On Monday, the Supreme Court handed abortion rights advocates a rare win when they declined to take up a pair of cases seeking to challenge a decades-old decision limiting protesters’ actions near the entrances of abortion clinics. But, experts say that even though this result is positive,the decision’s reach is limited and does nothing to roll back the near impunity the Trump administration has extended to anti-abortion protesters who target abortion clinics.
Anti-abortion activists who brought the cases sought to overrule Hill v. Colorado, a 2000 decision in which a majority of the justices upheld a Colorado law requiring that abortion protesters obtain consent before coming within eight feet of another person to speak to them or distribute leaflets within 100 feet of the entrance of a health care clinic, including abortion clinics. That decision came after two decades of escalating violence—including bombings and murders—that abortion opponents perpetrated against abortion clinics and providers. The Hill decision paved the way for more cities and states to enact “buffer zone” laws restricting protests outside clinics, which have become even more relevant following the court’s June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overruledRoe v. Wade. In the year after Dobbs, violence and threats against abortion providers and clinics skyrocketed, according to the National Abortion Federation, a professional network of abortion providers.
The cases seeking to challenge the Hill decision were also aimed at local buffer zone laws in Illinois and New Jersey. In the Illinois case, an anti-abortion group challenged a since-repealed 2023ordinance passed by the city of Carbondale, which largely mimicked the law cited in Hill. The Carbondale City Council wound up repealing that law last July, with local officials arguing that there had been no violations since its passage. (The legal challenge against the ordinance was also already underway at the time of the repeal.) In the New Jersey case, a conservative Christian legal organization challenged eight-foot buffer zone restrictions outside bothhealth care and transitional facilities—such as domestic violence shelters—that the city of Englewood established in 2014.
In Monday’s decision, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito said they would have taken up both cases. In his dissent in the Illinois case, Thomas wrote that the Hill decision had been weakened by both Dobbs—in which the majority characterizedHill as having “distorted First Amendment doctrines”—and the court’s ruling in McCullen v. Coakley, a 2014 case in which the justices unanimously agreed that a Massachusetts buffer zone law violated the First Amendment. “Hill has been seriously undermined, if not completely eroded, and our refusal to provide clarity is an abdication of our judicial duty,” Thomas wrote in his dissent Monday, adding, “I would have taken this opportunity to explicitly overrule Hill.”
Abortion rights advocates took the court’s rejection of the cases as a win, albeit a limited one.
Katie O’Connor, director of federal abortion policy at the National Women’s Law Center, said that while the organization was “relieved” to hear about the court’s decision, “anti-abortion extremists are now more emboldened” thanks to Trump.
Last month, for example, Trump’s DOJ announced it would limit enforcement of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a 1994 federal law that prohibits physical force, threats, or intimidation against people trying to access reproductive health clinics. While the law has been used to prosecute both anti-abortion protesters targeting abortion clinics and abortion rights protesters targeting anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers, Trump baselessly claimed the Biden administration “selectively weaponized [the law] against Christians.” The new DOJ guidance—which says the FACE Act should only be used in “extraordinary circumstances” or cases involving “death, serious bodily harm, or serious property damage”—reportedly has abortion providers bracing for more intense protests and fearing more violence. (The DOJ’s directive to limit FACE Act enforcement, though, does not override the legality of buffer zones, which are controlled by state and local law enforcement.)
And, of course, Trump also pardoned nearly two dozen people who were charged with violating the FACE Act just a few days after assuming office. One of them, Paulette Harlow, Trump falsely said “was put in jail because she was praying”—a claim that even her former attorney said was untrue. As I previously reported, court records state that Harlow was part of a group of people who broke into a DC abortion clinic in October 2020 and livestreamed it on Facebook. Once inside, Harlow body-slammed a clinic manager, chained herself to other protesters, and resisted arrest. (Harlow denied the allegations against her at trial, despite video evidence proving otherwise.)
According to Amy Friedrich-Karnik, director of federal policy at the reproductive rights research and policy organizationtheGuttmacher Institute, those actions from the Trump administration “made its stance on violence against abortion clinics and providers clear”—making buffer zones “more important than ever.”
“No patient should have to encounter threats, intimidation, and attacks while seeking health care—and no medical provider or health center staff should be threatened because of their work to deliver abortion care to patients in need,” Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement, adding that buffer zones “help to create a safer environment for patients, providers, and staff.”
As David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University who has written extensively about reproductive rights law and violence against abortion providers, pointed out, the significance of Monday’s decision is limited partly because he estimates there are fewer than a dozen buffer zone laws nationwide. He also cautioned against reading too much into the Supreme Court declining to take up the case, given that it only hears a tiny fraction of the cases that appear before it.
But, still, Cohen said the decision is meaningful for allowing buffer zones to stand at all given the on-the-ground power they wield when enforced by local law enforcement. “I think what [Trump has] done with respect to FACE means that there is even more importance on these local buffer zones,” he told me. “The message that his actions around the FACE Act send to anti-abortion extremists are potentially very scary for the next several years.”
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is still blocking most ongoing scientific funding over concerns about “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI), according to NIH sources and internal NIH correspondence. The freeze has continued even after top NIH officials acknowledged that continuing to block the funding would violate a federal court order.
Last month, the Trump administration issued a memo, through the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), requiring federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance,” including “grants and loans.” The purpose of the spending freeze was to ensure compliance with President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting funding for “DEI,” “woke gender ideology,” and other topics.
The directive was quickly challenged in federal court by a coalition of 22 states. The federal court issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) on January 31, which “restrained and prohibited” the Trump administration “from reissuing, adopting, implementing, or otherwise giving effect to the OMB Directive under any other name or title.”
Grant funding by the National Cancer Institute from February 1 through February 22 is one-sixth of what it was for the same period last year.
A February 12 memo by two top NIH officials, which was not released publicly but was obtained by Popular Information, acknowledged that the TRO prohibited the agency from freezing funding to implement Trump’s executive order on DEI. “We recognize that NIH programs fall under [the] recently issued Temporary Restraining Order,” the officials wrote and, therefore, “grant management staff” can “proceed with issuing awards for all…grants.”
That has not happened.
Another memo issued by the same officials on February 13, obtained by Popular Information through an NIH source, provided “supplemental guidance.” The February 13 memo imposed “hard restrictions on awards… where the program promotes or takes part in [DEI] initiatives.”
The restrictions apply to “new and continuation awards made on or after February 14, 2025.” The freeze will “remain in place until the agency conducts a review” to determine whether “funding of the activities/programs are…consistent with current policy priorities.”
According to another NIH source, the agency conducted a keyword search to identify “DEI” grants. All funding for these grants has been frozen. Internally, NIH staff believes these grants may be canceled entirely, the source told Popular Information. Further, in some of the NIH’s institutes and centers, according to internal NIH correspondence reviewed by Popular Information, all grants have been frozen pending the creation of anti-DEI language that can be added to applications. Thus far, the language has not been provided to grant management staff.
The freeze has impacted the funding of most continuing grants at NIH. These grants fund ongoing research, including many studies involving human subjects in clinical trials. Since Congress provides funding annually, these grants must be extended each year, but it is normally a routine administrative process.
Freezing this funding to implement the administration’s DEI policies does not comply with the federal court’s TRO. It also jeopardizes critical research on cancer treatments, heart disease prevention, stroke intervention, and other potentially life-saving topics.
David Moorman, a brain researcher and professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, has not had his annual grant renewed. It is now three weeks late. “At some point, our money will run out and if it doesn’t get renewed, we will have to start firing people in my lab and this research will die,” Moorman told the Boston Globe.
From February 1 to February 12 there was a total freeze on the issuing of continuing grants, according to publicly reported data. After the issuance of the February 12 memo, some continuing grants have been funded. Between February 13, 2025, and February 22, 2025, there were 335 continuing grants issued with a total value of $200,235,780. However, the data shows that most continuing grants are still being blocked. Over the same nine-day period in 2024, there were 823 grants issued with a total value of $484,709,831.
Funding for continuing grants administered by the National Cancer Institute has dropped from $162 million between February 1, 2024, and February 22, 2024, to $27 million over the same period this year.
Unelected bureaucrat Elon Musk spent his weekend pushing the federal workforce into further chaos, masterminding a bizarre email sent out through the Office of Personnel Management. The email, which was sent to virtually all civil federal workers, demanded “approx. five bullets” documenting what they had done during the week. While the heads of many federal agencies ultimately instructed their employees not to respond, Musk’s real aim immediately became clear: using the email as a way to troll those workers online—and to test just who would comply with his demands.
“How much time and energy has been wasted over this pointless fucking email?”
The new email bore significant similarities to the Musk-authored “Fork in the Road” email sent out weeks ago by OPM, which told employees to voluntarily resign or face layoffs. Like many Musk directives, it was sent outside work hours and normal channels, set an arbitrary deadline, and didn’t make clear how anyone would follow up on the information received. This weekend’s email went out on Saturday, and set a deadline of 11:59 EST on Monday night for workers to respond; while it told them not to send “classified information,” it contained no further detail on how their responses would be used, or even who would read them.
“It’s insulting on many fronts,” one federal worker who got the email told Mother Jones, and who said they wouldn’t respond unless expressly directed to by their agency’s leadership. Another person who works in intelligence told Mother Jones that any reply would violate their non-disclosure agreement.
On X, Musk made it abundantly clear that the real value of the email was seeing which employees would bend to his will, writing that failure to respond to the email “will be considered a resignation.” The text of the email did not contain this threat, meaning that federal employees would only have known their jobs were at risk if they are in the habit of browsing the hundreds of tweets Musk posts daily.
“This was basically a check to see if the employee had a pulse and was capable of replying to an email. This mess will get sorted out this week,” Musk wrote, explaining the move. “Lot of people in for a rude awakening and strong dose of reality. They don’t get it yet, but they will.”
But Musk used the gigantic mess he himself had created with the email to paint federal workers as lazy and in need of a threatened mass-firing—a public relations goal that seemed to be baked in from the start.
“Many do not read their email at all,” Musk claimed, further criticizing federal workers. He also reshared a News Nation segment praising the email, adding, “Those who do not take this email seriously will soon be furthering their career elsewhere.”
Musk also shamelessly used the email to gin up engagement on X, the social media platform he owns, by, for instance, posting an unscientific vanity poll asking whether workers should have to respond, then using it to claim that “the public” was “overwhelmingly in favor” of the email. The email played as a chunk of red meat thrown to his real base: the right-wing X accounts he spends all day engaging with online. “This is exactly what I voted for,” enthused Chaya Raichik of the far-right account Libs of TikTok.
Multiple agencies asserted independence from Musk’s DOGE and its new influence over the OPM, directing their employees not to respond while they conducted internal reviews of the email. They included the Department of Defense, who also shared that guidance on X, and the FBI, whose newly-installed director, Trump loyalist Kash Patel, sent out an email telling them, “When and if further information is required, we will coordinate the responses.”
Others waffled; as The Bulwark‘s Sam Stein reported, HHS, which is now led by anti-vaccine activist and energetic Trump booster Robert F. Kennedy Jr., initially told employees to respond before backtracking and telling them to “pause” those responses. And a few hours after workers at the Social Security Administration were told to respond, they received a followup message from their HR department, telling them replying was voluntary and clarifying that a non-response wouldn’t be considered a resignation.
On Monday morning, federal workers at the Treasury Department and the General Services Administration told Mother Jones that they too had been instructed to respond to the email. In the case of Treasury, the directive telling staff to respond to the email was signed by John W. York, a former Heritage Foundation policy analyst; the email did not specify his job at the department.
Even with some federal agencies choosing to bend the knee, several federal workers told Mother Jones it was obvious that the larger goal had been to simply scare them and waste their time— something that didn’t work as well as Musk may have hoped.
Many employees simply forwarded the email to their managers and unions. The email has already been cited in an amended union-backed lawsuit filed against DOGE, which argued OPM had rolled out a “new mandatory reporting program” for federal workers, but hadn’t compiled with the procedures required to put one into place.
“No notice was published,” the amended complaint noted, “in the Federal Register or anywhere else, regarding any OPM program, rule, policy, or regulation requiring all federal employees to provide a report regarding their work to OPM.”
“Obviously, everything about DOGE is horseshit,” another federal worker told Mother Jones. “They aren’t actually concerned with ‘rooting out waste’ as much as they are with taking a sledgehammer to crucial agencies, but I can’t help but think about how much time and energy has been wasted over this pointless fucking email.”
Jonathan Rivera had to get his foot, and part of his leg, amputated in January. Rivera lives in Florida—one of ten states which has declined federally backed Medicaid expansions through the Affordable Care Act, meant to patch state-level coverage gaps and allow more low-income people to qualify for care.
With House Republicans fielding Medicaid cuts in the range of hundreds of billions of dollars—at Trump’s behest—the income limits that determine eligibility, which already vary by state, could drop, putting Rivera and his wife at risk of losing health coverage despite their minimal income. Rivera’s wife, Dani, is also disabled, with nerve and cervical spine damage; her husband has been her caregiver since before his own medical emergencies. Their twelve-year-old son is autistic. If the couple did not have a child, in addition to being low-income, they wouldn’t have qualified for Medicaid at all under Florida’s strict eligibility requirements.
Without Medicaid, Rivera would not be able to afford prosthetics and associated care. A few years ago, he wasn’t on any insurance, and couldn’t afford diabetes medication, which led to the debilitatingly painful nerve condition Charcot foot. Unable to work, Rivera had surgery to rebuild his right foot in 2022. But returning to work as a cook led to further pressure on the foot, which he was forced to amputate. Now, the prospect of Medicaid cuts—and the possibility of losing coverage—loom over him.
“Getting kicked off it,” Rivera said, “would probably destroy me.”
“I don’t see how any state could protect people with disabilities from these kinds of cuts.”
Georgetown University public policy professor Edwin Park said that there are similarities between the current attacks on Medicaid and ones in 2017, during Trump’s first term, which also focused on “shifting the federal cost to states.” There are around 70 million Americans enrolled in Medicaid, half being children; 20 million of those enrollees only qualify due to Medicaid expansions—almost a third of the program. In a state like Florida, where there are 4.3 million people on Medicaid, around one million people are locked out by its refusal to take part in the expansion. (Required federal Medicaid eligibility groups also include disabled and aging people receiving Supplemental Security Income, pregnant people, and low-income children, all of whom Medicaid has to extend some level of coverage to in all states.)
The Riveras have been on private insurance in the past, but they faced high premiums, and—having had both—Rivera trusts Medicaid more for his post-amputation health care.
“States could restrict enrollment in some of the mandatory categories by lowering income thresholds or making it harder to keep,” said David Machledt, a senior health policy expert with the National Health Law Program. “The end result is people will lose coverage, and that will have major health impacts on those individuals.”
Elon Musk and Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson have been among many Medicaid opponents loudly promoting false, stereotyped accounts of widespreadwaste and fraud among its low-income recipients. But nearly two out of three working-age adults on Medicaid who aren’t on SSI—some seven million people—work. The truth of the matter is that most disabled people on Medicaid qualify due to income, which puts them at the highest risk for losing coverage if Republicans decide they’re not “poor enough” to cover. The approval process for SSI can take years, with tens of thousands of applicants dying annually while on wait lists. That leaves many disabled people too sick to work before the government agrees they’re “disabled enough,” if they end up qualifying at all.
“I don’t see how any state could protect people with disabilities from these kinds of cuts,” Park told me. “Two-thirds of people with disabilities who are on Medicaid aren’t eligible under the SSI pathway.”
And while cuts to Medicaid will be devastating for tens of millions of Americans, said Meg Comeau of Boston University’s Center for Innovation in Social Work and Health, “We won’t be able to get a good handle for a while on how many people are in those optional categories whose coverage has been taken away.”
Harper Phillips, who lives outside Raleigh, North Carolina, qualified for Medicaid in late 2023 thanks to North Carolina’s Medicaid expansion—a vast improvement from Phillips’ previous coverage through their husband’s job at Target, which cost the couple $500 in monthly premiums against his take-home pay of just $1,700 per month. After launching in December 2023, North Carolina saw 600,000 enrollees under the expansion in its first year alone.
Medicaid meant Phillips, who lives with Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and dysautonomia, is no longer afraid to visit medical specialists. “I’ve seen five or six specialists,” Phillips said. “That’s just not something I have to worry about.” But that’s also why Phillips is scared about having Medicaid being taken away from them.
Machledt said that changes in people’s lives can be seen quickly in states that have taken part in Medicaid expansion: less medical debt, better access to health care, and improvements in health outcomes. On a macro level, Machledt says that expansions have led to more stabilization of rural health care and more health care jobs; he is concerned that rollbacks on Medicaid expansion will lead rural hospitals to close, given that nearly 14 million Medicaid enrollees live in rural areas.
Comeau is also concerned about the impact of Medicaid rollbacks on even middle-class children with disabilities. “Those fundamental changes in the optional categories of Medicaid enrollees will have a huge impact on kids who otherwise would not have access to the kind of life-saving and life-sustaining care that they need,” she added.
Some Republicans in Congress and state governments have raised work requirements as a way to cut down on how many people qualify for Medicaid, which would put around 36 million Medicaid enrollees at risk of being booted. 13 states had enacted Medicaid work requirements during the first Trump presidency; Georgia currently has the only active Medicaid program with such requirements. A recent investigation by ProPublica and the Current also found that Georgia’s program “cost federal and state taxpayers more than $86.9 million, three-quarters of which has gone to consultants.” In Arkansas alone, 18,000 people were kicked off Medicaid rolls during the first seven months of the state implementing work requirements in 2018.
Park cautions people to be wary of claims from some politicians that Medicaid work requirements will not impact disabled people. “The work requirements [don’t] include exemptions for people with SSI,” he said, “let alone all the other people with disabilities who are covered by Medicaid.”
“These policies seem to be designed to trip people up and then blame them for falling.”
Kim Musheno, the Arc‘s senior director of Medicaid policy, said that medical exemption processes for work requirements are also flawed. “Exemptions required frequent documentation and verification, which created administrative barriers,” Musheno said. “Many individuals lost coverage simply because they couldn’t submit paperwork on time.” An October 2021 study also found that, of primary care providers in the first four states to enact Medicaid work requirements, one in five said they wouldn’t fill out paperwork signing off on work requirement exemptions, regardless of the circumstances.
Both Comeau and Machledt agree that it is not feasible for states to cough up the difference to make up for federal Medicaid cuts.
An April 2023 Congressional Budget Office analysis also predicts that enacting Medicaid work requirements will cost states a lot of money. “The CBO predicted it would increase state spending by $65 billion,” Machledt said. “So you’re shifting these costs onto the state budget that has to be balanced every year.”
There are avenues that states may likely take to reduce expenses, Comeau said, which include cutting provider costs. But, Comeau adds, “If they reduce provider rates, then fewer providers are interested in being enrolled.”
It also seems a likely possibility, Comeau explained, that states would roll back on optional Medicaid benefits, which includes a wide range of services people need, including physical therapy, prostheses like those Jonathan Rivera needs, hospice care, and certain prescription medication.
The right’s attacks on Medicaid, Machledt believes, “seem to be designed to trip people up and then blame them for falling.”
When Michael first started working in the Department of the Interior over a decade ago, he hid the fact that he was gay from his co-workers. “It can be an old boys’ club,” explains Michael, who still works in the department and requested to use a pseudonym to protect himself from retaliation. “People who were queer kept it to themselves so as not to rock the boat.” But his agency grew more diverse over the years, and eventually he came out to a small group of co-workers after learning that one was a lesbian. It was important to know he would be accepted and safe, he says, and “to have a few people that I could be myself with.”
Then, during Donald Trump’s first term, Michael remembers a meeting when a seasonal worker came out as transgender and asked the staff to use he/him pronouns. “His voice was cracking, his hands were shaking,” Michael still recalls. It reminded him of his own early days on the job. “I thought, There needs to be a group for community and support. I need to do this.”
So Michael started working with other queer people in his agency to form a monthly group for LGBTQ employees and anyone else who wanted to join. They organized Pride Month events, surveyed members on barriers they were facing in their jobs, and problem-solved with management, like helping get an employee’s official nametag changed when they came out as transgender.
Hundreds of organizations like Michael’s exist throughout the federal government—not just for LGBTQ workers, but also for veterans, Black and Hispanic workers, people with disabilities, and others who share a connection around a fundamental part of their identity. Known as “employee resource groups,” they’ve long been officially recognized and approved by federal agencies; the first federal Pride employee resource group, at the Smithsonian, was founded in 1988, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. During Trump’s first term, leadership urged employees to join them. “Employee Organizations can serve as sounding boards around strategic diversity and inclusion matters,” reads an April 2017 Interior Department bulletin, “and provide a support system that offers employees a sense of community, camaraderie, and connection to the organization.”
But since returning to power, Trump and his allies have cast these same groups as subversive and even illegal, an example of “radical” and “discriminatory” programspromoting diversity, equality, and inclusiveness. On February 5, the Office of Personnel Management—essentially the executive branch’s HR department—issued a memorandum telling agencies to “prohibit” employee resource groups that promote “unlawful DEIA initiatives” or “employee retention agendas based on protected characteristics.”
The OPM memo is just one of many Trump actions generating fear of a new “Lavender Scare”—a purge that could roll back decades of LGBTQ gains and send those who remain in the government back into the closet. While Trump has appointed a couple of token gay officials—Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and special missions envoy Ric Grenell—he’s simultaneously declared war on transgender people, issuing edicts against so-called “gender ideology” and an onslaught of executive orders attempting to impose widespread discrimination against trans people in schools, hospitals, sports, homeless shelters, and prisons.
“People came to us because they needed community, needed connection. We were trying to keep each other safe. Now, we’re all just this big target.”
The new administration’s anti-LGBTQ hostility doesn’t stop at the transgender community. On his second day in office, Trump rescinded a nearly 60-year-old order prohibitingdiscrimination by federal contractors. His appointees at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have halted that agency’s investigations of anti-LGBTQ discrimination. Last week, the Department of Homeland Security said it will now allow its agents to conduct surveillance based solely on a target’s gender identity or sexual orientation. And OPM opened a tipline for federal workers to report colleagues who have worked on DEI—a callback to an earlier era when employees were encouraged to report and out their gay coworkers.
In the US Department of Agriculture, multiple people have been asked to report the names of LGBTQ employee resource group leaders to higher-ranking officials, according to interviews with workers and a document reviewed by Mother Jones. In the Interior Department, too, Michael says that an official has informed him that they’ve been asked to produce the names of at least some participants in employee resource groups.
“I never thought my involvement in an after-work group would land me here,” a board member of a USDA queer employee resource group says.
“They’re not coming out and saying, ‘We want to fire the queers,’” Michael says. “They’re not asking people, ‘Are you gay? Are you lesbian?’ They’re asking, ‘Who is participating in DEI?’ But in the end it’s going to have the same effect.”
In interviews with Mother Jones,queer and trans workers who hold wide-ranging roles in the federal government, some with more than a decade of public service, say they have been living and working in fear since Trump regained office—afraid of being targeted or even fired for their gender identity, sexual orientation, or past efforts to support other LGBTQ employees. All eight federal workers interviewed for this story requested anonymity to protect themselves or their colleagues from workplace retaliation.
Transgender workers, in particular, tell Mother Jones they’re afraid of being fired every day simply for being who they are. “I don’t feel safe in my job,” says a trans woman who has spent more than a decade working as a civilian in the Department of Defense. Trump has already issued an executive order declaring her trans counterparts in the military unfit to serve, claiming that being trans “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.” Another new Trump order proclaims that the government will no longer recognize people’s gender identity, only their sex, as defined as their reproductive biology.
“It’s a persecution,” the DOD employee says. “The government no longer recognizes my medical condition or acknowledges my existence as a transgender woman.”
Seventy years ago, at the height of the McCarthy era—when federal employees with left-wing views were routinely interrogated and fired for being suspected communists—a related purge of queer workers was underway. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order listing “sexual perversion” as a basis for terminating federal civil service employees, on the theory that gay men and lesbians were susceptible to blackmail by the country’s enemies. In what became known as the Lavender Scare, at least 5,000 federal workers were fired for suspected homosexuality over the next two decades.
“More people were targeted during that period for being gay or for engaging in same-sex intimacy than were targeted for being communist,” says San Francisco State University professor Marc Stein. The firings rippled out to state and local governments and the private sector, he adds, “accompanied by notions that the gay people were weak, were divisive in workplaces, were not strong representatives of a moral United States.” It’s taken decades since then for LGBTQ people to gain acceptance in public life, including in the federal workforce. Not until the Obama administration was Eisenhower’s executive order formally rescinded. Today, an estimated 314,000 federal employees, USPS workers, and federal contractors are LGBTQ, according to the Williams Institute. Meanwhile, the number Americans who identify as LGBTQ is growing. A new Gallup report found that 9.3 percent of U.S. adults identified as LGBTQ+ in 2024, up from 7.6 percent the previous year.
“I went through and deleted a bunch of emails and contacts, because I have lists of queer employees, and I am afraid if someone in the Trump administration gets their hands on it.”
Now, the very programs and support groups that have helped queer folks integrate could create risks for their participants. Employee resource groups like Michael’s have been shutting down operations and wiping their websites, afraid of putting their members at risk in the openly hostile Trump administration.
“We’ve gone dark,” a former LGBTQ resource group leader in the Department of Agriculture tells Mother Jones. “We have pulled our contact lists off of government systems. Personally, as someone who has been very involved in queer spaces, I went through and deleted a bunch of emails and contacts, because I have lists of queer employees, and I am afraid if someone in the Trump administration gets their hands on it.”
“I’m scared for the people I’ve been trying to help,”says a trans worker for the Interior Department who is involved in employee resource groups. “People came to us because they needed community, needed connection. We were trying to keep each other safe. Now, we’re all just this big target.”
The requests for names of LGBTQ resource group leadersare taking place against a backdrop of mass firings across the government. Over the last few weeks, the Trump administration, with help from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, have set about terminatingvastswaths of the federal workforce—some because their jobs were centered on DEI, and others simply because they were were new on the job and on probationary status, with fewer protections from being fired.
These efforts have swept up queer and trans employees like Anna, a military veteran working at a national security agency who had recently changed from being a contractor to a full-time employee. When Trump won reelection in November, Anna decided it was time to accelerate her gender transition. She’d started medically transitioning in 2023, but hadn’t yet legally changed her name or the gender marker on her identity and personnel documents. “When the results of the election came in, I realized I had to step on the gas, make a lot of those changes,” Anna says, “before the chance to be myself was taken away.”
She applied to a court to change her name in her home state and worked with her agency’s HR department to eliminate references to her as male from her personnel records. But she was too late. Her legal name change—a prerequisite for other document changes—wasn’t granted until shortly before Trump’s inauguration. As a result, her HR documents were only partially updated before Trump declared, on his first day in office, that the federal government would only recognize sex based on reproductive biology.
Anna continued reporting to the office, sure she would be fired any day. “It feels, for lack of a better term, like the sword of Damocles is over the top of me,” Anna told me in early February.
“Someone like me? I’m just waiting for them to find me,” says a queer civil engineer. “It’s only a matter of time.”
But ultimately, Anna—who was still on probationary status, despite her years as a contractor—was caught up in a different purge. One recent afternoon, a director pulled her into a conference room with other workers and informed her she and other probationary employees were being terminated. She returned to her office, shell shocked, to pack a cardboard box and share a final goodbye with stunned colleagues. “It feels like I just got punched in the back of the head,” she told me that evening.
Despite the name change, when she received her termination notice late that night, it addressed her by her dead name.
When the new administration terminated federal DEI positions and programs on Inauguration Day, employees on DEI teams, or who had previously held those jobs, were swiftly placed on administrative leave and their access cut off to federal computers and systems. Some of those workers have since received notices that they have been officially fired. “They got disappeared,” says a nonbinary USDA worker I’ll call Ryan, who regularly worked with the agency’s DEI team as part of their job responsibilities. “I can’t look up their name in the system. All chats with them have been deleted.”
Late last week, a federal judge in Maryland issued a preliminary injunction blocking the parts of Trumps anti-DEI orders that threatened to cut off “equity-related” federal grants and funding for contractors. Yet the federal employees remain vulnerable—and it has become clear that the Trump administration’s DEI purge is far from over. Documents uncovered by the Washington Post show that DOGE plans to identify and fire workers who do not hold DEI-related jobs but could be “tied to diversity initiatives through unspecified other means,” as the Post put it. Dozens of employees in the Education Department have already been put on administrative leave for attending a DEI training during the first Trump administration, even though participation had, back then, been encouraged.
“Someone like me? I’m just waiting for them to find me,” says a queer civil engineer, who was previously assigned to work part-time on a program to mitigate anti-LGBTQ discrimination. “It’s only a matter of time. Those of us like me who have done trainings and are out, we’re afraid. It makes it incredibly hard to concentrate and focus at work.”
“The Lavender Scare was done under the guise of loyalty to the government, to protect the government from security breaches,” the engineer adds. “Now, it’s about loyalty to the president.”
“I don’t know how to stop being who I am anymore. I am devastated and barely holding it together most of the time.”
Even those who never worked on DEI, or participated in employee resource groups, worry about other ways they could be targeted—for example, through new rules like the January 29 OPM directive requiring that “intimate spaces” be “designated by biological sex and not gender identity.” The trans woman working in the Department of Defense, for instance, says she is determined to continue using the women’s restroom after going through the painstaking process of medical transition—including diagnosis, therapy, testing, and surgery. “I have been dehumanized so much,” she says. “I’m not going to stop using women’s facilities.” But she knows she could be reported and subject to discipline as a result. “That that exposes me to anyone who has a grudge against me or doesn’t support me,” she worries.
Even amid this terror campaign,support continues to exist for queer and trans federal workers—much of it quiet and behind the scenes. Several employees say their managers have privately expressed a desire to protect them; co-workers have been sending sympathetic messages.
And just because employee resource groups are taking down their websites and cancelling meetings doesn’t mean their networks have disappeared. Some groups are organized as nonprofits funded by member dues, which means they exist as separate entities from the government. In private messages and non-work email groups, queer federal employees are continuing to offer solidarity and advice on how to protect themselves. One former resource group leader says she’s been urging employees to download their entire electronic personnel files, track down copies of their degrees and professional licenses, and gather information about the complaint process at their agencies, before their access to computer systems is cut off.
“The other advice is to find people that you can be safe with and build community,” she adds. “As scared as I am to lose my job, I also have a network around me that is feeding me information, and that is helping me be prepared.”
“The Lavender Scare was done under the guise of loyalty to the government, to protect the government from security breaches. Now, it’s about loyalty to the president.”
Thankfully, there is no easy way for the federal government to identify gay and trans workers, according to a federally employed scientist with knowledge of the matter. A few agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—have, in the past, piloted small surveys with questions about LGBTQ status. But by and large, the scientist says, agencies do not keep data on the sexual orientation or transgender status of civil service employees.
Designing systems to collect such data was once the goal of a project, initiated in 2021 under the Biden administration, to analyze barriers faced by LGBTQ workers. But the Office of Personnel Management never finalized guidelines on how agencies should collect the data. To the scientist, that failure, once a source of frustration, is now reason for relief. “Had we been able to successfully have self-disclosed sexual orientation and gender identity in personnel documents,” she adds, “it [still] would take years before LGBTQ populations would willingly self-identify.”
That was the case for Ryan, the nonbinary employee in the USDA. Though they’d been sure of their identity for over a decade, they didn’t share it at work until two years ago, when they moved into a new role with new coworkersand finally decided to add “they/them” to the bottom of their emails. “That was my big ‘ripping the band-aid off,’” they say. “It was scary, but exhilarating.”
Then, at a recent staff meeting, employees were instructed to use a standard email signature that required them to remove their pronouns. Ryan broke down crying in front of their team. “I don’t know how to stop being who I am anymore,” they tell Mother Jones. “I am devastated and barely holding it together most of the time.”
But, Ryan adds, “I’m not quitting. I’m going to make them fire me if they want me to go away.”
The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.
On Thursday afternoon, before I began to write this newsletter, I searched Hakeem Jeffries in Google News. I found but a handful of recent entries for the House Democratic leader from New York. On Sunday, he had appeared on ABC News’ This Week and slapped President Donald Trump and the Republicans for having done nothing to lower the cost of living for Americans and for preparing to push more tax cuts for the wealthy. Three days later, Axios reported that Jeffries, during a call with House Democrats, advised his colleagues to bring guests to Trump’s address to Congress next month who have been negatively affected by the administration.
This search also turned up reports that Jeffries earlier in the month had criticized Trump’s comments on DEI and the DOGE attack on the federal workforce and had compared the Democrats to New York Yankee Aaron Judge, noting they ought to be patient: “He waits for the right one—and then he swings. We’re not going to swing at every pitch. We’re going to swing at the ones that matter for the American people.” Another story noted that Jeffries said at a press briefing, “I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have. What leverage do we have? Republicans have repeatedly lectured America—they control the House, the Senate and the presidency. It’s their government.” And on Wednesday he was in the news for cooking up a nickname for Trump—“Captain Chaos”—which to some ears might sound somewhat appealing.
That’s about it. Do these intermittent bursts of criticism strike you as the exertions of a leader who’s fighting a war of survival?
Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, are the two leaders of their party now. And they appear to be mainly watching as Trump and Musk mount an all-out blitzkrieg on the federal government, the rule of law, and democracy. Each day, El-Don launches a fusillade against agencies that provide critical services—USAID, IRS, EPA, FAA, NIH, CDC, USDA, EEOC, CFPB, USPS, NOAA, NASA, the Labor Department, Veterans Affairs, the National Science Foundation, the US Forest Service, the National Park Service,the Social Security Administration, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and more—and it’s all part of a grand scheme: to demolish the one entity than can counter the forces of oligarchy and autocracy.
I previously wrote that Democrats are bringing a teaspoon to a gunfight. But it’s unclear if most Ds even recognize they’re in a gunfight.
This is not your father’s GOP push for lower taxes for the plutocrats and less regulation for corporate pirates and polluters. Musk is seeking to dismantle government to make way for the libertarian dystopia he seeks in which the disruptors and robber-barons of today are free to do whatever they like, as an authoritarian (who’s their pal) rules without restraint. The goal is not government efficiency but government emasculation—and the obliteration of the political party that has called for utilizing government to address such crucial matters as economic inequity, inadequate health care, high prescription drug prices, environmental despoilation, education disparities, crappy infrastructure, housing shortages, and climate change.
The targets so far have generally been government agencies and departments that are perceived as liberal outposts (as if preventing malaria in Africa is a left-wing project). Check out this chart posted by Adam Bonica, a professor of political science at Stanford:
The DOGE firings have nothing to do with “efficiency” or “cutting waste.” They’re a direct push to weaken federal agencies perceived as liberal. This was evident from the start, and now the data confirms it: targeted agencies overwhelmingly those seen as more left-leaning.
Yet in the face of this onslaught—amid this existential battle—Jeffries and Schumer display little sense of urgency. The same goes for many other elected Democratic officials. I previously wrote that Democrats are bringing a teaspoon to a gunfight. But it’s unclear if most Ds even recognize they’re in a gunfight.
Trump and Musk are initiating assaults on multiple fronts every day (including weekends!). They are using their platforms and bullhorns to proclaim nonstop that they are vanquishing waste, fraud, abuse, and inefficiency. This is their narrative, and as good propagandists they repeat this line incessantly to justify their slash-a-thon that is defenestrating tens of thousands of government workers and ending or hindering programs and departments that bring food, clean water, and medical care to the needy; that address climate change; that safeguard workers in their workplaces; that protect consumers from vulturous financial firms; that collect revenue for the government; that prevent the pollution of our air and water; that research diseases; that control air traffic; that serve our veterans; that guard nuclear weapons; that inspect our food; and that do much more.
Where’s the counterpunch? Where’s the Democrats’ narrative? Are they in the ring 24/7 explaining to the public that DOGE is a dodge? Just a front for a top-down revolution of elites who want to be unfettered by rules, regulations, or laws? If they are not matching Trump and Musk syllable for syllable, they are losing. A crusade to slim down bloated government sounds good to many Americans. By not loudly calling BS on this, the Democrats lose any chance they might have of winning. Waiting for Trump and Musk to overreach, looking for strategic openings—ah, they really screwed the pooch by killing that veterans program!—is not going to do the trick in the face of this hostile takeover of the federal government by a power-mad autocrat and the world’s No. 1 oligarch. This is a recipe for being crushed. Rope-a-dope is not going to work. Neither will waiting for Trump and Musk to slip in the polls, which appears to be happening.
Your people are demanding action. They look to Washington and to the folks at the top of the party and scream in exasperation, “Where are you? What are you doing? What is the plan?”
The destruction being wreaked upon the government will not be easily undone or repaired, should the tables ever be turned. Many of the fired—people with expertise—won’t come back. Necessary programs will not be revived. Young people will not apply for jobs in a workforce that can be dismantled on a whim. This is the time for a robust response. The barbarians are not at the gate; they’re inside, burning and pillaging. Worrying about guests for a presidential speech two weeks from now is like fretting about your ride home from the dock when your ship is sinking mid-journey.
Then there’s this: Your people are demanding action. There’s polling data and plenty of anecdotal evidence that Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters across the land are yearning for leadership. They look to Washington and to the folks at the top of the party and scream in exasperation, “Where are you? What are you doing? What is the plan?” After the election, there was the usual post-loss chattering about what the party should do. Go left? Go right? Reach out to pissed-off white working-class guys? Focus on message delivery mechanisms? Downplay the social issues (say, trans rights) and zero in on bread-and-butter matters?
Those are all good questions for cogitation, and folks thought they had some time before the next election to reflect on all this. Yet now a crisis is at hand—for the nation and the party. A much different conversation is required—as is an action plan. And there’s a craving for it. On Thursday night, Jeffries was in Chicago for an event promoting his illustrated book, The ABCs of Democracy. Outside protesters chanted, “We don’t need a book tour” and called on Jeffries to “stand up right now” to the Trump-Musk assault. I don’t know if this is a sign of a burgeoning populist uprising of progressives against the Democratic Party. But, as much as I’m in favor of authors promoting their work, this is no time for a book tour.
There are institutional obstacles for the Democrats. Out-of-power parties in America tend not to have paramount leaders with national standing who can go toe-to-toe with a president or a run-amok billionaire. The job descriptions for Schumer and Jeffries do not cover this. They were elected to serve their constituents, not the nation, and, as congressional leaders, their jobs are to manage and wrangle their caucuses, each of which contain members with different needs, different perspectives, and different amounts of political courage. And there are no 2028 Democratic contenders who presently can command as much attention as the liar who stands behind the presidential podium. Some governors are trying—see Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois—while California Gov. Gavin Newsom, once a mighty Trump foe, has been pinned down by the tragic wildfires in Los Angeles.
Certainly, some Democrats understand this is a five-alarm, break-glass moment. When Musk and his minions were shutting down USAID, several House members and senators, including Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), showed up at its headquarters to protest. And in recent days, a few Democratic legislators have demonstrated fierceness. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York is one. She got the story right at a recent rally: “[Musk] is trying to gut everything good in America for his own private profit. This is the culmination of what oligarchy is all about…the fusion and the capture of the billionaire class of our democracy.”
"[Musk] is trying to gut everything good in America for his own private profit. This is the culmination of what oligarchy is all about…the fusion and the capture of the billionaire class of our democracy." – @aoc.bsky.social with @fedworkersunited.bsky.social today #SaveOurServices
Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut also understands this is a battle for the narrative: “The question is can you work with Republicans in the middle of a constitutional crisis when democracy is on the line? And right now, I think that this crisis is serious and deepening in its seriousness, that our job No.1, No. 2, and No. 3 is to save our democracy.”
@chrismurphyct.bsky.social: "The question is can you work with Republicans in the middle of a constitutional crisis when democracy is on the line? And right now, I think that this crisis is serious and deepening in its seriousness, that our job #1, #2, and #3 is to save our democracy."
But the absence of a top-dog Democrat swinging hard means the party must fashion a collective response to Trump and Musk. And the newly elected Democratic National Committee chair, Ken Martin, is not the answer. His job is mainly to serve the state committee chairs in managing the internal workings of the DNC, not serve as the party’s gladiator.
As I suggested weeks ago, the Dems need a war room that organizes a daily counterassault with those kickass House members and senators—and prominent experts and figures—who are stoked to fight their way into every news cycle to combat the Musk-MAGA propaganda. To point out the consequences of these firings. To promote the overarching message that a campaign to eviscerate government for the benefit of the elites is underway. This can’t be done just by a flurry of press releases. These pols need to be warriors blitzing across social media platforms with posts and video. They must hit whatever news outlets will have them. They must orchestrate PR stunts and events featuring fired workers whose work was essential. And they must do this over and over. There’s a simple strategy to adopt: Everything, everywhere, all at once.
It’s not quite rocket science to have Democratic legislators and leading scientists point out that cutbacks at NASA could help China or other nations gain an edge in space research and exploration or climate change technology. And then there’s another event the next hour on how the slashing at the USDA will lead to less safe food.
This is not going to be easy. Combatting fascism often isn’t. Some Democratic legislators—many?—are not street brawlers and would rather concoct insiderish strategies for how to deal with the pending spending legislation, arguably an important front. But the party as a whole needs to be on the battlefield and acting as if it is fighting for its political life—because that is what’s at stake, as well as the lives of many Americans across the country.
Here is John Oliver roasting Jeffries for his Aaron Judge comparison:
Nobody show Aaron Judge last night's episode of Last Week Tonight.
This story was originally published by theGuardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
The Trump administration is stripping away support for scientific research in the US and overseas that contains a word it finds particularly inconvenient: “climate.”
The government is withdrawing grants and other support for research that even references the climate crisis, academics have said, amid Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg upon environmental regulations and clean-energy development.
Trump, who has said that the climate crisis is a “giant hoax,” has already stripped mentions of climate change and global heating from government websites and ordered a halt to programs that reference diversity, equity, and inclusion. A widespread funding freeze for federally backed scientific work also has been imposed, throwing the US scientific community into chaos.
Researchers said work mentioning climate is being particularly targeted. One environmental scientist working in the western US who did not want to be named said their previously awarded grant from the Department of Transportation for climate-adaption research had been withdrawn, until they retitled it to remove the word “climate.”
“I still have the grant because I changed the title,” the scientist said. “I was told that I needed to do so before the title of the grant was published on the US DOT website in order to keep it. The explanation was that the priorities of the current administration don’t include climate change and other topics considered ‘woke’.”
“They want to return to an era where kids have polio, rivers are on fire, and cities are blanketed by pollution.”
The researcher said they were “shocked because the grant was already awarded and I would have risked losing it. I’m very concerned about science being politically influenced. If researchers can’t use certain words, it’s likely that some science will be biased.”
References to climate are being scrubbed elsewhere, too. Course materials at the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center at the University of Hawaii will delete mentions of “climate change,” leaked emails seen by the Guardian show. The alterations, at the behest of the Trump administration, affect about a dozen different course materials.
“Specifically, references to ‘climate change’ and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) have been removed or revised to align with the new priorities,” an administrator at the center wrote. “Please exercise caution when referencing these topics during instruction.”
The administration’s animus towards climate research has even extended overseas via the US’s Fulbright exchange program, which offers about 8,000 grants a year to American and foreign teachers and scholars.
Kaarle Hämeri, chancellor of the University of Helsinki in Finland, said the descriptions for Fulbright grants had been changed to remove or alter the words “climate change,” as well as “equitable society,” “inclusive societies,” and “women in society.”
Hämeri said that one grant to his university had already been withdrawn as a result of changes he said were also being imposed across other countries involved in the Fulbright program. Fulbright and the US state department were asked about the extent of the wording bans. “I understand that these actions are due to changed priorities in US government,” said Hämeri. “It will harm research in several important fields, especially as in many cases the US researchers are among the best in their field.”
At the National Science Foundation (NSF), a $9 billion federal agency that supports research in science and engineering, teams have been combing through active projects looking for dozens of words, including “women,” “biased” and “equality” that may violate Trump’s ban on certain grants.
The NSF, which has just fired about 10 percent of its workforce, did not respond to questions over whether climate is also on the banned list. Regardless, grants supporting an array of scientific work have been frozen amid this zealous mission to install a newspeak among scientists, despite a court order demanding the freeze be reversed.
“[The] NSF is working expeditiously to conduct a comprehensive review of our projects, programs and activities to be compliant with the existing executive orders,” a foundation spokesperson said.
The freeze on grants has upended scientific work across federal agencies, hospitals and universities, placing the future of hundreds of millions of dollars’ of research into question.
“The people most vulnerable in our society in terms of health and public safety are now even further at risk,” said Jennifer Jones, director of the center for science and democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“This administration doesn’t have a plan to advance science, they have a plan to remove obstacles for the oil and gas industry. They want to return to an era where kids have polio, rivers are on fire, and cities are blanketed by pollution.”
Jones said that the US government may be moving in the direction of Florida, where Republicans banned mention of climate change in state laws. “I live in a state where we are under threat more than ever from climate change but state employees can’t mention it,” she said. “This administration wants scientists to feel threatened. We’ve seen this before but Trump is doing it at an unprecedented scale now.”
The attack upon science “feels very personal right now” and may deter a new generation of young scientists from entering their areas of research, according to Joanne Carney, chief government affairs officer at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
“We could see a reduction in whole fields of scientific research that will slow down our ability to understand the natural world and craft policies to protect society and national security,” Carney said.
“We’re concerned about the signal this is sending out to any young student interest in Stem [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] who might not think they can see a future in the US,” she said. “We need greater investment in science and technology to be a global leader at this moment. Our adversaries will be very happy with this.”
Earlier this month, Kristan Hawkins, head of the influential anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, told her 85,000 followers on X that a particularly militant faction of anti-abortion activists worried hermore than pro-choice protesters. “The sad thing is the people I fear getting shot by, most of the time, aren’t crazy Leftists (most of them don’t have guns or how to use them, lol)…but ‘abolitionists,’” she posted. “Think about that.” The post appeared to be in response to allegations that Hawkins and other pro-life leaders had thwarted a recent bill in North Dakota that would have criminalized abortion.
Those accusations came from the group that Hawkins mentioned in her tweet: “abolitionists,” or activists who believe that abortion should be completely illegal with no exceptions. Since the Supreme Court ended federal protection for abortion access with its Dobbsv. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022, abolitionists have been pushing to criminalize abortion, with some of the most zealous arguing that the termination of a pregnancy should be considered a homicide and punished with the full force of the law.
Like their more mainstream pro-life counterparts, abolitionists often protest outside abortion clinics—but abolitionists also target other protesters who theoretically are on the same side. They reasonthat these other anti-abortion protesters are not sufficiently dedicated to eradicating abortion. “History will look back on ‘defund Planned Parenthood’ as the weakest demand in the face of a holocaust ever to exist,” reads one recent Instagram post from Abolitionists Rising, a group with nearly 49,000 followers. Some abolitionists have used violent rhetoric to advance their cause. NBC reported last year that in a 2023 speech, abolitionist leader Jason Storms said, “Guns collecting dust on the shelves are not helping us.” Instead, he called for “peace through superior firepower.”
A group of extremists, many of whom were motivated by fervent religious convictions, abolitionists were once considered a fringe element in the anti-abortion movement, even doing more harm than good by attacking the very women the anti-abortion movement claimed to want to protect. In 2022, the New York Timesreferred to abortion abolitionists as “the outer edge of the anti-abortion movement.” Yet Hawkins’ tweet drew immediate blowback—and not just from the handful of explicitly abolition-focused anti-abortion groups. The outcry reflects a developing trend that Cynthia Soohoo, co-director of the Human Rights and Gender Justice Clinic at the City University of New York School of Law, has observed over the past several years.
“Emboldened by Dobbs and their own rhetoric, abortion abolitionists now are pushing for laws based on their extremist, minority position that prenatal life should be treated as people.”
“Emboldened by Dobbs and their own rhetoric, abortion abolitionists now are pushing for laws based on their extremist, minority position that prenatal life should be treated as people,” she wrote in an email to Mother Jones. This concept, called fetal personhood, is gaining traction in the anti-abortion movement. Increasingly, Soohoo said, these abolitionist crusaders are winning the sympathy of pro-life lawmakers who, in turn, are proposing laws asserting that “abortion should be treated like homicide, with no exceptions and severe criminal penalties, and IVF should be banned.”
Over the last few years, several prominent and more mainstream supporters of the anti-abortion movement have embraced abolitionist rhetoric. In a 2023 episode of her podcast Relatable, conservative influencer Allie Beth Stuckey hosted Foundation to Abolish Abortion head Bradley Pierce, who argued that abortion should be considered murder. When Stuckey asked him whether he thought the death penalty should be considered for women who have abortions, he responded, “I think it should be on the table as something for the jury to consider.” The episode, titled “Is the Pro-Life Movement Fake?,” racked up 44,000 views on YouTube. Lila Rose, who leads the anti-abortion group Live Action, says she is pro-life, not abolitionist. Yet she declared on X last month to her 384,000 followers, “The pro-life movement will not settle for less than the abolition of abortion.”
One group that has been particularly vocal about its disdain for Hawkins is the TheoBros, a network of young, extremely online men who proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. For the TheoBros, Hawkins’ post was not only insufficiently pro-life, but also evidence of one of their long-held and frequently discussed beliefs: Women should not hold leadership positions or opine on political and social issues. “This is wicked slander against abolitionists,” posted TheoBro podcaster and Texas pastor Joel Webbon. “Remove this woman from public service.” In a subsequent post, he added, “Abortion will not end until feminism is utterly despised.” Another TheoBro, former Daily Wire reporter Ben Zeisloft, wrote: “She is a feminist. As you know, feminism is the main reason why abortion exists and persists. We need Christian men leading the fight against abortion, not feminist women.”
Charles Haywood, a shampoo magnate-turned-TheoBro who runs a shadowy network called the Society for American Civic Renewal, posted: “Abortion will go away when it is aggressively criminalized and results in social ostracism. That’s how men can ‘protect women and children’—by punishing the women who try to get abortions.” Smash Baals, an anonymous TheoBro X account with nearly 69,000 followers, posted, “If women couldn’t vote abortion would’ve never been legalized.”
For Erin Matson, CEO of the reproductive rights group Reproaction, the TheoBros’ reactions are part of a broader backlash against women in leadership roles in the anti-abortion movement. “There was this strategic effort to put more women at the front of these groups,” she said, “and there are men who want to get away from that because they see this as rightfully their turf.” In a since-deleted post on X, one of Hawkins’ critics wrote, “While she’s busy jet-setting and cosplaying as a baby-saving warrior, her husband is stuck at home playing both mom and dad.” In response, Hawkins wrote, “No civil conversation to be had with an asshole who posts this about me on their X.”
Activists and influencers are not the only champions of the abolitionist cause. Last year, Russell Vought, one of the main architects of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 conservative policy roadmap and now director of the Office of Management and Budget, said during a hidden-camera interview aired on CNN that he didn’t “believe in” allowing abortions for pregnancies that resulted from rape or incest or even for those that were necessary to save the life of the mother. As my colleague Sarah Szilagy has noted, Vice President JD Vance has advocated using medical records to investigate women who travel out of state to seek abortions.
The most effective arenas for abortion abolitionists are at the state level; in at least 17 states, they have worked with lawmakers to introduce bills that would treat abortion as homicide, according to the extremism watchdog group Political Research Associates. In 2023, the Colorado Times Recorder reported that abolitionist groups were urging supporters to run for local office. “You need one of them to carry this [abortion abolition resolution] because they’ve got to introduce it, or you can run for that and become part of your County Republican executive committee,” the Foundation to Abolish Abortion’s Pierce said at a 2023 rally in Kansas. Later that year, former Colorado state Rep. Dave Williams, who sponsored an abortion abolition bill, ran for and won the role of Colorado Republican Party chair. Other prominent abolitionist legislators include state Sen. Dusty Deevers (R-Okla.), Rep. David Eastman (R-Alaska), and Rep. Emory Dunahoo (R-Ga). In 2024, the Republican Party of Texas listed “abolish abortion in Texas” as one of its legislative priorities. Some states have moved to resurrect “zombie laws” that criminalize abortion; the Wisconsin state Supreme Court is in the process of deliberating over one such law from 1849.
As for President Donald Trump, his record on abortion abolition is mixed. In 2016, he said he thought there should be “some sort of punishment” for women who have abortions, though he later backtracked and suggested that the doctor performing the procedure was the one who should suffer. Last week, Trump drew strong criticism from abortion abolitionists when he vowed to protect access to in vitro fertilization. Because the procedure often results in extra embryos that are ultimately discarded, most anti-abortion activists oppose it, but abolitionists for whom the embryo is still a “person” are especially against it. On Wednesday on X, Abolitionists Rising called IVF “demonic,” saying, “It must be abolished, not regulated.” White nationalist activist Nick Fuentes said in a livestream Wednesday to his 126,000 followers on Rumble that although he himself was conceived through IVF, he believes that his parents committed a “great mortal sin.”
Meanwhile, Students for Life’s Hawkins has taken a comparatively moderate stance. “Shouldn’t a logical step for the Trump Administration be to regulate [IVF], at a minimum?” she asked on X. (IVF is already regulated in the United States.)
This tactic—adopting a more moderate position in order to seem reasonable by comparison—could be interpreted as similar to the one Hawkins used in her abolition tweet. Reproaction’s Matson said that by portraying abolitionists as radicals, Hawkins casts her “extreme position as somehow less extreme.” The criminalization of abortion remains broadly unpopular—16 percent of those surveyed in a Marist poll last year said they thought authorities should take legal action against women who have abortions. That’s likely why, in his hidden-camera CNN interview, Vought endorsed abortion criminalization. “I want to get to abolition,”he explained, “but [we’ve] also got to win elections.” Hawkins appears to be taking a different tack. The abolitionist pile-on against her on social media may have made it seem to outsiders that Hawkins was getting canceled, Matson said, but it “actually plays right into her hand.”
In a February 17 post on X, Hawkins explained that very strategy to her followers. “Remember this…successful & large social movements often develop a ‘right-wing’ of extremists,” she wrote. She noted as examples the Black Panthers of the civil rights movement, eco-terrorists in the environmental movement, and “‘abolitionists’ like John Brown” in the anti-slavery movement. “We aren’t fighting for our mere existence and free speech right (which would have been the case if Kamala Harris had won in November),” she wrote. “It means that our movement is moving forward and has great opportunities in the coming months.”
The day before the German election, I was sobbing uncontrollably over a video that my German family sent me. It shows a table on a sidewalk, set with pretty porcelain and a sign “Feel like coffee like at Grandma’s?” As passersby sit down, a young man with a guitar carefully pours a cup and offers cream and sugar. Then he sings: “Oma, you’ve been gone a while, but I remember how you’d sit down at our kitchen table and say ‘Never again is now.’”
The viral video, created by a Hamburg singer as part of a day of action against the extreme right, is a little corny. It’s definitely part of the “remembrance culture” that some sneer at. But for, I dare say, anyone who grew up in Germany somewhere between the 1950s and 2000s, it’s a gut punch. The grandmother in the song would have been, give or take, my dad’s generation—someone who was a child during the Nazi era, maybe didn’t talk about it much, but when they did, had this to say: Never, ever, ever again.
Right now, even as we mourn the last of those who remember the Third Reich and the Holocaust, Germany and other countries are electing parties that are, at the very most generous, fascist-adjacent. Twenty percent of Germans voted for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in Sunday’s election, twice as many as did so four years ago. That’s the gut punch part.
But tears are not going to get us out of here. So what will? From my perch here in the US—where I arrived decades ago, thinking that having grown up in a country that experienced fascism was never going to be relevant again—here are a couple of thoughts on what we might learn from the German election.
1: Multiparty democracy is a mess, but it has one big plus: It creates options for people who are mad at the status quo. The German campaign echoed a lot of Trump v. Harris 2024: Immigration and inflation were the drivers, and underneath that was the discontent with “those in charge” that has been a theme in virtually every recent election in the West. But unlike Americans, Germans who wanted to send a message to a government they didn’t like had options.
2: One of those options—but only one—was the AfD. Call them the Make Germany Great Again movement, but unlike MAGA they were not able to take over one of the dominant parties. They had to create their own. The AfD is where you’ll find traditional conservatives who’ve been radicalized, people who were always radical but couldn’t say so in polite society, and people who are simply mad as hell. It’s not a Nazi party: That would be illegal in Germany, and politically nonviable too, at least for now. But the AfD absolutely has created a space for fascist-adjacent politics and ideas, from forced “remigration” of immigrants including those with German citizenship, to rehabbing Third Reich slogans and questioning whether SS members were criminals.
3: Twenty percent for the AfD is about exactly what the polls predicted; they’d hoped for 25 percent, which would have been seismic. I can’t help thinking of my dad, who used to say that in any country, 20 percent of voters will vote for the nutbags, if nutbags are on offer. The big problem is when they sweep in a bunch of other folks.
4: But again, those other folks had options. The left-wing party (which has pretty thoroughly repudiated its roots in East Germany’s Communist Party) looks to be landing at close to 9 percent, up from just over 5. The libertarian party was punished for having been part of the unpopular governing coalition, but the new left-populist party BSW—anti-immigration, anti-aid to Ukraine, anti-pronoun, but pro-labor, pro-welfare state, and decidedly anti-Nazi—looks close to making it past the 5-percent threshold that would get it seats in Parliament. Think of BSW as if the Obama-Trump voters had made their own party. It’s a fascinating development and one we might see replicated elsewhere at some point.
5: More parties means more options for forming a non-fascist government. The “firewall” that Germany’s democratic parties have erected against the far right, pledging never to let them govern, has eroded, but it will hold. For now.
So what’s next? To be sure, being the strongest opposition party is the ideal scenario for the far right: They get to demagogue everything the government does and everything it can be blamed for, such as the soaring energy prices caused by AfD pal Putin and his war in Ukraine. That posture is where the far right is most comfortable (other than complete control). But in a country that is divided not along a single line, but along a spectrum, others, especially the emboldened left party, will compete with the AfD as the voices of protest.
And here’s who else turned out to be less popular than feared: Putin and Elon Musk. Musk, as my colleague Julianne McShane reported, campaigned hard for the AfD, and Putin’s courtship of them may have extended to paying one of their officials. But being the puppet of either an American billionaire or a Russian dictator is not a great look anywhere in Europe.
What should we take away from this for US politics? For one, that people vote in protest for lots of different reasons. It’s a mistake to assume (as Trump and Musk seem to believe, and some in the media too) that a MAGA victory means a MAGA country. America’s two-party system does a lot to mask the differences between voters, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
And just as importantly, small-d democrats were an overwhelming majority in Germany—and they might be here, too. Eighty percent voted for parties that vowed not to make common cause with the far right. That can’t happen in the US in quite the same way because of the far right’s takeover of the GOP. But America’s small-d democratic coalition still exists, and capital-D Democrats might capitalize on that by showing that their tent is big enough. Disagreement is healthy, if you can agree on the most important part—that democracy is about agreeing to disagree.
The next few years will be hard on small-d democrats everywhere. Bad things will continue to happen—maybe another pandemic, almost certainly an economic slowdown, quite possibly more armed conflicts. Demagogues and authoritarians will exploit those things as hard as they can. But 20 percent might be about their ceiling, unless they get extraordinarily lucky or democratic forces cave.
So let’s dust ourselves off and get to work. Because never again is now.
Elon Musk may be able to control—to some extent—the American government. But on Sunday, German voters showed he does not control theirs.
After polls closed Sunday in snap elections sparked by Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s vote of no-confidence in December, early exit polls showed the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party—which Musk has been boosting for months—finishing in second place, with about 20 percent of the vote. In first place is the center-rightChristian Democratic Union, former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s old party, which garnered about 29 percent of the vote—a victory that meansparty leader Friedrich Merz will become Chancellor.
Like Trump, the AfD supports mass deportations of immigrants and “unassimilated citizens,” which they term “remigration,” as my colleague Isabela Dias explained last year. As Mother Jones contributor Josh Axelrod, a Berlin-based reporter, wrote for us in December:
The AfD’s central pledge is to counteract the so-called Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory that claims white Europeans or Americans are the victims of a plot by nonwhite immigrants to “replace” them and poison their societies. It was the inspiration for shooters to take up arms and target Muslim victims in Christchurch, Jews in Pittsburgh, Black people in Buffalo, and gay people in Bratislava.
“It’s the thing that brings together the far-right in multiple countries,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Mother Jones.
For months, Musk has been warning that anything less than an AfD victory would bring about the destruction of Germany. “Only the AfD can save Germany,” he has repeatedly said. His efforts to boost the party have also included, as I have written, penning an op-ed in one of Germany’s biggest newspapers, Die Welt, about why he supports the party; interviewing party leader Alice Weidel on X last month; and making a video appearance at one of their rallies, at which he claimed Germans need to “move on” from “past guilt”—a comment many interpreted as referring to the Holocaust and subsequentlycondemned.
Musk continued his pro-AfD push this weekend in the lead-up to the election. When he wasn’t throwing the federal workforce into further disarray or asking elected officials—over whom he has no authority—what they got done this week, Musk spent much of the last couple of days boosting the AfD on X.
Despite coming in second, the results are still an unprecedented success for AfD, whose popularity has grown over the years at the same time as they have succeeded in pushing other German politicians further right. (As Axelrod explained for Mother Jones, the AfD has collaborated with the Christian Democrats in local government.) Weidel, the AfD party leader, is characterizing Sunday’s historic showing as a “success,” and said that they are prepared to be part of Germany’s next government—even though Merz has ruled out forming a governing coalition involving the AfD.
When Musk made his video appearance at the AfD rally last month, he lamented “too much control from [the] global elite” in German affairs. Through their elections, the German people have spoken—and it seems that, like many Americans, they don’t actually want the world’s richest man involved in their government.
Early Saturday morning, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to make a seemingly unprompted post egging on Elon Musk.
“ELON IS DOING A GREAT JOB,” the post says. “BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM GET MORE AGGRESSIVE. REMEMBER, WE HAVE A COUNTRY TO SAVE, BUT ULTIMATELY, TO MAKE GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE. MAGA!”
“Will do, Mr. President!” Musk replied in a post on X.
Within hours, the unelected tech billionaire looked to be eagerly complying, by seemingly ordering the sending of an email to untold numbers of federal employees demanding they promptly respond with “approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.” The email, which is similar to one Musk sent to employees at X after he bought that company, was unsigned and came from a human resources account at the Office of Personnel Management. It told recipients the deadline was Monday at 11:59 p.m. ET.
“Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” Musk said in a post on X announcing the directive.
The email itself does not say that, and as a federal employment law expert told CNN, Musk doesn’t have the authority to force federal employees to resign—and if he tried to, they would have ample legal recourse. And on Sunday afternoon, a spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management seemed to walk back Musk’s threat of firings, telling Mother Jones that “[a]gencies will determine any next steps.”
But predictably, the email created even more mass chaos across a federal workforce that Musk has already thrown into disarray through mass layoffs prompted by his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The biggest surprise may have been the federal officials—including a couple of Trump loyalists—who sought to guard their own turf from Musk, even by quickly telling their staff to essentially ignore the email, because Musk is not their boss.
Among them are newly-confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel, who wrote to staff Saturday night telling them to “please pause any responses” to the OPM email, while reminding them that the FBI will conduct its own internal reviews, NBC News reported. Interim US attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin, who was one of three people appointed by the RNC and the Trump campaign to run the party’s 2024 platform committee, wrote to employees to undermine the email, telling them to “be general” in their responses, and adding, “If anyone gives you problems, I’ve got your back,” CNN reported.
Ambassador Tibor Nagy, acting under secretary of management at the State Department, told staff that the department would respond on behalf of employees, adding, “No employee is obligated to report their activities outside of their Department chain of command,” NBC also reported. CNN reported, citing an anonymous source, that employees of the National Security Agency were told they should not respond until they get further guidance from the Department of Defense.
So far, it seems the only official who has publicly ordered employees to comply was Secret Service Director Sean Curran, who told employees that the email “requires your response,” according to CNN. Spokespeople for the White House and the Office of Personnel Management did not immediately respond to questions.
All of this—Musk’s overstepping of his authority and upending the federal workforce with uncertainty—is part of why GOP voters have turned out to recent town halls in droves to demand their Republican congresspeople answer how they would respond to how DOGE has accessed sensitive data and mass firings of federal workers, the Washington Postreported Friday.
As I have previously reported, polls keep showing that many Americans want Musk and DOGE out of government; new polls out this week from CNN and the Washington Post, for example, show far more Americans disapprove of Musk’s role in government than approve of it.
Update, Feb. 23: This post was updated with a comment from a spokesperson from the Office of Personnel Management.
North America’s largest urban solar power park is set to take shape in Medicine Hat, Alberta., following the sale on Tuesday of a 325 megawatt (MW) project to the prairie city.
The Saamis project, progressed to this point by Irish renewables developer DP Energy, is a planned photovoltaic development on an old industrial site in the northeast of Gas City—as Medicine Hat is known, due the area’s vast fossil gas reserves.
The multistage project, if fully built out, would be able to meet the peak load demand for the city’s industrial and commercial facilities as well as its 65,000 residents, a city official said.
“This provides us with a strategic option to build a utility-scale renewables energy project that would—in the first phase—complement our current natural gas generation,” Travis Tuchscherer, Medicine Hat’s director of energy marketing and business analysis, told Canada’s National Observer.
Tuchscherer said a final decision would be made later this year on the lead-off phase of the PV project, expected to generate 75 MW at a cost of around $120 million. The total value of the sale to the city was not disclosed.
Medicine Hat—which has more days of sunlight in a year than any other Canadian city—is weighing the impact of Alberta’s ongoing electricity market restructuring and changes to provincial carbon legislation that could affect the project timeline, he said.
Damian Bettles, DP Energy’s North America head of development, said the Saamis project was a model for other small and mid-sized cities with “suitable land” and looking to add large-scale clean power production.
Saamis was among the projects caught up in Alberta’s renewables moratorium last February, which established no-go zones for projects on prime agricultural land and “pristine viewscapes,” including a 27,000-square-mile area between the Rocky Mountains and the city of Calgary.
“But ours was ultimately a well-sited project, so we got through once we dealt with the viewscapes, decommissioning and high-grade agricultural land stipulations” in later revised guidelines by the Alberta Utility Commission, Bettles said.
Saamis will be built on a 1,600-acre plot of contaminated land near the Medicine Hat Complex, the country’s largest fertilizer plant. The acreage, damaged by a solid waste byproduct of nitrogen production, will be capped with clay before the solar panels are installed.
“Not only is it a productive use of a large area of contaminated land with limited development potential, it now also has the potential to contribute to the city’s energy transition to clean, renewable power,” Beetles told Canada’s National Observer.
P Energy, based in Cork, Ireland, has five Canadian wind and solar projects, in Alberta, Ontario, and Nova Scotia, and a tidal power pilot in the Bay of Fundy, and renewable energy developments in its home country as well as the United Kingdom and Australia.
“There is great potential for solar in Canada,” Bettles said, pointing to clean energy procurement plans underway in BC, Ontario and Quebec. DP Energy is in talks to develop several utility-scale projects across the country, he said, without giving further details.
Canada’s installed solar power capacity reached nearly 6,500 MW in 2022, with over 4,300 gigawatt-hours of electricity generated, enough to supply almost 500,000 homes.
Tuchscherer said Medicine Hat is exploring how to best incorporate future solar, wind, and battery storage plants into the city’s energy transition.
“Overall we are looking for proven technologies that can provide affordable power to our rate base and our own internal carbon compliance,” he said, adding the city would consider a battery energy storage plant to deal with the variability of solar power production as the Saamis project moved ahead.
Aside from growing interest in renewable energy from Medicine Hat’s “largest industrial consumers,” Tuchscherer said they are also studying the future energy needs for hyperscale data centres.
“So while we don’t believe there is a direct play for data centres and the Saamis project, we are keeping all options open for clean power supply in the long-term for present and future customers.”
On Friday, a federal judge partly blocked President Donald Trump’s attempt to root out programs related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, within the government.
[The order] argues that DEI programs violate civil rights laws by illegally enforcing “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences” that “deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement.” The White House also claimed that these policies are discriminatory because they select based on “how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing.”
As the New York Times has reported in detail, Maryland District Judge Adam B. Abelson barred the Trump administration from any effort to “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate any awards, contracts or obligations” related to diversity and inclusion, noting that such programs have been seen as “uncontroversially legal for decades.”
A coalition of academic institutions brought the lawsuit. In the initial complaint, as the Associated Press reports, the plaintiffs argued that “ordinary citizens” would “bear the brunt” of Trump’s DEI crackdown: “Plaintiffs and their members receive federal funds to support educators, academics, students, workers, and communities across the country,” it read. “As federal agencies make arbitrary decisions about whether grants are ‘equity-related,’ Plaintiffs are left in limbo.” After weeks of chaos within the educational system, the plaintiffs were granted some relief.
On Tuesday, leaders at the National Science Foundation reportedly laid off about 170 employees, many via Zoom—an estimated 10 percent of the agency’s workers. One of those workers spoke to Mother Jones, requesting anonymity, about the chaotic and emotional meeting, and what the job losses mean for the $9 billion agency, which is tasked with funding and supporting the country’s academic research. Here’s their account in their own words.
At 9 a.m., we got an email from HR calling us for a meeting at 10 am. There was no agenda offered. But many of us suspected what it was.
Initially, the Zoom invitation listed all of the people who were going to be fired as co-hosts of the meeting, so they sent a second invite. Because of the confusion about which invitation was the correct one, a lot of people joined late. And so, at first, people who came late didn’t hear what the meeting was about.
They told us we were being terminated. People were angry. People were crying. It was just confusing, too. We were told, you could resign or you could be terminated. How do I know what to do? Some people had thought, I had finished my one-year probation. I am not a probationary employee. We were told the agency had made a mistake—it should have been two years, and they’d corrected that.
We had until 1 p.m., when our termination letters would be sent, and we’d be shut out of the system. So by the time the meeting was over, we had about two hours to get any information we needed from our computers and to coordinate handing off our workload to someone else.
Afterward, I think because of the mix-up with Zoom link, people were sent a recording of the meeting. You can hear leadership talking before it starts, and you can hear people in the room laughing. I don’t know what it was about. But it just added to this feeling of disregard for what was taking place.
Then there was the delay. We don’t have your letters ready.It’ll be 2:00 when we send the letter. Then, It’ll be 3:00. Meanwhile, people who haven’t been called into the meeting are finding out about it. Supervisors of people in the meeting did not know about [it]. To me, that is one of the most disturbing pieces of this. It didn’t feel like an agency decision at all. It’s like there was a shadow institution inside or surrounding the agency. Who is making decisions? On what basis are they making decisions?
The paranoia and fear are part of the erosion of our work. Getting emails from people you don’t know. The agency changing your personnel status without informing you. The idea that there’s a list going around of people on probation. Am I on the list? Are you on the list? That’s a straight-up McCarthy-era question.
I think sometimes science is too abstract for the public to immediately recognize the importance of what we do. And that’s not because they can’t. In fact, that’s part of our mission: to create a scientifically literate public who can understand and appreciate how we’re using their taxes to make a positive difference in society.
But the people terminated on Tuesday represent a cross-section of those essential to getting the agency’s work done. They were administrative staff, people who track expenditures, write policy, organize review panels, and ensure conflict of interest policies are being observed. Some were brought on to help the agency run more efficiently. The irony.
In the afternoon, when people were supposed to be leaving, other staff started coming down to the lobby. They applauded people as they left the building. For this spontaneous swell of people to come out like that, it was very moving. It was a demonstration of care and respect that I’d not felt from the agency.
Since being terminated, I feel relieved, to be honest. Part of the relief was knowing cuts were coming and not knowing who or when or how. But I love the agency. I loved working there. I was so proud to work there. And the last month has been so disorienting. I couldn’t recognize NSF’s mission. I didn’t feel that same sense of pride and loyalty and faith.
I’m not most upset about losing my job. It’s more just this feeling of concern for our credibility. Like, what rules are we following? Whose rules are we following?
This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. National Science Foundation media officer Mike England provided the following statement:
“Earlier this month, the President issued Executive Order, Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative (‘Workforce Optimization E.O.’). To ensure compliance with this E.O., the National Science Foundation released 170 employees from Federal service effective Feb. 18. This action impacted most of our probationary employees and all our employees on expert appointments. We thank these employees for their service to NSF and their contributions to advance the agency mission. Expert appointments are defined as one year or less, normally on intermittent work schedules. Although appointments may be for one year, individuals may not work more than 130 days in a service year (the 365-day period that begins on the effective date of the appointment).
Of the 170 staff released, 86 were classified probationary, 84 staff were classified as experts.”
President Donald Trump is taking aim at the US Postal Service.
According to a Thursday report fromthe Washington Post‘s Jacob Bogage,the president plans to fire the members of USPS’ board and hand the keys to the agency over to the Department of Commerce.
Trump plans to make the move through executive order as early as this week, the Post reports. The board reportedly intends to take the administration to court if Trump carries out the firings or tries to take control, with postal experts telling the Washington Post that absorbing the independent agency would likely violate federal law. A White House spokesperson later denied the report.
After his re-election, Trump discussed privatizing the Postal Service with Howard Lutnick—later confirmed as Commerce Secretary—at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, according to a separate Post article from December.
But Trump’s new target is actually an old one. During his first term, the White House pushed to break up and sell off the Post Office—one of the most favorably viewed government agencies—in a 2018 plan: “A privatized Postal Service would,” among other things, “make business decisions free from political interference.”
On February 20, Mark Dimondstein, the president of the American Postal Workers Union, which represents over 200,000 USPS employees and retirees, issued a statement calling Trump’s reported plan an “unlawful attack” that was “part of the billionaire oligarch coup.” The move would increase costs and threaten the livelihoods of more than 7 million workers, Dimondstein said.
“Call your senator,” the union posted on X on Friday. “Urge them to block this unconstitutional takeover and ensure the Postal Service remains independent and in the hands of the people!”
I previously spoke with Dimondstein about the threat Trumpand DOGEpresent to the Postal Service. People who rely on USPS for essentials like medicine could be particularly at risk if the agency is privatized or loses its political independence, Dimondstein told me. Instead of privatizing the USPS, Dimondstein thinks the government should consider expanding it, pointing to opportunities for offering financial services for tens of millions of Americans with low incomes who are unbanked or underbanked—long a norm in many other countries. According to the Center for American Progress, a public policy research and advocacy organization, USPS is an “equalizer institution” that could allow access to free or low-fee bank accounts, as well as loan and check cashing services. USPS also provides outsized jobopportunities for women, Black workers, other workers of color, and veterans, he said.
Then there’s the role USPS plays in elections. As my colleague Pema Levy pointed out at the time, Democrats wanted to increase funding for the service prior to the 2020 election,to help delivermail-in ballots at the height of the Covid pandemic—but Republicans dissented.
Louis DeJoy, the postmaster general of the USPS and a Trump donor who earlier this week announced plans to step down, caused an uproar during that time. DeJoy made significant changes just before the 2020 vote, including scaling back the number of mail sorting machines and limiting the ability of workers to make additional postal trips where they would draw overtime. Critics said that those decisions restricted the agency’sability to serve mail-in voters during the pandemic—something that disproportionately hurt Democrats (according to the Elections Performance Index, 58 percent of Democrats voted by mail, while only 29 percent of Republicans did so in 2020).
Despite the postal service’s mandate to exist independently—passed by Congress and signed into law by Richard Nixon in 1970—the agency may, if Trump can override Congress, become one more brick in the wall of expanded executive power.
This story was originally published by theGuardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
The Trump administration is stripping away support for scientific research in the US and overseas that contains a word it finds particularly inconvenient: “climate.”
The government is withdrawing grants and other support for research that even references the climate crisis, academics have said, amid Donald Trump’s blitzkrieg upon environmental regulations and clean-energy development.
Trump, who has said that the climate crisis is a “giant hoax,” has already stripped mentions of climate change and global heating from government websites and ordered a halt to programs that reference diversity, equity, and inclusion. A widespread funding freeze for federally backed scientific work also has been imposed, throwing the US scientific community into chaos.
Researchers said work mentioning climate is being particularly targeted. One environmental scientist working in the western US who did not want to be named said their previously awarded grant from the Department of Transportation for climate-adaption research had been withdrawn, until they retitled it to remove the word “climate.”
“I still have the grant because I changed the title,” the scientist said. “I was told that I needed to do so before the title of the grant was published on the US DOT website in order to keep it. The explanation was that the priorities of the current administration don’t include climate change and other topics considered ‘woke’.”
“They want to return to an era where kids have polio, rivers are on fire, and cities are blanketed by pollution.”
The researcher said they were “shocked because the grant was already awarded and I would have risked losing it. I’m very concerned about science being politically influenced. If researchers can’t use certain words, it’s likely that some science will be biased.”
References to climate are being scrubbed elsewhere, too. Course materials at the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center at the University of Hawaii will delete mentions of “climate change,” leaked emails seen by the Guardian show. The alterations, at the behest of the Trump administration, affect about a dozen different course materials.
“Specifically, references to ‘climate change’ and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) have been removed or revised to align with the new priorities,” an administrator at the center wrote. “Please exercise caution when referencing these topics during instruction.”
The administration’s animus towards climate research has even extended overseas via the US’s Fulbright exchange program, which offers about 8,000 grants a year to American and foreign teachers and scholars.
Kaarle Hämeri, chancellor of the University of Helsinki in Finland, said the descriptions for Fulbright grants had been changed to remove or alter the words “climate change,” as well as “equitable society,” “inclusive societies,” and “women in society.”
Hämeri said that one grant to his university had already been withdrawn as a result of changes he said were also being imposed across other countries involved in the Fulbright program. Fulbright and the US state department were asked about the extent of the wording bans. “I understand that these actions are due to changed priorities in US government,” said Hämeri. “It will harm research in several important fields, especially as in many cases the US researchers are among the best in their field.”
At the National Science Foundation (NSF), a $9 billion federal agency that supports research in science and engineering, teams have been combing through active projects looking for dozens of words, including “women,” “biased” and “equality” that may violate Trump’s ban on certain grants.
The NSF, which has just fired about 10 percent of its workforce, did not respond to questions over whether climate is also on the banned list. Regardless, grants supporting an array of scientific work have been frozen amid this zealous mission to install a newspeak among scientists, despite a court order demanding the freeze be reversed.
“[The] NSF is working expeditiously to conduct a comprehensive review of our projects, programs and activities to be compliant with the existing executive orders,” a foundation spokesperson said.
The freeze on grants has upended scientific work across federal agencies, hospitals and universities, placing the future of hundreds of millions of dollars’ of research into question.
“The people most vulnerable in our society in terms of health and public safety are now even further at risk,” said Jennifer Jones, director of the center for science and democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“This administration doesn’t have a plan to advance science, they have a plan to remove obstacles for the oil and gas industry. They want to return to an era where kids have polio, rivers are on fire, and cities are blanketed by pollution.”
Jones said that the US government may be moving in the direction of Florida, where Republicans banned mention of climate change in state laws. “I live in a state where we are under threat more than ever from climate change but state employees can’t mention it,” she said. “This administration wants scientists to feel threatened. We’ve seen this before but Trump is doing it at an unprecedented scale now.”
The attack upon science “feels very personal right now” and may deter a new generation of young scientists from entering their areas of research, according to Joanne Carney, chief government affairs officer at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
“We could see a reduction in whole fields of scientific research that will slow down our ability to understand the natural world and craft policies to protect society and national security,” Carney said.
“We’re concerned about the signal this is sending out to any young student interest in Stem [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] who might not think they can see a future in the US,” she said. “We need greater investment in science and technology to be a global leader at this moment. Our adversaries will be very happy with this.”
The day before the German election, I was sobbing uncontrollably over a video that my German family sent me. It shows a table on a sidewalk, set with pretty porcelain and a sign “Feel like coffee like at Grandma’s?” As passersby sit down, a young man with a guitar carefully pours a cup and offers cream and sugar. Then he sings: “Oma, you’ve been gone a while, but I remember how you’d sit down at our kitchen table and say ‘Never again is now.’”
The viral video, created by a Hamburg singer as part of a day of action against the extreme right, is a little corny. It’s definitely part of the “remembrance culture” that some sneer at. But for, I dare say, anyone who grew up in Germany somewhere between the 1950s and 2000s, it’s a gut punch. The grandmother in the song would have been, give or take, my dad’s generation—someone who was a child during the Nazi era, maybe didn’t talk about it much, but when they did, had this to say: Never, ever, ever again.
Right now, even as we mourn the last of those who remember the Third Reich and the Holocaust, Germany and other countries are electing parties that are, at the very most generous, fascist-adjacent. Twenty percent of Germans voted for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in Sunday’s election, twice as many as did so four years ago. That’s the gut punch part.
But tears are not going to get us out of here. So what will? From my perch here in the US—where I arrived decades ago, thinking that having grown up in a country that experienced fascism was never going to be relevant again—here are a couple of thoughts on what we might learn from the German election.
1: Multiparty democracy is a mess, but it has one big plus: It creates options for people who are mad at the status quo. The German campaign echoed a lot of Trump v. Harris 2024: Immigration and inflation were the drivers, and underneath that was the discontent with “those in charge” that has been a theme in virtually every recent election in the West. But unlike Americans, Germans who wanted to send a message to a government they didn’t like had options.
2: One of those options—but only one—was the AfD. Call them the Make Germany Great Again movement, but unlike MAGA they were not able to take over one of the dominant parties. They had to create their own. The AfD is where you’ll find traditional conservatives who’ve been radicalized, people who were always radical but couldn’t say so in polite society, and people who are simply mad as hell. It’s not a Nazi party: That would be illegal in Germany, and politically nonviable too, at least for now. But the AfD absolutely has created a space for fascist-adjacent politics and ideas, from forced “remigration” of immigrants including those with German citizenship, to rehabbing Third Reich slogans and questioning whether SS members were criminals.
3: Twenty percent for the AfD is about exactly what the polls predicted; they’d hoped for 25 percent, which would have been seismic. I can’t help thinking of my dad, who used to say that in any country, 20 percent of voters will vote for the nutbags, if nutbags are on offer. The big problem is when they sweep in a bunch of other folks.
4: But again, those other folks had options. The left-wing party (which has pretty thoroughly repudiated its roots in East Germany’s Communist Party) looks to be landing at close to 9 percent, up from just over 5. The libertarian party was punished for having been part of the unpopular governing coalition, but the new left-populist party BSW—anti-immigration, anti-aid to Ukraine, anti-pronoun, but pro-labor, pro-welfare state, and decidedly anti-Nazi—looks close to making it past the 5-percent threshold that would get it seats in Parliament. Think of BSW as if the Obama-Trump voters had made their own party. It’s a fascinating development and one we might see replicated elsewhere at some point.
5: More parties means more options for forming a non-fascist government. The “firewall” that Germany’s democratic parties have erected against the far right, pledging never to let them govern, has eroded, but it will hold. For now.
So what’s next? To be sure, being the strongest opposition party is the ideal scenario for the far right: They get to demagogue everything the government does and everything it can be blamed for, such as the soaring energy prices caused by AfD pal Putin and his war in Ukraine. That posture is where the far right is most comfortable (other than complete control). But in a country that is divided not along a single line, but along a spectrum, others, especially the emboldened left party, will compete with the AfD as the voices of protest.
And here’s who else turned out to be less popular than feared: Putin and Elon Musk. Musk, as my colleague Julianne McShane reported, campaigned hard for the AfD, and Putin’s courtship of them may have extended to paying one of their officials. But being the puppet of either an American billionaire or a Russian dictator is not a great look anywhere in Europe.
What should we take away from this for US politics? For one, that people vote in protest for lots of different reasons. It’s a mistake to assume (as Trump and Musk seem to believe, and some in the media too) that a MAGA victory means a MAGA country. America’s two-party system does a lot to mask the differences between voters, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
And just as importantly, small-d democrats were an overwhelming majority in Germany—and they might be here, too. Eighty percent voted for parties that vowed not to make common cause with the far right. That can’t happen in the US in quite the same way because of the far right’s takeover of the GOP. But America’s small-d democratic coalition still exists, and capital-D Democrats might capitalize on that by showing that their tent is big enough. Disagreement is healthy, if you can agree on the most important part—that democracy is about agreeing to disagree.
The next few years will be hard on small-d democrats everywhere. Bad things will continue to happen—maybe another pandemic, almost certainly an economic slowdown, quite possibly more armed conflicts. Demagogues and authoritarians will exploit those things as hard as they can. But 20 percent might be about their ceiling, unless they get extraordinarily lucky or democratic forces cave.
So let’s dust ourselves off and get to work. Because never again is now.
Elon Musk may be able to control—to some extent—the American government. But on Sunday, German voters showed he does not control theirs.
After polls closed Sunday in snap elections sparked by Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s vote of no-confidence in December, early exit polls showed the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party—which Musk has been boosting for months—finishing in second place, with about 20 percent of the vote. In first place is the center-rightChristian Democratic Union, former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s old party, which garnered about 29 percent of the vote—a victory that meansparty leader Friedrich Merz will become Chancellor.
Like Trump, the AfD supports mass deportations of immigrants and “unassimilated citizens,” which they term “remigration,” as my colleague Isabela Dias explained last year. As Mother Jones contributor Josh Axelrod, a Berlin-based reporter, wrote for us in December:
The AfD’s central pledge is to counteract the so-called Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory that claims white Europeans or Americans are the victims of a plot by nonwhite immigrants to “replace” them and poison their societies. It was the inspiration for shooters to take up arms and target Muslim victims in Christchurch, Jews in Pittsburgh, Black people in Buffalo, and gay people in Bratislava.
“It’s the thing that brings together the far-right in multiple countries,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Mother Jones.
For months, Musk has been warning that anything less than an AfD victory would bring about the destruction of Germany. “Only the AfD can save Germany,” he has repeatedly said. His efforts to boost the party have also included, as I have written, penning an op-ed in one of Germany’s biggest newspapers, Die Welt, about why he supports the party; interviewing party leader Alice Weidel on X last month; and making a video appearance at one of their rallies, at which he claimed Germans need to “move on” from “past guilt”—a comment many interpreted as referring to the Holocaust and subsequentlycondemned.
Musk continued his pro-AfD push this weekend in the lead-up to the election. When he wasn’t throwing the federal workforce into further disarray or asking elected officials—over whom he has no authority—what they got done this week, Musk spent much of the last couple of days boosting the AfD on X.
Despite coming in second, the results are still an unprecedented success for AfD, whose popularity has grown over the years at the same time as they have succeeded in pushing other German politicians further right. (As Axelrod explained for Mother Jones, the AfD has collaborated with the Christian Democrats in local government.) Weidel, the AfD party leader, is characterizing Sunday’s historic showing as a “success,” and said that they are prepared to be part of Germany’s next government—even though Merz has ruled out forming a governing coalition involving the AfD.
When Musk made his video appearance at the AfD rally last month, he lamented “too much control from [the] global elite” in German affairs. Through their elections, the German people have spoken—and it seems that, like many Americans, they don’t actually want the world’s richest man involved in their government.
Early Saturday morning, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to make a seemingly unprompted post egging on Elon Musk.
“ELON IS DOING A GREAT JOB,” the post says. “BUT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM GET MORE AGGRESSIVE. REMEMBER, WE HAVE A COUNTRY TO SAVE, BUT ULTIMATELY, TO MAKE GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE. MAGA!”
“Will do, Mr. President!” Musk replied in a post on X.
Within hours, the unelected tech billionaire looked to be eagerly complying, by seemingly ordering the sending of an email to untold numbers of federal employees demanding they promptly respond with “approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.” The email, which is similar to one Musk sent to employees at X after he bought that company, was unsigned and came from a human resources account at the Office of Personnel Management. It told recipients the deadline was Monday at 11:59 p.m. ET.
“Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” Musk said in a post on X announcing the directive.
The email itself does not say that, and as a federal employment law expert told CNN, Musk doesn’t have the authority to force federal employees to resign—and if he tried to, they would have ample legal recourse. And on Sunday afternoon, a spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management seemed to walk back Musk’s threat of firings, telling Mother Jones that “[a]gencies will determine any next steps.”
But predictably, the email created even more mass chaos across a federal workforce that Musk has already thrown into disarray through mass layoffs prompted by his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The biggest surprise may have been the federal officials—including a couple of Trump loyalists—who sought to guard their own turf from Musk, even by quickly telling their staff to essentially ignore the email, because Musk is not their boss.
Among them are newly-confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel, who wrote to staff Saturday night telling them to “please pause any responses” to the OPM email, while reminding them that the FBI will conduct its own internal reviews, NBC News reported. Interim US attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin, who was one of three people appointed by the RNC and the Trump campaign to run the party’s 2024 platform committee, wrote to employees to undermine the email, telling them to “be general” in their responses, and adding, “If anyone gives you problems, I’ve got your back,” CNN reported.
Ambassador Tibor Nagy, acting under secretary of management at the State Department, told staff that the department would respond on behalf of employees, adding, “No employee is obligated to report their activities outside of their Department chain of command,” NBC also reported. CNN reported, citing an anonymous source, that employees of the National Security Agency were told they should not respond until they get further guidance from the Department of Defense.
So far, it seems the only official who has publicly ordered employees to comply was Secret Service Director Sean Curran, who told employees that the email “requires your response,” according to CNN. Spokespeople for the White House and the Office of Personnel Management did not immediately respond to questions.
All of this—Musk’s overstepping of his authority and upending the federal workforce with uncertainty—is part of why GOP voters have turned out to recent town halls in droves to demand their Republican congresspeople answer how they would respond to how DOGE has accessed sensitive data and mass firings of federal workers, the Washington Postreported Friday.
As I have previously reported, polls keep showing that many Americans want Musk and DOGE out of government; new polls out this week from CNN and the Washington Post, for example, show far more Americans disapprove of Musk’s role in government than approve of it.
Update, Feb. 23: This post was updated with a comment from a spokesperson from the Office of Personnel Management.