Spineless republi-cons in congress fail their country and even their own families.
Senator Adam Schiff – March 15, 2025
Category: History
The Founders Were Afraid for the Country, Too
The New York Times – Opinion
The Founders Were Afraid for the Country, Too
Jamelle Bouie – March 15, 2025
While writing my column this week, I was reminded of Benjamin Franklin’s famous quip about the outcome of the 1787 constitutional convention in Philadelphia. As the story goes, Franklin was leaving the hall after signing the Constitution when he approached by Elizabeth Powel, a close friend of George Washington’s. She asked whether the delegates had decided on a monarchy or a republic.
“A republic,” Franklin replied, “if you can keep it.”
This anecdote comes to us by way of James McHenry, a delegate from Maryland who later served as the United States’ third secretary of war. It was recorded in “The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787” and has had remarkable staying power in the decades and centuries since it entered popular memory.
The reason, I think, is that it captures better than almost anything else the apprehension and uncertainty that marked the first decade of the American republic.
Somewhat lost to history in our memory and mythology of the founding fathers is the fact that their optimism regarding their capacity to make the world anew was tempered by a deep pessimism born of past precedent and their own experiences as statesmen and politicians.
The framers were more than aware of the fragile and short-lived nature of republican government. “It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy,” Alexander Hamilton observed in Federalist No. 9, voicing the conventional wisdom of many of his peers. “If they exhibit occasional calms, these only serve as short-lived contrast to the furious storms that are to succeed.”
Accordingly, their own choices were informed by the examples of the past. They would avoid the direct democracy of Athens in favor of a system of representation; they would blend representation with the aristocratic elements of the Roman republic; and they would create a new office, the presidency, that would tether the executive power to the rule of law.
The product of human failings and human frailties, despotism could not help but lurk around every corner. The best the framers could do was to design their new government to be as resilient as it could be in the face of ambition and the will to power.
But, of course, there was no guarantee that it would work.
There is a wonderful book by the political scientist Dennis C. Rasmussen, titled “Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders,” that both captures and explains the pessimism of the revolutionary generation.
George Washington, for instance, feared that the nation would be pulled apart by faction and partisanship. “I have, for sometime past, viewed the political concerns of the United States with an anxious, and painful eye,” wrote Washington near the end of his life in a letter to none other than the aforementioned McHenry. “They appear to me, to be moving by hasty strides to some awful crisis; but in what they will result — that Being, who sees, foresees, and directs all things, alone can tell.”
Hamilton, who devoted his life in politics to building a strong national government, feared that the political system was too weak to secure a strong future for the nation. “Truly, My dear Sir, the prospects of our Country are not brilliant,” he wrote to Rufus King after Thomas Jefferson took office, complaining that the new president pushed a vision of “No army, no navy, no active commerce … as little government as possible.”
John Adams saw a lack of virtue among the people and feared that they would not be able to resist the temptations of a demagogue. “If there is any Thing Serious in this World, the Selfishness of our Countrymen is not only Serious but melancholy, foreboding ravages of Ambition and Avarice which never were exceeded on this Selfish Globe,” he wrote to his son, John Quincy Adams,. “You have seen much of it. I have seen more.…The distemper in our Nation is so general, and so certainly incurable.”
Interestingly, the founding father who lived longest into the 19th century, James Madison, retained a great deal more optimism about the future of the American Republic. “A Government like ours has so many safety valves, giving vent to overheated passions,” he wrote to the Marquis de Lafayette, commenting on the Missouri crisis, “that it carries within itself a relief against the infirmities from which the best of human Institutions cannot be exempt.”
To take the pessimism of the founders seriously — to really engage with their fears — is to see the extent to which they weren’t all wrong.
Washington’s warnings about the dangers of faction are, these days, well taken, especially as we observe in real time the ways that narrow political allegiance and fear of party censure can supersede a lawmaker’s commitment to anything broader than immediate partisan interest. How might Republicans in Congress deal with the illegal, unconstitutional and anti-constitutional actions of the White House if they weren’t so concerned with winning the next primary or raising money for the next campaign?
We can both recognize that modern democracy is inconceivable without the political party — it is a necessary coordinating institution — while also giving due credit to Washington who could see, even in those early years, the dangers that factional behavior and blind partisanship could pose to even a well-ordered political system.
Adams’s warnings about the consequences of a lack of virtue land especially hard in light of the rampant dishonesty that almost defines American politics at this moment in time. This isn’t the more ordinary fudging of truth that attends politics in most places and at most times; no, this is the kind of blatant and unapologetic lying that degrades public life itself. This is going before the American people and telling them things you know are not true to gain power, and then using that power to pursue your own interests against the public good.
Or look at the extent to which too many Americans indulge the worst forms of conspiratorial thinking, who indulge the worst fantasies about their political opponents and believe anything they’re told, as long as it flatters their prejudices and preconceptions about people on the other side of a political or cultural divide. This, too, is a rejection of civic virtue, of the good faith and good will that we ought to show our fellow citizens because we are not engaged in a winner-take-all struggle as much as we are a collective effort to live together as peacefully as we can.
Hamilton’s fears about anarchy were mostly about his disdain for democracy. And yet, as we bear witness to an aggressive attempt to dismantle the federal bureaucracy, we may find that he was right about the dangers of a weak state for the peace and security of the nation.
Against all of this, there is Madison’s optimism. And I have to say that I am inclined by disposition to stand with Madison.
Many groups of Americans — especially those who, because of race or religion, have found themselves outside the so-called mainstream — have faced challenges far worse than those at hand. They have had to survive as second-class citizens under authoritarian rule, or as supposed enemy nationals confined to internment camps, or as dangerous radicals suppressed and surveilled by their government.
The United States, it suffices to say, has been far from benign toward many of its own citizens. But even in the face of real oppression, those Americans (and their allies) had the capacity to fight for equality, to fight for democracy, to fight to make this country so much more than what it is often content to be.
After surveying the many difficulties facing the country, Madison wrote, at the very end of his life, that he was “far however from desponding, of the great political experiment in the hands of the American people.” Madison had seen and experienced a lifetime’s worth of political turmoil. Through it all, however, the republic endured. And as his time on this earth came to a close, he still believed in the strength of the system he had helped to create.
I’m not so sure about the strength of that system. (It should be said that a generation after Madison’s death, his Constitution collapsed under the weight of the slave system that gave him his livelihood.) I’m a little more optimistic about the American people themselves. Democracy is our birthright — it’s part of who we are. At our best, we are jealous of our freedom and eager to expand our collective liberty for the sake of a more egalitarian society.
We have a would-be despot in the White House. But even with a rotting Constitution on the verge of crisis, this is still a Republic, and the people are still sovereign. The task, then, is to make this clear to those in power who would like to pretend otherwise.
King trump above the law !
Thank you Justice Roberts !
Senator Adam Schiff – March 14, 2025
How can any Veteran vote for these anti-American putin loving republi-con fascists?
I served with many black and Latino Army Veterans. This make me so sad.
What Trump and Musk Want With Social Security
The Atlantic
What Trump and Musk Want With Social Security
Lora Kelley – March 14, 2025
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
The idea that millions of dead Americans are receiving Social Security checks is shocking, and bolsters the argument that the federal bureaucracy needs radical change to combat waste and fraud. There’s one big problem: No evidence exists that it’s true.
Despite being told by agency staff last month that this claim has no basis in fact, Elon Musk and President Donald Trump have continued to use the talking point as a pretext to attack America’s highest-spending government program. Musk seems to have gotten this idea from a list of Social Security recipients who did not have a death date attached to their record. Agency employees reportedly explained to Musk’s DOGE team in February that the list of impossibly ancient individuals they found were not necessarily receiving benefits (the lack of death dates was related to an outdated system).
And yet, in his speech to Congress last week, Trump stated: “Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old.” He said the list includes “3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149,” among other 100-plus age ranges, and that “money is being paid to many of them, and we’re searching right now.” In an interview with Fox Business on Monday, Musk discussed the existence of “20 million people who are definitely dead, marked as alive” in the Social Security database. And DOGE has dispatched 10 employees to try to find evidence of the claims that dead Americans are receiving checks, according to documents filed in court on Wednesday.
Musk and Trump have long maintained that they do not plan to attack Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the major entitlement programs. But their repeated claims that rampant fraud exists within these entitlement systems undermine those assurances. In his Fox interview on Monday, Musk said, “Waste and fraud in entitlement spending—which is most of the federal spending, is entitlements—so that’s like the big one to eliminate. That’s the sort of half trillion, maybe $600, $700 billion a year.” Some observers interpreted this confusing sentence to mean that Musk wants to cut the entitlement programs themselves. But the Trump administration quickly downplayed Musk’s comments, insisting that the federal government will continue to protect such programs and suggesting that Musk had been talking about the need to eliminate fraud in the programs, not about axing them. “What kind of a person doesn’t support eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending?” the White House asked in a press release.
The White House’s question would be a lot easier to answer if Musk, who has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” wasn’t wildly overestimating the amount of fraud in entitlement programs. Musk is claiming waste in these programs on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, but a 2024 Social Security Administration report found that the agency lost closer to $70 billion total in improper payments from 2015 to 2022, which accounts for about 1 percent of Social Security payments. Leland Dudek, a mid-level civil servant elevated to temporarily lead Social Security after being put on administrative leave for sharing information with DOGE, pushed back last week on the idea that the agency is overrun with fraud and that dead people older than 100 are getting payments, ProPublica reported after obtaining a recording of a closed-door meeting. DOGE’s false claim about dead people receiving benefits “got in front of us,” one of Dudek’s deputies reportedly said, but “it’s a victory that you’re not seeing more [misinformation], because they are being educated.” (Dudek did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.)
Some 7 million Americans rely on Social Security benefits for more than 90 percent of their income, and 54 million individuals and their dependents receive retirement payments from the agency. Even if Musk doesn’t eliminate the agency, his tinkering could still affect all of those Americans’ lives. On Wednesday, DOGE dialed back its plans to cut off much of Social Security’s phone services (a commonly used alternative to its online programs, particularly for elderly and disabled Americans), though it still plans to restrict recipients’ ability to change bank-deposit information over the phone.
In recent weeks, confusion has rippled through the Social Security workforce and the public; many people drop off forms in person, but office closures could disrupt that. According to ProPublica, several IT contracts have been cut or scaled back, and several employees reported that their tech systems are crashing every day. Thousands of jobs are being cut, including in regional field offices, and the entire Social Security staff has been offered buyouts (today is the deadline for workers to take them). Martin O’Malley, a former commissioner of the agency, has warned that the workforce reductions that DOGE is seeking at Social Security could trigger “system collapse and an interruption of benefits” within the next one to three months.
In going anywhere near Social Security—in saying the agency’s name in the same sentence as the word eliminate—Musk is venturing further than any presidential administration has in recent decades. Entitlement benefits are extremely popular, and cutting the programs has long been a nonstarter. When George W. Bush raised the idea of partially privatizing entitlements in 2005, the proposal died before it could make it to a vote in the House or Senate.
The DOGE plan to cut $1 trillion in spending while leaving entitlements, which make up the bulk of the federal budget, alone always seemed implausible. In the November Wall Street Journal op-ed announcing the DOGE initiative, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (who is no longer part of DOGE) wrote that those who say “we can’t meaningfully close the federal deficit without taking aim at entitlement programs” are deflecting “attention from the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse” that “DOGE aims to address.” But until there’s clear evidence that this “magnitude” of fraud exists within Social Security, such claims enable Musk to poke at what was previously untouchable.
How Far Gone Are We?
New York Times – Opinion
How Far Gone Are We?
Jamelle Bouie – March 13, 2025
The question of the day is whether the United States is embroiled in a constitutional crisis.
Consider the circumstances. Congress has essentially surrendered its power of the purse to an unelected co-president who has seized control of much of the federal bureaucracy. The actual president has asserted a unilateral executive authority so powerful and far-reaching that it threatens the republican character of the American political system. And that president has taken actions — such as an attempt to unravel birthright citizenship — that blatantly and flagrantly violate the Constitution.
But as critics of the crisis view note, for all of his lawbreaking, transgression and overreach, the president has yet to take the steps that would clearly mark a constitutional crisis — openly defying a lower court order or, more significantly, a judgment of the Supreme Court.
One thing the language of crisis captures, however, is the degree to which the American political system is under a tremendous amount of stress. And to the extent that this stress threatens the integrity of the constitutional order, it is because the American system is, and has been, in a profound state of disrepair. If we are in or approaching a constitutional crisis, it has been a long time coming.
In 2009 the legal scholars Jack M. Balkin and Sanford Levinson published an article on constitutional crises titled, aptly enough, “Constitutional Crises.”
The aim of their argument was to distinguish ordinary (or even extraordinary) political conflict from a breakdown in the operation of the constitutional system.
“When constitutional design functions properly — even if people strongly disagree with and threaten each other — there is no crisis,” Balkin and Levinson explained. “On the other hand, when the system of constitutional design breaks down, either because people abandon it or because it is leading them off of the proverbial cliff, disagreements and threats take on a special urgency that deserves the name of ‘crisis.’”
A crisis occurs, to put it a little differently, when a constitution fails to achieve its primary task, which is to channel political disagreement into ordinary politics. It’s when disagreement begins to break down into violence — into anarchy or civil war — that you have a constitutional crisis.
From here, Balkin and Levinson offered a typology of democratic constitutional crises (primarily in the United States, although this extends to other constitutional democracies as well). There is the “Type 1” crisis in which political leaders have publicly claimed “the right to suspend features of the Constitution in order to preserve the overall social order and to meet the exigencies of the moment.” In this kind of crisis, a president has essentially claimed the sovereign power to declare a state of exception, acting, in Locke’s words, “without the prescription of the law, and sometimes even against it.”
No president has ever claimed the right to act outside the Constitution. Instead, those presidents who have sought to expand their power tend to frame their actions as the necessary exercise of legitimate authority. Prominent examples include Abraham Lincoln at the start of the Civil War and, more recently, George W. Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks.
In the “Type 2” crisis, political leaders do not abandon the Constitution so much as refuse to break with a failing constitutional order. “If Type 1 crises feature actors who publicly depart from fidelity to the Constitution,” Balkin and Levinson wrote, “Type 2 crises arise from excess fidelity, where political actors adhere to what they perceive to be their constitutional duties even though the heavens fall.”
If there is a paradigmatic example of this crisis in American history, it can be found in the secession crisis of 1860 to early 1861, when President James Buchanan stood by as Southern secessionists seized federal armories and prepared for war.
The third and final category of constitutional crisis that Balkin and Levinson discussed involves a situation in which “the relevant actors all proclaim their constitutional fidelity” but “disagree about what the Constitution requires and about who holds the appropriate degree of power.” What distinguishes this from ordinary disagreements is the willingness to go outside of normal politics to resolve the conflict, up to and including the use of violence.
You can see this type of crisis in the struggle over Reconstruction, when recalcitrant Southern white people took up arms to challenge and overthrow the postwar biracial political order.
“Constitutional Crises” was something of an incongruous argument to be making, given the rise of Barack Obama, whose presidency opened with a sense of promise and optimism about the future. The mood and circumstances were a little more appropriate eight years later when, at the start of the first Trump administration, Balkin followed up on this exploration of constitutional crises with an article on what he evocatively termed “constitutional rot.”
If a constitutional crisis is an acute event — brought on by external shock or internal breakdown — then constitutional rot is something like a chronic illness. It is, Balkin wrote, “the degradation of constitutional norms that may operate over a long period.”
You may, at this late date, be tired of talking about norms, but it is true that constitutional democracies depend on them for their survival. A successful republic rests on well-functioning institutions that structure ambition and the acquisition of political power. It demands a certain amount of forbearance from both political leaders and ordinary citizens when it comes to the use of that power. Politics cannot be a winner-take-all game.
Above all, constitutional democracy requires a broad commitment to the public good, or what we might describe as civic virtue — a particular obsession of America’s revolutionary generation. This includes ordinary people, who have a responsibility to keep themselves informed and engaged, as well as elected officials, who are entrusted with the public good and thus the obligation to further the common interest rather than the most narrow concerns of themselves or their allies. Even our system, designed to harness ambition so that the “interest of the man” is “connected with the constitutional rights of the place,” according to Federalist No. 51, depends on a certain amount of selflessness from those who choose public service.
Constitutional rot is when all of this begins to deteriorate. It’s when government officials reject the public good in favor of the private interests of their supporters and financial backers, when institutions fail to address public problems, when political actors embrace a nihilistic ethos of winning regardless of the damage it might do to the overall health of the political system, and when politicians reject any and all limits on their use of power and try to insulate themselves from accountability, democratic or otherwise.
Each dynamic eats at the foundation of constitutional government. And like the rot that afflicts the sill plate of an old home, it will undermine the entire structure if left to grow and fester.
If we use the typology Balkin and Levinson outlined, then it is a little hard to say that the United States is experiencing a constitutional crisis. For as much as Donald Trump has centered his second term on a radical assertion of executive power, he has not yet claimed to be above or beyond the Constitution. His view, in fact, is that he has “an Article 2 where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” (This is wrong, of course, but it means something, even still, that the White House is trying to ground its claims within the existing political order.)
The Constitution also isn’t, at this moment, faltering on the shoals of a political, social or economic crisis, and our political leaders have not turned to extraconstitutional methods to try to resolve their conflicts.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether the current circumstances constitute a constitutional crisis. But it is extremely difficult to deny the extent to which the constitutional order is rotting from the inside out.
You can see it in the wide and widening gap between what the public wants from its government and what that government is able to deliver. You can see it in the vulgar influence peddling and outright looting that passes for normal behavior in Washington. You can see it in the catastrophic weakness of both political parties, whether it’s a Republican Party so hollowed out by extremism and in thrall to the ultrarich that it was easy pickings for a populist demagogue and his wealthy backers or a Democratic Party whose feckless leadership class is more concerned with securing its personal influence than building the kind of organization that can construct and mobilize popular majorities.
You can see it in the failure of the American political class to deal with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — a system-level threat to constitutional government whose ringleader was allowed to run, a third time, for president — and you can see it in that president’s easy seizure of the power of purse. The fact that Elon Musk, a de facto prime minister acting with the authority of the president, can cancel federal programs without a peep from the majority in Congress is a sign of constitutional rot. The fact that Republicans in Congress would rather beg Musk for a reprieve than assert the power of their institution is also a sign of constitutional rot setting in even further. And the fact that so many of our institutions are treating Trump’s executive decrees as laws — bending to and indulging his whims as if he were sovereign, as if he were a king and not a president — is a sign of constitutional rot.
Constitutional rot can lead to constitutional crisis. At the same time, not every house that rots at its foundation falls apart. Some become uninhabitable even as they appear otherwise. So it goes for a republic. We may retain the appearance of a constitutional democracy even as the rot corrodes the freedoms and values that give that term its weight and meaning. We’ve already reached the stage, after all, where the ruling regime attempts to deport one of its most vocal and vulnerable critics.
With a house, there is only one thing to do about rot. Tear it up. Remove it. And replace it with something new. If our political system — if our constitutional order — is too rotted through to secure freedom, equality and the blessings of liberty, then perhaps it’s time to rethink what it is we want out of American democracy.
Assuming, of course, that we can keep it intact.
Kremlin told U.S. it didn’t want Trump’s Ukraine-Russia envoy at peace talks
NBC News
Kremlin told U.S. it didn’t want Trump’s Ukraine-Russia envoy at peace talks
Keir Simmons – March 13, 2025
President Donald Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia was excluded from high-level talks on ending the war after the Kremlin said it didn’t want him there, a U.S. administration official and a Russian official told NBC News.
Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg was conspicuously absent from two recent summits in Saudi Arabia — one with Russian officials and the other with Ukrainians — even though the talks come under his remit.
“Together,” Trump said in announcing Kellogg’s nomination in November, “we will secure PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH.”
But Kellogg did not attend U.S.-Russia talks in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, on Feb. 18. Russian President Vladimir Putin thought he was too pro-Ukraine, a senior Russian official with direct knowledge of the Kremlin’s thinking told NBC News.
“Kellogg is a former American general, too close to Ukraine. Not our kind of person, not of the caliber we are looking for,” according to the official, who is not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
A U.S. official in the Trump administration, who is also not authorized to speak publicly, confirmed that Russia did not want Kellogg involved. The official did not know when that was communicated to the White House.
Where this leaves Kellogg is unclear.
Kellogg’s office did not respond to requests for comment on why he has not been involved in the negotiations and whether Russia had requested that he not attend.
National Security Council spokesman James Hewitt said Trump had “utilized the talents of multiple senior administration officials to assist in the bringing the war in Ukraine to a peaceful resolution.” He added that Kellogg remained “a valued part of the team, especially as it relates to talks with our European allies.”
Ending the war
Kellogg, 80, is a staunch Trump loyalist who served in various roles in Trump’s first term, including a stint as Vice President Mike Pence’s national security adviser.
Before he was confirmed as Trump’s envoy for Russia-Ukraine peace in January, he wrote about what he called the Biden administration’s “incompetent” foreign policies.
In a paper for the America First Policy Institute, which was founded to promote Trump’s policies, he suggested that to end the war the United States should arm Ukraine and strengthen its defenses, thus ensuring that “Russia will make no further advances and will not attack again after a cease-fire or peace agreement.”
“Future American military aid, however, will require Ukraine to participate in peace talks with Russia,” Kellogg and his co-author, Fred Fleit, wrote.
During his presidential campaign, Trump said that it was a top priority to end the war, which started in February 2022 when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of its smaller neighbor, and that he would halt hostilities “24 hours” after taking office.
The war has raged on after Trump became president for a second time, with Russia making slow progress on the battlefield in Ukraine and pressing Ukrainian forces that had taken a sliver of Russian territory across the border in Kursk.
On Feb. 11, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, went to Moscow and spent 3½ hours with Putin.
There is no official account of their meeting. Witkoff had traveled to Russia to help secure the release of Marc Fogel, an American teacher held for 3½ years for a minor medical cannabis infraction.
In a CBS News interview, Witkoff, a New York real estate developer and a friend of Trump’s, called his hourslong meeting with Putin a “trust building” assignment from Trump. He said that he was the only U.S. official present at the meeting and that he carried a message for Putin from Trump. Witkoff also said Putin “had something for me to transmit back to the president” but did not say what it was.
The following day, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he had spoken with Putin and that they had “agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately.”
“We agreed to work together, very closely, including visiting each other’s Nations,” he added.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov later said that during the 90-minute call, Putin “expressed readiness to receive American officials in Russia regarding areas of mutual interest, including, of course, the topic of Ukrainian settlement.”
On Feb. 13, Trump announced a list of diplomats who would attend the talks with Russia. Witkoff, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and national security adviser Michael Waltz were on the team led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio
Kellogg was not on the list. A second U.S. official told NBC News at the time that the decision stung him.
A representative for Witkoff would not comment when NBC News asked whether his boss discussed Kellogg’s exclusion with Putin.
Asked last week whether Russian officials had requested that Kellogg not be included in the high-level talks, Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that it was up to American leaders to “fix their delegation” and that Russia’s diplomats had “great experience of dealing with different envoys.”
Andrei Fedorov, a former deputy foreign minister who maintains close ties with the Kremlin, went further, telling NBC News that Kellogg was “not the person with whom Russia will negotiate with” because his position on the talks was to freeze the front line in Ukraine.
Russia wants Kyiv’s forces to withdraw from Ukrainian regions where there is still fighting, including the southern Kherson and Zaporizhzhia administrative regions, known as oblasts, Fedorov, said.
Russia illegally annexed the regions, along with Donetsk and Luhansk, in September 2022.
Little was said about the war in Ukraine after Rubio and his team met with Russian officials in Riyadh on Feb. 18, although Rubio did announce that the countries had agreed to restore embassy staffing.
Trump has since played hardball with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with relations reaching a low point after their extraordinary Oval Office spat on Feb. 28. The United States subsequently paused intelligence sharing and providing security assistance to Ukraine.
The pause was lifted Tuesday after a Ukrainian delegation agreed to a proposal for a 30-day interim ceasefire at a meeting in Saudi Arabia with Rubio and his team
Kellogg was not present.
On Thursday, Trump dispatched Witkoff to Russia again.
Shortly after he arrived, Putin said at a news conference that he agreed “with the proposals to stop the hostilities” but that there were issues that needed to be discussed. He added that he may need to “have a phone call with Trump.”
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trump and musk, who both never served their countries really hate U.S. Veterans: Trump’s mass federal workforce cuts: What has happened so far
USA Today
Trump’s mass federal workforce cuts: What has happened so far
Sarah D. Wire, USA TODAY – March 12, 2025
President Donald Trump’s mass firings of permanent federal employees have already begun and are expected to accelerate over the next few weeks with tens of thousands more employees terminated. But the layoffs didn’t come out of nowhere.
This week, federal agencies face a deadline to provide Trump administration officials with plans for a reduction in force, a dramatic downsizing of the nation’s more than 2 million federal workers that will occur over the next few months. Along with layoffs, some agencies are expected to indefinitely extend their hiring freezes, eliminate currently vacant positions and consolidate offices as ways to reduce headcount.
Guided by billionaire Elon Musk and his Department Of Government Efficiency aides, Trump has spent his first eight weeks in office focused on dismantling the federal government, including shutting down and laying off the staff of the United States Agency for International Development and taking steps to do the same to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Trump has also begun dismantling the Department of Education with cuts to about half of its workforce.
More: How Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has dominated Trump’s agenda
After a buyout offer was accepted by fewer federal employees than expected, tens of thousands of probationary federal workers were laid off. Probationary workers include employees in their first year or two on the job, people who have recently moved between federal agencies and people who were recently promoted.
The firings have affected all 50 states and include employees at agencies that Americans frequently interact with, including the National Park Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Veterans Affairs, Internal Revenue Service, National Institutes of Health and many others.
The White House has not responded to repeated requests from USA TODAY for a precise number of fired employees. Here’s a timeline of how Trump’s workforce firings have taken shape, starting with Inauguration Day.
Jan. 20: Trump signs executive order changing job classifications
Among his first actions as president, Trump signed an executive order that revives a policy from the final days of his first administration known as Schedule F. The directive creates a new employment classification for tens of thousands of nonpartisan career civil servants, effectively stripping them of job protections by reclassifying them as at-will positions, meaning they can be dismissed for nearly any reason.
A separate executive order froze hiring of federal civilian employees in the executive branch. It stated that any federal civilian position vacant when Trump took office may not be filled, and no new position may be created – with rare exceptions.
More: Trump talks tariffs, Gaza and Greenland, takes jab at Biden in first Oval Office presser
Jan. 28: Buyout offer made to federal employees
Trump’s administration offered buyouts to nearly all 2.3 million federal employees. The offer came in a surprise email that hit inboxes at 6:04 p.m. on Jan. 28 with the subject line: “The Fork in the Road.”
In the email, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management offered all federal employees eight months of pay and benefits through September if they resigned by Feb. 6. Unions warned workers considering Trump’s offer that there is no guarantee the president can or will stick to it because Congress hasn’t approved funding for federal agencies beyond March 14.
Jan. 29: Union sues over reclassifying federal employees
Unions representing federal employees sued the Trump administration to block the schedule F executive order, alleging that it aimed to politicize the federal government by stripping federal workers of job protections.
More: ‘Politics over professionalism’: Federal employees’ union sues Trump over executive order
Feb. 4: USAID employees placed on administrative leave
About 10,000 employees of the United States Agency for International Development ‒ two-thirds of whom work overseas across 60 countries ‒ were notified that they will be placed on administrative leave at the end of the week as part of Trump’s move to dismantle the foreign aid agency.
More: USDA plans big cuts to food bank, school food programs: What to know
Feb. 5: Government warns of furloughs
The Trump administration warned federal employees that they could be furloughed if they did not accept the buyout offer, according to an email obtained by USA TODAY.
The email warned employees that many will be stripped of civil-service protections and suggested there may be loyalty tests for those who remain.
Feb. 6: Boston judge temporarily halts deadline to accept buyout offer
U.S. District Judge George O’Toole issued a temporary restraining order pausing the Trump administration’s deadline to accept the buyout in order to allow time for labor unions to challenge the plan’s legality. The American Federation of Government Employees and two other unions filed the lawsuit arguing that the administration lacks any statutory basis for the “unprecedented offer.”
More: What to know after federal judge pauses Trump’s buyout deadline for federal workers
The Trump administration’s lawyers had argued that extending the deadline on the very last day would “markedly disrupt the expectations of the federal workforce, inject tremendous uncertainty into a program that scores of federal employees have already availed themselves of, and hinder the administration’s efforts to reform the federal workforce.”
Also on Feb. 6, the administration ordered all federal department and agency heads to produce lists of their lowest-performing employees.
The order from OPM Acting Director Charles Ezell also asked departments and agencies to identify potential barriers to ensuring “the ability to swiftly terminate poor performing employees who cannot or will not improve.”
Feb. 7: Trump fires head of the Office of Special Counsel
An aide to Trump fired Hampton Dellinger, who leads the Office of the Special Counsel, on the night of Feb. 7 in a one-sentence email. Dellinger sued, arguing that 1978 federal law creating his position states he can only be removed from his job because of inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.
Probationary employees largely rely on the special counsel to back them when challenging a dismissal through the proper government channels, rather than suing.
Feb. 10: Trump fires leaders of Merit Systems Protection Board
Within a matter of minutes, Trump fired the leaders of two other boards that federal workers can turn to as an avenue to contest their firing. Union challenges to the firings have been rejected because they have not first gone through these boards.
Trump fired Merit Systems Protection Board chair Cathy Harris, just before 11 p.m., leaving the board with two members – Raymond Limon, a Democrat whose term expired on March 1, and Henry Kerner, a Republican. A court temporarily reinstated Harris, whose term doesn’t expire until 2028, after she sued. The Merit Systems Protection Board is tasked with protecting federal workers against partisan politics and illegal employment practices. It cannot operate without a quorum.
Trump also fired the Federal Labor Relations Authority board chair, Susan Grundmann, three and a half minutes before he fired Cathy Harris. The authority handles certain complaints with federal workers’ labor unions.
Grundmann sued to be reinstated, but for the time being, Trump named Colleen Kiko, a Republican member, as chair, presiding over only one other member, Democrat Anne Wagner.
Also on Feb. 10, a court temporarily reinstated Dellinger, who promptly asked the Merit Systems Protection Board to pause the terminations of six probationary employees at six agencies, and reinstate them while he investigated their cases.
Feb. 11: Trump signs new EO to make major cuts to federal work force
Trump signed an executive order Feb. 11 that seeks to significantly reduce the size of the government by instructing heads of federal departments and agencies to undertake plans for “large-scale reductions in force.”
A White House summary of the order said agency heads were ordered to “coordinate and consult with DOGE to shrink the size of the federal workforce and limit hiring to essential positions.”
Under the order, federal agencies aren’t allowed to hire more than one employee for every four employees who depart. It also instructed the U.S. Office of Personnel Management to create new rules to ensure future federal hires are subject to additional conduct standards, such as U.S. citizenship and filing federal tax returns on time.
Feb. 12: Judge allows buyouts to move forward
O’Toole, the Boston-based federal judge, restored Trump’s buyout project, deciding federal employees unions that sued to stop the program lacked standing to bring their challenge and that his court does not have jurisdiction to hear their complaint.
In total, about 75,000 federal employees accepted President Donald Trump’s buyout offer. That equaled about 3.3% of the federal government’s 2.3 million workers, coming in below the White House’s projections that 5% to 10% of the workforce would accept. Congress has not yet approved spending for the next year or said spending for buyouts would be included.
More: President Trump’s buyouts for federal employees can proceed, judge rules
Feb. 13: Thousands of probationary employees are fired
Thousands of recently-hired federal workers received notice that they had been fired.
Probationary workers are easier to fire because they lack the bargaining rights that career employees have to appeal their terminations. Firings were government-wide: from the Department of Education and Small Business Administration to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Forest Service, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the agency that oversees the nation’s fleet of nuclear weapons.
The firings have continued in the weeks since, including more than 880 probationary employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – which forecasts the nation’s weather and protects ocean species – on Thursday.
More: ‘Took away my hope.’ Federal workers say Trump mass firings upended their lives
Feb. 20: Unions sue over firing probationary employees
A coalition of federal employee unions sued the administration, alleging that officials misused the probationary period to eliminate staff and that the Office of Personnel Management directed federal agencies to use a standardized termination notice falsely claiming performance issues in firing tens of thousands of employees.
“OPM, the federal agency charged with implementing this nation’s employment laws, in one fell swoop has perpetrated one of the most massive employment frauds in the history of this country, telling tens of thousands of workers that they are being fired for performance reasons, when they most certainly were not,” the unions argued in court documents.
Feb. 22: Five things or resign
Musk took to his social media site, X, to instruct federal workers to report their work accomplishments via email or resign.
“Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” said the post. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
The email that employees received did not mention termination or disciplinary action for employees failing to respond promptly, but sent shockwaves as employees got conflicting instructions from agencies about whether or not to respond.
“What did you do last week?” the emails read. “Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.”
Feb. 24: Office of Special Counsel says firing of probationary employees was illegal
Dellinger, who leads the Office of the Special Counsel, said firing probationary employees was illegal because it used boilerplate language blaming their performance rather than specific concerns and asked the Merit Systems Protection Board to decide whether to reinstate six employees while he investigates further.
More: Federal agency investigating Elon Musk’s Tesla hit with DOGE layoffs
Federal law generally requires 60 days’ notice for a reduction in force (what the federal government calls layoffs) and prohibits probationary employees from being fired for reasons unrelated to performance or conduct.
Feb. 25: Merit Systems Protection Board reinstates some probationary employees
The Merit Systems Protection Board ordered six fired federal employees to be rehired at least through April 10, while Dellinger’s office investigates.
“I find that there are reasonable grounds to believe that each of the six agencies engaged in a prohibited personnel practice,” stated the order. The Office of Special Counsel has said it is considering ways to seek relief for a broader group of federal employees similarly fired in recent weeks.
Feb. 26: New orders for mass layoffs targeting civil service employees
The Trump administration ordered heads of federal departments and agencies to prepare plans to initiate “large-scale reductions in force” by March 13.
A memo sent by the offices of Personnel Management and Management and Budget also instructed federal departments to eliminate and consolidate duplicative positions, reduce their property footprints and produce reorganization plans for their agencies.
Federal employees with full civil service protections are expected to be targeted. U.S. Postal Service workers, positions deemed necessary for law enforcement, national security and border and immigration obligations, as well as military personnel in the armed forces are exempted.
The memo also instructs federal departments to submit new organizational charts by April 14 as well as any proposed relocations of agency offices or headquarters from Washington to “less-costly parts of the country.”
More: Elon Musk talks death threats, DOGE directives at Trump’s first Cabinet meeting
Feb. 27: California judge blocks firing of probationary employees
Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern California District temporarily blocked the Trump administration from its mass firing of probationary federal employees.
Alsup said the mass firings were likely unlawful and ordered the Office of Personnel Management to halt the action, saying the agency acted out of bounds by telling other agencies – including the Education Department, the Small Business Administration and the Energy Department – to fire employees.
“OPM does not have any authority whatsoever, under any statute in the history of the universe, to hire or fire any employees, but its own,” Alsup said. The judge did not order the rehiring of anyone who had been terminated.
Feb. 28: A second five things email
The administration sent a second round of emails to federal workers instructing them to list what they’ve accomplished that week. The new directive came from agency leaders instead of DOGE.
More: How Trump and Musk have sought greater control over federal employees
March 5: Firings are up to agencies
In response to Alsup’s ruling, the Trump administration informed federal departments that any firings of their probationary workers are up to the agencies themselves.
The revised guidance from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management states that “OPM is not directing agencies to take any specific performance-based actions regarding probationary employees,” adding that “agencies have ultimate decision making authority over, and responsibility for, such personnel actions.”
That same day, the Merit Systems Protection Board ordered the U.S. Department of Agriculture to reinstate a fired worker, as well as “numerous” other probationary employees who were fired Feb. 13 and later.
The ruling at the request of the Office of Special Counsel who argued the firings violated federal laws related to probationary employees and reductions in force because they used a form letter that the Department of Agriculture also sent to nearly 6,000 other probationary employees.
March 6: Trump allowed to fire special counsel
More: ‘Blatantly illegal’: Judge reinstates labor board member fired by Donald Trump
A federal appeals court ruled that Trump did have authority to fire Dellinger, the Office of the Special Counsel leader who said firing probationary employees was illegal because agencies used boilerplate language. Dellinger said he would not appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Trump administration has said it will replace Dellinger with Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins. His agency is laying off workers whose main avenue to contest their firing is to turn to the Office of the Special Counsel for help.
March 12: Member back on the Federal Labor Relations Authority
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan reversed Trump’s Feb. 10 removal of Grundmann, a Democratic member from the Federal Labor Relations Authority, by issuing a permanent injunction requiring the rest of the board to treat Grundmann as if she had not been removed.
The authority hears disputes between federal agencies and their employees’ union and could play a significant role in expected legal fights over the mass layoffs.
What is ahead?
More: ‘We deserve to be heard.’ Fired fed workers begin weekly protests on Capitol Hill
Heads of federal departments and agencies have until Thursday to prepare and present plans to initiate “large-scale reductions in force” as Trump shifts to a more aggressive phase of cutting the federal workforce beyond recently hired or promoted employees.
Among the planned reductions, reported by USA TODAY, are terminations of 76,000 workers from the Department of Veterans Affairs, 1,300 workers from the Department of Education, and more than 1,000 workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Trump has also openly discussed cuts of 65% to the Environmental Protection Agency’s workforce.
Layoffs are not immediate. Agencies must give employees 30 or 60 days notice.
USA TODAY reporters Joey Garrison, Bart Jansen, Maureen Groppe, Kayla Jimenez, Erin Mansfield and Tom Vanden Brook contributed.
trump fires more Veterans than any president in history, and he’s not done yet: Trump’s VA secretary defends 80,000 layoffs in a wildly unpersuasive way
MaddowBlog: From The Rachel Maddow Show
Trump’s VA secretary defends 80,000 layoffs in a wildly unpersuasive way
Defending deep cuts at his agency, VA Secretary Doug Collins said, “The federal government does not exist to employ people.” He’s badly missing the point.
By Steve Benen – March 6, 2025
As recently as last week, Donald Trump told reporters that the White House is keeping track of the number of military veterans who are losing their jobs as a result of his administration’s policies. “We hope it’s going to be as small a number as possible,” the president said.
As a practical matter, those “hopes” don’t appear to be amounting to much. Thousands of veterans have already been laid off as a result of the White House’s agenda, even as veterans’ benefits are put in jeopardy by Elon Musk and his DOGE operation.
It was against this backdrop that Trump’s Veterans Affairs Department announced this week that it’s laying off 80,000 workers as part of an agencywide reorganization. While the precise total of veterans who’ll lose their jobs as part of this effort hasn’t yet been announced, it stands to reason that the number will be significant: Veterans make up a disproportionate share of federal employees in general, and at the VA, the percentage is likely to be even higher.
The White House’s Alina Habba told reporters this week that military veterans affected by the DOGE-led layoffs may not be “fit to have a job at this moment.”
As it turns out, she wasn’t the only member of Trump’s team making controversial comments about veterans headed for the unemployment line. NBC News reported on Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins, who released a video via social media this week, sharing his perspective on the developments.
“Now, we regret anyone who loses their job, and it’s extraordinarily difficult for me, especially as a VA leader and your secretary, to make these types of decisions,” Collins said in the video. “But the federal government does not exist to employ people. It exists to serve people.”
But no one has ever argued that the federal government exists to employ people. The point has always been that those who work on agencies such as the VA are there to serve Americans who need assistance.
If Collins or other Republicans want to argue that the department can lay off 80,000 people and not sacrifice care or benefits for veterans at all, they’re welcome to make the case. The fact that they’ve offered no such assurances suggests benefit cuts for those who served are, at a minimum, on the table for the Trump administration.
The Cabinet secretary added in the same video, “We’ll be making major changes, so get used to it.” But therein lies the rub: If you’re an injured veteran, worried about what Trump and his team have in store for the trimmed down VA, getting “used to” fewer services and less care is a life-changing proposition.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement, “Slashing nearly 80,000 VA staff is a benefit cut by another name. This staffing cut is a betrayal of our promise to our service members. It will mean longer wait times, fewer appointments, less health care service for our veterans.”
The New York Democrat added, in reference to the VA cuts, “It is outrageous. No one in America bargained for this and Democrats are going to fight this tooth and nail working with our veterans service organizations to fight these awful, unfair cuts that take out the desire to give tax cuts to billionaires on our veterans who served us so well. This is just one of the most outrageous things they have done and there’s a long list.”
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
Dictator Don and his court of fascists.
Occupy Democrats – March 4, 2025
