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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DOGE isn’t saving much money. So what is Elon Musk really up to?
Adam Rogers – April 21, 2025
If Elon Musk’s effort to remake the federal government was ever really about “waste, fraud, and abuse,” those DOGE days are over. His quasi-agency has made huge and unprecedented changes to what the federal government does. But ask an economist, historian, or political scientist why, or what it all means, and you’ll get a sad-sounding laugh in response.
One thing is clear: There were never many savings to be found. Last year, Musk predicted he could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. (That was always going to be tough, mathematically, given that the government’s entire discretionary budget is $1.7 trillion.) In January, Musk revised his estimate down to $1 trillion. Earlier this month, he revised the revision down to $150 billion.
On the other hand, DOGE has been very good at reducing the number of people who work for the government — as many as 216,000 federal employees and contractors are already out, with more dismissals in the works. Musk has gutted or eliminated agencies that prevent disease, protect us from pandemics, provide aid to our allies, ensure the safety of our food and medicines, and safeguard Americans against toxic chemicals. Every one of those efforts is a proven multiplier of our tax money — every dollar we spend on them redounds to the US economy. Which means that even if Musk succeeds at slashing government spending, he’ll actually be adding to the federal deficit: DOGE cuts to the Internal Revenue Service alone are estimated to cost America some $500 billion in lost tax revenue every year.
So if DOGE isn’t saving us money, what’s the reason for all the cuts? It can’t be motivated by the cliché that “government should be run like a business.” No successful business runs on the kind of bedlam being sown by Musk. What, in short, is going on here?
Here are four possible explanations for what DOGE is actually up to. Maybe none of them are right. Or perhaps they’re all accurate, to varying degrees. But one thing is certain: Each of them provides a more plausible insight into what DOGE is doing than the official explanation of saving taxpayers money.
(1) It’s an “exit” plan
For the past decade and a half, rich guys in Silicon Valley have been trying to leave it all behind — government regulation, wokeist diversity efforts, naysaying journalists, even the Earth itself. Broadly speaking, they call this idea “exit.” In a 2009 blog post, the influential investor Peter Thiel declared that it was time for tech entrepreneurs to abandon the concept of democracy and start their own city-states. A companion piece to that post — written by Patri Friedman, grandchild of the free-market economist Milton Friedman — peddled the idea of “seasteads,” floating cities in the ocean, beyond the jurisdiction of any nation. Musk, meanwhile, launched a company devoted to taking a select sliver of humanity to Mars, and the Exit crowd went all in on cryptocurrencies — money without a pesky state attached.
In a book published in 2022, the venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan laid out a blueprint for Exit. “Technology has enabled us to start new companies, new communities, and new currencies,” his website declared. “But can we use it to start new cities, or even new countries? This book explains how to build the successor to the nation state, a concept we call the network state.”
In a sense, DOGE is serving as a sort of advance guard for Exit. It’s cutting away every government function that isn’t useful to a future network state (stuff that protects the vulnerable and supports the needy) while retaining the resources needed to found Exit-style cities (the blockchain, census data, border control). Casey Lynch, a geographer at the University of Girona who studies Exit politics, says that’s in line with how Exiteers think: “The only things the government should be doing are administrative functions necessary to maintain the market. And the only kinds of government services that are necessary are those related to things like upholding financial transactions, fighting identity theft, and protecting property rights.”
This, in essence, is the new Exit: Don’t secede from the government — absorb the government, digest it, and excrete a new one. A few groups have even met with the Trump administration to get his support for launching what they’re calling “Freedom Cities.” Like a Thiel-backed prototype in Honduras, these enclaves would be economically autonomous zones, free from government limits on Exit passion projects like longevity treatments or nuclear fusion research. Srinivasan has proposed making the area around Musk’s SpaceX facility in Texas into one, and other folks have proposed building one in Greenland — after it’s acquired by the United States, of course. The move is supported by Ken Howery, a college pal of Thiel’s who is Trump’s nominee to serve as ambassador to Denmark.
(2) It’s techno-libertarianism for all
Traditional libertarians believe that people and markets function just fine — better, even — with minimal government oversight. That’s what Ronald Reagan’s cowboy-inflected individualism was all about: shrinking government and letting the markets do as they wanted. But Reagan was careful to leave untouched two cornerstones of federal governance: Social Security, to protect against dissent from within, and a hefty nuclear arsenal, to guard against threats from without.
Silicon Valley libertarianism scraps the social safety net and the nukes. It’s closer to the venture investor Mark Andreessen’s vision of “techno-optimism,” where digital technologies and unfettered markets solve every human problem. It’s not just having Amazon replace the post office, or bitcoin taking the place of banks — it’s “deleting” regulations across all of government, no matter how critical they are to America’s health and safety and financial well-being.
In this explanation, DOGE is attempting to turn back the clock to the regulation-free excesses of the Gilded Age. In the 1910s and 1920s, America was dominated by industrial oligarchs, plagued by race and class struggles, and free from laws that kept food safe and the air and water clean. It took a spectacular market crash, and a Great Depression, to usher in the modern age of federal oversight.
DOGE effectively wants to return America to the days before the New Deal, when industrialists could do as they pleased. Musk, in fact, has called for a “wholesale, spring cleaning” of all federal regulation. “If it’s not possible now, it’ll never be possible,” he said during a midnight call in February. “This is our shot. This is the best hand of cards we’re ever going to have. And if we don’t take advantage of this best hand of cards, it’s never going to happen, so we’re going to do it.”
Perhaps that techno-libertarian vision — of a digitized world without government — is the entire point of DOGE. “You strip government down to remove all the parts of it that are resisting you,” says David Lewis, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, “and rebuild it in a way that makes it, in your view, more efficient and responsive to you.” That’s actually more authoritarian than libertarian. But it does make government smaller — and weaker. And the weaker government is, the more the powerful can call the shots.
(3) It’s a heist
Tyler Cowen, a leading thinker on the right, has criticized what he calls “the libertarian vice.” Libertarians love it, he says, when the state fails — even if the private sector can’t or won’t step in to fix things.
But what if Musk’s libertarian vice is actually plain old greed? Consider some of the specific agencies DOGE has slashed. Why cut NASA, a broadly popular and relatively inexpensive operation? Well, without NASA to launch rockets, it would be left to private companies like SpaceX to get stuff into outer space. The same is true of DOGE’s cuts to the Office of Vehicle Automation Safety, which has ordered dozens of Tesla recalls and delayed the rollout of self-driving software. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have collected a dozen examples of DOGE targeting agencies that are trying to regulate Musk. One thing DOGE hasn’t gone after? SpaceX’s contracts for military space launches — jobs worth $5.9 billion to the world’s richest man.
DOGE is a Tech-ish Chainsaw Massacre. But with the very real pain comes no perceivable gain.Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Musk isn’t the only Silicon Valley beneficiary of DOGE’s assault. The IRS is turning to Palantir, the security and data company cofounded by Peter Thiel, to assemble all its data into one giant, easily surveilled bucket. The company is also handling the data back end for ICE’s planned mass deportations. The Justice Department, meanwhile, is disbanding its team of lawyers responsible for going after cryptocurrency crime. So maybe DOGE is just an inside job — a case of technologists using their access to Donald Trump to loot the Treasury and line their own pockets.
(4) It’s a confederacy of dunces
Maybe DOGE is just really, really bad at its job. I mean, why would anyone cause this much chaos for so little demonstrable gain?
“It is tempting to think there is some strategy behind it,” says Zachary Liscow, a Yale professor who served as chief economist of the Office of Management and Budget during the Biden administration. “But these are just not competent people. They often don’t have a plan, or it’s often not well thought out.”
There’s certainly a lot of evidence that DOGE is incompetent. It’s staffed by a bunch of kids from Musk’s world who bring virtually no experience in either government or business to the job. Its reports on the cuts it’s making have been hysterically inaccurate. It has cut things it didn’t know it was cutting — like the agency responsible for making sure nuclear reactors don’t melt down — and then scrambled to restore them after the fact. And by grinding away at the government’s ability to do anything, it’s introduced a crippling level of turmoil and uncertainty to America, both at home and abroad. “It’s definitely making us less effective,” says Liscow.
And that’s the bottom line, really, when it comes to DOGE. At a basic level, Musk’s assault on the federal government represents a rejection of modernity itself. “You can’t do modern life without modern regulation,” says Lewis, the political scientist. “Transportation systems, energy systems, waste systems, internet systems — all of those things require government interventions and monitoring to work effectively.” If Musk makes good on his promise to pull the plug on every regulation in sight, the world as we know it would effectively shut down.
I said this sounded like the Gilded Age, but in some ways DOGE is turning the clock back even further. Before the Civil War, the federal government was far weaker and more diffuse than it is today. Individual states competed over tariffs and railroads and lots of other stuff we now think of as national functions. Companies could employ children at starvation wages, dump whatever they wanted into America’s streams and rivers, and sell quack remedies that were more likely to kill you than cure you. That’s roughly where a DOGE-denuded federal government puts us. Forget 1920 — think 1850.
Musk seems to think America’s administrative infrastructure is bureaucratic frippery. To him, just having it is wasteful. “There are more federal agencies than there are years since the establishment of the United States,” Musk observed during an interview with Tucker Carlson. “Which means that we’ve created more than one federal agency per year, on average. That seems crazy.” Carlson responded by pulling his “That’s insane!” face for the camera, as if Musk had just invented arithmetic.
But that math is not math. Times, as they say, change. Look at all the things we depend on today that weren’t even fathomable at the nation’s founding: cars and planes and polystyrene and aspirin and the internet and high fructose corn syrup and phones and recorded music and electricity. We’ve created way more technological marvels than federal agencies. A National Transportation Safety Board is a small price to pay for the wonders of intercontinental flight.
And it isn’t just that the world is more complicated than it was in 1776 or 1850 or 1920. It’s that most of the advances we enjoy today were, in one way or another, created because of government, not in spite of it. An enduring and reliable state — one that invests in innovation, ensures economic stability, and makes sure everyone plays by the rules — is literally what makes technological progress possible. Musk can’t take the government all the way back to the 18th century, even if he’d like to. But if he makes good on his promises with DOGE, America’s future may end up looking a lot more like its past.
For decades, residents of South Patrick Shores in Brevard County have tied a myriad of health conditions to the area, potentially stemming from an old military base. The area is at the center of a suspected cancer cluster.
Before homes began to be built in the early 1950s, the area was a military landfill near the Banana River Naval Air Station, where Patrick Space Force Base is now located.
Hazardous waste—ranging from ammunition and unexploded ordnance to chemicals and fuels—is believed to be buried underground on the land just south of Cape Canaveral.
Two years ago, the corps scanned yards in a 52-acre portion of South Patrick Shores with ground-penetrating radars as part of a $5.8 million project to look for military waste. More than 300 homes lie on the site.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is set to begin digging in yards in South Patrick Shores (WKMG/YouTube)
This week, the Army’s engineering branch resumed its excavation efforts to dig at 10 test pits across the neighborhood, aiming to unearth long-hidden hazards that may be present. The ten pits will be dug by April 25.
Brad Tompa, who is leading the clean-up operation, told county commissioners last week that South Patrick Shores was an “uncontrolled dump.”
For homeowners who have given permission, the Corps will dig trenches approximately eight feet deep and eight feet long and begin sampling the soil for any contaminants that may have accumulated.
The initial phase of the investigation is anticipated to take six months, pending findings.
Brevard County Commissioner Katie Delaney alleged that residents who had dug items from their own yards had severe side effects, potentially stemming from the items found.
Sandra Sullivan, who in 2018 said she found lead, bullets, and a partially full oil barrel in her yard, said she became “sick.”
“I know it’s made me sick,” she told News 6 on Tuesday. “Every time I dug up something, between eight days and seven weeks, I would have symptoms.”
Photograph of Banana River Naval Air Station in 1943 before it became Patrick Air Force Base (U.S. Navy)
A 2019 report from the Florida Department of Health found higher rates of certain types of cancers—including bladder cancer and leukemia—in South Patrick Shores than in other parts of the country. The state health department was unable to confirm the cause.
The overall incidence of cancer in the community does not appear to be elevated.
The pattern of Hodgkin’s disease, a type of cancer that affects the lymphatic system, reportedly first emerged in South Patrick Shores in 1967, when 24-year-old Larry Crockett found out he had cancer. By 1982, five of Crockett’s neighbors were diagnosed with the same cancer.
According to a 1991 report by the Tampa Bay Times, eight people in a 10-block area near the toxic waste sites had been diagnosed with the rare cancer. Five of them had died.
“It’s not a fluke,” one resident diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease a decade earlier told the paper. At the time, a spokesperson for Patrick Air Force Base said there was “no known link.”
A health assessment was conducted in 1992 in the area after residents reported an increase in the number of cases of Hodgkin’s disease.
The report, still on the Florida DOH website, suggested that residents believed it stemmed from contamination linked to a radar cluster at the military base and the testing of DDT, which was used in WWII to limit the spread of insect-borne diseases.
Residents were also concerned about the rate of Lou Gehrig’s disease, which affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, and psychiatric illness in the area.
The Independent has contacted the Florida Department of Health and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for more information.
This trumpusk administration is first of all, not civilized. And if it were, it wouldn’t make any difference. vladimir putin and the money laundering trump aligned russian oligharchs, want to destroy America’s Constitutional Democracy, just at they’ve destroyed their own nation. And trump and a large number of MAGANAZI republi-cons in our congress are paid operatives of this fascist, evil, autocratic cabal. WTFU merica www.tarbabys.com
Producing Something This Stupid Is the Achievement of a Lifetime
By David Brooks, Opinion Columnist – April 10, 2025
Credit…Jasmine Clarke for The New York Times
You might have seen the various data points suggesting that Americans are losing their ability to reason.
The trend starts with the young. The percentage of fourth graders who score below basic in reading skills on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests is the highest it has been in 20 years. The percentage of eighth graders below basic was the highest in the exam’s three-decade history. A fourth grader who is below basic cannot grasp the sequence of events in a story. An eighth grader can’t grasp the main idea of an essay or identify the different sides of a debate.
Tests by the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies tell a similar story, only for older folks. Adult numeracy and literacy skills across the globe have been declining since 2017. Tests from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that test scores in adult literacy have been declining over the past decade.
Andreas Schleicher, the head of education and skills at the O.E.C.D., told The Financial Times, “Thirty percent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child.” He continued, “It is actually hard to imagine — that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.”
This kind of literacy is the backbone of reasoning ability, the source of the background knowledge you need to make good decisions in a complicated world. As the retired general Jim Mattis and Bing West once wrote, “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.”
Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute emphasizes that among children in the fourth and eighth grades, the declines are not the same across the board. Scores for children at the top of the distribution are not falling. It’s the scores of children toward the bottom that are collapsing. The achievement gap between the top and bottom scorers is bigger in America than in any other nation with similar data.
There are some obvious contributing factors for this general decline. Covid hurt test scores. America abandoned No Child Left Behind, which put a lot of emphasis on testing and reducing the achievement gap. But these declines started earlier, around 2012, so the main cause is probably screen time. And not just any screen time. Actively initiating a search for information on the web may not weaken your reasoning skills. But passively scrolling TikTok or X weakens everything from your ability to process verbal information to your working memory to your ability to focus. You might as well take a sledgehammer to your skull.
My biggest worry is that behavioral change is leading to cultural change. As we spend time on our screens, we’re abandoning a value that used to be pretty central to our culture — the idea that you should work hard to improve your capacity for wisdom and judgment all the days of your life. That education, including lifelong out-of-school learning, is really valuable.
This value is based on the idea that life is filled with hard choices: whom to marry, whom to vote for, whether to borrow money. Your best friend comes up to you and says, “My husband has been cheating on me. Should I divorce him?” To make these calls, you have to be able to discern what is central to the situation, envision possible outcomes, understand other minds, calculate probabilities.
To do this, you have to train your own mind, especially by reading and writing. As Johann Hari wrote in his book “Stolen Focus,” “The world is complex and requires steady focus to be understood; it needs to be thought about and comprehended slowly.” Reading a book puts you inside another person’s mind in a way that a Facebook post just doesn’t. Writing is the discipline that teaches you to take a jumble of thoughts and cohere them into a compelling point of view.
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Americans had less schooling in decades past, but out of this urge for intellectual self-improvement, they bought encyclopedias for their homes, subscribed to the Book of the Month Club and sat, with much longer attention spans, through long lectures or three-hour Lincoln-Douglas debates. Once you start using your mind, you find that learning isn’t merely calisthenics for your ability to render judgment; it’s intrinsically fun.
But today one gets the sense that a lot of people are disengaging from the whole idea of mental effort and mental training. Absenteeism rates soared during the pandemic and have remained high since. If American parents truly valued education would 26 percent of students have been chronically absent during the 2022-23 school year?
In 1984, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, 35 percent of 13-year-olds read for fun almost every day. By 2023, that number was down to 14 percent. The media is now rife with essays by college professors lamenting the decline in their students’ abilities. The Chronicle of Higher Education told the story of Anya Galli Robertson, who teaches sociology at the University of Dayton. She gives similar lectures, assigns the same books and gives the same tests that she always has. Years ago, students could handle it; now they are floundering.
Last year The Atlantic published an essay by Rose Horowitch titled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” One professor recalled the lively classroom discussions of books like “Crime and Punishment.” Now the students say they can’t handle that kind of reading load.
The philosophy professor Troy Jollimore wrote in The Walrus: “I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters. It’s not just the sheer volume of assignments that appear to be entirely generated by A.I. — papers that show no sign the student has listened to a lecture, done any of the assigned reading or even briefly entertained a single concept from the course.”
Older people have always complained about “kids these days,” but this time we have empirical data to show that the observations are true.
What happens when people lose the ability to reason or render good judgments? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Donald Trump’s tariff policy. I’ve covered a lot of policies over the decades, some of which I supported and some of which I opposed. But I have never seen a policy as stupid as this one. It is based on false assumptions. It rests on no coherent argument in its favor. It relies on no empirical evidence. It has almost no experts on its side — from left, right or center. It is jumble-headedness exemplified. Trump himself personifies stupidity’s essential feature — self-satisfaction, an inability to recognize the flaws in your thinking. And of course when the approach led to absolutely predictable mayhem, Trump, lacking any coherent plan, backtracked, flip-flopped, responding impulsively to the pressures of the moment as his team struggled to keep up.
Producing something this stupid is not the work of a day; it is the achievement of a lifetime — relying on decades of incuriosity, decades of not cracking a book, decades of being impervious to evidence.
Back in Homer’s day, people lived within an oral culture, then humans slowly developed a literate culture. Now we seem to be moving to a screen culture. Civilization was fun while it lasted.
New Pact Would Require Ships to Cut Emissions or Pay a Fee
A draft global agreement sets a fee for cargo ships, which carry the vast majority of world trade, to pay for their greenhouse gas emissions.
By Somini Sengupta – April 11, 2025
The industry produces about 3 percent of planet-warming emissions globally, on par with aviation. A cargo ship near Vancouver, British Columbia. Credit…Alana Paterson for The New York Times
Amid the turmoil over global trade, countries around the world reached a remarkable, though modest, agreement Friday to reduce the climate pollution that comes from shipping those goods worldwide — with what is essentially a tax, no less.
A accord reached in London under the auspices of the International Maritime Organization, a United Nations agency, would require every ship that ferries goods across the oceans to lower their greenhouse gas emissions or pay a fee.
The targets fall short of what many had hoped. Still, it’s the first time a global industry would face a price on its climate pollution no matter where in the world it operates. The proceeds would be used mainly to help the industry move to cleaner fuels. Some of it could also go to developing countries most vulnerable to climate hazards. The accord would come into effect in 2028, pending approval by country representatives at the agency’s next meeting in October.
The agreement marks a rare bit of international cooperation that’s all the more remarkable because it was reached even after the United States pulled out of the talks earlier in the week. No other countries followed suit.
“The U.S. is just one country and that one country cannot derail this entire process,” said Faig Abbasov, shipping director for Transport and Environment, a European advocacy group that has pushed for measures to clean up the maritime industry. “This will be first binding decision that will force shipping companies to decarbonize and switch to alternative fuels.”
The agreement applies to all ships, no matter whose flag they fly, including ships registered in the United States, although the vast majority of ships are flagged in other countries. It remained unclear whether or how Washington might respond to the fee agreement.
Officials at the State Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ships mostly run on heavy fuel oil, sometimes called bunker fuel and more than 80 percent of global goods move by ships. The industry accounts for around 3 percent of global greenhouse emissions, comparable to the emissions from aviation.
The agreement reached Friday is far less ambitious than one initially proposed by a group of island nations who had suggested a universal assessment on emissions.
After two years of negotiations, the proposal sets out a complicated two-tiered system of fees. It sets carbon intensity targets, which are like clean-fuel standards for cars and trucks. Ships using conventional shipping oil would have to pay a higher fee ($380 per metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent produced) while ships that use a less carbon-intensive fuel mix would have to pay a lower fee ($100 for every metric ton that exceeds the fuel standard threshold).
It is expected to raise $11 billion to $13 billion a year, according to the Organization’s estimates.
“It is a positive outcome,” said Arsenio Dominguez, the organization’s secretary-general. “This is a long journey. This is not going to happen overnight. There are many concerns, particularly from developing countries.”
The threshold would get stricter over time. It could allow the industry to switch to biofuels to meet the standards. That is a contentious approach, since biofuels are made from crops, and growing more crops to make fuel could contribute to deforestation.
The new shipping-fuel standards are meant to spur the development of alternative fuels, including hydrogen.
There were objections from many quarters. Developing countries with maritime fleets said they would be unfairly punished because they have older fleets. Countries like Saudi Arabia, which ship huge quantities of oil, and China, which exports everything from plastic toys to electric cars worldwide, balked at proposals to set a higher price, according to people familiar with the negotiations.
“They turned away a proposal for a reliable source of revenue for those of us in dire need of finance to help with climate impacts,” said Ralph Regenvanu, the climate minister for Vanuatu, in a statement after the vote.
In the end, countries that voted in favor of the compromise agreement included China and the European Union. Saudi Arabia and Russia voted against it.
The United States pulled out of the talks entirely.
Projections by the International Chamber of Shipping, an industry body, found that it would have a negligible effect on prices. “We recognize that this may not be the agreement which all sections of the industry would have preferred, and we are concerned that this may not yet go far enough in providing the necessary certainty,” said Guy Platten, the council’s secretary general. “But it is a framework which we can build upon.”
Claire Brown contributed reporting.
Somini Sengupta is the international climate reporter on the Times climate team.
Inside Elon Musk’s Gleeful Destruction of the Government
Miles Klee, Andrew Perez, Asawin Suebsaeng and Meagan Jordan – April 10, 2025
Ben Vizzachero had his dream job, working as a wildlife biologist with the Los Padres National Forest in California. He was moving up the ladder, had recently received a positive performance review, and was “making the world a better place,” he says.
Yet, over Presidents’ Day weekend in February, Donald Trump’s administration told Vizzachero he was being let go for his “performance.” Vizzachero was one of many thousands of “probationary” federal workers who were baselessly fired by Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency as part of Trump’s effort to purge the federal workforce and make it more MAGA.
It was crushing. “My job is my identity,” Vizzachero says. “How I’ve defined myself since I was five years old is that I love birds and bird-watching.” Talking with Rolling Stone in March, following his firing, he wondered what would happen to his health insurance and whether he would need to move in with his parents.
When a Democratic lawmaker invited Vizzachero as a guest to Trump’s joint address to Congress in March, he found himself seated near Musk. He took the opportunity to confront the world’s richest man. According to Vizzachero, he described his job to Musk and asked: “Am I waste?”
He says Musk, “with a very condescending smirk,” hit him with a line from the 1999 movie Office Space: “What would you say you do here?”
It was a dubious callback to the scene in which a pair of management consultants interview a worker and force him to justify his job before he’s fired. Like countless Wall Street traders who took the wrong lesson from Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” speech, Musk missed the point of Office Space: that corporate culture is dehumanizing, and bosses like him are odious cretins.
Soon after Trump’s and Republicans’ 2024 wins, which Musk supported with $290 million in political spending, the Tesla CEO publicly mused about using this line from Office Space on federal workers. He posted it in November on X, the social media platform he owns, with a laugh-crying emoji, resharing his earlier post of an AI-generated image in which he’s seated at a conference table behind a placard that reads “DOGE.” Two weeks later, Musk announced, “I rewatched Office Space tonight for the 5th time to prepare for @DOGE!” The billionaire reportedly had a DOGE T-shirt made, emblazoned with his favorite line. And one weekend in February, Musk threatened to fire every federal worker who failed to respond to an email asking them, “What did you do last week?”
Musk and the White House did not respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment.
“The American people are saying, you know what, Elon Musk? We believe you to be a liar.”
Everett Kelley
With DOGE, Musk has gleefully banished tens of thousands of federal employees, canceled lifesaving aid, and repeatedly threatened America’s safety-net programs, all as part of a purported hunt for waste, fraud, and abuse. He’s governed as an out-of-touch corporate villain, laughing about this carnage while partying, posting, delivering big payments to voters (although the amounts mean virtually nothing to him), and cashing in on new contracts and business opportunities — sometimes appearing high out of his mind. Even administration officials and Trump loyalists on Capitol Hill joke about the latest outrages of “Prime Minister Musk.” At every turn in his crusade of destruction, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has dared the courts and a weak Democratic opposition to stop him.
But it didn’t take long for ordinary Americans to get pissed off, with protests against DOGE, Musk, and his companies erupting nationwide. “The American people are saying, you know what, Elon Musk?” says Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, a federal labor union that has brought legal challenges against the Trump administration on behalf of the more than 820,000 workers across government agencies it represents. “We’re not buying what you’re selling. We believe you to be a liar.”
Organizers have mounted a “Tesla Takedown” campaign, with tens of thousands around the globe showing up at dealerships to condemn DOGE, according to the group. They have encouraged Tesla owners to sell their cars and stockholders to dump their shares, since much of Musk’s wealth comes from his stake in the electric-vehicle manufacturer.
“People have asked, ‘What is DOGE?’ ” says a retiree at an anti-Tesla protest in Los Angeles in March, explaining that she and her husband are trying to “educate people” about the harm Musk’s pet project is causing. Passing motorists honk in support of the approximately 25 people gathered at a Tesla center despite the rain. Some hold signs denouncing Musk as a Nazi (he has denied any association with Nazism), while another poster at the rally simply reads: “Not Sure About This Elon Guy.”
“There is a growing movement to divest, Tesla stock is in a precipitous decline,” says actor and writer Alex Winter, who launched Tesla Takedown with other activists in February. “Things are moving in the right direction.”
‘Crazy Uncle Elon’
Prior to Trump’s inauguration, observers weren’t sure how seriously to take the idea of a Musk-led government-efficiency commission, but the billionaire and DOGE have been at the vanguard of Trump’s shockingly lawless second administration.
Musk has spearheaded the president’s purge of the federal workforce and his efforts to consolidate information and power over federal funds — despite never being elected, appointed, or confirmed to hold such a pivotal role. Musk is technically a “special government employee,” a designation that allowed him to bypass a Senate confirmation process and avoid publicly reporting his financial holdings.
DOGE was created by renaming the U.S. Digital Service and moving it under the executive office in an apparent bid to circumvent public-record laws. The ethics watchdog American Oversight has sued to force the group to comply with those laws and preserve materials subject to Freedom of Information Act requests. “The public deserves to know the full extent of the damage,” said interim Executive Director Chioma Chukwu in a statement on an April court order requiring DOGE to fulfill this legal obligation.
Trump and Musk have tried to grant the new office expansive authorities never envisioned by Congress, including the ability to “impound,” or freeze, funds appropriated by lawmakers. Experts say the arrangement is unconstitutional on several levels — as are DOGE’s mass firings and its attempts to shutter or pause the work of whole government agencies. A lawsuit brought by personnel of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) laid out many of these arguments, contending that “Musk has acted as an officer of the United States without having been duly appointed to such a role,” and that DOGE “acted to eliminate USAID, a federal agency created by statute, where only Congress may do so.” A federal judge in Maryland agreed, finding that Musk and DOGE likely violated the Constitution as they dismantled the office. Another judge ordered the Trump administration to rehire thousands of probationary employees terminated by DOGE. (As of publication, the legal battle is ongoing.)
Vizzachero, the wildlife biologist, was among those rehired. The administration is still moving ahead with even larger mass firings.
“I am become meme. There’s living the dream, and living the meme, and that’s what’s happening.”
Elon Musk
Musk and his lieutenants — many pulled from his own companies, others young techie college dropouts lacking in government experience — have demanded unprecedented access to sensitive personal information and government payment systems, leading to still more legal challenges. Federal judges havefound that Trump’s administration likely violated privacy and administrative laws when it gave DOGE sweeping access to personal, private data held by the Social Security Administration, the Treasury Department, and the Education Department. Regardless, DOGE has continued to operate with the same playbook Musk used after acquiring Twitter, showing a zeal for speedy terminations and little regard for how departments function.
Throughout the chaos and confusion of Trump’s return to power, Musk also strove to cultivate the image he’s long maintained as a workhorse, showman, and expert in varied fields. He reportedly told friends he was sleeping at DOGE offices, rehashing claims he previously made about sleeping on a Tesla factory floor. He’s continually posted grandiose and often inaccurate estimates of how much money DOGE has saved.
And he seemed to relish his role as an all-powerful agitator. Musk began regularly smearing his enemies as “retards” on X and targeting judges who ruled against the administration or blocked DOGE’s incursions. He grew bold enough to describe Social Security, long considered untouchable, as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”
Onstage at Trump’s post-inauguration event, Musk threw a straight-armed salute to the crowd, then responded to the ensuing backlash with a series of puns on names of high-ranking Nazis from Adolf Hitler’s inner circle. Speaking virtually to the far-right German political party Alternative für Deutschland, Musk argued that Germany had placed “too much of a focus on past guilt.”
At the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference in February, Musk waved around a chain saw he said would slice through “bureaucracy” — this on the same day that his former partner Grimes publicly begged him on X to respond to her about a medical crisis experienced by one of their three children.
“I am become meme,” he said onstage. “I’m living the meme. You know, it’s like, there’s living the dream, and there’s living the meme, and that’s pretty much what’s happening.”
The bizarre CPAC appearance prompted speculation about Musk’s state of mind and recreational drug use, as he was wearing sunglasses inside and had difficulty stringing sentences together. People close to Musk have told The Wall Street Journal they have known him to use illegal drugs, including LSD, cocaine, Ecstasy, and mushrooms — a source of concern for some of the board members overseeing his companies. (Musk has denied using illegal drugs, though he has spoken about his use of prescription ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic.)
Some senior Trump administration officials and Cabinet members have found themselves deeply annoyed by Musk. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, three people familiar with the matter say, hasn’t hidden his disdain for Musk, with some State Department officials nicknaming the Tesla billionaire “Crazy Uncle Elon,” two of those sources tell Rolling Stone.
“I have been in the same room with Elon, and he always tries to be funny. And he’s not funny. Like, at all,” says a senior Trump administration official. “He makes these jokes and little asides and smiles and then looks almost hurt if you don’t lap up his humor. I keep using the word ‘annoying’; a lot of people who have to deal with him do. But the word doesn’t do the situation justice. Elon just thinks he’s smarter than everyone else in the room and acts like it, even when it’s clear he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Musk has gnawed at the patience of an array of high-ranking administration officials, to the point that — according to this official and two others — Trump lieutenants have walked out of meetings and earnestly asked one another if they thought Musk was high. Administration officials joked to one another about subjecting Musk to mandatory drug testing, which Musk himself has said would be a “great idea” for federal employees. (A lawyer for Musk has said he’s “regularly and randomly drug-tested at SpaceX and has never failed a test.”)
“Talking to the guy is sometimes like listening to really rusty nails on a chalkboard,” says the senior Trump administration official, who adds that Musk is not much of a team player, either. “He’s just the most irritating person I’ve ever had to deal with, and that is saying something.”
‘Why Do These Fucking Kids Know This?’
With Trump’s blessing, Musk has engineered a climate of fear that has infected nearly every corner of the U.S. executive branch. When DOGE’s “nerd army” has moved to take over federal agencies, if their demands are not immediately met, Musk’s minions have snapped at senior government officials: “Do I need to call Elon?”
The emails that Musk has had sent to federal employees have been so intentionally dickish that several have produced an avalanche of what one Trump administration official called “very rude” pranks and replies. Some of these crass responses include — per messages reviewed by Rolling Stone — graphic sexual images, including content involving urine and feces.
“I know Elon probably won’t see it, but I hope he sees it,” says one now-former federal employee, who says they replied to one such email with an image of a human butthole.
Musk is apparently amused by the unrest. Aside from his public memeing, when he has privately messaged associates and confidants about reports from federal staffers about how their lives have been wrecked, the Tesla CEO has been known to react with laugh-crying emojis, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.
The tech oligarch has repeatedly warned that millions of Americans over the age of 100 are receiving benefits — a flagrant misrepresentation of agency data. Trump has run with this falsehood, too, even as his acting Social Security commissioner has acknowledged that these people “are not necessarily receiving benefits.”
Musk has claimed there are “extreme levels of fraud” in Social Security — though he and DOGE haven’t provided any evidence. He’s argued, without basis, that hundreds of billions in fraud per year are going to undocumented immigrants from entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
The constant griping about entitlements is making an impact: When people lose their Social Security benefits, they are blamingMusk and DOGE.
Two administration officials and another Trump adviser tell Rolling Stone that when Musk has publicly decried Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme,” some close to Trump have tried to diplomatically remind Musk that this could be damaging politically.
“He’s the most irritating person I’ve ever had to deal with, and that’s saying something.”
Senior Trump Administration Official
“We like winning elections, and you may have noticed that a lot of our voters are elderly,” the Trump adviser notes. The complaint from Trumpland brass about Musk’s inability to absorb or entertain new information is a common one.
According to the Trump adviser and an administration official, the DOGE captain has stubbornly responded with comments like, “It is a Ponzi scheme, though.” (It is not.)
As Musk and his minions claim they’re hunting for wasteful spending, the tech mogul is vying for new contracts at agencies that regulate his many business interests — a situation that poses obvious conflicts of interest. The Trump White House has asserted that Musk can police his own conflicts, and excuse himself from DOGE’s work overseeing certain contracts if he believes it’s necessary.
As part of their purge, Musk and DOGE fired hundreds of probationary employees at the Federal Aviation Administration, which last year proposed fining Musk’s SpaceX for regulatory and safety violations. Musk also pressured the last FAA administrator to resign, leaving it without leadership when an Army helicopter and commercial jet collided over the Potomac River near D.C. in January, killing 67 people.
The agency has started utilizing Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet service, to help upgrade the systems it uses to manage America’s airspace. Musk has tried to spin this as charity, posting that “Starlink terminals are being sent at NO COST to the taxpayer on an emergency basis to restore air-traffic-control connectivity.” However, as Rolling Stone has reported, FAA officials quietly directed staff to quickly locate tens of millions of dollars to fund a Starlink deal.
The New York Times separately reported in March that Starlink is now being used on the White House campus, despite security concerns. Trump’s Department of Defense just awarded SpaceX billions more in contracts to put sensitive military satellites in space. DOGE is reportedly using Musk’s Grok AI chatbot liberally as it slashes the government.
Two sources with knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone that Musk’s DOGE staffers have grilled DOD employees about the Golden Dome project, Trump’s fantastical proposal to build a space-based missile-defense system to protect the entire United States — an idea ready-made for Starlink. Their questions were so specific that Pentagon officials wondered if the DOGE staff had access to highly sensitive and guarded information.
“Why do these fucking kids know this?” is how one of the sources describes their bewilderment at the time.
With DOGE, Musk has effectively infiltrated agencies that are supposed to oversee his businesses. This situation creates risk, experts say — as officials may not feel like they can scrutinize Musk’s businesses too closely. Case in point: In late February, the FAA cleared SpaceX to launch another unmanned test flight of its Starship rocket, a month after one exploded. Starship exploded again midair, raining debris over Florida and the Caribbean and disrupting nearly 500 flights.
The FAA’s probe of the first explosion concluded that the probable cause was “stronger than anticipated vibrations during flight.” The agency noted that SpaceX had “implemented corrective actions” prior to launching the second rocket, which exploded too.
‘Nobody Elected’ Musk
Musk’s unprecedented attack on the government has not gone without answer from average Americans, who have mobilized mass protests focused on DOGE and Tesla. Republican lawmakers holding town-hall events have had constituents show up to berate them over Musk, booing his name and denouncing his cuts. By early March, House Speaker Mike Johnson was telling his GOP colleagues to skip such events.
Demonstrations, meanwhile, spilled into the streets. “DOGE is illegitimate. Congress has not authorized them,” a federal worker at a March protest on the National Mall told Rolling Stone. The action saw significant support from veterans due to DOGE’s cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs. “Fuck Musk,” says another attendee, whose relative is a government contract worker. She notes that “nobody elected” Musk.
As Musk’s DOGE continues to slash jobs, a protest movement against him is brewing.
The White House and Trump law-enforcement officials have moved to crack down on Tesla vandals. At a Tesla showcase that Trump held on the White House driveway with Musk, the president said the attackers should be considered domestic terrorists. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that three individuals suspected of carrying out arson attacks on Tesla properties were facing sentences of up to 20 years. The FBI launched a task force to look at anti-Tesla violence.
Trump also suggested that individuals arrested for these crimes should be sent to prison in El Salvador.
What’s $1 Million?
Amid rising public anger about his role and influence, Musk held a town hall in late March in Green Bay, Wisconsin. More than 1,000 supporters joined him, as hundreds protested outside in the ice-cold rain.
The protesters were there to vent their anger about Musk’s attempts to buy a state Supreme Court seat. The tech billionaire — through his Super PAC, America PAC — had been offering voters $100 to sign a petition decrying so-called activist judges. Only petition signers could attend the town hall. Musk had announced he would give away checks for $1 million to two event attendees.
One protester, holding a sign that said “X-LAX needed to eliminate Musk,” told Rolling Stone that Musk had “no business in Wisconsin trying to influence votes.” Another held a sign declaring, “Packer fans don’t like Nazis,” with a picture of Musk’s straight-armed salute.
Inside, Musk appeared onstage donning a Packers-style cheesehead hat before signing it and throwing it into the crowd.
Shortly afterward, he brought two winners out to collect the $1 million checks. He admitted to the audience that the point of them is “just to get attention.” He laughed about how paying voters this way “causes the legacy media to kind of lose their minds.”
While $1 million would be a life-changing sum for most people, it means shockingly little to a man who was reportedly worth $316 billion at the end of March. One of these checks is equivalent to just over 60 cents for him, when you compare his net worth with that of the median American. (The $290 million that Musk spent to elect Trump and Republicans was equivalent to roughly $214 for him at the time — less than an average family’s weekly grocery bill.)
“I would thank him for radicalizing me. I had never attended a protest until I was fired.”
Ben Vizzachero
At his town hall, Musk — an immigrant — launched into a tirade about noncitizens receiving Social Security numbers, standing in front of a chart purporting to show a big spike under Democrats. In reality, legal immigrants are given Social Security numbers so they can pay taxes; this process was in fact made automatic during Trump’s first term. The crowd gasped as Musk gave them the false impression that DOGE had finally found real fraud in Social Security.
When Musk was interrupted by protesters, he joked that they were operatives funded by Democratic mega-donor George Soros — yes, inside the event filled with people he was paying $100 to sign his petition, where he also gave away $2 million.
Throughout the night, Musk argued that the Wisconsin Supreme Court election would have major implications not just for the state or the country, but possibly the world — if Democrats won, he argued, Republicans could lose two congressional seats.
Two days later, Wisconsin voters convincingly rejected Musk’s candidate, Brad Schimel, by 10 points. The election was a referendum on Musk — and he lost big.
Dr. Kristin Lyerly, a Wisconsin OB-GYN who serves on the board for the Committee to Protect Health Care and campaigned against Schimel, tells Rolling Stone, “Authenticity is incredibly important to Wisconsinites, and that is what Elon Musk completely lacked: any sense of authenticity.”
After Musk’s epic fail, word trickled out that he could soon leave the Trump administration. It wasn’t a surprise — special government employees are supposed to serve for 130 days or less per year. Musk’s effect on the government and its workers will linger.
On April 5, as a wave of “Hands Off!” protests coalesced against Trump and Musk in every state and cities around the world, Rolling Stone spoke again with Vizzachero. He was getting ready to speak at one of these rallies in California. (Now that he’s been rehired, he says, “the statements that I’m making to you are my personal opinions.”)
He reads his planned speech over the phone. He talks about how environmental and conservation laws brought back the bald eagle and the peregrine falcon, and restored America’s public lands. “The Trump administration wants to exploit and abuse our public lands so that they can make billionaires like Elon Musk even richer,” he says.
It’s been a month since his run-in with Musk. He says he’s “kind of grateful.”
If he saw Musk again now, Vizzachero says, “I would thank him for radicalizing me, because I had actually never attended a protest until a week after I got fired. I spent a long time sitting on the sidelines thinking there’s so much bad stuff happening. He gave me the push that I needed to use my voice to speak up and speak out.”
Trump Administration Opens More than 50% of Protected U.S. Forest Land for Logging: What That Means
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins claims that turning trees into timber will help prevent wildfires, though experts have deemed it a harmful and inefficient method
Meredith Kile – April 7, 2025
Robert F. Bukaty/APMilan Lumber Co. in Milan, New Hampshire, on Thursday, March 13, 2025
More than 50% of the United States’ formerly protected national forests are now on-limits for the logging industry.
Following an executive order from President Donald Trump aimed at increasing U.S. timber production, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has announced plans to remove environmental protections that will allow logging on millions of acres of national forest land.
In an April 3 memo titled “Increasing Timber Production and Designating an Emergency Situation on National Forest System Lands,” Rollins cites a goal to remove “heavy-handed federal policies and increase domestic timber production to protect our national and economic security.”
To comply with Trump’s directive to increase U.S. timber production by 25%, the Forest Service’s acting associate chief, Christopher B. French, sent an additional memo to regional National Forest System officials instructing immediate action.
According to the Department of Agriculture, French’s memo directs on-the-ground leadership to “increase timber outputs, simplify permitting, remove National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) processes, reduce implementation and contracting burdens and to work directly with states, local government, and forest product producers to ensure that the Forest Service delivers a reliable and consistent supply of timber.”
Millions of acres of that timber, Rollins’ Emergency Situation Determination explained, will come from land previously protected by the National Forest System.
Rollins’ office states that 66.9 million acres of NFS land have been designated “very high or high wildfire risk” and 78.8 million acres have been identified as “experiencing declining forest health” from insects, disease, invasive species and more.
Scott Olson/GettyA fire danger sign in Yale, Oklahoma, on March 17. 2025
Allowing for overlap, Rollins has now designated a total of nearly 113 million acres of NFS land — which amounts to 59% of the total forest land — as an emergency situation, making them candidates for logging and other “emergency actions” to supposedly ensure public safety.
“I am proud to follow the bold leadership of President Trump by empowering forest managers to reduce constraints and minimize the risks of fire, insects, and disease so that we can strengthen American timber industry and further enrich our forests with the resources they need to thrive,” Rollins, who co-founded the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute think tank, said in a statement.
However, when Trump issued a similar logging directive during his first term — during a federal shutdown — experts warned that clearing trees does not necessarily reduce wildfire risks.
“We can’t log our way out of the fire problem — thinning all the forests is not possible,” University of Colorado Boulder Professor Jennifer Balch told TheWashington Post in January 2019. “And even if it were, it won’t stop fires in the extreme weather that is happening more frequently, and will in the future.”
Balch explained that thinning federal forests near homes makes sense, however, only 2% of lands treated by the Forest Service between 2004 and 2013 experienced a wildfire. The more serious issue, she wrote, was a shrinking snowpack in the western U.S. due to steadily rising temperatures.
Rollins’ April 3 memo made no mention of climate change.
JOSH EDELSON/AFP via GettyThe Pasadena Jewish Temple & Center burns during the Eaton fire in Pasadena, California on January 7, 2025.More
During his presidency, Democrat Joe Biden proposed new protections for some of the oldest trees on NFS land. Old growth trees store large amounts of carbon, provide needed animal habitats and are also more likely to survive forest fires.
“Protecting our old growth trees from logging is an important first step to ensure these giants continue to store vast amounts of carbon,” Randi Spivak, public lands policy director with the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement in December 2023. “The Forest Service also needs to protect our mature forests, which if allowed to grow will become the old growth of tomorrow.”
The 22 Most Clever Signs From The “Hands Off” Protests
Michaela Bramwell – April 6, 2025
This weekend, thousands of people participated in the “Hands Off” protests across all 50 states to express their opposition to the policies of the Trump administration and cuts being made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
“Hands Off” event organizers said in a recent statement, “They’re taking everything they can get their hands on — our health care, our data, our jobs, our services — and daring the world to stop them. This is a crisis, and the time to act is now.”
Anadolu / Getty Images
Demonstrators got very clever with their protest signs, so here are some of the most memorable ones:
Major solar manufacturer opens massive new factory in unexpected state: ‘A crown jewel for us’
Michael Muir – April 6, 2025
Renewable energy received a major boost in Texas with the opening of a 1.6-gigawatt solar module factory in Brookshire. Waaree Solar Americas, a subdivision of Indian conglomerate Waaree Energies, began production in January 2025.
The manufacturer told PV Magazine, “The launch of commercial production marks a critical step in localizing solar manufacturing in the United States, contributing to job creation and economic growth while reducing reliance on imported solar products.”
The company plans to ramp up production in 2026 to three gigawatts and five gigawatts by the end of 2027. For reference, one gigawatt is enough energy to power around 876,000 homes for a year, per Carbon Collective. Texas is a fitting choice for the new facility as the Lone Star State is one of the country’s most enthusiastic adopters of solar energy.
Solar power is incredibly popular across the political spectrum in the United States, with a recent poll finding that almost 90% of citizens support federal incentives to install it. That popularity isn’t difficult to explain.
As a clean energy source, it appeals to environmentally conscious homeowners, while the potential savings make solar attractive to more fiscally minded consumers. Homeowners who take the plunge enjoy huge savings on their bills, which amount to tens of thousands over the panels’ lifetime.
Such is the bipartisan appeal of rooftop solar panels that when the Inflation Reduction Act offered incentives to lower the installation costs, Republican-leaning states were the biggest beneficiaries. Seven of the top ten states for solar panels in 2023 backed Trump in the 2024 election.
However, the future of solar subsidies is uncertain, with the current administration ordering a pause on IRA funding until April. Additionally, uncertainty over tariffs could make importing materials difficult, but Waaree seems to have anticipated that prospect.
CEO Amit Paithankar believes the company is in a good position regardless of what unfolds next. He told Moneycontrol it is uniquely placed to move in whatever direction is necessary.
“Our Texas facility will be a crown jewel for us,” Paithankar said. “Depending on whichever way the policy framework in the US shapes up, we will be in a good position.”
