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America’s Safety Is Fragile; Trump Is Tearing Down the Systems That Protect It
The systems that protect our lives and our communities were built through years of tireless effort. They can’t be allowed to collapse overnight.
May 05, 2025
America in 2025 is safer than it’s been in years. After a devastating surge during the early pandemic—when the U.S. homicide rate rose more than 30%—homicide rates have since plummeted. In 2024 alone, they dropped 16% nationally, one of the sharpest declines since the FBI began keeping national data.
This progress isn’t happenstance. It’s the direct result of deliberate investments in policy, research, and community-led strategies that addressed the underlying reasons for crime and violence. This progress is now under direct assault as the Trump administration has moved swiftly to dismantle the vital systems that keep Americans safe. In the last two weeks, the Justice Department canceled hundreds of critical grants to local governments and community organizations that fund violence prevention and public safety programs. Hundreds of National Science Foundation grants were terminated, including my own, following infiltration from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. If these rollbacks continue, we risk reversing years of progress and returning to a more violent, less stable future.
In Camden, New Jersey—where I teach at Rutgers University and serve as director of research at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center—the turnaround has been particularly dramatic. Just over a decade ago, Camden was written off as the “murder capital of the country.” In 2013, the small city of 75,000 people saw 57 homicides. In 2024, that number dropped to 17—a historic low. Today, fewer families are grieving, and fewer children are growing up in the shadow of violence. For a city long abandoned by political will and public imagination, this transformation offers a lesson in what’s possible when communities and institutions work together.
We must demand that our leaders defend our right to safety—not just from crime, but from neglect, disinvestment, and political sabotage.
The progress in Camden was not inevitable. It was built—piece by piece—through hard-won investments in community violence prevention and a complete overhaul of the city’s police force. And in recent years, we’ve seen similar progress unfold across the country in reducing violence—driven by a surge in federal investment and coordination.
In the wake of the pandemic, the Biden administration invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the kind of labor-intensive work that makes communities safer through the Community-Based Violence Intervention Initiative and provisions within the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Laws were passed to extend background checks, implement life-saving red flag laws, and crack down on gun traffickers. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives regulated ghost guns and the kits used to assemble them, curbing the surge of untraceable firearms on our streets. The White House even established an Office of Gun Violence Prevention to lead these efforts. Federal funding allowed grassroots organizations to hire street outreach workers and get help to those affected by violence before more harm was done.
States and cities followed suit, creating their own offices of violence prevention and refocusing law enforcement efforts on the those at highest risk while improving community relations. For the first time in decades, a coherent, multi-sector approach to safety led by the federal government was beginning to take hold. It was working.
All of that is now under threat.
Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has moved swiftly to dismantle the vital systems that keep Americans safe. The administration’s attacks are wide-ranging but the bigger picture is what matters. These aren’t isolated cuts or rollbacks. Taken together, they amount to a deliberate dismantling of the very infrastructure that underpins public safety in this country.
On his first day in office, Trump shuttered the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. In recent weeks, the Department of Health and Human Services initiated massive layoffs, including nearly the entire Division of Violence Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Programs that tracked injuries and deaths—like the Web-Based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS)—have gone dark. Researchers at universities across the country have had their federal funding frozen, stalled, or revoked, often with no official explanation. A group of House Republicans, led by Rep. Diana Harshbarger of Tennessee, has even called for a complete ban on federal research aimed at preventing gun violence—an attack not just on science, but on the very idea that violence is a problem we can solve.
The Department of Justice has also reversed course. A zero-tolerance policy for lawbreaking gun dealers, established under the Biden administration, has been eliminated. The result: Dealers who sell firearms without background checks or falsify records are now far less likely to lose their licenses. Attorney General Pam Bondi is reviewing lifesaving gun regulations, including a rule closing the gun show loophole and a ban on certain AR-style firearm attachments used in mass shootings. These policies were hard-fought and evidence-based. Now, they’re on the chopping block.
None of this is abstract. Research, policy, and funding are what make real-world safety possible. Without them, outreach workers and police officers can’t do their jobs. Emergency room partnerships break down. Communities lose tools to anticipate and prevent violence. Safety doesn’t just happen. It is produced through effort, coordination, and care. And when those systems collapse, people die.
Violence is not just a crime issue. It is a preventable threat to public health, even if the administration denies it. It spreads, it scars, and it sickens. It takes our children, hurts those who are most marginalized, and it divides us. The recent gains in safety are fragile—hard-earned, but easily reversed. If the systems that made that progress possible are dismantled, the violence will return. We can’t take this moment for granted, and we cannot afford to stand by while it’s undone.
We must demand that our leaders defend our right to safety—not just from crime, but from neglect, disinvestment, and political sabotage. The systems that protect our lives and our communities were built through years of tireless effort. They can’t be allowed to collapse overnight. The cost is too great. The consequences, unthinkable. It’s time to reclaim public safety as a public good, and to fight—loudly—for the systems that make peace possible.
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Trump Lawyers Behaving Badly
The White House attorneys who drafted Trump’s executive orders targeting Big Law firms—and the Justice Department lawyers trying to defend them—should consider the oath they took to defend the Constitution.
May 04, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi “to seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation,” including legal filings for improper purposes and statements that are not based on evidence.
Bondi should start with the White House attorneys who drafted Trump’s executive orders targeting Big Law firms—and her Justice Department lawyers trying to defend them.
Did Real Lawyers Write These Orders?
Cloaked in empty rhetoric about “conduct detrimental to critical American interests,” retribution is at the core of Trump’s edicts.
For example, the only detailed rationale for Trump’s Jenner & Block order was the firm’s association with Andrew Weissmann, who returned to the firm in 2020 after completing his work for Special Counsel Robert Mueller on the Trump-Russia investigation. Other than the Weissmann diatribe, Trump’s order merely recited vague and unsupported assertions about alleged “partisan ‘lawfare,’” “abuse of its pro bono practice,” and “racial discrimination.”
But on that basis, Trump directed all federal agencies to: 1) limit the entire firm’s engagement with federal employees; 2) limit the entire firm’s access to federal buildings; 3) suspend the entire firm’s security clearances; 4) terminate the firm’s government contracts; and 5) require all government contractors to disclose any business that they do with Jenner—with an eye toward terminating those contracts as well.
Zealous advocacy on behalf of any client—even the president of the United States—has limits.
Four law firms have challenged Trump’s similar orders. In stark language, four separate federal courts have granted immediate relief:
- “Disturbing”
- “It sends little chills down my spine.”
- “It threatens to significantly undermine our entire legal system and the ability of all people to access justice.”
- “There is no doubt this retaliatory action chills speech and legal advocacy, or that it qualifies as a constitutional harm.”
- “The framers of our Constitution would see this as a shocking abuse of power.”
In three recent hearings, Deputy Associate Attorney General Richard Lawson—Bondi’s longtime Florida colleague and Trump loyalist—struggled to answer judges’ basic questions about the orders targeting Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, and Jenner & Block:
- Do law firms have to make deals with Trump to avoid executive orders?
- “I can’t speak to that.”
- Are the deals in writing?
- “I have not been privy to this.”
- Has Trump achieved $1 billion in deals yet?
- “I do not know.”
When Lawson argued that Trump could target Jenner because it “discriminates against its employees based on race,” U.S. District Court Judge John Bates, an appointee of President George W. Bush, snapped back, “Give me a break.”
In fairness to Lawson, Trump and his White House attorneys who wrote the orders hadn’t given him much to work with.
Jenner: A Case Study
Take a closer look at Jenner’s claims, followed by selected highlights of the government’s 37-page response:
The First Amendment:
- Prohibits retaliatory actions for protected speech and viewpoint discrimination;
- Bars government interference with a client’s right to associate; and
- Prevents the government from imposing unconstitutional conditions on access to government services and benefits.
The government says that Trump was just exercising his free speech rights. It asserts that Jenner’s lawsuit “carries with it a dangerous risk of muzzling the Executive.” The government also argues that Jenner’s speech is not protected insofar as it “consists of employment practices involving racial discrimination [favoring women and minorities].”
The Fifth and Sixth Amendments guarantee a litigant the unfettered right to the effective assistance of counsel of his or her choice.
The government says that: 1) clients (not law firms) have to assert such claims; 2) any impact of barring Jenner from federal buildings or its clients from federal contracts is speculative; and 3) Trump’s order does not violate those rights in any event.
Due Process is required before the government can deprive a person of liberty or property interests. It requires notice of the claims, clarity about their meaning, and the opportunity to be heard before the deprivation occurs. None of that occurred. The resulting harm, including damage to the firm’s reputation, was immediate and ongoing.
The government says that: 1) the order is sufficiently clear; 2) it has not yet harmed the firm; and 3) the firm will receive any required notice before the order actually injures it.
Equal Protection requires the government to treat similarly-situated entities similarly or, at a minimum, have a rational basis for failing to do so.
The government insists that Jenner is not being singled out for unfair treatment.
The Constitution’s Separation of Powers prohibits Trump from acting as accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. But he wore all of those hats in his executive order.
The government says that Trump’s order is an appropriate exercise of presidential power.
Attention All Trump Lawyers: It’s Time for a Gut Check
Zealous advocacy on behalf of any client—even the president of the United States—has limits. Upon admission to the bar, every attorney swears an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution and to uphold the rule of law. A code of professional ethics requires any legal argument to be “warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument” for changing it. Attorneys must ensure that their statements about facts are “reasonably based” on evidentiary support.
Trump’s retaliatory orders seek to intimidate lawyers and law firms into submission and thereby undermine the legal system. His own conduct refutes his lawyers’ contrary arguments. As other firms have capitulated, pledged “political neutrality,” and collectively committed to provide almost $1 billion in free legal services to Trump-designated causes, his executive orders’ stated concerns about those firms’ “conduct detrimental to critical American interests” miraculously disappeared.
Trump even boasted, “And I agree they’ve done nothing wrong. But what the hell—they give me a lot of money, considering.”
In one of the many amicus briefs supporting Jenner’s challenge, more than 800 law firms—including Deputy Associate Attorney General Lawson’s former firm, Manatt, Phelps, & Phillips—urged that Trump’s executive order “should be permanently enjoined as a violation of core First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment guarantees, as well as bedrock separation-of-powers principles.”
“But something even more fundamental is at stake… [Trump’s] Orders pose a grave threat to our system of constitutional governance and to the rule of law itself.”
I don’t know what Trump’s lawyers see when they look into a mirror. But I know this: History will not be kind to them.
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After Two Setbacks For Google’s Monopoly, the Fight To Rein in Its Empire Continues
Long given an effective pass for its anti-competitive behavior, the company is finally getting its comeuppance in federal court, and not a moment too soon.
May 02, 2025
Don’t look now, but the federal government just notched not one, but two, major antitrust victories against one of the biggest corporations on Earth.
In the past few decades, digital monopolists like Google have built far-reaching empires impacting almost every facet of our online lives. Long given an effective pass for its anti-competitive behavior, the company is finally getting its comeuppance in federal court, and not a moment too soon.
Back in 2020, the Department of Justice (DOJ) sued Google for illegally monopolizing the search market. In 2023, this was followed by a second suit over the company’s digital advertising monopoly. In the first case, federal Judge Amit Mehta stated the obvious in his ruling that when it comes to the search engine market, Google is a monopolist; in April, the DOJ pushed an ambitious remedy proposal to dismantle its search monopoly. Google was dealt another blow in April in the second case, where judge Leonie Brinkema agreed that Google has illegally monopolized online advertising.
Antitrust enforcers are now making major strides toward reining in Google’s anti-competitive behavior.
There’s no question that Google’s monopoly is looking more fragile than ever. Even as Big Tech CEOs have bent over backwards to curry favor with the Trump administration, they’ve failed to stop antitrust efforts against them from continuing. And at a time when Meta is also in the antitrust hot seat in court, there’s real reason for optimism when it comes to finally taking Big Tech to task.
Nevertheless, when you consider the scale of Google’s empire, the search and digital advertising lawsuits should be seen as just the beginning of the battle. Sure, anyone who’s used a computer understands just how ubiquitous Google’s search engine is. But less obvious to most people is that it is set to control a media empire bigger than Disney, all while working to dominate the self-driving car market and gobble up promising startups. This doesn’t even get into the AI factor: As the DOJ noted in court, the rapid pace of AI development could further entrench Google’s monopoly if left unchecked.
Take YouTube, Google’s most powerful asset after search. As antitrust suits against Google in the U.S. and abroad have piled up in recent years, YouTube has often felt like a threat hidden in plain sight. Take the issue of advertising on YouTube, for example. The Information, a tech-focused publication, noted last year that Google has a policy of requiring would-be YouTube advertisers to use Google’s in-house DV360 tool. The impact of this rule has, predictably, been to put more money in Google’s pockets while deepening advertisers’ reliance on its services.
For $1.6 billion in 2006, Google was able to take control of what today is the world’s largest video platform, with the deal avoiding antitrust action. Almost 20 years later, there remains no real competitor to YouTube: Though TikTok and Instagram’s Reels compete with YouTube when it comes to short-form video, the service is without a peer in long-form, monetizable content.
In June 2024, a coalition of advocacy groups called on the DOJ to scrutinize YouTube. In their letter, they noted that the platform’s dominance is propped up by bundling practices that make it nearly impossible for rivals to compete. Of specific concern is that smart TVs emerging as a norm in U.S. households could allow Google and YouTube to cement its dominance in home entertainment.
Few moves better illustrate Google’s expansionist mindset (and arrogance in the face of antitrust lawsuits) than its bid to acquire Wiz. Though not a household name, there’s a reason that Google is intent on acquiring it, even after its initial bid was turned down. Despite launching just five years ago, Wiz has grown so fast that it is now used by roughly half of all Fortune 500 companies. By acquiring Wiz, Google will make other corporate giants even more dependent on its services, further fortifying its monopoly status.
Much of the coverage of the Wiz deal centers on its price tag, and for good reason. At $32 billion dollars, the Wiz acquisition stands to be the most expensive in Google’s history. This isn’t just notable because it is occurring in the face of multiple antitrust showdowns. But more unusual is that this figure is 30 times larger than Wiz’s expected revenue for 2025. While the math may seem peculiar at first, there’s likely more than meets the eye here.
Few have better insight into Google’s anti-competitive behavior than Jonathan Kanter, who took the company to court twice when he led the DOJ Antitrust Division under former President Joe Biden. In a recent CNBC interview, Kanter posited that the deal could be a “Trojan horse for Google to get access to data that is increasingly becoming out of its reach.”
In 2006, federal regulators fumbled the ball by allowing the acquisition of YouTube to go through unscathed. The next year, the Federal Trade Commission made the mistake of allowing Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, a deal that would help build and cement the company’s digital advertising dominance. But two decades later, antitrust enforcers are now making major strides toward reining in Google’s anti-competitive behavior. As federal officials work to correct the mistakes of the past, they should continue taking a multifaceted approach to Google’s monopoly.
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