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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What Happens To Your Body When You Walk For Just 2 Minutes—Or As Much As 60 Minutes
Bridie Wilkins – May 16, 2025
How Walking Duration Affects Your Body Tatiana Maksimova – Getty Images
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Don’t underestimate the power of walking. Studies show that just two minutes a day is enough for considerable benefits. But between boosting your mood, regulating blood sugar levels, and reducing blood pressure (to name a few), the gains you get will depend on how long–or short–your walks are.
Here’s how a 2, 5, 10, 30, 40 and 60-minute walk will affect your body.
The effects of a 2-5-minute walk
Regulates blood sugar (and aids weight loss)
A meta-analysis published in Sports Medicine analyzed seven studies which compared the impact of sitting, standing and walking on blood sugar regulation. The participants in the studies included were asked either to stand or walk for two to five minutes every 20-30 minutes throughout the day. The results showed that a short walk after eating caused the participants’ blood sugar levels to rise and fall more gradually than standing or sitting. The participants’ insulin levels also remained more stable.
The study didn’t investigate how this might affect weight loss, but we caught up with sports and exercise medicine consultant Dr Rebecca Robinson to explain: “Walking straight after a meal appears to be more effective at reducing both blood sugar [glucose] and the level of glucose in your interstitial fluid [the thin layer of fluid surrounding your body’s cells]. If you don’t walk straight away, excess glucose in your bloodstream will be stored by insulin and may be stored as fat.”
Ready to make walking a habit? Join WH+ to get the exclusive 4-week walking plan that burns fat and builds muscle.
“The contractions of your muscles during walking increase glucose uptake as the glucose is metabolized by your muscles for energy. This reduces the amount of sugar in your bloodstream. Digestion also uses glucose for energy, but walking boosts the total metabolic cost on your body after eating.”
“Spikes in your blood sugar will naturally occur after eating. If a diet is high in refined sugar and high glycemic index carbohydrates, this can increase the amount of insulin needed to store the excess blood sugar, which you may not have. If you don’t have enough insulin and are then left with excess blood sugar levels, this may be stored as fat, and this type of fat is often stored in your abdominal area and around your organs, which can cause heightened inflammation and conditions like heart disease.”
“A blood sugar spike also often leads to a crash, whereby your sugar levels rise, and your insulin response rises to store glucose quickly. This can make you crave more high sugar food and an increased calorie intake, leading to weight gain.”
“Walking after a meal rich in sugars or refined carbohydrates can help reduce the amount of insulin needed and may reduce the amount of glucose that gets stored as fat.”
The effects of a 10-minute walk
Reduces blood pressure
According to a study published in The Journal of Human Hypertension, ten minutes of walking could be enough to reduce blood pressure. The study’s participants completed three 10-minute walking sessions at moderate intensity over a three-hour period, and the results showed a significant reduction in systolic blood pressure after the third session.
Improves mood
A study published in Psychology of Sport and Exercise analyzed the emotional responses of participants after 10-minute and 30-minute walks, including an analysis of their future intentions for walking. The authors found that all walking sessions improved the participants’ mood—including just 10 minutes—while those who walked for 10 minutes also reported higher self-efficacy and intentions for future exercise.
Reduces illness risk
A meta-analysis published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine analyzed data of over 30 million people in 196 peer-reviewed studies and found that just 11 minutes a day of brisk walking was enough to reduce the risk of stroke, heart disease, and some cancers, while reducing inflammation.
The effects of a 30-minute walk
Reduces feelings of depression
Researchers for the journal, Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, found that people suffering from depression who walked on a treadmill for 30 minutes reported feeling more vigorous and had a greater sense of psychological wellbeing for up to an hour after completing their walks. Those patients also reported reductions in negative feelings such as tension, depression, anger and fatigue.
Walking on a treadmill for 30 minutes is proven to help reduce feelings of depression EmirMemedovski – Getty Images
Boosts bone density
A 2022 study published in PLOS ONE found that long-term brisk walking is an efficient way to improve bone density. Specifically, taking brisk walks for 30 minutes per day three or more times per week is recommended to prevent bone loss in premenopausal women.
The effects of a 40-minute walk
Improves memory
Researchers at Colorado State University recruited 180 adults over 60 who were generally healthy but inactive. One group walked for 40 minutes three times a week, while the second group danced three times a week, and the third did stretching three times a week. The results analyzed the brain’s white matter, which acts as the wiring that connects and supports billions of neurons and enables memory. MRI scans after six months showed improvements in this white matter in the brains of the people who walked, while these people also scored higher on memory tests. Those who remained sedentary did not show such improvements.
Boosts heart health
According to a 2018 observational study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology analyzing over 90,000 participants, walking at least 40 minutes two or three times a week was associated with a reduced risk of developing heart failure in postmenopausal women.
The effects of a 60-minute walk
Improves sleep
A 2019 study from Sleep found that postmenopausal women who do 60 minutes of light- to moderate-intensity physical activity, like walking, per day have longer, more restful sleeps than those who are sedentary.
Reduces risk of depression
Walking for an hour a day can reduce your risk of depression, according to a 2019 JAMA Psychiatry study. Researchers saw a 26-percent decrease in odds of developing depression with increased physical activity, like walking. “Intentionally moving your body in more gentle ways throughout the day–like walking, stretching, taking the stairs, doing the dishes–can still add up in good ways for your mood,” study author Karmel Choi told Harvard Health.
Reduces stress
Any amount of walking reduces the stress hormone cortisol, which helps you feel less stressed and more relaxed, says Joyce Shulman, co-founder and CEO of 99 Walks and Jetti Fitness and author of Walk Your Way to Better. But a 2022 study published in Molecular Psychiatry found that a 60-minute walk in nature decreases activity in brain regions involved in stress processing. In contrast, brain activity in those regions remained stable after a 60-minute walk in an urban environment.
(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.
DOGE’s Fraud Tracker at Social Security Turns Into a Massive Self-Own
Josh Fiallo – May 15, 2025
Brian Snyder / Reuters
How’s that for efficiency?
Procedures implemented by the Department of Government Efficiency suggested that just two out of 110,000 calls to the Social Security Administration this spring had a “high probability” of being fraudulent, Federal Computer Week reported.
That is a far cry from the 40 percent figure that was parroted by MAGA in recent months, including by DOGE’s recently departed leader, Elon Musk, and Vice President JD Vance. The real figure is about .0018 percent.
The anti-fraud procedures were put in place by DOGE last month and have seemingly done more harm than good, according to an internal memo viewed by Federal Computer Week. The new procedures reassured DOGE staff that fraudsters are not phoning the SSA every second, but reportedly slowed processing times at the administration by 25 percent and may soon be removed from protocol.
DOGE’s anti-fraud procedures have seemingly done more harm than good. / Samuel Corum/Getty Images
Such delays were described in a memo as a “degradation of public service,” which is the antithesis of DOGE’s supposed goal.
“No significant fraud has been detected from the flagged cases,” the internal document said, according to the magazine.
DOGE’s anti-fraud protocol required a three-day hold to be placed on phone claims in order to check for fraud. This procedure “delays payments and benefits to customers, despite an extremely low risk of fraud,” the memo said.
The 40 percent figure circulating in MAGA circles stems from a Fox News segment on March 27, where the DOGE engineer Aram Moghaddassi wrongly claimed that 40 percent of calls made to the SSA to change direct deposit information are from fraudsters.
In reality, Federal Computer Week reports that 40 percent of direct deposit fraud at the agency is associated with phone calls—not that four out of every 10 calls to the agency are from fraudsters.
Likely based on the exaggerated fraud figures, the SSA announced in March that it would phase out allowing people to make account changes or claims over the phone. That policy was scrapped a short time later, following a public backlash.
Musk has been notably quieter the last month. / JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
Musk, who has been notably quieter the last month, did not immediately address his department’s face-palm on Thursday.
Foreign groups are stealing $1 trillion a year through identity theft – and DOGE is just letting it happen
John Bowden – May 15, 2025
A new report details how the federal government is ignoring billions of dollars in identity theft-related fraud every year as outdated systems leave government agencies and Americans both vulnerable to scammers.
The report from Socure, a firm which sells identity verification services, found that fraudsters are using stolen identities to scam government agencies out of billions and bilk Americans from receiving benefits they are entitled to in the process. The problem is so vast, according to the report, that false or fraudulent claims originating from crime rings primarily based abroad make up between 2 percent to 12 percent of all applications for US government services.
Government estimates project that federal agencies annually lose about $500bn to fraudulent claims. Socure’s report indicates the number could be nearly twice that high.
For comparison, that’s more than 10 times the annual budget of USAID, the hub of US foreign aid and soft power now eviscerated by Elon Musk’s DOGE campaign and due for rehousing at the State Department.
First reported by NBC News, the report went on to find that a lack of identity verification systems at the federal level was having a cascading effect, as scammers often target private entities with information improperly obtained through government agencies.
“There is a real need for fraud prevention solutions which leverage simple consortium data that spans commercial and government programs,” it reads.
The report cited basic issues with federal identity verification efforts: callers who connected with agencies were often able to access information by providing information which by itself could have been illicitly obtained, like Social Security numbers and answers to security questions. Red flags, like Social Security numbers that do not match an applicant’s date of birth, applications filed from international IP addresses, or phone numbers with area codes that don’t match a person’s place of residence, are often ignored.
“Today, in many agencies, if someone calls into a call center and says that I’m locked out of my account, many of them will allow them to get access to their account by saying, ‘Hey, we’ll let you change your name and your password on here,’” Socure vice president Jordan Burris told NBC News. “They’ll probably ask them something to the effect of, ‘Hey, can you tell me your name? Can you tell me Social Security Number? Can you perhaps answer this question about a car that you probably had once upon a time?’”
One international fraud ring described as “sophisticated” by Socure’s analysis used stolen identities to launch 60 fraudulent claims across “multiple” agencies during a one-month span last fall.
It’s a bipartisan problem, too: according to Socure’s findings, fraud targeting government agencies jumped during the Covid pandemic as the federal government distributed assistance checks millions of Americans and insituted loan programs for businesses to support workers during lockdowns. The figures never recovered when those programs ended.
But it’s not part of the “waste, fraud, and abuse” which either Elon Musk’s DOGE effort or the Republican Congress are addressing through federal means and the effort to craft a budget bill that could pass the House and Senate. Republicans in Congress are hoping to find nearly $900bn in savings to fund a renewal of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, but are doing so by instituting work requirements for Medicaid which Democrats say just amounts to a layer of red tape aimed at kicking people off the program. The Republican plan also calls for cuts to food stamps and other changes to Medicaid aimed at lowering the burden for the federal government.
Elon Musk’s DOGE efforts have largely focused on cutting foreign aid programs and government grants (Getty Images)
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates that Medicaid and Medicare together make more than $100bn in improper payments every year. The GOP budget plan includes changes to eligibility requirements that make checks more frequent, but there’s no organized push for stronger electronic verification practices.
DOGE, meanwhile, is largely sputtering out after taking an axe to USAID and, by most accounts, urging large-scale cuts to federal staff rosters rather than changes to programs to improve efficiency, or even efforts to identify fraud. A website last updated on Sunday operated by the Musk-led effort indicates that his team is taking credit for $170bn in supposed savings, though that number is highly disputed.
Elon Musk is expected to take a public step back from his role in the coming days, while his team seems to largely view government programs as fraudulent and wasteful by design, rather than undermined by criminal groups.
Think you’re ‘middle class’ in America? Pew research shows there’s a roughly 49% chance you’re not actually
Vishesh Raisinghani – May 14, 2025
The term ‘“middle class” is often discussed but rarely defined. It’s a term the majority of Americans would use to define themselves, yet most people don’t know whether their household truly fits into this category.
Based on the Pew Research Center’s analysis of government data, roughly 49% of Americans don’t actually fall into the middle class income category.
Here’s a closer look at why that is.
The real middle class
Pew Research Center defines the middle class as a household with income that is at least two-thirds of the U.S. median income to double the median income. Based on government data for 2022, this would imply a range of incomes from $56,600 to $169,800.
As of 2023, 51% of American households fit into this category.
Another study from Gallup found that 54% of Americans would describe themselves as middle class, so it seems most people are pretty self-aware of where they fall on the income spectrum.
But, most Americans might not be aware that this cohort of middle-income earners is getting squeezed.
The share of the American population that fits into the middle-class category has been shrinking for the past five decades, according to Pew Research.
Roughly 61% of households across the country were part of this cohort in 1971 — a full 10 percentage points higher than the recent 51% rate.
American families are being increasingly pushed to opposite ends of the income spectrum.
From 1971 to 2023, the share of U.S. households in the lower-income bracket grew from 27% to 30%, while those in upper-income households increased from 11% to 19%.
This trend may be a reflection of growing income inequality across the country. And many families feel like they’re on the brink of falling into a lower category.
A recent survey by the National Foundation for Credit Counseling (NFCC) found that 53% of U.S. adults feel like they can’t make financial progress and 48% say they are “constantly treading water financially.”
For those respondents, it may take just one unexpected expense — or loss of income — to set them back.
Are you at risk?
If you and your family are in the middle-income category and worried about falling behind, there are ways to cement your position.
Reducing debt, especially consumer debt, could be a great way to secure yourself financially. In 2024, there were 494,201 personal bankruptcy filings in the U.S. — over 60,000 more than the previous year, according to Debt.org.
By reducing your debt burden, you can mitigate the risks of bankruptcy and reduce the monthly cost burden of servicing the debt.
Another way to secure your position is to have an emergency fund that can cover your living expenses if you suddenly lose income.
A six-month emergency fund can give you enough time to find a new job or different source of income without putting your family’s living standards at risk.
Finally, boosting your income to the upper-end of the spectrum could help you secure your middle-class lifestyle.
Launching a side gig or finding a passive income opportunity could help you get close to or even surpass the $169,800 household income threshold for upper-class status. Not only does this give you more financial flexibility, but it also puts a protective buffer on your current lifestyle.
This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. It is provided without warranty of any kind.
Millions of people depend on the Great Lakes’ water supply. Trump decimated the lab protecting it.
Anna Clark, ProPublica – May 12, 2025
Lake Erie, as seen from Wayne County, Michigan. – Nick Hagen for ProPublica
This story was originally published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive ProPublica’s stories in your inbox every week.
Just one year ago, JD Vance was a leading advocate of the Great Lakes and the efforts to restore the largest system of freshwater on the face of the planet.
As a U.S. senator from Ohio, Vance called the lakes “an invaluable asset” for his home state. He supported more funding for a program that delivers “the tools we need to fight invasive species, algal blooms, pollution, and other threats to the ecosystem” so that the Great Lakes would be protected “for generations to come.”
But times have changed.
This spring, Vance is vice president, and President Donald Trump’s administration is imposing deep cuts and new restrictions, upending the very restoration efforts that Vance once championed. With the peak summer season just around the corner, Great Lakes scientists are concerned that they have lost the ability to protect the public from toxic algal blooms, which can kill animals and sicken people.
Cutbacks have gutted the staff at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Severe spending limits have made it difficult to purchase ordinary equipment for processing samples, such as filters and containers. Remaining staff plans to launch large data-collecting buoys into the water this week, but it’s late for a field season that typically runs from April to October.
In addition to a delayed launch, problems with personnel, supplies, vessel support and real-time data sharing have created doubts about the team’s ability to operate the buoys, said Gregory Dick, director of the NOAA cooperative institute at the University of Michigan that partners with the lab. Both the lab and institute operate out of a building in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that was custom built as NOAA’s hub in the Great Lakes region, and both provide staff to the algal blooms team.
“This has massive impacts on coastal communities,” Dick said.
Gregory Dick, director of the Cooperative Institute of Great Lakes Research, which works side by side with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, says that cuts to the lab will have a massive impact on coastal communities. – Nick Hagen for ProPublicaMore
Multiple people who have worked with the lab also told ProPublica that there are serious gaps in this year’s monitoring of algal blooms, which are often caused by excess nutrient runoff from farms. Data generated by the lab’s boats and buoys, and publicly shared, could be limited or interrupted, they said.
That data has helped to successfully avoid a repeat of a 2014 crisis in Toledo, Ohio, when nearly half a million people were warned to not drink the water or even touch it.
If the streams of information are cut off, “stakeholders will be very unhappy,” said Bret Collier, a branch chief at the lab who oversaw the federal scientists that run the harmful algal bloom program for the Great Lakes. He was fired in the purge of federal probationary workers in February.
The lab has lost about 35% of its 52-member workforce since February, according to the president of the lab’s union, and it was not allowed to fill several open positions. The White House released preliminary budget recommendations last week that would make significant cuts to NOAA. The budget didn’t provide details, but indicated the termination of “a variety of climate-dominated research, data, and grant programs, which are not aligned with Administration policy” of ending “‘Green New Deal’ initiatives.”
An earlier document obtained by ProPublica and reported widely proposed a 74% funding cut to NOAA’s research office, home of the Great Lakes lab.
Vance’s office didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about how federal cuts have affected Great Lakes research. The White House also didn’t respond to messages.
Water samples from bodies of water in the Great Lakes region. – Nick Hagen for ProPublica
In a statement to ProPublica, staffers from Toledo’s water system credited the Great Lakes lab and NOAA for alerting it to potential blooms near its intake days ahead of time. This has saved the system significant costs, they said, and helped it avoid feeding excess chemicals into the water.
“The likelihood of another 2014 ‘don’t drink the water’ advisory has been minimized to almost nothing by additional vigilance” from both the lab and local officials, they said.
Remaining staff have had to contend with not only a lack of capacity but also tight limits on spending and travel.
Several people who have worked in or with the lab said that the staff was hampered by strict credit card limits imposed on government employees as part of the effort to reduce spending by the Department of Government Efficiency, which has been spearheaded by presidential adviser Elon Musk.
“The basic scientific supplies that we use to provide the local communities with information on algal bloom toxicity — our purchasing of them is being restricted based on the limitations currently being put in by the administration,” Collier said.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s custom-built hub for the Great Lakes region in Ann Arbor, Michigan. – Nick Hagen for ProPublica
NOAA and the Department of Commerce, which oversees the agency, didn’t respond to messages from ProPublica. Neither did a DOGE official. Eight U.S. senators, including the minority leader, sent a letter in March to a top NOAA leader inquiring about many of the changes, but they never received a response.
A number of the staffing losses at the Great Lakes lab came when employees accepted offers of early retirement or voluntary separation; others were fired probationary workers targeted by DOGE across the government. That includes Collier, who had 24 years of professional experience, largely as a research professor, before he was hired last year into a position that, according to the lab’s former director, had been difficult to fill.
A scientist specializing in the toxic algal blooms was also fired. She worked on the team for 14 years through the cooperative institute before accepting a federal position last year, which made her probationary, too.
A computer scientist who got real-time data onto the lab’s website — and the only person who knew how to push out the weekly sampling data on harmful algal blooms — was also fired. She was probationary because she too was hired for a federal position after working with the institute.
And because of a planned retirement, no one holds the permanent position of lab director, though there is an acting director. The lab isn’t allowed to fill any positions due to a federal hiring freeze.
At the same time, expected funds for the lab’s cooperative institute are delayed, which means, Dick said, it may soon lay off staff, including people on the algal blooms team.
In March, Cleveland’s water commissioner wrote a letter calling for continued support for the Great Lakes lab and other NOAA-funded operations in the region, saying that access to real-time forecasts for Lake Erie are “critically important in making water treatment decisions” for more than 1.3 million citizens.
In 2006, there was a major outbreak of hypoxia, an issue worsened by algal blooms where oxygen-depleted water can become corrosive, discolored and full of excess manganese, which is a neurotoxin at high levels. Cleveland Water collaborated with the lab on developing a “groundbreaking” hypoxia forecast model, said Scott Moegling, who worked for both the Cleveland utility and Ohio’s drinking water regulatory agency.
“I knew which plants were going to get hit,” Moegling said. “I knew about when, and I knew what the treatment we would need would be, and we could staff accordingly.”
The American Meteorological Society, in partnership with the National Weather Association, spotlighted this warning system in its statement in support of NOAA research, saying that it helps “keep drinking water potable in the Great Lakes region.”
Collier, the former branch chief, said that quality data may be lacking this year, not just for drinking water suppliers, but also the U.S. Coast Guard, fisheries, shipping companies, recreational businesses and shoreline communities that rely on it to navigate risk. In response to a recent survey of stakeholders, the president of a trade organization serving Great Lakes cargo vessels said that access to NOAA’s real-time data “is critically important to the commercial shipping fleet when making navigation decisions.”
Because federal law requires NOAA to monitor harmful algal blooms, the cuts may run against legal obligations, several current and former workers told ProPublica. The blooms program was “federally mandated to be active every single day, without exception,” Collier said.
Harmful algal bloom on Lake Erie, observed during weekly sampling in 2022. – The Cooperative Institute of Great Lakes Research at the University of MichiganA beaker holding a water sample taken from Lake Erie during a peak harmful algal bloom, shown at its natural concentration in 2017. – The Cooperative Institute of Great Lakes Research at the University of MichiganMore
The 2024 bloom in Lake Erie was the earliest on record. At its peak, it covered 550 square miles. Warming temperatures worsen the size and frequency of algal blooms. While the field season was historically only about 90 days, Collier said, last year the team was deployed for 211 days.
As the shallowest of the Great Lakes, Lake Erie is typically first to show signs of problems. But it’s also an emblem of environmental stewardship, thanks to its striking recovery from unchecked industrial pollution. The lake was once popularly declared “dead.” A highly publicized fire inflamed a river that feeds into it. Even Dr. Seuss knocked it in the 1971 version of “The Lorax.” The book described fish leaving a polluted pond “in search of some water that isn’t so smeary. I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie.”
“I should no longer be saying bad things about a body of water that is now, due to great civic and scientific effort, the happy home of smiling fish,” Geisel wrote to them.
Nicole Rice was recently fired from her position at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory after 10 years with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A promotion put her on probationary status. She’s worried that federal cuts are placing the Great Lakes system at risk. – Nick Hagen for ProPublicaMore
Project 2025, the plan produced by the Heritage Foundation for Trump’s second term, recommended that the president consider whether NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”
NOAA is “a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” the plan said, and this industry’s mission “seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable.”
“That is not to say NOAA is useless,” it added, “but its current organization corrupts its useful functions. It should be broken up and downsized.”
When asked at his confirmation hearing in January if he agreed with Project 2025’s recommendation of dismantling NOAA, Howard Lutnick, head of the commerce department, said no.
One month later, the Great Lakes lab’s probationary staff got termination notices. That includes Nicole Rice, who spent a decade with NOAA. A promotion made her communications job vulnerable to the widespread firings of federal probationary workers.
In recent testimony to a Michigan Senate committee, Rice expressed deep concern about the future of the Great Lakes.
“It has taken over a century of bipartisan cooperation, investment and science to bring the Great Lakes back from the brink of ecological collapse,” Rice said. “But these reckless cuts could undo the progress in just a few short years, endangering the largest surface freshwater system in the world.”
The first relates to the president’s declining popularity.
We learned, at the start of the week, that Donald Trump had sunk to new lows with most Americans. According to The Times’s poll with Siena College, Trump had dropped to 42 percent approval. A CNN poll shows Trump at 41 percent and both The Associated Press and The Washington Post have Trump at 39. His much-vaunted performance with Asians, Hispanics and Black Americans is also evaporated, as they shift back toward Democrats in response to the president’s poor performance. No president, not even this president in his first term, has become as unpopular as quickly as this iteration of Donald Trump.
And it’s not as if he has the ability to shift course. He is stubbornly committed to his tariffs, almost taunting anyone who might be worried about higher prices. He is committed to his unpopular cuts to federal agencies, his unpopular attacks on the federal judiciary and his increasingly unpopular immigration policies. Given his attitudes and the likelihood of an economic downturn, Trump is more likely to crater than he is to rise with the public.
All of this was basically predictable. It was predictable that Trump would pursue a ruinous set of policies — he campaigned on them. It was predictable that he would choose people ill-equipped to run the government; he did it the last time he was president. It was obvious that he would be surrounded by permissive advisers more interested in their own narrow ideological projects than in the well-being of the American people.
It did not take a clairvoyant to see how this second term would unfold. And yet it’s clear that there are plenty of people of influence who were caught off-guard by the reckless behavior of the second Trump administration. Their initial response to Trump was to accommodate him as the legitimate president (he won a free and fair election, after all); to pare back the most strident opposition and to acknowledge those areas where he was in line with the public. Even now, in the face of everything we’ve seen, there are voices who think the right approach is a quiet one.
But to my mind, the reality of Trump’s standing — of his rapidly declining political fortunes — is evidence that the best approach was the strident opposition that marked the president’s first term. As cringe-worthy as it might have been to some observers, that posture helped undermine the administration and worked successfully to contain Trump’s worst impulses.
The good news is that there is still plenty of time to embrace a more aggressive form of resistance. In doing so, people of influence — Democratic politicians, figures of industry and prominent media institutions — would be meeting the broad public where it already is. Among the polls released last week was one conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, which found that a majority of Americans, 52 percent, believe that “President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy.”
Can’t get any clearer than that.
My second thought, speaking of the public, is about diversity, equity and inclusion.
To read some prominent commentators is to get the impression that of all the things the administration is doing, the public is most receptive to its attacks on D.E.I. But there’s no real evidence to say this is the case. In fact, D.E.I. holds majority support among American adults, and when asked whether they approve or disapprove of the president’s attacks on diversity programs, 53 percent say they disapprove.
This might be because most Americans perceive something that these prominent commentators do not, which is that the administration’s attack on D.E.I. is less about fairness than it is recreating systems of domination and subordination. Consider this line of thought from Richard Kahlenberg of the Progressive Policy Institute, a curiously named group founded as the primary think tank of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council in 1989. According to Kahlenberg, observations that the Trump administration is not interested in fairness as such are “over the top.” To him, the president simply wants the government to “treat different racial groups the same.”
This is hard to take seriously. So far, in this apparent effort to spread racial equality, the White House has removed, without apparent cause or real justification, a number of Black Americans from senior positions in the military, removed the work of Black, women and Jewish authors from the Naval Academy (while leaving books such as “Mein Kampf”), criticized the Smithsonian, particularly its Museum of African American History, for spreading supposedly “improper ideology,” pushed the National Park Service to rewrite its history of the Underground Railroad, gutted the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, rescinded executive orders mandating desegregation in federal contracting, revoked a decades-old school desegregation order, and fired dozens of women and minorities from the boards that review science and research at the National Institutes of Health.
At the same time, the White House has elevated — to positions of great influence — a set of disastrously unprepared loyalists whose main qualifications seem to be the way they look. There is no question that Donald Trump chose Pete Hegseth — formerly a weekend Fox News host — to lead the Department of Defense because he looked straight out of “central casting.”
It takes nothing more than simple observation to conclude that the administration’s war on D.E.I. is a conscious effort to undermine recognition of Black Americans, women and other groups as well as stigmatize their presence in positions of authority. Frankly, one has to be willfully blind to the substance of the administration’s war on D.E.I. to think that it has anything to do with equal treatment.
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And yet, quite a few people seem to have deliberately pulled blinders over their eyes. First, so that they can pretend that the White House isn’t possessed of neosegregationist attitudes toward people who fall outside of a distinct set of racial and gender identities, and second, so that they can ignore the extent to which the president and his allies are obsessed with race, when race can be used to dominate and subordinate others.
Message From the Russian Military: ‘We Lost Your Son’
Russia lacks any formal, organized effort to account for legions of missing soldiers. That often leaves relatives in limbo, fending for themselves with scant government information.
By Neil MacFarquhar and Milana Mazaeva – May 3, 2025
Russian conscripts departing for their garrisons in Bataysk, Russia, last month. Credit…Sergey Pivovarov/Reuters
For months, Elvira Kaipova had not heard from her son Rafael, a Russian soldier deployed in Ukraine.
Military officials responded to her repeated questions about his whereabouts by saying he was on active duty and therefore incommunicado. Then, late last November, two days after they again made that assertion, she learned that he had gone missing on Nov. 1 — from a Telegram channel that helps military families.
“We lost your son,” Aleksandr Sokolov, the officer in Rafael’s unit in charge of family liaison, told her when she traveled to its headquarters in western Russia.
“Lost him how?” she says she responded, alarmed and angry, especially when the officer explained that after Rafael had failed to check in by radio, a search had proved impossible. “How do we search for him?” she says the officer told her.
Variations on that grim scenario have been repeated countless times since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The Russian Ministry of Defense lacks any formal, organized effort to track down legions of missing soldiers, according to bereaved families, private organizations that try to assist them and military analysts. Relatives, stuck in limbo, fend for themselves with scant government information.
The ministry itself declined to comment for this article. Mr. Sokolov, the liaison officer, said in a text message: “You do realize that I can’t comment on anything.”
Even if Russia and Ukraine reach a peace agreement, the hunt for missing soldiers is expected to endure for years, if not decades.
Rafael Kaipov, from Tyumen, Russia, has been missing since Nov. 1, according to his mother, Elvira Kaipova.
The Defense Ministry has not published any statistics about the number of missing, which military analysts and families say is because it does not know the number. Estimates run to the tens of thousands.
Anna Tsivilyova, a deputy minister of defense and a cousin of President Vladimir V. Putin, told the State Duma last November that 48,000 relatives of the missing had submitted DNA samples in hope of identifying remains, although that included some duplicate requests from the same family.
In Ukraine, “Want to Find,” a government project to help locate Russian servicemen captured or killed there, said it had received more than 88,000 requests for information, with over 9,000 in April alone. It noted that the overall number of missing is still unknown.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which tries to locate missing from both sides, whether civilians or military, has 110,000 cases submitted.
The family of Isakhanov Ravazan, a 25-year-old soldier, last received a brief voice message from him on Nov. 9. During a battle soon afterward, his aunt said, he radioed his commander that he could not stanch the bleeding from a bad wound. He has not been heard from since.
“No one saw him dead,” said his aunt, who, like several people in this article, did not want to be named for fear of falling afoul of laws against detailing battlefield losses. “Maybe he saved himself, maybe someone found him, we are still holding onto hope that he is alive,” she said. “There is no peace for the soul. I cannot sleep at night, and neither can his parents.”
Most missing soldiers most likely died fighting and were abandoned on the battlefield, experts said. There are not enough teams to collect bodies, and the constant deployment of drones makes retrieval too dangerous.
A military dog tag found with the body of a Russian soldier near Koroviy Yar, Ukraine, in 2023.Credit…Nicole Tung for The New York Times
Commanders have enough trouble delivering food and ammunition, and that is the priority, said a military analyst with the Conflict Intelligence Team, an independent organization in exile that tracks the conflict. The analyst, who declined to use his name to avoid jeopardizing relatives still in Russia, said only families of the soldiers care if bodies are collected, “and there is no punishment for alienating relatives.”
A Ukrainian man from the occupied city of Luhansk, who was dragooned into service as a battlefield medic and who also declined to be identified, said of his experience: “Hundreds of people were left lying out there. Every day, dozens were wounded or killed.”
Even when bodies are retrieved, identification is problematic. Often, remains can be removed only after the battle lines shift markedly so that attack drones fly elsewhere, and that could take months or even years.
The military morgue in the western city of Rostov, officially known as the Center for the Reception, Processing and Dispatch of the Deceased, is the main clearing center.
When she learned that her son was missing, Ms. Kaipova, who is married and has one other son, flew there first. “Everything is overcrowded,” she said, arriving at 7 a.m. to submit a DNA sample and leaving at 10 p.m. “Wives, mothers, fathers — all crying, sobbing, waiting.”
Investigators there told her and others that they face a backlog of around 15,000 unidentified servicemen. The sluggish pace, the constant referrals to different government agencies and the lack of basic information has families of the missing on a slow boil. Anger overflows from numerous online chat rooms where relatives seek help.
Ukrainian volunteers who collect the bodies of people killed in combat and try to identify the remains of Russian soldiers, in eastern Ukraine in February.Credit…Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
In one comment on the Vkontakte social network, a participant named Polina Medvedeva lambasted military commanders as “irresponsible.” Some of her husband’s comrades told her that he had died heroically, she wrote, but the military has not confirmed his death and there is no body.
“Where are the specifics?” she wrote. “Why is the command ignoring us, avoiding answers, throwing us from one number to another? My heart breaks with pain and anger for what they have done to our family.”
Some families go even more public.
Relatives of missing soldiers from the 25th Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade from the Leningrad region have made repeated appeals to Mr. Putin.
“Everywhere we encounter indifference!” they said in a video last month showing pictures of the missing. Every family receives exactly the same form letter and is just told, repeatedly, to wait, they said, “Help us! We are tired of living in ignorance for months and years!”
The Kremlin established the Defenders of the Fatherland State Foundation, ostensibly to help soldiers, veterans and their families. But it has no inside track on details about the missing, analysts said.
There is “no system of liaison with the soldiers’ families,” said Sergei Krivenko, the director of a human rights organization formed to help soldiers. He called the Fatherland Foundation a “fake structure,” designed to deflect blame from the defense ministry and “to give a semblance of action.”
The Fatherland Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.
Ms. Kaipova has written to numerous officials starting with Mr. Putin, visited his administrative office and searched through multiple hospitals, including some amid the fighting in eastern Ukraine. “I run in circles,” she said.
President Vladimir V. Putin meeting with the Defenders of the Fatherland State Foundation in Moscow, in March, in a photograph released by Russian state media.Credit…Mikhail Metzel/Sputnik
Her quest took a not uncommon turn when she thought she recognized Rafael with a grievous head wound in a short video clip filmed aboard an evacuation helicopter. She is convinced he is lying in a hospital somewhere afflicted with amnesia.
The administrator of one chat group where she posted the video said at least 20 other people identified the same man as their missing soldier.
“Everyone is so desperate that they see their loved ones in any face,” Ms. Kaipova conceded, but she dismissed any suggestion that this might be the case for her, as well. Her son’s unit said its medics had no record of evacuating him.
Rafael was a reluctant soldier. Raised in the central city of Tyumen, he seriously injured another man who tried to take his car. Officials presented him with a common choice in Russian criminal cases: Go to jail or to the front. His mother begged him to chose jail, but he recoiled. “He was in agony, pacing,” she said. “He did not want war or prison.”
He deployed last Aug. 1, his 20th birthday. She never heard from him again. A hospitalized soldier from his unit once called to tell her that Rafael had cried out for his mother in fear at the start of his first battle.
She learned from Form 1421, the terse military record of his disappearance, that he served with an intelligence unit. Rafael was among a group of soldiers carrying out “special tasks” in a Donetsk Province village, it said, when they came under fire from artillery and drones. “The group, which included Rafael Kaipov, lost contact after this engagement.”
Under new laws, commanding officers can go to court just six months after the last contact with a soldier to have him declared missing, allowing them to halt his combat pay.
The families themselves have to file an additional case to have the missing soldier declared dead, which releases hefty benefits. Some shun such a definitive step.
“I cry constantly, morning and night,” Ms. Kaipova said. “My biggest fear is that I will exhaust every lead and have no one left to turn to.”
Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.
Neil MacFarquhar has been a Times reporter since 1995, writing about a range of topics from war to politics to the arts, both internationally and in the United States.
Milana Mazaeva is a reporter and researcher, helping to cover Russian society.
