Author: sauer@technologists.com

Bulwark: ‘People Will Die’—RFK Jr. Guts America’s Health Bureaucracy

Stunned experts fear major damage to U.S. health, science, and expertise.

On Tuesday morning, the Department of Health and Human Services informed thousands of employees they were losing their jobs. The notices came by email and, in one sense, they were not a surprise. Last Thursday, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the layoffs were imminent, as part of a broader restructuring designed to shrink the department’s total workforce by 25 percent.

But it’s one thing to know those layoffs are coming, quite another to learn about the real people who will no longer have jobs, the real positions that will no longer exist, and the real divisions that will no longer operate as they did before.

The sheer breadth of the cuts is staggering: The layoffs affected agencies that exist to fight deadly pathogens, to protect the nation’s drug supply, to finance and carry out cutting-edge research—along with countless other divisions and offices that touch everything from rural health to early childhood care.
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Steven Beschloss: Trump Broke What Wasn’t Broken

Canada’s Prime Minister says the “old relationship” with America “is over” and “the U.S. is no longer a reliable partner.” The road to repair will be long.

No one voted for Donald Trump to destroy America’s relationship with our good neighbor and top trading partner, Canada, but here we are. The words last week of Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, make clear that the road to repair will only reopen once Trump no longer occupies our White House.

“The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over,” Carney said, following a meeting with his cabinet to discuss Canada’s response to Trump’s tariff threats. “It’s clear the U.S. is no longer a reliable partner. It is possible that with comprehensive negotiations, we could reestablish an element of confidence but there will be no going backwards.”

This comes in the wake of not only 25 percent tariffs affecting key industries and goods, but also Trump’s idiotic insistence that Canada should become the 51st U.S. state.
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NPR: Trump executive order seeks to ‘restore’ American history through Smithsonian overhaul

President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday directing Vice President Vance to eliminate “divisive race-centered ideology” from Smithsonian museums, educational and research centers, and the National Zoo.
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Performer and cultural strategist, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, former head of Social Impact at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, said the wording of the executive order is ill-informed.

“ To say the Smithsonian Institution has an anti-American agenda is to reveal a complete misunderstanding of what America’s supposed to be,” Joseph said.

Joseph and six other members of his team were laid off earlier this week as part of the Trump administration’s overhaul of the cultural center.
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Stéphane Dalbera: Grace Hopper a.k.a. The Final Boss of Technological Fix Fantasy

The creation of the legendary Rear Admiral Grace Hopper’s COBOL shattered many technological solutionist dreams built on the “just do it” mentality, as it came to be seen as a relic of a bygone era.

It’s undoubtedly the final boss of numerous illusions, with fortunes poured into efforts to defeat it worldwide, yet yielding dismal results.

And now, the inimitable Musk takes center stage, embarking on the audacious mission of migrating one of the U.S. government’s most complex applications in a matter of months.

In the hierarchy of delusional fantasies, this is likely only a notch below the idea of nuking Mars for terraforming.
[Rear Admiral Grace Hopper has largely been “DEI’d” from defense.gov, but there are still a few remaining pages for her.]
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – March 28, 2025

“Another wipeout walloped Wall Street Friday,” Stan Choe of the Associated Press wrote today. The S&P 500 had one of its worst days in two years, dropping 2%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 715 points, losing 1.7% of its value. The Nasdaq Composite fell 2.7%. On Tuesday, news dropped that the administration’s blanket firings and wildly shifting tariff policies have dropped consumer confidence to a low it has not hit since January 2021. Today’s stock market tumble started after the Commerce Department released data showing that consumer prices are rising faster than economists expected.

AIG chief international economist James Knightley said: “We are moving in the wrong direction and the concern is that tariffs threaten higher prices, which means the inflation prints are going to remain hot.” Business leaders like lower interest rates, which reduce borrowing costs and make it cheaper to finance business initiatives, but with rising inflation, the Federal Reserve will be less likely to cut interest rates.
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Tim Kaine: Why I’m forcing a vote on Trump’s Canada tariffs

Trump has created a fake “emergency” to impose tariffs whose cost will be borne by American families.
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President Donald Trump is abusing emergency powers to impose tariffs on Canada that will raise prices for American families and alienate one of our closest allies — so I’m forcing a vote to challenge him.
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The emergency powers Trump is invoking — based on provisions of the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act — are intended for use in legitimate emergencies related to foreign threats and adversaries. This law is typically used to place sanctions on bad actors like cartels and dictators, but Trump’s rationale for an “emergency” that justifies billions in taxes on American consumers doesn’t make sense in Canada’s case. He has made spurious claims of a fentanyl crisis at the northern border on par with the drug situation at the southern border, but his numbers don’t add up.
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Fortunately, the National Emergencies Act of 1976 included a provision allowing any senator to force a vote to block emergency powers being abused by the president. I will be pulling that procedural lever to challenge Trump’s Canada tariffs early next week.

I am leading this effort alongside Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) and Mark R. Warner (D-Virginia), and I am glad to be joined by our co-sponsors, Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island), Angus King (I-Maine), Chris Coons (D-Delaware) and Rand Paul (R-Kentucky). All 100 members of the chamber — including the 52 other Republicans — will have to make a public choice about whether to side with American families, businesses and farmers or with Trump.
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Thom Hartmann: She Stepped Onto a Sidewalk in Boston — and Vanished Into Trump’s Shadow State

Masked ICE agents are now snatching dissidents off the streets like a scene from Stalin’s Russia. This isn’t speculative fiction. It’s happening right now, in America…

This is how it begins.

Tuesday night, Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk was going out to a restaurant to meet friends when masked federal ICE agents dressed in street clothes seized her off a public sidewalk and disappeared her. Her apparent crime was co-authoring an op-ed critical of Trump and Netanyahu.

Where is she now? At first, nobody knew. As her attorney told The New York Times:

“We are unaware of her whereabouts and have not been able to contact her.”

Then it was revealed last night — as the video of her kidnapping went viral — that she’s been transported to a violent ICE facility in Louisiana. Yeah, that place. Without any legal due process that anybody can identify.
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Senator Sanders transcipt

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to travel in many parts of our country. And I have been able to talk to folks in Nebraska, in Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Colorado, and Arizona. And what I am hearing from in all of these states and in fact all over the country is that our nation right now faces enormous crises, unprecedented crises in the modern history of our country.

And how right now at this moment we respond to these crises will not only impact our lives, it will impact the lives of our kids and future generations. And in terms of climate change, the well-being of the entire planet.

And Mr. President, what I have to tell you is that the American people are angry at what is happening here in Washington, DC and they are prepared to stand up and fight back. In my view and what I have heard from many, many people is that they will not accept an oligarchic form of society where a handful of billionaires control our government, where the wealthiest person on Earth, Mr. Musk, is running all over Washington, DC slashing the Social Security Administration so that our elderly people today are finding it extremely difficult to access the benefits that they paid into.
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But we have had difficult moments before. And I am confident, from the bottom of my heart, that if we stand together, and we do not allow some right-wing extremists to divide us up by the color of our skin, or our religion, or where we were born, or our sexual orientation…

If we stand together, we can save this country. We can defeat oligarchy. We can defeat the movement toward authoritarianism. And in fact, we can create an economy and a government that works for all—not just a few.
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BBC: Five takeaways from leaked US top military chat group

1. Vance questions Trump’s thinking
   “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now,” Vance said. “There’s a further risk that we see moderate to severe spike in oil prices.”
2. Blame for ‘free-loading’ Europe
   He said to the defence secretary, “If you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.”
   Hegseth reciprocated: “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”
3. After the strike: Emojis and prayers
4. Controlling the message: Blame Biden
5. Waltz in the spotlight

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ProPublica: The October Story That Outlined Exactly What the Trump Administration Would Do to the Federal Bureaucracy

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In late October, ProPublica published one of its most prophetic stories in our history. You can be forgiven if you missed it at the time. There was a lot going on in the days before the election, and the headlines were dominated by seemingly consequential issues like the racist humor of a comedian who addressed Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden.

But if you weren’t among the several hundred thousand people who read our story, “‘Put Them in Trauma’: Inside a Key MAGA Leader’s Plans for a New Trump Agenda,” in real time, you may have seen it referenced since Trump took office in January.

The story drew on private recordings of a series of speeches given in 2023 and 2024 by Russell Vought obtained by our colleagues at Documented, a news site with a remarkable knack for uncovering information powerful interests would prefer remained secret.
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