Category: Science

How Citibank got caught in a $20B climate fight

Grist

How Citibank got caught in a $20B climate fight

Jake Bittle – March 12, 2025

In the chaotic first few weeks of the Trump administration, as the government has frozen and unfrozen billions of dollars in federal funding, Environmental Protection Agency chief Lee Zeldin has focused on one program in particular. For almost a month, he has been waging a crusade against the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a Biden-era program designed to finance climate action in underinvested areas.

For this initiative, the Biden EPA doled out billions of dollars to a handful of climate-focused nonprofits to help them set up their own “green banks.” These banks would then lend out the money to support solar panels and other clean energy development in areas that don’t typically draw a lot of investment in the hopes of mobilizing private money for the same projects.

Zeldin has attacked the green fund as “criminal” and sent letters to the climate nonprofits notifying them that their contracts are being terminated “effective immediately.” He has alleged without evidence that the Biden administration’s attempts to dole out funding after the 2024 election, and its selection of climate-focused nonprofits, are evidence of “waste and self-dealing.” Meanwhile, the Justice Department has attempted to open a grand jury investigation into the program, causing at least one senior prosecutor to resign, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation has also begun a probe into the money despite resistance from a judge. That’s in spite of the fact that Congress mandated the program when it passed the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, in 2022 and that the executive branch has no constitutional authority to override congressional spending.

Stuck in the middle of the administration’s feud against the green fund recipients is Citibank, the third-largest financial institution in the United States. The Biden administration entrusted Citi to manage the massive $20 billion program, but in the weeks since Zeldin’s campaign began, the bank has allegedly refused to release the money to grantees. It finds itself between a rock and a hard place — either give the money back to the EPA and breach its contracts with the climate nonprofits, or release the money to green grantees and risk President Donald Trump’s ire. The longer the bank holds out, the more risk there is that one of the IRA’s most ambitious and novel programs could collapse altogether.

Now the nonprofits charged with setting up these green banks are fighting back. Climate United Fund, the largest grantee from the program, filed a lawsuit over the weekend against both the EPA and Citi to secure its $7 billion grant. The nonprofit’s lawsuit accuses the agency of illegally pressuring Citi to withhold funds and the bank of breaching its contract with Climate United. Two other nonprofits, the Coalition for Green Capital and Power Forward Communities, filed suit this week as well to reactivate their respective $5 billion and $2 billion grants.

“We’re going to court for the communities we serve — not because we want to, but because we have to,” said Climate United Fund’s CEO, Beth Bafford, in a statement. “This isn’t about politics; it’s about economics.”

On Tuesday, hours after the third nonprofit filed its lawsuit, the EPA announced that it had “notified [the nonprofits] of the termination” of the green bank program. EPA said it would “re-obligate” the Biden-era money but did not say whether Citi had returned the funds. A representative for one grantee said she did not know the status of the funding.

Most federal grantees access funding through a Treasury Department portal known as the Automated Standard Application for Payments, or ASAP. Cities and nonprofits log into the portal and request electronic cash transfers to draw down the money the government has promised them. It’s not that different from filing an expense report in an online HR application at your job.

In the first weeks of the Trump administration, as the White House issued an executive order that “pause[d]” all funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, many grantees found they were unable to access this system. After multiple court orders, the Trump administration began to release some of this money from the Treasury. Some school districts have drawn down money to pay for clean buses, and some community banks have pulled down money from the $7 billion Solar for All program, which helps pay for energy improvements in low-income households. However, many grantees have said their money is still unavailable.

The green bank program doesn’t use ASAP. The program was designed to dole out nine- and 10-figure grants to a half-dozen nonprofits, giving each one seed money to start its own climate-focused bank. Most of these nonprofits were purpose-built to apply for the green bank program. Each one is a partnership between several community-focused financial institutions — Climate United, for instance, was founded by entities including Calvert Impact, a socially oriented investment fund, and Self-Help, a nonprofit credit union. The organization aimed to finance projects such as solar farms and electric truck fleets, and as project developers paid the money back, Climate United would lend it out to support different green initiatives. They used these initial loans to “de-risk” energy projects, making it easier to raise additional money from private-sector lenders.

This kind of program required a different sort of financial arrangement, and that’s where Citibank came in. Just four days before the 2024 election, Citi signed a contract with the Biden administration to help manage the green bank money, according to documentation filed with Climate United’s lawsuit. The bank agreed to hold Climate United’s funding and that of other grantees in money market accounts where it would earn investment income. When Climate United and other green funds needed money, Citi was supposed to liquidate a portion of their account and distribute the money within a day or so.

Holding the money at Citi rather than the Treasury was supposed to make it easier for the grantees to raise private cash for energy projects. “One of the three goals of the program is private-sector leverage,” said Adam Kent, who is the director of blended and inclusive finance at the environmental nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, which is not involved in any of the green banks. “Having the funding at Citi allows the awardees to book that award on their balance sheet, which allows them to go raise additional private capital.”

But on February 19, when Climate United attempted to draw funding down from its account, the fund received no response from Citi, according to the lawsuit. Climate United and its lawyers say they attempted to contact the bank no fewer than seven times over the course of two weeks before the bank responded. On March 3, a representative for the bank told the group that it had “forwarded [Climate United’s message]” to the EPA “for an appropriate response.” In a follow-up email, the bank said it was “awaiting further guidance.” The other two nonprofits that filed lawsuits also said that Citi refused to offer them clarity about the status of their money.

Email correspondence between Beth Bafford of Climate United Fund and a representative from Citi regarding Climate United's $7 billion grant. Citi has allegedly refused to release money according to its contract with Climate United.
Email correspondence between Beth Bafford of Climate United Fund and a representative from Citi regarding Climate United’s $7 billion grant. Citi has allegedly refused to release money according to its contract with Climate United.More

In response to an inquiry from Grist, the EPA said it does not comment on pending litigation. The Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which regulates financial agreements like the one between the EPA and Citi, did not respond to a request for comment.

Citi also did not respond to Grist’s request for comment. But in a court filing on Wednesday in the Climate United suit, Citi said that it “desires nothing more than to fulfill its contractual obligations” but said its duty to follow directives from the federal government took precedence over its commitment to disburse money to Climate United.

A funding delay of a few months could kneecap or even collapse the green bank program. In a declaration that accompanied Climate United’s lawsuit, Bafford said the nonprofit “cannot currently access funds to pay its payroll and other expenses.” She went on to say that “even temporary loss of access to its primary funding will severely damage Climate United’s internal operations, its financing programs … and its long-term reputation and ability to carry out its mission in the market.”

Kent concurs with that assessment. Even if Climate United and its fellow grantees succeed in getting their money, he said, the Trump administration’s vendetta against the program could hamper private interest in future solar farms and energy projects.

“I think the attacks on this program have definitely had chilling effects on [investors’] desire to say, ‘Hey, I actually think this is going to benefit my community,’” he said.

Zeldin has maintained his singular focus on the green bank program even as the EPA has begun to unfreeze other grants. He has referred to the disbursement to Citi as a “rushed effort” to shield money from Trump’s oversight. But in a twist, the administration has had more success freezing money that is housed at Citi than it has had freezing money at Treasury, where it has partially complied with court orders that require it to release some grants.

This isn’t the first time that Citi has found itself in the middle of a fight between the Trump administration and a federal grantee. Last month, the Federal Emergency Management Agency clawed back some $80 million from a Citibank account owned by New York City. The outgoing Biden administration had sent New York the money to house migrants at hotel shelters, but because the transaction had only taken place a few weeks earlier, Trump’s FEMA was able to reverse it through the Automated Clearing House transfer system without exerting political pressure on the bank. New York City has since sued to reclaim the money.

Even if a court orders Citi to restore the money to Climate United and other grantees, the Trump administration’s attempts to pressure the bank do not bode well for the fate of future climate investment — or for democracy itself, said Hana Vizcarra, a senior attorney at the nonprofit legal firm Earthjustice, which is not involved in the lawsuits.

“Any time the government is targeting private-sector institutions or others, it makes for a dangerous dynamic,” she said. “I think we’re seeing that in a lot of different places right now, and it can lead to some unpredictable actions in response.”

Editor’s note: The Natural Resources Defense Council and Earthjustice are advertisers with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions. This story has been updated to include a summary of Citi’s Wednesday court filing in the Climate United lawsuit.

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Trump’s FBI Moves to Criminally Charge Major Climate Groups

The New Republic – Opinion

Trump’s FBI Moves to Criminally Charge Major Climate Groups

Malcolm Ferguson – March 12, 2025

The FBI is moving to criminalize groups like Habitat for Humanity for receiving grants from the Environmental Protection Agency under the Biden administration.

Citibank revealed in a court filing Wednesday that it was told to freeze the groups’ bank accounts at the FBI’s request. The reason? The FBI alleges that the groups are involved in “possible criminal violations,” including “conspiracy to defraud the United States.”

“The FBI has told Citibank that recipients of EPA climate grants are being considered as potentially liable for fraud. That is, the Trump administration wants to criminalize work on climate science and impacts,” the @capitolhunters account wrote Wednesday on X. “An incoming administration not only cancels federal grants but declares recipients as criminals. All these grantees applied under government calls FOR ENVIRONMENTAL WORK, were reviewed and accepted. Trump wants to jail them.“

The Appalachian Community Capital Corporation, the Coalition for Green Capital, and the DC Green Bank are just some of the nonprofits being targeted.

“This is not fraud. This is targeted harassment,” @capitolhunters continued. “The idea of criminalizing community climate work wouldn’t have originated at the FBI—it likely comes from EPA director Lee Zeldin, who today cut all EPA’s environmental justice offices, which try to reduce pollution in poor and minority communities.”

Zeldin’s order eliminates 10 EPA regional offices as well as the one in Washington, D.C.

Elon Musk’s DOGE has worked quickly to cut federal agencies. Here’s a list of what’s been targeted so far.

Business Insider

Elon Musk’s DOGE has worked quickly to cut federal agencies. Here’s a list of what’s been targeted so far.

Grace Eliza Goodwin – March 6, 2025

  • Trump established the Department of Government Efficiency to cut federal spending and root out waste.
  • Under Elon Musk, DOGE has already targeted a number of federal agencies, including USAID and the DoD.
  • Here’s a list of the government programs and agencies DOGE has gone after so far.

Since returning to the White House, President Donald Trump has wasted little time sending his newly created DOGE office after federal agencies.

On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order officially creating DOGE. With billionaire SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk as its de facto leader, the group has taken swift action toward its stated goal of rooting out government fraud, waste, and abuse of taxpayer dollars.

Here’s a list of the agencies DOGE has targeted so far and other key initiatives from the new organization.

Social Security Administration

The Trump administration has sent DOGE to find fraud within the Social Security Administration, arguing that the agency sends out payments to dead Americans. A Business Insider analysis of recent SSA audits found that errors like overpaying beneficiaries and paying dead people amount to less than 1% of the SSA’s total benefits payouts — far less than Trump and Musk have claimed.

The SSA — which manages Social Security benefits and payouts — has been the target of DOGE’s sweeping reduction of the federal workforce, cuts that SSA workers have warned could delay payments to beneficiaries and hinder frontline workers’ ability to handle claims and issue Social Security cards.

As part of the Trump administration’s efforts to restructure the SSA, the agency banned its workers from reading the news on their work devices. One worker told BI that they sometimes need to access news sites to, for example, confirm deaths through obituaries, and without that ability, recipients’ claims could be slowed down.

Department of Defense

DOGE is now going after the Department of Defense, the oldest and largest government agency in the US, with a total budget of over $800 billion.

In early February, Trump said that he expected DOGE to “find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse” in the Pentagon. That includes what Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz has called the “absolute mess” of US shipbuilding.

DOGE posted on X on February 14 that it had begun looking into the DoD.

“Great kickoff with @DeptofDefense,” the post said. “Looking forward to working together to safely save taxpayer dollars and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse.”

DOGE staffers have been at the Pentagon collecting lists of probationary employees across defense agencies, and it’s expected that many could soon be terminated, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.

Internal Revenue Service

DOGE has set its sights on the IRS.

The task force sought access to the Internal Revenue Service’s data system that houses highly sensitive information about every taxpayer, nonprofit, and business in the country, The Washington Post reported on February 16.

The IRS considered granting DOGE broad access to its systems and data, including its Integrated Data Retrieval System, which lets IRS workers view and adjust taxpayer accounts and data, the Post reported.

But The White House later agreed to block DOGE’s full access to the IRS’s payment systems, instead granting read-only access of taxpayer data that has been anonymized, the Post reported on February 20, citing people familiar with the arrangement.

Before the agreement to make the data anonymous and read-only was reached, officials sounded alarm bells about the kind of access DOGE would have. Even within the IRS, access to this data is strictly monitored, and employees are prohibited form accessing their own files or those of their friends and family, according to the agency’s employee handbook.

Democratic Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon, a ranking member of the Committee on Finance, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a ranking member of the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, wrote a letter to the IRS on February 17 urging DOGE to disclose the extent of its access to IRS systems.

The senators argued that giving DOGE access to sensitive taxpayer data raises “serious concerns that Elon Musk and his associates are seeking to weaponize government databases containing private bank records and other confidential information to target American citizens and businesses as part of a political agenda.”

The IRS was also one of several federal agencies where probationary employees were fired en masse. The agency’s enforcement of tax evasion could be hit especially hard by the cuts.

And the IRS is working up plans that could cut its 90,000-person workforce in half through a variety of layoffs, attrition, and incentivized buyouts, the Associated Press reported on March 4 citing people familiar with the matter.

The IRS did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

National Institutes of Health

The National Institutes of Health — the federal agency that funds and conducts medical research under the Department of Health and Human Services — announced in a directive on February 7 that it was cutting how much of its funding can be used for administrative overhead.

The NIH said it would be placing a 15% cap on “indirect costs” related to research projects, which includes things like personnel, facility maintenance, and equipment. The NIH said on X that this limit would save the agency $4 billion per year, “effective immediately.”

After separate lawsuits from state attorneys general and organizations representing hospitals and research institutions, a federal judge temporarily blocked the funding cuts in February, and in March, extended that pause in a preliminary injunction.

The NIH has also been targeted by Trump and Musks’s widespread staffing cuts across the federal workforce, with the agency losing over 1,100 staffers, according to an internal email obtained by Reuters.

Federal worker layoffs

As part of Trump and Musk’s promise to reduce the federal budget, the Trump administration has laid off thousands of probationary workers — typically, employees who have been in their roles for less than two years — from a wide swath of federal agencies.

That includes workers at the Forest Service, the Office of Personnel Management, Small Business Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Education, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Internal Revenue Service, Veterans Affairs, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency that provides healthcare to more than 160 million Americans, said in a press release on February 5 that its officials were working with DOGE to find “opportunities for more effective and efficient use of resources in line with meeting the goals of President Trump.”

In response to a post containing a Wall Street Journal article about CMS collaborating with DOGE, Musk wrote on X, “Yeah, this is where the big money fraud is happening.”

On February 12, a group of 32 Democratic Senators wrote a letter to Trump urging him and Musk to keep their “hands off Medicare or Medicaid.”

“DOGE is invading CMS, posing immeasurable risks to Americans’ health care,” the letter reads. “DOGE representatives, with no training or expertise, could make unilateral, politically motivated decisions to target both beneficiaries and health care providers while blocking access to care and essential payments for services.”

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

NASA is also on DOGE’s hit list.

While at the Commerce Space Conference in Washington DC on February 12, the space agency’s acting administrator said that NASA was expecting a visit from DOGE.

“So we are a federal agency. We are going to have DOGE come. They are going to look — similarly to what they’ve done at other agencies — at our payments,” said Janet Petro, in comments reported by Bloomberg.

On February 14, the space agency confirmed to Flying, an aviation-focused magazine, that DOGE staff were on-site to review its payments.

NASA has done quite a lot of business with Musk’s own space company, SpaceX, amounting to around $14.5 billion in contracts between the two.

In a February 6 letter to NASA’s Janet Petro, Democratic Representatives Zoe Lofgren, a ranking member of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and Valerie Foushee, a ranking member of the Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, demanded the space agency provide answers on whether it was working with DOGE.

And in a follow-up letter sent on February 21, the representatives — now joined by Rep. Emilia Sykes, a ranking member of the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight — again urged the agency to disclose the extent to which it is working with DOGE, arguing that Musk’s involvement is a dangerous conflict of interest.

Department of Education

Trump has repeatedly said he wants to shut down the Department of Education (ED). On February 12, he told reporters that he wants the department closed “immediately,” adding that it “is a big con job.”

Along with some GOP lawmakers, Trump has said that education should be handled at the state and local level, and that a federal agency isn’t necessary.

On February 12, DOGE said that it had cancelled a number of ED contracts — including a “$4.6M contract to coordinate zoom and in-person meetings,” a “$3.0M contract to write a report that showed that prior reports were not utilized by schools,” and a “$1.4M contract to physically observe mailing and clerical operations.”

The cost-cutting group has also said that it has terminated 89 contracts at the ED, totaling $881 million.

Trump has said that he wants his newly confirmed education secretary, Linda McMahon, to put herself out of a job — a task McMahon herself hinted at in an email to ED staff about the agency’s “historic final mission.” And that may come sooner rather than later — Trump is expected to imminently issue an executive order disbanding the Education Department, the Wall Street Journal reported in March, citing people familiar with the matter.

DEI Initiatives

On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order terminating federal roles, offices, and programs related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

And on January 31, just 11 days into its existence, DOGE announced it had terminated 104 government contracts related to DEI programs and initiatives.

DOGE said the cuts — spanning 30 agencies including the Federal Aviation Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, Office of Personnel Management, Environmental Protection Agency, and many more — created over $1 billion in savings.

US Agency for International Development

Musk has been working to shut down the US Agency for International Development, which funds humanitarian efforts around the world. As the world’s largest provider of humanitarian aid, the US channeled nearly $32.5 billion through the agency in 2024, providing aid to countries like Ukraine, Jordan, and Ethiopia.

In a post on X on February 3, Musk accused the agency of being a “criminal organization” and said he “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” Hours later, USAID workers were told to stay home from work, and within days, the agency announced that all direct hire personnel would be placed on leave globally, with a few exceptions — a move that would have reduced its workforce from over 10,000 employees to less than 300.

Following a lawsuit from federal employee labor unions, a federal judge partially blocked Musk and Trump’s attempted shutdown of USAID — which legal experts argue is illegal without approval from Congress. The judge’s order temporarily blocked the Trump administration from placing USAID workers on leave, first until February 14, and in another extension, until at least February 21.

But by the end of February, USAID workers were told to clear out their desks at the agency’s Washington, DC headquarters after the Trump administration said it was ending 90% of the department’s contracts.

On March 5, the Supreme Court ruled against the Trump administration‘s freeze on foreign aid, allowing the release of nearly $2 billion in foreign aid funds.

Experts have warned that a shutdown of USAID would make China more powerful on the world stage.

Federal worker buyout

As part of Musk and Trump’s efforts to trim government spending and reduce the federal workforce, the Trump administration emailed a buyout offer to around 2 million government employees. The deferred resignation, sent by the Office of Personnel Management at the end of January, offered to pay employees their full salary and benefits through September, without the need to work during that time, in exchange for their resignation.

The offer was met with mass confusion, shock, and outrage from federal employees, many of whom questioned whether the government could actually promise to pay them through September with a looming government shutdown in March when current funding runs out.

The offer appeared to come straight out of Musk’s playbook, right down to the title of the email sent to federal workers: “Fork in the Road.”

After federal labor unions filed a lawsuit arguing that the offer is illegal, a federal judge twice extended the deadline for employees to accept the buyout, but ultimately ruled that it can proceed.

The offer finally closed on February 12, with 75,000 workers accepting the buyout, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

Federal Aviation Administration

Following the deadly American Airlines plane crash in Washington DC in January, Musk announced he would be going after the Federal Aviation Administration.

Days after the crash, Musk wrote on X that the FAA’s “primary aircraft safety notification system failed for several hours,” adding that, as a result, Trump gave the DOGE team his approval to “make rapid safety upgrades to the air traffic control system.”

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed Musk’s role, saying the DOGE team was “going to plug in to help upgrade our aviation system.”

Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas — who chairs the committee that oversees the FAA — said he’s confident in Musk’s ability to upgrade the FAA, adding that the American people should take “real comfort in his ability to navigate complicated technologies.”

Not everyone has so much faith in Musk.

Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington argued in a letter to Duffy that, as the CEO of SpaceX, Musk has a clear conflict of interest that should prohibit his involvement with the FAA.

Last year, the FAA proposed fining SpaceX more than $600,000 for two occasions where the rocket company is said to have violated its launch licenses.

On February 19, Duffy said on X he had enlisted SpaceX engineers “to help upgrade our aviation system.”

The FAA said in a statement to Business Insider on February 25 that it had begun testing out a SpaceX Starlink internet terminal at its facility in Atlantic City and two terminals at its “non-safety critical sites in Alaska.”

Treasury Department

Trump said he granted Musk and his DOGE team access to the Treasury department’s digital payments system, which controls trillions of dollars in payments to Americans — everything from Social Security benefits to tax refunds.

The Treasury Department said Musk’s team was only granted “read-only” access to the system, but the move still sparked criticism, particularly from Democratic lawmakers and federal workers’ unions. The unions sued the Treasury Department, arguing that the agency had illegally granted Musk access to sensitive personal and financial information.

Trump defended Musk’s access to the platform, telling reporters it was only so that DOGE could find additional areas to cut government waste.

“Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval, and we will give him the approval where appropriate,” Trump said.

On February 14, the Treasury Department’s acting inspector general said in a letter obtained by the AP that he was launching an audit of the payment system’s security controls and would be looking into whether any “fraudulent payments” had been made, as Musk has alleged. The Government Accountability Office also said it would be opening a probe into DOGE’s access to the payment system, according to a letter sent to lawmakers that was obtained by Politico.

For now, a federal judge has barred DOGE officials from accessing the Treasury Department’s sensitive payments systems until a lawsuit alleging the access is illegal concludes.

Federal Emergency Management Agency

Trump has threatened to overhaul, or entirely scrap, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which provides aid to Americans following natural disasters like Hurricane Milton and the LA wildfires.

The president has called the agency, which employs more than 20,000 staff around the US, a “very big disappointment” that is “very bureaucratic,” “very slow,” and costs “a tremendous amount of money.”

On February 10, Musk wrote on X that “FEMA betrayed the American people by diverting funds meant for natural disasters to pay for luxury hotels for illegal migrants.”

But New York City officials said that FEMA had correctly allocated the funds, which were never part of a disaster relief grant and were not used on luxury hotels, as Musk had said, The New York Times reported.

Hours after Musk’s post, FEMA’s acting director, Cameron Hamilton, posted on X that the payments had been suspended and that the responsible personnel will be held accountable.

On February 11, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security announced that four FEMA officials had been fired in connection to the payments, including the agency’s Chief Financial Officer, two program analysts, and a grant specialist.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

On February 6, a group of Democratic lawmakers accused “unelected and unvetted associates of Elon Musk and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency” of targeting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The NOAA is in charge of forecasting the weather, analyzing climate data, and tracking extreme weather events.

Senator Chris Van Hollen and Congressman Jamie Raskin, along with other Maryland Democrats, penned a letter alleging that DOGE bureaucrats had been visiting NOAA headquarters, housed within the Department of Commerce, with the intent to break up the agency and merge it with the Department of the Interior.

In their letter, the lawmakers urged the leaders of the US Department of Commerce, Howard Lutnick and Jeremy Pelter, to maintain the independence and integrity of the NOAA, as Lutnick had promised to do in his confirmation hearing.

The lawmakers argue that DOGE is illegally attacking NOAA without congressional approval, in an attempt to dismantle and privatize the agency which they say would rob American farmers, businesses, and citizens of crucial, life-saving services.

The Trump administration has already laid off hundreds of workers at NOAA, which meteorologists say will degrade weather forecasts and public safety.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Musk has repeatedly called for the elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was established in 2011 after the Great Recession to oversee financial products and services offered to Americans. It seeks to protect Americans from financial scams and abusive practices, like excessive overdraft fees.

“CFPB RIP,” Musk wrote on X on February 7 next to a tombstone emoji.

Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent ordered the CFPB to halt most of its work and told the consumer watchdog agency to stop issuing “public communications of any type.”

The CFPB has told staffers to “not perform any work tasks” while it shuts down its DC headquarters amid an uncertain future.

The agency followed up by sending termination notices to dozens of employees, some of whom had already accepted the buyout offer, sources familiar with the situation told CNBC.

The agency’s first director, Richard Cordray, has warned that shuttering the CFPB would turn the consumer finance world into the “wild, wild west,” adding that Musk’s attempted shutdown is unethical and, with his plans to offer financial services through X, could be considered a conflict of interest.

Productivity email sent to federal employees

DOGE sent a mass email to federal workers on Saturday, February 22 asking them to provide five bullet points explaining what work tasks they had accomplished in the past week. They were given a Monday night deadline to respond, and if they didn’t, Trump threatened that they could be “semi-fired” or “fired.” While at first Musk said anyone who didn’t respond would be terminated, he later changed course to say workers would be given another chance.

The “What did you do last week?” email, sent by the Office of Personnel Management, followed Trump’s instruction to Musk to”get more aggressive” in reducing the size of the federal workforce.

In a post on X on February 24, Musk explained the email as “basically a check to see if the employee had a pulse and was capable of replying to an email.”

The email caused mass confusion among federal workers, who received conflicting guidance from their superiors on whether to respond or not.

It’s not yet clear how the differing guidance across federal agencies will be resolved, but Musk said on X that the “mess will get sorted out this week.”

“Lot of people in for a rude awakening and strong dose of reality,” his post continued. “They don’t get it yet, but they will.”

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Trump Decides Presser on D.C. Plane Crash Is Best Time for a Joke

The New Republic – Opinion

Trump Decides Presser on D.C. Plane Crash Is Best Time for a Joke

Edith Olmsted – January 30, 2025

Donald Trump just will not take Wednesday night’s deadly aviation collision seriously.

While signing yet another batch of executive orders on Thursday, the president was asked whether he planned to visit the site of the deadly midair crash between a military helicopter and an American Airlines flight, which killed all 67 people on board the two aircraft.

“I have a plan to visit, not the site, because why don’t you tell me, what’s the site? The water?” Trump said. “You want me to go swimming?”

Trump followed up his flippant response by saying he planned to meet with some of the family members of those who had died in the crash.

The bodies of at least 28 people had been recovered from the Potomac River by Thursday evening, as recovery operations continued, according to the Associated Press.

Earlier on Thursday, Trump had suggested that the Biden administration’s diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring practices were to blame for the crash, specifically pointing to the Federal Aviation Administration’s practice of hiring people with “targeted disabilities.” The FAA published a report contradicting this outlandish and unserious claim, saying that staffing in the air traffic control tower was “not normal” on Wednesday night when the crash occurred.

It’s also worth noting that Trump went on television to speak about the crash hours before he had actually briefed on the incident. Meanwhile, National Transportation Safety Board member Todd Inman said Thursday it is too early to tell what exactly caused the crash.

Trump makes moves to expand his power, sparking chaos and a possible constitutional crisis

Associated Press

Trump makes moves to expand his power, sparking chaos and a possible constitutional crisis

Nicholas Riccardi – January 29, 2025

President Donald Trump arrives to speak at the 2025 House Republican Members Conference Dinner at Trump National Doral Miami in Doral, Fla., Monday, Jan. 27, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

Just a little over a week into his second term, President Donald Trump took steps to maximize his power, sparking chaos and what critics contend is a constitutional crisis as he challenges the separation of powers that have defined American government for more than 200 years.

The new administration’s most provocative move came this week, as it announced it would temporarily halt federal payments to ensure they complied with Trump’s orders barring diversity programs. The technical-sounding directive had enormous immediate impact before it was blocked by a federal judge, potentially pulling trillions of dollars from police departments, domestic violence shelters, nutrition services and disaster relief programs that rely on federal grants. The administration on Wednesday rescinded the order.

Though the Republican administration denied Medicaid was affected, it acknowledged the online portal allowing states to file for reimbursement from the program was shut down for part of Tuesday in what it insisted was an error.

Legal experts noted the president is explicitly forbidden from cutting off spending for programs that Congress has approved. The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to appropriate money and requires the executive to pay it out. A 50-year-old law known as the Impoundment Control Act makes that explicit by prohibiting the president from halting payments on grants or other programs approved by Congress.

“The thing that prevents the president from being an absolute monarch is Congress controls the power of the purse strings,” said Josh Chafetz, a law professor at Georgetown University, adding that even a temporary freeze violates the law. “It’s what guarantees there’s a check on the presidency.”

Democrats and other critics said the move was blatantly unconstitutional.

“What happened last night is the most direct assault on the authority of Congress, I believe, in the history of the United States,” Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine, said Tuesday.

While some Republicans were critical, most were supportive.

“I think he is testing the limits of his power, and I don’t think any of us are surprised by it,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican who is close with Trump.

At first blush, the Trump administration appeared to be following the correct procedures in identifying potential spending cuts, and the Impoundment Control Act outlines a procedure for how they could become permanent, said Rachel Snyderman, a former official at the Office of Management and Budget who is now at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Congress must eventually sign off on any cuts the administration wants to make, Snyderman said, though she noted that no president since Bill Clinton, a Democrat, has been successful in getting that done. Congress did not act on $14 billion in impoundment cuts Trump proposed during his prior term, she said.

“We have to see what the next steps are,” Snyderman said.

The attempt to halt grants came after Trump, who during the campaign pledged to be “a dictator on day one,” has taken a number of provocative moves to challenge legal constraints on his power. He fired the inspectors general of his Cabinet agencies without giving Congress the warning required by law, declared that there is an immigrant “invasion” despite low numbers of border crossings, is requiring loyalty pledges from new hires, challenged the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship and is moving career staff out of key positions at the Department of Justice to ensure his loyalists control investigations and prosecutions.

On Tuesday evening, the new administration made its latest move, trying to prune the federal workforce by offering pay until the end of September for those who agree to resign by the end of next week.

The Trump actions have all led to a cascade of court challenges contending he has overstepped his constitutional bounds. A federal judge in Seattle has already put on hold Trump’s attempt to revoke birthright citizenship, calling it a blatant violation of the nation’s foundational legal document. On Tuesday, nonprofit groups persuaded a federal judge in Washington to put the administration’s spending freeze order on hold until a fuller hearing on Feb. 3.

Democratic attorneys general also rushed to court to block the order. New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez, a Democrat, said the swiftness of the court action against Trump’s spending freeze demonstrates the “carelessness” of the order.

“My hope is that the president, working with Congress, can identify whatever his priorities are and can work through the normal constitutional order that is well established that limits the power of Democratic and Republican presidents,” he said.

The grant freeze — administration officials described it as a “pause” — fit with a long-sought goal of some Trump allies, including his nominee to run the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, to challenge the constitutionality of the Impoundment Control Act. They contend the president, as the person in charge of distributing funds, should be able to have some control over how the money goes out.

Though there’s little doubt the new administration wanted a court fight over its power to control spending, experts agree that this was likely not the way they hoped to present it.

“This is a really sloppy way of doing this,” said Bill Galston, of the Brookings Institution, adding that he thought it was an administration error. “This is just classic Trump. He believes it’s better to be fast and sloppy than slow and precise.”

In her first press conference, Trump’s new press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, on Tuesday urged organizations that need the grants to call the administration and show how their operations are “in line with the president’s agenda.”

“It’s incumbent on this administration to make sure, again, that every penny is accounted for,” Leavitt said.

Republican lawmakers largely took the freeze in stride.

“This isn’t a huge surprise to me,” said Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota during the House Republican retreat at one of the president’s Florida golf resorts. “Clearly, Donald Trump campaigned in no small part on the idea that the Biden administration was putting out a lot of money that was not consistent with Donald Trump’s values.”

But Democrats and others were furious at the move, which seemed designed to undercut congressional authority.

“If President Trump wants to change our nation’s laws, he has the right to ask Congress to change them,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, said in a statement. “He does not have the right to violate the United States Constitution. He is not a king.”

Chafetz, of Georgetown University, said the lack of pushback from Republican members of Congress was especially alarming because the legislative branch is the one whose powers are most at risk in the latest power play.

Even if Trump loses the legal battle, Chafetz said, he and his followers might feel like they’ve won by pushing things to this extreme.

“Damaging the institutions they don’t like,” he said, “seems to be their whole theory of governance.”

Riccardi reported from Denver. Associated Press writers Kevin Freking and Lisa Mascaro in Washington and Morgan Lee in Albuquerque, New Mexico, contributed to this report.

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Trump’s First Big Fiasco Triggers Stephen Miller’s Rage—Take Note Dems

The New Republic

Trump’s First Big Fiasco Triggers Stephen Miller’s Rage—Take Note Dems

Greg Sargent – January 29, 2025

Admitting failure is anathema to the authoritarian leader, who is perpetually in danger of being diminished only by those who are resentful of his glory—which is why White House adviser Stephen Miller is frantically searching for scapegoats to blame for the unfolding disaster around President Donald Trump’s massive freeze on federal spending. “Welcome to the first dumb media hoax of 2025,” Miller angrily tweeted on Tuesday night. “Leftwing media outright lied, and some people fell for the hoax.”

What Miller is actually angry about is that the media covered this fiasco aggressively and fairly. Miller insists that the press glossed over the funding pause’s supposed exemption for “aid and benefit programs.” But this is rank misdirection: The funding freeze, which is likely illegal, was indeed confusingly drafted and recklessly rolled out. This is in part what prompted the national outcry over the huge swath of programs that it threatened, Medicaid benefits included—and the media coverage that angered Miller.

All of which carries a lesson for Democrats: This is what it looks like when the opposition stirs and uses its power in a unified way to make a lot of what you might call sheer political noise. That can help set the media agenda, throw Trump and his allies on the defensive, and deliver defeats to Trump that deflate his cultish aura of invincibility.

“This has been a red-alert moment for weeks—but now no one can deny it,” Senator Chris Murphy, the Connecticut Democrat who has argued for an emergency footing against Trump, told me. “For my colleagues that didn’t want to cry wolf, the wolf is literally chomping at our leg right now.”

Until this crisis, the Democratic opposition has mostly been relatively tentative and divided. Democrats were not sufficiently quick, forceful, or unified in denouncing Trump’s illegal purge of inspectors general and his deranged threat to prosecute state officials who don’t comply with mass deportations. Internal party debates suggest that many Democrats believe that Trump’s 2024 victory shows voters don’t care about the dire threat he poses to democracy and constitutional governance, or that defending them against Trump must be reducible to “kitchen table” appeals.

But the funding-freeze fiasco should illustrate that this reading is highly insufficient. An understanding of the moment shaped around the idea that voters are mostly reachable only via economic concerns—however important—fails to provide guidance on how to convey to voters why things like this extraordinary Trumpian power grab actually matter.

Democrats need to think through ways to act collectively, to utilize something akin to a party-wide strategy, precisely because this sort of collective, concerted action has the capacity to alert voters in a different kind of way. It can put them on edge, signaling to them that something is deeply amiss in the threat Trump is posing to the rule of law and constitutional order.

Generally speaking, some Democrats have several objections to this kind of approach. One is that voters don’t care about anything that doesn’t directly impact them and that warnings about the Trump threat make them look unfocused on people’s material concerns. Another is that if Democrats do this too often, voters will stop believing there’s real cause for alarm.

The funding-freeze fiasco got around the first objection for Democrats because it did have vast material implications, potentially harming millions of people. But Democrats shouldn’t take the wrong lesson from this. A big reason this became a huge story was also that it represented a wildly audacious grab for quasi-dictatorial power. Democratic alarms about this dimension of the story surely helped prompt wall-to-wall coverage. Democrats can learn from that.

Faiz Shakir, a progressive dark-horse candidate for Democratic National Committee chair, suggests another way around the first objection—that Democrats can seize on Trump’s abuses of power in a way that does appeal to the working class. The party, he argues, can enlist elected officials and influencers with working-class credibility to explain that those abuses should matter, not just to working-class voters’ bottom lines but, critically, because his degenerate public conduct should disgust them as well. He says Democrats can argue: “The way he is acting is a betrayal of working-class values and your working-class interests.”

Shakir also suggests an intriguing way for the party to act in concert. As chair, he’d aggressively encourage as many elected officials as possible to use the video-recording studio at the DNC in moments like these, getting them to record short takes on why voters should care about them, then push the content out on social media.*

Shakir said he sees a model in Murphy, who regularly serves up short, hyper-timely videos that use phrases like “Let me tell you why this matters.”

https://twitter.com/i/status/1884297054136021224

The goal, Shakir said, would be to provide Democrats with research and recording infrastructure enabling elected officials to find their own voices and flood information spaces with civic knowledge. This also would give Democrats who want to stick to a “kitchen table” approach a way to shape their own warnings around that.

Minnesota Democratic Party Chair Ken Martin, a leading DNC chair candidate, agrees that speed and unity are paramount. “We can’t be waiting several days to organize a response to each of these things from Trump—we have to move quick,” Martin said, adding that the “larger party apparatus” should all be “singing from the same sheet of music.”

The second objection to a concerted approach—that it risks a “cry wolf” effect—is also seriously flawed. It’s already clear some Democrats are using this to avoid hard fights, for instance in hints about “working with” Elon Musk or Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who each pose serious threats to bedrock ideals of public service. Also, if Democrats bestow bipartisan legitimacy on Trumpian moves like appointing those two walking civic basket cases, it complicates sounding the alarm in even more grave situations.

“It is hard for us to argue that our democracy is falling if we’re helping to confirm all of his nominees,” Murphy told me.

Taking too much of an à la carte approach to Trump’s abuses of power also risks squandering leverage. Democratic strategist Jesse Lee notes that the party’s lawmakers could consider a unified, future-oriented approach to abuses like the funding freeze. “The fight is real and here,” Lee said, arguing that Democrats can “make it clear” to GOP leaders that “they will get no Dem votes bailing them out while this power grab is in place.” (On Wednesday, the Trump administration rescinded the funding pause, strengthening the case for an aggressive opposition.)

Nobody denies that the Democratic Party is a big, sprawling, highly varied organism with elected officials facing a huge spectrum of different political imperatives. Of course there will be variation in how they approach each Trumpian abuse. But as Brian Beutler puts it, the answer to this cannot be to “lodge passing complaints about Trump’s abuses of power, but turn every conversation back to the cost of groceries.” This incoherently implies that the abuses themselves are not serious on their own terms.

How to corral Democrats who don’t want to sound warnings in particular situations is not easy to solve. But some of the ideas above are a start. And regardless, at a minimum, we need clearer signs that party leaders, at the highest levels, are seriously thinking through how to act concertedly in ways that clearly signal to voters that we’re in a civic emergency, and will argue to wayward Democrats that this is in their interests as well.

“People will not take us seriously if we don’t do our jobs every day like we’re in the middle of a constitutional crisis,” Murphy told me. “Today, everybody understands that he’s trying to seize power for corrupt purposes. But tomorrow, we have to start acting with purpose to stop what he’s doing.” If you doubt the efficacy of this, Stephen Miller’s anger confirms it as clearly as anyone could want.

* This article is about a breaking news story and has been updated. It has also been edited to include mention of the DNC’s existing recording studio.

Trump administration orders sweeping freeze of federal aid

Politico

Trump administration orders sweeping freeze of federal aid

Jennifer Scholtes and Nicholas Wu – January 27, 2025

One week in, the Trump administration is broadening its assault on the functions of government and shifting control of the federal purse strings further away from members of Congress.

President Donald Trump’s budget office Monday ordered a total freeze on “all federal financial assistance” that could be targeted under his previous executive orders pausing funding for a wide range of priorities — from domestic infrastructure and energy projects to diversity-related programs and foreign aid.

In a two-page memo obtained by POLITICO, the Office of Management and Budget announced all federal agencies would be forced to suspend payments — with the exception of Social Security and Medicare.

“The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve,” according to the memo, which three people authenticated.

The new order could affect billions of dollars in grants to state and local governments while causing disruptions to programs that benefit many households. There was also widespread confusion over how the memo would be implemented and whether it would face legal challenges.

While the memo says the funding pause does not include assistance “provided directly to individuals,” for instance, it does not clarify whether that includes money sent first to states or organizations and then provided to households.

The brief memo also does not detail all payments that will be halted. However, it broadly orders federal agencies to “temporarily” stop sending federal financial assistance that could be affected by Trump’s executive actions.

That includes the president’s orders to freeze all funding from the Democrats’ signature climate and spending law — the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure package enacted in 2021. It also imposes a 90-day freeze on foreign aid.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in a statement decried the announcement as an example of “more lawlessness and chaos in America as Donald Trump’s Administration blatantly disobeys the law by holding up virtually all vital funds that support programs in every community across the country.”

The New York Democrat urged the administration to lift the freeze.

“They say this is only temporary, but no one should believe that,” he said. “Donald Trump must direct his Administration to reverse course immediately and the taxpayers’ money should be distributed to the people. Congress approved these investments and they are not optional; they are the law.”

Bobby Kogan, who worked at the White House budget office during the Biden administration, called the memo a “big, broad, illegal” order that violates impoundment law, which blocks presidents from unilaterally withholding money without the consent of Congress.

“This is as bad as we feared it would be,” said Kogan, who also served as a Democratic aide to the Senate Budget Committee and is now a director at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

The president of the National Council of Nonprofits, Diane Yentel, said in a statement that the order “could decimate thousands of organizations and leave neighbors without the services they need.”

The funding pause, first reported by journalist Marisa Kabas, is scheduled to start at 5 p.m. Tuesday, a day after the memo was sent to agencies.

Carmen Paun and Adam Cancryn contributed to this report.

Trump’s track record of disaster misinformation as he casts blame over California wildfires

ABC News

Trump’s track record of disaster misinformation as he casts blame over California wildfires

LaLee Ibssa – January 11, 2025

Trump’s track record of disaster misinformation as he casts blame over California wildfires

As deadly wildfires burn through Southern California, President-elect Donald Trump has spent the week attacking Democratic officials and continuing a pattern of spreading misinformation about natural disasters.

“I think that Gavin is largely incompetent, and I think the mayor is largely incompetent, and probably both of them are just stone-cold incompetent,” Trump said of California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday night while hosting Republican governors at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.

Since the fires broke out, Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and President Joe Biden have faced criticism over a lack of preparedness, budget cuts to the fire department and a lack of water to fight the fires. Trump has pointed fingers at all three, spreading false claims about California’s water policy and federal assistance.

MORE: Trump keeps saying send water from the north to LA fires, but officials say that’s not the problem

For example, Trump blamed Biden as he falsely claimed that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had “no money” to help California despite Congress recently passing a disaster relief supplemental totaling $29 billion.

PHOTO: President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Republican governors at Mar-a-Lago, Jan. 9, 2025, in Palm Beach, Fla. (Evan Vucci/AP)
PHOTO: President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Republican governors at Mar-a-Lago, Jan. 9, 2025, in Palm Beach, Fla. (Evan Vucci/AP)

The president-elect also pushed exaggerated claims as he accused Newsom of refusing to sign a “water restoration declaration,” saying he instead diverted water resources in order to protect the endangered Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta’s smelt fish.

“He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California,” Trump posted on Truth Social.

While there are regulations that limit the amount of water pumped from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to protect the species, the governor’s office said there was no such declaration, calling the accusation “pure fiction.”

Newsom said he has not heard from Trump since the fires broke out, but the president-elect’s rhetoric isn’t helping.

“I don’t know what he’s referring to when he talks about the Delta smelt in reservoirs. The reservoirs are completely full, the state reservoirs here in Southern California,” he said. “That mis- and disinformation I don’t think advantages or aids any of us,” Newsom said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Newsom said that Trump has not called him since the fires, or since the elections. When asked whether Newsom was worried that aid would be held back, Newsom said he was. He added that he hopes he can have the “same relationship and that same spirit” with Trump as he did with Biden.

“Well, I mean, he’s done it in Utah. He’s done it in Michigan, did it in Puerto Rico. He did it to California back before I was even governor in 2018, until he found out folks in Orange County voted for him and then he decided to give the money. So he’s been at this for years and years and years. It transcends the states, including, by the way, Georgia he threatened similarly. So that’s his style. And we take it seriously to the extent that in the past it’s taken a little bit more time,” Newsom said on NBC.

Biden and other emergency officials have also rejected Trump’s claims, maintaining the fire was caused by fierce winds and extremely dry conditions and that the initial water shortage occurred due to power being shut off in order to avoid sparking additional fires.

Still, Trump has long pushed these claims, suggesting while on the campaign trail that he’d withhold aid for California if Newsom didn’t reinstate Trump’s policies.

PHOTO: The devastation of the Palisades Fire is seen in the early morning in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, Jan. 10, 2025. (John Locher/AP)
PHOTO: The devastation of the Palisades Fire is seen in the early morning in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, Jan. 10, 2025. (John Locher/AP)

Trump’s administration in his first term signed a memorandum that redirected millions of gallons of water to farmers living in the Central Valley and Southern California, pumping it out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

“The water coming here is dead. And Gavin Newsom is going to sign those papers, and if he doesn’t sign those papers, we won’t give him money to put out all his fires, and we don’t give him the money to put out his fires. He’s got problems,” Trump said at a press conference at his Los Angeles golf course in September.

After a closed-door meeting with Senate Republicans at the Capitol on Wednesday, Trump continued to criticize Newsom’s handling of the wildfires while ultimately asserting that the two would need to work together.

“So, what’s happened is a tragedy, and the governor has not done a good job,” Trump told ABC News’ Senior Congressional Correspondent Rachel Scott.

“With that being said, I got along well with him — when he was governor, we worked together very well, and we would work together,” Trump said. “I guess it looks like we’re going to be the one having to rebuild it.”

It isn’t the first time Trump has gone after emergency officials in the wake of disasters. When hurricanes caused devastation in parts of Georgia and North Carolina last year, Trump quickly pivoted his campaign schedule to focus on those areas.

During those visits, Trump repeatedly spread misinformation about FEMA’s response, incorrectly casting blame on federal officials in the Biden administration and falsely claiming that the administration had drained funds from FEMA to house illegal migrants.

“They got hit with a very bad hurricane, especially North Carolina and parts of Georgia. But North Carolina really got hit. I’ll tell you what, those people should never vote for a Democrat, because they held back aid,” Trump claimed in an October interview.

Local and federal officials warned Trump about how his politically motivated rhetoric could be causing harm as the areas hit attempted to rebuild; however, the president-elect often refused to backtrack.

While visiting Asheville, North Carolina, Trump refused to address threats of violence against FEMA workers, instead saying, “I think you have to let people know how they’re doing. If they were doing a great job, I think we should say that, too, because I think they should be rewarded. But if they’re not doing — does that mean that if they’re doing a poor job, we’re supposed to not say it?”

MORE: Biden says federal government to cover 100% of costs for initial LA fire recovery

Even while in office, Trump received pushback at times for peddling misinformation.

PHOTO: Donald Trump, listens to a question as he visits Chez What Furniture Store which was damaged during Hurricane Helene on September 30, 2024 in Valdosta, Georgia. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
PHOTO: Donald Trump, listens to a question as he visits Chez What Furniture Store which was damaged during Hurricane Helene on September 30, 2024 in Valdosta, Georgia. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)More

In 2019, Trump claimed that Alabama was in the path of Hurricane Dorian, causing the National Weather Service to issue a public service announcement refuting Trump’s claims. Then, that same year, when senators first failed to pass disaster relief aid to hurricane victims in Puerto Rico, Trump blamed local leaders as he spread false claims, saying repeatedly that Puerto Rico had received “more money than has ever been gotten for a hurricane before.”

MORE: FEMA assistance available for those affected by Los Angeles fires

“The people of Puerto Rico are GREAT, but the politicians are incompetent or corrupt,” Trump posted at the time.

Republican governors came to Trump’s defense on Thursday night, touting his leadership skills as president during disasters.

“You could criticize the president-elect, but I think you also have to hold these other people accountable,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told reporters at Mar-a-Lago.

“I worked well with Biden during his time at natural disasters, but I work well with Donald Trump, so I’m very confident as a state that knows we face these that a Trump administration is going to be very strong and is going to be there for the people, regardless of party,” DeSantis added.

Despite Trump’s harsh words, Los Angeles officials say they haven’t heard from the president-elect directly but have been in touch with members of his team and they expect Trump to visit the area after sending him an invitation on Saturday.

Gov. Gavin Newsom slams Trump’s disinformation about California wildfires

NBC News

Gov. Gavin Newsom slams Trump’s disinformation about California wildfires

Alexandra Marquez – January 12, 2025

California Gov. Gavin Newsom blasted President-elect Donald Trump’s response to the California wildfires in an interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” recorded Saturday, saying, “Mis- and disinformation I don’t think advantages or aids any of us.”

Newsom appeared to be referring to Trump’s posts on Truth Social blasting Newsom, President Joe Biden and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass since the fires broke out Tuesday.

In one post, the president-elect baselessly claimed Newsom had blocked a measure that would have allowed water to flow from Northern California to Southern California.

Image: Powerful Winds Fuel Multiple Fires Across Los Angeles Area gavin newsom (Eric Thayer / Getty Images)
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, right, tours the downtown business district of Pacific Palisades as the Palisades Fire continues to burn in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

“Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way,” Trump wrote, using an insulting nickname for Newsom.Advertisement

In that post, Trump added that Newsom “wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!)” and “he is the blame for this.”

“Responding to Donald Trump’s insults, we would spend another month,” Newsom told NBC News’ Jacob Soboroff. “I’m very familiar with them. Every elected official that he disagrees with is very familiar with them.”

He added that Trump was “somehow connecting the delta smelt to this fire, which is inexcusable because it’s inaccurate. Also, incomprehensible to anyone that understands water policy in the state.”

In another post, Trump wrote, “NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA. THIS IS WHAT JOE BIDEN IS LEAVING ME. THANKS JOE!” and appeared to falsely claim, as he did last year in the aftermath of several hurricanes, that money had been drained from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA.

At least 16 people have died in devastating wildfires across the greater Los Angeles area.

On Friday, Newsom wrote a letter to Trump inviting him to come to his state and tour the destruction.

“I invite you to come to California again — to meet with the Americans affected by these fires, see the devastation firsthand, and join me and others in thanking the heroic firefighters and first responders who are putting their lives on the line,” the governor wrote.

Newsom told Soboroff on Saturday that he had not received a response to the letter.

He added that he’s worried the president-elect may make good on his threats to withhold disaster aid from the state after his inauguration.

Newsom cited Trump’s past efforts to withhold federal disaster aid from states with leaders he was feuding with.

“He’s done it in Utah. He’s done it in Michigan, did it in Puerto Rico. He did it to California back before I was even governor, in 2018,” Newsom said.

“So he’s been at this for years and years and years. It transcends the states, including, by the way, Georgia he threatened similarly. So that’s his style. And we take it seriously to the extent that in the past it’s taken a little bit more time [to get federal aid],” the governor added.

Trump’s pick to lead EPA was paid tens of thousands to write op-eds criticizing climate policies and ESG

Business Insider

Trump’s pick to lead EPA was paid tens of thousands to write op-eds criticizing climate policies and ESG

Bryan Metzger – January 12, 2025

How Trump's transition could open the floodgates for buying influenceScroll back up to restore default view.

  • Former Rep. Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick to lead the EPA, made $186,000 from paid op-eds and speeches.
  • Some of those op-eds criticized climate policies and ESG.
  • The former NY congressman also made $45,475 from gambling at casinos.

Former Rep. Lee Zeldin, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, has made millions of dollars in recent years from consulting, speaking fees, and paid op-eds, according to a financial disclosure made public on Saturday.

That includes tens of thousands of dollars to write about environmental and climate change-related topics. In one instance, Zeldin was paid $25,000 for an op-ed in which he likened environmental, social, and governance investing, or ESG, to the practices of disgraced cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried.

A staunchly pro-Trump Republican first elected to Congress in 2014, Zeldin left office after mounting an unsuccessful bid for governor of New York in 2022. As retiring lawmakers in both parties often do, Zeldin cashed in, establishing a consulting firm to advise corporate clients while enmeshing himself in the well-funded world of conservative political advocacy.

It’s paid off. According to the disclosure document, which covers Zeldin’s major financial activities since the beginning of 2023, the ex-congressman has made a total of $775,000 in salary income and between $1 million and $5 million in dividends from his main firm, Zeldin Consulting.

He’s also received $144,999 from America First Works, a pro-Trump nonprofit where he has a board seat, along with $65,500 from paid speeches and $15,000 from an entity called “Plymouth Union Public Research.”

He also got lucky — literally — winning a combined $45,475 in the last two years from gambling at the Golden Nugget, Venetian, and Atlantis casinos.

“All nominees and appointees will comply with the ethical obligations of their respective agencies,” Trump-Vance Transition Spokesperson Brian Hughes said in a statement.

Zeldin did not respond to a request for comment.

$120,500 for writing op-eds

The ex-congressman’s disclosure reveals a variety of income streams, including substantial speaking fees from GOP organizations in Florida and California, a Long Island synagogue, and a Turning Point USA event in Michigan in June. In multiple instances, Zeldin was paid over $10,000 for a single appearance.

He also disclosed a combined $26,775 in payments from Fox News and Nexstar Media Group for “use of media studio.”

The document lists payments from several public relations firms for paid op-eds, listing the news outlet and the date of publication. The titles of those opinion pieces are not listed, but Business Insider identified several that matched the publication and date included in the disclosure.

Among the most notable were a series of paid op-eds on climate issues — Zeldin could soon lead the agency responsible for the federal government’s environmental policies.

In an op-ed for Real Clear Policy published in March 2023 entitled “How Congress Can Stop the Next FTX,” Zeldin called on Congress to investigate ESG practices and the nonprofit watchdog Better Markets, arguing that companies may use ESG to avoid regulatory scrutiny in the same manner that Bankman-Fried used political contributions to curry favor with Washington.

The disclosure indicates that Zeldin was paid $25,000 to write that op-ed. He also appears to have made an additional $10,000 for another Newsday op-ed in August about ESG and $3,000 for a Fox News op-ed in July that criticized New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s climate policies and called on her to lift the state’s fracking ban.

Zeldin was also paid to write about other topics, including $10,000 for a New York Post op-ed criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris’ housing policy proposals, $10,000 for a Washington Times op-ed calling on regulators to crack down on China-linked financial platforms, and $15,000 for a Washington Examiner op-ed accusing the Biden administration of targeting Republican-run states via Medicaid regulations.

In some cases, Zeldin was paid even when the articles never saw the light of day. His disclosures list two op-eds that were never published, for which he received $10,000 and $30,000.

In total, Zeldin reported $120,500 in op-ed payments. The original clients who made those payments are unclear, and Zeldin and the Trump-Vance transition did not respond to a question about the original sources.

As with other nominees, Zeldin has agreed to divest himself from his consulting business if he’s confirmed as the next EPA administrator, according to his ethics agreement. His confirmation hearing is set for Thursday, January 16.