
A few days after his Fox News interview on April 2, Gracias joined the All-In podcast on April 4 and offered more details on the data he says he used and the conclusions he drew, which has been subsequently shared by conservative media outlets and amplified by Musk on his social media site X for several days.
Neither Gracias nor a DOGE spokesperson responded to NPR’s questions about when and how any Social Security data was accessed and whether it complied with the court order.
NPR reached out to Social Security and initially spoke to acting press officer Nicole Tiggemann. In a subsequent email from a generic press account, the agency declined to answer detailed questions about DOGE’s data access. It did confirm that a chart Gracias publicized showing totals of noncitizens with Social Security numbers through EBE was taken from an SSA dashboard — but claimed that the restraining order prevented them from responding to NPR’s request for additional data from the program. The agency did not respond to inquiries asking to confirm who gave the emailed answer.
That leaves many questions still unanswered about the Social Security data behind DOGE’s claims. It’s possible the analysis was conducted before the March 20 TRO or that Gracias is not the DOGE employee who accessed any personal Social Security information. So far, there has been no evidence provided of any states sharing public or private voter data with the DOGE team at SSA either.
It’s also possible that the data about noncitizens comes from non-DOGE activities. The judge overseeing the case wrote on March 21 that the TRO only applies to “SSA employees working on the DOGE agenda. It has no bearing on ordinary operations at SSA.”
One clue about the data’s potential provenance comes from this week’s court filing: a March 17 email exchange from someone identified as Employee 7 who copied Gracias and Koval on a request for access to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program, which SSA uses to verify the immigration status of EBE applicants.
“This access is absolutely critical to get detailed immigration status for non-citizen SSNs to detect fraud and improper payments,” the email reads.
Employee 7 appears to be DOGE staffer Marko Elez, who resigned from his post at the Treasury Department over past racist tweets — and who shared a spreadsheet of personal information in violation of data-sharing policies, an audit found — before being rehired at multiple federal agencies.
Gracias puts the EBE program at the center of his account about how his team decided to check voter rolls. The program started in 2017 during the first Trump administration but grew dramatically under the Biden administration, which allowed millions of asylum-seekers to enter the U.S. and expanded the categories of immigrants who could stay on a temporary basis.
Until recently, under the EBE program, noncitizens applying for work permits, green cards or naturalization with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services could apply for Social Security cards without visiting a field office. The Washington Post and other outlets reported that the EBE program was paused in mid-March, citing an internal email. NPR has not independently confirmed the reporting.
A sign directs voters to cast their ballots at a polling station set up at the Flagler County Public Library on April 1 in Palm Coast, Fla. People associated with DOGE are using Social Security data to advance debunked claims that large numbers of noncitizens are voting.Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Lawfully present immigrants who are authorized to work get Social Security numbers to ensure they are “paying their taxes into the Social Security trust funds as required by law,” said Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and disability policy at the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.Sponsor Message
Since immigrants in the process of naturalizing could use the EBE program, those individuals could be expected to appear on voter rolls once they became U.S. citizens.
It remains unclear which state records the DOGE team checked for noncitizens. On the All-In podcast, Gracias described checking the public voter rolls of four “friendly” states to find noncitizens on the rolls. He then said “we went even further with those friendly states and found that many of those people had actually voted.”
Later in the program, he said “well over a thousand voted” in one state. He has said his team has referred those cases for federal prosecution. In the same unsigned email, the unnamed SSA spokesperson declined to respond to NPR’s questions about the inquiry into individuals who allegedly were identified as illegal voters using Social Security data, citing “ongoing criminal investigations on this matter.”
But voting experts say the data cross-checking Gracias describes raises legal questions and can be prone to many kinds of errors.
“There are huge accuracy questions here,” said Charles Stewart, the director of MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab.
Typically, states’ public voter rolls would not include Social Security numbers, which would make data matching far less precise. There are known issues with false matches when just using names and birthdays.
Furthermore, it is common for states to find voters who have since naturalized and become citizens when cross-checking databases of noncitizens against their voter rolls.
“DOGE has repeatedly made massive data errors,” said David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “I have some doubts that they’ve discovered anything more than maybe just some poor government data quality tracking or they don’t understand the data they’re looking at.”
It’s also not clear if the DOGE effort to combine Social Security data with other sources inside and outside the federal government runs afoul of data sharing and privacy laws that are designed to limit access to sensitive information to those who have a need to use it.Sponsor Message
“The use has to be consistent with the reason that you’re asking for the records in the first place, which has to be consistent with your own agency’s mission,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School and a voting policy adviser in the Biden administration. “‘Because I’m curious’ is not a thing when the federal government comes to data.”
President Trump signs an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on March 6.Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
Gracias appeared to attribute some of his team’s access to an executive order signed by the president last month that directs agencies to facilitate “both the intra- and inter-agency sharing” of records.
“President Trump had the courage to allow us to go across databases, he signed an executive order,” he said on Fox News. “It’s never been done before where agencies could talk to each other and databases can talk to each other. That allowed us to connect all this data to find these people across the system, across the benefits system, all the way to the voting records.”
Another executive order, “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” directs the Department of Homeland Security and DOGE to “review each State’s publicly available voter registration list” among other requests, similar to Gracias’ effort at SSA.
Both presidential actions include the caveat that any sharing must occur “consistent with law.”
The latest in DOGE data concerns
Multiple federal judges have found the DOGE effort has likely broken the law in its effort to comb through agencies to find “waste, fraud and abuse.” Court records have also shown the Trump administration is unable to account for the scope of DOGE’s data access, or the need for a small number of staffers to have virtually unfettered access to sensitive, compartmentalized data across the government.
The claims made by Gracias and Musk about Social Security data underscores growing questions around how DOGE is using the data it has gathered. In a ruling blocking DOGE access to Treasury systems, Judge Jeannette Vargas warned that “a real possibility exists that sensitive information has already been shared outside of the Treasury Department, in potential violation of federal law.”Sponsor Message
But Gracias’ latest claims about noncitizens voting continue to have an impact on policy in the Trump administration and with the Republican-controlled Congress. During Thursday’s House debate over the SAVE Act, Rep. Aaron Bean, R-Fla., mentioned DOGE’s allegations and the claim that the Biden administration had “imported” noncitizens as a reason to pass the bill.
“We have evidence that they’re participating in our elections,” Bean said. “The DOGE team just announced millions of illegals now have Social Security numbers. It’s happening and it ends today when we vote on this SAVE Act.”
Have information you want to share about DOGE access to government databases, Social Security, immigration and IT systems? Reach out to these authors through encrypted communication on Signal. Stephen Fowler is at stphnfwlr.25, and Jude Joffe-Block is at JudeJB.10.
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