I know that sounds weird, but that’s what the new leader of the agency says
HBO still Chernobyl
I think we all assumed that the job of the Environmental Protection Agency was pretty specific: the protect the environment. The new administrator says that while they want to ensure that America has clean air and water they have a much bigger priority:
Zeldin touched on regulatory reform and the changes the agency will make that he says will spur economic growth. “It means that it’s going to be easier to purchase a car. It’s going to be easier to heat your home. Operating a small business is going to be easier for people who are looking for employment, are going to have more opportunities.”
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to eliminate its scientific research arm, firing as many as 1,155 chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists, according to documents reviewed by Democrats on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
The strategy is part of large-scale layoffs, known as a “reduction in force,” being planned by the Trump administration, which is intent on shrinking the federal work force. Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the E.P.A., has said he wants to eliminate 65 percent of the agency’s budget. That would be a drastic reduction — one that experts said could hamper clean water and wastewater improvements, air quality monitoring, the cleanup of toxic industrial sites, and other parts of the agency’s mission.
The E.P.A.’s plan, which was presented to White House officials on Friday for review, calls for dissolving the agency’s largest department, the Office of Research and Development, and purging up to 75 percent of the people who work there.
I guess King Donald is going to sign an Executive Order declaring that all water, air and land be free of pollutants and it will be done. That’s the way America works now, apparently.
By the way:
The E.P.A.’s science office provides the independent research that undergirds virtually all of the agency’s environmental policies, from analyzing the risks of “forever chemicals” in drinking water to determining the best way to reduce fine particle pollution in the atmosphere. It has researched synthetic playground material made from discarded tires; found that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, can contaminate drinking water; and measured the impact of wildfire smoke on public health. The office also helps state environmental agencies figure out how to address algae blooms, treat drinking water and more.
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern sum up where we stand only eight weeks into American Carnage 2.0 — The Return of the King.
The pair summarize for Slate the multiple examples of the administration asserting its supremacy over the judicial branch just over the last week: the Lebanese doctor from Brown University, the 250 Venezuelan migrants, the Monday hearing in which DOJ lawyers refused to present evidence that they did not deliberately defy another court order they unilaterally deemed not “lawful.”
The Trump administration’s position seems to be that “all judicial rulings are merely advisory, or just suggestions, and the three coequal branches of government have been replaced by an elected monarch.” Except for the elected part. Trump and his hangers-on have no real use for elections unless they validate his manliness.
Trump capped off this weekend of lawlessness by announcing, in the early hours of Monday morning, that Biden’s preemptive pardons for Jan. 6 committee members are “void” because they were allegedly signed by autopen. This declaration rejects well-known, long-standing guidance from the Office of Legal Counsel (which the Justice Department has not yet withdrawn), and seems to be based on a conspiracy theory promoted by the Heritage Foundation. The reason these facially absurd autopen claims are so vitally important to the emerging theory of the imperial presidency is that they reveal precisely how cynical Trump’s view of boundless presidential power really is. These novel assertions of authority are not statements about presidential powers, but rather statements about Trump’s powers, which clearly apply to no other president. And the fact that DOJ lawyers are comfortable standing up before both federal judges and the American people to claim that Trump’s constitutional authority is without limit—whereas Biden’s was part of some ongoing criminal conspiracy and wholly illusory—shores up the notion that none of these claims attach to the office of the president, but that they inhere in fact in the person of Donald J. Trump.
For those folks who have been waiting to climb the pole and ring the “constitutional crisis” bell, it would appear we have arrived. Neither Judge Sorokin nor Judge Boasberg believed that he was signing a meaningless order, and both judges demanded compliance that never came. We are long past the point at which courts have any reason to believe Trump’s lawyers when they use rhetorical tricks and deliberate misdirection to suggest that judicial orders were ambiguous or that compliance is inadvertently delayed in good faith. We are now at the place, only eight weeks into this presidency, at which judges must decide if they will take the necessary steps to enforce their decisions, including sanctions and contempt, or if they will agree to be made irrelevant. Those are the remaining options. And if the courts surrender now, the people will lose their last line of defense against an administration that wields Article II like a cheat code to subvert democracy.
Trump will of course appeal any adverse rulings all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and expect his SCOTUS majority to support his kingship. “The best support,” Lithwick and Stern explain, “comes from a solo 2015 opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas that even Justice Antonin Scalia ridiculed as promoting ‘a presidency more reminiscent of George III than George Washington.’ ”
Thus, I would not say Trump is destined to be disappointed by SCOTUS. These days the court majority has found ways to get around disappointing him in rulings nearly as creatively evasive as the DOJ’s lawyers have proven this week. But the Roberts court majority might as well slit their own wrists as allow Yertle to declare himself unreviewable by the judicial branch.
Adding to the chaos in Washington is the fact that there is no one reactionary agenda at play in Trump 2.0. Yes, there is Donald Trump’s attempt to “king me” and join the exclusive Autocrats’ Club with all the appertaining riches and corruption. There is the well-documented Project 2025 with its Heritage and Christian nationalist influences. Bit players are the spineless Republicans kowtowing to Trump and minority Democrats’ flailing in House/Senate disunity.
And then there is Elon Musk and his DOGE coders doing their thing almost independent of everything else. But what their project is is not well understood. Efficiency and cutting waste are a smokescreen.
Mike Brock commented Monday (reacting to a February post by Noah Smith) on the ideological project behind Musk’s activities at Notes from the Circus. “[W]e face not chaotic incompetence but deliberate subversion,” he explains.
Short version, Musk’s anti-democratic DOGE project is in reality “a mechanism of state capture.” Behind him and behind J.D. Vance is eccentric billionaire Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley billionaires with their goal of establishing a “post-liberal order” imagined as a “domain of enlightened autocrats making decisions insulated from public interference.”
When you examine what DOGE is doing in the context of those goals, DOGE makes more sense. But the media has yet to take that project seriously because it sounds so much like a conspiracy theory.
Dr. Arnim Zola: Schmidt believes he walks in the footsteps of the gods. Col. Chester Phillips: Hm! Dr. Arnim Zola: Only the world itself will satisfy him. Col. Chester Phillips: You do realize that’s nuts, don’t you? Dr. Arnim Zola: The insanity of the plan is of no consequence. Col. Chester Phillips: And why is that? Dr. Arnim Zola:Because he can do it!
But if you recognize that Musk’s project is not merely about efficiency but about who controls the levers of power, then you see DOGE for what it is: a mechanism of state capture. A vehicle to strip the government of neutral expertise and replace it with an ideological vanguard, loyal not to institutions but to Musk’s broader anti-democratic project.
Similarly, if you see Peter Thiel merely as a wealthy libertarian with eccentric views, you miss the larger picture—that his project is not just about tax cuts and deregulation, but about the construction of a post-liberal order in which governance is no longer constrained by democratic accountability, but instead functions as a domain of enlightened autocrats making decisions insulated from public interference.
[…]
This is the Silicon Valley delusion in its purest form—the belief that technical proficiency is a substitute for political wisdom. But power is not just about competence. It is about ideology, incentives, and institutional control. Musk is not a stabilizer; he is an accelerant. He is not a bulwark against Trump’s excesses; he is a visionary for a different form of autocracy—one optimized for oligarchic rule rather than nationalist demagoguery.
It also explains Trump’s interest in Greenland. He’s been influenced by Dryden Brown’s Praxis project, another of those “network states” imagined by libertarians with too much money and no sense of civic responsibility as a democracy-free techno-dystopia. Run by them, of course, over your plebian objections.
They also imagine setting up AI-driven, deregulated “freedom cities” in this country and they are presenting those ideas to the Trump administration. Josh Marshall calls it “an important window into what’s happening right now with DOGE.” He emphasizes, “Once you get beneath what we might call the cyber-libertarian spray tan, these are really digital lordships which at a fundamental level would be very at home in the Middle Ages or in the early transitional phases of a number of European maritime empires.”
Marshall warns:
… the real idea here is to stand up what amounts to a sovereignty-free-zone where private corporations can step out of democratic self-government, which is of course the point. As I said, there’s nothing particularly “digital” or “networked” about any of this. These are just lordships which oligarchs now want to carve out of a democratic Republic.
As Brock sees it:
If anything, Musk represents an even more insidious danger than Trump’s erratic nationalism. Trump’s movement is destructive and lawless, but ultimately incompetent—prone to self-sabotage, incapable of sustained governance. Musk, on the other hand, represents the rationalization of autocracy. He doesn’t oppose strongman rule; he wants to optimize it—to strip away inefficiencies, to replace its vulgarities with precision, to run a dictatorship like a well-engineered company.
Run by digital Medicis.
As Zola warned, the insanity of the plan is of no consequence if they can do it.
As a follow up to the post below, just read this. The Washington Post got audio of the Kennedy Center Meeting Trump attended today:
Trump and board members floated names such as Paul Anka, Sylvester Stallone, Johnny Mathis and Andrea Bocelli for the award.
The president also suggested giving awards to Elvis Presley, Luciano Pavarotti and Babe Ruth, though the Kennedy Center Honors are not given posthumously. Pavarotti was honored in 2001. Trump floated expanding the event to include politicians, executives and athletes.
“Elvis sells better as a dead man,” Trump said.
During the board meeting, Trump railed against previous Kennedy Center Honors, saying, “In the past, I mean, these are radical left lunatics that have been chosen. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t watch it. And the host was always terrible.”
It is unclear how many members will be added to the committee. Their identities are also unknown. “We’re expanding the committee so that the search for the Kennedy Center Honors is more inclusive,” said one board member, who could not be identified by voice alone.
No you didn’t accidentally drop acid. They actually used the word “inclusive” a word which has been deleted from every government website.
This will be ratings gold for sure:
Trump seemed to say he would agree to be the ceremony’s host. “I don’t want to, but I want this thing to be successful,” he told the board.
Another bit of evidence of his decline into delusional megalomania.
Luckily, he’s got such great taste that the center will be incredibly successful:
He said he hopes to bring in Broadway shows. (The center routinely books tours of Broadway productions.)
Later, Trump and board members mentioned several shows they would be interested in bringing, including “Hello, Dolly!” “Phantom of the Opera,” “Camelot,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Cats.”..
At other points during the meeting, Trump shared personal stories and anecdotes, including about the first time he saw “Cats” and which members of the cast he found attractive. He also spoke about how dangerous the Potomac River can be. The center is adjacent to the river.
Oh my God.
You may have heard that Trump toadie Ric Grenell was mad at people for booing JD Vance at a performance the other night but you may not have heard what he wrote:
He cited the center’s diversity as a strength and urged tolerance for different political views. “As President, I take diversity and inclusion very seriously,” he wrote. “I have met with many of you, and I love that we are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, agnostic, gay, straight, black, white, Hispanic and absolutely different.”
As I said, you aren’t on drugs. He actually said that.
This is actually a good thing, though. The more time he spends destroying the Kennedy Center, the less he has to destroy the country. I think he should devote at least four days a week to it.
Trump has a lot on his plate and he’s very, very busy. Yes, he found time to squeeze in several hours of golf and partying at his beach club over the weekend even as he’s creating a constitutional crisis but he needs to have some downtime.
Now he’s back to work doing the important work of the American people that no one else can do.
President Trump is expected to tour the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts today, where he will also preside over a board meeting as the Center’s new chair.
Last month, Trump led an overhaul of the Kennedy Center’s leadership by dismissing the previously-appointed Board of Trustees, along with longtime Kennedy Center chair David Rubenstein. Deborah Rutter, who served as president of the cultural center for over a decade, was also ousted.
President Trump named an all-new board that, in an unprecedented move, elected him as the new Kennedy Center Board Chair.
The Kennedy Center has not shared a copy of today’s meeting agenda with NPR, but The New York Timesreports that Trump is aiming to exert more influence over the selection of the Kennedy Center Honorees and the board plans to discuss changes to the committee that makes nominations.
He’s going to choose the honorees from now on in his quest for the Golden Age of American Culture. I’d guess his first decrees will be for Kid Rock, Mel Gibson, Jon Voight and The VIllage People. Jason Aldeen, James Woods and Billy Ray Cyrus will have to wait for next year.
People didn’t vote for Project 2025 because Trump disowned it on the campaign trail saying he had nothing to do with it and that it was too extreme. We knew he was lying but his campaign was concerned enough about it to have him go out and lie. (Not that he doesn’t do that reflexively anyway.) He knew it was toxic to his chances.
Paul Dans was director of Project 2025 for the Heritage Foundation, the hard-right group which has produced such policy plans for more than 40 years.
Project 2025 alarmed progressives with its advocacy of slashing government staffing and budgets and attacking protections for LGBTQ+ Americans; efforts to ensure diversity, equity and inclusion throughout government; attempts to tackle the climate crisis; and more.
Democratic attacks proved effective enough for Trump to claim he had “nothing to do” with the project. In July, as the Trump campaign scrambled to limit damage, Dans was forced out of his Heritage role.
Now, with Trump back in power, the president and his chief donor and ally, the Tesla and SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk, have mounted an assault on the federal government that has already led to thousands of firings, a bonfire of climate regulations, attacks on DEI initiatives real and imagined and much more.
“It’s actually way beyond my wildest dreams,” Dans told Politico. “It’s not going to be the easiest road to hoe going forward. The deep state is going to get its breath back here, but the way that they’ve been able to move and kind of upset the orthodoxy, and at the same time really capture the imagination of the people, I think portends a great four years.”
Dans told Politico that even though he was the sacrificial lamb the campaign tossed aside and he called their distancing from Project 2025 “malpractice.” But he’s so thrilled at how they are enacting it almost to the letter that he says now that he would be thrilled to be asked to join the administration. Why not? Nobody who matters (Republicans who are willingly making themselves human sacrifices for their Daddy) will care.
In reality, Trump is not only enacting Project 2025, he is going farther with his inane tariffs, destroying the world order, and allowing DOGE to run through the federal government with a chainsaw randomly cutting anything that gets in its way without even a review. It’s Project 2025 on steroids.
They handled the secure transport of nuclear materials — dangerous, demanding work that requires rigorous training. Four of them took the Trump administration’s offer of a buyout and left the National Nuclear Security Administration.
A half-dozen staff members left a unit in the agency that builds reactors for nuclear submarines. And a biochemist and engineer who had recently joined the agency as head of the team that enforces safety and environmental standards at a Texas plant that assembles nuclear warheads was fired.
In the past six weeks, the agency, just one relatively small outpost in a federal work force that President Trump and his top adviser Elon Musk aim to drastically pare down, has lost a huge cadre of scientists, engineers, safety experts, project officers, accountants and lawyers — all in the midst of its most ambitious endeavors in a generation.
The nuclear agency, chronically understaffed but critically important, is the busiest it has been since the Cold War. It not only manages the nation’s 3,748 nuclear bombs and warheads, it is modernizing that arsenal — a $20-billion-a-year effort that will arm a new fleet of nuclear submarines, bomber jets and land-based missiles.
Since the last year of the first Trump administration, the agency has been desperately trying to build up its staff to handle the added workload. Though it was still hundreds of employees short of what it had said it needed, it had edged up to about 2,000 workers by January. Now, with the Trump administration’s buyouts and firings, the agency’s trajectory has gone from one of painstaking growth to retraction.
Don’t worry. Elon knows some college freshmen who can do the job, no problem. He’s a genius, you know.
I live in hope every day that nothing catastrophic happens but there are so many catastrophic decisions and actions being taken it’s hard to believe that something isn’t going to happen. Let’s hope it isn’t this.
I’m sorry to say that I think that may be literally true. These are not normal people. That account is the official Rapid Response account of the Trump 47 White House.
I wrote about the Salvadoran prison plan last month. and earlier today. This is actually happening. I am truly surprised they haven’t just re-opened the Bush era black site torture chambers. But that’s a lot more expensive. Better to send them to a country that will happily do the job for peanuts.
I must have written a hundred times that the torture regime of the Bush administration was only the first step to official authoritarian status. And here we are.
Elon Musk told Fox News’ Larry Kudlow this past week that Democrats support the safety net programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid so they can lure undocumented immigrants to America and get their votes. It’s based upon the previously “fringe” Great Replacement Theory, which Musk apparently believes justifies taking a chainsaw to the federal government. It’s nonsense, of course. Undocumented immigrants cannot collect any of those benefits despite the fact that they routinely pay into them. Musk has it completely backwards. And, no they can’t vote either.
The question now is just how far into the Trump administration this Great Replacement ideology goes. It’s clear that top adviser Stephen Miller believes it and it’s quite likely a number of others do as well. Considering that this weekend Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, under the pretense that we are being “invaded” you have to wonder when they are going to find a way to declare full “wartime” powers. Who knows? Maybe they’ll find a way to use the Great Replacement Theory to round up their domestic political enemies as well . After all, they believe they’re providing “material support” for alien enemies with their support for “entitlements.” (I’m only half kidding…)
With the invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act of the Trump administration took another giant leap toward a Constitutional crisis. The Brennan Center defines the rarely used law this way:
The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is a wartime authority that allows the president to detain or deport the natives and citizens of an enemy nation. The law permits the president to target these immigrants without a hearing and based only on their country of birth or citizenship.
They point out that it is supposed to be used in cases of espionage or sabotage but in only three cases: the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II, which I think we can at least agree were existential crises, even if the law was applied in appalling ways. It’s the law that President Franklin Roosevelt used to justify the Japanese Internment, the darkest moment of his otherwise illustrious presidency.
But it should be noted that the law is only intended to be used under a declaration of war or when a foreign government threatens or undertakes an “invasion” or “predatory incursion.” The first requires congressional action but latter justification is up to the president under his inherent authority. But as the Brennan Center points out, previous presidents and the Supreme Court have always considered this to have been enacted under the war power:
In the Constitution and other late-1700s statutes, the term invasion is used literally, typically to refer to large-scale attacks. The term predatory incursion is also used literally in writings of that period to refer to slightly smaller attacks like the 1781 Raid on Richmond led by American defector Benedict Arnold.
In other words, it was never intended to be nor has it ever been used as a power to deport people without due process for garden variety criminal activity — or no crime at all.
On Friday night Trump signed the Executive Order claiming:
“Over the years, Venezuelan national and local authorities have ceded ever-greater control over their territories to transnational criminal organizations, including TdA,. he result is a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States.”
Trump is nonsensically attempting to use the words “invasion” and “incursion” to describe criminal immigrants as if simply calling Venezuela a “hybrid criminal state” makes it true. Neither can the alleged members of the targeted Tren de Agua gang be accurately described as terrorists who have “unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.” (Trump did declare the gang a terrorist organization last month but that doesn’t make it so.) It’s absurd. Assuming they are all members of the criminal gang he has cited, and there’s no way of knowing who they are since there is no due process, this is obviously a domestic criminal matter, akin to dealing with organized crime, not an act of war against the United States.
But then the alleged isolationist peacenik Donald Trump has been itching to use war powers since he became president the first time. And it didn’t completely come out of the blue. He talked about using the Alien Enemies Act on the campaign trail, often mentioning it as the only remedy for the lurid crimes he insisted were stalking everyone in America on a daily basis.
A federal judge has already issued a temporary restraining order to stop the deportations even ordering some planes filled with prisoners bound for a prison in El Salvador to turn around in the air. The administration did not obey the order later saying that the planes were already over international waters and the prisoners were transferred to the notorious El Salvadoran prison. The U.S. has agreed to pay millions for their keep.
Axios reported over the week-end that members of the White House were exuberant over the impending showdown between Trump and the judiciary over whether any judge has the power to stop a presidential order regardless of what it is, one senior official saying, “This is headed to the Supreme Court. And we’re going to win.”
According to Axios this whole drama was orchestrated by Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem who planned to keep the announcement of Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act under wraps until they could fly the prisoners to El Salvador, telling the reporters, “we wanted them on the ground first, before a judge could get the case, but this is how it worked out.” But the news leaked and the ACLU and Democracy Forward quickly filed a lawsuit.
Keep in mind that we have no idea who has been disappeared into that prison.
This is only part of the crackdown on non-citizens, regardless of their status. The case of legal green card holder Mahmoud Kahlil, detained for protesting, is the most famous at the moment. But there are others, like this Laotian mother of 5 who has been in the U.S. since she was 8 months old, snatched up without warning and put on a plane to a country she’d never been to. ICE has also deported legitimate visa holders without explanation, detained German and British tourists, European legal residents, and who knows how many Latinos, legal and otherwise, without probable cause. The sad fact is that no non-citizen can be considered safe from the threat of detention and expulsion with little or no due process in America today.
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