Only the Senate can stop the largest wealth transfer in US history
Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.), Opinion Contributor – June 9, 2025
Last week, the House Republican majority passed what can only be called their “Big Billionaire Bill” — a budget reconciliation measure that amounts to one the largest transfers of wealth in American history.
This measure literally steals from the poor and the working class to give to the ultra-rich. As a member of the Ways and Means Committee, I know firsthand how this bill would take from working people and give to the ultra-wealthy. The consequences will be staggering if it becomes law.
I grew up working class, working jobs at Target and Subway. Republicans want to make people like me believe that they’re helping while raising taxes on them, cutting Medicaid and SNAP, and then telling them to have more babies. That’s insulting.
My Republican colleagues moved their second attempt at a House Budget Committee hearing to the dead of night — after a failed first try and following late-night markups in several committees the previous week. Alongside my Democratic colleagues, we spent nearly 30 hours grinding their agenda nearly to a halt, from Wednesday at 1 a.m. to to 11 p.m. in the Rules Committee and on the floor. The fact that they had to move their last hearing before it could move to the floor at 1 a.m. tells me they’re ashamed of themselves. And they should be.
Working families want billionaires to pay their fair share, not to lose their health care and nutrition programs for their kids. I hear it from Americans at town halls, on social media, and even at the grocery store. Millions across the country could lose Medicaid coverage: 3.4 million in California, 400,000 in North Carolina, 250,000 in Minnesota, 380,000 in Texas, 390,000 in Virginia, and 1.2 million in New York — moms, kids, and seniors who could be left without health care.
These are real people in every district, many represented by Republicans who voted for this bill. Nearly half of new moms and their babies in California rely on Medicaid and could lose their care. Seniors who can’t get enough coverage through Medicare will lose. Sons and daughters who can’t afford their parents’ nursing home care will lose. People in rural communities, where hospitals are already closing, will lose too.
Republicans claim to be the party of families. But their bill makes it harder for working people to get by — harder to welcome a new child, get postpartum care, or afford basic medical needs. Worse, Republicans will make it harder for millions of families to afford groceries every month thanks to cuts to nutrition assistance programs. When billionaires can get richer at the expense of working families, what does that say about us as a nation?
I fear America’s promise of hope and opportunity will dim if this administration keeps pushing us to the point where no one sees a future here anymore.
But I refuse to accept a future where America’s greatness is measured by the size of its tax breaks for billionaires instead of the strength of our working families. I call on the Senate to reject this bill and protect the American Dream for everyone.
Jimmy Gomez, a Democrat, represents California’s 34th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The huge banner of a glaring Trump in front of the USDA is a literal sign the U.S. has lost its democracy
John Casey – May 16, 2025
Donald Trump official presidential portrait
A colossal, brooding image of Donald Trump now looms over the U.S. Department of Agriculture headquarters in Washington, D.C. The banner is unmistakably authoritarian in both style and scale. It features a stone-faced Trump gazing down upon the capital like a watchful overlord.
This is not a campaign advertisement. It is a signal. A warning. A literal and metaphorical sign that democracy in America is no longer functioning as intended.
Historically, such displays of obnoxiousness have not heralded democratic renewal. Quite the opposite. They’ve marked the entrenchment of dictatorship. Authoritarian regimes the world over have relied on these massive visual monuments to instill fear, demand obedience, and project omnipresence.
For decades, and most especially during World War II, Stalin’s steel-eyed portraits towered over Soviet streets and public buildings, reminding citizens that the state saw everything. Mao Zedong’s image hung from Tiananmen Gate like a secular deity watching over the masses. It was massive, larger than life, eternal, aloof for a reason..
History books and other visions etched in my memory bring images of Kim Jong Un of North Korea, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, Fidel Castro of Cuba, and of course Hitler, who all followed the same playbook. They saturate public space with the leader’s face and saturate your mind with the leader’s authority.
Imagine, for a moment, if Franklin Delano Roosevelt had plastered massive banners of his face across Washington during World War II. Hanging a 30-foot portrait from the Treasury Building or looming over war bond posters with cold, impassive eyes. The public would have been outraged. Congress would have rebelled. Even amid war, Roosevelt respected the distinction between democratic leadership and personal cult.
Trump has now joined this visual canon of despots with his banner brooding over a government institution. It is not just “deeply creepy,” as some observers have said. It is the textbook behavior of a man who believes the state belongs to him. It is fascist iconography, domesticated.
This chilling banner didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Since being sworn in for his second term on January 20, Trump has governed not as a president but as a ruler unbound by law, or at least he thinks he’s unbound by law.
His Department of Justice has been purged of independence, its prosecutors reassigned or fired if they resisted Trump’s will. And don’t even get me started about the “yes, yes, yes” attorney general, Pam Bondi, who is a perfect lackey for the wannabe dictator. No to Trump in not in her vocabulary.
Trump’s suggestion that he should be allowed a third term because one was supposedly “stolen,” is no longer a fringe fantasy. It’s a real and present threat, floated not only at rallies and interviews but by White House aides and conservative media outlets that now function more like state-run propaganda than independent journalism.
He has declared that federal workers must show “personal loyalty” to him. Inspectors general and career civil servants have been removed en masse and replaced with unqualified loyalists. Programs that support education, public health, and environmental protection have been gutted in favor of funding massive security forces that answer directly to the Executive Branch.
Meanwhile, efforts to erase and rewrite history are accelerating. Trump’s allies are systematically removing references to slavery and civil rights from textbooks, recasting the January 6 insurrectionists as “patriots,” and purging LGBTQ+ references from public libraries. This is not governing. It’s regime-building, complete with a giant portrait.
As Trump’s face stares down from the side of a federal agency building, it’s a 30-foot reminder of who is in charge, who is watching, and who cannot be questioned.
This use of personal imagery as a weapon of psychological control is not just about ego, and it’s a key mechanism of authoritarian rule. During Stalin’s Great Purge, his image became synonymous with the state itself. To criticize Stalin, even in private, was to invite arrest, or worse.
Saddam Hussein commissioned thousands of portraits of himself, placing them in every school, airport, and office in Iraq. The size and frequency of his image sent a clear message that this country was his.
So too with Kim Il Sung, his son Kim Jong il, and his son Kim Jong Un. whose portraits are reportedly required in every home in North Korea, and most people clean them on a regular basis. Disrespecting the image is a punishable offense.
These leaders understood something simple but potent: Symbols shape reality. And control of the visual environment is control of the collective psyche.
The USDA banner is not just gaudy or excessive. It’s strategic. It’s authoritarian. It’s a message not just to the public but to the bureaucracy itself that loyalty flows up, power flows down, and both are enforced with fear.
Democracy depends on a humble, limited executive, and while we’ve had some egomaniacs as president here in the U.S. (think Richard Nixon), we’ve been fortunate not to have one who plasters banners of himself outside of government buildings.
Our presidents have been elected, not enthroned. They serve, not rule. The placement of a massive Trump banner on a government building reveals that this line has been crossed, and we are no longer a republic. We are living under the cult of one man.
When the government starts using public property to display the ruler’s image, when dissent is criminalized, when history is rewritten and power is centralized, we are not looking at the future. Instead, we are seeing the end of something. The end of accountability. The end of democratic pretense. The end of America as we knew it.
The banner may yet come down. But the damage it represents is already done.
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(NewsNation) — The Trump administration faced another loss this week after a federal judge blocked an executive order allowing mass firings of federal employees and delayed any current layoffs until May 23.
In March, a different judge ruled that probationary workers laid off by DOGE had to be rehired. While many of those workers are back on payroll, many are not working due to other cuts.
Overall, the numbers show DOGE has not been successful in its efforts to reduce spending. The department claims to have saved $170 billion, mostly by cutting government contracts, grants and leases.
The cuts have also not brought down the national deficit.
In fact, the government spent $20 billion more in President Donald Trump’s first three months than the Biden administration spent over that same time frame last year.
The deficit has grown from $840 billion in January to more than a trillion dollars today, according to the U.S. Treasury — a $290 billion increase in the past year, partly due to tax cuts that Trump wants to make permanent in his “big, beautiful” budget bill.
Some Republicans are raising the alarm about growing debt.
“We have to get back to weeding out the fraud, the waste, abuse. We are careening towards a sovereign debt crisis, and if we don’t get our spending under control, all of this doesn’t really matter because the dollar won’t mean anything anymore,” said Rep. Greg Murphy, R-N.C.
DOGE said 40% of the Social Security Agency’s calls were ‘fraudulent.’ Data suggests it was actually less than 1%
Irina Ivanova – May 16, 2025
Elon Musk, here seen on Capitol Hill on Dec. 5, 2024, has called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”
An oft-repeated claim that 40% of Social Security calls are fraudulent is wildly overstated, according to a report, which found that less than 1% of calls have any possible link to fraud. However, changes the administration made to combat the alleged problem have led to payment delays and a “degradation” in service, the report found.
Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency is moving to overhaul Social Security on the pretext that the government’s premier safety-net program is losing massive amounts of money to fraud. Musk has claimed his engineers have found $100 billion a week in fraudulent entitlement payments, a situation the Tesla CEO called “utterly insane.”
DOGE made similar claims in an April interview with Fox News. DOGE engineer and Musk employee Aram Moghaddassi told Bret Baier that 40% of calls to Social Security trying to change direct-deposit information are from fraudsters.
“So when you want to change your bank account, you can call Social Security. We learned 40% of the calls that they get are from fraudsters,” Moghaddassi told Fox.
Even Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested in a podcast appearance that the only people complaining about missing payments are fraudsters.
“The easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen, cause whoever screams is the one stealing,” he told All-In, using his 94-year-old mother-in-law as an example of someone who wouldn’t call in.
‘No significant fraud‘
But the true rate of phone fraud, according to a news outlet that covers government technology, is just a fraction of 1%.
Nextgov/FCW, which obtained an internal SSA document, reported that just two Social Security claims out of 110,000 had a high probability of being fraudulent. Fewer than 1% of claims had any potential for fraud at all, according to Nextgov.
“No significant fraud has been detected from the flagged cases,” the internal document said, according to the site.
The SSA’s own justification for changing the benefits process in March said that roughly “40 percent of Social Security direct deposit fraud is associated with someone calling SSA to change direct deposit bank information,” not that 40% of all calls are fraudulent.
DOGE did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
A Social Security spokesperson told Fortune that, between March 29 and April 26, SSA’s new fraud detection tools flagged 20,000 distinct social security numbers where “a direct deposit change was requested over the phone and failed a security measure,” and said its fraud measures helped the office avoid $19.9 million in losses.
The office “continues to refine the anti-fraud algorithm to flag only the claims with the highest probability of fraud,” the spokesperson said in an email.
‘Delays’ and ‘degradation‘
However, the changes have also created a “degradation of public service,” according to Nextgov. In addition to requiring ID checks, the SSA put an automatic delay on new benefit claims so it could run fraud checks, Nextgov reported. The move “delays payments and benefits to customers, despite an extremely low risk of fraud,” the document noted, according to Nextgov.
An Inspector General report from February found that, in fiscal year 2023, 0.6% of all payments made across Social Security’s old-age and disability programs were “overpayments.” That term includes payments made in the wrong amounts when people don’t update their earnings information or other information that would change their eligibility, such as living in a nursing home.
In March, Social Security announced that no benefits claims could be made by phone, before reversing the policy amid outrage. It has added more requirements for people changing their bank information, requiring beneficiaries to either visit a Social Security office in person or use two-factor authentication to confirm their identity.
DOGE’s Fraud Tracker at Social Security Turns Into a Massive Self-Own
Josh Fiallo – May 15, 2025
Brian Snyder / Reuters
How’s that for efficiency?
Procedures implemented by the Department of Government Efficiency suggested that just two out of 110,000 calls to the Social Security Administration this spring had a “high probability” of being fraudulent, Federal Computer Week reported.
That is a far cry from the 40 percent figure that was parroted by MAGA in recent months, including by DOGE’s recently departed leader, Elon Musk, and Vice President JD Vance. The real figure is about .0018 percent.
The anti-fraud procedures were put in place by DOGE last month and have seemingly done more harm than good, according to an internal memo viewed by Federal Computer Week. The new procedures reassured DOGE staff that fraudsters are not phoning the SSA every second, but reportedly slowed processing times at the administration by 25 percent and may soon be removed from protocol.
DOGE’s anti-fraud procedures have seemingly done more harm than good. / Samuel Corum/Getty Images
Such delays were described in a memo as a “degradation of public service,” which is the antithesis of DOGE’s supposed goal.
“No significant fraud has been detected from the flagged cases,” the internal document said, according to the magazine.
DOGE’s anti-fraud protocol required a three-day hold to be placed on phone claims in order to check for fraud. This procedure “delays payments and benefits to customers, despite an extremely low risk of fraud,” the memo said.
The 40 percent figure circulating in MAGA circles stems from a Fox News segment on March 27, where the DOGE engineer Aram Moghaddassi wrongly claimed that 40 percent of calls made to the SSA to change direct deposit information are from fraudsters.
In reality, Federal Computer Week reports that 40 percent of direct deposit fraud at the agency is associated with phone calls—not that four out of every 10 calls to the agency are from fraudsters.
Likely based on the exaggerated fraud figures, the SSA announced in March that it would phase out allowing people to make account changes or claims over the phone. That policy was scrapped a short time later, following a public backlash.
Musk has been notably quieter the last month. / JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
Musk, who has been notably quieter the last month, did not immediately address his department’s face-palm on Thursday.
Foreign groups are stealing $1 trillion a year through identity theft – and DOGE is just letting it happen
John Bowden – May 15, 2025
A new report details how the federal government is ignoring billions of dollars in identity theft-related fraud every year as outdated systems leave government agencies and Americans both vulnerable to scammers.
The report from Socure, a firm which sells identity verification services, found that fraudsters are using stolen identities to scam government agencies out of billions and bilk Americans from receiving benefits they are entitled to in the process. The problem is so vast, according to the report, that false or fraudulent claims originating from crime rings primarily based abroad make up between 2 percent to 12 percent of all applications for US government services.
Government estimates project that federal agencies annually lose about $500bn to fraudulent claims. Socure’s report indicates the number could be nearly twice that high.
For comparison, that’s more than 10 times the annual budget of USAID, the hub of US foreign aid and soft power now eviscerated by Elon Musk’s DOGE campaign and due for rehousing at the State Department.
First reported by NBC News, the report went on to find that a lack of identity verification systems at the federal level was having a cascading effect, as scammers often target private entities with information improperly obtained through government agencies.
“There is a real need for fraud prevention solutions which leverage simple consortium data that spans commercial and government programs,” it reads.
The report cited basic issues with federal identity verification efforts: callers who connected with agencies were often able to access information by providing information which by itself could have been illicitly obtained, like Social Security numbers and answers to security questions. Red flags, like Social Security numbers that do not match an applicant’s date of birth, applications filed from international IP addresses, or phone numbers with area codes that don’t match a person’s place of residence, are often ignored.
“Today, in many agencies, if someone calls into a call center and says that I’m locked out of my account, many of them will allow them to get access to their account by saying, ‘Hey, we’ll let you change your name and your password on here,’” Socure vice president Jordan Burris told NBC News. “They’ll probably ask them something to the effect of, ‘Hey, can you tell me your name? Can you tell me Social Security Number? Can you perhaps answer this question about a car that you probably had once upon a time?’”
One international fraud ring described as “sophisticated” by Socure’s analysis used stolen identities to launch 60 fraudulent claims across “multiple” agencies during a one-month span last fall.
It’s a bipartisan problem, too: according to Socure’s findings, fraud targeting government agencies jumped during the Covid pandemic as the federal government distributed assistance checks millions of Americans and insituted loan programs for businesses to support workers during lockdowns. The figures never recovered when those programs ended.
But it’s not part of the “waste, fraud, and abuse” which either Elon Musk’s DOGE effort or the Republican Congress are addressing through federal means and the effort to craft a budget bill that could pass the House and Senate. Republicans in Congress are hoping to find nearly $900bn in savings to fund a renewal of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, but are doing so by instituting work requirements for Medicaid which Democrats say just amounts to a layer of red tape aimed at kicking people off the program. The Republican plan also calls for cuts to food stamps and other changes to Medicaid aimed at lowering the burden for the federal government.
Elon Musk’s DOGE efforts have largely focused on cutting foreign aid programs and government grants (Getty Images)
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates that Medicaid and Medicare together make more than $100bn in improper payments every year. The GOP budget plan includes changes to eligibility requirements that make checks more frequent, but there’s no organized push for stronger electronic verification practices.
DOGE, meanwhile, is largely sputtering out after taking an axe to USAID and, by most accounts, urging large-scale cuts to federal staff rosters rather than changes to programs to improve efficiency, or even efforts to identify fraud. A website last updated on Sunday operated by the Musk-led effort indicates that his team is taking credit for $170bn in supposed savings, though that number is highly disputed.
Elon Musk is expected to take a public step back from his role in the coming days, while his team seems to largely view government programs as fraudulent and wasteful by design, rather than undermined by criminal groups.
Millions of people depend on the Great Lakes’ water supply. Trump decimated the lab protecting it.
Anna Clark, ProPublica – May 12, 2025
Lake Erie, as seen from Wayne County, Michigan. – Nick Hagen for ProPublica
This story was originally published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive ProPublica’s stories in your inbox every week.
Just one year ago, JD Vance was a leading advocate of the Great Lakes and the efforts to restore the largest system of freshwater on the face of the planet.
As a U.S. senator from Ohio, Vance called the lakes “an invaluable asset” for his home state. He supported more funding for a program that delivers “the tools we need to fight invasive species, algal blooms, pollution, and other threats to the ecosystem” so that the Great Lakes would be protected “for generations to come.”
But times have changed.
This spring, Vance is vice president, and President Donald Trump’s administration is imposing deep cuts and new restrictions, upending the very restoration efforts that Vance once championed. With the peak summer season just around the corner, Great Lakes scientists are concerned that they have lost the ability to protect the public from toxic algal blooms, which can kill animals and sicken people.
Cutbacks have gutted the staff at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Severe spending limits have made it difficult to purchase ordinary equipment for processing samples, such as filters and containers. Remaining staff plans to launch large data-collecting buoys into the water this week, but it’s late for a field season that typically runs from April to October.
In addition to a delayed launch, problems with personnel, supplies, vessel support and real-time data sharing have created doubts about the team’s ability to operate the buoys, said Gregory Dick, director of the NOAA cooperative institute at the University of Michigan that partners with the lab. Both the lab and institute operate out of a building in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that was custom built as NOAA’s hub in the Great Lakes region, and both provide staff to the algal blooms team.
“This has massive impacts on coastal communities,” Dick said.
Gregory Dick, director of the Cooperative Institute of Great Lakes Research, which works side by side with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, says that cuts to the lab will have a massive impact on coastal communities. – Nick Hagen for ProPublicaMore
Multiple people who have worked with the lab also told ProPublica that there are serious gaps in this year’s monitoring of algal blooms, which are often caused by excess nutrient runoff from farms. Data generated by the lab’s boats and buoys, and publicly shared, could be limited or interrupted, they said.
That data has helped to successfully avoid a repeat of a 2014 crisis in Toledo, Ohio, when nearly half a million people were warned to not drink the water or even touch it.
If the streams of information are cut off, “stakeholders will be very unhappy,” said Bret Collier, a branch chief at the lab who oversaw the federal scientists that run the harmful algal bloom program for the Great Lakes. He was fired in the purge of federal probationary workers in February.
The lab has lost about 35% of its 52-member workforce since February, according to the president of the lab’s union, and it was not allowed to fill several open positions. The White House released preliminary budget recommendations last week that would make significant cuts to NOAA. The budget didn’t provide details, but indicated the termination of “a variety of climate-dominated research, data, and grant programs, which are not aligned with Administration policy” of ending “‘Green New Deal’ initiatives.”
An earlier document obtained by ProPublica and reported widely proposed a 74% funding cut to NOAA’s research office, home of the Great Lakes lab.
Vance’s office didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about how federal cuts have affected Great Lakes research. The White House also didn’t respond to messages.
Water samples from bodies of water in the Great Lakes region. – Nick Hagen for ProPublica
In a statement to ProPublica, staffers from Toledo’s water system credited the Great Lakes lab and NOAA for alerting it to potential blooms near its intake days ahead of time. This has saved the system significant costs, they said, and helped it avoid feeding excess chemicals into the water.
“The likelihood of another 2014 ‘don’t drink the water’ advisory has been minimized to almost nothing by additional vigilance” from both the lab and local officials, they said.
Remaining staff have had to contend with not only a lack of capacity but also tight limits on spending and travel.
Several people who have worked in or with the lab said that the staff was hampered by strict credit card limits imposed on government employees as part of the effort to reduce spending by the Department of Government Efficiency, which has been spearheaded by presidential adviser Elon Musk.
“The basic scientific supplies that we use to provide the local communities with information on algal bloom toxicity — our purchasing of them is being restricted based on the limitations currently being put in by the administration,” Collier said.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s custom-built hub for the Great Lakes region in Ann Arbor, Michigan. – Nick Hagen for ProPublica
NOAA and the Department of Commerce, which oversees the agency, didn’t respond to messages from ProPublica. Neither did a DOGE official. Eight U.S. senators, including the minority leader, sent a letter in March to a top NOAA leader inquiring about many of the changes, but they never received a response.
A number of the staffing losses at the Great Lakes lab came when employees accepted offers of early retirement or voluntary separation; others were fired probationary workers targeted by DOGE across the government. That includes Collier, who had 24 years of professional experience, largely as a research professor, before he was hired last year into a position that, according to the lab’s former director, had been difficult to fill.
A scientist specializing in the toxic algal blooms was also fired. She worked on the team for 14 years through the cooperative institute before accepting a federal position last year, which made her probationary, too.
A computer scientist who got real-time data onto the lab’s website — and the only person who knew how to push out the weekly sampling data on harmful algal blooms — was also fired. She was probationary because she too was hired for a federal position after working with the institute.
And because of a planned retirement, no one holds the permanent position of lab director, though there is an acting director. The lab isn’t allowed to fill any positions due to a federal hiring freeze.
At the same time, expected funds for the lab’s cooperative institute are delayed, which means, Dick said, it may soon lay off staff, including people on the algal blooms team.
In March, Cleveland’s water commissioner wrote a letter calling for continued support for the Great Lakes lab and other NOAA-funded operations in the region, saying that access to real-time forecasts for Lake Erie are “critically important in making water treatment decisions” for more than 1.3 million citizens.
In 2006, there was a major outbreak of hypoxia, an issue worsened by algal blooms where oxygen-depleted water can become corrosive, discolored and full of excess manganese, which is a neurotoxin at high levels. Cleveland Water collaborated with the lab on developing a “groundbreaking” hypoxia forecast model, said Scott Moegling, who worked for both the Cleveland utility and Ohio’s drinking water regulatory agency.
“I knew which plants were going to get hit,” Moegling said. “I knew about when, and I knew what the treatment we would need would be, and we could staff accordingly.”
The American Meteorological Society, in partnership with the National Weather Association, spotlighted this warning system in its statement in support of NOAA research, saying that it helps “keep drinking water potable in the Great Lakes region.”
Collier, the former branch chief, said that quality data may be lacking this year, not just for drinking water suppliers, but also the U.S. Coast Guard, fisheries, shipping companies, recreational businesses and shoreline communities that rely on it to navigate risk. In response to a recent survey of stakeholders, the president of a trade organization serving Great Lakes cargo vessels said that access to NOAA’s real-time data “is critically important to the commercial shipping fleet when making navigation decisions.”
Because federal law requires NOAA to monitor harmful algal blooms, the cuts may run against legal obligations, several current and former workers told ProPublica. The blooms program was “federally mandated to be active every single day, without exception,” Collier said.
Harmful algal bloom on Lake Erie, observed during weekly sampling in 2022. – The Cooperative Institute of Great Lakes Research at the University of MichiganA beaker holding a water sample taken from Lake Erie during a peak harmful algal bloom, shown at its natural concentration in 2017. – The Cooperative Institute of Great Lakes Research at the University of MichiganMore
The 2024 bloom in Lake Erie was the earliest on record. At its peak, it covered 550 square miles. Warming temperatures worsen the size and frequency of algal blooms. While the field season was historically only about 90 days, Collier said, last year the team was deployed for 211 days.
As the shallowest of the Great Lakes, Lake Erie is typically first to show signs of problems. But it’s also an emblem of environmental stewardship, thanks to its striking recovery from unchecked industrial pollution. The lake was once popularly declared “dead.” A highly publicized fire inflamed a river that feeds into it. Even Dr. Seuss knocked it in the 1971 version of “The Lorax.” The book described fish leaving a polluted pond “in search of some water that isn’t so smeary. I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie.”
“I should no longer be saying bad things about a body of water that is now, due to great civic and scientific effort, the happy home of smiling fish,” Geisel wrote to them.
Nicole Rice was recently fired from her position at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory after 10 years with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A promotion put her on probationary status. She’s worried that federal cuts are placing the Great Lakes system at risk. – Nick Hagen for ProPublicaMore
Project 2025, the plan produced by the Heritage Foundation for Trump’s second term, recommended that the president consider whether NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”
NOAA is “a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” the plan said, and this industry’s mission “seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable.”
“That is not to say NOAA is useless,” it added, “but its current organization corrupts its useful functions. It should be broken up and downsized.”
When asked at his confirmation hearing in January if he agreed with Project 2025’s recommendation of dismantling NOAA, Howard Lutnick, head of the commerce department, said no.
One month later, the Great Lakes lab’s probationary staff got termination notices. That includes Nicole Rice, who spent a decade with NOAA. A promotion made her communications job vulnerable to the widespread firings of federal probationary workers.
In recent testimony to a Michigan Senate committee, Rice expressed deep concern about the future of the Great Lakes.
“It has taken over a century of bipartisan cooperation, investment and science to bring the Great Lakes back from the brink of ecological collapse,” Rice said. “But these reckless cuts could undo the progress in just a few short years, endangering the largest surface freshwater system in the world.”
The first relates to the president’s declining popularity.
We learned, at the start of the week, that Donald Trump had sunk to new lows with most Americans. According to The Times’s poll with Siena College, Trump had dropped to 42 percent approval. A CNN poll shows Trump at 41 percent and both The Associated Press and The Washington Post have Trump at 39. His much-vaunted performance with Asians, Hispanics and Black Americans is also evaporated, as they shift back toward Democrats in response to the president’s poor performance. No president, not even this president in his first term, has become as unpopular as quickly as this iteration of Donald Trump.
And it’s not as if he has the ability to shift course. He is stubbornly committed to his tariffs, almost taunting anyone who might be worried about higher prices. He is committed to his unpopular cuts to federal agencies, his unpopular attacks on the federal judiciary and his increasingly unpopular immigration policies. Given his attitudes and the likelihood of an economic downturn, Trump is more likely to crater than he is to rise with the public.
All of this was basically predictable. It was predictable that Trump would pursue a ruinous set of policies — he campaigned on them. It was predictable that he would choose people ill-equipped to run the government; he did it the last time he was president. It was obvious that he would be surrounded by permissive advisers more interested in their own narrow ideological projects than in the well-being of the American people.
It did not take a clairvoyant to see how this second term would unfold. And yet it’s clear that there are plenty of people of influence who were caught off-guard by the reckless behavior of the second Trump administration. Their initial response to Trump was to accommodate him as the legitimate president (he won a free and fair election, after all); to pare back the most strident opposition and to acknowledge those areas where he was in line with the public. Even now, in the face of everything we’ve seen, there are voices who think the right approach is a quiet one.
But to my mind, the reality of Trump’s standing — of his rapidly declining political fortunes — is evidence that the best approach was the strident opposition that marked the president’s first term. As cringe-worthy as it might have been to some observers, that posture helped undermine the administration and worked successfully to contain Trump’s worst impulses.
The good news is that there is still plenty of time to embrace a more aggressive form of resistance. In doing so, people of influence — Democratic politicians, figures of industry and prominent media institutions — would be meeting the broad public where it already is. Among the polls released last week was one conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, which found that a majority of Americans, 52 percent, believe that “President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy.”
Can’t get any clearer than that.
My second thought, speaking of the public, is about diversity, equity and inclusion.
To read some prominent commentators is to get the impression that of all the things the administration is doing, the public is most receptive to its attacks on D.E.I. But there’s no real evidence to say this is the case. In fact, D.E.I. holds majority support among American adults, and when asked whether they approve or disapprove of the president’s attacks on diversity programs, 53 percent say they disapprove.
This might be because most Americans perceive something that these prominent commentators do not, which is that the administration’s attack on D.E.I. is less about fairness than it is recreating systems of domination and subordination. Consider this line of thought from Richard Kahlenberg of the Progressive Policy Institute, a curiously named group founded as the primary think tank of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council in 1989. According to Kahlenberg, observations that the Trump administration is not interested in fairness as such are “over the top.” To him, the president simply wants the government to “treat different racial groups the same.”
This is hard to take seriously. So far, in this apparent effort to spread racial equality, the White House has removed, without apparent cause or real justification, a number of Black Americans from senior positions in the military, removed the work of Black, women and Jewish authors from the Naval Academy (while leaving books such as “Mein Kampf”), criticized the Smithsonian, particularly its Museum of African American History, for spreading supposedly “improper ideology,” pushed the National Park Service to rewrite its history of the Underground Railroad, gutted the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, rescinded executive orders mandating desegregation in federal contracting, revoked a decades-old school desegregation order, and fired dozens of women and minorities from the boards that review science and research at the National Institutes of Health.
At the same time, the White House has elevated — to positions of great influence — a set of disastrously unprepared loyalists whose main qualifications seem to be the way they look. There is no question that Donald Trump chose Pete Hegseth — formerly a weekend Fox News host — to lead the Department of Defense because he looked straight out of “central casting.”
It takes nothing more than simple observation to conclude that the administration’s war on D.E.I. is a conscious effort to undermine recognition of Black Americans, women and other groups as well as stigmatize their presence in positions of authority. Frankly, one has to be willfully blind to the substance of the administration’s war on D.E.I. to think that it has anything to do with equal treatment.
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And yet, quite a few people seem to have deliberately pulled blinders over their eyes. First, so that they can pretend that the White House isn’t possessed of neosegregationist attitudes toward people who fall outside of a distinct set of racial and gender identities, and second, so that they can ignore the extent to which the president and his allies are obsessed with race, when race can be used to dominate and subordinate others.
Message From the Russian Military: ‘We Lost Your Son’
Russia lacks any formal, organized effort to account for legions of missing soldiers. That often leaves relatives in limbo, fending for themselves with scant government information.
By Neil MacFarquhar and Milana Mazaeva – May 3, 2025
Russian conscripts departing for their garrisons in Bataysk, Russia, last month. Credit…Sergey Pivovarov/Reuters
For months, Elvira Kaipova had not heard from her son Rafael, a Russian soldier deployed in Ukraine.
Military officials responded to her repeated questions about his whereabouts by saying he was on active duty and therefore incommunicado. Then, late last November, two days after they again made that assertion, she learned that he had gone missing on Nov. 1 — from a Telegram channel that helps military families.
“We lost your son,” Aleksandr Sokolov, the officer in Rafael’s unit in charge of family liaison, told her when she traveled to its headquarters in western Russia.
“Lost him how?” she says she responded, alarmed and angry, especially when the officer explained that after Rafael had failed to check in by radio, a search had proved impossible. “How do we search for him?” she says the officer told her.
Variations on that grim scenario have been repeated countless times since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The Russian Ministry of Defense lacks any formal, organized effort to track down legions of missing soldiers, according to bereaved families, private organizations that try to assist them and military analysts. Relatives, stuck in limbo, fend for themselves with scant government information.
The ministry itself declined to comment for this article. Mr. Sokolov, the liaison officer, said in a text message: “You do realize that I can’t comment on anything.”
Even if Russia and Ukraine reach a peace agreement, the hunt for missing soldiers is expected to endure for years, if not decades.
Rafael Kaipov, from Tyumen, Russia, has been missing since Nov. 1, according to his mother, Elvira Kaipova.
The Defense Ministry has not published any statistics about the number of missing, which military analysts and families say is because it does not know the number. Estimates run to the tens of thousands.
Anna Tsivilyova, a deputy minister of defense and a cousin of President Vladimir V. Putin, told the State Duma last November that 48,000 relatives of the missing had submitted DNA samples in hope of identifying remains, although that included some duplicate requests from the same family.
In Ukraine, “Want to Find,” a government project to help locate Russian servicemen captured or killed there, said it had received more than 88,000 requests for information, with over 9,000 in April alone. It noted that the overall number of missing is still unknown.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which tries to locate missing from both sides, whether civilians or military, has 110,000 cases submitted.
The family of Isakhanov Ravazan, a 25-year-old soldier, last received a brief voice message from him on Nov. 9. During a battle soon afterward, his aunt said, he radioed his commander that he could not stanch the bleeding from a bad wound. He has not been heard from since.
“No one saw him dead,” said his aunt, who, like several people in this article, did not want to be named for fear of falling afoul of laws against detailing battlefield losses. “Maybe he saved himself, maybe someone found him, we are still holding onto hope that he is alive,” she said. “There is no peace for the soul. I cannot sleep at night, and neither can his parents.”
Most missing soldiers most likely died fighting and were abandoned on the battlefield, experts said. There are not enough teams to collect bodies, and the constant deployment of drones makes retrieval too dangerous.
A military dog tag found with the body of a Russian soldier near Koroviy Yar, Ukraine, in 2023.Credit…Nicole Tung for The New York Times
Commanders have enough trouble delivering food and ammunition, and that is the priority, said a military analyst with the Conflict Intelligence Team, an independent organization in exile that tracks the conflict. The analyst, who declined to use his name to avoid jeopardizing relatives still in Russia, said only families of the soldiers care if bodies are collected, “and there is no punishment for alienating relatives.”
A Ukrainian man from the occupied city of Luhansk, who was dragooned into service as a battlefield medic and who also declined to be identified, said of his experience: “Hundreds of people were left lying out there. Every day, dozens were wounded or killed.”
Even when bodies are retrieved, identification is problematic. Often, remains can be removed only after the battle lines shift markedly so that attack drones fly elsewhere, and that could take months or even years.
The military morgue in the western city of Rostov, officially known as the Center for the Reception, Processing and Dispatch of the Deceased, is the main clearing center.
When she learned that her son was missing, Ms. Kaipova, who is married and has one other son, flew there first. “Everything is overcrowded,” she said, arriving at 7 a.m. to submit a DNA sample and leaving at 10 p.m. “Wives, mothers, fathers — all crying, sobbing, waiting.”
Investigators there told her and others that they face a backlog of around 15,000 unidentified servicemen. The sluggish pace, the constant referrals to different government agencies and the lack of basic information has families of the missing on a slow boil. Anger overflows from numerous online chat rooms where relatives seek help.
Ukrainian volunteers who collect the bodies of people killed in combat and try to identify the remains of Russian soldiers, in eastern Ukraine in February.Credit…Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
In one comment on the Vkontakte social network, a participant named Polina Medvedeva lambasted military commanders as “irresponsible.” Some of her husband’s comrades told her that he had died heroically, she wrote, but the military has not confirmed his death and there is no body.
“Where are the specifics?” she wrote. “Why is the command ignoring us, avoiding answers, throwing us from one number to another? My heart breaks with pain and anger for what they have done to our family.”
Some families go even more public.
Relatives of missing soldiers from the 25th Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade from the Leningrad region have made repeated appeals to Mr. Putin.
“Everywhere we encounter indifference!” they said in a video last month showing pictures of the missing. Every family receives exactly the same form letter and is just told, repeatedly, to wait, they said, “Help us! We are tired of living in ignorance for months and years!”
The Kremlin established the Defenders of the Fatherland State Foundation, ostensibly to help soldiers, veterans and their families. But it has no inside track on details about the missing, analysts said.
There is “no system of liaison with the soldiers’ families,” said Sergei Krivenko, the director of a human rights organization formed to help soldiers. He called the Fatherland Foundation a “fake structure,” designed to deflect blame from the defense ministry and “to give a semblance of action.”
The Fatherland Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.
Ms. Kaipova has written to numerous officials starting with Mr. Putin, visited his administrative office and searched through multiple hospitals, including some amid the fighting in eastern Ukraine. “I run in circles,” she said.
President Vladimir V. Putin meeting with the Defenders of the Fatherland State Foundation in Moscow, in March, in a photograph released by Russian state media.Credit…Mikhail Metzel/Sputnik
Her quest took a not uncommon turn when she thought she recognized Rafael with a grievous head wound in a short video clip filmed aboard an evacuation helicopter. She is convinced he is lying in a hospital somewhere afflicted with amnesia.
The administrator of one chat group where she posted the video said at least 20 other people identified the same man as their missing soldier.
“Everyone is so desperate that they see their loved ones in any face,” Ms. Kaipova conceded, but she dismissed any suggestion that this might be the case for her, as well. Her son’s unit said its medics had no record of evacuating him.
Rafael was a reluctant soldier. Raised in the central city of Tyumen, he seriously injured another man who tried to take his car. Officials presented him with a common choice in Russian criminal cases: Go to jail or to the front. His mother begged him to chose jail, but he recoiled. “He was in agony, pacing,” she said. “He did not want war or prison.”
He deployed last Aug. 1, his 20th birthday. She never heard from him again. A hospitalized soldier from his unit once called to tell her that Rafael had cried out for his mother in fear at the start of his first battle.
She learned from Form 1421, the terse military record of his disappearance, that he served with an intelligence unit. Rafael was among a group of soldiers carrying out “special tasks” in a Donetsk Province village, it said, when they came under fire from artillery and drones. “The group, which included Rafael Kaipov, lost contact after this engagement.”
Under new laws, commanding officers can go to court just six months after the last contact with a soldier to have him declared missing, allowing them to halt his combat pay.
The families themselves have to file an additional case to have the missing soldier declared dead, which releases hefty benefits. Some shun such a definitive step.
“I cry constantly, morning and night,” Ms. Kaipova said. “My biggest fear is that I will exhaust every lead and have no one left to turn to.”
Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.
Neil MacFarquhar has been a Times reporter since 1995, writing about a range of topics from war to politics to the arts, both internationally and in the United States.
Milana Mazaeva is a reporter and researcher, helping to cover Russian society.
The New Deal Is a Stinging Rebuke to Trump and Trumpism
Jamelle Bouie – April 30, 2025
Credit…Nathan Howard/Reuters
There is no question that Donald Trump’s ambition in the first 100 days of his return to the Oval Office was to set a new standard for presidential accomplishment. To rival, even surpass, the scope of Franklin Roosevelt’s efforts nearly a century ago, when he moved so quickly — and so decisively — that he established the first 100 days as a yardstick for executive action.
But as consequential as they have been, and as exhausting as they’ve felt to many Americans, these first months of Trump’s second term fall far short of what Roosevelt accomplished. Yes, Trump has wreaked havoc throughout the federal government and destroyed our relationships abroad, but his main goal — the total subordination of American democracy to his will — remains unfulfilled. You could even say it is slipping away, as he sabotages his administration with a ruinous trade war, deals with the stiff opposition of a large part of civil society and plummets in his standing with most Americans.
If measured by his ultimate aims, Trump’s first 100 days are a failure. To understand why he failed, we must do a bit of compare-and-contrast. First, let’s look at the details of Trump’s opening gambit. And second, let’s measure his efforts against the man who set the terms in the first place: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. To do so is to see that the first 100 days of Trump’s second term aren’t what we think they are. More important, it is to see that the ends of a political project cannot be separated from the means that are used to bring it into this world.
Trump began his second term with a shock-and-awe campaign of executive actions. He, or rather the people around him, devised more than 100 executive orders, all part of a program to repeal the better part of the 20th century — from the New Deal onward — as well as fundamentally transform the relationship between the federal government and the American people.
His ultimate aim is to turn a constitutional republic centered on limited government and the rule of law into a personalist autocracy centered on the rule of one man, Donald J. Trump, and his unlimited authority. Trump’s vision for the United States, put differently, has more in common with foreign dictatorships than it does with almost anything you might find in America’s tradition of republican self-government.
To that end, the president’s executive orders are meant to act as royal decrees — demands that the country bend to his will. In one, among the more than four dozen issued in his first weeks in office, Trump purports to purge the nation’s primary and secondary schools of supposed “radical indoctrination” and promote a program of “patriotic education” instead. In another, signed in the flurry of executive activity that marked his first afternoon back in the Oval Office, Trump asserts the power to define “biological” sex and “gender identity” themselves, in an attempt to end official recognition of trans and other gender nonconforming people.
In Trump’s America, diversity, equity and inclusion programs aren’t just frowned upon; they’re grounds for purges in the public sector and investigations in the private sector. Scientific and medical research must align with his ideological agenda; anything that doesn’t — no matter how promising or useful — is on the chopping block. Any institutions that assert independent authority, like law firms and universities, must be brought to heel with the force of the state itself. Everything in American society must align with the president’s agenda. Those who disagree might find themselves at the mercy of his Department of Justice or worse, his deportation forces.
Trump claims sovereign authority. He claims the right to dismantle entire federal agencies, regardless of the law. He claims the right to spend taxpayer dollars as he sees fit, regardless of what Congress has appropriated. He even claims the right to banish American citizens from the country and send them to rot in a foreign prison.
Trump has deployed autocratic means toward authoritarian ends. And the results, while sweeping, rest on a shaky foundation of unlawful actions and potentially illegal executive actions.
Now, let’s consider Roosevelt.
It’s from Roosevelt, of course, that we get the idea that the 100th day is a milestone worth marking.
Roosevelt took office at a time of deprivation and desperation. The Great Depression had reached its depths during the winter of his inauguration in March 1933. Total estimated national income had dropped by half, and the financial economy had all but shut down, with banks closed and markets frozen. About one-quarter of the nation’s work force — or close to 15 million people — was out of work. Countless businesses had failed. What little relief was available, from either public or private sources, was painfully inadequate.
“Now is the winter of our discontent the chilliest,” Merle Thorpe, the editor of Nation’s Business — then the national magazine of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — wrote in an editorial that captured the mood of the country on the eve of Roosevelt’s inauguration. “Fear, bordering on panic, loss of faith in everything, our fellow-man, our institutions, private and government. Worst of all, no faith in ourselves, or the future. Almost everyone ready to scuttle the ship, and not even ‘women and children first.’”
It was this pall of despair that led Roosevelt to tell the nation in his Inaugural Address that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Despite the real calls for someone to seize dictatorial power in the face of crisis, Roosevelt’s goal — more, possibly, than anything else — was to rescue and rejuvenate American democracy: to rebuild it as a force that could tame the destructive force of unregulated capitalism.
As such, the new president insisted, the country “must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline.” His means would fit his ends. He would use democracy to save democracy. He would go to the people’s representatives with an ambitious plan of action. “These measures,” he said, “or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.”
What followed was a blitz of action meant to ameliorate the worst of the crisis. “On his very first night in office,” the historian William E. Leuchtenburg (who died three months ago) recounted in his seminal volume, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940,” Roosevelt “directed secretary of the Treasury William Woodin to draft an emergency banking bill, and gave him less than five days to get it ready.”
Five days later, on March 9, 1933, Congress convened a special session during which it approved the president’s banking bill with by acclamation in the House and a nearly unanimous vote in the Senate. Soon after, Roosevelt urged the legislature to pass an unemployment relief measure. By the end of the month, on March 31, Congress had created the Civilian Conservation Corps.
This was just the beginning of a burst of legislative and executive activity. On May 12 alone, Roosevelt signed the Federal Emergency Relief Act — establishing the precursor to the Works Progress Administration — the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act. He signed the bill creating the Tennessee Valley Authority less than a week later, on May 18, and the Securities Act regulating the offer and sale of securities on May 27. On June 16, Roosevelt signed Glass-Steagall, a law regulating the banking system, and the National Industrial Recovery Act, an omnibus business and labor relations bill with a public works component. With that, and 100 days after it began, Congress went out of session.
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The legislature, Leuchtenburg wrote,
had written into the laws of the land the most extraordinary series of reforms in the nation’s history. It had committed the country to an unprecedented program of government-industry cooperation; promised to distribute stupendous sums to millions of staple farmers; accepted responsibility for the welfare of millions of unemployed; agreed to engage in far-reaching experimentation in regional planning; pledged billions of dollars to save homes and farms from foreclosure; undertaken huge public works spending; guaranteed the small bank deposits of the country; and had, for the first time, established federal regulation of Wall Street.
And Roosevelt, Leuchtenburg continued, “had directed the entire operation like a seasoned field general.” The president even coined the “hundred days” phrasing, using it in a July 24, 1933, fireside chat on his recovery program, describing it as a period “devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal.”
The frantic movement of Roosevelt’s first months set a high standard for all future presidents; all fell short. “The first 100 days make him look like a minor league statesman,” said one journalist of Roosevelt’s successor Harry S. Truman. The Times described the first 100 days of the Eisenhower administration as a “slow start.” And after John F. Kennedy’s first 100 days yielded few significant accomplishments, the young president let the occasion pass without remark.
There is much to be said about why Roosevelt was able to do so much in such a short window of time. It is impossible to overstate the importance of the crisis of the Depression. “The country was in such a state of confused desperation that it would have followed almost any leader anywhere he chose to go,” observed the renowned columnist and public intellectual Walter Lippmann. It also helped that there was no meaningful political opposition to either Roosevelt or the Democratic Party — the president took power with overwhelming majorities in the House and the Senate. The Great Depression had made the Republicans a rump party, unable to mount an effective opposition to the early stages of the New Deal.
This note on Congress is key. Beyond the particular context of Roosevelt’s moment, both the expectation and the myth of Roosevelt’s 100 days miss the extent to which it was a legislative accomplishment as much as an executive one. Roosevelt did not transform the United States with a series of executive orders; he did so with a series of laws.
Roosevelt was chief legislator as much as he was chief executive. “He wrote letters to committee chairmen or members of Congress to urge passage of his proposals, summoned the congressional leadership to White House conferences on legislation … and appeared in person before Congress,” Leuchtenburg wrote in an essay arguing that Roosevelt was “the first modern president”:
He made even the hitherto mundane business of bill signing an occasion for political theater; it was he who initiated the custom of giving a presidential pen to a congressional sponsor of legislation as a memento.
Or as the journalist Raymond Clapper wrote of Roosevelt at the end of his first term: “It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the president, although not a member of Congress, has become almost the equivalent of the prime minister of the British system, because he’s both executive and the guiding hand of the legislative branch.”
Laws are never fixed in place. But neither are they easily moved. It’s for this reason that any president who hopes to make a lasting mark on the United States must eventually turn to legislation. It is in lawmaking that presidents secure their legacy for the long haul.
This brings us back to Trump, whose desire to be a strongman has led him to rule like a strongman under the belief that he can impose an authoritarian system on the United States through sheer force of will.
His White House doesn’t just rely on executive orders; it revolves around them. They are the primary means through which the administration takes action (he has signed only five bills into law), under a radical assertion of executive power: the unitary executive taken to its most extreme form. And for Trump himself, they seem to define his vision of the presidency. He holds his ceremonies — always televised, of course — where subordinates present his orders as he gushes over them.
But while we have no choice but to recognize the significance of the president’s use of executive power, we also can’t believe the hype. Just because Trump desires to transform the American system of government doesn’t mean that he will. Autocratic intent does not translate automatically into autocratic success.
Remember, an executive order isn’t law. It is, as Philip J. Cooper explained in “By Order of the President: The Use and Abuse of Executive Direct Action,” a directive “issued by the president to officers of the executive branch, requiring them to take an action, stop a certain type of activity, alter policy, change management practices, or accept a delegation of authority under which they will henceforth be responsible for the implementation of law.” When devised carefully and within the scope of the president’s lawful authority, an executive order can have the force of law (provided the underlying statute was passed within the constitutional authority of Congress), but it does not carry any inherent authority. An executive order is not law simply because the president says it is.
Even though Trump seems to think he is issuing decrees, the truth is that his directives are provisional and subject to the judgment of the courts as well as future administrations. And if there is a major story to tell about Trump’s second term so far, it is the extent to which many of the president’s most sweeping executive actions have been tied up in the federal judiciary. The White House, while loath to admit it, has even had to back down in the face of hostile rulings.
The president might want to be a king, but despite the best efforts of his allies on the Supreme Court, the American system is not one of executive supremacy. Congress has all the power it needs to reverse the president’s orders and thwart his ambitions. Yes, the national legislature is held by the president’s party right now. But that won’t be a permanent state of affairs, especially given the president’s unpopularity.
MAGA propaganda notwithstanding, Trump is not some grand impresario skillfully playing American politics to his precise tune. He may want to bend the nation to his will, but he does not have the capacity to do the kind of work that would make this possible, as well as permanent — or as close to permanent as lawmaking allows. If Roosevelt’s legislative skill was a demonstration of his strength, then Trump’s reliance on executive orders is a sign of his weakness.
None of this is to discount the real damage that he has inflicted on the country. It is precisely because Republicans in Congress have abdicated their duty to the Constitution that Trump has the capacity to act in catastrophically disastrous ways.
But the overarching project of the second Trump administration — to put the United States on the path toward a consolidated authoritarian state — has stalled out. And it has done so because Trump lacks what Roosevelt had in spades: a commitment to governance and a deep understanding of the system in which he operated.
Roosevelt could orchestrate the transformative program of his 100 days because he tied his plan to American government as it existed, even as he worked to remake it. Trump has pursued his by treating the American government as he wants it to be. It is very difficult to close the gap between those two things, and it will become all the more difficult as the bottom falls out of Trump’s standing with the public.
Do not take this as succor. Do not think it means that the United States is in the clear. American democracy is still as fragile and as vulnerable as it has ever been, and Trump is still motivated to make his vision a reality. He may even lash out as it becomes clear that he has lost whatever initiative he had to begin with. This makes his first 100 days less a triumph for him than a warning to the rest of us. The unthinkable, an American dictatorship, is possible.
But Trump may not have the skills to effect the permanent transformation of his despotic dreams. Despite the chaos of the moment, it is possible that freedom-loving Americans have gotten the luck of the draw. Our most serious would-be tyrant is also among our least capable presidents, and he has surrounded himself with people as fundamentally flawed as he is.
On Inauguration Day, Donald Trump seemed to be on top of the world. One hundred days later, he’s all but a lame duck. He can rage and he can bluster — and he will do a lot more damage — but the fact of the matter is that he can be beaten. Now the task is to deliver him his defeat.
