When U.S. Congress recently approved a budget proposing nearly $880 billion in spending cuts to execute President Donald Trump’s agenda, which will almost certainly mean funding tax cuts for the wealthy, it didn’t just target unnecessary spending—it targeted our healthcare.

Republicans claim this is about combating fraud, but we know the truth. Let’s be clear: Slashing Medicaid by billions of dollars is a direct attack on critically needed health services, as it covers essential healthcare like doctors visits, hospital care, cancer screenings, reproductive healthcare, and more. These cuts threaten not only our access to care, but our fundamental rights to live and thrive.

Attacks on Medicaid will impact millions of Americans, but will disproportionately harm marginalized groups, including people with disabilities; the elderly; low-income families; and most severely Black women, girls, and gender-expansive people. Given the wide-ranging impact these cuts will have on people’s ability to control their health, bodies, lives, and reproduction, this isn’t just a healthcare issue—it’s a matter of reproductive justice.

Expanding Medicaid in more states, increasing access to doula care, and committing to researching racial discrimination in the healthcare system are just a few of the steps we must take.

Medicaid is a lifeline in addressing the deep inequities in healthcare coverage, and any cuts to this vital program threaten to unravel the limited progress we’ve fought so hard to make. Currently, Medicaid funds almost two-thirds of Black births, provides coverage for almost a third of Black women, and insures over half of Black girls. The fact of the matter is that Black women, girls, and gender-expansive people have the most to lose, and it’s undeniable that Medicaid cuts will only exacerbate the Black maternal mortality crisis our communities are already struggling to survive.

It is true that providing lifesaving healthcare to millions of people comes at a cost. But when politicians start looking for ways to trim the federal budget, Medicaid is often first on the chopping block. And yet, slashing Medicaid has proven politically impossible—because the truth is, 8 in 10 Americans overwhelmingly support it. People like being able to see a doctor when they need to, and they recognize Medicaid is essential in making that possible.

Despite its popularity, cuts to Medicaid may soon become reality because of decades of relentless attacks on reproductive justice by our elected leaders. From forced sterilization, to shackling women during birth, from the Hyde Amendment and to overturning the federal right to an abortion, this country has an insidious history of reproductive abuse—particularly against Black women. Now, attacks on Medicaid are just the latest tactic used by anti-choice politicians to strip us of our bodily autonomy and further deny us access to lifesaving reproductive healthcare.

Access to healthcare should never be determined by income or zip code, but these cuts force states to make up this deficit by either raising taxes or slashing education budgets, further burdening our communities. Rural Americans, particularly, will suffer as rural hospitals often rely heavily on Medicaid funding to stay afloat. These cuts will worsen maternal healthcare deserts, which have 1 in 6 Black babies born in areas with limited or no access to essential maternal care.

What’s worse, adding “work requirements,” which were narrowly avoided under Trump’s first administration, will also be used as a tool to remove people from Medicaid. Not because they are not working, but because new bureaucratic reporting requirements will create confusion, and ultimately cause people, including people with disabilities and the elderly, to be disqualified from coverage.

In reality, 92% of Medicaid beneficiaries under 65 are employed, debunking the harmful stereotype that people on Medicaid are not working. There is a long history of scapegoating poor people for receiving social services and adding increased burdens to show they “deserve” help. This is the same racist welfare reform narrative we have heard for decades—the false “welfare queen” myth, used to police Black women, incarcerate Black mothers, and justify cuts to social services.

Make no mistake, Black women will bear the brunt of these Medicaid cuts. Yes, our healthcare system, including Medicaid, has flaws, but slashing coverage for the most vulnerable Americans is not the solution. During a time when access to reproductive healthcare is under attack like never before and Black maternal mortality rates are still continuing to rise, we need policy solutions rooted in reproductive justice.

This means centering Black women, girls, and gender-expansive people who are disproportionately impacted by Medicaid cuts and the policies driving these changes. Expanding Medicaid in more states, increasing access to doula care, and committing to researching racial discrimination in the healthcare system are just a few of the steps we must take. Our lives—and our future—depend on it.

Today is Tax Day, and the brazen attack of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency against the federal government looms large over the Internal Revenue Service. The recent announcement that reductions in force are commencing at the IRS spells danger for taxpayer services, essential government workers, and the heart of our voluntary tax system.

As the president of the union representing IRS employees and the executive director of the largest tax fairness coalition, we each bring a different perspective to this unfolding catastrophe. But we share the same strong objection to DOGE’s drastic, ill-conceived and likely illegal attack on the nation’s tax collection agency.

The immediate victims of the DOGE attacks on the agency are the laid-off employees and those threatened with firing. Though Musk and President Donald Trump present their haphazard crusade as one waged against elites in the nation’s capital, the reality is that about 85% of federal employees work outside the Washington, D.C., area. As a result, neighbors across the country will lose their jobs, and communities everywhere will feel the economic impact of lost IRS positions and facilities.

If Musk tries to cut $10 billion from IRS enforcement spending, he will be risking $50-90 billion in lost revenue each year. That’s a strange strategy for someone who claims he wants to make the government more cost-efficient.

IRS employees are disproportionately female and members of racial or ethnic minorities, groups that have historically faced discrimination in hiring and advancement. Nearly 10% of IRS workers are military veterans. The National Treasury Employees Union is currently in court fighting these improper layoffs.

Next, taxpayers filing their annual returns and expecting prompt refunds will feel the impact. The reduction in IRS employees means fewer answered calls, longer wait times for help, and delayed refunds. The administration’s plan to shut over 100 taxpayer assistance centers across the country will leave most Americans unable to get in-person help with their tax issues.

As damaging as the cuts are to every federal agency, cuts to the IRS are different in one important respect: They could cost us a fortune in lost revenue.

Roughly 70% of the personnel cuts thus far have been in enforcement, which will make it easier to avoid detection for the millionaire and billionaire tax cheats who evade an estimated $150 billion in taxes every year. It is estimated that every dollar cut from enforcement costs $5 to $9 in revenue. So if Musk tries to cut $10 billion from IRS enforcement spending, he will be risking $50-90 billion in lost revenue each year. That’s a strange strategy for someone who claims he wants to make the government more cost-efficient.

However, it’s really not surprising that Musk, the richest individual in the world, is focusing on diminishing the agency’s ability to enforce the law. That’s what his allies in Congress have been trying to do ever since the agency received restored funding in 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act. That increased enforcement has focused exclusively on wealthy households and big corporations. Musk has a vested interest in hobbling IRS efforts to ensure the rich and big corporations pay what they owe.

The Inflation Reduction Act’s restored funding for the IRS yielded successes. As of last summer, the agency had collected over $1 billion just from 1,600 millionaires who owed but had failed to pay at least $250,000 each. It also informed Microsoft that it owed $29 billion in back taxes and had plans to increase audits on big companies (those worth more than $250 million), large partnerships (those with over $10 million in assets), and individuals with income over $10 million.

The Musk axe might also fall on the IRS Direct File program, the new system allowing taxpayers in about half the country to file for free directly with the government, bypassing expensive tax preparation firms. (The program is still in the pilot stage and will eventually be available to all taxpayers.) Musk announced recently he “deleted” the technical support department that helped create Direct File, but as of now the service itself is still operational. We don’t know how long that will last with Musk’s operatives roaming the halls of the IRS.

The restored funding for the IRS also helped it improve customer service. The average wait time on calls to the agency had dropped from 30 minutes to 3; over 50 in-person taxpayer assistance centers had been opened before the mass closures, and backlogs of unprocessed returns dropped.

All of this is at risk, of course, as DOGE prepares a “hackathon” that would allow our national tax data to be easily accessible to third parties. Compromising the tax data of millions of Americans in conjunction with efforts to stall attempts to modernize our tax system portend nothing less than disaster for the services we depend on.

Because the IRS brings in the revenue that funds the rest of the government, Musk’s gang is striking at the heart of the federal government’s ability to fund healthcare for seniors, nutrition for children, and other needs of the American people. The DOGE attack on the IRS is also an attack on economic justice and equality. Taxes on ultra-high income and extreme wealth help to narrow the nation’s destabilizing economic gaps. It’s hard not to conclude that those very injuries—not “waste, fraud and abuse”—are the real aim of DOGE’s wayward campaign.

Yesterday was the day democracy in our nation officially died.

We no longer live in the America we grew up in: “The land of the free and the home of the brave.” The country the rest of the world looked up to and depended on. The country that claimed to follow the rule of law, and valued compassion and the protection of its most vulnerable people.

We are now in the midst of a outright coup against the Constitution, against the United States, and against our founding ideals: Donald Trump proclaimed it yesterday when he openly defied the Supreme Court and our founding documents with a sneer, and his neofascist sycophants chuckled and giggled in the Oval Office.

When Marco Rubio claimed that arresting and deporting a man legally living in the US was “foreign policy” that can’t be overseen by the Supreme Court and then congratulated himself on his cleverness.

Trump’s response to the ruling was a resounding, “Fuck you” to our courts, our Constitution, and our laws.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a legal U.S. resident who committed no crime, is now held in El Salvador’s most notorious concentration camp, where as many as 75 men are packed into cells designed for a fraction of that number.

Prisoners are not allowed outside — not for fresh air, not for exercise — and the fluorescent lights never go off. Food is minimal: plain rice or beans twice a day, with water. There is no possibility of appeal for him or the other 75,000 people El Salvadoran dictator Bukele has arrested and imprisoned without due process.

This father of three US citizens, this husband of a US citizen, who had been in the US with the permission of our government, is today packed in with savage gang members — literally murderers and rapists — in one of the most infamous and violent prisons in the world.

He has is no access to legal counsel, no information about charges or release, and medical care is often denied except in extreme emergencies. Days blur into nights as men lie on concrete floors or sit in silence, many carving repetitive paths along the walls to stay sane.

Kilmar may be doing the same, clinging to routine, to hope, to anything that reminds him he once belonged to a country that promised justice.

But then came the most lawless president in the history of America, who yesterday all but declared that we are no longer a constitutional democratic republic as long as he is president.

Article I, Section 9 of the United States’ Constitution is unambiguous about habeas corpus, Latin for “produce the body,” which means no person can be imprisoned without first knowing the charges against them, being able to challenge those charges, and having a court of law decide their fate.

This right embraced by our Founders and written into our Constitution literally dates back to the year 1215 when King John signed the Magna Carta at Runnymede, as Article I Section 9 clearly states:

“The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

(Trump is falsely and cynically claiming in an illegal Executive Order that the government of Venezuela has sent gang members to “invade” the US. Bizarrely, even if a court were to uphold this “invasion” gimmick, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is neither a gang member nor even a Venezuelan; he’s a citizen of El Salvador who’s lived in the US since he was 16, is a union worker and beloved member of his community, and was here legally.)

Fifth Amendment to the Constitution:

“No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury… nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…”

Sixth Amendment to the Constitution:

“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.”

Seventh Amendment to the Constitution:

“[T]he right of trial by jury shall be preserved…”

Eighth Amendment to the Constitution:

“Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

Please point out to me where, in our Constitution, it says that the President of the United States or the Secretary of State can simply order a “person” (see 5th Amendment; nowhere does the word “citizen” appear) to be arrested and transported to a foreign hellhole concentration camp without a warrant, without an attorney, without a trial, and without even advance notice that might give him a chance to protest his innocence.

An unanimous Supreme Court ruled last week that our Constitution, as quoted above, says exactly what it means and Trump must “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is not a criminal and has been denied all of the due process provisions detailed above in our Constitution and its amendments.

Justice Sotomayor was explicit:

“The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene. …
“[T]he proper remedy is to provide Abrego Garcia with all the process to which he would have been entitled had he not been unlawfully removed to El Salvador. That means the Government must comply with its obligation to provide Abrego Garcia with ‘due process of law,’ including notice and an opportunity to be heard…
“It must also comply with its obligations under the Convention Against Torture.”

Trump’s response to the ruling was a resounding, “Fuck you” to our courts, our Constitution, and our laws. And to the millions of American citizens who are frightened by his systematic dismantling of our legal system.

It was an open assertion by Trump that he can do anything he wants, no matter how unlawful or unconstitutional, without fear of consequences. That he has successfully staged a coup against the government of the United States and her laws and has every intention of running this country like Russia or Hungary.

And not only that, he told El Salvador’s authoritarian president Bukele that the people he next wants to send to his slave labor camp are American citizens like you and me:

“Home grown criminals. Home growns are next. You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough.”

Which brings us to a frightening echo of Jefferson’s objections to the “tyranny” of King George II, as outlined in the Declaration of Independence he authored and was signed on July 4, 1776:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

“He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. …

“He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers. …

“He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone…

“He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws…

“For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

“For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences: …

“For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments: …

“In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” (emphasis added)

If Trump and his ass-kissing lackeys aren’t stopped by public outrage, our courts, and our Constitution and laws, then America has ceased to be a functioning republic and the future is unknowable but certainly grim.

If Trump and his ass-kissing lackeys aren’t stopped by public outrage, our courts, and our Constitution and laws, then America has ceased to be a functioning republic and the future is unknowable but certainly grim.

That would be, the Declaration says, the very definition of tyranny. As Senator Chris Murphy just posted to Bluesky:

“You may not think this case matters to you. But Abrego Garcia was legally in the U.S., just like all the rest of us. His status as an immigrant doesn't matter as a matter of law. If Trump can lock up or remove ANYONE — no matter what the courts say — we are all at grave risk.”

Trump should be impeached for his defiance of the Supreme Court and our Constitution. For spitting in the face of our Founders and every American veteran who has ever fought (or died) for this country and it’s ideals. For using foreign concentration camps.

Tragically, however, Republicans in Congress and across the country are now fully in on the coup. They have chosen an egomaniacal, self-centered narcissist and his billionaire friends over their integrity, country, and their oath of office.

Show up in the streets this coming Saturday and reach out to your elected representatives to demand a return to the rule of law.

The number for Congress is 202-224-3121, at least for the moment; like with Social Security, Trump may cut that phone number off any day now, too.

Each year for Tax Day, my colleagues and I at the Institute for Policy Studies release a tax receipt so you can learn where your taxes are actually going.

This year, you may be more worried about the price of eggs than your tax dollars. But with President Donald Trump now urging a $1 trillion military budget, it’s worth thinking about what we’re already spending.

Last year, the average taxpayer paid $3,707 for weapons and wars. That’s the equivalent of 628 dozen eggs. So if you thought buying a dozen or two a week for your family was taxing, well, that’s just the beginning.

Taxpayers are directly subsidizing the world’s wealthiest man even as he cuts programs for the poorest people on Earth.

Yet the president and his allies in Congress are planning on spending more for war and mass deportations—and less on just about everything else.

And it is a war budget, make no mistake. President Trump has escalated bombing in Yemen and doubled down on providing weapons to Israel, raising the chances of a new, full-blown Middle East war.

The president is also flirting with war with China, both through his trade war but also more directly. Much of the Pentagon’s future spending is in preparation for a war with China.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk and DOGE are supposed to save money. But look at what they’re cutting: The average taxpayer paid just $39 for USAID last year, the international aid program that DOGE eliminated. For the cost of just six dozen eggs per taxpayer, that saved millions of lives—including millions of children who are now at risk.

DOGE and the president have fired staff and cut programs at the National Institutes of Health that conduct lifesaving cancer research. To discover those cures, the average taxpayer paid $149 in 2024—about 25 dozen eggs. Not a bad investment to help treat cancer.

The president also eliminated a program for museum and library funding for which the average taxpayer paid just $1.43 in 2024—about three eggs. And the president is dismantling an agency called the Interagency Council on Homelessness that coordinates services to help end homelessness, for which the average taxpayer paid just one penny in 2024.

These are just average figures, so those with lower incomes are paying far less for these things. Either way, these aren’t the kinds of cuts you’d make if you were really looking to get the best bang for your buck.

Instead, you might start with weapons contractors. In 2024, the average taxpayer paid $1,430 for Pentagon contractors—the equivalent of 242 dozen eggs.

One of those contractors is SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company. Indeed, SpaceX is benefiting from new Pentagon contracts while Musk takes his chainsaw to cancer research and homeless services. Taxpayers are directly subsidizing the world’s wealthiest man even as he cuts programs for the poorest people on Earth.

Naturally, a $1 trillion Pentagon budget will open the floodgates for more money for contractors, who already get over half the Pentagon budget each year. Cutting that planned $1 trillion by 10% could pay to avert GOP plans to cut $1 trillion from Medicaid and food stamps over the next 10 years.

Or you could skip the president’s plans for mass deportations and detentions of immigrants. At $98 for the average taxpayer in 2024, this amount is set to balloon as Congress prepares billions in new funding for the president’s deportations of students, fathers, mothers, and even a U.S. citizen child seeking emergency cancer treatment.

The U.S. needs humane and commonsense immigration law, not an indiscriminate dragnet that scapegoats even legal residents for problems they had no role in creating. We could put that money back into threatened services like the NIH, local libraries, and ending homelessness—or all of the above, given how comparatively cheap those things are.

With many Americans struggling to afford the price of eggs, healthcare, and housing, the government can and should help with those real problems instead of creating new ones with new wars and new mass deportation plans.

Today our 2024 taxes are due. You likely had most of your federal taxes deducted from your paychecks throughout the year. This is not true, however, for mega-millionaires and billionaires, some of whom are practically running our government right now. They receive much of their income in the form of appreciation on the stocks of the corporations they run. And the companies themselves use loopholes and deductions to reduce their tax bill, sometimes down to zero.

Take Tesla (please!).

The company, valued at over $1 trillion, paid no federal income tax on its 2024 income of $2.3 billion. And its CEO, Elon Musk, who had hoarded some $342 billion in wealth by earlier this year, avoids paying taxes on most of his income until he chooses to “realize” capital gains by selling his enormously appreciated stock.

Because of our overall low taxes, the U.S. does not collect as much revenue as other comparable nations. This means you get a lot less by being an American citizen than you get by being a French, German or Swedish citizen. Less health care, less child care, less access to affordable college.

These low taxes are part of the reason that America experiences supercharged inequality. While other countries do more to boost people at the bottom and enable upward mobility for the middle class, in the U.S. low taxes combined with an anti-worker, anti-consumer, anti-environment regulatory regime means that here the rich get richer and the rest of us stagnate.

A regime of relatively robust taxation and reasonable regulation delivered a more educated, healthier, more prosperous America.

Further, the extreme wealth of the billionaire class often lets them buy the elected officials and the policies they want—usually policies that add further to their riches in a vicious cycle that leaves most of us worse off. President Trump has given Musk the power to fire tens of thousands of workers, eliminate funding for hospitals and universities around the country, and destroy Congressionally-created agencies that carry out vital public functions.

Shutting down special tax breaks for very wealthy individuals and profitable corporations could go a long way to addressing these problems. But Trump and his allies in Congress are moving dramatically in the opposite direction. While they plan to double down on tax cuts that mainly benefit the wealthy, they are also allowing the most destructive billionaire-driven attack we’ve ever seen on the policies that keep us healthy and safe.

Musk is wielding a chainsaw against public services using his so-called DOGE (“Department of Government Efficiency” though it’s not a government agency and will likely undermine efficiency). DOGE’s cuts to services could decimate education, health, and income support. And its cuts to public oversight will enable corporations to more easily exploit us as workers, consumers, and community members.

For example, Trump and Musk are trying to eliminate the Department of Education and slash school budgets in ways that will particularly harm children with disabilities, students in disadvantaged rural and urban schools, and college access for working class kids.

They’ve fired 10,000 staff members at the Department of Health and Human Services, including those who ensure vaccine distribution, drug safety, and health care access. They’ve haphazardly slashed funding nationwide for labs conducting medical research on cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, maternal health, and more.

They tried to get rid of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an agency which has recovered more than $21 billion for consumers from companies that engage in unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices. And they even slashed the Federal Emergency Management Association which helps communities facing floods, hurricanes, and wildfires, leaving communities unprotected.

Their reasons are three-fold, all bad for regular people:

• Cutting public services can free policymakers to pass expensive tax cuts for the wealthiest people and corporations.
• It can also allow privatization of services so Musk and others can demand payment to provide them.
• Finally by hobbling regulations and firing public employees that safeguard factories, inspect meat, and test drugs, Musk hopes to juice corporate profits as CEOs are permitted to shed factory safety equipment, ignore anti-pollution rules, and violate labor laws.

This doesn’t even begin to touch on the crazy on-again, off-again tariffs that are roiling our financial markets and industrial supply chains.

Policymakers of the 20th century created regulations, safety nets, and labor standards that made Americans more educated, more prosperous, and healthier. They didn’t work perfectly of course. But education, income, and health improved dramatically over this span.

Educational investments boosted high school attainment rates for adults from a mere 10 percent in 1910 to 90 percent by 2017. With more education and unionization, inflation-adjusted per capita income went from $18,460 in 1967 to $46,193 by 2023. Research and vaccination nearly eradicated polio, smallpox, and measles. And safety standards meant the number of workers killed on the job plummeted from 15.8 to 1.9 per 100,000 between 1928 (when tracking began) and 1998. The big picture: life expectancy at birth nearly doubled (from 46.6 years to 74.7 years) for white men and more than doubled (from 32.5 years to 68.2 years) for Black men between 1900 and the year 2000.

In other words, a regime of relatively robust taxation and reasonable regulation delivered a more educated, healthier, more prosperous America. In 2025, it seems, Trump and those he enables are trying to make American impoverished again by rolling back the 20th century and its accomplishments.

Friends,

As tens of millions of Americans hussle to pay their taxes, President Donald Trump has put the entire global economy into chaos. 401(k)s are tanking, savings are shrinking, treasury bonds are losing value, supply chains are convulsing.

Even America’s oligarchs are petrified. They contributed millions to Trump’s inauguration. Many invested heavily in his campaign. They lavished praise on the new president and have supported his every move—in order to benefit from his promised big tax cut.

But the chaos he’s unleashed on the world economy is causing many of them to go public with their worries.

“Obviously,” Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, said in a conference call with reporters, “the China stuff is significant. We don’t know the full effect.”

But we do know that global investors are fleeing Treasury bonds, which had been the safest place to put money in the world. That may not be the full effect, but it’s a huge and frightening one.

By Friday morning, Dimon was warning that the economy faced “considerable turbulence” from the tariffs, while echoing Trump’s assertion that the immediate turmoil was nothing to worry about. “I really almost don’t care fundamentally about what the economy does in the next two quarters,” Dimon said. “That isn’t that important. We’ll get through that. We’ve had recessions before and all of that.”

Oops. The word “recession” coming out of the mouth of the CEO of the largest bank in the United States? That itself is extraordinarily worrying.

Notably, JPMorgan has added nearly half a billion dollars to its financial cushion, preparing for losses from customers who won’t be able to pay credit card debts and loans.

Other oligarchs are repeating the R word.

In a Friday interview on CNBC, BlackRock’s chief executive, Laurence D. Fink, warned that the American economy was “very close—if not in—a recession now.” Fink admitted that in its push for tariffs, the United States had become “the global destabilizer” and that the trade war “went beyond anything I could have imagined in my 49 years in finance.”

Yesterday, Dan Ives, an analyst for Wedbush Securities, told investors that “the mass confusion created by this constant news flow out of the White House is dizzying for the industry and investors and creating massive uncertainty and chaos for companies trying to plan their supply chain, inventory, and demand.”

Many oligarchs continue to kiss Trump’s derriere while at the same time trying to signal to major investors that they’re sane. It’s tricky. “A willingness to adjust a strategy based on new facts and data is a sign of the strength of a leader,” Bill Ackman, the chief executive of the hedge fund Pershing Square, pirouetted on social media yesterday. “It is not an indication of weakness.”

No. It’s an indication of insanity.

“Sentiment has obviously deteriorated,” Robin Vince, chief executive of BNY, one of the world’s largest banks, said in an interview. “Time is not our friend.”

When they speak in the passive tense like this, you know they’re pulling their punches.

None dare come right out and say it: Trump is f*cking out of his mind and crashing the entire world economy. “It’s not smart to criticize the president,” said Robert K. Steel, a veteran Wall Street executive and top Treasury Department official under President George W. Bush.

Not smart because Trump has too many ways to punish them.

Last month, the Trump Organization sued the giant financial services company Capital One for shutting the organization’s accounts after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

The oligarchs know Trump has many ways to reward them, too.

On Friday, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, got a reprieve from Trump’s tariffs on China, which would have just about killed Apple’s iPhone profits. (The exclusions apply to smartphones and other electronics.)

Cleverly, Cook, and Apple had announced last Monday that, as a result of a conversation between Cook and Trump, Apple would be investing more than $500 billion in the United States over the next four years and creating thousands of jobs, in what looked like “a bet on America.”

It was BS. The $500 billion figure was simply what Apple had already planned, including everything from Apple’s day-to-day activities with thousands of suppliers in all 50 states to the operation of its domestic data centers, as well as its investments in Apple TV+ and other projects already manufactured in the country.

The announcement mentioned a new advanced manufacturing plant in Houston to produce servers that support Apple’s AI, but the plant is owned by Foxconn, which is doing the investing. (Apple has perfected the art of outsourcing capital expenditures to its partners without risking its own money.)

But yesterday, Trump backtracked even on the electronics reprieve, calling it “temporary.” China, meanwhile, put a stop to shipments of rare earth materials critical to semiconductors and much of our military technology.

Where and how will this chaos end? The oligarch’s main line in to Trump is through Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who apparently talked Trump down from the worst of his tariff craziness last week.

But Bessent himself is part of the chaos. He and others inside the White House are all saying radically different things. No one is in charge. Some, like Elon Musk and trade adviser Peter Navarro, are openly taking potshots at each other.

Bessent, a member of the billionaires club, doesn’t even get what this economic chaos is doing to average Americans. Last weekend, he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that people who want to retire now aren’t paying attention to the stock market: “They don’t look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what’s happening.”

Hello?

The oligarchs won’t tell Trump how much chaos he’s unleashed, and they don’t even know how the chaos is affecting average people. The oligarchy is almost as incompetent and out of touch as is Trump.

But average people comprise the real economy. They’re also taxpayers. And their worried discussions over their kitchen tables spell even worse trouble ahead for the economy—and far worse ahead for Trump and his Republican Party.

Friends,

As tens of millions of Americans hussle to pay their taxes, President Donald Trump has put the entire global economy into chaos. 401(k)s are tanking, savings are shrinking, treasury bonds are losing value, supply chains are convulsing.

Even America’s oligarchs are petrified. They contributed millions to Trump’s inauguration. Many invested heavily in his campaign. They lavished praise on the new president and have supported his every move—in order to benefit from his promised big tax cut.

But the chaos he’s unleashed on the world economy is causing many of them to go public with their worries.

“Obviously,” Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, said in a conference call with reporters, “the China stuff is significant. We don’t know the full effect.”

But we do know that global investors are fleeing Treasury bonds, which had been the safest place to put money in the world. That may not be the full effect, but it’s a huge and frightening one.

By Friday morning, Dimon was warning that the economy faced “considerable turbulence” from the tariffs, while echoing Trump’s assertion that the immediate turmoil was nothing to worry about. “I really almost don’t care fundamentally about what the economy does in the next two quarters,” Dimon said. “That isn’t that important. We’ll get through that. We’ve had recessions before and all of that.”

Oops. The word “recession” coming out of the mouth of the CEO of the largest bank in the United States? That itself is extraordinarily worrying.

Notably, JPMorgan has added nearly half a billion dollars to its financial cushion, preparing for losses from customers who won’t be able to pay credit card debts and loans.

Other oligarchs are repeating the R word.

In a Friday interview on CNBC, BlackRock’s chief executive, Laurence D. Fink, warned that the American economy was “very close—if not in—a recession now.” Fink admitted that in its push for tariffs, the United States had become “the global destabilizer” and that the trade war “went beyond anything I could have imagined in my 49 years in finance.”

Yesterday, Dan Ives, an analyst for Wedbush Securities, told investors that “the mass confusion created by this constant news flow out of the White House is dizzying for the industry and investors and creating massive uncertainty and chaos for companies trying to plan their supply chain, inventory, and demand.”

Many oligarchs continue to kiss Trump’s derriere while at the same time trying to signal to major investors that they’re sane. It’s tricky. “A willingness to adjust a strategy based on new facts and data is a sign of the strength of a leader,” Bill Ackman, the chief executive of the hedge fund Pershing Square, pirouetted on social media yesterday. “It is not an indication of weakness.”

No. It’s an indication of insanity.

“Sentiment has obviously deteriorated,” Robin Vince, chief executive of BNY, one of the world’s largest banks, said in an interview. “Time is not our friend.”

When they speak in the passive tense like this, you know they’re pulling their punches.

None dare come right out and say it: Trump is f*cking out of his mind and crashing the entire world economy. “It’s not smart to criticize the president,” said Robert K. Steel, a veteran Wall Street executive and top Treasury Department official under President George W. Bush.

Not smart because Trump has too many ways to punish them.

Last month, the Trump Organization sued the giant financial services company Capital One for shutting the organization’s accounts after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

The oligarchs know Trump has many ways to reward them, too.

On Friday, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, got a reprieve from Trump’s tariffs on China, which would have just about killed Apple’s iPhone profits. (The exclusions apply to smartphones and other electronics.)

Cleverly, Cook, and Apple had announced last Monday that, as a result of a conversation between Cook and Trump, Apple would be investing more than $500 billion in the United States over the next four years and creating thousands of jobs, in what looked like “a bet on America.”

It was BS. The $500 billion figure was simply what Apple had already planned, including everything from Apple’s day-to-day activities with thousands of suppliers in all 50 states to the operation of its domestic data centers, as well as its investments in Apple TV+ and other projects already manufactured in the country.

The announcement mentioned a new advanced manufacturing plant in Houston to produce servers that support Apple’s AI, but the plant is owned by Foxconn, which is doing the investing. (Apple has perfected the art of outsourcing capital expenditures to its partners without risking its own money.)

But yesterday, Trump backtracked even on the electronics reprieve, calling it “temporary.” China, meanwhile, put a stop to shipments of rare earth materials critical to semiconductors and much of our military technology.

Where and how will this chaos end? The oligarch’s main line in to Trump is through Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who apparently talked Trump down from the worst of his tariff craziness last week.

But Bessent himself is part of the chaos. He and others inside the White House are all saying radically different things. No one is in charge. Some, like Elon Musk and trade adviser Peter Navarro, are openly taking potshots at each other.

Bessent, a member of the billionaires club, doesn’t even get what this economic chaos is doing to average Americans. Last weekend, he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that people who want to retire now aren’t paying attention to the stock market: “They don’t look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what’s happening.”

Hello?

The oligarchs won’t tell Trump how much chaos he’s unleashed, and they don’t even know how the chaos is affecting average people. The oligarchy is almost as incompetent and out of touch as is Trump.

But average people comprise the real economy. They’re also taxpayers. And their worried discussions over their kitchen tables spell even worse trouble ahead for the economy—and far worse ahead for Trump and his Republican Party.

"I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody." —James Carville, 1993

Are you up in arms about the existential threat Trump poses to democracy—about how he stomps on the courts, usurps the congressional power of the purse, recklessly fires government workers, kisses up to autocrats, attacks free speech, and deports immigrants on trumped-up charges? Isn't Trump the new face of fascism?

Maybe, but the bond market vigilantes showed us what undemocratic power really looks like.

The bond market is gigantic, $140 trillion worth of interest-bearing IOUs. Every nation and every large institution holds government bonds. And the most sought-after bonds come from the U.S. Treasury, especially the 10-year Treasury note, which has for a long time been considered as risk-free as any investment can be.

While tens of millions of people and institutions own government bonds, the vigilantes, a subset of bond traders spread across the world, place bets on whether they expect bond prices will be going up or down. Their buying and selling guides market prices higher or lower. No one knows how many vigilantes it actually takes to move the market, but it’s not just a few people in a back room somewhere.

Wherever they are located, the vigilantes share an understanding—a profound group-think—of what makes for strong government bonds. If the large holders of capital in a particular country are threatened, the vigilantes demand a higher interest rate on existing bonds, thereby putting downward pressure on the value of those bonds. They are demanding a higher interest rate because they believe the bonds, due to what they believe are bad government policies, just got riskier. (By definition, if the interest rates go up, the price of existing bonds goes down.)

The decline in the value of these bonds immediately inflicts financial pain on millions upon millions of bondholders all over the world. The message is impossible to ignore.

These vigilantes are not anti-government populists. What they think harms the economy is usually the opposite of what the rest of us believe is good. They are anti-populists who care only about protecting the interests of capital and maximizing their own profits. They punish the bonds of countries that want to increase social spending, improve worker wages, and curtail corporate power, even if that means undermining the policies established by duly elected officials. Democracy is irrelevant, if not a hindrance, to bond vigilantes. They are the global enforcers of runaway inequality.

We saw their power at work in 2024, when the vigilantes turned Liz Truss into the shortest-serving prime minister ever of the United Kingdom. By planning tax cuts that would be paid for with government debt, hoping for a post-Brexit economic stimulus, the vigilantes believed she would hurt the value of British bonds and the British pound, so they started a run on both. Truss reversed course and then resigned after only 45 days in office.

Similarly, the vigilantes, in effect, told Trump this week he could not continue with his poorly thought-out Liberation Day tariffs. They demonstrated disapproval by crashing the value of U.S. government bonds, and evaporating, at least temporarily, trillions of dollars of wealth. Even Trump, who believes he can browbeat Congress and intimidate the courts, was forced to retreat.

The vigilantes said kneel, and he did.

"Their goal is to make as much money as possible and damned be any government policy that gets in the way. That may not be fascism, but it sure isn't democracy."

Let's consider what this means. An unelected group of people, who control the investments of millions of wealthy people and institutions, has apparent veto power over elected officials the world over. The vigilantes have become an unelected branch of every government on the planet, with the supreme power to control economic policy.

How did high finance amass so much power? Was this part of a plan? Or of a coup?

After the 1929 stock market crash, Franklin Roosevelt saw how the financial barons at the time manipulated markets and were unable to police themselves. Left to their own devices, Roosevelt was sure they would crash the economy again and extend the Depression indefinitely. Therefore, he determined, the power of finance had to be constrained.

The New Deal crafted a set of stiff regulations that prevented the large financial institutions of the time from running wild, including the Glass-Steagall Banking Act (1933), the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act (1934), the Chandler Bankruptcy Act of 1938, the Securities and Exchange Commission founding in 1934, the Investment Company Act (1940), along with a myriad of specific rules that greatly curtailed the power of Wall Street, like severe limitations on a company's ability to buy back its own shares of stock to manipulate its price.

The Bretton Woods Agreement (1944) further limited the amount of currency that could be transferred in and out of a given country. These regulations were so effective that for the next 25 years there were no financial crashes and, not coincidentally, Wall Street compensation was no higher than the wages of comparable personnel in the non-financial sector.

But when the Bretton Woods Agreement was dissolved in 1971, money flowed rapidly around the world. By the 1980s all caution was thrown to the wind, Wall Street's shackles were removed, and banks and traders once again ran wild with dangerous new financial maneuvers that finally crashed the economy in 2008. (Please see Wall Street's War on Workers.)

At that point, however, the toothpaste was out of the tube. Global bond markets, based mostly on growing U.S. government debt, had grown to mammoth proportions. The vigilantes had escaped the clutches of regulators and now ruled supreme over government bonds, and hence government policies.

As early as 1972, James Tobin, the Nobel laureate, understood that the deregulation of currency trades would lead financial market players to rapidly move money in and out of economies. These rapid and unconstrained capital flows would essentially exercise a veto over sovereign government policies intended to improve the well-being of its citizens at the expense of capital. Tobin recommended that governments "throw some sand in the wheels of our excessively efficient international money markets."

That sand became known as the Tobin tax, a small levy on every foreign exchange transaction. The only problem? It hasn't happened yet, and you can be sure that if it ever were enacted the bond vigilantes would stomp all over it.

Those vigilantes may have saved us this week from ill-conceived tariffs, but they are not on our side, nor do they care about democracy. Their goal is to make as much money as possible and damned be any government policy that gets in the way.

That may not be fascism, but it sure isn't democracy.

Most of us can remember at least a few troubling scenes from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984: the mandatory love demanded for the spectral dictator Big Brother; the malleability of facts at the Ministry of Truth; or the ruling party’s memorably grim slogans, “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery.” But for me, the most disturbing image of all—and I first read the book in high school—was the “Two Minutes Hate,” aroused among the public by threatening images on giant video screens.

Within just 30 seconds, Orwell wrote, “A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.” As those moments of hate continued, what appeared was “the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen, so that some of the people in the front row actually flinched out of their seats.”

Finally, as “row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces… swam up to the screen” and brought those two minutes of Hate to their terrifying climax, the face of Big Brother appeared “full of power and mysterious calm,” prompting spectators to shout, “My Saviour!,” and to break into “a deep, slow, rhythmical chant of ‘B-B!… B-B!’—over and over.”

In its totality, Trump’s vision is of a continental Fortress America, formed by annexing the northern lands of Canada and Greenland, while sealing off Mexico for ethnic reasons as a separate but subordinate state.

For, as Orwell explained, those people of Oceania were “at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia.” Officially, “Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia,” which “represented absolute evil.” Yet through some quirk of memory, the novel’s hero Winston “well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia.”

That was, in some fashion, Orwell’s ultimate horror: a world divided into three great continental blocs, with humanity held in thrall to omnipotent leaders like Big Brother through endless wars against an ever-changing enemy. Even though he published1984 nearly 80 years ago in 1948, just two years before he died, more than three quarters of a century later, in the age of U.S. President Donald Trump, his fictional fantasy is fast becoming an unsettling simulacrum of our current geopolitical reality and that couldn’t be eerier (at least to me).

A Tricontinental Strategy

Amid a torrent of confusing, often contradictory foreign policy pronouncements pouring forth almost daily from the Trump White House, the overall design of his de facto geopolitical strategy has taken shape with surprising speed. Instead of maintaining mutual-security alliances like NATO, President Trump seems to prefer a globe divided into three major regional blocs, each headed by an empowered leader like himself—with Russia dominating its European periphery, China paramount in Asia, and the United States controlling, in a version of fortress America, all of North America (including, of course, the Panama Canal). Reflecting what his defense secretary called a “loathing of European freeloading” and his administration’s visceral disdain for the European Union, Trump is pursuing that tricontinental strategy at the expense of the traditional trans-Atlantic alliance, embodied by NATO, that has been the foundation for American foreign policy since the start of the Cold War.

Trump’s desire for ultimate continental hegemony lends a certain geopolitical logic to his otherwise seemingly off-the-wall, quixotic overtures to claim Greenland as part of the United States, reclaim the Panama Canal, and make Canada “the 51st state.” On his sixth day in office, President Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, “I think Greenland will be worked out with us. I think we’re going to have it.” He then added, “I don’t know really what claim Denmark has to it. But it would be a very unfriendly act if they didn’t allow that to happen because it’s for protection of the free world.” After Vice President JD Vance made a flying visit to a remote U.S. military base in Greenland and claimed its people “ultimately will partner with the United States,” Trump insisted that he would never take military force “off the table” when it came to claiming the largest island on this planet.

Turning to his northern neighbor, Trump has repeatedly insisted that U.S. statehood would mean “the people of Canada would pay a much lower tax…They would have no military problems.” During his first weeks in office, he imposed a 25% duty on all imports from Canada and Mexico, which was quickly followed by a blizzard of similar tariffs that instantly sparked multiple trade wars with once-close allies. In response, Justin Trudeau, then Canada’s prime minister, whom Trump was already referring to as “governor” (as in the head of that 51st state), charged in an emotional speech that the American president wants “to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy, because that’ll make it easier to annex us.”

In his inaugural address last January, President Trump also complained that “the Panama Canal… has foolishly been given to the country of Panama after the United States… spent more money than ever spent on a project before and lost 38,000 lives in the building of the Panama Canal.” He added that “we have been treated very badly from this foolish gift that should have never been made, and Panama’s promise to us has been broken… And above all, China is operating the Panama Canal. And we didn’t give it to China.” To a burst of applause, he insisted, “We gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.” No surprise then that, on his very first trip as secretary of state, Marco Rubio stormed into Panama City where he pressured its president, José Raúl Mulino, to placate Trump by withdrawing from Beijing’s global Belt and Road Initiative.

In its totality, Trump’s vision is of a continental Fortress America, formed by annexing the northern lands of Canada and Greenland, while sealing off Mexico for ethnic reasons as a separate but subordinate state. Then, sweeping aside what had long been a U.S. reliance on global multilateral defense pacts and, with the country’s Arctic approaches under its control, the administration would draw a defensive frontier around Greenland and through the North Atlantic Ocean, secure the Panama Canal as a southern bastion, and maintain military control over the entire Pacific Ocean. Every major component of such a strategy would, of course, be laden with the potential for conflict, particularly the administration’s plans for the Pacific, where the U.S. faces a continuing challenge from China.

Demolishing a World Order

Following his second inauguration in January 2025, President Trump has pursued this distinctive tricontinental strategy by working with remarkable speed to demolish the institutional pillars of the “rules-based international order” the U.S. had supported and tried to advance since the end of World War II. Standing in the Rose Garden on his April 2 “liberation day,” Trump proclaimed a roster of tariffs reaching as high as 49% that, said Foreign Policy magazine, “will shatter the world economy” the U.S. has built since 1945, while the respected Economist observed that it “heralds America’s total abandonment of the world trading order.” After calling the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) “corrupt” and falsely claiming that he had “stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas,” Trump abolished just about all the global humanitarian initiatives of that agency. He cut 5,800 programs that provided food rations for a million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, malaria prevention for 53 million people globally, and polio immunization for millions of children worldwide, among all too many other things. In a further flurry of executive orders, he also shut down the global broadcaster Voice of America, spuriously claiming that it was “radical” (though a judge has, for now, stopped that shutdown process), withdrew from the World Health Organization (WHO), and quit the Paris climate accords for a second time. Apart from the harm inflicted on poor communities across three continents, the closure of most USAID programs has crippled the key instrument of America’s “soft power,” ceding China the role as prime development partner in at least 40 countries worldwide.

In junking that Paris climate agreement, Trump has ensured that the U.S. would abdicate any leadership role when it comes to the most consequential issue facing the international community, climate change and the potential devastation of the planet. In the process, he has left a void that China may readily fill by offering stable world climate leadership in contrast to the “aggressive unilateralism” of Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” second term.

With its military alliances compromised and its trade relations roiled by tariff wars, Washington’s international influence will, in all probability, be significantly reduced (or worse) by the end of Trump’s second term in 2029.

Reflecting his aversion to multilateral alliances, Trump’s first major foreign policy initiative was a unilateral attempt to negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war. On February 12, he launched peace talks through what he called a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, agreeing that “our respective teams start negotiations immediately.” By month’s end, tensions from that tilt toward Moscow had culminated in a televised Oval Office meeting in which Trump berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, saying, “You’re either going to make a deal or we’re out, and if we’re out, you’ll fight it out. I don’t think it’s going to be pretty.”

That unilateral approach not only weakened Ukraine’s ability to defend itself, but also disregarded and even degraded NATO, which had, for the past three years, expanded its membership and military capacity by supporting Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion. Recoiling from the “initial shock” of that utterly unprecedented breach, Europeans quickly appropriated $160 billion to begin reinforcing their own arms industry in collaboration with both Canada (not eager to become the 51st state) and Ukraine, thereby aiming in the future to reduce their dependence on American weaponry. If his administration does not formally withdraw from NATO, Trump’s ongoing hostility, particularly toward its crucial mutual-defense clause, may yet serve to weaken if not eviscerate the alliance—even as, recently, Trump has also gotten “very angry” and “pissed off” at Russian President Vladimir Putin for not responding effusively enough to his gestures. Consider that an indication that American relations across much of Eurasia could soon prove all too unpredictably chaotic.

Fighting for the Pacific Penumbra

In the Asia-Pacific region, Trump’s new global strategy is already straining longstanding U.S. alliances. At the start of his second term, the American presence there rested on three sets of mutual-defense pacts: the AUKUS entente with Australia and Britain, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (with Australia, India, and Japan), and a chain of bilateral defense agreements stretching along the Pacific littoral from Japan to the Philippines. However, Trump’s disdain for military alliances, his penchant for abusing allies, and his imposition of ever more punitive tariffs on the exports of all too many of those allies will undoubtedly only weaken such ties and so American power in the region.

Although his first administration famously waged a trade war with Beijing, Trump’s attitude toward the island of Taiwan has been ambiguous. “I think Taiwan should pay us for defense,” he said last June during the presidential campaign, adding, “You know, we’re no different than an insurance company.” Once in office, however, his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, issued an interim strategic guidance stating that “denial of a Chinese fait accompli seizure of Taiwan… is the department’s sole pacing scenario,” requiring that the U.S. shift some of its forces from Europe to Asia. In similar signs of a commitment to that island, the administration has noisily raised tariffs and technology controls on China, while quietly releasing $870 million in military aid for Taiwan. Should Beijing indeed attack Taiwan outright or, as appears more probable in the future, impose a crippling economic blockade on the island, Trump could find himself faced with a difficult choice between a strategic retreat or a devastating war with China.

However it might happen, the loss of that island would break the U.S. position along the Pacific littoral, possibly pushing its naval forces back to a “second island chain” running from Japan to Guam, a major blow to America’s geopolitical position in the region. In short, even within Trump’s tricontinental strategy, the Western Pacific will remain at best a contested terrain between Beijing and Washington, fraught with the possibility of armed conflict in that continuing great-power rivalry, and war will remain a grim possibility.

A Residue of Ruin

With little chance of success, Trump’s attempt at a grand Fortress America strategy will likely leave a residue of ruin—corroding American global power, compromising the current world order, and harming countless millions worldwide who once benefitted from this country’s humanitarian aid. His attempt at consolidating control over North America has already encountered determined resistance in Ottawa, which responded to him with a strong bid to join Europe’s accelerated development of its own defense industries.

While the Trump administration’s aversion to formal alliances and its imposition of protective tariffs will likely weaken diplomatic ties to traditional allies in Asia and Europe, both China and Russia are likely to gain greater influence in their respective regions. From a strategic perspective, this start of a staged U.S. retreat from its military bastions at the antipodes of Eurasia in Western Europe and eastern Asia will weaken its longstanding influence over that vast landmass, which remains the epicenter of geopolitical power globally. With its military alliances compromised and its trade relations roiled by tariff wars, Washington’s international influence will, in all probability, be significantly reduced (or worse) by the end of Trump’s second term in 2029.

In the meantime, as he takes Americans on his own version of a succession of Two Minute Hates—of freeloading Europeans, prevaricating Panamanians, vile Venezuelans, Black South Africans, corrupt humanitarians, illegal immigrants, and lazy Federal workers—count on one thing: he’s leading us on a path eerily reminiscent of 1984. Unless, of course, like Orwell’s hero Winston, all too many of us somehow come to love Big Brother and so set aside our musty old Constitution and take Donald Trump’s often-repeated hints to elect him to a third term on a planet plunging headlong into a tempest of armed conflict, commercial chaos, and climate change.

Republican leaders in Congress have been working feverishly over recent days to renew the rich people-friendly 2017 Trump tax cuts set to expire at this year’s end. Both the House and Senate have now passed bills that do that renewing—and also add in some assorted new goodies.

All that remains before this latest giveaway to grand fortune becomes law: a bit of dickering between House and Senate GOP leaders over the tax cut’s particulars and then President Donald Trump’s John Henry on whatever legislation that dickering ends up producing.

Trump can barely wait for the signing ceremony. But he’s also pushing for much more than an extension—and expansion—of those 2017 tax cuts. His ultimate goal: erasing taxes on income from the entire federal tax code.

Some 48% of Americans say they worry “a great deal” about how “income and wealth are distributed,” a remarkably high share of the public given how seldom our media and politics directly address that distribution.

“You know,” Trump told a press conference this past Tuesday, “our country was the strongest, believe it or not, from 1870 to 1913. You know why? It was all tariff based. We had no income tax.”

Over those years, federal revenue most certainly did come mostly from tariffs. And those tariffs did work wonders—for the nation’s rich. Our original Gilded Age wealthy frolicked in an America where the rich and their corporations could essentially operate however they pleased. They could pay their workers precious little and cavalierly short-change consumers at every opportunity.

In that same America, the federal government did precious little to protect average Americans from greed and grasping—and even less to make their lives more economically secure.

Changing that profoundly unequal state of affairs took decades of organizing on the part of workers, farmers, and middle-class reformers. By 1913, that organizing had paid off. The ratification of the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that year gave Congress the authority to levy income taxes. By the end of World War I, America’s wealthy faced a 79% levy on their top tax-bracket income.

But the nation’s rich would come roaring back in the Roaring Twenties. America’s wealthiest flexed their political muscles enough to get that top tax rate down to 25%. They would go on to party hardy throughout that decade, right up until the 1929 stock market crash. The 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that Trump so likes to trumpet helped turn that crash into the Great Depression.

Amid that unprecedented downturn, America’s grassroots would rise up and break the plutocratic lockgrip on public policy. Working people would gain collective bargaining rights. Seniors would gain Social Security. The super rich would gasp as federal tax rates on their top-bracket income jumped to over 90%.

The end result? By the mid-1950s, over half America’s households had money left over after meeting their most basic living expenses. No modern nation had ever before reached that status.

That share-the-wealth momentum, unfortunately, would soon begin ebbing. Since the late 1970s, as the Economic Policy Institute has detailed, only Americans of substantial means have been sharing in Corporate America’s economic bounty.

How can we change this top-heavy state of affairs? Last week, at an unusual conference in Washington, D.C., activists highlighted a detailed agenda for making America start working for all Americans, not just the wealthiest among us. What made this confab so unusual? The people who put it together all just happen to rate as wealthy themselves.

The sponsor of this How To Beat the Broligarchs gathering: Patriotic Millionaires, the national group that’s been organizing Americans of means to “tax the rich, pay the people, and spread the power” since 2010. This past week’s broligarch-bashing conference gave these millionaires—and activists and scholars equally interested in creating a more equal United States—a vibrant forum for sharing information, insights, and, most importantly, an ambitious gameplan for ending rule by the rich.

“Our economy should be judged on how well it takes care of working people,” as Patriotic Millionaires founder Erica Payne notes, “not on how many billionaires it mints in a calendar day.”

To take better care of working people, the new Patriotic Millionaires economic plan, entitled America 250: The Money Agenda, proposes a “Cost of Living Tax Cut Act” that would exempt all annual income up to $41,600—the current cost of living for the typical American adult—from federal income tax.

Another Patriotic Millionaires-proposed piece of legislation, the “Cost of Living Wage Act,” would nearly triple the federal minimum wage, from $7.25 an hour to $20, a rate that would adjust every year to rising prices.

To help trim our richest down to something resembling democratic size—and offset the cost of exempting low incomes from income tax—the Patriotic Millionaires plan would also start subjecting millionaires to a surtax on their taxes due.

Another part of the plan would tax the capital gains millionaires pocket—their profits from buying and selling stocks and other assets—at the same rate as ordinary earned income. Still another plan section would essentially prevent the mostly tax-free intergenerational transfer of assets from the super rich to their super fortunate offspring.

What makes that prevention so important? Under current law, point out Patriotic Millionaires analyst Bob Lord and law professors Brian Galle and David Gamage in a new research paper, between 80 and 90% of the wealth “that rich families have set aside for their heirs will likely never be subject” to the over-a-century-old federal estate tax.

The first phase of the “Anti-Oligarchy Act” the Patriotic Millionaires plan is proposing would have all inheritances over $1 million taxed as ordinary income. This phase would also “impose a progressive tax on large sums of trust-held wealth to limit the accumulation of dynastic wealth.”

The second phase would seek to impose “a tax on the wealth of the richest Americans sufficient to reduce their wealth to a level in harmony with the ideals of democracy, amending the United States Constitution if necessary.”

The pollsters at Gallup have just asked Americans if they worry “a great deal”—or much less—about 16 different current-day concerns. Some 48% of Americans say they worry “a great deal” about how “income and wealth are distributed,” a remarkably high share of the public given how seldom our media and politics directly address that distribution.

The new Patriotic Millionaires tax plan obviously isn’t going to become the law of the land anytime soon. But the plan could help refocus America’s political debate onto the dynamics that are threatening to destroy our democracy. Let’s get that debate going. Soon.

On March 15, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz informed fellow Trump Administration officials through their now-infamous Signal chat that a U.S. missile attack had resulted in the collapse of an apartment building filled with Yemeni civilians. Vice President JD Vance replied, “Excellent.”

Democrats on Capitol Hill have since expressed outrage—not at the deaths of innocent civilians, or at the United States’ unprovoked attack on a sovereign country, but at the fact that the conversation was not more carefully shielded from the public.

The Trump administration claims to have resumed bombing in Yemen to stop the Houthi rebels’ attacks on shipping vessels in the Red Sea, despite the fact that the Houthis, who serve as the de facto government of much of the country, had ceased those attacks months ago. Scores of Yemeni civilians have died since the United States resumed the bombing last month. Air strikes have denied tens of thousands of people in this impoverished country access to electricity and drinking water. The Democratic leadership in Congress has refused to condemn this destruction or attempt to invoke the War Powers Resolution, which was enacted in 1973 to limit a president’s ability to engage in armed conflict without the consent of Congress.

Today, it is the majority of congressional Democrats who are allying with a Republican President to support war crimes and undermine international humanitarian law.

Those same Democratic leaders have expressed little opposition to President Donald Trump’s support of Israel’s ongoing occupation forces in Lebanon, which violate the terms of the cease-fire agreement made between Israel and Lebanon last fall. Nor have the Democrats objected to Trump’s support for Israel’s violation of its 1974 disengagement agreement with Syria, or his defense of the ongoing large-scale seizure of Palestinian lands and destruction of villages in the occupied West Bank.

And it’s not just Israel. The Democratic leadership has also backed Trump’s arms shipments and other support for oppressive Arab dictatorships, including Morocco, whose illegal annexation of Western Sahara he recognized in 2020, violating a series of United Nations Security Council resolutions and a landmark ruling of the International Court of Justice.

Soon after Trump launched his war on Yemen, Israel’s far-right government tore up its cease-fire agreement with Hamas, which was the product of months of negotiations led by the United States, Egypt, and Qatar. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the indicted war criminal feted this week in Washington, D.C., relaunched devastating air strikes as Israeli troops re-occupied large swathes of the territory, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people.

More than 1,000 Palestinians, primarily civilians, have been killed in these post-cease-fire attacks, including more than 300 children. The recent execution-style slaying of 15 paramedics and rescue workers in clearly marked ambulances by Israeli forces, who attempted a coverup by burying the victims and their vehicles in a mass grave, has sparked international outrage.

Meanwhile, both Netanyahu and Trump are pushing forward with their plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip of surviving Palestinians in order to develop resorts there, per Trump’s aspiration. Rather than try to force 2.3 million people out by bayonet point, the U.S. and Israel appear determined to drive out the population by bombing civilians and blocking food and medicines from entering the besieged enclave, forcing the remaining population to flee in order to survive.

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has sponsored Joint Resolutions of Disapproval over some of Trump’s continued backing of Netanyahu.

“As a result of Israel’s blocking of humanitarian aid into Gaza, many thousands of children there face malnutrition and even starvation,” Sanders said. “Sadly, and illegally, much of the carnage in Gaza has been carried out with U.S.-provided military equipment. Providing more offensive weapons to continue this disastrous war would violate U.S. and international law.”

Among the weapons included in the resolution are 35,000 two-thousand-pound bombs, which have caused thousands of civilian casualties over the past 18 months. The international outcry over these war crimes was so great that even President Joe Biden suspended their shipment last spring. Trump insisted that such arms shipments should be resumed, however, and the majority of Senate Democrats are supporting him.

Indeed, only 14 Democratic Senators voted for Sanders’ resolutions to block the transfer of these and other deadly weapons.

This was not a result of political pressure. Only 15% of Americans and just 5% of Democrats support additional military aid to Israel. Senate offices were flooded with calls to support the resolutions in a campaign organized by a wide array of peace, human rights, and religious organizations. Despite this, more than 70% of Senate Democrats sided with Trump and the arms industry over the wishes of their constituents.

The truth is that a number of Democratic members of Congress, whom millions of people see as leading the resistance, actually ally with Trump on foreign policy.

While Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.)—a prominent supporter of Trump’s massive arms transfers—was widely praised for his marathon speech warning of the dangers of Trump’s policies, few pointed out that Booker expressed support for Trump’s backing of Israel’s far-right government and autocratic Arab allies during his address and joined the majority of Democrats if voting against limiting arms shipments.

Instead of challenging Trump’s Middle East policies, today’s opposition party resembles the so-called “Death Squad Democrats” who backed former President Ronald Reagan’s policy in Central America. The difference is that such Democratic militarists were then in the minority. Today, it is the majority of congressional Democrats who are allying with a Republican President to support war crimes and undermine international humanitarian law.

Had today’s Democrats been in office 40 years ago, they would have likely backed arming the Contra terrorists in Nicaragua, the death squads in El Salvador, and the Guatemalan genocide against the indigenous Mayans. A few years earlier, they would have probably supported former President Richard Nixon’s carpet bombing of Vietnam.

Perhaps today’s Democratic Party leadership assumes that the threat to basic government institutions and our very democracy posed by the Republicans is so great that progressive voters will support their candidates even if they side with Trump on such issues as offensive military operations, arms control, human rights, and international law.

This is not necessarily the case, however. Polls have shown that Democratic support for Israel’s war on Gaza was the number one issue among the 6 million voters who backed Biden in 2020 but did not vote for Kamala Harris in 2024.

Indeed, a case could be made that, given the closeness of the presidential election and some key congressional races, Democratic support for Israel’s wars on its neighbors cost them the White House and both houses of Congress.

A growing number of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters do see opposing ethnic cleansing, undeclared wars, massacres of civilians, and other crimes as a fundamental principle that’s worth defending. Even if that means standing up to the party’s leadership.

Correction: An earlier version of this article said that Kamala Harris lost 19 million voters who voted for Joe Biden in 2020. The actual figure is around 6 million. The piece has been updated to reflect this.

If there was ever a strong contemporary case for declaring that silence is complicity, consider the hush of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and even George W. Bush as they grind their teeth over the Donald Trump-Elon Musk wrecking of America. Trump is destroying freedom of speech and due process, abolishing democratic restraints, and establishing a criminal fascistic dictatorship.

Trump pounds Biden for the Trump administration’s blunders and failures an average of six times a day. These assaults go unrebutted by the Delaware recluse, nursing his political wounds.

The Clintons? Bill sticks to his private telephone wailings. While Hillary, who gave us Trump in 2016 with her smug, stupid campaign, penned a self-anthem op-ed in The New York Times on March 28, 2025. She writes: “Mr. Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (of group chat fame) are apparently more focused on performative fights over wokeness than preparing for real fights with America’s adversaries.” Trump is not belligerent enough for the war hawk Hillary Clinton who has been the pro-Iraq sociocider butcher of Libya and the ardent supporter behind provocative “force projection” of the Empire around the world.

What would all the GIs, who they caused to lose their lives in their presidential wars, think of their timidity?

Before turning to the excuses for essentially shutting themselves up during our country’s greatest political upheaval—unconstitutional and criminal to the core—here is what prominent former Democratic presidents and presidential candidates COULD do:

1. Tens of millions of Americans voted for our past presidents. They are waiting for their leaders to speak up, stand up, and mightily help lead the fight to stop Trump’s mayhem against the American people in red and blue states. The people want former Democratic leaders to galvanize the Democratic Party, still largely in disarray about confronting Trump.

Don’t they know they have a trusteeship obligation to citizens, many of whom are voicing their demands for a comprehensive plan of offense against the GOP in town meetings and other forums?

The media, threatened daily by Trump, is eager to give former Democratic Party leaders coverage.

2. They are all mega-millionaires, very capable of raising many more millions of dollars quickly with their fame and lists of followers. They know very rich people as friends. They could set up strike forces in Washington and around the country to provide needed, fighting attorneys, organizers, and other specialists to ride head-on against the proven damage to health, safety, and economic well-being of people here and abroad and counter Trump’s daily cruel and vicious assaults. They could end Trump’s unrebutted soliloquy of lies and false scenarios over mainstream and social media.
3. They could push the Democrats in Congress to hold constant “unofficial” public hearings and file resolutions and legislation that provide the daily evidence of this dictator and his recidivistic criminality and push for impeachment and Trump’s removal from office. Impossible, you might say with the GOP in narrow control on Capitol Hill. Look back at Richard Nixon who for far fewer violations was told by Republican senators that his time was up. Politicians save their political skin in approaching elections before rescuing an unstable, egomaniacal, vengeful politician like the one now camped at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Trump will be soon plunging in polls and stock market drops, inflation, recession, and more Gestapo-like kidnappings and disappearances to foreign prisons of targeted individuals. These conditions are not popular with the American people.
4. The former Democratic leaders could do what Bernie Sanders is doing and traverse the country supporting the fighting civic spirit of the American people who oppose the painful afflictions wrought by Tyrant Trump.
5. Gore is well-credentialed to show how the actions of Hurricane Donald, Tornado Trump, Drought Donald, and Wildfire Musk’s fossil-fuel-driven greenhouse gases are leading to a climate catastrophe. The facts and trends Trump omnicidally ignores need to be front and center.

Even George W. Bush, known for causing the deaths of over 1 million Iraqis and the destruction of their country by his criminal war of aggression has a beef. His sole claim to being a “compassionate conservative”—the funding of life-saving AIDS medicines overseas—has gone down in flames with Trump’s illegal demolition of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Bush may be mumbling about this, but he’s staying in his corner painting landscapes.

All this abhorrent quietude in the face of what they all believe is a mortal attack on the Republic has the following excuses:

First, they don’t want to get into a pissing match with a slanderous ugly viper, who unleashes his hordes of haters on the internet. That’s quite a surrender of patriotic duty at a time of unprecedented peril. What would all the GIs, who they caused to lose their lives in their presidential wars, think of their timidity?

Second, it wouldn’t have much impact. America doesn’t listen to “has-beens.” Then why is Obama still the most popular retired politician in America with over 130 million followers on Twitter? That attitude is just convenient escapism.

Third, plunging into the raucous political arena with the Trumpsters and Musketeers is just too disruptive of a comfortable daily routine life by politicians who believe they have been there, done that, and deserve a respite. Self-diminishment gets you nowhere with tens of millions of people in distress who seek powerful amplifiers from well-known leaders behind the demand that Trump understands: YOU’RE FIRED, ringing throughout the nation from liberals and betrayed Trump voters hurting in the same ways. That mass demand is what pushes impeachment of the most visibly impeachable president in American history.

In the final analysis, it comes down to their absence of civic self-respect and cowardliness in confronting Der Fuhrer. Aristotle was right: “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.”

Attempts by the Department of Homeland Security to secure private information from the Internal Revenue Service on people who file taxes with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number is a violation of federal privacy laws that protect taxpayers. It is also a change that could seriously damage public trust in the IRS, which could jeopardize billions of dollars in tax payments by hardworking immigrant families.

The recent memorandum of understanding between the IRS and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—which led to the resignation of the Acting IRS Commissioner—establishes procedures for requesting taxpayer information under IRC section 6103(i)(2) for criminal investigations. But that section is clear: Taxpayer information is confidential unless Congress specifically authorizes disclosure. No such authorization exists for routine immigration enforcement.

Using the IRS and its resources for immigration enforcement is a departure from the agency’s core mission, which is to administer tax laws. What’s more, federal privacy law unambiguously protects all taxpayer information, meaning tax returns and taxpayer information must remain confidential except under very specific circumstances that do not include immigration enforcement. This weaponization should worry all filers, because if this can be done without congressional authorization then it can be done to other groups as well.

Every 10-percentage point drop in the income tax compliance rate of undocumented immigrants would lower federal tax revenue by $8.6 billion per year, and state and local tax collections by $900 million per year.

Besides the privacy implications, there are other important considerations when we look at how this will affect immigrant families.

We know that undocumented immigrants pay taxes. Recent Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy research finds that undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in taxes in 2022, with more than a third of that amount ($37.3 billion) going to states and localities.

Deporting immigrants on a large scale would cause most of those revenues to vanish from public coffers. Both income and sales tax revenues would be reduced as these individuals would no longer be in the U.S. earning taxable incomes and making taxable purchases.

We predict a $7.9 billion reduction in annual revenue for every 1 million undocumented people who exit the country, with $2.5 billion of that coming out of state and local budgets.

But these figures almost certainly understate the true revenue cost of deportations. They don’t account for losses to business outputs and workforce declines in sectors like construction and agriculture. They don’t consider the effects these efforts will have on documented immigrants who may be erroneously swept up in this. And they don’t try to measure how deportations may lead immigrant families to retreat from public view, constrained to less formal, off-the-books employment at jobs less likely to withhold income tax from paychecks.

Our analysis suggests that every 10-percentage point drop in the income tax compliance rate of undocumented immigrants would lower federal tax revenue by $8.6 billion per year, and state and local tax collections by $900 million per year.

On Saturday, April 5 hundreds of thousands gathered across the United States rallying under the banner of “hands off.” The protest was against the devastation wielded by the Trump government on public services, consumer protections, public healthcare, and trade freedom. The protesters’ ire turned especially to Elon Musk’s work with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) radically downsizing U.S. government spending. “Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Elon Musk has to go!” They chanted

The scenes of public dissent were in sharp contrast to the image of Musk, just a few months ago, taking the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington raising a chainsaw high in the air with boyish glee. “This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy,” he extolled, referring to his aggressively ruthless ambition to ax $2 trillion from the U.S. federal budget.

The April protests are a sign that Musk’s fresh-faced jubilance and billionaire-funded political luck might be running out at the hands of his own destructive impulses. As Musk wantonly fights against what he calls “civilizational suicidal empathy,” is it possible that by promising to end “death by bureaucracy,” he has willfully sowed the seeds of his own political demise?

He represents a very particular marriage of politics and capitalism that has no respect for the law, believing that the masters of industry should also be the masters of the world, unencumbered by stuffy bureaucrats trying to stymie their pursuit of greatness.

Musk portrays himself as the billionaire version of the classic vigilante: the man (almost always) who takes the law into his own hands in search of a self-styled brand of justice and effectiveness. A significant part of Musk’s cultural cache is that he exploits the vigilante myth, portraying himself as the savior of an America dream destroyed by corrupt and inefficient democratic institutions.

President Donald Trump described Musk’s vigilante appeal well: “Elon is doing a great job, but I would like to see him get more aggressive. Remember, we have a country to save.” Destruction, redemption, and emancipation driven by masculine emotion is at the heart of Musk’s DOGE endeavor.

Vigilantes achieve their ambitions through self-justified law breaking, reflected in Musk’s DOGE being condemned as illegal. With unwavering confidence in their own convictions, vigilantes feel justified in using whatever powers they have to ensure what they think is right is enforced—and in Musk’s case that is a lot of power.

Unlike the vigilantes we see on television or in the movies, Musk is not a violent avenger seeking justice through the barrel of a gun (or even at the end of chain saw). His weapons are not firearms but money and power. He is portrayed as “the DOGEfather” in vigilante reference to Don Corleone, the eponymous anti-hero of 1972 gangster film The Godfather.

Musk acts out billionaire vigilantism par excellence. He represents a very particular marriage of politics and capitalism that has no respect for the law, believing that the masters of industry should also be the masters of the world, unencumbered by stuffy bureaucrats trying to stymie their pursuit of greatness.

The aggression of Musk’s ambition to slash government and upturn the institutions of democracy appears to be turning against up him. His popularity is nosediving as his unpredictable and conflict-ridden behavior escalates. Musk may have taken the stereotype of the vigilante to such extremes that he is exercising a death wish not just on his own political career but on very idea of the heroic billionaire savior.

The tides are certainly changing. Musk may have used his wealth to influence the presidential election last year, but this month his $25 million spend could not secure Trump’s preferred candidate Brad Schimel in the campaign for as seat in Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Tesla’s sales around the world have plummeted, with people seemingly embarrassed at the prospect of being seen to be associated with Musk. Many are putting bumper stickers on their cars with slogans such as “I Bought This Before We Knew Elon Was Crazy.” In Britain social media campaigners Everyone Hates Elon orchestrated a public art project where people took sledgehammers to a donated Tesla Model S. Their purpose was “to create a debate about wealth inequality.”

Employees are not far behind. Musk practically begged them not to sell Tesla stock holdings. Meanwhile investors are calling for Musk to resign as CEO of Tesla as he gets more and more embroiled in political controversy and Tesla’s market value stumbles. In the the not too recent past conservatives rallied behind the slogan “go woke, go broke.” This is rapidly turning around to “go MAGA, go broke.”

Musk’s outlandish death drive might end up killing the vigilante myth he trades on rather than killing American democracy. Time will tell, but for now there are plenty of reasons to hope that it will.

In a blitz of destructive actions announced by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin last month, he specifically called for a reconsideration of the 2009 Endangerment Finding. A formal proposal for reconsideration of the finding (and all the agency regulations and actions that depend on it) is expected this month.

The science underpinning the Endangerment Finding is airtight, but that won’t stop the Trump administration from setting up a rigged process to try to undo it and give a blank check to polluters. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) will fight back to defend climate science and protect public health safeguards.

In an earlier post, I laid out some of the history and context for the 2009 science-backed Endangerment Finding and the Cause or Contribute Finding. These findings followed from the landmark 2007 Mass v. EPA Supreme Court ruling which held that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are unambiguously air pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act. Together, these establish the clear basis for EPA’s authority and responsibility to set pollutions limits for heat-trapping emissions from vehicles, power plants, and other sources of these pollutants, under the Clean Air Act.

There is nothing mysterious about the heat-trapping attributes of greenhouse gases, nor their impact on public health. It’s called science.

Attacks on the Endangerment Finding and EPA’s Clean Air Act authority from industry interests are nothing new. Importantly, courts have repeatedly upheld both, including in a resounding 2012 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals–D.C. Circuit in Citizens for Responsible Regulation v. EPA. But those who have long sought to overturn or weaken regulations to limit heat-trapping emissions now have Administrator Zeldin in their corner. And he has shown himself to be an unbridled purveyor of disinformation and proponent of harmful attacks on bedrock public health protections, as my colleague Julie McNamara highlights.

The details of what will be included in the reconsideration proposal are unclear at this point. But we do know some of the trumped-up lines of attack the Zeldin EPA could advance to try to invalidate these findings because many of these tired arguments are outlined in EPA’s reconsideration announcement.

Here are the facts:

Fact No. 1: The Science Backing the Endangerment Finding Is Beyond Dispute

Every major scientific society endorses the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change driven by GHG emissions. The Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) and the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report are two major recent authoritative summaries of peer-reviewed climate science, which show that the science on climate change has only become more dire and compelling since 2009.

The impacts of climate change on human health are also starkly clear and backed by overwhelming evidence. Here’s the main finding from the NCA5 chapter on public health, for instance:

Climate change is harming physical, mental, spiritual, and community health through the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events, higher incidences of infectious and vector-borne diseases, and declines in food and water security. These impacts worsen social inequities. Emissions reductions, effective adaptation measures, and climate-resilient health systems can protect human health and improve health equity.

As just one example, climate change is contributing to worsening extreme heat, which exerts a punishing toll on people’s health, including that of outdoor workers. Heat is already the leading cause of extreme weather-related deaths in the United States, and studies show that heat-related mortality is on the rise.

Looking around the nation, with communities reeling from extreme heatwaves, intensified hurricanes, catastrophic wildfires, and record flooding, climate impacts are the lived reality of all too many people. To deny that or obfuscate about the underlying causes is not only disingenuous, but actively harmful and outright cruel.

Fact No. 2: The Law Requires an Independent Scientific Determination of Endangerment, Unhindered by Cost Considerations

A Finding of Endangerment under the Clean Air Act is specifically focused on a threshold scientific determination of whether the pollutant under consideration harms public health or welfare. Costs to industry of meeting any subsequent regulations are not relevant per the statute.

The original Endangerment Finding was reached in the context of the vehicle emissions, per section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act, partially excerpted below:

The administrator shall by regulation prescribe (and from time to time revise) in accordance with the provisions of this section, standards applicable to the emission of any air pollutant from any class or classes of new motor vehicles or new motor vehicle engines, which in his judgment cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.

In its 2012 decision, the D.C. Circuit was also clear is noting that “By employing the verb ‘shall,’ Congress vested a non-discretionary duty in EPA.” That duty is not circumscribed by cost considerations.

Of course, the impacts of climate change are themselves incredibly costly and those costs are mounting as heat-trapping emissions rise. Unsurprisingly, the social cost of greenhouse gases, a science-based estimate of those costs, is another metric that the Trump EPA is seeking to undermine in yet another blatant attempt to put a thumb on the scale in favor of polluting industries.

Fact No. 3: EPA Used Well-Established Methodologies in Its Assessment of Six GHGs

As noted in the 2009 Endangerment Finding, the EPA defined the pollutant contributing to climate change as “the aggregate group of the well-mixed greenhouse gases” with similar attributes. The attributes include that they are sufficiently long-lived, directly emitted, contribute to climate warming, and are a focus of science and policy.

The EPA used a very well-established scientific methodology to combine emissions of GHGs on the basis of their heat-trapping potential, measured in carbon-dioxide equivalents. In the case of passenger cars, light- and heavy-duty trucks, buses, and motorcycles—the transportation sources EPA considered for the original Endangerment Finding—they emitted four key greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and hydrofluorocarbons.

False, glib claims in the reconsideration announcement baselessly accuse the 2009 Endangerment Finding of making “creative leaps” and “mysterious” choices. There is nothing mysterious about the heat-trapping attributes of greenhouse gases, nor their impact on public health. It’s called science. Once again, relying on the mountain of evidence in the peer-reviewed scientific literature would make that readily apparent.

Fact No. 4: EPA Has the Responsibility and Authority to Regulate Major Sources of GHGs

The Cause or Contribute Finding—which specifically established that greenhouse gas emissions from new vehicles contribute to the pollution that harms public health—may also come under attack. This finding has been extended to other major sources of GHGs, including power plants and oil and gas operations. However, the Trump administration could attempt to use accounting tricks to avoid regulating emissions—as it has tried before.

In its first term, the administration attempted multiple underhanded maneuvers along these lines, including in the context of methane and volatile organic compound regulations in the oil and gas sector. For these regulations, the administration split up segments of the source category, designated them as separate source categories, used that manipulation to claim inability to regulate certain segments, and asserted that methane emissions from the remaining segments were too small and regulating them would not provide additional benefits, so those too could not be regulated. Separately, in the final days of the administration, EPA released an absurd framework attempting to set thresholds for determining “significance,” trialed in the context of power plants.

This irrational approach could be used to artificially segment components of power plants or the power system, for example, and then claim no regulations are required. This kind of rigged math wouldn’t fool a kindergarten child, but there’s no telling where this administration might go in its desperate attempt to undo or weaken regulations on greenhouse gas emissions.

Zeldin’s Relentless Subversion of EPA’s Mission

Under Administrator Zeldin, EPA’s mission to protect public health and the environment has been completely subverted. His shocking rhetoric lays bare how far he will go to protect polluters at the expense of the public. Here he is, for instance, crowing about going after 31+ EPA regulations and guidance, as well as the enforcement of pollution standards meant to protect all of us:

Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen. We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion…

EPA even set up an email address for polluters to send an email to get a presidential exemption from complying with regulations on toxic pollution, such as mercury emissions, regulated under the Clean Air Act!

Zeldin is fervently committed to dismantling public health protections and rolling back enforcement of existing laws passed by Congress. Going after the Endangerment Finding is an integral part of this all-out assault because, in the Trump administration’s harmful calculation, revoking the finding is a potential means to rolling back all the regulations that depend on it.

Ironically, some utilities and oil and gas companies have spoken out in favor of keeping the finding intact, as they fear a greater risk of climate damages lawsuits in the absence of EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gases. Of course, this just exposes that they know their products are causing damage. What they seek is the weakest possible exercise of EPA authority so they can continue to reap profits while evading accountability for those harms.

We Can Fight Back With Science

But none of this is a foregone conclusion. The legal and scientific basis for the Endangerment Finding is incredibly strong. The false claims Zeldin and other opponents have trotted out are full of bombast but weak on substance.

The science on climate change is so indisputably well-established, that it’s hard to see how any court would uphold a challenge to it. That’s not to say Zeldin won’t try to find a cabal of fringe “scientists” to try to attack it, but they’re unlikely to succeed on the merits.

Public comments on the proposal to reconsider the Endangerment Finding can help set the record straight on facts. And if the Zeldin EPA ignores them and finalizes a sham finding or revokes the finding with a faulty rationale, that will be challenged in court.

UCS will be closely following the details of EPA’s proposal to reconsider the Endangerment Finding when it is released. And we will let you know how you can add your voice to bolster this crucial science-based finding, and the public health protections that flow from it. So, stay tuned!

The Trump administration has assigned itself the mission of ruining education in the United States. From attacks on DEI to attaching themselves to conservative education activists, a blatantly obvious result of the Trump administration will be to make education inaccessible for anyone who is not wealthy and white.

A prime example is financial aid. The administration hasn’t yet stated where Federal Student Aid (FSA) and the application system it administers, Free Application for Student Aid (FAFSA), would be placed if President Donald Trump succeeds in his entirely misguided assault on the Department of Education. FAFSA is the standardized form that students fill out every year to receive federal assistance in paying for college, grad school, med school, law school, etc. FSA, by way of the FAFSA, now services an estimated 17 million students per year. FAFSA ensures millions of students across the country can obtain an education and pursue a career of their choice. Without it, how can students who do not come from privilege pay some exorbitant amount of money in tuition?

Reportedly, President Trump is considering moving the agency (and thus the system) to the Department of Commerce, run by Howard Lutnick. Small Business Administration (SBA) Chief Kelly Loeffler, best known for her insider trader scandal, wants to move the program to her agency. This would more than quadruple the SBA’s loan portfolio after Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has already cut “a few hundred” of SBA’s probationary staff.

Imagine AI trying to help students complete their financial aid.

Both Commerce and SBA disburse loans. SBA actually offers a myriad of different loans, even some specific to women. The problem is that with the massive reduction in the federal workforce, how can Loeffler and her skeleton staff manage to serve the needs of approximately 17 million students per year? Loeffler has only suggested moving FAFSA, not FSA (meaning the trained administrative staff) to SBA.

While the agency has grown over the years from serving just under 48,000 loans in 2022 to over 70,000 in 2024, especially after the cuts from DOGE, it does not have the dedicated workforce to service the needs of students in the way FSA can. SBA’s peak in 2024, prior to being kneecapped by Musk, was approximately 70,242 loans. That is nowhere near the average of 17 million students that FSA is used to aiding. Especially given the 2024 FAFSA mishap in which Education’s (well intentioned) attempts to streamline the application for students led to issues of communication between both students and the agency, and even an inability to process applications. It does not help that the Education Department already contracts out to lenders like Nelnet who already are keeping people in debt for longer than they should be. Students will be waiting for their federal dollars, and graduates will be forever saddled with debt.

For its part, Commerce (whose IT system similarly was hit with Elon Musk’s DOGE sledgehammer) offers flexible loans for mortgages and cars, but again, the type of loan servicing is entirely different for student borrowers. Commerce also has some issues with technology and modernization (include identity authentication and even its financial systems), which in the entirely digital landscape that is FAFSA would probably impact students in a way that would inhibit their ability to successfully complete their applications

A third and no more viable option for students is turning FSA into a government-owned enterprise. Rather than scrapping FSA, Project 2025 proposed spinning it off into a “new government corporation with professional governance and management.” A government corporation is a company created by Congress to achieve specific policy goals. This would turn FSA into something akin to Amtrak.

Now, Musk would make the argument that these loan serving agencies indicate why the federal workforce should be replaced with AI. Experts say this would be a terrible idea that would lead to chaos. CEO of the Work3 Institute, an AI advisory firm, Deborah Perry Piscione points out that while AI can streamline some paperwork, it just can’t replace civil servants. Piscione gave the example of an AI chatbot that does not understand the unique elements of a veteran applying for benefits. Imagine AI trying to help students complete their financial aid.

The Education Department already utilizes AI to answer rudimentary questions in their call centers. Last September, during the rollout of the new FAFSA, three-quarters of the calls were left unanswered. AI in its current form simply does not have the processing power to service the 17 million students who need aid.

A study from the U.S. Merit Systems Protection board MSPB) found that downsizing agencies ultimately undermined the mission they were supposed to accomplish. ED has the smallest federal workforces of the cabinet agencies, so rolling it into other agencies already saddled with existing duties would exacerbate these problems. Increasing the federal workforce, and curtailing the reliance on AI, probably would have ensured that three-quarters of phone calls would not have been missed.

The Trump administration seemingly does not believe a quality education is a right. Trump and his lackeys putting the Department of Education in limbo is probably part of the plan to eviscerate any sense of a national commitment to higher education for all. Leaving FAFSA in limbo will have a material impact on students. Just last year, almost 18 million students filled out this form, a slight uptick from the average of 17 million. The groups that are most likely to receive aid are Black students, women, and dependents (most likely to be minors).

A little history lesson for you: FSA was established under former President Lyndon Johnson through the Higher Education Act to ensure students could pay for college. Students would fill out the Common Financial Aid Form, which was later replaced by the FAFSA in 1992 during the HEA’s reauthorization. Even in the 1960s, Washington politicians knew that college was inaccessible to anyone who was not well off. The Trump administration’s decision to dismantle ED, and put millions of students at risk, will have dire consequences that will ripple across decades.

This spring my husband and I are moving three tenths of a mile and 200 years back in time.

We are moving from our super-energy-efficient, passive solar home built in 2001 to a farmhouse built in 1800. (And looking for someone to buy the cozy green home we raised our family in. Check it out here and spread the word!) We are excited to have more space to share with extended family. And, we will have a project on our hands! Regaining some of the features we are leaving behind—heat pumps, PV, a composting toilet, and more—will take time. A fun and satisfying challenge we hope!

The great news is that we will still be part of the experiment we have participated in for almost 30 years: Cobb Hill Cohousing, a multi-generational community of 23 families in Vermont’s Connecticut River Valley. The house we are moving to is located within Cobb Hill, just a bit further from the cluster of houses we’ve called home.

We will still share 280 acres of farm and forest and participate in community celebrations and decision-making. We’ll still have neighbors to help and to rely on. We’ll still have maple syrup, eggs, flowers, herbs, vegetables, milk, and cheese all produced by our neighbors on our shared land. We’ll have learning companions to navigate alongside in an increasingly destabilized world.

No one knows how to live sustainably and equitably in our current society or how to prepare for coming climate shocks. So we need to learn. And learning is faster with more minds in the mix.

A big move like ours prompts reflection. We had to move, but we didn’t want to go anywhere else. Here are six reasons that came to mind when we paused to ask ourselves why.

1. People: As disasters become more frequent and politics destabilizes, it feels more important than ever to live connected to other people. People who can be there in an emergency or help make sense of the tumult. But not just people, these specific people. We are connected to our neighbors by shared work, shared fun, and shared history. We are watching their children grow up and hopefully adding something to those kid’s lives. These are the people who brought soup when I broke my ankle, who loaned me a walker to get to the ER, who visited and cheered me up. These are the people I want to bring soup to when they need it!
   
2. Land: There’s the pleasure of coming to know a piece of land deeply. Of walking its paths in spring and summer and skiing them in winter. Of watching for the return of familiar birds and wildflowers with each season. There’s also the work and joys of stewardship, of seeing a once over-harvested forest slowly return to good health. And, by putting most of our shared land under permanent conservation easement and making it open to our neighbors for enjoyment, we find ways to share these gifts now and into the future, which is its own kind of satisfaction.
   
3. Learning: No one knows how to live sustainably and equitably in our current society or how to prepare for coming climate shocks. So we need to learn. And learning is faster with more minds in the mix. We took three tries to get a PV system at Cobb Hill. I led the first two, which ran aground. Then Sandy came in with new determination and a new path in mind. Every day when I walk past the solar-panel-covered barns I think about all three tries, how my “failures” and Sandy’s fresh eyes cracked the code. I think about the need to reinvent community meals after they paused for the pandemic (thanks Audrey!) or the need to wire EV charging ports on infrastructure that didn’t anticipate them (thanks Jesse!) And so on. We have a lot to learn at this moment in human history, but we don’t have to do it alone!
   
4. Food: There’s the taste of a fresh strawberry or an ear of corn moving from field to plate in five minutes. Then there’s the satisfaction of growing some of what you eat and knowing the people who grew more of it. In these times when the federal government’s ability to keep the food system safe is faltering, there’s also peace of mind in seeing at least part of the supply chain right outside your door.
   
5. Resilience: From the connections between good people, a well-loved bit of land, the capacity to learn, and the capacity to grow at least some food comes something bigger than any piece alone. It’s the capacity to cope. It is, hopefully, the capacity to help each other and offer support to wider circles when surprises come and the pace of change speeds up.
   
6. A link to the future: Many have passed through Cobb Hill. Some stayed for a growing season, some for their childhood, some for the length of a learning program. They’ve moved on to start (or join) other communities, farms, nonprofits. I like to think they’ve all taken something with them, a new skill, a lesson in what NOT to do, a belief that dreams can become physical stuff. Maybe in the end that’s the main reward of trying to do things differently—the encouragement to others that they can create the possibilities they see.

Cobb Hill isn’t the only way to find these six things, thank goodness. You’ll find them in smaller groups and larger ones, in cities, in the tropics, on the coast. In this time of transition and reflection in my own family, I hope that knowing they exist in one place might make it easier for you to imagine (or create) them elsewhere, too.

No media outlet has done a better job on reporting on the havoc that special government employee Elon Musk and U.S. President Donald Trump have unleashed than Wired. Their outstanding reporting continued Friday as they scooped everyone by reporting that “the Social Security Administration will no longer be communicating with the media and the public through press releases and ‘dear colleague’ letters, as it shifts its public communication exclusively to X, sources tell WIRED. The news comes amid major staffing cuts at the agency.”

That’s right—all public information about Social Security will come via X. For example, in late March SSA announced that they updated their identification verification procedures via an announcement on their website. So in the future, SSA will have to put all of this into a 280-character post or SSA can go to 4,000 characters if they are willing to upgrade to Premium or Blue.

The first thing that came to mind with SSA’s announcement—wasn’t this a conflict of interest with Elon Musk’s role at X? Many other questions followed, such as the role of asking for feedback from Social Security stakeholders, members of Congress, and last but far from least in my mind—Social Security beneficiaries. I hope that congressional oversight or the press will be able to get some answers here.

According to Wired, SSA regional staff would be cut by 87%:

Today, the agency has 547 employees working in the nearly dozen regional offices (previously, the number was closer to 700, but many people have retired, a current employee with knowledge of the staffing numbers says). After the cuts, the number is expected to be closer to 70.

The Wired piece also raises what is a very ironic twist to this switch to X. SSA employees need to get special permission to access social media. Could the move to X make it harder for SSA employees to learn what their own agency was doing? Surely, this would hinder their ability to serve the public.

It looked like SSA was moving in a more positive direction this week as the agency retreated from its position of drastic cuts to the number of services beneficiaries could access over the phone. Had these changes gone into effect, they would have dramatically impact individuals’ ability to access their earned benefits. A deluge of phone calls from beneficiaries and heat from members of Congress forced SSA to change their course.

After SSA’s retreat on phone services, advocates and members of Congress may have thought that their efforts could have been, at least for the moment, deployed somewhere else. Sadly, this is not the case. The decision to move all public communications to X demonstrated that that Trump and Musk are focused on destroying Social Security. Supporters of Social Security cannot let up for one minute. They will need to fight every day for Social Security until January 20, 2029.

U.S. President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s shared goal of fully privatizing public services from the postal service to Social Security and Medicare will destabilize society, broadening the wide chasm of socioeconomic inequalities already haunting the nation’s politics.

Until the election of Trump and his appointment of Musk, the U.S. government, unlike giant corporations, did not summarily terminate large numbers of workers to achieve “efficiencies” to augment a “bottom line.” Indeed, the present elimination of legions of government workers is wholly arbitrary, having immediate destructive impacts on American society.

Now the administration wants to enhance even further the economic and political positions of the wealthy through tax reductions disproportionately benefiting the wealthy class.

Governments are not businesses nor should they be run as businesses. Historically, the role of government is to regulate those forces in society that would, if left to their own devices, advance their own interests at the expense of society. By moderating the social and environmental impact of these private entities and their direction, and by addressing the social inequities created by disparities in socioeconomic power, the government ensures the stability and security of society. Citizens are protected from the negative consequences of concentrated wealth and the political machinations employed to maintain and to increase the wealthy and corporate class’ power and privileges. Thus breaking down the legitimate power of government facilitates economic and political concentration, denying equal opportunity to resources and wealth. This is not only an assault on individual political rights; it leads to conflict and anarchy.

Not surprisingly, billionaires are leading the charge to undermine government’s vital roles. This is tantamount to letting the fox inside the hen house. While deregulating and privatizing public services—a movement that has gradually gained momentum with the rise of economic and political conservatism from 1980 to the present—is the general plan of Trump, Musk, and their conservative collaborators, it is these two billionaires who are already profiting from the enterprise. They are each positioned to accumulate multiple tens and hundreds of millions of dollars of greater wealth by promoting market products through their access to mass media, government contracts, and deregulation. And now the administration wants to enhance even further the economic and political positions of the wealthy through tax reductions disproportionately benefiting the wealthy class.

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and a host of other public-supported services and investments—from providing funding to enable the University of Maine to improve industry and environment to veterans’ assistance—must be insulated against the vicissitudes of market forces. Government, with its broad taxing capacity, distributes the economic risk across these programs much more securely than publicly traded stocks. Social Security checks should not be directly and irrevocably tied to the market.

At the same time, those who prosper most from the publicly funded infrastructure (i.e. educated workforce, highways, ports, etc.) must pay substantially more taxes than ordinary citizens. With fully-levied progressive taxation the government will be able to transfer wealth to less wealthy Americans in the form of programs improving peoples’ livelihoods and welfare, ensuring greater economic, social, and political stability.

I need some help here. The Trump presidency and the “America only” future he’s hawking to the public like the world’s most arrogant snake-oil salesman feels beyond my ability to address right now, even though I consider doing so my life’s work.

But sometimes the news of the day simply feels too absurd, too strange, to seriously address, like President Donald Trump’s comment the other day as he sat next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House: “You know how I feel about the Gaza Strip. I think it’s an incredible piece of important real estate.”

Dividing the world into abstract chunks of real estate! This is lethal blather, without which war would be too complex to wage. First you have to sell the concept to the public, then do whatever is necessary—murder-wise—to claim the real estate itself

What does it mean that we live in a world that includes both generosity and greed, both love and genocide? Knowing this, how do we proceed?

Meanwhile, life goes on in minuscule bits for the average person, who is unaffected by (but perhaps in favor of) this war or that war or that war. The minutiae of life—my life, your life—goes on. Sometimes I take it upon myself to notice it. Or even learn from it—dig for the soul and spirit of the universe within it. To that end I welcome “The Cardinal,” a poem I wrote several years ago, in honor of everything that doesn’t matter.

I thank you god
if that’s your name
for the beauty and the trash,
the spill, the vomit, the love and
exhaust smoke of
this new most
amazing day.
Outside my window
a cardinal shocking
as a nosebleed
pecks the raw winter
ground beneath its feet.
I thank you for its
food and mine,
for my coffee and for these
words, these malleable
playthings of awareness,
which still birth
all I think and know.
Let them stroke
the trembling potential
of what I see and what’s
to come.
The cardinal lifts.
I salute it with
my cup
and swallow.

In honor of the cardinal, let me ask: What if he “mattered”—to organized human consciousness, to the global power structure that purports to control the future? What if we valued minutiae—that is to say, basic existence, the actual world we live in—in a way that transcended our valuing of power, dominance, ownership, and control? What if humanity, Planet Earth’s organizers in chief, could push their own evolution beyond exploitation of the planet to... God knows what?

What if those with power actually valued those without power, which includes Planet Earth itself?

Sorry, but here’s more President Trump, continuing to muse about Palestine:

Having a peace force like the United States there, controlling and owning the Gaza Strip would be a good thing, because right now all it is for years and years, all I hear about is killing and Hamas and problems.

If you take the people, the Palestinians, and move them around to different countries—and you have plenty of countries that will do that... you call it the Freedom Zone, a free zone, where people aren’t going to be killed every day. That’s a hell of a place.

Yeah, an “incredible piece of important real estate” shouldn’t have genocide going on. But the cause of the genocide is the victims themselves, apparently, so we just have to move them to wherever. Maybe they’re physically, historically and spiritually connected to that land, which they call “home,” but in Trump World this is real estate—so, sorry, genocide victims, you’ll have to move. The issue here is money.

Pssst... don’t tell anyone, but this is the god we worship, fervently and thoughtlessly.

All of which leaves me feeling as lost as I did when I started this column. As I try to honor the minutiae of real life, I realize that also includes Donald Trump and all world leaders, or at least their flawed humanity, as well as earthworms and cardinals, sunlight, sky, rain and snow and everything else I can see beyond my kitchen window. What does it mean that we live in a world that includes both generosity and greed, both love and genocide? Knowing this, how do we proceed?

Slowly, I’d say, and with minimal certainty; the paradox is within all of us. The best we can do is keep our eyes and hearts wide open.