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Public Service Workers Are Teaching Us a Lesson
This Public Service Recognition Week, we can show our appreciation for their grit and dedication by taking a page out of their book and joining the fight to protect public services and workers’ voices on the job.
May 04, 2026
There is no sector of the workforce more resilient than those who work in public service. As billionaires raise costs for working families and funding for essential services is slashed, these workers are being asked to do more with less.
Every day they go above and beyond to respond to the needs of their community: stepping up during extreme weather events, responding to emergencies, educating the next generation, keeping our streets clean, caring for patients and the elderly, ensuring public safety, and so much more.
This Public Service Recognition Week, we can show our appreciation for their grit and dedication by taking a page out of their book and joining the fight to protect public services and workers’ voices on the job.
Despite the importance of all they do, public service workers are often met with attacks by anti-union politicians, rather than the support they deserve. These attacks include budget cuts that endanger their jobs, staffing crises that jeopardize safety for everyone, and threats to pay and benefits.
The best way to channel our love for this country and commitment to our communities is by getting organized and standing together to make working people’s lives better.
Never giving in, public service workers answer this assault by getting organized.
Nationwide, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) members are using their union voice to demand more for their communities. Since the extremists in Congress and the Trump administration recklessly slashed funding for Medicaid, food assistance, and other programs to give tax breaks to billionaires, AFSCME members have been fighting at the state and local level to protect schools, hospitals, public works projects, and more.
In the courts, AFSCME members have successfully protected funding for museums, libraries, and childcare. And at the bargaining table, they continue to negotiate for fair wages, safe staffing, and respect, all of which ensure public services remain strong for the community.
They don’t do it to get rich or get famous. They keep going—behind the scenes and outside the limelight—because working in public service is their life’s calling.
Their resilience and perseverance teaches all of us an important lesson: The best way to channel our love for this country and commitment to our communities is by getting organized and standing together to make working people’s lives better.
So, this week, remember to stop and show your appreciation for the public service workers who show up every single day by joining them in the fight.
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'Monstrous' Trump Rule Change Could Slash Benefits to 400,000 Adults With Down Syndrome and Other Disabilities
"As they push to build a $400 million ballroom, they are stripping disabled Americans of their meager benefits," said one congressional candidate.
Apr 29, 2026
The Trump administration is pushing forward with a new rule that could strip as many as 400,000 low-income adults with disabilities of hundreds of dollars per month.
ProPublica reported on Tuesday that the Trump administration was planning a major rule change to the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, which provides basic income to adults with severe disabilities like Down syndrome and autism and some indigent elderly people who may struggle to support themselves.
The program, which serves around 7.5 million Americans, typically provides payments of around $600-700 per month—enough to help pay for basic needs like food and shelter, but not enough to live on independently, especially for those already struggling due to disabilities. As a result, many SSI recipients still reside with family members.
Under the rule change, ProPublica reported that the administration would "penalize" these individuals "simply for living in the same home as their families, according to four federal officials, internal emails, and a federal regulatory listing."
According to the report:
The administration is working on a rule change that would deduct the value of a disabled adult’s bedroom from their SSI allotment, even if the family members they live with are poor enough to qualify for food stamps. This would mean slashing the benefits of some of the most low-income SSI recipients by up to a third... or ending their support altogether.
Kathleen Romig and Devin O’Connor of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explained the proposed rule change in a policy briefing in August:
Currently, very low-income disabled or older people who receive SSI can have their benefits reduced by up to one-third (about $300 a month) if they receive “in-kind support and maintenance,” including a place to stay. Similarly, SSI recipients can have their benefits reduced based on the income of their parents (if they are under 18) or spouse, under the assumption that they will contribute to an SSI beneficiary’s living expenses. However, these reductions don’t apply to beneficiaries who live in a household that receives “public assistance,” including food assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). That’s because households financially precarious enough to qualify for those benefits can’t afford to financially support SSI recipients...
SSI’s public assistance household rule has been updated to reflect the ways struggling families make ends meet—but the Trump administration proposal would return the program to the outdated criteria first established in 1980... This change would ignore the reality that families who receive SNAP have very low incomes—the typical multi-person SNAP household with at least one member who receives SSI has an annual income of around $17,000, well below the poverty line.
According to ProPublica, one woman with Down syndrome in Philadelphia, 22-year-old Shy’tyra Burton, who has struggled to find a job due to her intellectual disability, is expected to see her $994 monthly benefit cut by about $330 a month because she has continued to live with her father, Rondell, a sanitation worker.
He makes about $2,000 a month, or $24,000 annually—well below the federal poverty line for a single parent with multiple children. Even with the SSI payment, which allows Shy’tyra to pay for her own internet and meals, Rondell said that he's "still barely managing."
Using actuarial figures from the Social Security Administration (SSA), which administers the program, ProPublica determined that as many as 400,000 disabled people and indigent elderly people could lose some or all of their benefits.
"These are not people gaming the system," argued Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.), whose state could see more than 57,000 people lose benefits as a result of the cuts.
"Fewer than one in three applicants is approved," he said. "The process takes years and requires medical and vocational evaluations.
"The administration calls this rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse. It is not," he continued. "This policy costs more, helps no one, and punishes families for taking care of their own."
The rule change is being reviewed by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), where it will be subject to editing before being sent back to the Social Security Administration, where it will face a period of public comment.
The OMB is administered by Director Russell Vought, one of the architects of the Heritage Foundation's far-right Project 2025 agenda. In addition to using last year's government shutdown to withhold SNAP benefits from around 42 million Americans and starve blue states of funding for federal programs, he has used the office to push for a full-fledged assault on benefits for the poor, disabled, and elderly, including those administered by the SSA.
Vought reportedly led the charge for the SSA to raise the age threshold for disabled adults receiving Social Security disability insurance from 50 to 60, or to remove age as a factor altogether when determining whether a disabled individual has the capability to work. According to the Urban Institute, the plan could have kicked 750,000 people off their disability payments and reduced payouts by $82 million over the next decade.
The administration ultimately backed off the proposal once it became clear that many of those hurt would be older coal miners and factory workers in red states, some of Trump's core demographics of support. But it is still reportedly soldiering ahead with its plan to cut SSI payments for those with disabilities.
Vought has justified these and other dramatic cuts as part of efforts to make the government more efficient. But ProPublica found that while cutting Burton’s benefit could save taxpayers about $11 per day, it could mean her father is unable to care for her, forcing her into a state facility that costs hundreds of dollars a day in public money.
"The Trump rule would have harmful consequences beyond the loss of benefits and eligibility, creating heartbreaking dilemmas for SSI recipients and their families," explained Romig and O'Connor. "It could discourage families from offering help to their loved ones, for fear of jeopardizing their meager benefits. It could force more people to turn to institutional care because they could no longer afford to live in the community."
Fred Wellman, a military veteran and Democratic candidate for the second congressional district in Missouri—a state where around 6,000 disabled and elderly people could potentially be affected by the proposed cuts—called the policy a “truly monstrous decision” especially in light of a recent Republican proposal for Congress to allocate $400 million for Trump’s White House ballroom project after a court ruled it could not be funded using donations.
"As they push to build a $400 million ballroom, they are stripping disabled Americans of their meager benefits," Wellman said. "Over and over, this administration and the GOP choose cruelty over caring. It’s just sick."
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Trump Is Telling All The Wrong People, 'You're Fired' and Devastating America
Entire careers and livelihoods have been destroyed by this dictator using the White House to vastly enrich himself and his cronies.
Apr 26, 2026
On my radio show-podcast—the Ralph Nader Radio Hour—interviews of knowledgeable people have detailed the ravages by the cruel, serial law violator, Tyrant Trump, inflicted on millions of Americans. Still, the report from the V-Dem Institute at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg produced a jolting Common Dreams headline: 'Trump is Dismantling US Democracy at a Speed ‘Unprecedented in Modern History.’"
The report described the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term as achieving in one year what budding autocracies take a decade to accomplish, adding that “the speed of decline is comparable to some coups d’état.”
To wreck, weaken, and endanger our country, Trump disrupts the lives of millions of civil servants, contractors, small businesses, and their families. He fired or forced out hundreds of thousands of federal civil servants staffing programs that protect the health, safety, and economic well-being of tens of millions of Americans, relying on food supplements, Medicaid, government-backed loans, and innumerable other social safety nets.
Trump has especially targeted law enforcement programs directed at enforcing worker and consumer safety, financial protections, and environmental health against toxic corporations. He is taking federal cops off the corporate crime beat.
Multiply this story of undeserved misery and fragility hundreds of thousands of times.
Here are some specifics. Qualified foreign doctors have had their visas rejected. The US has a doctor shortage, especially in rural areas. These physicians were blocked by Trump from extending care in areas with no doctors.
Huge, arbitrary cuts for scientific research have closed or curtailed labs, left individual scientists pursuing crucial discoveries to save lives without the government grants funding vital promising projects. He has also accelerated a brain drain from the US to Europe and China, and reduced the number of scientists, engineers, and nurses coming to the US to work, where they are seriously needed.
Entire careers and livelihoods have been destroyed by this dictator using the White House to vastly enrich himself and his cronies.
Let’s be more specific. The New York Times published a front-page story about what is happening to employees of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), illegally closed down in the first week of Trump’s regime. This reckless action jeopardizes millions of impoverished lives abroad. The article opened with: “She was fired by email while on maternity leave, given 24 hours to clear out her desk, and left with three days of health insurance and no severance.” Her husband, also working with funding from USAID, lost his job. They are now relying on food stamps, Medicaid, and a supplemental nutrition program—long-standing programs being cravenly slashed by the Trumpsters, while giving huge tax escapes to the super rich and large corporations like Apple.
Multiply this story of undeserved misery and fragility hundreds of thousands of times. Through Elon Musk’s criminal enterprise, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), whole agencies were being illegally shattered, and virtually shut down, e.g., the Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the US Institute of Peace. Others were being strip-mined like the Department of Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Agriculture.
Trump tore up civil service union contracts. The unions are suing Trump for this breach of contract. Such lawsuits drag on interminably and are hardly covered by the media. What the union leaders and members should be doing is peaceably encircling the White House for round-the-clock vigils and featuring large signs calling Trump out in vivid language. After all, the headquarters of the AFL-CIO is less than a block from the White House for easy logistics.
What are the pretexts coming out of Trump’s snarling mouth to justify such devastation of America? One is that he accuses these agencies of being “woke,” an ill-defined word for “leftists” that he has turned into another of his four-letter epithets for his ever-true believers.
A more frequent declaration issued without substantiation is that his decisions are based on “a grave threat to national security.” His lies don’t pass the laugh test.
This pretext is always applied to Trump’s blockage of offshore wind turbines, which he strangely has long called “ugly.” Trump recently exempted oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from measures to protect endangered species. Self-described warrior of God and Jesus Christ, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, stated that such exemptions would bolster national security by increasing domestic oil production.
Trumpian effrontery gets worse. He issued an executive order removing collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal employees employed by a dozen agencies on national security grounds. The 1978 law he falsely invoked applied to “intelligence officers,” not to cleaners, guards, clerks, etc., in federal buildings. Again, the expected lawsuits were filed. Amid judicial delays, Trump gets his way.
When pressed by reporters to explain these pretexts, Trump’s flaks come up with ridiculous assertions promptly rebutted by specialists in each area. (See The New York Times, April 19, 2026—“Trump Has a Go-To Justification for His Contentious Decisions: National Security.”)
Who elected Trump? The Democratic Party’s feeble, cowardly, and uninspiring performance in 2024—repressing through its corporate-conflicted consultants’ decisive input from its progressive wing and civic and labor leaders—was a big factor. (See the August 27, 2024, letter to Liz Shuler).
Who unleashed this runaway felonious politician violating daily innumerable federal laws, regulations, international treaties, and constitutional provisions, constituting serious impeachable offenses? (See H.Res.1155).
First, the congressional Republicans have abjectly surrendered their oath of office to constitutionally lead the congressional branch of government. In addition, the cowardly Democrats, who could have conducted scores of “shadow hearings” to inform the media and citizenry are largely MIA.
It is time for citizens to press their Senators and Representatives to stop this Trump rampage—before it is too late. The Congressional Switchboard number is 202-224-3121.
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Trump Joins the War on Cancer... on the Side of Cancer
Nothing can compare to the scale and breadth of Trump 2.0’s across-the-board evisceration of every part of the government that helps with cancer prevention and treatment.
Apr 23, 2026
Last week marked one year of me being cancer free. I’ve shared parts of the story of my excruciating recovery on a couple occasions. Still, it’s been truly surreal to embark on this journey back to health while being inundated with report after report of Trump administration policies that seem intent on increasing the suffering caused by cancer. Where normal governments seek to protect people through research, medical innovation, and funding for early treatment and prevention, this administration has slashed research into cancer, cut funding for medical care, and moved to relax standards on how much exposure to carcinogens companies are allowed to inflict on surrounding communities. This is, in short, a pro-cancer government.
Every administration has been guilty of taking actions that jeopardized public health, but there is simply nothing that can compare to the scale and breadth of Trump 2.0’s across-the-board evisceration of every part of the government that helps with cancer prevention and treatment. For half a century, the United States waged a War on Cancer. Since January 2025, it has instead waged war on cancer’s victims.
Cutting Cancer Research
The most obvious part of the Trump administration’s war on cancer patients is the frontal assault on research seeking to develop new screenings, treatments, and, hopefully, cures for an array of cancers.
On January 21, 2025, his first full day back in office, President Donald Trump imposed a bevy of restrictions on the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including functionally freezing external communications, grant review, and employee travel. By executive fiat, Trump and his right hand man-domestic policy puppet master Russell Vought delayed the disbursement of the NIH’s $47 billion in research funds, including $7 billion under the aegis of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). This consequently forced a pause on the review and approval of new clinical oncology trials. At the end of his second week in office, Trump mandated an instant 15% cap on NIH grant overhead, effectively demanding that the agency spend $4 billion less than planned. After freezing funding until the start of February, the NIH then began ruthlessly, frequently illegally (according to multiple federal court decisions) terminating grants; more than 1,800 were ended between February and June. And while courts have restored many of the improperly terminated grants, there’s a lot less recourse for new grants that are not being issued, leaving many research labs across the country, “running on fumes,” as The Washington Post described it. According to the Post’s analysis, NIH grants this year have fallen by over 50%.
The current suits in the White House would like you to believe the idea of a moonshot to treat cancer and the usage of words like “woman” in scientific research is more controversial than the erosion of decades of medical research and mass defunding of investment in curing one of the most omnipresent diseases in human history.
From the start of this term, the administration has also censored the production and dissemination of federal health research from agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the NIH. This includes illegally scrubbing swathes of publicly available data and web resources and requiring approval from the administration for CDC scientists to publish in external journals. The CDC mandated that no research publication was to use a list of supposedly “DEI” terms, including “LGBTQ” and “biologically female.” In other instances, any inclusion of the word “race,” “gender,” “sex,” “pregnancy,” or even “woman” was grounds for censorship. The result has been a chilling of important investigations that impact how we treat cancer; the type of tumor I had (called a carcinoid) occurs most often in older women.
The CDC, though, would not let a researcher publish that last sentence, if it had its way.
On April 1 2025, four NIH institute directors and another acting director were placed on leave. By late April, the chaos of a rampaging DOGE and mass layoffs had already forced out at least 2,500 staff (more than 10% of the agency’s 20,000 headcount) including two dozen of the 320 in-house research physicians at the NIH Clinical Center. After some of the internal administration restrictions were eased, researchers were still dealing with massive backlogs for basic lab equipment. That May, the administration sent a stop work order to the SMART IRB system, an NIH-funded initiative that streamlined institutional review board approval for clinical trials used by more than 1,300 institutions. A career researcher at NIH told Science that “however bad everyone on the outside thinks it is, it is a million times worse.”
All in all, the NIH has seen a proposed 44% funding cut, with the NCI facing a 37% cut. And it isn’t just NIH; there have been major reductions in cancer research funding from the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs as well. A $1.5 billion Pentagon-directed health research grant fund, about half of which was devoted for cancer research, was slashed by 57%; funding for kidney, pancreatic, and lung cancer were zeroed out. At the VA, DOGE deployed an inaccurate data tool that terminated numerous grants, including one gene sequencing device that was being used to research cancer treatments.
According to STAT, the term “Cancer Moonshot” is now considered “controversial” at NIH, presumably because it was a Biden initiative. It’s difficult to imagine a more appropriate encapsulation of our ongoing reality: The current suits in the White House would like you to believe the idea of a moonshot to treat cancer and the usage of words like “woman” in scientific research is more controversial than the erosion of decades of medical research and mass defunding of investment in curing one of the most omnipresent diseases in human history.
Cuts, Not Cures
The war on cancer patients extends far beyond the scientific agencies. A number of agencies are also rolling back environmental and workplace safety regulations that protect us from cancer.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) alone is rolling back limits on a range of carcinogens including formaldehyde, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions (which include formaldehyde, nitrogen oxide, arsenic, sulfur, and other carcinogenic compounds), asbestos, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (also called PFAS or forever chemicals), and vinyl chloride. In a triumphant press release, the Trump EPA celebrated its moves to deregulate a host of chemicals, including dangerous air particulate (called PM 2.5), coal ash, and oil and gas wastewater, all of which are carcinogenic. The EPA also recertified Monsanto’s weedkiller Dicamba, which has been linked to higher risk of liver cancer and leukemia (and also banned twice by federal courts already). One of the chemical industry alums tapped to lead the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, Nancy Beck, is known for pushing for the rollback of bans on carcinogenic solvents. To top it all off, the agency is also down 25% of its staff, so it would be poorly positioned to enforce what standards survive the regulation purge.
Elsewhere, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has decimated the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), terminating 85% of its workforce. NIOSH conducted research on how exposure to dangerous chemicals impacted workers’ health, including studying cancer risk among miners and firefighters. The database tracking cancer in firefighters ended enrollment. NIOSH was instrumental in identifying now iconic toxic substances, including carcinogens like asbestos and ethylene oxide, and helping to develop federal workplace safety rules based on those findings.
Even students are being readily placed in harm’s way; the administration’s attack on clean energy programs has blocked school districts’ efforts to replace their diesel buses, and their cancer-causing exhaust, with electric ones. The Department of Interior has announced its intent to bring back the glory days of coal mining, despite coal exhaust spewing toxic air pollutants. To this end, the administration is exempting coal-fired power plants from upgraded air quality regulations. The administration has exempted around 100 industrial sites from Biden-era regulation of cancer-causing air pollutants.
Cartoonish Cruelty
Those are just two fronts in the federal government’s deeply disturbing war on cancer victims. Some 2 million Americans get cancer every year, with more than 600,000 dying from the disease. Thousands upon thousands more will be driven into both of those camps, from all of the policies I’ve mentioned and many, many more. Cuts to the Mine Safety and Health Administration and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Food and Drug Administration’s Food Inspection Service, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which runs an air quality evaluation program that helps to apprise Americans of how safe it is to be outdoors for extended periods, leave all of us more in danger of facing cancer. Medicaid and Medicare cuts, the gutting of consumer protection bodies, and the revolving door with Big Pharma mean that we’ll pay more if we do.
Against this backdrop, the Trump administration sought to burnish its nonexistent cancer-busting image by announcing a $50 million initiative to deploy AI to fight pediatric cancer. The big shiny figure is really a drop in the bucket in terms of impact. Worse, its part and parcel of the White House’s naked embrace of the AI-hype that is driving an industrial buildout that itself causes cancer.
The only logical conclusion to glean from the simultaneous destruction of cancer research, ripping up of the rules and agencies that protect us from it, and willful zeal for fossil fuels (often wrapped up with AI-mania via the data center build out) and exempting them from air quality oversight is that this is a pro-cancer administration. They admitted as much when news broke before Trump was even inaugurated that his EPA would no longer tally the human cost of air pollution.
Whether it’s counted or not, though, it is there. The type of cancer I had is a “mild” one; I still lost a lung, had a vocal cord paralyzed, spent months barely able to get through a day, and still get winded easily. The official position of the US government appears to be that more people should have to endure that.
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DOGE 'Doesn't Exist' Anymore, But the Damage It Did 'Will Be Felt for a Long Time'
"The little bit of spending DOGE cut has already killed hundreds of thousands and will eventually lead to millions of deaths," one expert said.
Nov 23, 2025
The Department of Government Efficiency—Elon Musk's much-heralded attempt to take a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy—has quietly disbanded eight months before its official expiration date, Reuters reported on Sunday.
The news agency received confirmation of DOGE's demise from Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor earlier this month.
"That doesn't exist," Kupor told Reuters, adding that it was "no longer a centralized agency."
Kupor also said that a government hiring freeze implemented by DOGE had ended.
" DOGE is fading away like bank robbery gangs fade away after the robberies are done."
When President Donald Trump first signed the executive order creating DOGE, he said that it would last until July 4, 2026. However, following a public feud with Musk in late spring, Trump and his team had indicated the department was no longer active, often speaking of DOGE in the past tense.
Musk originally set out to save $1 trillion in federal expenditures by cutting what he claimed to be waste. According to the DOGE website, the department has only saved $214 billion of that aim. However, even that number is in dispute, with one Senate report finding the agency wasted over $21 billion.
At the same time, DOGE sowed chaos in the federal government by mass firing workers, hobbling consumer watchdog agencies, and gutting the US Agency for International Development (USAID)—a move that could lead to more than 14 million deaths worldwide by 2030. At the same time, DOGE employees' attempts to gain access to sensitive government data have made the data of millions of Americans less secure. One whistleblower report said the department uploaded Social Security data to a cloud server at risk from hacking.
Several experts reacted to Reuters' report by reflecting on DOGE's destructive legacy.
"Difficult to overstate how profound a failure DOGE was," Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, wrote on social media. "Spending in FY2025 was not only than in FY2024—but higher than it was projected to be when Trump first took office.* The little bit of spending DOGE cut has already killed hundreds of thousands and will eventually lead to millions of deaths."
Rachel Khan wrote for the New Republic:
DOGE’s legacy is both very stupid and very sad: It decimated the federal workforce, including Social Security personnel at local offices, and made it easier for hackers to access your data. The agency tore apart USAID, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of lives lost globally. And all this for projected savings—numbers which grew smaller and less ambitious every time Musk mentioned them.
While DOGE may fade away into a fever dream of Trump’s first 100 days, its effects—and the suffering it inflicted—will be felt for a long time.
Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, joked, "DOGE seems to be out of business, I guess Elon put our $5k dividend checks in the mail," referring to a promise Musk had made to redistribute DOGE's savings to taxpayers.
However, other commenters argued that DOGE had not failed, but had rather succeeded at its unstated aims.
Georgia State University political scientist Jeff Lazarus wrote that Musk "donated $277 million to Trump so he could steal the federal government’s data, dismantle the nation’s infrastructure, and stop foreign aid from going to nonwhite people. It’s a quid pro quo breathtaking in scope, corruption, and damage, & completely unprecedented in American history."
Bluesky user En Buen Ora wrote: "DOGE did not fail in any way to accomplish its goals. Its goals were never efficiency or saving money. Its goals were to destroy as much of government as possible forever, and to steal data for the Space Nazi. DOGE is fading away like bank robbery gangs fade away after the robberies are done."
While DOGE as an entity may not longer be working, Reuters noted that several of its employees had moved on to other government positions:
- Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia now runs the Trump-created National Design Studio;
- former Acting DOGE Administrator Amy Gleason is an adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS);
- DOGE team member Zachary Terrell is chief technology officer at HHS;
- Rachel Riley is chief of the Office of Naval Research; and
- Jeremy Lewin, who helped gut USAID, works for the State Department overseeing foreign assistance.
ProPublica has compiled a running list of every DOGE staffer it could verify, which now totals 114.
Author Tyler King wrote on social media that “‘DOGE doesn’t exist anymore' is a misleading premise because more than 100 former DOGErs have become deeply embedded in federal agencies to generally fuck around with our data and arbitrarily disrupt budgets."
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Supporting Survivors: A Spark of Hope In A Climate of Violence
All communities must realize that funding for domestic violence resources is not just charity—it’s an investment in public safety, community health, and the future stability of families.
Sep 21, 2025
Another school shooting? Shooting of a social media conservative advocate? In a nation where children can be murdered at church or school, an activist like Charlie Kirk can be assassinated at a campus event, and a man can kill a pregnant teen because of “road rage,” it is a daily challenge to prepare for the worst and simply hope for the best.
I wonder if I will become a victim to my circumstances or a survivor with a cautionary tale.
Despite US President Donald Trump recently dismissing domestic violence as "a little fight with the wife," 1 out of every 2 women are subjected to gender-based violence by an intimate partner in the US. This means every employer employs survivors and we all know someone affected.
Despite its prevalence, the silence and stigma surrounding this issue continue to isolate survivors. Equally concerning, survivors face overwhelming financial obstacles, unlivable wages, reduced access to essential services, and now recent funding cuts to domestic violence services. Nonprofit organizations that support survivors are being asked to do more with fewer resources.
The fact is economic security for survivors is not just about preventing them from returning to abusers—it’s about investing in a safer, healthier, more resilient society for everyone.
In this political climate, it feels audacious to hope for government budgets to include the kind of holistic, wraparound services that support communities’ most vulnerable populations. From the highest levels of government there have been thousands of layoffs including the US Agency for International Development, the Internal Revenue Service, the Education Department, the Defense Department, health agencies, the National Park Service, and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
In light of these devastating layoffs and funding cuts, survivor-serving organizations have lost most, if not all, government funding and must pivot to sustain themselves. In an ideal situation this may transpire into leveraging complimentary community resources, exchanging services, and collaborating to build grassroots, organic networks of support.
This can also look like survivors of domestic violence left alone with shame, fear, and confusion on what to do next. The window of opportunity for survivors to access support is narrow.
Without immediate emergency support, survivors are forced to return to unimaginable circumstances and some never make it out. Research is clear: Economic security is one of the greatest pathways to helping individuals break free from the cycle of abuse; without stable housing, income, or childcare, survivors are often forced back into unsafe situations.
As a survivor, I acknowledge the privilege I have by being the breadwinner. Once I broke free from the mental bondage and fear of physical abuse, I was fortunate enough to have my career (although I almost lost it), a home with my name on the lease (and $15,000 in back rent), and just enough fight left to obtain a restraining order and full custody of my son.
I tried utilizing what services existed in my area but ran into agencies with reduced staffing and hours. The providers did their best to support me over the phone, but they were also overwhelmingly busy and forgot to send follow-up emails, so I did the best I could on my own with a lot of faith and just a little spark of hope. Statistics and experiences show most survivors aren’t that lucky.
All communities must realize that funding for domestic violence resources is not just charity—it’s an investment in public safety, community health, and the future stability of families. When someone makes the courageous decision to leave an abusive environment, their path forward must not be blocked by scarcity and closed doors.
I share my experience to help others. I speak up to destigmatize talking about domestic violence and its correlation to economic security. I offer to take care of survivors' children while they figure out what to do next and sometimes just provide a safe space to process.
No one wakes up and decides to become a victim, nor does a person wake up and decide to be a batterer—however this happens at a frequency equal to 24 people per minute and 10 million people per year in the United States.
By focusing on the most vulnerable populations, there will be positive residual consequences for everyone. There is an estimated $7.73 billion cost of domestic violence in my home state of California alone.
Nationally, “One study estimated the cost of intimate partner violence against women to US society, including health costs and productivity losses," would be $12.1 billion n 2025 dollars.
This affects everyone as economic insecurity is widespread: 77% of US adults report they don’t feel fully financially secure. The fact is economic security for survivors is not just about preventing them from returning to abusers—it’s about investing in a safer, healthier, more resilient society for everyone.
By providing stable economic foundations, it is possible to create a world where leaving isn’t a leap into the unknown—it’s a step toward a future filled with hope and opportunity.
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Why Male Suicide Prevention Requires Policy, Not Just Awareness
On this Suicide Prevention Day, the question is whether we will stop treating male suicide as a seasonal headline and start treating it as a preventable epidemic.
Sep 10, 2025
Today is September 10, World Suicide Prevention Day. The hashtags are already out. Politicians are tweeting about “awareness.” Nonprofits are posting hotline numbers. News outlets will run a few stories, maybe a profile of a grieving family or a segment on rising youth anxiety. Communities will hold vigils and light candles. And then, as happens every September, Congress will return to debating budgets that cut the very services that keep people alive.
Suicide has become an annual ritual of shock, treated as if it were a hurricane that blew in unannounced instead of a slow-moving crisis we have been measuring for decades.
Suicide is not weather. It is not random. It is patterned, predictable, and preventable. Rates climb where jobs collapse and housing becomes unstable. They spread where guns are plentiful and mental healthcare is scarce. They grow in cultures that equate vulnerability with weakness. And they accelerate when elected officials strip away the programs that keep people from falling over the edge.
I know the consequences of silence. My father died by suicide when I was young. For more than a decade, I did not know how he died. My family believed silence could protect me. But silence also isolates, leaving questions that cannot be asked and grief that cannot be named. That fog never fully lifts. It is a reminder that behind every statistic is a family that carries loss forward, often without words for it.
That loss is now multiplied across nearly 50,000 American families each year. Almost 50,000 people died by suicide in 2022—the highest number ever recorded—and nearly 50,000 again in 2023. That is one death every 11 minutes. Three out of four were men. Men are half the country yet nearly 80% of its suicides. The rate for men over 85 is the highest of any group, 15 times higher than women of the same age. Middle-aged men follow close behind, especially in rural counties where work has dried up, institutions have withered, and guns are everywhere. Even among younger men, suicide remains a leading cause of death.
The methods matter. More than half of suicides now involve a firearm. Men are far more likely than women to use a gun, and that choice often makes the difference between an attempt and a death. A gun is immediate and almost always fatal. A moment of despair becomes permanent because the tool at hand was designed to be permanent. Where lethal means are easy and care is scarce, brief despair turns irreversible. States with higher gun ownership have higher suicide rates. The connection is not mysterious. It is arithmetic.
Suicide is not inevitable. It rises when supports are stripped and stigma is reinforced.
Economics tell the same story. Men who lose jobs, homes, or the ability to provide are at higher risk. One national study found that more than 1 in 5 men aged 45 to 64 who died by suicide had recently lost a job, faced eviction, or been buried by debt. When a man’s sense of worth is tied to being a provider, losing that role can feel like losing his reason to live. Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton called these “deaths of despair,” and the label fits. But despair is not destiny. Raise the minimum wage, expand tax credits, stabilize housing, and suicides among working-class men decline. Let wages stagnate, strip away safety nets, and suicides rise. If despair tracks wages and rent, then budgets decide who lives long enough to get help.
Budgets are moral documents. In 2025, the Trump administration proposed cutting more than a billion dollars from the nation’s main mental health agency. That means fewer clinics, fewer treatment teams, fewer crisis counselors. The same budget threatened to scrap parts of the 988 crisis line, including its LGBTQ youth service. At the Department of Education, $1 billion in school counselor grants was pulled back, leaving rural districts that had finally hired mental health staff facing layoffs. Insurance rules that would have forced companies to cover therapy on par with physical health were paused. On homelessness, the administration reversed Housing First, vowing instead to sweep encampments, force treatment, and “bring back asylums.” Each of these choices falls hardest on men. When Medicaid is cut, when housing supports vanish, when community clinics close, the men most in need are left to cycle through emergency rooms, jails, or morgues.
Policy failures meet cultural stigma. Only about a third of men say they would seek professional help if depressed, compared to nearly 60% of women. The rest say they would handle it on their own, or not at all. That reluctance is reinforced by leaders and influencers. US President Donald Trump once suggested veterans with PTSD “aren’t strong.” Andrew Tate tells millions of young men that “depression isn’t real.” Jordan Peterson blames despair on feminism and political correctness. These voices frame pain as weakness, recast systemic causes as personal failings, and tell men that asking for help makes them lesser. For someone already on the edge, that message can be lethal.
And when suicide is mentioned in politics, it is often weaponized rather than addressed. Commentators invoke male suicide to claim that society only cares about women or minorities. Lawmakers cite “what’s happening to our boys” while voting against Medicaid expansion or school mental health funding. Grievance substitutes for prevention. The fire is pointed to, then the water is cut.
The alternative is straightforward, if not simple. Treat the 988 crisis line like 911: permanent, funded, universal. Expand Medicaid and enforce insurance parity so therapy is covered like any other medical need. Keep counselors in schools. Invest in housing with voluntary supports. Build mobile crisis teams so despair meets a trained counselor, not a police squad. And meet men where they are: union halls, barber shops, job sites, veterans’ groups.
We know this works. In Colorado, “Man Therapy” has used humor and direct language to reach men who would never otherwise consider counseling. Veterans’ peer networks reduce stigma and improve follow-through on care. In Australia, the “Men’s Shed” movement has built thousands of local spaces where older men gather, work on projects, and informally support one another—a model credited with reducing isolation and depression. These are not small-scale experiments. They are blueprints for national policy.
Suicide is not inevitable. It rises when supports are stripped and stigma is reinforced. It falls when care is reachable, affordable, and treated as normal. My father’s death remains a personal loss. But the broader crisis is a collective choice. We know the patterns. We know the risks. We know the solutions. What remains is whether policymakers are willing to act on them.
On this Suicide Prevention Day, the question is not whether we will keep raising awareness. It is whether we will stop treating male suicide as a seasonal headline and start treating it as a preventable epidemic. If policymakers can count the dead, they can also count the votes that decide whether men keep dying at this scale. The choice is not between silence and hashtags. It is between burying another 50,000 next year—or building a country where men live long enough to be heard.
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Trump’s ‘Shock-and-Awe’ Approach to Governing Is as Deluded as W’s Iraq War
When this nightmare ends we will be left with a mess of rubble and a monumental task of rebuilding.
Sep 09, 2025
Nothing good will come of the chaos that has already been created by the Trump administration. In just a few months, it’s taken a wrecking ball to institutions, agencies, and programs.
The administration has taken dramatic steps to: gut the federal work force; withhold billions of dollars in research grants intended to address health and a range of other scientific concerns; eliminate foreign aid programs and the entities that deliver them; dismantle governmental health institutions; slash programs that provide healthcare and food to the poor and disabled; wreak havoc in international trade relations by imposing, then withdrawing, then reimposing tariffs based on whim or personal vendetta; and create fear and panic in cities across the country with the dramatic expansion of immigration enforcement that has included the hiring thousands of unvetted individuals, many of whom have an ideological bent and are eager to get a gun and badge to carry out their agenda. And this is only a partial list of the Trump administration’s destruction.
A case can easily be made that reform was needed in many of these areas. It must be acknowledged that waste or redundancy is somewhat inevitable in programs or agencies that have been in existence for decades or more. And there can be hesitancy to terminate programs that have either outlived their usefulness or never had their intended impact. But needed reforms are always best done with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
By using the latter approach, the administration has not only done significant damage to government, but has also eroded the public’s trust. The wholesale gutting of staff, cutting of research grants, elimination of programs, and exaggerated claims made in denigrating these programs cannot easily be remedied by the next administration. Expertise has been lost, unmet needs will only multiply, and some elected officials will be hesitant to reestablish or provide funding for programs that this administration has convinced a sizable number of voters are wasteful.
Look at what has been lost. By attempting to discredit the effectiveness of vaccines and shaking the public’s confidence in their importance, we may now see the resurgence of childhood diseases that had largely been eradicated. In eliminating programs that provide food benefits to the poor, not only will they suffer, but America’s farmers who were also often direct beneficiaries of these efforts will be hurt. Tariffs will make imported goods more expensive for American consumers and contribute to an erosion of trust in the US as a reliable trading partner. The resulting loss of US standing in many regions of the world has already led to governments to increasingly look to China. Losses are evident too in setbacks in scientific research, the ability to predict weather conditions and patterns, and the damage done to efforts to meet climate change goals.
When this nightmare ends we will be left with a mess of rubble and a monumental task of rebuilding.
While US President Donald Trump’s disruptive and destructive impact has been mainly felt domestically, it calls to mind the approach President George W. Bush used in the Middle East. In the aftermath of the nightmare of the 9-11 terror attacks, the Bush administration lost control of its policymaking to a collection of neoconservative ideologues both inside and outside of the administration. Convinced that reforming or tweaking the problems that existed in the Middle East would never get to the root of the problems, they chose to apply the wrecking ball to the region. They were going to blow it up and then rebuild “the new Middle East.”
We are now almost eight months into the “constructive chaos” engineered by this administration. The damage they have done is enormous, and will take a generation or more to rebuild.
The Bush policy was based on ideology, not reality. They were going to remove Saddam Hussein, install a government that met US criteria, and, as they so poetically put it, “serve as a beacon of democracy that would light the entire Middle East.” When it became clear that none of this worked, they latched onto the term “constructive chaos” to explain the “logic” behind their Middle East foreign policy. It was an effort to convince us that the mess they had created was intentional and necessary and that the growing violence and instability that followed were merely the “birth pangs” of the “new Middle East” they were helping to usher into existence. But there was no “logic,” and nothing “constructive” about the “chaos.” The spawn of the “birth pangs” were ISIS, an emboldened Iran, and weakened Arab “Republics” that destabilized the region.
We are now almost eight months into the “constructive chaos” engineered by this administration. The damage they have done is enormous, and will take a generation or more to rebuild. At this point, the Trump crowd hasn’t felt the need to fashion a clever explanation for what they’ve done. In part that’s because the impact of the damage is just beginning to be felt and much of Trump’s base are still under his sway and continue to believe that the mess they see isn’t real or will easily be fixed in short order.
But as was the case in the Bush years, reality will ultimately rear its head; questions will be asked and fingers will be pointed. Then the process of rebuilding can begin. It will take time to reconstruct what has been destroyed and to regain the trust that has been lost. But it can be done.
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Neoliberalism in France Receives a New Blow as Yet Another Government Falls
France has now lost its third prime minister in 12 months as political parties from the far-right to the hard-left refuse to back draconian budget proposals as a means of addressing the country’s financial woes.
Sep 08, 2025
Europe’s second-largest economy has plunged into political paralysis again, as the French government has been overthrown by yet another no-confidence vote. This time, the no-confidence vote was against Prime Minister François Bayrou and his proposals to reduce the country’s public deficit from a projected 5.4% in 2025 to 4.6% in 2026—and to fall within the European 3% by 2029—with highly unpopular measures that would have included a “freeze” on government spending, over 5.3 billion euros in cuts to local authorities, and 5 billion euros in cuts in the country’s healthcare budget, yet with plans underway to significantly boost defense spending in the next few years. Bayrou’s 2026 budget envisaged in total around 44 billion euros ($51.3 billion) in cuts, tax increases, and even the scrapping of two public holidays, with the latter stirring as much outcry in France as the austerity budget itself.
Essentially, France has now lost its third prime minister in 12 months as political parties from the far-right National Rally (RN) to the hard-left La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) refuse to back draconian budget proposals as a means of addressing the country’s financial woes. The collapse of the Bayrou government was not a surprise, and some of us had even predicted that it would “meet the same fate” as the government that preceded it, namely that of Michel Barnier. Indeed, there is no other country in Europe with continuous anti-neoliberal struggles as France. Opposition to the normalization of the neoliberal socioeconomic reality has been in constant motion since the mid-1990s when President Jacques Chirac launched a direct attack on the foundational principles of the welfare state.
However, since assuming the presidency in 2017, Emmanuel Macron and his various governments (France has a semi-presidential system) have sought to shove neoliberalism down people’s throats at a record-breaking speed. Unsurprisingly enough, in a recent IFOP poll conducted for Le Journal du Dimanche, French President Emmanuel Macron and his now ousted Prime Minister François Bayrou emerged as the most unpopular leadership duo in the history of the Fifth Republic.
On August 25, Bayrou, who wanted to be known as “Mr. Anti-Debt,” stunned even his political allies when he announced that he would call for a vote in the National Assembly for his neoliberal budget proposals to rescue France from its ailing finances. It was a political grenade that no one had expected. Moreover, Bayrou did so even though he was fully aware of the fact that he was not, in all likelihood, going to avoid the collapse of his government. In fact, he seems to have predicted the outcome of the confidence vote on Monday, September 8, when he said on a radio interview just a few days earlier, in a rather philosophical and quintessentially French fashion, that “there are worse disasters in life than the collapse of the government.”
The most obvious reason why Bayrou gambled with a confidence vote on his plans to reduce France’s public deficit is because he had miscalculated all along the concerns of the French people about deficits and debt. He had embarked on a PR campaign to convince the public that the future of France was at stake on account on the nation’s worrying state of financial affairs. He employed distressful images by invoking the Greek debt crisis of the early 2010s as a warning of what might happen to France and spoke with an apparent earnestness of the possibility of a market meltdown if the French government failed to act boldly and quickly. In his speech to the National Assembly ahead of the confidence vote, Bayrou said that France’s excessive debt load is “life-threatening.”
Yet, typical of neoliberal attitudes and self-serving policies, Bayrou failed all along to realize that while the average French citizens were not insensitive to the realities of the country running a budget deficit of 5.8% of GDP and a national debt of 114% of GDP, they found socially unacceptable the neoliberal economic measures proposed for addressing its financial woes. One could say that, from their own point of view, if the organization of the economy along the principles of neoliberal capitalism is the cause of France’s financial woes, then neoliberalism certainly could not be the answer to their solution. Indeed, an IFOP survey conducted in July found that 57% of respondents believed that a plan was needed to reduce the country’s public deficit and national debt, but only 26% found the measures to be “just.”
The French people, from the far-right to the far-left, have made it very clear that they do not consider neoliberal policies as a remedy either to economic problems such as unemployment or to financial situations like public deficits and national debt.
As a matter of fact, both Bayrou and Macron failed to grasp the fact that it is neoliberalism itself that has fueled the surge both of RN and the New Popular Front (NFP), a coalition of left-wing parties that won the largest number of seats in the snap parliamentary election that was held in July 2024, even if the far-right and the hard-left are worlds apart in terms of the overall social and political values that they embrace and advocate.
There is, however, an additional and probably more important reason why Bayrou gambled on a confidence vote over his neoliberal budget proposal even though he knew that the odds of carrying the day were stacked against him. He was hoping that his decision to do so would compel lawmakers in the National Assembly to think twice about toppling his government by reflecting on the impeding consequences stemming from the planned actions of the grassroots protest movement organized around the cry “Block everything” (“Bloquons tout”), scheduled for September 10. The movement’s organizers hope to bring the country to a complete standstill (which, coincidentally, is what the US needs in light of the autocratic actions of President Donald Trump which are turning the country into a third world dictatorship), but the prevailing climate in French politics and society is such these days that even mainstream political parties have offered backing to this nationwide shutdown that will, apparently, take place even with the collapse of the Bayrou government.
Love it or hate it, one must agree that French politics is never boring. More important, the protest movements in the country—starting at least with the French opposition to the Algerian war, later on with the May ’68 events and more recently with the yellow vest protests and now with the new protest movement dubbed “Block everything”--should provide tremendous inspiration to popular struggles against exploitation, oppression, and social injustices everywhere in the world.
What French President Emmanuel Macron’s move might be following the collapse of Bayrou’s government remains to be seen. Nonetheless, it would be politically naive of him to think that a new government will fare better in the future if it insists on pushing neoliberal measures as a solution to the country’s financial woes. For the French people, from the far-right to the far-left, have made it very clear that they do not consider neoliberal policies as a remedy either to economic problems such as unemployment or to financial situations like public deficits and national debt.
Indeed, even the center-right in France, which in recent years has rallied around Emmanuel Macron and his neoliberal vision, has generally been very cautious about the Anglo-American economic model with its attack on government and worship of the market. No doubt, this is why the prevailing sentiment in France is that not only Macron’s governments cannot sustain themselves in the current political climate but that Macron himself is finished and must go.
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Dumbing Down America’s Best Idea: National Parks in Free Fall
Each week of the Trump administration, there is another action stripping the National Park System of its intellectual, institutional, and moral core.
Aug 16, 2025
Often been referred to as America’s Best Idea, our National Park System has played a key role over the years in inspiring a global conservation movement.
But consider the plight of the National Park Service (NPS) today, nearly 10 years into its second century since its 1916 founding. Even as it sets new all-time visitation records, no one could claim our national parks are basking in a golden age.
Much has been made of the NPS hemorrhaging staff under Trump 2.0, with an estimated 25% overall workforce reduction just since January. At the same time, daily decisions governing national parks are made by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, a former software executive and South Dakota governor with no park management experience. Despite plummeting staff levels, Burgum has issued orders directing that
- All park units remain open;
- Parks should take steps to maximize visitation and recreational opportunities; and
- Accommodate desires of gateway communities in park operations.
At the same time, Secretary Burgum has “consolidated” most all NPS administrative, human resource, and IT staff to work for all Interior agencies, a move costing NPS another 5,700 employees, approximately one-quarter of its remaining workforce. The disruptive impact of this internal move is now just starting to be felt, and its impact is magnified by new restrictions on park purchasing and contracts.
All of this is taking place without an NPS director, or even a nominee to serve as director. Even its chief deputy director is a career Army officer, with no prior national park experience. In addition, the entire chain-of-command through the secretary is almost completely devoid of any official with any background in national parks.
Meanwhile, most of the NPS regional director slots are vacant, and there are an unknown but large number of empty park superintendent positions. Compounding matters is the decision to shutter the two national park academies, which provide training to current and future NPS leaders in the laws, policies, and practices guiding park management. These shutdowns are major blows to the professionalism of this institution.
Even more profoundly, President Donald Trump’s budget plan proposes to divest as many as 350 of the 433 national park units to state or local governments. Meanwhile, the Trump mega-bill leaves NPS on even shakier fiscal status, while the few park investment proposals are highly questionable at best, and do little to help the park system, such as creating a new “Garden of Heroes,” filled with statuary depicting Americans the Trump administration deem as great.
Meanwhile, edicts issued under Trump and Burgum have gone further, such as demanding that all park interpretative displays be stripped of anything that could be interpreted as “negative” or “disparaging.” These orders have the effect of casting aside such essential notions as historical accuracy and cultural context. They also inject a corrosive politicization into park interpretive displays, lectures, and tours which had been designed to educate rather than merely placate.
The first and indispensable step for renewal will be recruiting a new generation of leaders who truly understand and appreciate the unique role of our national parks.
Compounding all of the above is the eviscerating of park planning, with National Environmental Policy Act requirements for considering long-term impacts and alternatives undergoing radical truncation. Consequently, road building and other development projects within national parks will be harder to stop or moderate regardless of damage to park resources. Moreover, since the scientific specialists within NPS are fast disappearing, there will be little capacity to even assess those impacts.
One example of this scientific retreat is the cessation of air quality monitoring at national parks. Maintaining the air quality of our most pristine places is apparently no longer of value, but it is far from the only scientific research work in our parks grinding to a halt.
In short, the combination of these developments means that our park system is being hollowed out. Each week there is another action stripping the National Park System of its intellectual, institutional, and moral core. The damage done in the past few months is both dramatic and cumulative, in many cases building on a slow degradation over the past 30 years. It will not be easily or quickly reversed.
Nor has the system touched bottom yet, as the impact of several of these moves has yet to be full felt. This descent will be long and painful with a turnaround not yet on the horizon.
The first and indispensable step for renewal will be recruiting a new generation of leaders who truly understand and appreciate the unique role of our national parks. They will have to rededicate our park system to an ethic of public enjoyment that also safeguards conservation of these resources for the balance of national parks’ second century. It cannot happen soon enough.
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