The Trump Administration is gutting the federal agency in charge of combatting foreign election interference, increasing the likelihood that foreign actors could successfully meddle in US elections.
Bridget Bean, the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, announced on Friday in a memo obtained by WIRED that she was ordering “a review and assessment” of all positions at the agency focused on election security and countering disinformation and misinformation. Bean, a former Trump official at FEMA, said that CISA would “pause all elections security activities” until the review is completed in early March.
The administration has already placed 17 staffers at CISA who work with local election officials to prevent cyber-attacks and other forms of foreign and domestic election interference on administrative leave. Separately, Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded an FBI task force charged with combatting foreign election interference by the likes of Russia, China and other countries.
Taken together, election security experts warn these moves will put US elections dangerously at risk of foreign interference.
“Every cut made to our election security and foreign malign influence operations is like handing a gift on a silver platter to our foreign adversaries such as Russia, China and Iran,” Kathy Boockvar, the former secretary of state for Pennsylvania and co-chair of the Elections Committee of the National Association of Secretaries of State during the 2020 election, told NPR this week. “It directly strengthens their ability to invade our national security and interfere in our elections, leaving every American citizen more vulnerable.”
CISA coordinates cybersecurity efforts across the US government and helps election administrators secure voting machines from hackers and prevent other threats to US elections while countering the increasing spread of disinformation and misinformation from foreign and domestic actors. In December, it revealed that Chinese hackers were targeting US telecom records and trying to steal information from high-ranking politicians and government officials.
Kentucky Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams told the Associated Press recently that the agency’s work with local election officials was particularly important. “The most value that we’ve got from CISA has been the people that they have on the ground in our state that build direct relationships, not just with us but with the individual county clerks,” he said. “They’re teaching them and helping them check their physical security and their cyber hygiene, and that’s been extremely popular.”
After Russian actors interfered in the 2016 election, Congress passed a bipartisan bill creating CISA in 2018, designating election security as critical infrastructure. Trump signed it despite calling evidence of Russian interference in the election “a hoax.” But he turned on the agency after it combatted his false claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 election. He fired CISA’s first director, Chris Krebs, after he called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”
House Republicans subsequently accused CISA of being “the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media.” The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 report called for gutting the agency, a blueprint the administration appears to be following.
The effort to dismantle the federal government’s role in combatting foreign election interference comes at a time when such threats are increasing. Foreign adversaries are “more active now than they ever have been” in election interference and disinformation efforts, Jen Easterly, CISA’s director under the Biden Administration, warned in advance of the 2024 election.
The mostly white residents that call Skidaway Island, Georgia home today consider it a paradise: waterfront views, live oaks and marsh grass alongside golf courses, swimming pools, and other amenities.
Rewind to 1865: The island was a thriving Black community, where freedmen farmed, created a system of government, and turned former cotton plantations into a Black American success story. It began when the government gave them land under Field Order No. 15, also known as the 40 acres program. But it wouldn’t last.
Within two years, the government had taken that land back from the freedmen and returned it to the former enslavers.
Over a two-and-a-half-year investigation, journalists at the Center for Public Integrity unearthed records that prove that dozens of freed people had, and lost, titles to tracts at what’s now The Landings. Today, 40 acres in The Landings development are worth at least $20 million.
“You could feel chills to know that they had it and then they just pulled the rug from under them, so to speak,” said Linda Brown, one of the few Black residents at The Landings.
This week on Reveal, with the Center for Public Integrity and in honor of Black History Month, we also show a descendant her ancestor’s title for a plot of land that is now becoming another exclusive gated community. And we look at how buried documents like these Reconstruction-era land titles are part of the long game toward reparations.
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At a time when Republicans control all levers of power in Washington and national Democrats are struggling to respond to Donald Trump’s increasingly extreme agenda, Democrats at the state legislative level are targeting ten states in an effort to resist Trump and protect key rights and freedoms.
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) announced this week that its top targets for the 2025-2026 election cycle include defending its one-seat majorities in the state Houses of Virginia and Pennsylvania, and both chambers of the legislature in Alaska, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
“Five of our battleground chambers were each decided in the last election cycle by a single seat, directly impacting the lives of 40 million Americans,” the DLCC wrote in a recent strategy memo. “Majorities in many states will likely come down to just a few districts and hundreds of votes.”
Democrats are also hoping to chip away at GOP state legislative majorities in Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, and North Carolina.
Such races are often overlooked at the national level, but state legislatures have a tremendous amount of power to decide weighty matters on the economy, healthcare, voting laws, abortion rights, gun control, and much more. The complete absence of Democratic power in Washington magnifies the importance of the states; Democratic attorneys general, for example, are leading the way on challenging Trump’s king-like assertion of executive power on issues like immigration and cuts to federal funding.
“As Trump throws one chaos bomb after another, there’s never been a more important time to watch what’s happening in the states,” DLCC President Heather Williams said in a press call on Friday. “State legislatures are the only ballot level with the power to fight back against Project 2025 and the Republicans’ takeover of Washington. This is also the only place where Democrats are in majorities and can pass any kind of proactive agenda.”
Democratic state legislative candidates outperformed the party’s dismal performance at the top of the ticket in 2024. Though Trump won 312 Electoral College votes, Republicans gained only 57 seats out of the roughly 6,000 races on the ballot across the country, according to an analysis by Bolts. While Democrats lost control of legislative chambers in Michigan and Minnesota, they held closely contested chambers like the Pennsylvania House and picked up 14 seats in the Wisconsin legislature after previously gerrymandered maps were struck down, rare bright spots for the party in swing states Trump won.
Still, following the 2024 election, Republicans have one-party control of 23 states compared to 15 for Democrats. Democrats want to not only pick up seats in 2026, but continue making gains through 2030, when new redistricting maps will be drawn following the decennial census.
The unpopularity of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris no doubt hurt Democrats down-ballot in 2024. In 2026, Democrats could benefit from an anti-Trump backlash at the polls, like they did during the first midterm election under Trump in 2018, when the party flipped more than 300 state legislative seats. Some of Trump’s initial actions in his second term, like a freeze on federal grants that states rely on, could be a particularly salient issue for voters. At the same time, local candidates may be better positioned to emphasize bread-and-butter issues like the cost of living that the national party too often ignored in 2024.
“I think by and large Democrats are focused on affordability,” said DLCC political director Jeremy Jansen. “One of the clear lessons learned from the electorate in 2024 is that affordability is a big issue right now. Democrats are doing what they can at the state level to impact the lives of everyday folks and help address issues of affordability and economic opportunity.”
The Republican advantage at the state level had a major impact on the balance of power in Washington. Republicans in North Carolina drew an aggressive gerrymander of U.S House districts in advance of the 2024 election, which allowed the GOP to pick up three new House seats—just enough to maintain control of the chamber and ensure one-party rule in DC, removing any checks and balances to Trump in Congress.
As Williams put it, “The future of the country hinges on the balance of power in the states.”
The natural environment took an unprecedented pounding during the war in Gaza. And as the territory’s inhabitants have returned home since the ceasefire, the extent of the environmental devastation is becoming clear, raising crucial questions about how to reconstruct Gaza in the face of severe and potentially irreversible damage to the environment.
The war has knocked out water supplies and disabled sewage treatment facilities, causing raw effluent to flow across the land, polluting the Mediterranean and underground water reserves essential for irrigating crops. More than two-thirds of Gaza’s farmland, including wells and greenhouses, has been damaged or destroyed by bombardment and military earthworks.
Detailed satellite images taken since the ceasefire began on January 19 show 80 percent of Gaza’s trees lost. In addition, vital wetlands, sand dunes, coastal waters, and the only significant river, the Wadi Gaza, have all suffered extensively. The UN Environment Programme warns that the stripping of trees, shrubs, and crops has so badly damaged the soils of the once-fertile, biodiverse, and well-watered territory that it faces long-term desertification.
Nature is the “silent victim of Israel’s war on Gaza,” says Saeed Bagheri, a lecturer in international law at the University of Reading in the U.K.
Scientist Ahmed Hilles, head of the National Institute for Environment and Development, a leading Palestinian think tank, last week called for an international fact-finding committee “to assess the damage and lay the basis for environmental restoration and long-term recovery.” He said it should “prioritize the rehabilitation of water sources, soil remediation, and the restoration of agricultural lands.”
The Palestinian territory of Gaza extends for 24 miles along the shore of the eastern Mediterranean. Though small, it is a biodiversity hotspot where wildlife from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa meet. It has boasted more than 250 bird species and 100 mammal species, from wild cats and wolves to mongooses and mole rats, according to research conducted over the past two decades by the foremost expert on the territory’s fauna and flora, Abdel Fattah Abd Rabou of the Islamic University of Gaza in Gaza City.
Both wildlife and the human population have been sustained by its abundant underground water reserves. “The shallow sand wells provided an ample supply of the sweet life-giving water,” says Mark Zeitoun, director general of the Geneva Water Hub, which advocates for peace through diplomacy on water. This water, overlain by fertile soils, was why so many Palestinians fled to Gaza after being expelled from their homes by militias following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
But Gaza’s population has since soared to more than 2 million inhabitants, making it one of the most densely populated places on Earth—it vies with Singapore, but without the high-rises. That has put immense pressure on the underground water. Extraction prior to the war was more than three times greater than recharge from rainfall and seepage from the Wadi Gaza, which had dwindled due to dams upstream in Israel.
As water tables fall, salty seawater has infiltrated the aquifer. By 2023, more than 97 percent of Gaza’s once-sweet underground water was unfit for drinking, according to the World Health Organization. Increasingly, well water has been restricted to irrigating crops. Public water supplies have come largely from seawater desalination plants built with international aid, augmented by water delivered from Israel through three cross-border pipelines.
The UN estimates the war has left more than 40 million tons of rubble that includes human remains, asbestos, and unexploded ordnance.
But since the start of the war on October 7, 2023, public supplies have dramatically diminished. Last October, the Palestine Water Authority reported that 85 percent of water facilities were at least partially out of action. Output from water-supply wells had fallen by more than a half, and desalination plants lacked power, while Israel had reduced deliveries down the pipelines.
A survey found that only 14 percent of households still relied on public supplies. Most were taking water from potentially contaminated open wells or unregulated private tankers. In September, Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, the UN special rapporteur on human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation, charged that limiting access to clean water “is clearly employed as a weapon in Gaza against [the] Palestinian civil population.”
Israel denies this. “The IDF does not aim to inflict excessive damage to civilian infrastructure,” an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson said, “and strikes exclusively on the grounds of military necessity and in strict accordance with international law.” It cites cases where it says Hamas has stored weapons and launched attacks from such water infrastructure.
Meanwhile, the fate of the once-abundant underground water—the lifeline for both human and natural life—hangs by a thread. With most wells currently out of use for irrigated agriculture, withdrawals from the aquifer may have been reduced. But the war has increased contamination of what water remains.
The threats are various. UNEP warns that Israeli efforts to use seawater to flood the estimated 300 miles of underground tunnels Hamas has dug beneath Gaza could be contaminating the groundwaters beneath. (The IDF has said on social media that it “takes into consideration the soil and water systems in the area” before flooding tunnels.) Meanwhile, sewage treatment has all but ceased, with facilities either destroyed by military action or disabled by lack of power. Even the solar panels installed at some treatment works have reportedly been destroyed.
Raw sewage and wastewater spills across the land and into water courses or the Mediterranean—up to 3.5 million cubic feet every day, according to UNEP. The porous soils in most of Gaza mean sewage discharged onto the land readily seeps into underground water reserves. “The crisis threatens long-term environmental damage as contaminants seep into groundwater,” says the UN Development Programme (UNDP).
The marine environment is also choking in sewage. In 2022 Israeli environmentalist Gidon Bromberg, who heads EcoPeace Middle East, a transnational NGO, persuaded Israeli security authorities to allow Gaza to import cement to build new three sewage treatment plants along the shoreline. The work was completed, and the following summer both Palestinians and Israelis could, for the first time in many years, swim safely from their respective Mediterranean beaches without encountering Gaza’s raw sewage. Fish returned and a Mediterranean monk seal was recorded for the first time ever off Gaza. But by the start of 2024, a few months after the war began, the plants were all out of action and satellite images showed plumes of sewage spewing into the sea.
The destruction of the built environment in Gaza is also a threat to the natural environment. UN agencies estimate the war has created more than 40 million tons of rubble, containing human remains, asbestos and other hazardous materials, and unexploded ordnance. Meanwhile, the collapse of waste collection services has resulted in a proliferation of makeshift dumps—141, according to a UNDP count in October—while open-air waste burning regularly sends black smoke and hazardous pollutants through densely populated areas.
Some international lawyers argue that Israel is guilty of war crimes against the natural environment in Gaza as much as against its people. The Geneva Convention prohibits warfare that may cause “widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment.” All three terms provoke debate about their precise meaning. The IDF said its actions are proportionate and are justified by military needs and within international law. But Bagheri said, “The destruction of the natural environment in Gaza is now very well documented. It is not collateral or incidental, but deliberate.”
Before the conflict, cultivation covered more than a third of Gaza. But by September, the UN Food and Agriculture Organizaton assessed that two-thirds of farmland had been badly damaged. Analyses of satellite imagery by Forensic Architecture, an interdisciplinary group of researchers at Goldsmiths’ College, part of the University of London, dedicated to exposing “state and corporate violence,” found that more than 2,000 farms, greenhouses, and other agricultural sites had been destroyed, “often to be replaced with Israeli military earthworks.”
The IDF said it “does not intentionally harm agricultural land and seeks to mitigate environmental impact,” but that “Hamas often operates from within orchards, fields, and agricultural land”. Yet there are growing concerns that the damage—in particular from the removal of trees—could prove permanent.
Tree loss has been examined in detail by He Yin, a geographer who heads the remote sensing and land science laboratory at Kent State University. He shared with Yale Environment 360 his latest assessment of satellite images.
Before the war, trees covered around a third of the cultivated area, he says. By late September, 67 percent of them had been damaged. But by January 21, two days after the ceasefire came into effect, that figure had risen to 80 percent, with losses exceeding 90 percent in northern Gaza. Prior to the conflict there were some natural trees, says Yin. “But I would say they are pretty much all gone now.”
There are two likely causes of tree loss: displaced residents cutting down trees for firewood, and the Israeli military bombarding and uprooting trees to eliminate cover for Hamas fighters and clear security buffer zones around the edge of Gaza.
With most farms covering less than two acres, “the loss of a single tree can be devastating” for farmers’ future fruit harvests, says Yin. But the environmental implications of tree loss could also prove permanent and devastating for future generations. UNEP says that uprooting by military equipment “has moved, mixed and thinned the topsoil cover over large areas.” This, it says, “will impact future cultivation [and] make the land vulnerable to desertification.”
All this is bad news not just for people, but for wildlife. The space for nature to flourish in Gaza is very limited. Still, long-term research by Abd Rabou found that, despite human population pressures, some species have revived in recent years. After the abandonment of a series of Israeli settlements in the territory in 2005, “dozens of Arabian wolf [sic] and other carnivores crept intermittently through gaps in the border to the east of the Gaza Strip.”
Yin’s images of the area reveal an almost total loss of trees since May, sometimes replaced by bombardment craters.
Animals dug burrows beneath Israel’s security fences to reach domestic livestock and poultry, as well as small prey living in waste dumps and sewage treatment plants.
But there are natural attractions for wildlife too. The Wadi Gaza, which bisects the territory, is an important stopover for migrating water birds, including herons, storks, flamingos, and raptors, as well as home to the Palestine sunbird, the territory’s national bird. The wadi’s attraction continues even though it has suffered badly in recent decades from both upstream water diversions and sewage discharged from refugee camps.
Still, in 2000, the Palestinian Authority made the wadi the territory’s only nature reserve, and in 2022, work began on a $50 million UN project to reduce pollution and restore its ecology.
The start of the war halted that work. And over the past 15 months, the wadi has again become a running sewer and dumping ground. “Top of my concerns for Wadi Gaza are pollution from debris, wastewater, corpses, ammunition, and explosives,” says Nada Majdalani, the Palestine director of EcoPeace Middle East.
Another ill-fated Gazan ecological treasure is Al-Mawasi, a narrow fertile strip of sand dunes near the border with Egypt. Once, Al-Mawasi was thinly populated and rich in wildlife attracted by miniature wetlands that form amid the dunes where the underground water surfaces. Abd Rabou has recorded 135 bird species there, including many Palestine sunbirds, as well as 14 species of mammals and 20 of reptiles.
But early in the war, the IDF designated Al-Mawasi a “safe zone” for people fleeing its bombardment of nearby towns. Hundreds of thousands sought shelter amid the dunes. Then, last July, the IDF began bombing the enclave, in pursuit of Hamas fighters. This redoubled the damage to the fragile ecosystem. Yin’s images of the area reveal an almost total loss of trees since May, sometimes replaced by bombardment craters.
Currently, most information about the state of Gaza’s natural environment comes from such remote sensing imagery. Detailed ground observations are rare. It has been unsafe, and even with a ceasefire, NGOs have other priorities. Meanwhile, academic life has been shattered by the war. Much of the Islamic University of Gaza, including Abd Rabou’s biology department, was destroyed in the first days of the conflict.
With or without a restored campus, it may be a while before peer-reviewed literature on the state of nature in Gaza resumes. When I contacted Abd Rabou by email in January to discuss his work, he sent a swift reply. “Now I am not able to communicate at all,” he wrote, “because five of my children were lost during the Israeli war on Gaza and my house was completely destroyed.”
Minnesota teenager Ava T. lives with seizures that predominate in the morning, preventing her from attending school safely before noon. When her suburban Minneapolis school district refused to update her individualized education plan—a disability accommodation guaranteed by federal law—to allow at-home evening instruction to compensate, Ava and her parents sued in 2021.
A district court sided with Ava and her family—her last name is withheld—ruling in 2022 that the school district had violated her rights under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. But separate complaints say that the district had breached Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, which include extensive disability rights provisions. In five of the 13 federal circuit courts, including the Eighth Circuit, which covers Minnesota, families suing schools under Section 504 and the ADA have to prove “bad faith or gross misjudgment,” a standard the Eighth Circuit said Ava’s case did not meet—despite acknowledging that the family “may have established a genuine dispute about whether the district was negligent or even deliberately indifferent.”
The Supreme Court agreed to hear Ava’s case, A.J.T. v. Osseo Area Schools, in January. Its ruling will decide whether that tougher standard—bad faith is notoriously hard to prove—applies nationwide under Section 504 and the ADA when suing schools. A ruling against Ava and her family could be a major setback for student disability rights enforcement and an equally major boon for the Trump administration’s plan to gut the Department of Education at the expense of disabled kids
“All that [Ava] was seeking was the same kind of access to an education that she would have had if she didn’t have this disability.”
“Bad faith and gross misjudgment are made-up standard that’s not in the text of the statute at all,” says Stanford Law School professor William Koski, who directs the school’s Youth and Education Law Project. If the majority of justices were—as they claim—”textualists,” Koski says, they’d overturn the Eighth Circuit’s ruling.
The Osseo case has drawn less public response from disability organizations than other suits to reach the Supreme Court—like 2023’s Acheson Hotels, LLC v. Laufer, ruled moot before it was heard—perhaps because of more drastic, faster-moving concerns, like executive branch assaults on the Department of Education and vital medical research. Unlike some of those attacks, this case wouldn’t risk a wholesale dismantling of disability rights, but rather continue to expand an anti–civil rights practice not rooted in law.
Koski sees it as positive “that the court’s going to weigh in” on the contested topic, but “as a lawyer who represents children and families,” he says, “I hope they clear it up on the side of the less stringent standard.”
The Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, an association of disabled children, parents, and lawyers—submitted a statement in support of Ava T.’s case. “All that [Ava] was seeking was the same kind of access to an education that she would have had if she didn’t have this disability,” COPAA legal director Selene Almazan told Mother Jones. Almazan says the bad-faith test is at odds with the Handicapped Children’s Protection Act of 1986 that was codified into law by Congress, calling the test “a very outdated standard”—one that the Supreme Court might even overturn.
The school district in the case, meanwhile, has repeatedly argued that a ruling in its favor would have little impact on kids with disabilities. Koski, who has a long history of litigation in support of disabled children and their families, disagrees.
“If you have a more stringent standard like bad faith or gross misjudgment,” Koski says, “It’s going to be much more difficult for plaintiffs to bring freestanding, independent claims under Section 504.”
The acting head of the National Archives announced his resignation on Friday, paving the way for Donald Trump to continue his takeover of the government’s records and the agency that serves as custodian of the nation’s history.
Deputy Archivist William Bosanko informed staff in an email Friday that he will step down on Tuesday. Bosanko, who has worked at the agency since 1993, has been the acting head of the National Archives and Records Administration for just a week, after Trump fired Archivist of the United States Colleen Shogan.
Under federal law, a president can fire the archivist but must also “communicate the reasons for any such removal to each House of the Congress.” Trump did not do that. Over a week ago, the Trump White House moved to make Secretary of State Marco Rubio the acting archivist, despite standing law that the deputy archivist assumes those responsibilities if the position is vacant.
Bosanko’s exit is part of a Trump putsch at the agency, which was deeply involved in the case of the top-secret documents Trump removed from the White House when he left office in 2021. According to two sources familiar with the situation, Bosanko was pushed out by Jim Byron, a 31-year old who was recently president of the Richard Nixon Foundation. Byron delivered Bosanko an ultimatum: Resign now or be fired next week.
Reached by phone Friday evening, Byron declined to comment.
Byron has been working out of the Archives’ offices as a political appointee representing the White House. Byron has often described himself as a mentee of Hugh Hewitt, an ardent pro-Trump commentator who preceded Bryon as head of the Nixon Foundation and who now sits on its board. (The Nixon Foundation and the Archives have occasionally been in conflict with each other, which often happens with presidential foundations and the government agency that oversees presidential libraries, according to an Archives source.)
Speculation at the Archives regarding the next head archivist has focused on Hewitt and two other candidates: John Solomon, a far-right journalist known for reporting and promoting false claims about Joe Biden’s connections to Ukraine in 2019, and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a former senior director of intelligence at the National Security Council in the early days of the Trump administration, who was hired by then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn (before Flynn was fired) and later ousted by H.R. McMaster, Flynn’s successor. (In 2022, Trump designated Solomon and Kash Patel, now his pick to lead the FBI, as his representatives to the Archives.)
After this story first published, Hewitt told Mother Jones, “I am never going back into government. Ever. I want to stay on air through the end of the story and then enjoy grandkids. Not for me.”
Trump clashed with the National Archives after leaving office in 2021 with a slew of government documents, many highly classified. Trump refused efforts by the Archives to retrieve the material, prompting the Justice Department to subpoena him for the missing documents. Trump allegedly then had staffers at his Mar-a-Lago residence hide boxes of classified documents from FBI investigators. And he allegedly ordered an aide to delete security camera footage of boxes being moved in a bid to hide evidence from a grand jury. Trump was also charged with violating the Espionage Act by showing classified material to visitors who lacked security clearances.
Trump, who has maintained without evidence that he declassified all the material he removed from the White House, avoided trial after Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, threw out the case based on the claim that Special Counsel Jack Smith, who brought the charges, had not been properly appointed.
Under federal law, the chief archivist must “be appointed without regard to political affiliations and solely on the basis of the professional qualifications required to perform the duties and responsibilities of the office.” Trump, though, may have other qualifications in mind. With the archivist appointment, he not only will be able to extract payback; he will be able to control the government agency that helps shape American history.
The Equal EmploymentOpportunity Commission (EEOC) has begun filing motions to dismiss court cases the agency brought against businesses accused of discriminating against transgender and nonbinary employees.
Federal court records show the EEOC filed to dismiss four cases related to gender identity late this week. Multiple EEOC workers, who spoke to Mother Jones on the condition of anonymity, say agency staff have been instructed not to investigate current or future complaints regarding gender identity.
There are at least seven EEOC cases about gender identity and sexual orientation discrimination pending in the federal court system. The EEOC received more than 3,000 charges alleging discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity in fiscal year 2023, the most recent year for which data is available.
On Friday, the EEOC asked a judge in the Western District of New York to dismiss a case in which a claimant said they were described as an “it” and called a “transformer” by their manager at a Holiday Inn Express. The employee reported the alleged harassment, but were told by hotel management they weren’t a “good fit” for the housekeeping role, and subsequently received notice that their employment was terminated, the original complaint said. The motion to dismiss indicates “recent Administration policy changes” as reasoning.
The EEOC also sought dismissal on Friday of a lawsuit in which a group of transgender Wendy’s employees claimed they were on the receiving end of “pervasive sexual harassment including repeatedly subjecting the transgender employees to misgendering, graphic sexual comments, unequal access to bathrooms, intrusive questions, and degrading conduct based on gender identity.” Subsequently, some of the transgender employees reported seeing their hours reduced or were terminated.
In a third case—regarding a Lush cosmetics store manager allegedly telling a transgender employee he wanted to have sex with a trans person, and texting a nonbinary employee about sexual acts—the EEOC filed a stipulation to dismiss on Friday. Lush had failed to adequately investigate the harassment, the original EEOC complaint said, causing at least two employees to quit.
On Thursday, the EEOC asked a judge in Alabama to dismiss a discrimination case in which a nonbinary individual alleged they were fired from a Home2 Suites hotelfor not conforming to male gender stereotypes. After seeing the employee with pink nail polish and capri pants, a manager wanted the employee “hidden” due to their appearance, the complaint said. Shortly after, the employee was terminated. The motion cites President Donald Trump’s executive order on “Gender Ideology Extremism” as a basis.
A remaining case, in which a motion to dismiss has not yet been filed, regards a transgender employee at a Culver’s restaurant in Michigan who alleged he was purposely misgendered, dead-named, and asked whether he had undergone gender-reassignment surgery. After the employee reported the harassment, he was fired.
While in alignment with President Donald Trump’s executive order on “gender ideology extremism,” the motions to dismiss are at odds with a recent Supreme Court decision authored by Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee. In the 2020 case, Bostock v. Clayton County, a 6-3 majority concluded that firing an employee based on their sexuality or gender identity was a violation of existing sex-based discrimination protections in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
“If someone says, ‘I’m not going to hire you because you’re gay,’ or ‘I’m not going to hire you because you’re a transgender individual’—that’s unlawful now and the Supreme Court held it,” says Brian Wolfman, a Georgetown University Law Center professor who won a sex-based employment discrimination case in front of the Supreme Court last year.
But even if a court eventually overrules Trump’s executive order on “gender ideology,” the individuals who filed EEOC complaints based on claims related to their gender identity may not be able to seek future recourse: Dismissals with prejudice are final judgements. Theoretically, a judge could refuse to grant the motions to dismiss, or personal attorneys for the plaintiffs may be able to intervene and represent clients in the EEOC’s absence. But the former scenario isn’t regularly seen, and the latter is likely unfeasible for vulnerable claimants who lack funds to hire private counsel.
“To go through with what was likely a multi-year investigation, and then to finally feel safe that the EEOC is going to file the case, and vindicate your rights, and then to just get the rug pulled out from under you—it’s fucking awful,” says an EEOC staffer who asked to remain anonymous to avoid career repercussions.
The motions to dismiss follow earlier instructions from the commission, now led by Trump-appointed Acting Chair Andrea Lucas, to pause investigations into new and existing complaints based on charges of discrimination involvingsexual orientation and gender identity.
Employees are scared of what the administration will change next at EEOC. “As a federal employee, this has definitely caused me a lot of sleepless nights,” one EEOC staffer says. “I wake up every morning, and think, ‘What the fuck is it gonna be today?'”
“We’re here trying to help people who have been discriminated against and disadvantaged,” affirms another EEOC employee. The new administration’s guidance to dismiss litigations based on a claimant’s transgender status “is discriminatory and directly violates the agency’s core mission.”
The Trump administration doesn’t have a policy plan for America, but it does have an ideology: white nationalism.
That’s what’s driving the barrage of executive orders, shutdowns, and freezes currently wreaking havoc in America. Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes explains why it’s important to know the difference between white supremacy and white nationalism.
For years, Trump has surrounded himself with right wing ideologues like Stephen Miller, whose penchant for citing white nationalist websites in policy discussion was uncovered during Trump’s first term. Now, America is seeing the impact of the belief in a zero-sum game. “For one group to win, others must lose,” Hayes concludes in an interview with Eric K. Ward, executive vice president of Race Forward, a racial justice non-profit.
“This administration has no solution,”Ward explains. “In the meantime, what they seek to do is distract us,” Ward explains.
Follow @garrisonh and Mother Jones for more coverage on the rise of white nationalism in America.
Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s pick to head the FBI, failed to divulge an important set of corporate ties on the financial disclosure form and questionnaire he was required to fill out as part of his Senate confirmation process.
These connections involve a land purchase he made in Virginia with a friend through a chain of limited liability corporations in which Patel held an interest. Patel’s filings acknowledge his ownership of the property, but the lack of disclosure of these LLCs obscures the partnership he formed when acquiring this undeveloped lot.
Here’s what happened. On November 1, 2021, Patel registered a company called Skeleton Coast in Nevada. That same day another LLC named Dons of Marbury was created in Nevada, with two officers—Patel’s Skeleton Coast and a Virginia-based firm, NextGen Building & Management LLC.
NextGen Building is a real estate development company founded by realtor Jordan Shahin, a friend of Patel who plays with him on an ice hockey team called the Dons that competes in a Washington, DC, league. According to a recent Washington Examinerarticle on Patel’s hockey hobby, Shahin has “grown close” to Patel in recent years.
Patel and Shahin registered two other LLCs in Nevada on November 1, 2021, according to Nevada state business records: Monarchs of Marbury LLC and Marbury Empires LLC. For each company, two officers were listed: Patel’s Skeleton Coast and Shahin’s NextGen Building.
Several months later, on March 7, 2022, Marbury Empires purchased a 3.64-acre vacant lot in Chantilly, Virginia, for $550,000, according to Loudon County property records. The land abuts a development named Marbury Estates. A year earlier it had been listed for sale for $850,000, according to Zillow. (The sellers were two companies, Bethany LLC and 931 Bonnie Brae LLC. Their owners are not publicly known.)
Eight months after Marbury Empires LLC bought this property, Patel and Shahin changed the officers of this company, removing Skeleton Coast and NextGen Building and replacing them with the Dons of Marbury LLC as the sole officer. This placed a layer of corporate ownership between the companies for which Patel and Shahin were publicly identified as officers and the LLC that purchased the Virginia property.
In April 2023, the undeveloped lot, still owned by Marbury Empires LLC, was listed for sale for $1,095,000—about twice what Patel and Shahin had paid for it. Two months later, it was taken off the market. This past October it was again listed for sale, this time for $1.8 million. As of Friday, the listing remained active.
On the questionnaire that Patel filled out for the Senate Judiciary Committee, he disclosed he was a managing member of Skeleton Coast and noted that his equity interest in this LLC was $773,357. He did not disclose his interest in Dons of Marbury, Monarchs of Marbury, or Marbury Empires.
On his financial disclosure form, he likewise recorded his position as an officer of Skeleton Coast, but on this document he said the LLC had no value (contradicting his Senate questionnaire). He did report on this form that he owned undeveloped land in Chantilly worth between $500,001 and $1 million dollars. He did not disclose his ties to any of the Marbury LLCs.
The financial disclosure form Patel filled out required him to report “all positions as an officer, director, trustee, general partner, proprietor, representative, employee, or consultant.” And the Senate questionnaire instructed him to list all “corporations, companies, or other enterprises [and] partnerships…with which you have been affiliated as an officer, director, partner, proprietor, or employee since graduation from college.” Patel appears to have had a controlling or significant interest in the LLC that purchased the Chantilly land through two other LLCs he set up, yet he did not disclose two of these three firms.
Because the rules for financial disclosures can provide wiggle room, it’s unclear if Patel violated any in not revealing the LLCs that he and Shahin used to purchase this land. But for a national security position, it’s important that all significant financial relationships be revealed. And Patel kept these interactions hidden.
Patel and a spokesperson for Patel did not respond to queries about this land deal and the LLCs he did not disclose. Shahin did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The missing LLCs are not the only problem with Patel’s disclosures. Investigative journalist Roger Sollenberger revealed this week that Patel had failed to acknowledge his financial ties to two companies connected to a specialist in off-shore banking. And Patel did not file his financial disclosure statement until two days after the Senate Judiciary Committee held his confirmation hearing. That meant senators at this session could not ask him about any of the questions his disclosures (or lack thereof) have raised. This includes questions abouta payment from a Kremlin-linked source, Patel’s stake in a Chinese manufacturing firm, and money he received for “consulting” work for Qatar that he has not publicly explained.
On Thursday—after Republicans on the committee voted to approve his nomination and send it to the Senate floor—Senate Democrats sent Patel a list of queries. Several referred to unresolved matters related to his disclosures. One concerned the story first reported by Mother Jones that Patel received $25,000 from a Ukrainian-Russian-American filmmaker who has worked for a propaganda operation funded by Vladimir Putin. None of the questions related to Patel’s partnership with Shahin and the LLCs he did not mention.
On Friday, Hagan Scotten became the seventh federal prosecutor assigned to New York Mayor Eric Adams’ corruption case to resign, after he refused the Justice Department’s order to dismiss the case.
“I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion,” Scotten wrote in a fiery, letter obtained by the New York Times. “But it was never going to be me.”
Scotten’s departure follows similar acts of extraordinary defiance this week after six senior Justice Department officials refused to comply with Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove’s demand to dismiss the case. That included US Attorney Danielle Sassoon, who wrote an eight-page letter that significantly questioned the government’s standing. Together, the resignations marked the most high-profile repudiation of President Donald Trump’s influence over the Justice Department.
In September 2024, after months of reports of suspicious luxury travel to Turkey, Adams was charged with bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy, and soliciting campaign contributions from foreign nationals. And for a moment, the indictment appeared to be the end of Adams’ political career. But since the November election, Adams has brazenly cozied up to Trump, who, in turn, publicly signaled that he was considering a pardon for the embattled mayor.
The kowtowing has only continued. On Thursday, after meeting US Border Czar Tom Homan, the New York mayor promised to reopen Rikers Island’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement office.
So will Adams’ case ever secure a prosecutor willing to do the Justice Department’s bidding? According to Reuters, Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove pressured the remaining prosecutors to decide amongst themselves who would sign the motion during a meeting on Friday.
As the world’s richest man pitches himself as the savior of the American taxpayer, the companies he runs are raking in more federal dollars.
This past Sunday, Tesla finalized a deal to sell 430 megawatts of batteries to Genera, the private company that now operates Puerto Rico’s power plants, for $767 million. The contract, first brokered in October before the election, will be “fully financed with federal funds,” according to a press release.
On Monday, SpaceX netted another $7.5 million supplemental contract with NASA, bringing the total value of that particular deal with Musk’s private rocket firm to $38 million. That’s on top of the more than $4 billion NASA is already paying SpaceX.
“Over and over again, he’s just involved in governmental actions that directly and substantially impact his own financial wellbeing.”
Appearing on television alongside the president in the Oval Office on Tuesday, a defiant Musk dismissed concerns over any conflicts of interest, insisting he had little to do with contracts brokered by the companies where he serves as chief executive.
“You have to look at the individual contract,” Musk told reporters. “First of all, I’m not filing the contract. It’s people at SpaceX…and I like to say if you see any contract where it was awarded to SpaceX and it wasn’t by far the best value for the taxpayer, let me know—because every one of them was.”
On Thursday, the State Department backed away from plans to spend $400 million on armored Tesla vehicles, after the proposal was revealed on social media and reported by the New York Times. The procurement forecast did not specify which Tesla model would be purchased, but the Times speculated the stainless-steel Cybertruck “would be the most suitable vehicle,” despite questions about its safety.
All seven of Musk’s companies—which include X (formerly Twitter), xAI (a rival to OpenAI), Neuralink (a brain implant startup), Starlink (satellite internet service) and the Boring Company (a tunnel drilling firm), in addition to Tesla and SpaceX—have netted a combined $20 billion in US government contracts and subsidies, according to the Financial Times.
“Elon Musk is a walking conflict of interest,” Craig Holman, the government affairs lobbyist at the consumer watchdog Public Citizen, told me by phone on Thursday. “Over and over again, he’s just involved in governmental actions that directly and substantially impact his own financial wellbeing.”
The federal code known as 18 USC 208 “prohibits an executive branch employee from participating personally and substantially in a particular Government matter that will affect his own financial interests, as well as the financial interests of certain individuals with whom he has ties outside the Government,” according to the US Office of Government Ethics.
In theory, that “should” apply to Musk, Holman said. But Trump can easily issue a waiver exempting Musk from complying with the rules as a so-called special government employee.
Lawmakers have considered tightening federal ethics rules on special government employees in the past, but those were “not serious efforts,” Holman said.
“We haven’t seen this type of abuse until now,” he said.
Hours after being confirmed as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. issued a statement that laid out sweeping plans for his first 100 days in office. Chief among his goals, he wrote, was to combat what he called a “growing health crisis” of chronic disease. The document called for the federal government to investigate the “root causes” of a broad range of conditions, including autism, ADHD, asthma, obesity, multiple sclerosis, and psoriasis. Conspicuously absent was any explicit mention of childhood vaccines, which Kennedy has long railed against as the head of the anti-vaccine advocacy group Children’s Health Defense.
But the document did zero in on another one of his fixations: a class of widely prescribed drugs that treat depression, anxiety, and mood disorders. The government, he said, would “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, [and] mood stabilizers.”
Kennedy has repeatedly railed against what he sees as rampant overprescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, commonly known as SSRIs, which treat depression and anxiety and include medications like Prozac and Zoloft. As with his previous assertions about vaccines, many of his statements about these drugs are not backed by science. In a 2023 livestream on X with Elon Musk, he claimed that “tremendous circumstantial evidence” suggested that people taking antidepressants were more likely to commit school shootings. (Actually, most school shooters were not taking those drugs, evidence shows.) Kennedy has also called people who take SSRIs addicts—and then tried to claim he didn’t during his confirmation hearings.
When government researchers follow Kennedy’s orders to study SSRIs, they’ll find reams of research, including long-term studies, that have found that the drugs are safe and non-addictive. That’s good news for the 13 percent of American adults who use SSRIs to treat depression and anxiety. In addition to this well-documented track record of safety, manufacturers have closely monitored adverse reactions to the drugs in children and teens. The Food and Drug Administration already requires drug manufacturers to include warnings in packaging because of some evidence that SSRIs can cause a temporary increase in suicidal thoughts in pediatric patients (though evidence on this point is mixed).
So despite this evidence, what options does Kennedy offer in response to the supposed overprescription of and addiction to SSRIs? In a podcast appearance last July, Kennedy said he planned to dedicate money generated from a sales tax on cannabis products to “creating wellness farms—drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country.” He added, “I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need—three or four years if they need it—to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities.” The farm residents would grow their own organic food because, he suggested, many of their underlying problems could be “food-related.”
In advance of Kennedy’s confirmation, 15,000 physicians signed an open letter opposing his appointment; the letter specifically mentioned his false claims “linking school shootings to antidepressants.” During the confirmation hearings, Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) said Kennedy’s statements about antidepressants “reinforce the stigma that people who experience mental health [conditions]…face every single day.” Smith said she was “very concerned that this is another example of your record of sharing false and misleading information that actually really hurts people.”
When I first reported on President Donald Trump’s promise to “BUILD A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD,” an expert summed up the idea as “the insane ramblings of a senile old person.” But, with Trump in office, the “Iron Dome for America” plan is seemingly happening—and the project’s benefits for some of the most powerful people in the world are coming into focus.
In late January, Trump announced details for the Dome. A land-based missile-interceptor system—like the one Israel has—would not be possible to build for a country the size of the United States. Instead, military commentators coalesced around another plan: build a cloud of “satellite missile interceptors” similar to former President Ronald Reagan’s ill-fated 1980s “Star Wars” proposal.
In turn, the US Missile Defense Agency asked defense companies on January 31 to pitch space-based sensors and interceptors that could detect and defeat “advanced aerial threats” from low-space orbit. That means the proposed Iron Dome would almost certainly require thousands of satellites for putting interceptor weapons in space.
The company that currently dominates the market for such equipment? Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
“SpaceX is the only company that currently has the capacity to launch that many things,” Dr. Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists told Mother Jones. “They’re such a critical resource at this point that…if you’re going to launch a lot of things, SpaceX is going to be in the mix.”
There are—according to astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, who maintains a count of pretty much everything orbiting this planet—just over 11,000 working satellites in orbit. 6998 of them are Starlink satellites. That means 62 percent of all working satellites orbiting this planet belong to a company started byElon Musk, a drastic increase from only 5 years ago. More critically: SpaceX has the necessary launch capacity to send thousands of load-bearing satellites into orbit. They already handle the majority of NASA’s launches, for billions of dollars each year.
“So, yeah, they’d make a ton of money,” Grego said. “And companies building these interceptors would make a ton of money.”
A paper published in February by the National Security Space Association—a military-industrial think tank—highlights this further: though it might not be capable of efficiently stopping intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), a satellite missile-interceptor system like the proposed American Iron Dome cloud would be uniquely capable of getting Elon Musk paid.
NSSA’s Chris Williams estimated that an Iron Dome for America would require about 1,500 “space-based interceptor” satellites in low-earth orbit. This, he said, would only be possible because “the advent of low-cost launch, enabled by SpaceX, significantly reduces the anticipated cost.”
Todd Harrison of the American Enterprise Institute put the likely cost at somewhere between $11 and $27 billion for such a system—and pointed out that despite all that money, the system would only be able to intercept up to two rockets at a time. (For context, two is a small number. The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation estimates that China has over 100 ICBMS, Russia has over 300, and the US has over 400.)
“You need something like three interceptors to have a pretty good chance of taking down one incoming ICBM,” said John Erath, CACNP’s Policy Director. “So the numbers add up quickly, and the math isn’t good.”
While technology has improved since Reagan dreamed of space lasers, Erath said, “that does not necessarily make it easy.”
“You might say that protecting an American city from a nuclear attack is worth billions. That may be correct, but this is the kind of thing that needs to be discussed in Congress before it’s approved,” he added. “If you could even get to where a system like this could be made to work, the costs would be literally astronomical. That needs to be made clear to the taxpayers, who would be ultimately paying the bills.”
Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, said many missile-shield plans have come and gone since the first anti-ballistic missile system was proposed by Soviet scientists in the early 1960s. But outside of spatially limited cases like Israel’s, he’s never seen missile shield technology make anyone safer.
“Things are very different in the nuclear context,” he said. In practice, building elaborate missile shield systems might just encourage other countries to build more missiles. During the Cold War, he explained, the Soviet Union deployed a ground-based missile defense system around Moscow. And rather than deterring tensions, it inflamed them. “[The United States] knew there was a missile defense,” he said, so “they ended up allocating, I think, 60 warheads against Moscow.” (Now, Russian spokespeople are calling the American Iron Dome plan an attempt to turn space into “an arena of armed confrontation.”)
“Invoking Iron Dome is just marketing, trying to manufacture credibility for something that has never worked,” she said. Instead of wasting money on the unachievable, she said, US efforts would be better spent on nuclear disarmament—something Trump threw his support behind this week. But paying companies like SpaceX to create an “American Iron Dome,” Grego argued, would have the opposite of that effect.
“Missile defenses are not a useful or long-term strategy for keeping the US safe from nuclear weapons,” she said.
This story was originally published by Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
Flanked by Donald Trump in the Oval Office this week, Elon Muskclaimed his much-vaunted, but ill-defined Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was providing “maximum transparency” on its blitz through the federal government. Its official website was empty, however—until Wednesday, when it added elements including data from a controversial rightwing think tank recently sued by a climate scientist.
New elements include DOGE’s feed from X, Musk’s social network, and a blank section for savings identified by the agency, promised to be updated “no later than” Valentine’s Day. At the top of the website’s regulations page, DOGE used data published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a libertarian think tank that claims to fight “climate alarmism.”
The CEI’s “unconstitutionality index,” which it started in 2003, compares regulations or rules introduced by government agencies with laws enacted by Congress.
The CEI claims to fight “climate alarmism,” and has long worked to block climate-focused policies, successfully lobbying against the ratification of the international climate treaty the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 as well as the enactment of the 2009 Waxman-Markey bill, which aimed to place a cap on greenhouse gas emissions.
The think tank ran ads to counter Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, claiming in one ad: “The Antarctic ice sheet is getting thicker, not thinner…Why are they trying to scare us?” In a second ad, the CEI said carbon dioxide was “essential to life,” adding: “They call it pollution. We call it life.” The campaign incited pushback from a scientist who said his research was misrepresented in the ads.
During Trump’s first term, the organization also successfully pushed him to pull the United States from the 2015 Paris climate treaty. Today, it regularly publishes arguments against the mandatory disclosure of climate-related financial risks and increased efficiency regulations on appliances.
Last January, the CEI lost a lawsuit filed against it by the climate scientist Dr Michael Mann for $1 million in punitive damages.
The think tank has extensive ties to the far-right network formed by the fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch and his late brother David. In 2020, the network provided some $900,000 to CEI, public records show—a number that is likely an underestimate, as it does not include “dark money” contributions which need not be disclosed. CEI also accepted more than $640,000 from the Koch network between 1997 and 2015.
CEI’s other donors have included the nation’s top oil and gas lobbying group, American Petroleum Institute, and the fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil. It is an associate member of ultraconservative State Policy Network, which has also received funding from Koch-linked groups and whose members have fought to pass punitive anti-pipeline protest laws.
The White House and CEI were contacted for comment.
Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s pick to head the FBI, failed to divulge an important set of corporate ties on the financial disclosure form and questionnaire he was required to fill out as part of his Senate confirmation process.
These connections involve a land purchase he made in Virginia with a friend through a chain of limited liability corporations in which Patel held an interest. Patel’s filings acknowledge his ownership of the property, but the lack of disclosure of these LLCs obscures the partnership he formed when acquiring this undeveloped lot.
Here’s what happened. On November 1, 2021, Patel registered a company called Skeleton Coast in Nevada. That same day another LLC named Dons of Marbury was created in Nevada, with two officers—Patel’s Skeleton Coast and a Virginia-based firm, NextGen Building & Management LLC.
NextGen Building is a real estate development company founded by realtor Jordan Shahin, a friend of Patel who plays with him on an ice hockey team called the Dons that competes in a Washington, DC, league. According to a recent Washington Examinerarticle on Patel’s hockey hobby, Shahin has “grown close” to Patel in recent years.
Patel and Shahin registered two other LLCs in Nevada on November 1, 2021, according to Nevada state business records: Monarchs of Marbury LLC and Marbury Empires LLC. For each company, two officers were listed: Patel’s Skeleton Coast and Shahin’s NextGen Building.
Several months later, on March 7, 2022, Marbury Empires purchased a 3.64-acre vacant lot in Chantilly, Virginia, for $550,000, according to Loudon County property records. The land abuts a development named Marbury Estates. A year earlier it had been listed for sale for $850,000, according to Zillow. (The sellers were two companies, Bethany LLC and 931 Bonnie Brae LLC. Their owners are not publicly known.)
Eight months after Marbury Empires LLC bought this property, Patel and Shahin changed the officers of this company, removing Skeleton Coast and NextGen Building and replacing them with the Dons of Marbury LLC as the sole officer. This placed a layer of corporate ownership between the companies for which Patel and Shahin were publicly identified as officers and the LLC that purchased the Virginia property.
In April 2023, the undeveloped lot, still owned by Marbury Empires LLC, was listed for sale for $1,095,000—about twice what Patel and Shahin had paid for it. Two months later, it was taken off the market. This past October it was again listed for sale, this time for $1.8 million. As of Friday, the listing remained active.
On the questionnaire that Patel filled out for the Senate Judiciary Committee, he disclosed he was a managing member of Skeleton Coast and noted that his equity interest in this LLC was $773,357. He did not disclose his interest in Dons of Marbury, Monarchs of Marbury, or Marbury Empires.
On his financial disclosure form, he likewise recorded his position as an officer of Skeleton Coast, but on this document he said the LLC had no value (contradicting his Senate questionnaire). He did report on this form that he owned undeveloped land in Chantilly worth between $500,001 and $1 million dollars. He did not disclose his ties to any of the Marbury LLCs.
The financial disclosure form Patel filled out required him to report “all positions as an officer, director, trustee, general partner, proprietor, representative, employee, or consultant.” And the Senate questionnaire instructed him to list all “corporations, companies, or other enterprises [and] partnerships…with which you have been affiliated as an officer, director, partner, proprietor, or employee since graduation from college.” Patel appears to have had a controlling or significant interest in the LLC that purchased the Chantilly land through two other LLCs he set up, yet he did not disclose two of these three firms.
Because the rules for financial disclosures can provide wiggle room, it’s unclear if Patel violated any in not revealing the LLCs that he and Shahin used to purchase this land. But for a national security position, it’s important that all significant financial relationships be revealed. And Patel kept these interactions hidden.
Patel and a spokesperson for Patel did not respond to queries about this land deal and the LLCs he did not disclose. Shahin did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The missing LLCs are not the only problem with Patel’s disclosures. Investigative journalist Roger Sollenberger revealed this week that Patel had failed to acknowledge his financial ties to two companies connected to a specialist in off-shore banking. And Patel did not file his financial disclosure statement until two days after the Senate Judiciary Committee held his confirmation hearing. That meant senators at this session could not ask him about any of the questions his disclosures (or lack thereof) have raised. This includes questions abouta payment from a Kremlin-linked source, Patel’s stake in a Chinese manufacturing firm, and money he received for “consulting” work for Qatar that he has not publicly explained.
On Thursday—after Republicans on the committee voted to approve his nomination and send it to the Senate floor—Senate Democrats sent Patel a list of queries. Several referred to unresolved matters related to his disclosures. One concerned the story first reported by Mother Jones that Patel received $25,000 from a Ukrainian-Russian-American filmmaker who has worked for a propaganda operation funded by Vladimir Putin. None of the questions related to Patel’s partnership with Shahin and the LLCs he did not mention.
On Friday, Hagan Scotten became the seventh federal prosecutor assigned to New York Mayor Eric Adams’ corruption case to resign, after he refused the Justice Department’s order to dismiss the case.
“I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion,” Scotten wrote in a fiery, letter obtained by the New York Times. “But it was never going to be me.”
Scotten’s departure follows similar acts of extraordinary defiance this week after six senior Justice Department officials refused to comply with Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove’s demand to dismiss the case. That included US Attorney Danielle Sassoon, who wrote an eight-page letter that significantly questioned the government’s standing. Together, the resignations marked the most high-profile repudiation of President Donald Trump’s influence over the Justice Department.
In September 2024, after months of reports of suspicious luxury travel to Turkey, Adams was charged with bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy, and soliciting campaign contributions from foreign nationals. And for a moment, the indictment appeared to be the end of Adams’ political career. But since the November election, Adams has brazenly cozied up to Trump, who, in turn, publicly signaled that he was considering a pardon for the embattled mayor.
The kowtowing has only continued. On Thursday, after meeting US Border Czar Tom Homan, the New York mayor promised to reopen Rikers Island’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement office.
So will Adams’ case ever secure a prosecutor willing to do the Justice Department’s bidding? According to Reuters, Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove pressured the remaining prosecutors to decide amongst themselves who would sign the motion during a meeting on Friday.
As the world’s richest man pitches himself as the savior of the American taxpayer, the companies he runs are raking in more federal dollars.
This past Sunday, Tesla finalized a deal to sell 430 megawatts of batteries to Genera, the private company that now operates Puerto Rico’s power plants, for $767 million. The contract, first brokered in October before the election, will be “fully financed with federal funds,” according to a press release.
On Monday, SpaceX netted another $7.5 million supplemental contract with NASA, bringing the total value of that particular deal with Musk’s private rocket firm to $38 million. That’s on top of the more than $4 billion NASA is already paying SpaceX.
“Over and over again, he’s just involved in governmental actions that directly and substantially impact his own financial wellbeing.”
Appearing on television alongside the president in the Oval Office on Tuesday, a defiant Musk dismissed concerns over any conflicts of interest, insisting he had little to do with contracts brokered by the companies where he serves as chief executive.
“You have to look at the individual contract,” Musk told reporters. “First of all, I’m not filing the contract. It’s people at SpaceX…and I like to say if you see any contract where it was awarded to SpaceX and it wasn’t by far the best value for the taxpayer, let me know—because every one of them was.”
On Thursday, the State Department backed away from plans to spend $400 million on armored Tesla vehicles, after the proposal was revealed on social media and reported by the New York Times. The procurement forecast did not specify which Tesla model would be purchased, but the Times speculated the stainless-steel Cybertruck “would be the most suitable vehicle,” despite questions about its safety.
All seven of Musk’s companies—which include X (formerly Twitter), xAI (a rival to OpenAI), Neuralink (a brain implant startup), Starlink (satellite internet service) and the Boring Company (a tunnel drilling firm), in addition to Tesla and SpaceX—have netted a combined $20 billion in US government contracts and subsidies, according to the Financial Times.
“Elon Musk is a walking conflict of interest,” Craig Holman, the government affairs lobbyist at the consumer watchdog Public Citizen, told me by phone on Thursday. “Over and over again, he’s just involved in governmental actions that directly and substantially impact his own financial wellbeing.”
The federal code known as 18 USC 208 “prohibits an executive branch employee from participating personally and substantially in a particular Government matter that will affect his own financial interests, as well as the financial interests of certain individuals with whom he has ties outside the Government,” according to the US Office of Government Ethics.
In theory, that “should” apply to Musk, Holman said. But Trump can easily issue a waiver exempting Musk from complying with the rules as a so-called special government employee.
Lawmakers have considered tightening federal ethics rules on special government employees in the past, but those were “not serious efforts,” Holman said.
“We haven’t seen this type of abuse until now,” he said.
Hours after being confirmed as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. issued a statement that laid out sweeping plans for his first 100 days in office. Chief among his goals, he wrote, was to combat what he called a “growing health crisis” of chronic disease. The document called for the federal government to investigate the “root causes” of a broad range of conditions, including autism, ADHD, asthma, obesity, multiple sclerosis, and psoriasis. Conspicuously absent was any explicit mention of childhood vaccines, which Kennedy has long railed against as the head of the anti-vaccine advocacy group Children’s Health Defense.
But the document did zero in on another one of his fixations: a class of widely prescribed drugs that treat depression, anxiety, and mood disorders. The government, he said, would “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, [and] mood stabilizers.”
Kennedy has repeatedly railed against what he sees as rampant overprescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, commonly known as SSRIs, which treat depression and anxiety and include medications like Prozac and Zoloft. As with his previous assertions about vaccines, many of his statements about these drugs are not backed by science. In a 2023 livestream on X with Elon Musk, he claimed that “tremendous circumstantial evidence” suggested that people taking antidepressants were more likely to commit school shootings. (Actually, most school shooters were not taking those drugs, evidence shows.) Kennedy has also called people who take SSRIs addicts—and then tried to claim he didn’t during his confirmation hearings.
When government researchers follow Kennedy’s orders to study SSRIs, they’ll find reams of research, including long-term studies, that have found that the drugs are safe and non-addictive. That’s good news for the 13 percent of American adults who use SSRIs to treat depression and anxiety. In addition to this well-documented track record of safety, manufacturers have closely monitored adverse reactions to the drugs in children and teens. The Food and Drug Administration already requires drug manufacturers to include warnings in packaging because of some evidence that SSRIs can cause a temporary increase in suicidal thoughts in pediatric patients (though evidence on this point is mixed).
So despite this evidence, what options does Kennedy offer in response to the supposed overprescription of and addiction to SSRIs? In a podcast appearance last July, Kennedy said he planned to dedicate money generated from a sales tax on cannabis products to “creating wellness farms—drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country.” He added, “I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need—three or four years if they need it—to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities.” The farm residents would grow their own organic food because, he suggested, many of their underlying problems could be “food-related.”
In advance of Kennedy’s confirmation, 15,000 physicians signed an open letter opposing his appointment; the letter specifically mentioned his false claims “linking school shootings to antidepressants.” During the confirmation hearings, Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) said Kennedy’s statements about antidepressants “reinforce the stigma that people who experience mental health [conditions]…face every single day.” Smith said she was “very concerned that this is another example of your record of sharing false and misleading information that actually really hurts people.”
President Donald Trump has plunged the National Labor Relations Board—an independent federal government agency that enforces laws on collective bargaining and unfair labor practices—into chaos, risking the enforcement of workers’ rights across the country.
On January 28, Trump fired General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo. Soon after, he pushed out Democratic Board member Gwynne Wilcox. While Abruzzo’s firing was not a surprise—she was a Biden appointee who expanded labor rights—the dismissal of Wilcox was far outside the norm. A president had never removed a Board member prior to the end of their term. (Wilcox has since filed a lawsuit against Trump, arguing that her termination violated the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which states that Board members can only be removed “upon notice and hearing, for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office, but for no other cause.”)
In early February, the purge continued. Trump fired Acting General Counsel Jessica Rutter, who had just replaced Abruzzo, and appointed William Cowen, a conservative who briefly served as a Board member under George W. Bush. He then dismissed Susan Tsui Grundmann, the Chair of the Federal Labor Relations Authority, an independent federal agency that oversees labor relations between the federal government and its employees. During her term, Grundmann fought against budget cuts that she asserted would force furloughs amid a rise in federal employee unionization.
The shake-up is particularly alarming because—by leaving only two members on the five-member Board—the Trump administration has eliminated a quorum, effectively preventing the NLRB from ruling on cases at the federal level.
Margaret Poydock, a senior policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank, told me that the NLRB firings not only “essentially paralyze” the agency from making decisions but also “destroy its independence.”
The NLRB maintains independence in part because its Board members’ terms are five years. This is intentional, Poydock says, and allows members to serve between administrations, thus shielding them from presidential interference. But because Trump can now fill three seats, this may no longer be the case.
Poydock points to the letter firing Abruzzo and Wilcox as a glimpse at what is to come. Trent Morse, the deputy director at the Office of Presidential Personnel who wrote on Trump’s behalf, stated that he did not think the pair could “fairly evaluate matters before them without unduly disfavoring the interests of employers.”
Such language furthers concerns that Trump wants the NLRB to take a pro-business stance. In his first term, the Board and the Trump-appointed General Counsel Peter Robb systemically reversed workers’ rights to form unions and collective bargain with their employers.
In September 2019, the NLRB lowered the standard for employers to demonstrate that they followed collective bargaining agreements when making unilateral changes to employment policies like safety and disciplinary action, thus decreasing the grounds for employees to file unfair labor practice charges.
Firing a Board member before their term is up and leaving three Board seats vacant to freeze it out of a quorum “is a different animal” that “stops the enforcement of the law, period,” said a labor official.
Just this week, the Department of Justice said that it would no longer defend members of the NLRB—as well as the Federal Trade Commission and Consumer Product Safety Commission—from being fired by the president without good reason. The DOJ is requesting that the Supreme Court overturn its 1935 decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, in whichthe high court declared that Congress could block President Franklin D. Roosevelt from dismissing an FTC commissioner due to a disagreement in political views. Overturning the decision may allow Trump to increase his executive power and bypass checks and balances.
This has left labor leaders who communicate with the Board alarmed.
“While regions can go through the ministerial function of scheduling an election, certifying an election, and identifying an unfair labor practice, without a functioning NLRB, there are no repercussions [for employers], there’s no enforcement, and it all just stops,” said Andrea Hoeschen, the general counsel and an assistant executive director at Actors’ Equity Association, a labor union that represents over 51,000 professional actors and stage managers.
During our phone conversation, Hoeschen brought up Whole Foods, which is owned by Amazon, requesting in early February that the NLRB disregard the union election results at a Philadelphia store (in part due to Abruzzo and Wilcox’s departures). Although a regional NLRB official could reject Whole Foods’ complaint and certify the union win, that decision would hold little significance until at least one Board member is nominated and confirmed.
This recent push is part of a broader assault on the NLRB.
After the federal agency accused Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s of illegally impeding its workers’ unionization efforts and asserted that SpaceX unjustly fired eight employees for criticizing their CEO, Elon Musk, the four companiesattacked the federal agency in separate lawsuits, claiming that its structure violates the separation of powers by allowing the NLRB to wield legislative, judicial, and executive authority—including penalizing companies without a jury trial. The lawsuit could result in a decision to undo the NLRB as we know it—even ruling the board unconstitutional.
These legal battles run counter to the GOP’s efforts to portray itself as the class-conscious party. “Five, ten years from now,” Donald Trump told Bloomberg Businessweekabout the future of the GOP prior to his 2016 election victory. “You’re going to have a worker’s party.” At the Republican National Convention last year, Sean O’Brien, the general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, talked to the crowd about large corporations firing employees who tried to organize: “This is economic terrorism at its best.”
But as my colleague Tim Murphy pointed out, billionaire union-buster Elon Musk donated at least $288 million to help elect Trump and other Republican candidates this past election. “It was not the rise of the workers,” he wrote. “It was the restoration of the bosses.”
This contradiction promises detrimental consequences for the most vulnerable workers as the GOP’s working-class policy hinges on issues like anti-immigration—developments we are already seeing today. Instead of conservatives pointing the finger at corporations and arguing for helping workers through actions like facilitating union formation, the rhetoric seems to mostly align with blaming immigrants. As my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, JD Vance claimed numeroustimes on the 2024 campaign trail that immigration leads to lower wages for American workers.
Hoeschen also highlighted how she has a union election petition, unfair labor practice charges, and a 10(j) injunction pending for male revue workers who organized last year at the Chippendales location in Las Vegas. While staff at NLRB’s Region 28 in Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Albuquerque have been “very responsive,” Hoeschen said they require authorization from either the NLRB or the General Counsel in order to request 10(j) injunctive relief, which aims to temporarily stop certain unfair labor practices while administrative judges and the Board litigate the dispute.
According to Hoeschen, Rutter had sent out guidance on how labor cases would move forward without a Board quorum, but the Trump administration removed her hours after she distributed the memo. Cowen, the Trump-appointed replacement, has yet to put forward any guidelines.
“I’ve dealt with two different regions and the compliance office in DC,” Hoeschen told me last week. “The people working there are not promising me they’ll be able to be responsive the next day…We don’t know how long they’re going to be there.”This week, Hoeschen updated me, saying she is no longer able to reach the DC compliance attorney.
Hoeschen says that Trump’s actions at the NLRB go well beyond the norm of a Republican administration or even his first term.
Unions are typically able to prepare for a new Republican majority in the Board, but firing a Board member before their term is up and leaving three Board seats vacant to freeze it out of a quorum “is a different animal” that “stops the enforcement of the law, period.”
Hoeschen emphasized that what’s happening is antidemocratic and goes against precedent; no one has ever tried to repeal the National Labor Relations Act in court.
“All those people who voted last year—we heard so much about Republicans making inroads into the working class—those people haven’t gone away with inauguration,” Hoeschen said. “All those people who filed for election petitions and organizing drives last year are still here…That’s not representative of where Americans are right now.”
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