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Christian Nationalists Are Swooning Over JD Vance’s Remarks on Fox News

On Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on Wednesday evening, Vice President JD Vance held forth about what he called an “old school, very Christian concept.”

You love your family, then you love your neighbor, then you love your community, then you love you fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society.

These may sound like familiar anti-liberal talking points, but one particular corner of the internet was ecstatic about Vance’s words: the TheoBros, a group of mostly millennial, ultra-conservative men, many of whom proudly call themselves Christian nationalists. Among the tenets of their tributary of Reformed Protestant Christianity is the idea that the United States should be subject to biblical law.  

After Vance’s Hannity appearance, Andrew Isker, a reformed preacher and the author of the book Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide For Taking Dominion And Discipling Nations, was triumphant in a post to his 37,000 followers on X. For years, Isker wrote, people had called him  “‘racist’ for speaking about the ancient, traditional Christian idea of ordered loves.” But now, he wrote, “To see it articulated clearly by the Vice President of the United States shows that we are winning and the postwar liberal rejection of all unchosen bonds is on its last legs. Our fathers will be honored once again.”

In response to a post on X that was critical of Vance’s remarks about the supposed Christian hierarchy of love, Andrew Torba, Isker’s co-author and CEO of the far-right social media platform, Gab, posted to his 469,000 followers on X. “The Vice President of the United States is talking about rightly ordered loves… and you’re blackpilling?” (In other words, he suggested, it was ridiculous to complain about such a happy turn of events.)

Indeed, what is known as the Christian order of love is one of the TheoBros’ favorite topics. One key element of this doctrine for them is that it’s unchristian to love foreigners as much as you love your countrymen. Yet for many of them, this idea is more than just an expression of patriotism. Rather, it’s rooted in the concept of Kinism—a white nationalist term, popularized a few decades ago, that nations should be ethnically and racially pure and that the United States specifically is the domain for white Christians.

Which was the quiet part that some of the TheoBros said out loud after Vance’s remarks.  

“Any Christian who denies ‘hierarchy of loves’ has white men at the lowest level of their hierarchy of loves,” posted Stephen Wolfe, the author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism.

William Wolfe, no relation to Stephen, served in the previous Trump administration both as the deputy assistant secretary of defense and as director of House affairs at the Department of State. He posted, “Liberal Christians really are like: ‘There is no such thing as a hierarchy of love and also all white men are the worst.’”

This isn’t the first time that Vance has amplified ideas from the world of the TheoBros. As I wrote last fall, he touched on similar themes in his address last July at the Republican National Convention:

Vance portrayed a vision of America that resonated deeply with Trump voters. “America is not just an idea,” he said solemnly. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”

To many viewers at home, this seemed like the stuff of a boilerplate, patriotic stump speech. But the words “shared history” lit up a far-right evangelical corner of social media. “America is a particular place with a particular people,” Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor and podcaster, wrote on X. “This is one of the most important political questions facing America right now,” posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced by third world migrants and Muslims. Answer it right, and we can renew America once more.”

Vance was embracing one of their most cherished beliefs: America should belong to Christians, and, more specifically, white ones. “The American nation is an actual historical people,” says Stephen Wolfe (no relation to William), the author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, “not just a hodgepodge of various ethnicities, but actually a place of settlement and rootedness.” For this group of evangelical leaders, Vance, a 40-year-old former Marine who waxes rapturous about masculinity and women’s revered role as mothers, was the perfect tribune to spread their gospel of patriarchal Christian nationalism.   

Vance’s connections to the TheoBros are well-documented. Not only has he been photographed posing with them, he co-founded the Rockbridge Network, a group of powerful Republican donors, with Chris Buskirk, who serves on the board of the TheoBro magazine American Reformer. Pete Hegseth, now President Trump’s Secretary of Defense, also has connections to the TheoBros movement.

The TheoBros have noticed the new vice president’s embrace of their ideas, and they’re delighted. “JD Vance and [former Fox News host] Tucker Carlson definitely have been reading reformed right wing X,” gushed one anonymous TheoBro X account to its 67,000 followers on Thursday.  “I’m convinced that J.D. Vance has an alt and reads our tweets,” posted Brian Sauvé, a TheoBro in Ogden, Utah. “And there’s nothing you can do to convince me otherwise.”

Kash Patel Suddenly Can’t Seem to Remember His Long Record of Extremism

Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s pick to head the FBI, published a book that included a list of political enemies he characterized as Deep Staters. He called for the prosecution of law enforcement officials who investigated President Donald Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election. He hailed January 6 rioters convicted of violence against police officers as “political prisoners.” On social media, he amplified a meme celebrating violence against Trump critics.

Yet when Patel appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday for his confirmation hearing, he refused to acknowledge many of the over-the-top statements he has made and actions he has taken as a fierce pro-Trump warrior. He was trying to hide the real Patel.

Of all of Donald Trump’s high-level appointments, Patel has the record most replete with remarks and actions in sync with MAGA extremism. Throughout the hearing, Democrats confronted him with examples of his far-right soldiering for Trump—social media posts, quotes from his media interviews, passages from his book—and he kept dodging the questions, claiming the comments were taken out of context or “partial,” insisting that he could not recall them, or pleading ignorance.

When Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) questioned Patel, he cited a statement Patel made on Steve Bannon’s podcast: “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media…We’re going to come after you.” To this, Patel said, “That’s a partial quotation.” (The intent of Patel’s statement did not differ in the remark’s fuller form.)

Whitehouse pointed out that Patel had published in a book what has been widely characterized as an “enemies list” of 60 so-called Deep State figures who ought to be investigated and had reposted a video depicting him taking a chainsaw to Trump’s political enemies (including former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff).

As an aide held up a photo of that particular social media post, Whitehouse asked, “Is that you reposting that?” Patel replied, “Senator, I had nothing to do with the creation of that meme”—a statement did not address his amplification of the violent imagery.

When Whitehouse noted that Patel had pushed the conspiracy theory that FBI agents had instigated the January 6 riot, Patel replied, “That’s completely incorrect.” (He had.) And when the senator recounted that Patel once said judges who rule against Donald Turmp should be impeached because they are “political terrorists,” Patel just stared at him.

Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) asked Patel to explain his support of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election and referred to a 2023 interview: “You said that Donald Trump has every right to tell the world that in 2020, 2016, and every other election in between was rigged by our government, because they were.” Patel responded, “I don’t have that statement in front of me.”

When Klobuchar noted Trump’s claims of election fraud had been rejected by numerous courts, Patel would not accept that. “I don’t have enough of the facts in front of me,” he commented.

Klobuchar queried Patel about a statement in which he had declared that after a Trump victory there would be prosecutions of Justice Department officials for rigging the 2020 presidential election. “You’re reading a partial statement so I’m unable to respond,” Patel said.

Klobuchar asked Patel to comment on his suggestion that the FBI headquarters should be shut down and “reopened as a museum of the Deep State.” Patel didn’t explain this remark. Instead, he complained he was a victim of “false accusations and gross mischaracterizations.”

Several Democrats pressed Patel on his work with the J6 Prison Choir, a group of January 6 rioters who recorded a version of the national anthem mashed up with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. The song became a mainstay at Trump’s campaign rallies.

Patel told Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) that he promoted the song to raise money for the families of January 6 attackers. But when Durbin asked “who sings on this recording,” Patel claimed that he didn’t know. Asked if the singers were January 6 rioters, Patel said, “I’m not aware of that.” That was a ludicrous answer.

In fact, in a May 10, 2023 post on Trump’s Truth Social platform, Patel said the song came from “political prisoners still locked in jail without trial following the January 6th protest in 2021. J6 Prison Choir consists of individuals who have been incarcerated as a result of their involvement in the January 6, 2021 protest for election integrity.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) asked Patel if the choir members were “political prisoners,” as Patel had described them. “I don’t know everyone in the J6 choir,” Patel answered. The senator then asked Patel about specific members of the choir, including Ryan Nichols, who was convicted of spraying police officers with pepper spray on January 6, and James McGrew, who was imprisoned for crimes that included throwing a wooden handrail at police officers on January 6 after punching others. Patel said he wasn’t familiar with them.

Blumenthal cited another choir member: Ronald Sandlin, who pleaded guilty after he was accused of shouting “you’re going to die” at police in the Capitol rotunda.”

“I don’t know who that is,” Patel said.

Throughout the hearing, Patel downplayed his association with the J6 Prison Choir members and did not acknowledge that his work promoting its song glorified these Trump supporters who had engaged in horrific violence.

Late in the hearing, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), honed in on Patel’s claim that he “didn’t have anything to do with” the creation of the J6 choir song. Schiff highlighted an interview with Bannon in which Patel, using the word “we,” claimed credit for producing the recording of the song. Patel said he had been using “the proverbial we” and maintained he had not helped arrange the recording.

Schiff then asked if Patel had bothered to vet the members of the choir to determine if any of them had engaged in violence against police officers. He replied, “I didn’t record it myself.”

Democratic senators questioned Patel about his promotion of a line of pills that supposedly would help people “detox” from Covid vaccines. “Spike the Vax, order this homerun kit to rid your body of the harms of the vax,” Patel wrote in one post, NBC News reported. Did Patel, Klobuchar inquired, perform clinical trials before claiming the pills cured vaccine side effects? “I’m not a doctor, so no,” Patel said.

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) asked Patel if he made money from the pills. Patel said she should consult his financial records. “I don’t have those statements in front of me,” he said.

In one weird exchange, Durbin asked Patel if he was familiar with Stew Peters, a far-right and antisemitic podcaster known for false claims about Covid.

“Not off the top of my heard,” Patel said.

“You made eight separate appearances on his podcast,” Durbin responded. (This proved too much even for Peters. “Clearly Kash Patel is lying,” the host said after the hearing. “He absolutely does know who I am.”)

Antisemitic far-right broadcaster Stew Peters responds to Kash Patel claiming that he is not familiar with Peters, despite appearing on his show multiple times: "Clearly, Kash Patel is lying. He absolutely does know who I am."

Right Wing Watch (@rightwingwatch.bsky.social) 2025-01-30T20:47:10.221Z

Again and again, Patel sidestepped his well-documented past as a Trump extremist who has advocated for vengeance against Trump’s political foes. He insisted he would be a neutral enforcer of the law if confirmed as FBI director. The statements, tweets, and quotes that he refused to acknowledge told a different story.

Severe Weather Is Increasing the Cost of Living for Black Americans

This story was originally published by Capital B, a nonprofit newsroom that centers Black voices. To read more of Adam Mahoney’s work on climate change, visit Capital B.

As Los Angeles battled its largest wildfires in history, parts of the southern U.S. faced a very different kind of disaster — record-breaking snowstorms not seen in over 125 years.

In LA, the Benn family didn’t lose their home to the flames, but they did lose access to their livelihood. Their screen-printing business, which they’ve run in Altadena since 2007, is now in limbo. Before the fires, their community boasted the second-highest concentration of Black-owned businesses in LA County. Now, with no clear timeline for reopening the area, the Benns are struggling to make ends meet.

Meanwhile, in New Orleans, Quelly, a hairstylist and mother of young children, lost three days of income when the snowstorm shut down her city for half a week. For someone self-employed, it’s a blow that’s hard to afford. 

Since January 2024, extreme weather events have hit harder and cost more than ever before. Disasters like these are piling up at an unprecedented rate. A new analysis puts the damage and economic losses at $799 billion — around 3% of the U.S. economy — thanks to wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, and winter storms. And while these crises affect everyone, Black Americans are feeling the impact the most. Underfunded communities are struggling to recover, jobs are disappearing, and insurance premiums are skyrocketing as the risk of displacement grows. 

These extreme weather events are disrupting industries you wouldn’t normally associate with disasters, making it harder for Black families to access basic necessities like food and water. A recent report warns that without swift action to limit the impact of severe weather, it will cost children born in 2024 at least $500,000 up to $1 million over their lifetime. That’s from higher living costs — like soaring housing costs and strained food supplies — and lower earnings from missed work.

“Quite clearly, if you’re awake, everybody should understand, we’re living in very dangerous times, and Black folks and people who are economically vulnerable, they’re already facing heightened exposures to these events,” explained Lemir Teron, an associate professor in Howard University’s Department of Earth, Environment, and Equity. “Our resilience gets curtailed when we don’t have the policies or the money to better protect ourselves.”

In Florida, this month, Black farmers are grappling with the aftermath of an unprecedented winter storm that dumped record snow, sleet, and freezing rain across the region. Farmers say they’ve never faced such devastation — not even from Category 5 Hurricane Michael in 2018 — as 10 inches of snow leveled greenhouses and shattered irrigation systems. The fallout will be felt nationwide when the fruits and vegetables we depend on don’t make it out of the Sunshine State. 

“The cold snap and the snow showed us we have to be ready, and I don’t think our states — the Southern states — are ready,” said Trenise Bryant, who is a food-service manager for Florida elementary-age children and a housing advocate across the state. “I don’t know if our infrastructure and ecosystems can withstand what’s to come.”

She said last year’s hurricanes and this record storm showed the importance of government and community groups working together because “if we can’t get that funding for people that don’t have access, people that are living on the street, that means no access to housing, food, and water for them.” 

Trump’s attempt to revamp disaster recovery

“It’s the worst series of disasters since the Dust Bowl,” said Joel Myers, the founder of AccuWeather, the group that conducted the $799 billion damage and economic loss analysis. The fallout, he said, could drive a new wave of migration. For Black communities already facing systemic barriers, the road to recovery is anything but even, and as we’ve reported, migration doesn’t always guarantee protection from these climate threats.

In Detroit, Sandra Turner-Handy has had to clean out bacteria-filled floodwaters from her home twice in recent years. Flooding has become more common in recent years due to much greater rainfalls than normal, leaving many residents dealing with the financial burdens of home improvements, loss of work, and mold-induced illnesses

“We have experienced so much in the last year with the extreme heat, the cold, and the flooding,” Turner-Handy said. “We can’t escape it.”

The Trump administration is taking aim at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is largely responsible for how America responds to weather events. During his first week back in office, he signed an executive order calling for a sweeping review of the agency and floating the idea of shutting it down altogether. 

In the executive order, Trump accused FEMA of political bias and mishandling disaster aid, claiming it’s leaving Americans vulnerable. Last year, when Hurricane Helene dismantled the Southeast, Trump spread rumors that the agency was deliberately not giving aid to white conservatives. In reality, studies show that Black neighborhoods receive an estimated 10% less recovery aid than white ones. The aid discrepancy has substantially contributed to the racial wealth gap in the South. 

The Trump administration is also pushing to shift more disaster response costs to states, a move that critics warn could leave under-resourced communities, particularly Black and low-income areas, even more exposed to climate disasters.

Trump has also paused spending benefitting Black and “disadvantaged” communities from the Biden administration’s two key spending pots: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. These funds had been used to do things like replace lead pipes, improve access to electricity in Black rural communities, and fortify buildings and roads against flooding across the South. Analyses have shown that Trump-stronghold states like Georgia and the Carolinas benefited the most from this spending.

“We had started to understand that climate change has an impact [on] our city and that these issues relate not just to the heat and the cold, but can bring more illnesses and affect the amount of money in our pockets,” said Turner-Handy, who was awarded a grant through the IRA last fall, but was told last week that she will not be receiving the money under the Trump administration. The funding was meant to be used to install air quality monitors in her community. 

“We’re left ripe for more harm,” she said. 

With a leadership shake-up and the potential for states to shoulder a bigger burden, the debate over FEMA’s future and climate spending comes as the country faces increasingly devastating hurricanes, wildfires, and floods. With more weather events on the horizon, Black Americans and other marginalized groups are still struggling to bounce back from previous disasters.

“Eventually, climate denialism is going to harm us all in the same way. Folks who have means will be exposed to things that they don’t presently deal with,” said Teron, the professor who also pointed out how America’s inability to address climate change will result in global issues like sea level rise in West Africa

“These rollbacks on the federal level, the severity of extreme weather, it’s going to harm us all,” he said.

Trump Asks Schools to Report Activist Students for Deportation

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order “to combat anti-Semitism” that allows for a broad crackdown on pro-Palestine speech, including deporting demonstrators on student visas.

The order, titled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” asks federal agencies to report within 60 days all ways to combat antisemitism, including identification of “all civil and criminal authorities or actions.” Definitions in the order are vague: It re-establishes a prior Trump push on antisemitism from 2019 and implies antisemitism includes expressions of anti-Zionism.

Trump was more blunt in an attached fact-sheet released with the executive order. “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” Trump said. “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

As usual, the meaning of “Hamas sympathizer” was left ill-defined, leaving many pro-Palestine protesters at risk.

“We will find you, and we will deport you.”

Notably, in a section titled “Additional Measures To Combat Campus Anti-Semitism,” Trump recommends that colleges and universities be “familiarized” with American law on “inadmissible aliens.” The order then says these “institutions may monitor for and report activities by alien students and staff relevant to those grounds and for ensuring that such reports about aliens lead, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to investigations and, if warranted, actions to remove.”

The order does not explicitly require schools to deport anyone—nor does it immediately cancel anyone’s visa. Instead, it puts the ball in the universities’ court: Will they collaborate in the deportation of Trump’s political enemies, or will they stand up for their students?

Dima Khalidi, of the advocacy organization Palestine Legal, said in a statement the order is meant to intimidate, “aimed at enforcing an ideological strangulation on schools by attempting to scare students into silence about Israel’s genocide in Gaza with threats of prosecution and deportation.”

“The implications of this executive order go far beyond the Palestine movement,” Khalidi added. “It encourages government agencies to find ways to target any dissent from Trump’s agenda, and aims to enlist universities themselves as its censors and snitches.” Some students who participated in pro-Palestine protests quietly locked their social media accounts on Wednesday. Others asserted that they would not be intimidated.

This order “effectively illegalizes criticism of Israel for non-citizens, [including] green card holders,” Michigan immigration attorney Eric Lee said on X. “This will impact what students say in class, what they write in essays, what they tell their professors in office hours. This chills the speech of the entire population.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is Trying to Hide Who He Is

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearings to become Secretary of Health and Human Services could have been a window into Kennedy’s beliefs and how he’d run one of the largest departments in the U.S. government. Instead, Kennedy spent much of the two days he was questioned before two different Senate committees denying his past comments, obfuscating his long record as an anti-vaccine activist, and, in some cases, flatly denying things he’s previously said publicly. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of places where Kennedy reversed his previous positions, denied something he’s previously said, or presented a misleading picture of past actions.

Characterized himself as not anti-vaccine but pro “strong science”

Kennedy’s clear record is that of a man who stokes suspicion and distrust towards vaccines at every turn, and has done so for almost 20 years. Nonetheless, throughout the hearing, Kennedy insisted that he’s not a vaccine opponent, saying that he and his children are vaccinated against some illnesses, and that he simply wants good science and data. 

But the fact is that since 2005, with the publication of “Deadly Immunity,” his now-retracted Rolling Stone article, a cornerstone of Kennedy’s public career has been casting doubt on the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Kennedy chaired Children’s Health Defense from 2015 to 2023, through which he spent countless hours making misleading claims about vaccines. The original name of the organization, the World Mercury Project, stemmed from the false claim that vaccines contain a harmful form of mercury. In 2016, Kennedy accused Congress of allowing “mercury-contaminated vaccines that other countries have long outlawed.” This statement misrepresented thimerosal, a preservative that’s been demonized by the anti-vaccine movement for decades, and which has, in any case, been removed from most vaccines since 2001. 

Kennedy has also expressed unqualified support for Andrew Wakefield, who authored the retracted study suggesting a link between vaccines and autism, an association that has been disproven and debunked many times over. (During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy also suggested that the Institute of Medicine—a non-profit advisory organization now known as the National Academy of Medicine—needed to look into the purported vaccines-autism connection. But the IOM already did in 2011, and issued a report, hundreds of pages long, conclusively finding that vaccines do not cause autism.

“If the science says I’m wrong about what I’ve said in the past,” Kennedy proclaimed at one in the hearing, “as I said, I will apologize.”

This is a common talking point for Kennedy—that he’s not anti-vaccine, but merely pro-science—but that doesn’t make it true.

Offered a misleading picture of why he traveled to Samoa

Kennedy repeatedly distorted his infamous trip to Samoa in the run up to a measles outbreak that killed 83 people, most of them unvaccinated children.

During his visit, he spoke to the prime minister about vaccines and met with two anti-vaccine activists. Kennedy has acknowledged in the past that he went to Samoa at the invitation of one of them, “medical freedom” campaigner Edwin Tamasese; as NBC recently reported, an explicit goal of the trip was for the two men to discuss vaccines.

Kennedy, however, insisted at the hearing that he was there to attend an independence celebration and introduce a “medical informatics” system, adding, “I never thought gave any public statement about vaccines. You cannot find a single Samoan who will say ‘I didn’t get a vaccine because of Bobby Kennedy.’” 

Claimed an apology he gave to a woman who accused him of sexual harassment was for “something else”

In July, Vanity Fair reported allegations from Eliza Conney that Kennedy had groped her during her time working as a caregiver for his children. Cooney told Reuters that Kennedy apologized to her over text after the story came out. According to Reuters, the text read, “I read your description of an episode in which I touched you in an unwanted manner. I have no memory of this incident, but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feelings. If I hurt you, it was inadvertent. I feel badly for doing so.”

When questioned about the alleged incident during the hearing by Senator Patty Murray of Washington, Kennedy denied sexually harassing or assaulting Cooney. When asked if he’d apologized to her, he said he had not, adding, without elaboration, “I apologized to her for something else.” 

Denied claiming Lyme disease is a bioweapon

When Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) suggested on Wednesday that Kennedy had claimed Lyme disease was a “miltary-engineered bioweapon,” Kennedy responded, “I probably did say that.”

Yet on Thursday, when Sen. Susan Collins of (R-Maine) asked him about his statements on Lyme disease as a bioweapon, he changed his story. “I’ve never believed that, Senator,” he said. “What I said is, we should always follow the evidence.” 

The idea that Lyme disease is a bioweapon has been thoroughly debunked

Denied saying Covid-19 was an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon

Kennedy claimed in the summer of 2023 that Covid was a bioweapon, telling an Upper East Side audience, “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”  

But in what represented a bit of an emerging pattern, when questioned about these remarks during the hearing, Kennedy claimed he “didn’t say it was deliberately targeted.” 

There is also no proof that Covid is an ethnic bioweapon, a theory so fringe that few people besides Kennedy have even promoted it. 

Flip-flopped on Ozempic

During Thursday’s hearings, Kennedy told Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), “The GLP-1 drugs—class of drugs—are miracle drugs.” That’s a departure from his previous comments on Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs of its class. In October, he said on a Fox News appearance, “They’re counting on selling [Ozempic] to Americans because we’re so stupid and so addicted to drugs.” He also claimed at the time that the European Union “is right now investigating Ozempic for suicidal ideation”—even though the EU’s report, published in April, had already found no relationship.

Cast himself as a staunch opponent of abortion

During the hearings, Kennedy said repeatedly that he agrees with President Trump that “every abortion is a tragedy,” as he put it, and that the state “should control abortion,” presenting this as a long-held position. But it isn’t: Kennedy previously said on his own 2024 presidential campaign’s website he would have, as president, restored Roe vs. Wade, adding, “Body sovereignty must be protected.” 

Denied calling antidepressant users “addicts”  

“You described Americans who take mental health medications as addicts who need to be sent to wellness farms to recover,” Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) said during Wednesday’s hearings. “Is that what you believe?” Kennedy then denied ever having said “that antidepressants are like addicts.”

Yet as Mother Jones reported in July, when he made a podcast appearance to unveil a plan to overhaul addiction treatment programs during his 2024 campaign, Kennedy described a vision of opioid, antidepressant, and ADHD “addicts” receiving treatment on tech-free “wellness farms,” where they would spend as much as three or four years growing organic produce.

Denied suggesting pesticides could cause children to become transgender 

On Wednesday, Bennetasked Kennedy, “Did you say exposure to pesticides causes children to be transgender?” Kennedy replied, “No, I never said that.” But in July, a report by CNN found dozens of instances of Kennedy spreading the notion. In a 2022 episode of his podcast, for example, Kennedy said, “If you expose frogs to atrazine, male frogs, it changes their sex and they can actually bear young…and so the capacity for these chemicals that we are just raining down on our children right now to induce these very profound sexual changes in them is something we need to be thinking about as a society.”

Although the hearings questioning Kennedy have concluded, it’s unclear when the Senate will schedule a vote on his confirmation. Several senators indicated they’d follow up with further questions over the weekend. Clearly, they’ll have a lot to ask about. 

Inside the Fight for the First Whole Foods Union

On Monday, workers at Philadelphia’s Center City Whole Foods Market voted 130–100 to be represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. It marks the first time an Amazon-owned Whole Foods store has voted to unionize—and it is one of the first major union elections of the second Trump presidency. 

The organizing effort, which workers say has been in the works for over a year, went public in November. Workers say it was driven by myriad demands, including a push for increased pay. The base wage at the Center City Whole Foods is $16 per hour. According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, the living wage for a single person in Philadelphia, without dependents, is over $22 per hour. (Amazon, which has owned Whole Foods since 2017, is worth about $2.5 trillion.) 

A woman speaks into a microphone. Behind her, an assembled group holds signs that read, "Make Amazon pay Whole Foods workers!"
Khy Adams speaks to Whole Foods Market workers in Philadelphia. UFCW Local 1776

Whole Foods workers told me the low pay means they have to work multiple jobs to manage their bills. Khy Adams, 32, makes $16.50 an hour in the hot foods department but has to work as a culinary instructor on the side. She said she often logs well over 50 hours per week between her two jobs.

“The union-busting propaganda started happening within weeks.”

Mase Veney, 26, has worked in the produce department for three years. Mostly, he said, that means “lifting heavy boxes” in a freezing cooler. About a year and a half ago, at the end of his shift, Veney emerged to talk to a friend in another department. “I just came out to take a break because I was freezing cold,” he said. But for this break, he was castigated for wasting time. Then, he said, some of his shifts mysteriously disappeared from the calendar. 

After that incident, Veney joined forces with four other workers to figure out how to start a union.

Dozens of people march on the sidewalk outside the Whole Foods store.
Whole Foods workers march for unionization.UFCW Local 1776

Almost immediately after going public, they faced opposition. Fliers reading, “Stay Whole, Vote No,” circulated around the store. Managers whom Veney and his co-workers were used to working with were transferred to other store locations. “The union-busting propaganda started happening within weeks,” Adams said.

During the first week of January, UFCW Local 1776 filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that at least one worker was fired as retaliation for union activity and that “supervisors coercively told employees that they would not be getting wage increases because of their union activities and made promises of wage increases if they did not vote to unionize.” (Amazon disputes these assertions. A Whole Foods representative said the company will implement a raise when it is legal to do so.) 

Strange faces started showing up around the store, workers said, as the unionization vote approached. “They started bringing in people from Texas, people from Florida—a lot of people from New York. There was one person who was there from California,” Adams told Mother Jones.

The new people, who wore “Culture Champion” merchandise, never told her their job title. They were oddly gregarious, Adams remembered. “We’re here to help with anything you need,” she recalled them saying. And the new colleagues were especially eager, Adams said, to talk about why unionizing could be harmful to workers. Yet when she tried to assign them tasks, they were nowhere to be found. “On any given day, I would see maybe four or five people that would have ‘Culture Champion’ merch on, but they wouldn’t necessarily be performing a job,” she said.

A woman holds up a tote bag that reads, "I stand with union workers." Next to her, a man holds a sign that reads, "Make Amazon pay Whole Foods workers!"
Whole Foods workers with union swagUFCW Local 1776

Meanwhile, her department was chronically understaffed. Dishes regularly piled up because too few people were hired to wash them. Adams often tried her best to manage preparing the rotisserie chickens, operating the hot bar, and tending to the soups all at the same time. 

On Monday, when the results began to come in, Adams almost could not believe it. “The propaganda machine wanted us to believe that we were isolated, that no one wanted this, that we were just on an island all by ourselves,” she said. “But I’m not the only person who wants this—we aren’t the only group of people who want this.” 

In a statement, the company said: “We are disappointed by the outcome of this election, but we are committed to maintaining a positive working environment in our Philly Center City store.”

Now, the challenge for the newly unionized Whole Foods workers is to negotiate with their employer. Amazon has been more than willing to deploy anti-union tactics in the past. In October, the company received a complaint from the NLRB over its refusal to negotiate with unionized delivery drivers employed by a third-party company. And when an Amazon warehouse in New York’s Staten Island voted to unionize nearly three years ago, the company refused to come to the bargaining table. While refusing to bargain is illegal, the penalties are minimal.

Dozens of people stand in front of an entrance to the Whole Foods store.
After voting to unionize, Whole Foods workers hold a press conference outside the Philadelphia Center City Whole Foods store. UFCW LOCAL 1776

The unionized Whole Foods workers will also face a much more anti-union NLRB—just hours after their election, President Donald Trump fired NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who was well known for going after Amazon. 

Now, “we have to certify these votes to make sure that everything goes through and that Amazon doesn’t try to throw a wrench in that plan, which they are very much known for,” Adams said. During the vote certification process, Amazon has a chance to challenge any ballots filed. 

“I feel like it’ll make Amazon fight harder, because they know that Trump’s in office,” Veney said. “But we have a lot of people behind us, backing us up, and I think we can make this thing happen.” The unionized workers, knowing they won’t be supported on the federal level by Trump, are looking to local and state-level politicians for backup. 

Their first challenge, Veney said, is simple. Earlier this month, the Center City store was reportedly exempted from a regionwide wage increase. Workers said they were told this was because Amazon didn’t want to sway the outcome of the election. 

“The vote is now over,” Adams said. “So where are our wage increases that you said you were going to give us?” 

Trump Responds to Washington Plane Crash With Racist, Ableist Diatribe

On Wednesday, an Army Black Hawk helicopter crashed into a commercial American Airlines flight as it was in the process of landing at Ronald Reagan International Airport in Washington, DC. Officials believe that there were no survivors among the 67 people on both craft.

After tragedies like these, it’s typical for American presidents to address the grieving public. What’s not typical of presidents is to blame issues with, for example, the Federal Aviation Administration on disabled people and people of color. Prior to diving into a bigoted speech at a next-day press conference on the crash, Trump claimed to have “pretty good ideas of what happened,” suggesting disabled people, people of color, Barack Obama, and ex-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg were to blame for the tragedy.

In his speech, Trump rattled off a long list of the disabilities he said the Biden FAA had allowed air traffic controllers to have—citing, among others, dwarfism—poising hiring them as a negative move. There is nothing to confirm the air traffic controllers, who attempted to intervene at least twice prior to the crash, were even disabled. In addition, disabled people are not hired if they cannot perform the duties of their job.

And he gave himself a pat on the back for his executive order ending equitable hiring processes, issued last week, which claimed that the FAA “specifically recruited and hired individuals with ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities, psychiatric issues, and complete paralysis.” Trump has a history of attacking disabled people and of insulting his political opponents by asserting that they are “mentally disabled.”

Trump then segued to blasting former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, claiming that Buttigieg had run the FAA “right into the ground with his diversity” during his time at the helm. It is unclear whether Trump is referring to Buttigieg’s own sexuality, the FAA pushing for more equitable hiring processes, or the ex-secretary’s groundbreaking rulemaking and actions—which included taking steps to make airlines more accountable for breaking disabled people’s wheelchairs.

It is also impossible to separate Trump’s attacks on intellect—he centered his speech on a fixation with air traffic controllers as “naturally talented geniuses”—from his previously expressed racist views, or from his fixation on hiring processes in the FAA that tried to recruit more workers of color.

This is allegedly the person, after all, who told his ex-fixer Michael Cohen that “Black people are too stupid to vote for me.” He cast blame on the FAA’s “diversity and inclusion hiring plan, which says diversity is integral to achieving FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel—I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I think it’s just the opposite.”

And even though Barack Obama has been out of office for more than eight years, Trump—who boosted his political prominence by pushing racist birther conspiracy theories against the former president—found time to attack him for FAA hiring changes. “I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best,” he said. “I put safety first. Obama, Biden, and the Democrats put policy first.”

“African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, we took care of everybody at levels that nobody’s ever seen before,” Trump said in another bizarre segue. But the FAA “determined that the workforce was too white,” he claimed. “Too white—and, uh, we want the people that are competent. But now we mourn.”

There Is No Evidence the US Planned to Send $50 Million for “Condoms in Gaza”

At her first White House press briefing on Tuesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that the Trump administration had paused $50 million in funding for “condoms in Gaza.” Leavitt called the money a “preposterous waste” and the pause an example of how the new administration is safeguarding “tax dollars.” The next day, President Donald Trump repeated the point.

But there is no evidence to support the claim that the United States was going to send $50 million in aid for condoms in Gaza.

“No US government funding was used to procure or distribute condoms.” 

In response to a request for comment, a State Department official told Mother Jones on condition of anonymity that the “Trump administration stopped two $50 million buckets of ‘aid’ for Gaza via the International Medical Corp [sic].” The official said some of this money would have gone to family planning “including emergency contraception; Sexual healthcare including prevention and management of sexually transmitted infections (STIs); and Adolescent sexual and reproductive health.” The official added that “Condoms have traditionally always been used for family planning in developing countries by USAID.” 

To summarize: Funding was set to go to Gaza to assist International Medical Corps, some unspecified portion of it was for family planning and contraceptives, and condoms are “traditionally always” part of that. That is radically different from what Leavitt said Tuesday. And it does not appear to be true, either. International Medical Corps said in a press release, “No US government funding was used to procure or distribute condoms, nor to provide family-planning services.”

It also is not correct that condoms are “traditionally always” distributed to support US government reproductive health programs, particularly in the Middle East. A report from USAID covering the 2023 fiscal year stated that the agency has not provided any funding for condoms in the Middle East in recent years. (As CNN and the Guardian have made clear, the only contraceptive funding for the region was less than $50,000 that went to Jordan for oral and injectable birth control.)

Leavitt’s claim also leads to preposterous conclusions. Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post showed that the United States has spent 3.3 cents per condom on average in recent years. For Leavitt to be right, USAID would have been planning to send more than 1.5 billion condoms to Gaza. That works out to more than 700 condoms per person there.

While there is no evidence the United States was about to pay for condoms in Gaza, there would be good reasons for doing so. “Notwithstanding the absurdity of this particular claim, contraceptive access *is* an important health issue in crisis settings like Gaza,” Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, wrote on X. “Unplanned pregnancies in a context of starvation and displacement can be hugely challenging and carry health risks.”

More importantly, the funding pause Leavitt touted at the press conference could have devastating consequences for Gazans in desperate need of medical attention.

Among other things, International Medical Corps said the money helps maintain one of only three neonatal intensive care units operational in Gaza and supports the delivery of 20 babies per day. The group added about its work in Gaza:

International Medical Corps has received $68,078,508 from USAID to support our operations in Gaza since October 7, 2023. With the generous support of USAID and the American people, we’ve used these resources to operate two large field hospitals currently located in central Gaza—one in Deir Al Balah and one in Al Zawaida—offering a combined total capacity of more than 250 beds, including 20 in the emergency room and 170 in the surgical department. These facilities provide 24/7 lifesaving medical care to roughly 33,000 civilians per month, in a highly dangerous and insecure environment where healthcare infrastructure has been decimated. 

If the USAID stop-work order is kept in place, the group has said it will be able to continue providing lifesaving aid in Gaza for only about a week.

On Fox News on Tuesday, host Jesse Watters retroactively claimed another reason for the funding stop: “They are making condom bombs.” Trump echoed that claim Wednesday, saying “condoms to Hamas” had to be stopped because “they’ve used them as a method for making bombs.” (In past years, Israeli media sources have reported that militants in Gaza allegedly used condoms to make improvised incendiary devices.)

That makes it even less likely that the United States was planning to send condoms to Gaza. In reality, the Trump administration is using a made-up premise of vast condom spending to block lifesaving medical work.

The World’s Largest Rubber Plantation is About to Go on Strike

For sixteen years, Eric Fatoma seldom ventured beyond the boundaries of Firestone’s 185 square mile property in Liberia, where he was employed at the American-founded tire company’s rubber plantation. Around 7,000 employees and their families live on what the company describes as the world’s largest contiguous natural rubber farm, relying on Firestone for food, education, and medical care. Generations of Liberian workers have done so, through a series of violent civil wars and a devastating Ebola epidemic.

Fatoma, 57, first worked as a “tapper,” extracting latex from rubber trees, before learning how to operate heavy machinery. At $8.50 (USD) a day, it was enough for a “comfortable” life, he said. He and his wife, who sometimes worked in maintenance, could support their eight children, and Fatoma had saved enough to buy a motorbike. They lived on the property in a small home, split between two cramped bedrooms.  

In 2019, Fatoma was among eight hundred members of the Firestone Agricultural Workers Union of Liberia (FAWUL) who were laid off. Termination letters cited “economic challenges faced by the Company.” 

Fatoma felt he had no choice but to accept a short-term contract through a third-party labor agency and become an office clerk. It came with a pay cut, to five dollars per day, and a newfound uncertainty—each contract lasted only a few months and had to be renewed. But in a country still recovering from war, there were few employment opportunities outside of the farm. Around 30 percent of the Liberian population live on less than $2.15 a day, and a significant portion, particularly women and young people, are employed informally in unreliable and unregulated work that is often paid under the table. 

But FAWUL argues that, for the roughly two thousand people currently employed through third-party contractors on the farm, working conditions have become exploitative. A report published last month by the International Lawyers Assisting Workers Network (ILAW) argues that the precarious employment status of contract workers has made them vulnerable to abuse and that some of the conditions “amount to violations of international labor standards on forced labor.” 

Near the end of last year, when FAWUL’s collective bargaining agreement was set to expire, the union began negotiating new terms with Firestone. In addition to bargaining for wage increases and better benefits for directly employed workers, they hoped that contract workers could join their union. But after a week of government-mediated negotiations in late January, when it seemed unlikely that the parties would come to an agreement, FAWUL’s parent union, the National Timber Wood, Construction & Allied Workers’ Union of Liberia, called for a strike, set to begin tomorrow. On Friday, six thousand employees will not show up to work on Firestone’s Liberia plantation.

In the century that Firestone has been in Liberia, its presence has reshaped the country—for better or worse. As the country’s largest agricultural employer, the company has invested heavily in developing its region of Liberia—building roads, schools, and hospitals. But concerns about working conditions on the plantation have long persisted and drawn international attention. At least since 2006, international unions such as the AFL-CIO and United Steelworkers have bolstered FAWUL’s organizing efforts. Some observers see this as yet another chapter in a long history of extraction and exploitation. 

“This is not a new story,” Deborah Greenfield, a co-author of the ILAW report and a former policy director at the International Labour Organization, told me. “Firestone Liberia has been under the microscope for 100 years now. In a sense, their practices haven’t changed that much, and their responses haven’t changed that much.”

“Firestone Liberia has been under the microscope for 100 years now. In a sense, their practices haven’t changed that much, and their responses haven’t changed that much.”

Firestone, which is now owned by the multinational Japanese corporation Bridgestone, operates the Liberian plantation through a subsidiary. A Bridgestone Americas spokesperson said that the ILAW report includes “misleading and false statements regarding the company’s labor practices and commitment to workers’ rights.” 

“Firestone Liberia is firmly committed to ethical business practices, transparency, and adherence to the laws of Liberia,” the statement read. “Firestone Liberia and our parent company, Bridgestone Americas, uphold a zero-tolerance policy against child labor, forced labor, and any practices violating human rights.” When reached for comment about the strike, the spokesperson said that Firestone “remains committed to resolving our differences at the negotiating table and requests that the union re-engage in discussions.”

The world’s rubber consumption will only continue to grow—it is used to make things like condoms, shoes, hoses, gloves, and, most of all, tires. But automating the extraction of natural rubber, which is more desirable than its synthetic counterpart for manufacturing, is difficult. This means that human labor is essential in order to make even cheap, disposable products. 

Globalized trade can obscure what it takes to produce the things we buy. (Do you know the people who manufactured your sneakers?) In this way, modern supply chains—how raw materials are extracted, processed, and made into products that arrive at American doorsteps—create distance between the worker and customer. But the Liberian workers behind Firestone’s products are hoping that customers will recognize the human cost of their goods.

In December, the international workers’ rights group Solidarity Center hosted a public webinar about working conditions on the plantation for Firestone investors. During the presentation, Bongorlee, the union’s president, appealed to the international community to turn its scrutiny on Firestone. “We believe that you will be able to mount pressure based on… how the workers are suffering on the plantation, and why it is important for them to be covered by our union, so that they can be given dignity,” Bongorlee said. 

The rubber trade is shrouded in a legacy of colonial exploitation. At the turn of the twentieth century, European settlers exported rubber trees from the Amazon rainforest and established large plantations in British Malaya, French Indochina, and the Dutch East Indies. Today, harvesting natural rubber remains grueling, low-wage work done in parts of Southeast Asia and West Africa. The process of extraction is similarly unchanged. Laborers make careful cuts to latex vessels that grow in spirals around the Pará rubber tree, collecting a slow trickle of the milky liquid in buckets. Work in sweltering tropical temperatures begins in the pre-dawn hours, with the threat of snakes underfoot. 

These days, most of the world’s natural rubber comes from small, family-owned farms in Asia, which sell to a network of distributors. Firestone’s sprawling rubber plantation in Liberia, established a century ago, is a relic of a bygone era of the industry.

In July 2024, human rights lawyers and union experts visited Firestone Liberia and conducted interviews with workers, which formed the basis of the ILAW report co-authored by Greenfield and Lance Compa, a lecturer emeritus at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Contract workers interviewed by researchers described poor living conditions, unpaid mandatory overtime, and difficult-to-reach production quotas. According to the report, these workers lived in “constant fear of being disciplined or dismissed” if they spoke out, and some said that they had been retaliated against for even attending union meetings.  

There are three types of jobs most commonly held on Firestone Liberia: “tappers” who extract latex, “cup washers” who clean the buckets used to collect latex, and “slashers” who clear underbrush. Contract workers, who are primarily employed as “tappers,” told researchers that they must work 50-60 hours per week to reach production quotas, or risk being fired. According to the report, workers are not paid for overtime, in defiance of Liberian law, which requires overtime pay after 48 hours of work. And because some workers are paid per pound of dried latex extracted, pay can fall below Liberia’s minimum wage of $5.50 a day. 

International observers have long been concerned about demanding production quotas on the plantation. In 2005, the International Labor Rights Fund sued Firestone in a US District court on behalf of 23 Liberian child laborers and their guardians. The lawsuit claimed that the company was aware that children often worked alongside their parents “tapping” rubber trees to meet quotas. Firestone said that they do not directly employ children, and the lawsuit was eventually tossed out by an appeals court. 

When we think of forced labor, we might imagine work done at the “point of a bayonet,” Greenfield, the report’s co-author, said at the presentation to shareholders. “(But) it’s really important to look at forced labor in the context of contemporary circumstances.”

The precarity of their employment, Greenfield and Compa argue in the report, “plunged” contract workers into “steadily worsening conditions” with no avenues of redress. The report claims that conditions under which contract workers must operate meet international standards of forced labor and violate Bridgestone’s own Global Human Rights Policy. 

A Bridgestone spokesperson said that Firestone prohibits retaliation against employees who have grievances and that third-party contractors must comply with “rigorous training, safety, and code of conduct standards.” The spokesperson said that the company “(holds) contracting companies accountable, terminating those who we become aware of failing to meet these standards.” 

As Liberia’s first major foreign investor, Firestone has long framed itself as a vital partner in the country’s development.  

Liberia was founded in 1822 by formerly enslaved Black people, who had been sent to the coast of West Africa by the American Colonization Society, an organization opposed to racial integration. Despite resistance from local leaders, the settlers established the colony with support from the US government and named its capital Monrovia, for the fifth American president James Monroe. In 1847, Liberia declared independence and became Africa’s first republic. But, for a century, the settlement struggled to be economically self-sufficient. Then came Harvey S. Firestone, founder of the Ohio-based tire company, who had been searching for a place to develop a rubber plantation. In 1926, the company signed a 99-year lease for one million acres of Liberia, at an annual rent of six cents per acre. A subsequent agreement exempted Firestone and its foreign employees from taxes and duties. 

In 1929, a US official in Liberia expressed concerns that Liberian elites were using force to recruit workers for plantations and farms, including Firestone’s. After American officials grew concerned, the League of Nations—of which the US was not a member—launched an investigation. It found that, though Liberian political elites may have coerced workers, there was “no evidence” that Firestone “consciously employs any but voluntary labour.” 

Firestone remained a major player in the country, maintaining relationships with Liberian leaders throughout the 20th century—including, as detailed in a ProPublica investigation, the convicted war criminal Charles Taylor. (The company told ProPublica that it had never willingly assisted Taylor’s occupation of Liberia.) Another leader, Samuel Doe, described Liberia’s relationship with Firestone as a “contract of mutual survival.” 

“Early on, Firestone sold itself on corporate social welfare.”

“Early on, Firestone sold itself on corporate social welfare,” said Gregg Mitman, an environmental history professor at the University of Wisconsin and the author of Empire of Rubber. It provided free housing, education, and medical care, and sold rice and palm oil to workers at subsidized rates. But, given its privileged tax status, Firestone’s presence in Liberia did not fundamentally transform the country’s economy. One economist estimated that, from 1926 to 1977, three out of every four dollars earned by Firestone in Liberia were transferred to its American headquarters. “You can ask yourself whether that is a mutually beneficial arrangement,” Mitman said. 

As the labor movement began gaining momentum in Liberia, Firestone saw its first employee walk-out in 1949, with workers demanding higher wages, improved living conditions, and better treatment by white management. A series of strikes followed throughout the 1950s, which were sometimes quashed by state police.

Between 1989 and 2003, the country was decimated by a series of civil wars, with fatalities estimated between 150,000 and 250,000—during which Firestone continued to operate. As Liberia struggled to rebuild, it once again turned to foreign capital, a strategy that has historically failed to create “sustainable infrastructure and basic social services,” said Robtel Neajai Pailey, a Liberian activist and professor of social policy at the London School of Economics. “The extractive nature of foreign direct investment (doesn’t lift) Liberian citizens out of multi-dimensional poverty.”   

In 2007, after a series of wildcat strikes and with international observers present, FAWUL held what has been described as its first independent leadership elections. The new slate of leaders won wage increases and lower quotas in their next contract. At the time, a United Steelworkers official who had helped FAWUL organize wrote, “It is proof that they have a union now that requires management to treat them with dignity and respect.”

When I spoke to Fatoma in early January, over a WhatsApp video call, he told me that he had just been laid off. He thinks his termination is directly related to his recent election as a union representative. “When you advocate at Firestone, you are an enemy,” Fatoma said. 

Firestone does not currently recognize FAWUL’s ability to negotiate on behalf of contract workers, despite the strong majority who voted for it in September. Firestone has said that it “recognizes the rights for workers to join a union,” but argues that contract workers cannot be represented by FAWUL because they are employed by third-party agencies. 

Fatoma hopes that being represented by FAWUL will give contract workers enough leverage to change their working conditions.

But January’s negotiations, which were overseen by Liberia’s Ministry of Labour, were unsuccessful. Bongorlee, FAWUL’s president, said that Firestone would not allow contract workers to join FAWUL, but said that they could form their own. According to Bongorlee, the negotiations stalled on retirement benefits and sick pay for directly employed workers.

Even if FAWUL and Firestone ultimately reach an agreement, Greenfield says, the fight is far from over. “Companies don’t change their actions overnight,” Greenfield told me. “What you need is a fundamental shift of power, and that doesn’t come about easily, and it doesn’t come about quickly.”

Correction, January 30: An earlier version of this story misstated the timing of the strike. It is set for January 31.

Planning for the Worst in Trump’s Next Term: Prepare, Don’t Panic, and Don’t Comply in Advance

In the frenetic days following the November election, longtime abortion provider Amy Hagstrom Miller spent a lot of time in meetings—some in person, some on Zoom—rallying her troops. As one of the most prominent and tenacious independent abortion providers in the country, with six Whole Woman’s Health clinics in four states, it was a safe bet that she and her staff of 125 would find themselves in the crosshairs of a Donald Trump presidency and the anti-abortion extremists his second term will empower.

Hagstrom Miller could feel the alarm and dread that washed over some of her employees as they contemplated an America in which the 1873 Comstock Act might be enforced to institute a national abortion ban, the abortion pill would come under myriad other relentless attacks, federal appointees would use their bureaucratic powers to target providers in states where abortion remains legal, and patients would face new risks to their physical safety and constitutional rights. 

But she also felt her employees’ determination, and even excitement, to double down on the part of their work that they like to call “kicking against the pricks.” Hagstrom Miller’s consistent message was sober without being defeatist. Prepare—but don’t panic. And above all, do not comply in advance.

“One of the first signs of authoritarianism is that people start to comply with things before they are actually enforced,” Hagstrom Miller told me repeatedly during a series of interviews since before the election. “We can prepare for different scenarios, but we are not going to stop doing what we do. Abortion was needed well before Trump was alive and will be needed well after he leaves office.”

As the new Trump administration takes power, Hagstrom Miller is uniquely positioned to guide abortion supporters through this terrifying crossroads for reproductive and gender rights. She spent 20-plus years in Texas battling the right-wing lawmakers and legal strategists working to pass some of the most draconian abortion laws in the country. The end of Roe v. Wade finally forced her to leave the state, but she did not go away. She has continued to be a thorn in the anti-abortion movement’s side, expanding the reach of her other clinics while counseling providers in blue states that are facing existential threats to abortion rights for the first time. Rather than succumbing to fear, Hagstrom Miller has been staying vigilant, being proactive, and reminding those in her orbit to do the same.

Her clinics in Minnesota, Maryland, and—most recently—Virginia and New Mexico have been stockpiling as much of the abortion drug mifepristone as they can in case shipping is disrupted by the Trump administration’s policies. They’ve been over-ordering medical supplies, from gloves to exam-table paper, in light of anti-abortion groups’ well-telegraphed plans to resurrect the Comstock Act to ban the shipping of all abortion-related supplies and equipment. Far from preparing to curtail their work, her clinics have been expanding services: raising the gestational limit for medication abortion from 11 weeks to 12 weeks for telemedicine appointments; mailing pills to a larger number of states, including New York, Colorado, and California; and exploring how to accept Medicaid patients from states that allow the program to reimburse telehealth abortion care. “People tell me, ‘Well, Trump is going to ban pills by mail,’ and I’m just like, ‘Well, people have threatened to do that stuff for my entire career, actually.’ It’s not going to stop us from doing what we can to help our patients now,” she says.

Their preparations aren’t just logistical, but also psychological, aimed at helping her team and their allies stay resilient amid all the attacks.

“They’ve talked about Comstock, they’ve talked about a national abortion ban,” Hagstrom Miller says. “But at the same time, we can’t just bow down and normalize it all. We can’t let extremists who want to revive a law from the 1800s have that kind of power over us. We need to proceed in a way that treats these threats as remarkably radical—not just as inevitable.”

Coming from someone else, that advice might feel like Pollyanna-ish platitudes out of sync with this political moment. From Hagstrom Miller, who has weathered countless storms as an abortion provider in the South, it’s a bracing reminder that the future is far from hopeless—if we can draw from the lessons of the past.

“I learned a lot while practicing in Texas, and I’ll leverage that experience to push back on the second Trump presidency, whether it be exploiting loopholes, filing lawsuits, or finding other creative ways of resistance,” she says. “We know how to protect ourselves while also being cautious.”

“It’s not necessarily wisdom we wanted,” Hagstrom Miller adds. “But we have it and we’re sure as hell going to use it.”

Hagstrom Miller grew up in a “fairly progressive” Christian family in what she calls “judgy progressive” Minnesota in the ’70s and ’80s. The attitude, she says, was, “We believe people should have [the right to] abortion.” But when it came to a woman’s decision to actually have one, “it was sort of talked about like it was still a mistake or a problem.” Majoring in religion and international studies in college, she traveled extensively and lived abroad, shaping a worldview that rejected, as she puts it, how the religious right sought to “weaponize” Christianity to attack reproductive rights and gender equality. After her first post-college job at a Minnesota Planned Parenthood, she moved to local independent abortion clinics. “I was drawn to the fact we could provide a sort of oasis where the patient could choose the course of their lives,” she says, “and we could help be their guide.”

She worked briefly at a provider in Texas in the early 1990s, then moved to New York City, where her time at high-patient-volume clinics taught her the business of abortion care. She appreciated how easy it was for abortion patients and providers to go about their business there, but also felt restless. “Abortion was on literally every corner, and it was paid for by Medicaid,” Hagstrom Miller recalls. “That’s how it should be, right?” But she missed the advocacy part of the work she’d gotten a taste of in Texas. So when she moved back to the state in 2000, she accepted an offer to run a small clinic; three years later, she bought two clinics and merged them when the doctor-owners retired—the start of her Whole Woman’s Health network. “Be careful what you wish for, right?” she says with a laugh.

“It seemed like almost every single time the legislature met, from the moment I touched ground in Texas in 2000, a new restriction was passed.”

Meanwhile, the conservatives who dominated Texas politics during the George W. Bush era were taking an even harder turn to the right—and using their powers to chip away relentlessly at abortion and reproductive rights. “It seemed like almost every single time the legislature met, from the moment I touched ground in Texas in 2000, a new restriction was passed,” Hagstrom Miller says: parental notification requirements; a 24-hour waiting period; mandatory ultrasounds; restrictions on insurance coverage; bans on abortion after 24 weeks, then 20 weeks; and on and on.

Hagstrom Miller became what she calls a “loophole archaeologist.” The 2003 waiting period law, for instance, required a doctor’s appointment 24 hours in advance of an abortion with the same physician who would perform the procedure—a rule designed to unnecessarily burden patients and clinics alike. Hagstrom Miller noticed that the text of the statute didn’t specify an in-person visit, so she allowed for phone consultations instead. “A lot of other providers were scared to do this,” she says. “I know what the law probably meant, but they didn’t write it that way.” Her clinic led the charge with this interpretation, and others eventually followed suit, forming a united front. The tactic bought her and other clinics’ patients another four years before lawmakers clarified the language, she says. It’s a strategy that she’s employed over and over, she adds: “Comply with the law,” but “in the most liberal, progressive way possible.”

Hagstrom Miller employed a similar strategy when navigating Senate Bill 8, also known as the Heartbeat Act, which banned abortions at around six weeks. Her clinics continued to provide abortion within the confines of the radical law, even as some clinics in the state halted all care. Hagstrom Miller consulted attorneys about how to follow the law while avoiding legal liability, boosting her staff’s confidence in treating patients, and changed the scheduling process to fit in more patients, which helped keep the clinics afloat even as they operated at 40 percent capacity. She shared these tactics with providers in Georgia and Florida who eventually faced similar bans and also urged them to pay attention to whether a law permits abortion through six weeks versus up to six weeks, a distinction that lawmakers might not notice but that would be critical to delivering care. “Sometimes the pockets of resistance are mundane legal jargon. But social change often relies on the mundane,” she adds. “The words ‘may’ and ‘shall’ or ‘through’ and ‘up to’ in a law can make all the difference in the world in whether we can see patients or not.”

Meanwhile, even as she was finding loopholes, Hagstrom Miller often used the legal system to fight the underlying restrictions, filing about a dozen lawsuits over the years, with varying degrees of success. The most high-profile case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, was a challenge to so-called TRAP (targeted regulation of abortion providers) laws that required abortion doctors to obtain admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of a clinic and forced clinics to conform to the same building codes as ambulatory surgical centers. With a Republican-appointed majority on the US Supreme Court, “many people, even on our side, told us we were crazy to bring the Hellerstedt case, that we were taking too much risk and were never going to win,” Hagstrom Miller recalls. But in a surprising, and historic, 2016 decision, the high court deemed the TRAP laws an “undue burden” on abortion patients.

By contrast, Hagstrom Miller’s legal challenge to SB 8, the so-called Heartbeat Act, in 2021 was an unmitigated defeat, with the Supreme Court allowing the law to stand. “What’s the alternative?” she asks, referring to litigation even when victory is far from guaranteed. “Our backs are up against the wall. You can’t only do things if the odds are in your favor. You have to do what’s right, no matter what.”

“Our backs are up against the wall. You can’t only do things if the odds are in your favor. You have to do what’s right, no matter what.”

Backing down under Trump’s second term isn’t an option either. “If they enforce Comstock,” she says, “we are going to sue them.”

The clever maneuvering and legal battles, even when successful, have been costly and draining. During the Hellerstedt lawsuit, for example, Hagstrom Miller was forced to temporarily close her five Texas clinics and permanently shutter two of them. Even with pro bono representation from the Center for Reproductive Rights, she still spent about $1 million on the case, she says. “Depositions and trial prep, all of that stuff takes a ton of time, and we need to make sure providers have resources to support them,” Hagstrom Miller says. But without the major-name ID and fundraising power of an organization like Planned Parenthood, independent abortion clinics—which historically have provided the majority of abortion care in the US—have always been at a disadvantage when it comes to financial support, with big funders directing their money elsewhere.

Hagstrom Miller recalls how, during a cocktail party in 2014, a Planned Parenthood executive mentioned receiving a million-dollar donation from the late billionaire (and onetime third-party presidential candidate) Ross Perot in response to the Hellerstedt lawsuit. She was “gutted.” While major reproductive health groups benefited from her Supreme Court case, her Whole Woman’s Health clinics were struggling. “I was just tired of Planned Parenthood raising money off of our lawsuit,” Hagstrom Miller says. “I love people at that organization, but here we were with no way to fundraise ourselves. I decided I’m not going to stay mad, I’m going to do something about it.”

So in 2015, she created Whole Woman’s Health Alliance, a nonprofit that allowed the group to accept donations and foundation grants to finance “non-revenue-generating” work, such as communications, advocacy, and sometimes legal fees. The alliance helped Hagstrom Miller keep her Texas clinics afloat and expand her network into a handful of friendlier states. “A lot of people reach out to me when they want to retire and sell their practices,” she says.

And then in 2022, the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning Roe. Texas swiftly enforced a criminal trigger ban that threatened providers with at least $100,000 in fines and up to life in prison for performing an abortion. Hagstrom Miller was forced to immediately shutter her four remaining clinics in McAllen, Fort Worth, McKinney, and Austin simultaneously and lay off half of her 45-person Texas staff, including 15 physicians.

“Everything collapsed all at once. Dobbs devastated us—financially and emotionally. It was a traumatic and heartbreaking time.”

“Everything collapsed all at once,” she says. “Dobbs devastated us—financially and emotionally. It was a traumatic and heartbreaking time.”

It wasn’t just the Supreme Court decision that was demoralizing, Hagstrom Miller says. She also felt “betrayed” by the wider national reproductive rights movement. When her practice collapsed in Texas, leaving her with huge financial burdens, major abortion-rights funders were missing in action. Hagstrom Miller says she asked multiple donors and foundations—including some of the movement’s biggest backers—for “clinic wind-down” resources to pay for everything from administrative overhead to severance for staff, only to be repeatedly turned down. As she recalls it, one funder told her: “Why would I invest in something that’s dying anyway? There’s no future there.”

“It felt like such disrespect to the clinic workforce,” Hagstrom Miller says. “We felt abandoned. When the movement needed us to fight these big Supreme Court battles, we were there. But when we needed them, they just cast us aside.”

“We felt abandoned. When the movement needed us to fight these big Supreme Court battles, we were there. But when we needed them, they just cast us aside.”

Hagstrom Miller says she tried to appeal to the Biden White House directly about this issue, proposing something akin to FEMA support or Paycheck Protection Program loans for providers forced to move out of state. She had hoped to continue to lobby a Harris administration; now, under Trump, she worries about how independent clinics will fare if they must self-fund their efforts to relocate.

The lack of help for shuttered clinics is symptomatic of the reproductive rights movement’s broader failures, she says, including its unwillingness to channel resources to red states where abortion is banned and to local abortion funds that are suffering from major money problems. A growing chorus of state-level activists has stressed the deep and “alarming” disconnect between the priorities of powerful national abortion organizations and the actual needs of abortion providers and patients. Hagstrom Miller hopes movement leaders and funders will learn from their mistakes, fundamentally rethinking what they do and increasing their investment in grassroots groups on the ground. “When [the people] that say they are supporting the movement don’t do anything to actually help those of us working every day to help abortion patients, then something needs to seriously change.”

Amid the lack of institutional support in post-Dobbs Texas, Hagstrom Miller was thrust into one of the most chaotic periods of her career. What happened at her Whole Woman’s Health clinic in the town of McAllen, in the Rio Grande Valley, was a particularly painful lesson—one about which some reproductive health advocates around the country remain upset.

Community advocates wanted to buy the facility and turn it into a reproductive justice center, but fell far short of the money they needed, partly, they say, because a Whole Woman’s Health employee asked them to remove the clinic’s name from their fundraising campaign. Meanwhile, Hagstrom Miller was frantically negotiating lease buyouts for facilities in Austin and McKinney and trying to sell her clinic in Fort Worth (she had to pay the mortgage for a year before it finally sold).

In the fall of 2022, a father-daughter pair of doctors calling themselves the Peruvian Alliance made a $275,000 cash offer to buy the McAllen clinic, claiming it was for their own family medicine practice. Hagstrom Miller, her employees, and lawyers say that they researched the prospective buyers and that their backgrounds checked out. But just two weeks after purchasing the clinic, the new owners turned the deed over to the McAllen Pregnancy Center, an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center that had long targeted Whole Women’s Health. Reproductive advocates were understandably furious at Hagstrom Miller. “They were so easily able to Trojan Horse their way in there,” Noemi Pratt, then the board secretary for South Texans for Reproductive Justice, said at the time. “How did you so easily allow this to happen?”

Hagstrom Miller, on the other hand, says she felt “duped.” “We were completely stunned. This was such a huge and painful betrayal, I still have difficulty talking about it today,” she says. “It was hard not to internalize it and blame ourselves. We just felt such grief.”

After being pushed out of Texas, Hagstrom Miller decided to move to abortion-protective New Mexico. She initially hoped to establish her clinic somewhere near the Texas border. But those rural communities were prime targets for anti-abortion activists pushing for the passage of “sanctuary for the unborn” ordinances. “It just didn’t feel safe for our patients,” she says. So Hagstrom Miller turned her sights to Albuquerque, raising $450,000 on GoFundMe to help fund the new facility.

Since opening its doors in March 2023, the vast majority of the clinic’s patients originate from Texas. Just minutes from the airport, the facility includes a special waiting room for families and others accompanying patients from out of state. There are couches to sleep on and toys to keep children entertained.

In the coming years, Hagstrom Miller hopes to see more collaboration among providers nationwide to strategize and help each other out. “There is a legacy of wisdom and expertise with some of us abortion providers here in the South who have been doing this for decades,” she says. “It could be useful to not only people on the federal level, but people in states who haven’t yet needed to flex those muscles and may be afraid of what’s to come. There’s a lot to be learned.”

And a lot to fight for. Since taking office, Trump has already reinstated the global gag rule, a policy that restricts US funding for foreign organizations that advocate or even refer for abortions; scrapped the federal government’s reproductive rights website; and limited protections for abortion clinics against violent protesters (a development Hagstrom Miller predicted). He’s stacked federal agencies with anti-abortion appointees and faced a pressure campaign from activists to ban medication abortion. Hagstrom Miller’s mind races with some of the other, less obvious ways the new administration could target patients and providers, from shredding privacy protections like HIPAA to launching arbitrary Medicaid audits—and other possibilities she’d rather not discuss publicly even as she prepares for the worst.

“Some of these things are very behind the scenes,” she says. “A lot of people don’t understand how regulatory interference works because it feels largely invisible. But anti-abortion activists sometimes understand better than pro-choice advocates do. And these maneuvers could shut us down as easily as an abortion ban.”

Hagstrom Miller doesn’t sugarcoat how difficult the next four years are likely to be. She gets triggered when people reflexively refer to her and other providers as “resilient” or “tireless,” words that fail to acknowledge how deeply exhausting her work has become. (“Fuck you all, I’m very tired!” she says with a laugh.) “Sometimes we are just numb and have to stare off into space,” she admits. “You can’t immediately spring into action—it feels fake and forced. It’s okay to take time to mourn these huge losses and then act when we are ready.”

What continues to motivate her is the gratitude she receives from her patients, day in and day out. “This is still super-meaningful work,” Hagstrom Miller says. “I can directly see the value it brings to people’s lives, and that fills my cup and keeps me going. As long as I have that, I will keep fighting.”

For Scientists Studying Environmental Health, Trump’s Diktats Are a Slow-Moving Disaster

Gabriel Filippelli opened up his email inbox on Monday to encounter some unexpected news: a notice that his $300,000 grant from the State Department was no more. 

Filippelli is the Chancellor’s Professor of Earth Sciences and executive director of the Environmental Resilience Institute at Indiana University. Previously a senior science advisor to the State Department, he has dedicated his career to understanding and improving environmental health. “I work on issues related to pollution and air quality,” says Filippelli. Increasingly, he has worked on projects involving “climate and health in the present and the future.”

He’s also one of the many scientists whose research was thrown into disarray by the recent flurry of executive orders from the Trump administration. Filippelli is more exposed than most. In addition to the above-mentioned project, he had a pair of proposals up for review by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), both of which have placed a “temporary” freeze on their grant processes.

His institute, meanwhile, relies on a $5 million grant via the Inflation Reduction Act, whose funding President Donald Trump has vowed to claw back. Nothing has yet been done to jeopardize his IRA funding, which Filippelli has already received, but he says the institute’s work, which centers on environmental justice, may be uniquely “vulnerable.”

“We recognized that there was a gap between what Midwestern communities need to build climate resilience and the resources available to them,” he explains. The Environmental Resilience Institute fills that gap for those communities, “both red and blue,” and helps train people for jobs in the clean energy and decarbonization sectors. I caught up with Filippelli earlier this week to discuss the details. Our conversation below was edited for length and clarity.

Tell us more about the project whose funding was eliminated.

It’s a really cool one. The embassy in Pakistan put out a call for projects to help build capacity by developing partnerships, and one of those areas was in climate and air quality. We built a team of folks—including Indiana University, two Pakistani universities, and one Pakistani tech company—to help acquire a set of air quality monitors and deploy them in Pakistan to train faculty and students in Pakistan on air quality and climate resilience, and also bring some of that expertise and partnerships to the US. It was funded in October and we’ve been working on it over the last year.

How were you informed that your funding was rescinded? 

Over the weekend, the State Department notified universities around the country, including mine, that they were going to suspend awards effective immediately. That’s what the term is: “suspended.” At least in my case, the award no longer “effectuated the priorities of the State Department.” It was simply a form letter that just said that—and then warned that no further spending can be made on any of the awards.

And you had been actively working on this from the start?

We started in October. We just finished drafting our first quarterly report to the embassy in Pakistan. I just had to cancel a trip to Pakistan to run some on-the-ground workshops.

Will this project be able to continue in any way?

Not in it’s current form. I’m sure the networks and partnerships that we’ve built will continue. They can’t forbid us from working with the universities, but they can forbid us from being supported by [federal] funds. The future is kind of murky. 

What was the reaction of your Pakistani partners?

I’ve only gotten one very brief message. [The news arrived in] the middle of the night there. I think they’ll just be waking up now. The one brief message was just like two words: “My goodness.” It was a shock response.

How will this loss affect you and your colleagues?

The impacts for Indiana University and me are that we’ve already built up structures to spend time in Pakistan to implement this. We have students and staff involved. We had already begun arranging for a visit by Pakistani colleagues to the US to learn from us, and also to teach us about their environmental work in Pakistan. 

It’s going to be relatively devastating for Pakistan. They’d already begun the process of constructing some air quality monitors and recruiting a bunch of the team members. When the US fails to come through on a commitment, it’s pretty demoralizing, particularly for the international partners. They need answers badly. Their air quality is terrible. It’s not getting any better. They rate really poorly on climate resilience. They need these resources now. 

Have you ever had funding pulled like this?

Never in my life. Nor, based on chatting with some colleagues, in theirs. Federal funding can easily and rightfully be pulled if there’s malfeasance on the part of the grantee, but I’d never experienced this. I’ve received 40 research awards in my career, and never once would it even cross my mind that something like this would happen. 

You are one of many American scientists grappling with these directives. What is the atmosphere among the researchers you are in touch with?

Pretty much shocked. A bunch of these dominoes are falling. First NIH suspends their study sections, meaning that there can be no action taken on any proposal. Ironically, I have a proposal in front of the NIH right now. And then the NSF just announced they are pausing all of their panel reviews. I have a proposal in the panel that would have been meeting today and tomorrow.

The NIH is under HHS, so we can [understand] a pause in some of that funding, but the National Science Foundation is usually hands off by the administration, and so that’s particularly shocking to me.

What are those proposals you have in the works?

The NIH proposal was to work with communities in El Paso, Texas, and Indianapolis to determine the major sources of lead in their blood. What are the environmental sources and how do you engage with those communities to reduce lead poisoning? The one at the National Science Foundation is developing a new graduate program around environmental sustainability and urban sustainability.

Is there anything else you’d like to emphasize about all of this?

I don’t think that many people know—certainly the administration doesn’t seem to—how much investment the US government puts into science and how much those dollars actually accrue to where they’re being spent. My research projects at Indiana University support student training. They support undergraduate lab researchers to get inspired by science. They support new discoveries that have resulted in patents. They have included changing some recommendations at the national level.

They are investments—local investments. I fully expect congressional delegations to push back against a lot of that stuff, because this money is going into their districts, including some large grants. I hoped to see an uproar at that level and a restoration of some of these very imprudent decisions.

Universities are our discovery makers, but they also train the next generation of Americans. When you start providing this kind of uncertainty in universities, you’re imperiling many generations in the future. 

“It’s a Scam”: Federal Workers React to Trump’s Supposed Buyout

Federal workers comprise less than one percent of the US population, but are responsible for facilitating programs that help all 330-plus million Americans have access to health care, veterans’ services, safe transportation, clean water, nutritional assistance, and so much more. 

On Tuesday evening, a memo titled “Fork in the Road,” from a mysterious Office of Personnel Management (OPM) email address, began offering nearly all federal government workers—excluding members of the military, postal workers, immigration officers, and national security personnel—the option to leave their nonpartisan, bureaucratic posts. All they have to do is send the word “resign” in the body of a reply to hr@opm.gov by February 6. 

In exchange for leaving of their own volition, the email claims federal workers taking the offer will be able to “retain all pay and benefits” and be “exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements” until eight months from now, on September 30. (Last week, President Donald Trump issued a memorandum requiring all federal workers to return to in-person work “as soon as practicable.”)

Workers who choose to resign could be placed on leave or see their duties reduced through September, the email says. Resigning would also, theoretically, save federal workers the anxiety of a looming layoff down the road, when Trump is expected to make good on his promise to decimate the current federal workforce. “The majority of federal agencies are likely to be downsized,” the Tuesday email, reviewed by Mother Jones, says. “At this time, we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position.”

To federal employees who received it, the email “implied that anyone who didn’t resign must fall in line with the administration or their jobs could be at risk,” says one federal employee of the Department of Commerce. To the email’s authors, it’s an attempt to allow federal workers who don’t want to contribute to “making America great again” the ability to “choose a different line of work” and receive “a very generous payout of eight months,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told NBC.

Union leaders, who represent about one in four federal workers, and labor lawyers are skeptical about the email’s terms and legality. Meanwhile, government employees are oscillating between shock and awe: Many expressed a genuine concern for their ability to continue serving Americans through their roles. Others are amused by the absurdity of suggesting millions of workers step aside via individual, one-word email replies. Mother Jones heard from roughly a dozen federal workers and union representatives for this story; most were granted anonymity to avoid workplace retaliation. 

“It seemed like a scare tactic, like so much of what they’ve done so far,” said a USDA employee.

A civilian Army employee said that the email’s “composition and the ‘reply Resign’ line made it hard to take seriously.”

Some Treasury workers represented by the National Treasury Employees Union even thought the email was a phishing attempt or spam.

“They did not believe it was really coming from the federal government,” says Doreen Greenwald, the union’s national president.

On Tuesday afternoon, a couple of hours before some USDA employees received the offer for paid resignation, their supervisors called them to convene about a different email. This one was incredibly vague, and a tad eerie: “Watch Your Emails,” it said. “Starting tonight, OPM will be sending out an important federal workforce announcement.”

USDA leaders seemed surprised by that OPM correspondence and the offer to resign that followed. “It’s clear [that] middle management and agency leadership were not aware this was coming,” said the USDA worker, adding that colleagues have set up means of communicating outside work channels to strategize with and support one another. “We have no idea whether OPM can legally authorize the terms, accept resignations, or even legally email us like this.”

For starters, it’s unclear whether the federal government is even able to place huge swaths of government workers on leave for several months, as the OPM email says it will. Current statute indicates that agencies can put employees on leave for “a period of not more than a total of 10 work days.” 

Additionally, the maximum amount agencies that are downsizing or reorganizing can offer federal workers in exchange for resignation is $25,000, according to an OPM webpage about the Voluntary Separation Incentive Payment Authority, which stipulates voluntary separation payments for agencies that are “downsizing or restructuring.” The sum an average federal worker makes in eight months is at least double that.

“My initial interpretation was that it’s a scam,” said one foreign service officer. “The memo was so lacking in details, it couldn’t possibly offer what it claimed to. Nowhere does it actually say what will happen to anyone who replies.”

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) isn’t confident that employees who accept the offer will get anything. “There is no guarantee that the claims in the Program will be honored by the Government,” the union, which represents the rights of some 800,000 government employees, said in a statement Wednesday. “Employees who opt-in to the Program will be at the mercy of the administrators of the Program, whose claims contain inconsistencies and lack stated legal underpinning.”

Federal workers aren’t the only ones at risk of negative impacts resulting from mass government resignations: Anyone who requires safe medication, clean air, healthy produce, natural disaster aid, or anything else the federal government touches—so, all of us—could suffer, too.

“It’s a Scam”: Federal Workers React to Trump’s Supposed Buyout

Federal workers comprise less than one percent of the US population, but are responsible for facilitating programs that help all 330-plus million Americans have access to health care, veterans’ services, safe transportation, clean water, nutritional assistance, and so much more. 

On Tuesday evening, a memo titled “Fork in the Road,” from a mysterious Office of Personnel Management (OPM) email address, began offering nearly all federal government workers—excluding members of the military, postal workers, immigration officers, and national security personnel—the option to leave their nonpartisan, bureaucratic posts. All they have to do is send the word “resign” in the body of a reply to hr@opm.gov by February 6. 

In exchange for leaving of their own volition, the email claims federal workers taking the offer will be able to “retain all pay and benefits” and be “exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements” until eight months from now, on September 30. (Last week, President Donald Trump issued a memorandum requiring all federal workers to return to in-person work “as soon as practicable.”)

Workers who choose to resign could be placed on leave or see their duties reduced through September, the email says. Resigning would also, theoretically, save federal workers the anxiety of a looming layoff down the road, when Trump is expected to make good on his promise to decimate the current federal workforce. “The majority of federal agencies are likely to be downsized,” the Tuesday email, reviewed by Mother Jones, says. “At this time, we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position.”

To federal employees who received it, the email “implied that anyone who didn’t resign must fall in line with the administration or their jobs could be at risk,” says one federal employee of the Department of Commerce. To the email’s authors, it’s an attempt to allow federal workers who don’t want to contribute to “making America great again” the ability to “choose a different line of work” and receive “a very generous payout of eight months,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told NBC.

Union leaders, who represent about one in four federal workers, and labor lawyers are skeptical about the email’s terms and legality. Meanwhile, government employees are oscillating between shock and awe: Many expressed a genuine concern for their ability to continue serving Americans through their roles. Others are amused by the absurdity of suggesting millions of workers step aside via individual, one-word email replies. Mother Jones heard from roughly a dozen federal workers and union representatives for this story; most were granted anonymity to avoid workplace retaliation. 

“It seemed like a scare tactic, like so much of what they’ve done so far,” said a USDA employee.

A civilian Army employee said that the email’s “composition and the ‘reply Resign’ line made it hard to take seriously.”

Some Treasury workers represented by the National Treasury Employees Union even thought the email was a phishing attempt or spam.

“They did not believe it was really coming from the federal government,” says Doreen Greenwald, the union’s national president.

On Tuesday afternoon, a couple of hours before some USDA employees received the offer for paid resignation, their supervisors called them to convene about a different email. This one was incredibly vague, and a tad eerie: “Watch Your Emails,” it said. “Starting tonight, OPM will be sending out an important federal workforce announcement.”

USDA leaders seemed surprised by that OPM correspondence and the offer to resign that followed. “It’s clear [that] middle management and agency leadership were not aware this was coming,” said the USDA worker, adding that colleagues have set up means of communicating outside work channels to strategize with and support one another. “We have no idea whether OPM can legally authorize the terms, accept resignations, or even legally email us like this.”

For starters, it’s unclear whether the federal government is even able to place huge swaths of government workers on leave for several months, as the OPM email says it will. Current statute indicates that agencies can put employees on leave for “a period of not more than a total of 10 work days.” 

Additionally, the maximum amount agencies that are downsizing or reorganizing can offer federal workers in exchange for resignation is $25,000, according to an OPM webpage about the Voluntary Separation Incentive Payment Authority, which stipulates voluntary separation payments for agencies that are “downsizing or restructuring.” The sum an average federal worker makes in eight months is at least double that.

“My initial interpretation was that it’s a scam,” said one foreign service officer. “The memo was so lacking in details, it couldn’t possibly offer what it claimed to. Nowhere does it actually say what will happen to anyone who replies.”

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) isn’t confident that employees who accept the offer will get anything. “There is no guarantee that the claims in the Program will be honored by the Government,” the union, which represents the rights of some 800,000 government employees, said in a statement Wednesday. “Employees who opt-in to the Program will be at the mercy of the administrators of the Program, whose claims contain inconsistencies and lack stated legal underpinning.”

Federal workers aren’t the only ones at risk of negative impacts resulting from mass government resignations: Anyone who requires safe medication, clean air, healthy produce, natural disaster aid, or anything else the federal government touches—so, all of us—could suffer, too.

Trump Tells DOJ to Prosecute Teachers Who “Unlawfully” Support Trans or Nonbinary Students

During his campaign, President Donald Trump frequently repeated the inflammatory and outrageous lie that, without parents’ knowledge, schools are sending children for gender-affirming surgeries.

During a campaign stop filmed by Fox News at a Bronx, New York, barbershop, Trump answered a voter’s question about failing school systems by saying, “No transgender, no operations—you know, they take your kid—there are some places, your boy leaves for school, comes back a girl. Okay? Without parental consent.” He added, “At first, when I was told that was actually happening, I said, you know, it’s an exaggeration. No: it happens. It happens. There are areas where it happens.”

Obviously, this is untrue, but now, he’s trying to solve the problem he invented as part of his anti-trans campaign strategy—by going much, much further than the earlier lies, and threatening to prosecute teachers who take steps to acknowledge or support the identities of trans or nonbinary students.

In the executive order issued Wednesday evening, titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 schooling,” Trump directs the attorney general to work with local and state officials to investigate teachers who “unlawfully facilitat[e] the social transition of a minor student.” The order defines “social transitioning” to include using a trans student’s name and pronouns, recognizing a student as nonbinary, or allowing them to use the restroom that aligns with their gender identity.

The same section of the order suggests that K-12 teachers and school officials who take action to support trans students’ identities be prosecuted under laws banning sexual exploitation of minors and practicing medicine without a license. There are 3.8 million public school teachers in the United States, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

The threats don’t stop there. Federal funding for schools and programs that teach lessons about gender or race is also in jeopardy. Trump’s order instructs the Departments of Education, Defense, Health and Human Services, and Justice to come up with an “Ending Indoctrination Strategy” within the next 90 days, identifying federal funding streams that “directly or indirectly support or subsidize the instruction, advancement, or promotion of gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology” in classrooms and teacher training.

But what does “discriminatory equity ideology” actually mean? The order defines it as “ideology that treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups, rather than as individuals, and minimizes agency, merit, and capability in favor of immoral generalizations.” In context, this seems to be Trump’s new phrase for what conservative activists used to call “critical race theory”—a term that itself mischaracterizes academic concepts around systemic and institutional racism as being anti-white.

The order is a transparent attempt to inject schools with whitewashed American history. It directs federal agencies to promote “patriotic education,” which it defines as teaching an “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding.” To achieve that goal, it reestablishes the 1776 Commission, which Trump created during his first term to cultivate “patriotic citizens ready for the workforce, not political activists.” The original 1776 Commission’s report on US history identifies progressivism as one of the foremost threats to American principles and derides social justice policies as antithetical to the “color-blind civil rights” movement.

Wednesday’s order is the latest in a string of executive actions targeting diversity initiatives and trans rights that Trump has signed since taking office just over a week ago. These orders include redefining sex, banning trans people from the military, curtailing access to gender-affirming care for people under the age of 19, and ending DEI initiatives in the federal workforce.

Trump provided the blueprint in his first term to target antiracism and LGBTQ inclusion. His 2020 executive order to abolish DEI initiatives from the federal government armed conservative organizations and politicians with the language to target government entities, particularly schools, at the local and state levels. While former President Joe Biden quickly undid that order, it became the catalyst for the introduction of nearly 900 similar anti-DEI policies across the United States.

RFK Jr. Signals He’ll Give the Anti-Abortion Movement Exactly What They Want

Last Friday, my colleague Julianne McShane and I broke the news of a pair of letters sent by 30 prominent anti-abortion movement leaders to the heads of the Departments of Health and Human Services and Justice, asking them to use the powers of their agencies to attack abortion pills.

During his contentious confirmation hearing as President Donald Trump’s nominee for HHS secretary today, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. signaled that he’d do exactly that. Under questioning from senators, Kennedy said that he would instruct the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration to study the safety of mifepristone—a medication that has been FDA-approved to end pregnancies for 25 years, with vast amounts of research supporting its safety and effectiveness.

“President Trump has made it clear to me that one of the things he is not taking a position [on] yet [is] mifepristone,” Kennedy said. “But he’s made it clear to me that he wants me to look at the safety issues. And I’ll ask NIH, FDA to do that.”

RFK Jr. says he will instruct the NIH and FDA to review the safety of the abortion drug mifepristone.

Nikki McCann Ramírez (@nikkimcr.bsky.social) 2025-01-29T16:17:21.585Z

The “safety concerns” that anti-abortion activists like to raise about mifepristone are a thin pretext for their ideological efforts to end all abortions, everywhere. It’s efficient for them to attack medication abortion because it accounts for nearly two-thirds of all US abortions, according to the most recent research. Last year, I reported on a lawsuit by anti-abortion doctors attacking mifepristone’s FDA approval:

From the beginning, the anti-abortion doctors’ arguments have been cloaked in such faux concerns about mifepristone’s safety. In their original complaint, the doctors argued that the FDA hadn’t had enough evidence to approve the drug or loosen regulations on it, and they cited flimsy research to suggest mifepristone was harmful. Those claims have been roundly debunked by mainstream medical associations, which explain that mifepristone is backed by decades of data. Even before it came to the United States, the drug was used for years for abortions in Europe; since its approval here in 2000, around 6 million people in the US have taken it. As the New York Times reports, more than 100 scientific studies have concluded that mifepristone is a safe way to end a pregnancy.

Meanwhile. it turns out that some of the studies cited by the doctors weren’t scientific at all. One, relied on in Kacsmaryk’s decision, was based on anonymous blog posts from a site called “Abortion Changes You.” Last month, a journal retracted three other papers cited by ADF in the case, explaining that an independent review had found “fundamental problems,” “incorrect factual assumptions,” “material errors,” and “misleading presentations.” Sage, the studies’ publisher, reported that nearly all their authors had affiliations with anti-abortion advocacy groups yet had not disclosed any conflicts of interest.

Of course, the real reason mifepristone is a target isn’t a result of science, but rather simple math: Medication abortions are immensely popular, accounting for nearly two-thirds of all abortions across the country. Thanks to recently enacted “shield laws” in a handful of states, including California and Massachusetts, providers there can now prescribe the pills to patients in states with abortion bans.

As McShane has noted, abortion rights could be undermined by Trump appointees throughout a number of government agencies. HHS, with its 80,000 people and responsibility to oversee the FDA, the NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health, among other offices could potentially wield enormous power over reproductive health care. But, she explains, Kennedy’s position on the issue until now has been ambiguous:

Like Trump, Kennedy has been inconsistent on his abortion stances. In 2023, for example, he said he backed a 15-week national abortion ban before subsequently walking that back. His campaign told the Washington Post in November 2023 that he supported codifying Roe v. Wade and maintaining the FDA’s approval of mifepristone—but these were positions he held before Trump named him as his HHS nominee. Since then, abortion opponents have reportedly asked that Kennedy appoint a high-ranking anti-abortion stalwart to HHS and publicly commit during his confirmation hearings to restoring anti-abortion policies within HHS from Trump’s first administration, such as preventing abortion pills from being mailed or distributed at pharmacies and rescinding a Biden-era rule that stipulated HIPAA privacy protections should apply to abortions. (In December, anti-abortion Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) claimed in a post on X that during a private meeting with him, RFK Jr. had committed to those measures and others.) Project 2025 also makes a litany of anti-abortion recommendations for the HHS secretary, including issuing guidance that states can defund Planned Parenthood in their state Medicaid plans.

That ambiguity appears to have been resolved today.

Trump Picks Torture Memo Author for Deputy Transportation Secretary

Two decades ago, while serving in President George W. Bush’s Justice Department, Steven Bradbury wrote a series of memos justifying waterboarding that former Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called “permission slips for torture.”

Now, Bradbury is Donald Trump’s nominee for Deputy Transportation Secretary.

When it comes to writing about why the United States can torture, Bradbury is less well-known than his former Justice Department colleague John Yoo. Still, he played a key role. Bradbury wrote three top-secret legal memos in 2005 that were essential to providing the Central Intelligence Agency with legal cover for subjecting detainees to “enhanced interrogation techniques” including waterboarding. In the public version of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2014 “torture report,” Bradbury’s name and memos appear 178 times.

In 2017, Trump picked Bradbury to be general counsel at the Transportation Department. After Trump left office, Bradbury served as a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and played a key role in shaping the section of Project 2025 that covers the Department of Transportation. The president is now giving him a promotion. (The White House and Bradbury did not respond to requests for comment.)

Bradbury was confirmed in 2017 over the vehement objections of McCain, who was infamously tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. The late Arizona senator argued about Bradbury’s legal opinions in a passionate floor speech in which he made that clear that the memos “provided a legal framework for the use of methods including waterboarding, which is a mock execution and an exquisite form of torture in which the victim suffers the terrible sensation of drowning.”

“We are speaking of an interrogation technique that dates from the Spanish Inquisition and has been a prosecutable offense for over a century,” McCain continued. “It is among the crimes for which Japanese war criminals were tried and hanged following World War II and was employed by the infamous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.” McCain stressed that “a more meticulous justification for torture is still a justification for torture—and arguably a more pernicious one.”

Bradbury included an often sickening level of detail to support his conclusions in the memos, one of which ran 46 pages. It sanctioned thirteen interrogation techniques including “Dietary manipulation,” “Nudity,” “Cramped confinement,” “Stress positions, “Sleep deprivation (more than 48 hours,)” and “Waterboard.” There is also a paragraph largely devoted to justifying the CIA’s decision to force detainees to wear only an adult diaper: 

If the detainee is clothed, he wears an adult diaper under his pants. Detainees subject to sleep deprivation who are also subject to nudity as a separate interrogation technique will at times be nude and wearing a diaper. If the detainee is wearing a diaper, it is checked regularly and changed as necessary. The use of the diaper is for sanitary and health purposes of the detainee; it is not used for the purpose of humiliating the detainee, and it is not considered to be an interrogation technique.

CIA records tell another story. They make clear that a central “purpose” of the diapers was to “cause humiliation” and to “induce a sense of helplessness,” according to the Senate torture report.

Bradbury also signed off on the CIA’s policy of forcing detainees to remain awake for potentially more than one week at a time. He concluded that forcing detainees to appear naked before male and female interrogators was acceptable partly because “it is very unlikely that nudity would be employed at ambient temperatures below 75°F.” Bradbury wrote that giving detainees only “bland, unappetizing, but nutritionally complete” foods was permissible partly because detainees were weighed weekly to ensure they were not losing too much weight. The amount of time detainees could be doused with 41-degree water—an excruciatingly low temperature—was calculated down to the minute following a review of the medical literature on hypothermia. About waterboarding, Bradbury’s memo explained:

We understand that the effect of the waterboard is to induce a sensation of drowning. This sensation is based on a deeply rooted physiological response. Thus, the detainee experiences this sensation even if he is aware that he is not actually drowning. We are informed that based on extensive experience, the process is not physically painful, but that it usually does cause fear and panic. 

In blending a desire for order and cleanliness with a willingness to sanction almost unspeakable acts, Bradbury evoked some of the most shameful chapters of modern history. As Marguerite Feitlowitz writes about Argentina’s Dirty War in her book A Lexicon of Terror, “Language helps to ritualize torture; it lends structure, provides a ‘reason,’ an ‘explanation,’ an ‘objective.'” She continues, “Moreover, the special idiom provided categories for practices otherwise out of bounds. It was enabling.”

In another memo, Bradbury took on a different legal question: If the 13 interrogation techniques did not count as torture when used on their own, did it constitute torture when they were used in combination? No, Bradbury concluded. It did not.

Bradbury went on in the memo to write about using “nudity, sleep deprivation (with shackling and, at least at times, with use of a diaper), and dietary manipulation” to bring detainees to “‘a baseline dependent state.’” He frequently refers to his other writing in italicized shorthand: “As we discussed in Techniques…In Techniques, we recognized…In Techniques, we explained.”

He was using the royal we. Only Bradbury’s signature appears at the bottom of both memos.

McCain made his repulsion clear in his 2017 Senate speech. “The memos that bear his name made it possible for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—a monster and a murderer, to be sure, but a detainee held in US custody under the laws of armed conflict—to be water-boarded 183 times,” the senator said. “This technique was used so gratuitously that even those applying it eventually came to believe that there was no reason to continue. They were ordered to do so anyway.” 

He continued: “The memos that bear Mr. Bradbury’s name also made it possible for a Libyan detainee and his wife to be rendered to a foreign country, where that woman was bound and gagged while several months pregnant, and photographed naked as several American intelligence officers watched…I am told that picture still exists, somewhere in the archives that record this shameful period in our history.”

RFK Jr. Just Lied to Senators About His Views on Antidepressants and Addiction

A few hours into his confirmation hearings on Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, had a tense exchange with Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN). The subject was Kennedy’s misleading claims that antidepressants caused teenagers to commit school shootings. As Smith pointed out, reams of evidence dispute that claim.

Yet Kennedy persisted in his crusade against SSRIs. “Listen, I know people, including members of my family, who’ve had a much worse time getting off of SSRIs than they did than people have getting off heroin,” he told Smith. (Kennedy himself was once addicted to heroin.)

When Smith brought up Kennedy’s controversial plan to treat SSRI “addicts” at government-sponsored wellness farms, he attempted to distance himself from that idea. “You described Americans who take mental health medications as addicts who need to be sent to wellness farms to recover,” Smith said. “Is that what you believe?” Kennedy promptly denied ever having said “that antidepressants are like addicts.”

But as I reported in July, he actually did lump users of SSRIs and ADHD medications together with people who are dependent on opioids and benzodiazepenes, referring to that broad group as “addicts.” On an episode that month of the Latino Capitalist podcast that was billed as a “Latino Town Hall,” Kennedy unveiled his plan to overhaul addiction treatment programs. He described opioid, antidepressant, and ADHD “addicts” receiving treatment on tech-free “wellness farms,” where they would spend as much as three or four years growing organic produce.

The farms would be funded, he said, with money generated through a sales tax on cannabis products. (As of now, cannabis is still illegal at the federal level; sales taxes are state and local.) “I’m going to dedicate that revenue to creating wellness farms—drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country,” Kennedy said. “I’m going to make it so people can go, if you’re convicted of a drug offense, or if you have a drug problem, you can go to one of these places for free.”

More on Kennedy’s wellness farms plan here:

SCOOP: RFK Jr. suggests creating "wellness farms" to "reparent" those struggling with addiction by growing organic food and taking away screens.

But it's not just addiction. He says it'll also be a place for people with ADHD and depression to get off SSRIs and antidepressants. pic.twitter.com/3oUmznEGwP

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) July 24, 2024

It Took RFK Jr. Just Six Minutes to Lie to Congress

Six minutes into his opening statement at his confirmation hearing Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lied. President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services brazenly repeated a statement that has been cited as false multiple times.

“News reports claim I am anti-vaccine…I am not,” he said in his opening statement to the Senate Finance Committee.

At that, a protester in the audience, shouted, “You lie.” She was removed from the hearing room by Capitol Hill police.

The protester was right. In July 2023, Kennedy told a podcaster, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” That same month, during an interview on Fox News with Jesse Watters, Kennedy said, “I do believe that autism comes from vaccines.” That notion has long been scientifically debunked. In 2021, he told a podcaster that people should “resist” guidelines from the Centers for Disease and Control on vaccines. He added, “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated.” And the non-profit that he led promoted an anti-vaccine campaign with the slogan, “IF YOU’RE NOT AN ANTI-VAXXER YOU AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION.”

And then there are all the anti-vax books he has written that certainly convey the impression that vaccines are dangerous.

Yet at the hearing, Kennedy tried to run from his past. He claimed that when it comes to vaccines he was merely “pro-safety” and only has asked “uncomfortable questions.” He said that vaccines play a “critical role in health care” and noted that “all my kids are vaccinated.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, was determined not to let Kennedy slip by with his Big Lie about vaccines. He cited several of Kennedy’s past remarks. Referring to Kennedy’s comment that his kids were vaccinated, Wyden noted that during a 2020 podcast interview, Kennedy said he “would do anything, pay anything, to go back in time and not vaccinate” his kids.

Kennedy tried to weasel his way out, claiming that no vaccine is safe and effective “for everyone.” But that’s obvious, given that all vaccines can have adverse reactions. He did not bother to counter the other comments that Wyden referenced. He also dodged questions about the assertion in a 2021 book he wrote that parents have been misled to believe measles is a deadly disease and that the measles vaccine is safe and necessary. When Wyden asked whether measles is deadly, Kennedy refused to provide a yes or no answer. But he told the committee that he supports the measles and polio vaccines. Wyden scoffed at this remark.

Kennedy had to call on his powers of slipperiness to duck tough questions. Asked about the petition he filed in May 2021 with the Food and Drug Administration to rescind the authorization for the Covid vaccine and to block future access to it, he said he had only been focused on the use of vaccines for six-year-old children. That was highly misleading. Kennedy’s request to the FDA claimed the vaccine’s costs outweighed the benefits for everyone, not just children.

Kennedy’s penchant for sidestepping was on continuous display through the morning. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), asked him about a bonkers comment pertaining to Covid he uttered in 2023: “Covid-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” This remark had been widely interpreted as antisemitic and suggestive that the Covid was designed as bioweapon that would spare certain people.

Kennedy responded that he had not said “deliberately targeted”—and this silly dodge provoked laughter from the crowd. He said he had been merely referring to an NIH study. Bennet did not have the time during his five-minute allotment to look this up. But that NIH study—which Kennedy did not mention when he made those remarks in 2023—did not say this virus was designed to target certain demographic groups. It only noted that “genetic factors” might play a role in how the disease affects people.

This was classic Kennedy: Cite an informative-sounding source that does not actually say what he claims it says. In this instance, he had implied that Covid was a bioweapon, as he has said about other diseases, including Lyme disease. He had no proof for this—as with many of his conspiratorial claims—but when called out at this hearing he pointed to a study that does not confirm his outlandish allegation. Kennedy’s mastery of this methodology, when applied to issues of life-and-death, makes him a potentially dangerous appointment.

When Kennedy was asked by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the committee chair, if anything in his background “might present a conflict of interest,” he said no. That was misleading. In his financial disclosure filing, Kennedy revealed that he has earned millions of dollars by referring clients to personal injury law firms suing Merck in various courts on behalf of people who received HPV vaccines—which studies show help prevent cervical cancer. Despite his nomination, he indicated he plans to keep receiving fees from those lawsuits. That means he could receive a large sum if Merck loses the cases or settles them, a prospect that Kennedy, if confirmed, could potentially influence.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) pressed Kennedy on his financial stake in these lawsuits. Would Kennedy agree, she asked, not to pocket any money from these cases when he is secretary and for four years afterward? “There is a lot of ways that you could influence those future lawsuits and pending lawsuits,” Warren said, noting that Kennedy as HHS secretary could impact cases by publishing anti-vaccine claims in official government reports or by sharing FDA data with lawyers bringing the suits. Kennedy did not agree to eschew money from these lawsuits. Instead, he repeatedly misconstrued Warren’s request. “You are asking me not to sue vaccine companies,” Kennedy said. That was not what she was asking.

It was clear throughout the first hours of the hearing that none of Kennedy’s falsehoods and misrepresentations mattered to the Republican members of the committee. He was not meaningfully challenged by any of them. That was not surprising, for, as Kennedy displayed thoroughly, when it comes to adhering to the truth, his record on this front is similar to that of the fellow looking to hire him.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Distorts the Facts on His Infamous Samoa Visit

During his confirmation hearing on Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, glossed over key details about his involvement in the 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people, most of whom were unvaccinated children.

Under oath, Kennedy claimed that his trip to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines,” and that the purpose of his trip had been “to introduce a medical informatics system” and to “digitize records in Samoa and make health delivery much more efficient.”

In the past, Kennedy has acknowledged opposition to vaccines factored into the trip.

But that’s not exactly true. Recent reporting from NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny shows that Kennedy traveled to Samoa on behalf of the anti-vaccine nonprofit he founded, Children’s Health Defense; in the past, he has acknowledged that his opposition to vaccines factored into the trip, claiming that he’d gone because “government officials, including the Prime Minister were curious to measure health outcomes following the ‘natural experiment’ created by the respite from vaccines.”

The “respite,” as Kennedy’s put it, occurred at a moment of distrust in Samoa’s vaccine system: two children in Samoa had died in 2018 after a nurse accidentally mixed expired muscle relaxant into their shots instead of sterile water, after which the country briefly placed its vaccine program on hold. Even after it resumed, measles vaccination rates plummeted, leaving the island’s children unprotected when the outbreak began in September 2019.

It’s has long been public knowledge that Kennedy spent time in Samoa visiting two prominent anti-vaccine activists. The first was Samoan Edwin Tamasese, who was subsequently arrested during the outbreak for speaking out against the government’s vaccination campaign, and, according to the BBC, promoting fake measles cures, including papaya leaf extract and vitamin C. (The charges were dismissed in 2020.) The second was Samoan-Australian influencer Taylor Winterstein, who had planned to present a workshop about making “informed choices” on vaccines. While she was prevented from doing so by the Samoan government, she still traveled to the country and met with Kennedy. Just after the visit, she wrote on Instagram that their meeting has been “divinely timed” and that she would cherish their conversation.

Since Kennedy began his 2024 presidential run and later, as he transitioned to an effort to win the top job at HHS, he and Children’s Health Defense have tried to offer an alternate and misleading picture of his visit to Samoa.

The effort flies in the face of Kennedy’s past words. For example, in 2021, Kennedy wrote an article for Childrens’ Health Defense that called Tamasese a “medical freedom hero” and acknowledged that the anti-vaccine activist had arranged his visit to Samoa. While the article mentions the goal of introducing “a medical informatics system,” it also suggests that vaccines, not measles, were responsible for the deaths; advances the debunked link between vaccines and autism; and attacks the “Global Medical Cartel” for its support of vaccines.

In 2021, Kennedy admitted that during his visit, he’d talked “a limited amount” about vaccines to Prime Minister Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi. And after the outbreak began, he wrote a letter to the prime minister suggesting, without any evidence, that it could have been caused by a “vaccine strain” or an ineffective vaccine.

Chaos Follows Trump’s Anti-DEI and “Efficiency” Measures

This week, the FBI’s Office of Integrity and Compliance issued a memo ordering that posters mentioning diversity should be taken down. The memo, signed by Catherine Bruno, the office’s assistant director, stated that diversity had been considered one of the agency’s “core values,” along with accountability, compassion, fairness, integrity, leadership, respect, and “rigorous obedience to the Constitution.” Now, however, “consistent with recent executive orders”—meaning a ban on DEIA programs the new Trump administration announced in its first week—she wrote that such posters would have to be thrown away. 

“It’s like they are lighting the match to watch it burn.”

“In addition to disposing of the posters described above,” the memo added, “please review all materials in your offices, both in hard copy and digital format, and remove any materials that include the core value of diversity.” Bruno wrote that mentions of diversity would also have to be scrubbed from both internal and external websites, and physical materials “should be disposed of appropriately (do not keep them).” Her message, which Mother Jones has viewed, then notes that poster frames could be reused.

The memo struck some employees at the agency as a bit of black comedy, a concrete example of the bizarre situations playing out across the federal government as agencies scramble to comply with Trump’s new executive orders. Federal employees say these early executive actions purporting to root out “inefficiency” and ban diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are creating concerning, demoralizing, and just plain stupid situations at work. 

“This is all just disheartening,” one federal employee told Mother Jones. “It’s so disgusting that our bosses, Congress, hate us.” 

People working in the intelligence community have seen immediate changes to their work environment, according to two federal employees. At one intelligence agency, a support group for people with disabilities was disbanded in response to the executive order; a similar group at the same agency for employees who are disabled veterans was also scrapped.

Mother Jones asked spokespeople at the CIA and FBI about how they’re handling the executive guidance around DEIA and whether affinity groups and support systems for disabled employees had been eliminated. “We are complying with the Executive Order and Office of Personnel Management implementing guidance,” the FBI wrote. “The Office of Diversity and Inclusion has been dissolved, along with component DEIA programs.” The CIA provided a virtually identical statement: “We are complying with the EO and OPM Implementing Guidance. The Office of Diversity and Inclusion has been dissolved, along with component DEI programs.”

The General Services Administration, meanwhile, has hired Thomas Shedd, who previously worked at Tesla, to direct its division of Technology Transformation Services. A GSA employee told Mother Jones that Shedd and two men with unclear roles who appear to be recent college graduates have been conducting “code reviews,” similar to what Elon Musk did when he took over Twitter. A GSA spokesperson seemed to confirm the reviews are taking place, describing them as “customary” and “routine in the software world” after changes in leadership

According to the employee, none of the people involved have been identified during these code meetings as being part of the Department of Government Efficiency, the project Musk is leading to supposedly streamline the federal government. But Wired reported Tuesday that people now occupying senior roles at the Office of Personnel Management include a 21-year old former Palantir employee and a person who graduated high school in 2024 who “lists jobs as a camp counselor and a bicycle mechanic among his professional experiences, as well as a summer role at Neuralink,” Musk’s neurotechnology company. The OPM acknowledged a request for comment but did not provide a statement before publication.

Employees at the GSA aren’t clear about what the code reviews are meant to accomplish—only that they suspect they are designed to try to prove that the department’s current way of doing things is inefficient or inferior.

“Applying the Twitter to X model to the federal government by a bunch of tech bros risks crippling not just government activity but the public,” the GSA employee said. “If they are being this flip with our programs, it’s like they are lighting the match to watch it burn and laugh as everything becomes ash.” 

“Everything that is coming down is to punish.”

A person familiar with the United States Digital Service, a little known White House organization that has been subsumed by Musk’s DOGE project, said that employees there have all been recently interviewed and specifically asked what they think of DOGE. Rumors of pending layoffs have begun to swirl. 

The situation, one federal employee in the intelligence community said, is far worse than at any time in the first Trump administration. “It feels different,” they said. “It feels the like everything that is coming down is to punish. Like this is all about revenge.” It seems, the worker added, “like the admin is out for blood and wants to win some game in their head by making some other side lose. They don’t seem to realize that means we all lose.”

In all, Trump’s anti-DEI and pro-“efficiency” measures seem to have immediately created new layers of bureaucracy and busywork, plunged collective morale into the government-issued toilet, and left many federal employees desperate to leave. Of course that is likely a deliberate feature, not a bug, of the orders. Indeed, on Tuesday, employees at multiple agencies received an unusual email titled “Fork in the Road,” which took inspiration from a similar missive Musk engineered after taking control of Twitter. (A version was also posted on OPM’s website.)

The legally questionable emails suggested that employees should consider resigning or run the real risk of being fired in the near future. As Trump seeks a “more streamlined and flexible workforce,” the email warned, “the majority of federal agencies are likely to be downsized through restructurings, realignments, and reductions in force.”

“During the first week of his administration,” the email began, “President Trump issued a number of directives concerning the federal workforce. Among those directives, the President required that employees return to in-person work, restored accountability for employees who have policy-making authority, restored accountability for senior career executives, and reformed the federal hiring process to focus on merit. As a result of the above orders, the reform of the federal workforce will be significant.” The email even included a draft “separation plan,” referred to as a “deferred resignation letter,” and told employees they had only until February 6 to sign.

“Whichever path you choose,” it concluded, the irony hard to miss, “we thank you for your service to The United States of America.”

Update, January 29: This story has been updated with comments from the GSA and CIA, which did not respond before publication.

“Hybrid Homeschools” Are Booming, and Silicon Valley Cash Is Rolling In

In 2016, Chris Turner, a new father in Georgia, began a process familiar to many parents: He set about trying to plan his children’s education. His neighborhood schools failed to impress him; they were too rigid, with too much busy work. To his dismay, he found that despite the hefty price tags for private schools, “they didn’t feel fundamentally different than just a typical public school. Their environments were slightly better, the teachers were slightly better, maybe the curriculum was slightly better, but nothing was like fundamentally different in the way that it felt like everything else in the world was fundamentally changing.”

You could have forgiven Turner for his fixation on societal change. When he was school shopping, he was in his early 30s and getting a crash course in the world of tech startups. A few years before, he had launched a company called Tenrocket, which built apps for other startup founders. At the Atlanta co-working spaces he frequented, he met other entrepreneurs, some of whom had skipped college in order to get started making things in the real world. Their industriousness impressed him.

Turner recalls becoming “obsessed with that problem” of educating kids to function in a new world, which led to his next startup project: a new kind of classroom experience. In his vision, children as young as 5 could learn through activities like, he told me, “starting businesses and hosting podcasts and building rockets and going to Costa Rica on a study abroad trip.” In 2018, Turner quit his startup job and spent the next two years planning and fundraising to make this notional school a reality: In 2020, he launched a learning space, called Moonrise, on a bustling corner of the affluent and progressive Atlanta-adjacent city of Decatur, Georgia.

Moonrise has no curriculum or teachers. Instead, adult “guides”—often college students, parents, or retirees—preside over activities like knitting lessons, excursions with virtual reality headsets, or a Minecraft club. If the day’s activities don’t appeal, students are free to do, well, whatever they want. They can play cards with a friend all day, read a book, or, as several students were doing on the day I visited, curl up in a pillow fort with an iPad. The staff doesn’t track academic outcomes, because that’s not their domain: Moonrise is a “learning center,” not a school, so it is not subject to state curriculum and testing requirements. That’s the parents’ responsibility. (Sort of: According to the homeschool accountability group Coalition for Responsible Home Education, just two states, New York and Hawaii, enforce state requirements about documenting students’ academic progress.)

Moonrise is what’s known as a hybrid homeschool, an educational model that offers homeschool families a place for children to learn outside the home a few days a week. Though part-time tiny schools for homeschoolers have existed for decades, their popularity skyrocketed during the pandemic, when some families found that they liked that style of education and never went back to traditional schools. Since 2019, the number of Americans who homeschool has doubled to about 6 percent of US students or about 2.9 million school-aged children. When Moonrise launched at the beginning of the pandemic, just a handful of families were enrolled; today it serves 150.

Turner expects that number to grow in 2025 because, in January, Georgia became one of the 33 states to offer a private school voucher program, which allows families to use funds designated for public education toward private school tuition. Each state’s program works differently; the one in Georgia offers $6,500 to families whose local public school’s test scores rank in the bottom 25 percent of schools in the state. That amount would hardly make a dent in the tuition bills for local elite private schools, some of which charge upward of $38,000 annually. But Moonrise’s unlimited plan, which offers homeschool families up to 12 hours a week in the space, costs just under $6,000 a year, and families can add extra time at the rate of $20 an hour. Georgia’s new voucher program is expected to yield 20,000 more homeschoolers in the state—marking a potentially very significant customer base expansion for Turner.

In states with older private school vouchers, programs similar to Moonrise are already proliferating: A company called Primer runs a network of hybrid homeschools in Florida, Alabama, and Arizona, each of which offers a robust voucher program. Another chain, Prenda, with 1,000 locations across the country, recommends that prospective families take advantage of “generous and flexible” voucher programs in states where they’re available.

In part because the expansion of vouchers and other school choice programs is expected to continue under President Trump, hybrid schools like Moonrise have proven attractive to Silicon Valley investors aiming to “disrupt” the educational system. From the funding he’s now receiving from a Peter Thiel–backed venture firm to the political climate, Turner sees signs all around him that hybrid homeschools like Moonrise are poised to grow in popularity. “So everything that we’re doing,” he said, “is setting up for the ability for us to meet that demand.”

On a recent Wednesday morning, I drove to Moonrise and parked out front next to an SUV with a bumper sticker that read “A SMALL LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE TOOK MY MONEY.” Once inside, I took in the sunlit, loft-like space, which previously housed a gifts and home furnishings store. Moonrise, I discovered, really does feel less like a classroom and more like a coworking space for kids, with pieces of mid-century modern furniture for lounging and blonde wood tables for projects. My tour guide was a manager named Nicole, a former Waldorf teacher who told me she hopes to gain experience at Moonrise so that she can eventually open her own school and eco-village. “I don’t like the school system—I think it’s broken,” she told me as we breezed by the Moonrise podcast studio. “We offer things kids actually want to learn, but it’s not so rigid.”

When I first arrived at around 10 a.m., there were only three “Risers” present: a 6-year-old zooming around the room on her pink and purple roller skates and two more kids relaxing in a fort made of cushions and blankets. A nature show about elephants was playing on the screen above the well-appointed tank of the Moonrise mascot, Mochi, a stately axolotl—a kind of salamander in case you didn’t know. After a few minutes, a Cybertruck pulled up outside, and a dad dropped off two school-aged boys who enthused about their adventures during a recent snow day; a few minutes later, two more kids showed up.

When I called Turner a few hours after my visit, he was eager to share his insights, especially about what he saw as a lag between the educational system and the technology sector. “It seems like everything in the world of tech especially is accelerating at this massive pace,” he told me. “But kids are still sitting in front of teachers, sitting in rows of desks, listening to lectures, and focusing on academics. But everything else is moving to, like, flexibility, creativity, and value creation, not just based on degrees.”   

“Kids are still sitting in front of teachers, sitting in rows of desks, listening to lectures, and focusing on academics. But everything else is moving to, like, flexibility, creativity, and value creation, not just based on degrees.”   

On the phone, Turner’s tone was affable and measured. But like many people, he’s a more firebrand version of himself on social media, cheerfully engaging in the culture wars, bragging about having refused to wear a mask at airports in 2020, and quoting rightwing provocateur James Lindsay’s statement that “Woke is Marxism evolved to take on the West,” which he described in a 2023 post as “*by far* the best theory of woke ideology I’ve encountered. At times I was almost moved to tears by its explanatory power.” (When I asked Turner about the post he told me that it was something of a one-off and that he’s no James Lindsay superfan.) A policy wish list Turner posted in August included “defend the west,” “let kids work,” and “deregulate founders.”

On X, Turner regularly praises Silicon Valley celebrities who, he told me, he believes get a bad rap because people get caught up in their politics rather than focusing on what they’ve accomplished. Last August he called Elon Musk “a once-in-a-generation engineer with the design and product standards of Steve Jobs and the work ethic of Henry Ford.” He mused last May on X, “Can you imagine what the last decade would have been like without Elon Musk? Dude is like Batman for western values.” By western values, Turner later told me, he meant “things like liberty, democracy, capitalism, scientific and technological progress, and defense against anything aiming to tear down these values.”

Thiel is another favorite—Turner told me unsurprisingly—given that some of the PayPal founder’s thoughts about education align with Turner’s. Thiel runs a fellowship for entrepreneurs who have foregone a college degree to instead launch a company, and his Founders Fund was one of the venture firms that raised $18.7 million in funding for the hybrid homeschool chain Primer. “Whenever I get concerned about the future of this great country, I remember that Peter Thiel is an American and instantly feel better,” Turner posted in 2021.

That post proved prophetic for Turner’s own business. In 2023, Moonrise was chosen to be part of an accelerator run by a Bay Area investment firm called 1517, which is also funded in part by Thiel. The founder of 1517, Michael Gibson, previously helped Thiel launch his fellowship for college dropouts and is the author of the 2022 book Paper Belt on Fire: How Renegade Investors Sparked a Revolt Against the University. In it, he makes the argument that instead of canceling student debt, the government should defund student loan programs. When I asked Gibson why he decided to fund Moonrise, he responded that it was because Turner “knows that if he doesn’t bring a Moonrise to every town, then our current sad failure of an education system will own the next generation like a gulag warden,” he wrote in an email. “That will be bad for these children, bad for America, and bad for the human race.”

As part of the 1517 accelerator program, Moonrise received $500,000 in seed funding. That windfall has allowed Turner to think much bigger: He plans to launch four locations next year and double the number of locations every year after that, with a goal of 100 locations nationwide by 2030. It’s an ambitious plan, but in addition to his Silicon Valley funding, Turner believes the political winds are at his back. “The Trump administration is more pro-school choice, so we just expect that to increase demand for options like Moonrise,” he told me. Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick for secretary of education, has supported programs that divert public school money toward charter schools and vouchers. America First Policy Institute, the right-wing advocacy group she helms, says it lobbies for school choice so that “every family has the funds to send their children to the school that fits their needs.” Like President Trump, Turner believes that the federal Department of Education is a “failure,” and that it should be dismantled so states would have more control over their education systems. Eliminating the DOE as Trump has suggested, he says, “will allow the expansion of school choice, and it will reduce the national debt.”

One major critique of private school voucher programs is their propensity to shunt taxpayer money to religious institutions. Studies of private school voucher programs have found that about 90 percent of the money they provide is used to pay for tuition at religious private schools.

“The modern version of the indulgence is a piece of paper many believe will save you from Hell. Only they call it a college diploma and they charge $200k. Well, that was bullshit in 1517 and it’s bullshit now.”

Turner said Moonrise has no faith affiliation, though many of its member families are Christian. Some of 1517 Fund’s staffers are vocal about their Christian faith on X, though in an email to me, Gibson, the 1517 co-founder, called himself a “pagan heretic” and said the firm’s name—which comes from the year of the Protestant Reformation—was meant as a nod to the practice of papal indulgences that the movement sought to end. “The modern version of the indulgence is a piece of paper many believe will save you from Hell,” he wrote. “Only they call it a college diploma and they charge $200k. Well, that was bullshit in 1517 and it’s bullshit now.”

Yet Gibson has also posted occasionally on X about what he sees as the dangers of an overly secular society. “You know you’re talking to the atheist Church of No Christ when: (1) they substitute ‘humanity’ for soul e.g. ‘this person’s humanity is as vital and precious as our own’ (2) instead of God, they say ‘the arc of justice’ or ‘the right side of history,’” he wrote in 2022. When I asked him what he meant, he replied that he had intended the post as “a commentary on how leftism is a warped version of Christianity without Christ. That is to say, the moral intuitions of the left are the vestiges of Christian intuitions at work after the death of God.”

Other growing hybrid homeschool chains have funding from groups that are more explicitly religious. Primer secured a funding round from New Founding, a venture capitalist firm that says it aims “to shape institutions with Christian norms.” The conservative political activism group Turning Point USA runs a national network of 41 Christian hybrid homeschools.

Hybrid homeschools aren’t regulated, so it’s impossible to say how many of them have religious underpinnings. That ambiguity is concerning to Rachel Laser, president of the nonprofit group Americans United for Separation of Church and State. She worries that many of the schools that vouchers fund could “indoctrinate students in one particular faith and discriminate against students, families, and staff who don’t share the school’s beliefs.”

What’s more, says Laser, voucher programs don’t always deliver the results they promise. In Arizona, where private school vouchers are available to any families that want them, the program cost the state 1,000 percent of the initial estimate. It also served five times more affluent than low-income families—the opposite of its initial intent. In Arkansas’ program, which was designed to offer alternatives to students in the lowest-ranking public schools, just 2 percent of participants come from schools ranked “D” or “F.” Vulnerable students, says Laser, “aren’t the ones who primarily benefit from universal private school voucher programs.”

As for the future, Turner hesitated to share details about where the next Moonrise locations will open, but the employee who showed me around told me that Turner had been eyeing Florida because of its robust voucher program. Turner said he is also courting more Silicon Valley investors, though he declined to say which ones. In the next year, he plans to restructure Moonrise’s pricing plans to allow for greater flexibility. The question now, he said, “is not whether or not people want to use it, it’s how much they’re going to use it.”

In the meantime, at the Georgia Moonrise space, it’s business as usual. A recent list of activities included weightlifting, making ice cream, learning about startup founder careers, a NASA Spacecraft STEM Challenge, and debate club. (The topic: “Is College Worth It?”) On X in October, Turner likened his founding of Moonrise to the history of the United States. “We first rejected monarchy (school), then we invented democracy (co-learning), and now we’re in the ‘democracy has to function’ phase,” he wrote. “The next phase is to build a strong culture of excellence, most likely through our equivalent of capitalism.”

Trump Tells DOJ to Prosecute Teachers Who “Unlawfully” Support Trans or Nonbinary Students

During his campaign, President Donald Trump frequently repeated the inflammatory and outrageous lie that, without parents’ knowledge, schools are sending children for gender-affirming surgeries.

During a campaign stop filmed by Fox News at a Bronx, New York, barbershop, Trump answered a voter’s question about failing school systems by saying, “No transgender, no operations—you know, they take your kid—there are some places, your boy leaves for school, comes back a girl. Okay? Without parental consent.” He added, “At first, when I was told that was actually happening, I said, you know, it’s an exaggeration. No: it happens. It happens. There are areas where it happens.”

Obviously, this is untrue, but now, he’s trying to solve the problem he invented as part of his anti-trans campaign strategy—by going much, much further than the earlier lies, and threatening to prosecute teachers who take steps to acknowledge or support the identities of trans or nonbinary students.

In the executive order issued Wednesday evening, titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 schooling,” Trump directs the attorney general to work with local and state officials to investigate teachers who “unlawfully facilitat[e] the social transition of a minor student.” The order defines “social transitioning” to include using a trans student’s name and pronouns, recognizing a student as nonbinary, or allowing them to use the restroom that aligns with their gender identity.

The same section of the order suggests that K-12 teachers and school officials who take action to support trans students’ identities be prosecuted under laws banning sexual exploitation of minors and practicing medicine without a license. There are 3.8 million public school teachers in the United States, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

The threats don’t stop there. Federal funding for schools and programs that teach lessons about gender or race is also in jeopardy. Trump’s order instructs the Departments of Education, Defense, Health and Human Services, and Justice to come up with an “Ending Indoctrination Strategy” within the next 90 days, identifying federal funding streams that “directly or indirectly support or subsidize the instruction, advancement, or promotion of gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology” in classrooms and teacher training.

But what does “discriminatory equity ideology” actually mean? The order defines it as “ideology that treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups, rather than as individuals, and minimizes agency, merit, and capability in favor of immoral generalizations.” In context, this seems to be Trump’s new phrase for what conservative activists used to call “critical race theory”—a term that itself mischaracterizes academic concepts around systemic and institutional racism as being anti-white.

The order is a transparent attempt to inject schools with whitewashed American history. It directs federal agencies to promote “patriotic education,” which it defines as teaching an “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding.” To achieve that goal, it reestablishes the 1776 Commission, which Trump created during his first term to cultivate “patriotic citizens ready for the workforce, not political activists.” The original 1776 Commission’s report on US history identifies progressivism as one of the foremost threats to American principles and derides social justice policies as antithetical to the “color-blind civil rights” movement.

Wednesday’s order is the latest in a string of executive actions targeting diversity initiatives and trans rights that Trump has signed since taking office just over a week ago. These orders include redefining sex, banning trans people from the military, curtailing access to gender-affirming care for people under the age of 19, and ending DEI initiatives in the federal workforce.

Trump provided the blueprint in his first term to target antiracism and LGBTQ inclusion. His 2020 executive order to abolish DEI initiatives from the federal government armed conservative organizations and politicians with the language to target government entities, particularly schools, at the local and state levels. While former President Joe Biden quickly undid that order, it became the catalyst for the introduction of nearly 900 similar anti-DEI policies across the United States.

RFK Jr. Signals He’ll Give the Anti-Abortion Movement Exactly What They Want

Last Friday, my colleague Julianne McShane and I broke the news of a pair of letters sent by 30 prominent anti-abortion movement leaders to the heads of the Departments of Health and Human Services and Justice, asking them to use the powers of their agencies to attack abortion pills.

During his contentious confirmation hearing as President Donald Trump’s nominee for HHS secretary today, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. signaled that he’d do exactly that. Under questioning from senators, Kennedy said that he would instruct the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration to study the safety of mifepristone—a medication that has been FDA-approved to end pregnancies for 25 years, with vast amounts of research supporting its safety and effectiveness.

“President Trump has made it clear to me that one of the things he is not taking a position [on] yet [is] mifepristone,” Kennedy said. “But he’s made it clear to me that he wants me to look at the safety issues. And I’ll ask NIH, FDA to do that.”

RFK Jr. says he will instruct the NIH and FDA to review the safety of the abortion drug mifepristone.

Nikki McCann Ramírez (@nikkimcr.bsky.social) 2025-01-29T16:17:21.585Z

The “safety concerns” that anti-abortion activists like to raise about mifepristone are a thin pretext for their ideological efforts to end all abortions, everywhere. It’s efficient for them to attack medication abortion because it accounts for nearly two-thirds of all US abortions, according to the most recent research. Last year, I reported on a lawsuit by anti-abortion doctors attacking mifepristone’s FDA approval:

From the beginning, the anti-abortion doctors’ arguments have been cloaked in such faux concerns about mifepristone’s safety. In their original complaint, the doctors argued that the FDA hadn’t had enough evidence to approve the drug or loosen regulations on it, and they cited flimsy research to suggest mifepristone was harmful. Those claims have been roundly debunked by mainstream medical associations, which explain that mifepristone is backed by decades of data. Even before it came to the United States, the drug was used for years for abortions in Europe; since its approval here in 2000, around 6 million people in the US have taken it. As the New York Times reports, more than 100 scientific studies have concluded that mifepristone is a safe way to end a pregnancy.

Meanwhile. it turns out that some of the studies cited by the doctors weren’t scientific at all. One, relied on in Kacsmaryk’s decision, was based on anonymous blog posts from a site called “Abortion Changes You.” Last month, a journal retracted three other papers cited by ADF in the case, explaining that an independent review had found “fundamental problems,” “incorrect factual assumptions,” “material errors,” and “misleading presentations.” Sage, the studies’ publisher, reported that nearly all their authors had affiliations with anti-abortion advocacy groups yet had not disclosed any conflicts of interest.

Of course, the real reason mifepristone is a target isn’t a result of science, but rather simple math: Medication abortions are immensely popular, accounting for nearly two-thirds of all abortions across the country. Thanks to recently enacted “shield laws” in a handful of states, including California and Massachusetts, providers there can now prescribe the pills to patients in states with abortion bans.

As McShane has noted, abortion rights could be undermined by Trump appointees throughout a number of government agencies. HHS, with its 80,000 people and responsibility to oversee the FDA, the NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health, among other offices could potentially wield enormous power over reproductive health care. But, she explains, Kennedy’s position on the issue until now has been ambiguous:

Like Trump, Kennedy has been inconsistent on his abortion stances. In 2023, for example, he said he backed a 15-week national abortion ban before subsequently walking that back. His campaign told the Washington Post in November 2023 that he supported codifying Roe v. Wade and maintaining the FDA’s approval of mifepristone—but these were positions he held before Trump named him as his HHS nominee. Since then, abortion opponents have reportedly asked that Kennedy appoint a high-ranking anti-abortion stalwart to HHS and publicly commit during his confirmation hearings to restoring anti-abortion policies within HHS from Trump’s first administration, such as preventing abortion pills from being mailed or distributed at pharmacies and rescinding a Biden-era rule that stipulated HIPAA privacy protections should apply to abortions. (In December, anti-abortion Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) claimed in a post on X that during a private meeting with him, RFK Jr. had committed to those measures and others.) Project 2025 also makes a litany of anti-abortion recommendations for the HHS secretary, including issuing guidance that states can defund Planned Parenthood in their state Medicaid plans.

That ambiguity appears to have been resolved today.

Fear Is the Goal

Trump’s first week back in office delivered what he does best: dystopian showmanship.

Photos of deportation flights released with glee; shots of the military deployed to the border to handle an “invasion” at its lowest levels in years. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) publishing on social media numbers of arrests and deportations (not that much greater than under the previous administration) like a scorecard. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem with a glamour shot in the New York Post doing a ride-along raid in New York City. Federal agents working with ICE on operations reportedly being told to be “camera ready” and wear tactical gear identifying their agency for the media. Trump talking about a migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay.

This blitz is more than just an indication of a real crackdown. It is the point in and of itself. The horrific spectacle of Trump’s mass deportation chimera produces one of the key goals: widespread terror.

Maybe the endgame is the elusive right-wing dream of “self-deportation.” Maybe it just gives the impression of “promise made, promise kept.” Either way, the administration will cheer the deportation machine the United States has long relied on as if Trump was the first to make use of it.

But the objective was accomplished. It caused fear. Reports of ICE activity in Chicago—and elsewhere—promptly created anxiety among immigrant communities.

Consider how on January 24, the White House account on X shared a photo of immigrants being loaded onto a cargo plane. “Deportation flights have begun,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt declared. “President Trump is sending a strong and clear message to the entire world: if you illegally enter the United States of America, you will face severe consequences.”

“This desire to popularize fear is unconscionable and abhorrent.”

Immigration experts and observers were quick to point out that deportation flights never stopped during the Biden administration. The novelty, American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick noted, was the “PR” element of using a military aircraft. “This is utter propaganda,” he wrote, “and you have to make sure not to fall for it.” Tom Cartwright, an immigration activist who monitors ICE deportation flights, called it a “theater of the absurd.”

The shock and awe, as Lauren Carasik, a clinical professor of law and director of the Global Justice Clinic at Western New England University, writes in the Boston Review is meant to “ratchet up anxiety and overwhelm and disempower not only immigrants but the rights groups and even the faith-based and health care institutions that seek to protect them.”

In short: Fear is the goal.

The effect looks like immigrant families keeping children at home instead of sending them to school. From Colorado to Virginia, superintendents and principals have had to release statements and social media messages to reassure immigrant families.

“We’re already hearing stories of parents keeping their children home from school and families avoiding church services,” Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of the pro-immigration reform America’s Voice, said in an email statement, “and we’re hearing the worries of leaders from essential industries, concerned about what the loss of workers in agriculture, construction, and health care will do to their workforce and our broader economy.”

To get the message across, the administration even had help from a TV personality. On Sunday, Phil McGraw, known as talk show host Dr. Phil, embedded with Trump’s faithful border czar Tom Homan, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and other federal agents during operations in Chicago. “It’s a pretty high risk mission that we’re going on,” McGraw says in a video for his MeritTV network. “This truly is a targeted ICE mission because they’re not sweeping neighborhoods like people are trying to imply.” (That day, ICE arrested 1,179 people nationwide, according to NBC News, almost half of whom were deemed “criminal arrests.”)

In another excerpt, McGraw can be seen grilling a man over whether he had been charged with sex crimes or been deported before. Afterward, he went on television to parrot Homan’s talking points, including that ICE’s raids are focused on public safety threats and sanctuary cities are to blame for broader enforcement operations. “Tom Homan’s intention is, if you’re in the country illegally,” he said, “you need to self-deport because if they catch you in the country illegally, you could be barred from coming back into the country before a number of years.”

Back in December, McGraw reportedly brokered a friendly meeting between Homan and New York City Mayor Eric Adams, after which, according to Gothamist, the Democrat said he would alter sanctuary city laws to give local authorities more latitude to cooperate with the federal government on immigration enforcement.

Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin called McGraw an “accomplice” and said having the TV host tag along with ICE “is dangerous and makes no sense.”

But the objective was accomplished. It caused fear. Reports of ICE activity in Chicago—and elsewhere—promptly created anxiety among immigrant communities. Advocates told Politico residents had been calling since the early morning to share what they thought were sightings of immigration officials in their neighborhoods.

“This desire to popularize fear is unconscionable and abhorrent,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said during a press briefing on Tuesday. Referencing McGraw’s stunt, he added: “We’re not entertained.”

This happened days after the Trump administration rescinded guidance that previously limited ICE activity in or near so-called “sensitive” locations, such as hospitals, places of worship, and schools. Officials at a Chicago elementary school even mistakenly reported the presence of ICE officers, before it was clarified that they were actually US Secret Service agents investigating a threat against an unnamed government official.

Trump and his aides will, no doubt, continue to try to ramp up and advertise arrests and deportations to quickly match the vision they sold of the largest deportation operation in US history. But they’re fully aware of the constraints to accomplish even one million deportations a year, including funding, detention space, personnel, and the finite universe of immigrants with serious criminal records to target.

Knowing they can’t easily deliver on mass deportation, Trump will want to make the public believe—especially those who could be potentially impacted—as if they can remove anyone and everyone. That terror will have real consequences.

Trump Picks Torture Memo Author for Deputy Transportation Secretary

Two decades ago, while serving in President George W. Bush’s Justice Department, Steven Bradbury wrote a series of memos justifying waterboarding that former Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called “permission slips for torture.”

Now, Bradbury is Donald Trump’s nominee for Deputy Transportation Secretary.

When it comes to writing about why the United States can torture, Bradbury is less well-known than his former Justice Department colleague John Yoo. Still, he played a key role. Bradbury wrote three top-secret legal memos in 2005 that were essential to providing the Central Intelligence Agency with legal cover for subjecting detainees to “enhanced interrogation techniques” including waterboarding. In the public version of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2014 “torture report,” Bradbury’s name and memos appear 178 times.

In 2017, Trump picked Bradbury to be general counsel at the Transportation Department. After Trump left office, Bradbury served as a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and played a key role in shaping the section of Project 2025 that covers the Department of Transportation. The president is now giving him a promotion. (The White House and Bradbury did not respond to requests for comment.)

Bradbury was confirmed in 2017 over the vehement objections of McCain, who was infamously tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. The late Arizona senator argued about Bradbury’s legal opinions in a passionate floor speech in which he made that clear that the memos “provided a legal framework for the use of methods including waterboarding, which is a mock execution and an exquisite form of torture in which the victim suffers the terrible sensation of drowning.”

“We are speaking of an interrogation technique that dates from the Spanish Inquisition and has been a prosecutable offense for over a century,” McCain continued. “It is among the crimes for which Japanese war criminals were tried and hanged following World War II and was employed by the infamous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.” McCain stressed that “a more meticulous justification for torture is still a justification for torture—and arguably a more pernicious one.”

Bradbury included an often sickening level of detail to support his conclusions in the memos, one of which ran 46 pages. It sanctioned thirteen interrogation techniques including “Dietary manipulation,” “Nudity,” “Cramped confinement,” “Stress positions, “Sleep deprivation (more than 48 hours,)” and “Waterboard.” There is also a paragraph largely devoted to justifying the CIA’s decision to force detainees to wear only an adult diaper: 

If the detainee is clothed, he wears an adult diaper under his pants. Detainees subject to sleep deprivation who are also subject to nudity as a separate interrogation technique will at times be nude and wearing a diaper. If the detainee is wearing a diaper, it is checked regularly and changed as necessary. The use of the diaper is for sanitary and health purposes of the detainee; it is not used for the purpose of humiliating the detainee, and it is not considered to be an interrogation technique.

CIA records tell another story. They make clear that a central “purpose” of the diapers was to “cause humiliation” and to “induce a sense of helplessness,” according to the Senate torture report.

Bradbury also signed off on the CIA’s policy of forcing detainees to remain awake for potentially more than one week at a time. He concluded that forcing detainees to appear naked before male and female interrogators was acceptable partly because “it is very unlikely that nudity would be employed at ambient temperatures below 75°F.” Bradbury wrote that giving detainees only “bland, unappetizing, but nutritionally complete” foods was permissible partly because detainees were weighed weekly to ensure they were not losing too much weight. The amount of time detainees could be doused with 41-degree water—an excruciatingly low temperature—was calculated down to the minute following a review of the medical literature on hypothermia. About waterboarding, Bradbury’s memo explained:

We understand that the effect of the waterboard is to induce a sensation of drowning. This sensation is based on a deeply rooted physiological response. Thus, the detainee experiences this sensation even if he is aware that he is not actually drowning. We are informed that based on extensive experience, the process is not physically painful, but that it usually does cause fear and panic. 

In blending a desire for order and cleanliness with a willingness to sanction almost unspeakable acts, Bradbury evoked some of the most shameful chapters of modern history. As Marguerite Feitlowitz writes about Argentina’s Dirty War in her book A Lexicon of Terror, “Language helps to ritualize torture; it lends structure, provides a ‘reason,’ an ‘explanation,’ an ‘objective.'” She continues, “Moreover, the special idiom provided categories for practices otherwise out of bounds. It was enabling.”

In another memo, Bradbury took on a different legal question: If the 13 interrogation techniques did not count as torture when used on their own, did it constitute torture when they were used in combination? No, Bradbury concluded. It did not.

Bradbury went on in the memo to write about using “nudity, sleep deprivation (with shackling and, at least at times, with use of a diaper), and dietary manipulation” to bring detainees to “‘a baseline dependent state.’” He frequently refers to his other writing in italicized shorthand: “As we discussed in Techniques…In Techniques, we recognized…In Techniques, we explained.”

He was using the royal we. Only Bradbury’s signature appears at the bottom of both memos.

McCain made his repulsion clear in his 2017 Senate speech. “The memos that bear his name made it possible for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—a monster and a murderer, to be sure, but a detainee held in US custody under the laws of armed conflict—to be water-boarded 183 times,” the senator said. “This technique was used so gratuitously that even those applying it eventually came to believe that there was no reason to continue. They were ordered to do so anyway.” 

He continued: “The memos that bear Mr. Bradbury’s name also made it possible for a Libyan detainee and his wife to be rendered to a foreign country, where that woman was bound and gagged while several months pregnant, and photographed naked as several American intelligence officers watched…I am told that picture still exists, somewhere in the archives that record this shameful period in our history.”

RFK Jr. Just Lied to Senators About His Views on Antidepressants and Addiction

A few hours into his confirmation hearings on Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, had a tense exchange with Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN). The subject was Kennedy’s misleading claims that antidepressants caused teenagers to commit school shootings. As Smith pointed out, reams of evidence dispute that claim.

Yet Kennedy persisted in his crusade against SSRIs. “Listen, I know people, including members of my family, who’ve had a much worse time getting off of SSRIs than they did than people have getting off heroin,” he told Smith. (Kennedy himself was once addicted to heroin.)

When Smith brought up Kennedy’s controversial plan to treat SSRI “addicts” at government-sponsored wellness farms, he attempted to distance himself from that idea. “You described Americans who take mental health medications as addicts who need to be sent to wellness farms to recover,” Smith said. “Is that what you believe?” Kennedy promptly denied ever having said “that antidepressants are like addicts.”

But as I reported in July, he actually did lump users of SSRIs and ADHD medications together with people who are dependent on opioids and benzodiazepenes, referring to that broad group as “addicts.” On an episode that month of the Latino Capitalist podcast that was billed as a “Latino Town Hall,” Kennedy unveiled his plan to overhaul addiction treatment programs. He described opioid, antidepressant, and ADHD “addicts” receiving treatment on tech-free “wellness farms,” where they would spend as much as three or four years growing organic produce.

The farms would be funded, he said, with money generated through a sales tax on cannabis products. (As of now, cannabis is still illegal at the federal level; sales taxes are state and local.) “I’m going to dedicate that revenue to creating wellness farms—drug rehabilitation farms, in rural areas all over this country,” Kennedy said. “I’m going to make it so people can go, if you’re convicted of a drug offense, or if you have a drug problem, you can go to one of these places for free.”

More on Kennedy’s wellness farms plan here:

SCOOP: RFK Jr. suggests creating "wellness farms" to "reparent" those struggling with addiction by growing organic food and taking away screens.

But it's not just addiction. He says it'll also be a place for people with ADHD and depression to get off SSRIs and antidepressants. pic.twitter.com/3oUmznEGwP

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) July 24, 2024

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Distorts the Facts on His Infamous Samoa Visit

During his confirmation hearing on Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, glossed over key details about his involvement in the 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people, most of whom were unvaccinated children.

Under oath, Kennedy claimed that his trip to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines,” and that the purpose of his trip had been “to introduce a medical informatics system” and to “digitize records in Samoa and make health delivery much more efficient.”

In the past, Kennedy has acknowledged opposition to vaccines factored into the trip.

But that’s not exactly true. Recent reporting from NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny shows that Kennedy traveled to Samoa on behalf of the anti-vaccine nonprofit he founded, Children’s Health Defense; in the past, he has acknowledged that his opposition to vaccines factored into the trip, claiming that he’d gone because “government officials, including the Prime Minister were curious to measure health outcomes following the ‘natural experiment’ created by the respite from vaccines.”

The “respite,” as Kennedy’s put it, occurred at a moment of distrust in Samoa’s vaccine system: two children in Samoa had died in 2018 after a nurse accidentally mixed expired muscle relaxant into their shots instead of sterile water, after which the country briefly placed its vaccine program on hold. Even after it resumed, measles vaccination rates plummeted, leaving the island’s children unprotected when the outbreak began in September 2019.

It’s long been public knowledge that Kennedy spent time in Samoa visiting two prominent anti-vaccine activists. The first was Samoan Edwin Tamasese, who was subsequently arrested during the outbreak for speaking out against the government’s vaccination campaign, and, according to the BBC, promoting fake measles cures, including papaya leaf extract and vitamin C. (The charges were dismissed in 2020.) The second was Samoan-Australian influencer Taylor Winterstein, who had planned to present a workshop about making “informed choices” on vaccines. While she was prevented from doing so by the Samoan government, she still traveled to the country and met with Kennedy. Just after the visit, she wrote on Instagram that their meeting has been “divinely timed” and that she would cherish their conversation.

Since Kennedy began his 2024 presidential run and later, as he transitioned to an effort to win the top job at HHS, he and Children’s Health Defense have tried to offer an alternate and misleading picture of his visit to Samoa.

The effort flies in the face of Kennedy’s past words. For example, in 2021, Kennedy wrote an article for Childrens’ Health Defense that called Tamasese a “medical freedom hero” and acknowledged that the anti-vaccine activist had arranged his visit to Samoa. While the article mentions the goal of introducing “a medical informatics system,” it also suggests that vaccines, not measles, were responsible for the deaths; advances the debunked link between vaccines and autism; and attacks the “Global Medical Cartel” for its support of vaccines.

In 2021, Kennedy admitted that during his visit, he’d talked “a limited amount” about vaccines to Prime Minister Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi. And after the outbreak began, he wrote a letter to the prime minister suggesting, without any evidence, that it could have been caused by a “vaccine strain” or an ineffective vaccine.

It Took RFK Jr. Just Six Minutes to Lie to Congress

Six minutes into his opening statement at his confirmation hearing Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lied. President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services brazenly repeated a statement that has been cited as false multiple times.

“News reports claim I am anti-vaccine…I am not,” he said in his opening statement to the Senate Finance Committee.

At that, a protester in the audience, shouted, “You lie.” She was removed from the hearing room by Capitol Hill police.

The protester was right. In July 2023, Kennedy told a podcaster, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” That same month, during an interview on Fox News with Jesse Watters, Kennedy said, “I do believe that autism comes from vaccines.” That notion has long been scientifically debunked. In 2021, he told a podcaster that people should “resist” guidelines from the Centers for Disease and Control on vaccines. He added, “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated.” And the non-profit that he led promoted an anti-vaccine campaign with the slogan, “IF YOU’RE NOT AN ANTI-VAXXER YOU AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION.”

And then there are all the anti-vax books he has written that certainly convey the impression that vaccines are dangerous.

Yet at the hearing, Kennedy tried to run from his past. He claimed that when it comes to vaccines he was merely “pro-safety” and only has asked “uncomfortable questions.” He said that vaccines play a “critical role in health care” and noted that “all my kids are vaccinated.”

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, was determined not to let Kennedy slip by with his Big Lie about vaccines. He cited several of Kennedy’s past remarks. Referring to Kennedy’s comment that his kids were vaccinated, Wyden noted that during a 2020 podcast interview, Kennedy said he “would do anything, pay anything, to go back in time and not vaccinate” his kids.

Kennedy tried to weasel his way out, claiming that no vaccine is safe and effective “for everyone.” But that’s obvious, given that all vaccines can have adverse reactions. He did not bother to counter the other comments that Wyden referenced. He also dodged questions about the assertion in a 2021 book he wrote that parents have been misled to believe measles is a deadly disease and that the measles vaccine is safe and necessary. When Wyden asked whether measles is deadly, Kennedy refused to provide a yes or no answer. But he told the committee that he supports the measles and polio vaccines. Wyden scoffed at this remark.

Kennedy had to call on his powers of slipperiness to duck tough questions. Asked about the petition he filed in May 2021 with the Food and Drug Administration to rescind the authorization for the Covid vaccine and to block future access to it, he said he had only been focused on the use of vaccines for six-year-old children. That was highly misleading. Kennedy’s request to the FDA claimed the vaccine’s costs outweighed the benefits for everyone, not just children.

Kennedy’s penchant for sidestepping was on continuous display through the morning. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), asked him about a bonkers comment pertaining to Covid he uttered in 2023: “Covid-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” This remark had been widely interpreted as antisemitic and suggestive that the Covid was designed as bioweapon that would spare certain people.

Kennedy responded that he had not said “deliberately targeted”—and this silly dodge provoked laughter from the crowd. He said he had been merely referring to an NIH study. Bennet did not have the time during his five-minute allotment to look this up. But that NIH study—which Kennedy did not mention when he made those remarks in 2023—did not say this virus was designed to target certain demographic groups. It only noted that “genetic factors” might play a role in how the disease affects people.

This was classic Kennedy: Cite an informative-sounding source that does not actually say what he claims it says. In this instance, he had implied that Covid was a bioweapon, as he has said about other diseases, including Lyme disease. He had no proof for this—as with many of his conspiratorial claims—but when called out at this hearing he pointed to a study that does not confirm his outlandish allegation. Kennedy’s mastery of this methodology, when applied to issues of life-and-death, makes him a potentially dangerous appointment.

When Kennedy was asked by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), the committee chair, if anything in his background “might present a conflict of interest,” he said no. That was misleading. In his financial disclosure filing, Kennedy revealed that he has earned millions of dollars by referring clients to personal injury law firms suing Merck in various courts on behalf of people who received HPV vaccines—which studies show help prevent cervical cancer. Despite his nomination, he indicated he plans to keep receiving fees from those lawsuits. That means he could receive a large sum if Merck loses the cases or settles them, a prospect that Kennedy, if confirmed, could potentially influence.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) pressed Kennedy on his financial stake in these lawsuits. Would Kennedy agree, she asked, not to pocket any money from these cases when he is secretary and for four years afterward? “There is a lot of ways that you could influence those future lawsuits and pending lawsuits,” Warren said, noting that Kennedy as HHS secretary could impact cases by publishing anti-vaccine claims in official government reports or by sharing FDA data with lawyers bringing the suits. Kennedy did not agree to eschew money from these lawsuits. Instead, he repeatedly misconstrued Warren’s request. “You are asking me not to sue vaccine companies,” Kennedy said. That was not what she was asking.

It was clear throughout the first hours of the hearing that none of Kennedy’s falsehoods and misrepresentations mattered to the Republican members of the committee. He was not meaningfully challenged by any of them. That was not surprising, for, as Kennedy displayed thoroughly, when it comes to adhering to the truth, his record on this front is similar to that of the fellow looking to hire him.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Distorts the Facts on His Infamous Samoa Visit

During his confirmation hearing on Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, glossed over key details about his involvement in the 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people, most of whom were unvaccinated children.

Under oath, Kennedy claimed that his trip to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines,” and that the purpose of his trip had been “to introduce a medical informatics system” and to “digitize records in Samoa and make health delivery much more efficient.”

In the past, Kennedy has acknowledged opposition to vaccines factored into the trip.

But that’s not exactly true. Recent reporting from NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny shows that Kennedy traveled to Samoa on behalf of the anti-vaccine nonprofit he founded, Children’s Health Defense; in the past, he has acknowledged that his opposition to vaccines factored into the trip, claiming that he’d gone because “government officials, including the Prime Minister were curious to measure health outcomes following the ‘natural experiment’ created by the respite from vaccines.”

The “respite,” as Kennedy’s put it, occurred at a moment of distrust in Samoa’s vaccine system: two children in Samoa had died in 2018 after a nurse accidentally mixed expired muscle relaxant into their shots instead of sterile water, after which the country briefly placed its vaccine program on hold. Even after it resumed, measles vaccination rates plummeted, leaving the island’s children unprotected when the outbreak began in September 2019.

It’s has long been public knowledge that Kennedy spent time in Samoa visiting two prominent anti-vaccine activists. The first was Samoan Edwin Tamasese, who was subsequently arrested during the outbreak for speaking out against the government’s vaccination campaign, and, according to the BBC, promoting fake measles cures, including papaya leaf extract and vitamin C. (The charges were dismissed in 2020.) The second was Samoan-Australian influencer Taylor Winterstein, who had planned to present a workshop about making “informed choices” on vaccines. While she was prevented from doing so by the Samoan government, she still traveled to the country and met with Kennedy. Just after the visit, she wrote on Instagram that their meeting has been “divinely timed” and that she would cherish their conversation.

Since Kennedy began his 2024 presidential run and later, as he transitioned to an effort to win the top job at HHS, he and Children’s Health Defense have tried to offer an alternate and misleading picture of his visit to Samoa.

The effort flies in the face of Kennedy’s past words. For example, in 2021, Kennedy wrote an article for Childrens’ Health Defense that called Tamasese a “medical freedom hero” and acknowledged that the anti-vaccine activist had arranged his visit to Samoa. While the article mentions the goal of introducing “a medical informatics system,” it also suggests that vaccines, not measles, were responsible for the deaths; advances the debunked link between vaccines and autism; and attacks the “Global Medical Cartel” for its support of vaccines.

In 2021, Kennedy admitted that during his visit, he’d talked “a limited amount” about vaccines to Prime Minister Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi. And after the outbreak began, he wrote a letter to the prime minister suggesting, without any evidence, that it could have been caused by a “vaccine strain” or an ineffective vaccine.

Chaos Follows Trump’s Anti-DEI and “Efficiency” Measures

This week, the FBI’s Office of Integrity and Compliance issued a memo ordering that posters mentioning diversity should be taken down. The memo, signed by Catherine Bruno, the office’s assistant director, stated that diversity had been considered one of the agency’s “core values,” along with accountability, compassion, fairness, integrity, leadership, respect, and “rigorous obedience to the Constitution.” Now, however, “consistent with recent executive orders”—meaning a ban on DEIA programs the new Trump administration announced in its first week—she wrote that such posters would have to be thrown away. 

“It’s like they are lighting the match to watch it burn.”

“In addition to disposing of the posters described above,” the memo added, “please review all materials in your offices, both in hard copy and digital format, and remove any materials that include the core value of diversity.” Bruno wrote that mentions of diversity would also have to be scrubbed from both internal and external websites, and physical materials “should be disposed of appropriately (do not keep them).” Her message, which Mother Jones has viewed, then notes that poster frames could be reused.

The memo struck some employees at the agency as a bit of black comedy, a concrete example of the bizarre situations playing out across the federal government as agencies scramble to comply with Trump’s new executive orders. Federal employees say these early executive actions purporting to root out “inefficiency” and ban diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are creating concerning, demoralizing, and just plain stupid situations at work. 

“This is all just disheartening,” one federal employee told Mother Jones. “It’s so disgusting that our bosses, Congress, hate us.” 

People working in the intelligence community have seen immediate changes to their work environment, according to two federal employees. At one intelligence agency, a support group for people with disabilities was disbanded in response to the executive order; a similar group at the same agency for employees who are disabled veterans was also scrapped.

Mother Jones asked spokespeople at the CIA and FBI about how they’re handling the executive guidance around DEIA and whether affinity groups and support systems for disabled employees had been eliminated. “We are complying with the Executive Order and Office of Personnel Management implementing guidance,” the FBI wrote. “The Office of Diversity and Inclusion has been dissolved, along with component DEIA programs.” The CIA provided a virtually identical statement: “We are complying with the EO and OPM Implementing Guidance. The Office of Diversity and Inclusion has been dissolved, along with component DEI programs.”

The General Services Administration, meanwhile, has hired Thomas Shedd, who previously worked at Tesla, to direct its division of Technology Transformation Services. A GSA employee told Mother Jones that Shedd and two men with unclear roles who appear to be recent college graduates have been conducting “code reviews,” similar to what Elon Musk did when he took over Twitter. A GSA spokesperson seemed to confirm the reviews are taking place, describing them as “customary” and “routine in the software world” after changes in leadership

According to the employee, none of the people involved have been identified during these code meetings as being part of the Department of Government Efficiency, the project Musk is leading to supposedly streamline the federal government. But Wired reported Tuesday that people now occupying senior roles at the Office of Personnel Management include a 21-year old former Palantir employee and a person who graduated high school in 2024 who “lists jobs as a camp counselor and a bicycle mechanic among his professional experiences, as well as a summer role at Neuralink,” Musk’s neurotechnology company. The OPM acknowledged a request for comment but did not provide a statement before publication.

Employees at the GSA aren’t clear about what the code reviews are meant to accomplish—only that they suspect they are designed to try to prove that the department’s current way of doing things is inefficient or inferior.

“Applying the Twitter to X model to the federal government by a bunch of tech bros risks crippling not just government activity but the public,” the GSA employee said. “If they are being this flip with our programs, it’s like they are lighting the match to watch it burn and laugh as everything becomes ash.” 

“Everything that is coming down is to punish.”

A person familiar with the United States Digital Service, a little known White House organization that has been subsumed by Musk’s DOGE project, said that employees there have all been recently interviewed and specifically asked what they think of DOGE. Rumors of pending layoffs have begun to swirl. 

The situation, one federal employee in the intelligence community said, is far worse than at any time in the first Trump administration. “It feels different,” they said. “It feels the like everything that is coming down is to punish. Like this is all about revenge.” It seems, the worker added, “like the admin is out for blood and wants to win some game in their head by making some other side lose. They don’t seem to realize that means we all lose.”

In all, Trump’s anti-DEI and pro-“efficiency” measures seem to have immediately created new layers of bureaucracy and busywork, plunged collective morale into the government-issued toilet, and left many federal employees desperate to leave. Of course that is likely a deliberate feature, not a bug, of the orders. Indeed, on Tuesday, employees at multiple agencies received an unusual email titled “Fork in the Road,” which took inspiration from a similar missive Musk engineered after taking control of Twitter. (A version was also posted on OPM’s website.)

The legally questionable emails suggested that employees should consider resigning or run the real risk of being fired in the near future. As Trump seeks a “more streamlined and flexible workforce,” the email warned, “the majority of federal agencies are likely to be downsized through restructurings, realignments, and reductions in force.”

“During the first week of his administration,” the email began, “President Trump issued a number of directives concerning the federal workforce. Among those directives, the President required that employees return to in-person work, restored accountability for employees who have policy-making authority, restored accountability for senior career executives, and reformed the federal hiring process to focus on merit. As a result of the above orders, the reform of the federal workforce will be significant.” The email even included a draft “separation plan,” referred to as a “deferred resignation letter,” and told employees they had only until February 6 to sign.

“Whichever path you choose,” it concluded, the irony hard to miss, “we thank you for your service to The United States of America.”

Update, January 29: This story has been updated with comments from the GSA and CIA, which did not respond before publication.

“Hybrid Homeschools” Are Booming, and Silicon Valley Cash Is Rolling In

In 2016, Chris Turner, a new father in Georgia, began a process familiar to many parents: He set about trying to plan his children’s education. His neighborhood schools failed to impress him; they were too rigid, with too much busy work. To his dismay, he found that despite the hefty price tags for private schools, “they didn’t feel fundamentally different than just a typical public school. Their environments were slightly better, the teachers were slightly better, maybe the curriculum was slightly better, but nothing was like fundamentally different in the way that it felt like everything else in the world was fundamentally changing.”

You could have forgiven Turner for his fixation on societal change. When he was school shopping, he was in his early 30s and getting a crash course in the world of tech startups. A few years before, he had launched a company called Tenrocket, which built apps for other startup founders. At the Atlanta co-working spaces he frequented, he met other entrepreneurs, some of whom had skipped college in order to get started making things in the real world. Their industriousness impressed him.

Turner recalls becoming “obsessed with that problem” of educating kids to function in a new world, which led to his next startup project: a new kind of classroom experience. In his vision, children as young as 5 could learn through activities like, he told me, “starting businesses and hosting podcasts and building rockets and going to Costa Rica on a study abroad trip.” In 2018, Turner quit his startup job and spent the next two years planning and fundraising to make this notional school a reality: In 2020, he launched a learning space, called Moonrise, on a bustling corner of the affluent and progressive Atlanta-adjacent city of Decatur, Georgia.

Moonrise has no curriculum or teachers. Instead, adult “guides”—often college students, parents, or retirees—preside over activities like knitting lessons, excursions with virtual reality headsets, or a Minecraft club. If the day’s activities don’t appeal, students are free to do, well, whatever they want. They can play cards with a friend all day, read a book, or, as several students were doing on the day I visited, curl up in a pillow fort with an iPad. The staff doesn’t track academic outcomes, because that’s not their domain: Moonrise is a “learning center,” not a school, so it is not subject to state curriculum and testing requirements. That’s the parents’ responsibility. (Sort of: According to the homeschool accountability group Coalition for Responsible Home Education, just two states, New York and Hawaii, enforce state requirements about documenting students’ academic progress.)

Moonrise is what’s known as a hybrid homeschool, an educational model that offers homeschool families a place for children to learn outside the home a few days a week. Though part-time tiny schools for homeschoolers have existed for decades, their popularity skyrocketed during the pandemic, when some families found that they liked that style of education and never went back to traditional schools. Since 2019, the number of Americans who homeschool has doubled to about 6 percent of US students or about 2.9 million school-aged children. When Moonrise launched at the beginning of the pandemic, just a handful of families were enrolled; today it serves 150.

Turner expects that number to grow in 2025 because, in January, Georgia became one of the 33 states to offer a private school voucher program, which allows families to use funds designated for public education toward private school tuition. Each state’s program works differently; the one in Georgia offers $6,500 to families whose local public school’s test scores rank in the bottom 25 percent of schools in the state. That amount would hardly make a dent in the tuition bills for local elite private schools, some of which charge upward of $38,000 annually. But Moonrise’s unlimited plan, which offers homeschool families up to 12 hours a week in the space, costs just under $6,000 a year, and families can add extra time at the rate of $20 an hour. Georgia’s new voucher program is expected to yield 20,000 more homeschoolers in the state—marking a potentially very significant customer base expansion for Turner.

In states with older private school vouchers, programs similar to Moonrise are already proliferating: A company called Primer runs a network of hybrid homeschools in Florida, Alabama, and Arizona, each of which offers a robust voucher program. Another chain, Prenda, with 1,000 locations across the country, recommends that prospective families take advantage of “generous and flexible” voucher programs in states where they’re available.

In part because the expansion of vouchers and other school choice programs is expected to continue under President Trump, hybrid schools like Moonrise have proven attractive to Silicon Valley investors aiming to “disrupt” the educational system. From the funding he’s now receiving from a Peter Thiel–backed venture firm to the political climate, Turner sees signs all around him that hybrid homeschools like Moonrise are poised to grow in popularity. “So everything that we’re doing,” he said, “is setting up for the ability for us to meet that demand.”

On a recent Wednesday morning, I drove to Moonrise and parked out front next to an SUV with a bumper sticker that read “A SMALL LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE TOOK MY MONEY.” Once inside, I took in the sunlit, loft-like space, which previously housed a gifts and home furnishings store. Moonrise, I discovered, really does feel less like a classroom and more like a coworking space for kids, with pieces of mid-century modern furniture for lounging and blonde wood tables for projects. My tour guide was a manager named Nicole, a former Waldorf teacher who told me she hopes to gain experience at Moonrise so that she can eventually open her own school and eco-village. “I don’t like the school system—I think it’s broken,” she told me as we breezed by the Moonrise podcast studio. “We offer things kids actually want to learn, but it’s not so rigid.”

When I first arrived at around 10 a.m., there were only three “Risers” present: a 6-year-old zooming around the room on her pink and purple roller skates and two more kids relaxing in a fort made of cushions and blankets. A nature show about elephants was playing on the screen above the well-appointed tank of the Moonrise mascot, Mochi, a stately axolotl—a kind of salamander in case you didn’t know. After a few minutes, a Cybertruck pulled up outside, and a dad dropped off two school-aged boys who enthused about their adventures during a recent snow day; a few minutes later, two more kids showed up.

When I called Turner a few hours after my visit, he was eager to share his insights, especially about what he saw as a lag between the educational system and the technology sector. “It seems like everything in the world of tech especially is accelerating at this massive pace,” he told me. “But kids are still sitting in front of teachers, sitting in rows of desks, listening to lectures, and focusing on academics. But everything else is moving to, like, flexibility, creativity, and value creation, not just based on degrees.”   

“Kids are still sitting in front of teachers, sitting in rows of desks, listening to lectures, and focusing on academics. But everything else is moving to, like, flexibility, creativity, and value creation, not just based on degrees.”   

On the phone, Turner’s tone was affable and measured. But like many people, he’s a more firebrand version of himself on social media, cheerfully engaging in the culture wars, bragging about having refused to wear a mask at airports in 2020, and quoting rightwing provocateur James Lindsay’s statement that “Woke is Marxism evolved to take on the West,” which he described in a 2023 post as “*by far* the best theory of woke ideology I’ve encountered. At times I was almost moved to tears by its explanatory power.” (When I asked Turner about the post he told me that it was something of a one-off and that he’s no James Lindsay superfan.) A policy wish list Turner posted in August included “defend the west,” “let kids work,” and “deregulate founders.”

On X, Turner regularly praises Silicon Valley celebrities who, he told me, he believes get a bad rap because people get caught up in their politics rather than focusing on what they’ve accomplished. Last August he called Elon Musk “a once-in-a-generation engineer with the design and product standards of Steve Jobs and the work ethic of Henry Ford.” He mused last May on X, “Can you imagine what the last decade would have been like without Elon Musk? Dude is like Batman for western values.” By western values, Turner later told me, he meant “things like liberty, democracy, capitalism, scientific and technological progress, and defense against anything aiming to tear down these values.”

Thiel is another favorite—Turner told me unsurprisingly—given that some of the PayPal founder’s thoughts about education align with Turner’s. Thiel runs a fellowship for entrepreneurs who have foregone a college degree to instead launch a company, and his Founders Fund was one of the venture firms that raised $18.7 million in funding for the hybrid homeschool chain Primer. “Whenever I get concerned about the future of this great country, I remember that Peter Thiel is an American and instantly feel better,” Turner posted in 2021.

That post proved prophetic for Turner’s own business. In 2023, Moonrise was chosen to be part of an accelerator run by a Bay Area investment firm called 1517, which is also funded in part by Thiel. The founder of 1517, Michael Gibson, previously helped Thiel launch his fellowship for college dropouts and is the author of the 2022 book Paper Belt on Fire: How Renegade Investors Sparked a Revolt Against the University. In it, he makes the argument that instead of canceling student debt, the government should defund student loan programs. When I asked Gibson why he decided to fund Moonrise, he responded that it was because Turner “knows that if he doesn’t bring a Moonrise to every town, then our current sad failure of an education system will own the next generation like a gulag warden,” he wrote in an email. “That will be bad for these children, bad for America, and bad for the human race.”

As part of the 1517 accelerator program, Moonrise received $500,000 in seed funding. That windfall has allowed Turner to think much bigger: He plans to launch four locations next year and double the number of locations every year after that, with a goal of 100 locations nationwide by 2030. It’s an ambitious plan, but in addition to his Silicon Valley funding, Turner believes the political winds are at his back. “The Trump administration is more pro-school choice, so we just expect that to increase demand for options like Moonrise,” he told me. Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick for secretary of education, has supported programs that divert public school money toward charter schools and vouchers. America First Policy Institute, the right-wing advocacy group she helms, says it lobbies for school choice so that “every family has the funds to send their children to the school that fits their needs.” Like President Trump, Turner believes that the federal Department of Education is a “failure,” and that it should be dismantled so states would have more control over their education systems. Eliminating the DOE as Trump has suggested, he says, “will allow the expansion of school choice, and it will reduce the national debt.”

One major critique of private school voucher programs is their propensity to shunt taxpayer money to religious institutions. Studies of private school voucher programs have found that about 90 percent of the money they provide is used to pay for tuition at religious private schools.

“The modern version of the indulgence is a piece of paper many believe will save you from Hell. Only they call it a college diploma and they charge $200k. Well, that was bullshit in 1517 and it’s bullshit now.”

Turner said Moonrise has no faith affiliation, though many of its member families are Christian. Some of 1517 Fund’s staffers are vocal about their Christian faith on X, though in an email to me, Gibson, the 1517 co-founder, called himself a “pagan heretic” and said the firm’s name—which comes from the year of the Protestant Reformation—was meant as a nod to the practice of papal indulgences that the movement sought to end. “The modern version of the indulgence is a piece of paper many believe will save you from Hell,” he wrote. “Only they call it a college diploma and they charge $200k. Well, that was bullshit in 1517 and it’s bullshit now.”

Yet Gibson has also posted occasionally on X about what he sees as the dangers of an overly secular society. “You know you’re talking to the atheist Church of No Christ when: (1) they substitute ‘humanity’ for soul e.g. ‘this person’s humanity is as vital and precious as our own’ (2) instead of God, they say ‘the arc of justice’ or ‘the right side of history,’” he wrote in 2022. When I asked him what he meant, he replied that he had intended the post as “a commentary on how leftism is a warped version of Christianity without Christ. That is to say, the moral intuitions of the left are the vestiges of Christian intuitions at work after the death of God.”

Other growing hybrid homeschool chains have funding from groups that are more explicitly religious. Primer secured a funding round from New Founding, a venture capitalist firm that says it aims “to shape institutions with Christian norms.” The conservative political activism group Turning Point USA runs a national network of 41 Christian hybrid homeschools.

Hybrid homeschools aren’t regulated, so it’s impossible to say how many of them have religious underpinnings. That ambiguity is concerning to Rachel Laser, president of the nonprofit group Americans United for Separation of Church and State. She worries that many of the schools that vouchers fund could “indoctrinate students in one particular faith and discriminate against students, families, and staff who don’t share the school’s beliefs.”

What’s more, says Laser, voucher programs don’t always deliver the results they promise. In Arizona, where private school vouchers are available to any families that want them, the program cost the state 1,000 percent of the initial estimate. It also served five times more affluent than low-income families—the opposite of its initial intent. In Arkansas’ program, which was designed to offer alternatives to students in the lowest-ranking public schools, just 2 percent of participants come from schools ranked “D” or “F.” Vulnerable students, says Laser, “aren’t the ones who primarily benefit from universal private school voucher programs.”

As for the future, Turner hesitated to share details about where the next Moonrise locations will open, but the employee who showed me around told me that Turner had been eyeing Florida because of its robust voucher program. Turner said he is also courting more Silicon Valley investors, though he declined to say which ones. In the next year, he plans to restructure Moonrise’s pricing plans to allow for greater flexibility. The question now, he said, “is not whether or not people want to use it, it’s how much they’re going to use it.”

In the meantime, at the Georgia Moonrise space, it’s business as usual. A recent list of activities included weightlifting, making ice cream, learning about startup founder careers, a NASA Spacecraft STEM Challenge, and debate club. (The topic: “Is College Worth It?”) On X in October, Turner likened his founding of Moonrise to the history of the United States. “We first rejected monarchy (school), then we invented democracy (co-learning), and now we’re in the ‘democracy has to function’ phase,” he wrote. “The next phase is to build a strong culture of excellence, most likely through our equivalent of capitalism.”

How DOGE Will Try to Dodge Transparency

On the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency he had promised after winning the 2024 election.

Watchdog groups were ready to challenge DOGE from the start under the assumption it would fall under the legal rules governing outside government advisory groups. Indeed, within minutes of Trump’s swearing in, four such lawsuits were filed against it.

“This is an entity that is operating in secrecy.”

But in an apparent attempt to dodge the rules, Trump’s order, instead of creating an outside government advisory group, officially set up DOGE as part of the Executive Office of the President. On paper, its mission was pared down, from massive cuts to government to improving IT efficiency. Did the president and his co-conspirator Elon Musk have a change of heart—or is something else going on?

Since November, DOGE had acted as an off-the-books committee lead by Musk and another MAGA-aligned billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy. It was already contacting federal agencies and, according to reports, communicating via Signal, an encrypted app with a built in auto-deletion feature that violates federal record-keeping laws.

If DOGE is an outside committee, their work—originally described as drastically reducing the size of the federal workforce and finding up to $2 trillion in spending cuts—must comply with the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), the lawsuits alleged, a 1972 law intended to bring transparency and balance to such committees. One such suit filed by watchdog groups and veterans and teachers organizations called DOGE “a shadow operation,” and argued its “unchecked secrecy, access, and private influence—bought by political loyalty—is anathema to efficient, effective government.”

According to a Washington Post investigation, Ramaswamy and Musk had different ideas about DOGE’s mission—and Musk’s winning perspective was shaped by a desire to skirt transparency requirements. While Ramaswamy perceived of DOGE as an outside government group seeking to slash regulations and shutdown entire agencies, Musk reportedly preferred an operation within the government “using the power of technology and data-mining to achieve DOGE’s aims.”

Further, according to the Post, Musk saw his route as avoiding requirements for transparency: “Musk became increasingly convinced that DOGE should operate as a small team within the government, where it could get access to highly sensitive information and avoid lawsuits attempting to force disclosure of its meetings and minutes.” Musk’s vision won; Ramaswamy left the project. According to the Dispatch, the administration’s decisions not only shielded DOGE from transparency laws, but also regulations governing who they can hire and at what salary.

No matter how DOGE is constructed and sets about its work, the Inauguration Day lawsuits are an opening salvo in a legal battle that is likely to stretch on. “We stand by the proposition that’s in our complaint, that this is an entity that is operating in secrecy,” said Nikhel Sus, deputy chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “Whether they are a private advisory committee or a government agency, they have to comply with certain federal transparency requirements, and there is no indication that they are.”

Take the Freedom of Information Act, which would not apply to an outside advisory committee, but does apply to executive agencies. “They have to pick a lane here. It’s not as if they could be exempt from both FACA and FOIA and all the other government transparency laws,” Sus argues.

It’s possible, Sus acknowledges, that DOGE will fight disclosure under both laws. Trump’s order officially renamed and reconstituted the US Digital Service, a little-known presidential office, as the United States DOGE Service. The USDS began in 2014 as an Obama-era initiative to improve government technology following the disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov, and has since been housed in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a part of the Executive Office of the President that is subject to FOIA.

But the executive order is ambiguous on whether USDS remains part of OMB, or is now more directly under the purview of the Oval Office. If it no longer is in OMB, the courts would have to determine whether in its new form it remains subject to FOIA, after assessing whether it is limited to advising the president or if it is more broadly active across government. Trump’s day one executive order called for DOGE to advise agency heads—a scope that seemingly goes beyond advising the president—but, as we have seen, when it comes to rulings on government records, it really depends on which judge you get.

The president’s order envisions an 18-month timeline for DOGE’s work, and sorting this out in the courts could easily take longer. “The clock will run out on DOGE well before litigation, including all appeals, can be concluded,” warns Bob Bauer. As Bauer, White House counsel under President Barack Obama, told the Dispatch, that’s especially true since Trump administration lawyers are likely to make a “backstop claim that FACA’s limits on how a president gets advice are unconstitutional.” 

Such a push to invalidate FACA would be in line with the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority who are skeptical of any limits on a president’s power, having already rejected repercussions for presidents who break the law in their infamous 2024 immunity decision.

DOGE’s mandate is now muddied by an executive order that conflicts with its original stated goals, leaving uncertainty about what the effort will try to accomplish. But its unstated capabilities are dangerous: The newly constituted USDS is entitled to suck up an enormous amount of data from every part of government. As the executive order lays out, it should have “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems.” That data could be used to determine which jobs would be made redundant through technology. Or those decisions could be made after scooping up the emails of all federal employees and finding justifications for dismissal—especially if Trump can eliminate civil service protections. Musk could, as he has done before, publicly target federal employees, but this time with their own communications in hand.

It’s not just the rank and file that could be terrorized by DOGE. While Musk has not been officially named as head of DOGE, in some sort of leadership capacity he could have vast amounts of intelligence on—and sway over—agencies that regulate his own businesses. Based on the executive order, it’s possible he could even have access to cabinet members’ communications, eroding any independence they may have and creating leverage over them.

That makes it worth asking: Is his goal IT modernization, or the power to be had along the way?

Trump Aims to Rescind a Half-Century of Environmental Rules

This story was originally published bVox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

If you pick through Donald Trump’s parade of executive orders upon taking office on January 20, you’ll discover many that revoke orders made by Joe Biden. But in one, Trump dug even further back: He revoked an executive order issued by Jimmy Carter in 1977, nearly half a century ago.

Carter’s order gave the Council on Environmental Quality, a branch of the White House, the authority to issue binding regulations governing how federal agencies comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Trump, by revoking it, takes away that power from the CEQ.

This may seem rather technical, but Trump in effect set off a process that could lead to very meaningful changes in the way the federal government handles environmental reviews for everything from oil pipelines to solar farms to highways to light rail systems to national parks.

NEPA is a law that governs federal agencies, telling them how and when to review the environmental impacts of federal projects. It is enforced, however, through private action: Individuals, companies, environmental groups, and so on can sue federal agencies for failing to conduct sufficient NEPA review, and courts can and do demand more review in response, delaying or killing the underlying project under review.

To the law’s advocates, this provides a powerful method for conservationists and average citizens to fight back against polluting projects near them. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) calls NEPA the “environmental Magna Carta,” citing cases where it’s protected communities from water-contaminating drilling projects or blocked oil pipelines that enable greenhouse emissions.

To critics, including business groups generally skeptical of regulation but also many renewable energy developers whose projects are often subject to NEPA, the law causes pointless delays to beneficial projects, including ones necessary to building the clean energy needed for rapid decarbonization, and must be reformed if the US is to tackle climate change seriously.

Trump, of course, does not care about climate change. He made that much clear when he paired his NEPA order with an executive order blocking all offshore wind turbines and any onshore turbines built with public funds or on public lands, and his Department of Interior followed it up a few days later with an order suspending permits for all renewable energy projects, including solar in addition to wind. Trump’s skepticism toward NEPA reflects the much older skepticism that business and extractive industries have always had toward the law. But given the new anti-NEPA turn among some climate advocates, it’s worth asking what exactly his changes will mean for the buildout of solar and other renewables.

It’s too early to say for sure, but some people in the pro-renewables, anti-NEPA camp are hopeful. “I think it’s probably the right move if you want to move really fast and deploy clean energy resources or any kind of energy resources,” Eli Dourado, chief economist at the Abundance Institute and a leading NEPA critic, told me.

A more skeptical read is that Trump’s order raises more questions than answers. One thing energy developers crave is certainty, especially from the government, and if nothing else, the order creates a huge amount of uncertainty as to the future of NEPA and environmental review.

NEPA is one of the first federal environmental laws, passed in 1969, before the Clean Air or Clean Water Acts and before the Environmental Protection Agency was even created. As initially drafted, it had little teeth, beyond stating the opinion of Congress that there should be “productive and enjoyable harmony between man and his environment.”

But Lynton Caldwell, an adviser to Sen. Scoop Jackson (D-WA), added what would become the law’s most important provision: a requirement that federal agencies consider the environmental impacts of any “major action” they undertake and produce a “detailed statement” laying out those impacts.

Under the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, which governs how federal agencies make and revise rules and adjudicate administrative decisions, people with standing (usually those who might be harmed by a rule or federal action) have the right to challenge executive agencies in court. Environmental groups soon realized that they and their supporters could use this ability to challenge federal agencies for failing to follow NEPA.

NRDC, in its list of “NEPA Success Stories,” gives the example of a proposed land exchange between the US Forest Service and a lumber company in Washington state. “Citizen groups” and the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe challenged the idea, and a court ruled that the Forest Service “violated NEPA by failing to consider an adequate range of alternatives and by neglecting to analyze the cumulative impacts of the proposed exchange.” This forced the Forest Service to redo the analysis; the swap went forward, but in NRDC’s view, “with a better design that protected old-growth forest and culturally and recreationally important public lands.”

Federal agencies are just like you or me: They hate getting sued. So setting clear standards for what NEPA review of projects should look like became necessary soon after it was passed. In 1977, Carter’s executive order gave the job of setting these standards to the Council for Environmental Quality, a section of the White House that had actually been created by NEPA in 1969. CEQ would be tasked with developing regulations that other agencies—the EPA, the Department of Transportation, etc.—have to follow in doing their NEPA reviews.

And that, indeed, is how the process has proceeded for decades now. Agencies can and do approach NEPA differently, with some being more lenient than others. But their review processes were governed by regulations that had to be consistent with CEQ’s regulations, and ultimately by courts that could determine that the processes were insufficient, forcing the agencies to do years more of analysis and sometimes delaying projects considerably. Those court determinations were always ultimately based on the text of NEPA itself, but informed by prior court rulings, as well as CEQ’s rules.

Trump’s EO revokes the 1977 order giving CEQ authority to issue these regulations, and instructs the chair of CEQ to, within 30 days, “propose rescinding” all regulations the Council has issued to date. In lieu of these binding regulations, the Council is supposed to (also within 30 days) provide “guidance” as to how agencies should conduct NEPA reviews going forward.

This creates something of a paradox, notes John Ruple, a law professor at the University of Utah and until last year senior counsel to CEQ under Biden. “President Trump ordered CEQ to ‘propose rescinding CEQ’s NEPA regulations,‘ but there does not appear to be a way for CEQ to do that, since rescinding a regulation requires an agency to go through the rulemaking process—and Trump just told CEQ that it no longer has rulemaking authority,” Ruple explained. “I don’t know how CEQ can do what he directs.”

This focus on CEQ’s regulations is probably in part due to a recent court case, Marin Audubon Society v. Federal Aviation Administration (2024). The case involves a conservation group in California challenging the FAA’s environmental review of proposals to conduct aerial tours of national parks. In November, two of three judges on a panel of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the case that CEQ lacked the legal authority to issue NEPA regulations, because NEPA itself did not explicitly give it that power. That sowed no small amount of uncertainty about the status of CEQ and NEPA, and the Trump EO seems clearly meant to back up the judges’ determination that CEQ not promulgate these kinds of regulations.

There are some immediate concerns that come to mind with Trump’s EO. One is that there isn’t a chair of CEQ: It’s a Senate-confirmable position and Trump has not even nominated someone to it yet. It seems doubtful that the role will be permanently filled anytime soon; it took until April 2021 for Biden’s chair to be confirmed by the Senate, and Trump didn’t have one until two years into his term. In lieu of a formal chair, there’s an acting chair, but having a temporary official propose a comprehensive overhaul of a half-century’s worth of rules in less than a month is a tall order.

To some NEPA skeptics, rescinding CEQ’s regulations opens up a world of possibility where the council and the agencies it advises can embrace a different approach to environmental review, in which fewer projects rise to the level of needing a concise environment assessment or a long, involved environmental impact statement.

Thomas Hochman of the Foundation for American Innovation laid out a few ways this could work in a blog post. “Without those binding regulations in place, agencies are free to adopt much narrower definitions of terms like ‘significance’ and ‘major federal action,’ trim back their alternatives analyses, and treat factors like environmental justice or greenhouse gas emissions as optional rather than mandatory considerations,” Hochman writes.

For instance, if NEPA review is required in cases where “major Federal actions significantly affecting the quality of human environment” are involved, then agencies could decide that, for instance, projects that the federal government provides only limited funding for are not “major Federal Actions,” or that certain small activities do not “significantly” affect the quality of the human environment. “Repealing the EO creates a lot of opportunity but also a bunch of uncertainty and ultimately it’ll come down to implementation and some court fights,” Aidan Mackenzie of the Institute for Progress agreed.

Other experts I spoke to were not so sure. The NEPA law itself lays out how environmental review must proceed, and if an agency decided to adopt different interpretations of words like “major” and “significant” than it had used previously, it could be opening itself up to a lot of litigation risk. Suppose the FAA decides it doesn’t think, say, the aerial tours of a national park in the Marin County case are likely to have a “significant” impact on the quality of the environment. All it takes is one judge to agree with a litigant that the impact is significant for that decision to send the FAA into years of legal struggle, delaying the underlying project in the process. CEQ’s regulations were meant, at least in part, to create a uniform set of standards that agencies could avoid those kinds of lawsuits by following. If they break with those standards, agencies could put themselves at risk.

“NEPA lays out the things that agencies have to consider in fairly exacting fashion,” said Alex Mechanick, who until January 20 was senior counselor to the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office on Management and Budget, and thus a top White House official dealing with regulatory issues. “It’s not clear to me how much juice they can get out of efforts to reduce burden via just weakening regulations, because those regulations could be held to be inconsistent with the statute.”

One big question here is how exactly courts will respond to the fact that CEQ regulations are no longer binding. One plausible answer is that they don’t respond at all: They’re still required to hold agencies accountable to the text of NEPA, and the last half-century of regulations provides them with a known method of determining what’s compatible with NEPA and what isn’t. “Courts could…look at CEQ’s current regulations and say, ‘All right, regardless of what Trump’s EO does, we find this direction persuasive to us in interpreting and understanding requirements under the statute,’” Ruple told me.

Dourado at the Abundance Institute was more optimistic that the change would have meaningful effects: “It’s a clean way to undo a lot of built-up procedure all at once—to say that ‘we don’t even have the authority to make these rules, and therefore we can just rescind them.’” But he of course agrees that ultimately, the agencies are bound by the NEPA statute, which has actually gotten somewhat more detailed in recent years.

The Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, the spending deal that Biden and House Republicans struck that year, included changes to the law that set page limits for environmental reviews and time limits for their authoring, but also laid out in more detail than NEPA had before exactly how reviews should proceed and what factors they should include. By getting more specific, the law gave regulators less wiggle room to change course than they might have previously had.

Ultimately, any serious changes to the law will have to come as part of another legislative package. That isn’t unthinkable—in addition to the 2023 changes, Biden signed a bill in October limiting NEPA reviews of chip manufacturing plants, so Congress is capable of passing bipartisan NEPA reform—but it’s probably not doable on party lines. Budget reconciliation, which lets Senate Republicans pass some legislation with 50 votes, probably isn’t usable for permitting reform. That means any package will need Democratic support, and while a comprehensive bipartisan package on permitting reform came close to passing in December, it died over disagreement about the NEPA reform portion.

If Trump’s NEPA order has an ambiguous effect, at best, on the speed of renewable build-out, the wind executive order has a clearly negative one. Ironically, the order itself relies on NEPA: It calls for increased federal review of offshore and onshore wind projects for environmental impacts, and because most wind projects need federal permits and/or subsidies, most projects are subject to these new requirements. The rule also uses federal authority over coasts to block offshore wind projects entirely. Industry groups are declaring that it could block more than half of existing wind projects in the US.

Onshore wind is roughly tied with solar as the cheapest per-megawatt source of electricity in the US, cheaper even than natural gas (if not as reliable—the wind doesn’t always blow). Offshore wind, which took a harder hit in the order, is significantly more expensive, and faces other challenges, like the Jones Act, which bans foreign-built ships from traveling between US ports. Because the US does not build ships capable of installing offshore wind itself, in practice projects have to sail from Canada or other neighboring countries all the way to, say, New Jersey, to install turbines.

On the plus side, projections suggest that solar is getting cheaper faster than wind is, meaning that wind buildout might be comparatively less important for decarbonization going forward, and the Trump EO is less destructive than it looks at first glance. But these forecasts can be badly wrong, and it’s hard to sugarcoat Trump’s decision to block buildout of one of the cheapest clean energy sources there is, whatever the ultimate effects of his NEPA EO are. Moreover, the Department of Interior action this past week targeted solar just as much as wind.

Put it all together, and it’s hard to avoid the boring but important conclusion here: Trump is not doing much of anything that will make clean energy easier to build in the near term, and is doing several things that will make it harder.

The Madness of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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.

The media has failed the public on a crucial matter: the derangement of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Often he is described in news reports as a vaccine skeptic, when he is far more than that. He is an extreme vaccine opponent. And he has lied about this, saying he has “never been anti-vaxx,” though he recently declared, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” He still promotes the debunked notion that vaccines cause autism. In May 2021, he petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to stop the use of all Covid vaccines. He proclaimed it “the deadliest vaccine ever made”—though these vaccines were estimated to have saved 20 million lives globally in the first year of their use. His anti-vaccine advocacy also played a role in a deadly measles outbreak in Samoa in 2019 that killed scores of children, and this, too, he has lied about.

But Kennedy’s false claims about vaccines and his own stance on the issue are merely just one slice of his craziness that has not been fully conveyed to the public. For years, he has pushed a host of conspiracy theories and false propositions in such an aggressive and unhinged manner as to raise profound questions about his judgment and analytical abilities. Placing a fellow this cracked, disingenuous, and paranoid in charge of the American public health system—which Donald Trump has proposed to do by nominating him to be secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services—threatens national and global security. This could be the most dangerous act of Trump’s presidency. Yet Republican senators and much of the public are ho-humming this perilous appointment.

Like Trump, Kennedy for years has wielded a firehose of falsehoods across multiple fronts and has engaged in assorted misconduct and odd behavior, so much so that the individual lies and misdeeds zip by and blur into a mess that becomes tough for the media to thoroughly depict and hard for the public to absorb.

He claimed that a global elite led by the CIA had been planning for years to use a pandemic to end democracy and impose totalitarian control on the entire world. This was Alex Jones-level crazy.

During the pandemic, he not only recklessly opposed the vaccines; he also made the baseless and seemingly antisemitic comment that Covid was engineered to spare Jews and Chinese people. He compared anti-Covid public health measures to the Holocaust and claimed Dr. Anthony Fauci was orchestrating “fascism.” (Kennedy published an entire book in 2021 outlandishly attacking Fauci, asserting this public health official, over his decades-long career, had mounted “a historic coup d’état against Western democracy.” In this book, he claimed that Fauci once funded testing of an AIDS treatment on a group of foster children and many of them died because of the experiment—a scurrilous allegation that has been debunked.) Kennedy, who has no training in science or medicine, also hyped unproven treatments for Covid, including hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

In 2022, Kennedy pushed a wild-eyed theory about the pandemic that showed how bonkers he can be. He claimed that a global elite led by the CIA had been planning for years to use a pandemic to end democracy and impose totalitarian control on the entire world. This was Alex Jones-level crazy. But Kennedy fervently insisted he had proof: the ominous-sounding Event 201. That was the name of a pandemic simulation held at a New York City hotel in October 2019, months before Covid struck. In one podcast, he said that no one had to take his word on this claim of a diabolical scheme and that you could look up Event 201 and even watch its recorded proceedings on YouTube. I did and discovered the simulation, conducted publicly by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, was a rather anodyne gathering of corporate execs, former government officials, and policy experts that did not come close to matching Kennedy’s description of it. Yet Kennedy maintained this exercise was proof of a worldwide plot to exploit a pandemic to “execute a coup d’etat against democracy.” Only an observer far removed from reality could sit through the three-and-a-half-hour-long Event 201 and reach such a loony conclusion.

While excitedly propagating this conspiracy theory, Kennedy demonstrated a methodology he has employed in other instances. He misrepresents facts. He fabricates. He sounds authoritative and offers what appears to be oodles of evidence. But he blends dollops of reality with fevered fantasies and concocts a goulash of irrational conspiracy. If he’s not a self-aware con man, he must be delusional. Whatever the case may be, he has pocketed millions of dollars—including $10 million last year—as an anti-vax champion.

On other health policy matters, he has peddled canards and shams. He falsely suggested that HIV did not cause AIDS and that this disease was attributable, in part, to the use of recreational drugs—notably, poppers—by gay men. He has frequently said that human-made chemicals in the environment could be making children gay and causing “gender confusion.” (There is no scientific evidence to back this up.) He has bolstered the baseless claim that the usage of antidepressants has led to school shootings. He has promoted the drinking of raw milk, which presents the risk of foodborne disease and the spread of avian flu, given the recent outbreak in dairy cows. He has pushed the unfounded view that fluoride in drinking water causes arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease. (Major public health groups say fluoridation prevents cavities and is safe.)

Kennedy has compiled a long history of personal misconduct, conspiracy-mongering, and unrelenting lying. It may be too much for senators to vet and consider during his confirmation hearings.

Outside the public health realm, Kennedy has hawked other unfounded conspiracy theories. He once asserted, “They’re putting in 5G [high-speed broadband service] to harvest our data and control our behavior. Digital currency that will allow them to punish us from a distance and cut off our food supply.” (He also told podcaster Joe Rogan that wifi “radiation” causes cancer, “cellphone tumors,” and “opens your blood brain barrier” to toxins—of which there is no scientific proof.) Not surprisingly, he has long insisted that the CIA was part of the plot to assassinate his uncle, President John Kennedy. (He also believes Sirhan Sirhan, who was convicted of murdering his father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, did not fire the shot that killed the senator and that a second gunman was involved.)

And then there’s just a wide range of RFK Jr. weirdness and questionable (if not scandalous) behavior. This includes dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park; decapitating a dead whale and taking its head home; allegedly sexually assaulting a babysitter; keeping a sex diary of his many extramarital affairs during his second marriage; hailing his past use of heroin; reportedly sexting with a reporter (while married to his third wife); and causing concern at an environmental group he led over his puzzling distribution of tens of millions of dollars.

Kennedy, once widely praised for his work as an environmental lawyer, has compiled a long history of personal misconduct, conspiracy-mongering, and unrelenting lying. It may be too much for senators to vet and consider during his confirmation hearings. But all this and his lack of experience managing a large government department warrants extensive scrutiny, as he is slated to take over the world’s biggest public health agency. Moreover, his recent policy pronouncements ought to spark worry. He has called for pausing all drug development for four years, as well as research into infectious diseases. So no work on pharmaceuticals that might help Americans stricken with cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and other illnesses? And no research or vaccine development for a bird flu strain that might mutate into a virus transmitted between humans?

A forceful and articulate public speaker who has mastered the art of appearing to be well-informed, Kennedy has repeatedly showed that he is unfettered by reality and facts and that he is an erratic and stubborn pitchman for unfounded conspiracy theories and dangerously false propositions. Putting him at the helm of the nation’s public health system creates a risk of great magnitude. Had he succeeded in blocking the Covid vaccines, millions more Americans might have died.

A clear-eyed look at his positions, actions, and assertions leads to a frightening conclusion: He is an untrustworthy and unstable person. To put it simply, he is batty. And it is absolutely nuts for him to be in charge of an agency that must rely on sound science, solid research, and prudent policy to safeguard the health and well-being of the American people. If the Senate Republicans confirm his nomination, it will be an act of abysmal recklessness and irresponsibility. Out of mindless loyalty to Trump or fear of him, they will inject a potentially deadly virus into a system meant to protect us.

What My Black Mother’s Involuntary Sterilization in 1965 Reveals About America Today

This piece is adapted from Holy Ground: On Activism, Environmental Justice, and Finding Hope by Catherine Coleman Flowers, published by Spiegel & Grau on January 28, 2025.

Just before Christmas in 1965, my mother was recovering from the birth of her fifth child, David, at the John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital, on the campus of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. She was twenty-six years old. By all measures it should have been a very happy holiday season for my parents—not just because of the arrival of the baby, but also because this was the year that the Voting Rights Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, one year after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed. Two momentous markers for those who had devoted so much of their lives to the Civil Rights Movement. Deep systemic racism remained, but there must have been a feeling of real hope for Black parents all over the South. Hope that their children would be safer, better educated, and have more economic and social possibilities because they would grow up in a world that was free, or maybe just freer, from the Jim Crow horrors that had scarred their lives.

And yet, while my mother was in the hospital, physicians had decided that her reproductive life should end. While she was in labor, she was told that she had to consent to tubal ligation in order for the doctor to deliver her baby. Tubal ligation, what is casually called “having your tubes tied,” was part of a national program, sanctioned by state governments, that sterilized women. That the hospital was for poor women without insurance was another way that the medical establishment preyed on low-income people.

This process of forced and involuntary sterilization was referred to by activist Fannie Lou Hamer, with the mordant humor that emerges from righteous fury, as “Mississippi appendectomies.” In Hamer’s case, she had gone to the hospital to have a uterine tumor removed in 1961, and while she was thoroughly sedated, the doctors decided her reproductive organs should go as well. Why not? Hamer was poor and Black and likely fertile. As a Mississippi congressman had reportedly said, forced sterilization was designed to “stop this black tide which threatens to engulf us.”

It is impossible to quantify how many mostly poor and mostly Black women were sterilized at the same time as my mother and Hamer. Each state had its own programs, and, even then, individual doctors could improvise with few consequences. But in 1970, during the height of the Nixon administration, when both the House and the Senate were controlled by the Democrats, Congress passed the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act. It sounds quite innocuous, doesn’t it? But, in fact, in what can only be described as eugenics, the act sanctioned and subsidized sterilizations of Medicaid recipients and Indian Health Service patients. The grim numbers demonstrate its efficiency: 100,000 to 150,000 poor and mostly Black and Native women were sterilized every year until 1979, when federal sterilization guidelines were enacted to protect women from the procedure.

The John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital was founded in 1892 as Alabama’s only hospital for Black people. It was one part of the compound created by Booker T. Washington that included a prestigious university, all designed to educate and support the Black community. In 1913, the hospital was renamed in honor of Andrew, the former governor of Massachusetts, an abolitionist who advocated for the inclusion of Black troops not just in the Union forces but in the US military. But in 1965, while my mother was in the maternity ward, in another area of the hospital, immoral experiments conducted by the US Public Health Service and the Communicable Disease Center on almost four hundred Black men who suffered from syphilis were entering their thirty-third year. The project would continue for another seven years before the practice was exposed to the press and finally ended in 1972. Not before an appalling human cost: 128 patients died of syphilis or related complications, forty wives were infected, and nineteen children were born with congenital syphilis.

But this was not yet revealed in the Christmas season of 1965. Since 1919, Alabama had led the way among states in forcing the sterilization of people who were considered by racist and eugenicist state legislators to have demonstrated their unfitness to be a part of society. Sterilization was mandatory for people who were in hospitals, prisons, or orphanages or who were considered to be intellectually disabled, or “feebleminded,” as they disparagingly said back then. The revelations from Hitler’s eugenicist Germany—which engaged in similar practices—slowed the enthusiasm in the US, but it was revived again in the 1950s, continued, and then was further supported by the government act through the 1970s. In some teaching hospitals, poor Black women were not told what was taking place. They were used by medical students to perfect their technique in performing sterilizations, much like cadavers. This was the case for my mother.

In some teaching hospitals, poor Black women were not told what was taking place. They were used by medical students to perfect their technique in performing sterilizations, much like cadavers.

The assault on the human rights of women was federally sanctioned and federally funded through a program in which doctors had carte blanche to sterilize women and adolescent girls and others they deemed unworthy of becoming parents. On the occasions that they actually did inform these women of what was going to happen, doctors quashed any protest by threatening to cut off welfare support or refusing medical services—delivering their children in a hospital, for instance. This violent act on women’s bodies gained some of its diabolical power from the secrecy surrounding the most intimate aspects of women’s lives. Yes, people knew that it was going on, but what leverage did they have?

Finally, they found recourse in the justice system. After decades, this degrading and inhumane practice emerged from the shadows on July 17, 1973, when the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of two mentally disabled sisters, Mary Alice and Minnie Lee Relf. Mary and Minnie were the youngest of six children in a Montgomery family. Their parents were illiterate, and their father had been injured in an accident and unable to work. Oh, yes, and of course they were African American. In other words, they were perfect victims in an unjust system. The girls were twelve and fourteen years old, and boys had begun visiting them. One day, city social workers picked the girls up, told their mother that they were going to a family planning clinic to receive birth control shots (which, by the way, had not yet been tested on humans), and instead were taken to a hospital.

Minnie Lee, also illiterate, was the older sister and was given a consent form that she signed with an X. Informed consent technically granted, both girls were given tubal ligations.

Their parents were not permitted to visit them for three days. When they returned home, their father saw the scars on Minnie Lee’s body. Jessie Bly, a Black social worker in the hospital, found out what had happened and told the girls’ parents, which in turn led their father to demand answers. He was told they had been sterilized because they had “signed” the consent form. Bly then took the family to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which had been aware of the practice but had not yet found a suitable case to file. This one fit the bill, and the organization sued the federal government and brought the story to public attention. Senator Edward Kennedy from Massachusetts even invited the girls’ parents to testify in Congress.

Between the congressional hearings and the wide publicity the Relf case received, my parents had heard of the case—as had everyone in Alabama. But for my mother, this was personal in more ways than one. At the time, she was an organizer for the National Welfare Rights Organization, a nonprofit group that fought for women’s and children’s dignity, justice, democratic participation, and income equality. It was founded in 1966, when a group of welfare activists met and decided that a grassroots organization for poor people all across the country was necessary in order to galvanize their power within the broad framework of the Civil Rights Movement.

My mother became involved in the Alabama branch of the organization a few years later, working in the community to reach out to poor women and families to help them with their benefits and inspire them to get involved politically. In this position, when news of the Relf case broke in March 1973, she was tasked with finding and talking to women who had been sterilized, just as she had been. That part wasn’t hard. Within the informal networks that existed at the time, women all over the community spoke to each other about the case and urged their sisters and friends to step forward if they too had suffered this terrible treatment.

A new dimension of my mother was revealed to me. In her quiet way, even with her sunny disposition, she carried with her the dignified but burning rage of Black women who had been grievously wronged for their entire lives. Then, when the time was right—and the story of Mary Alice and Minnie Lee made the time right—she deployed that rage for the good of others.

When my mother was sterilized, I was seven years old and, of course, I didn’t know anything about it. After all, as the oldest child, I was a seasoned veteran of my mother being pregnant, leaving for a few days, and returning with a squalling baby. I seem to remember that it felt as if she was gone for a longer time when she gave birth to my youngest brother, but I didn’t think twice about that. In 1973, when I was fifteen, the word spread about her work with the National Welfare Rights Organization. I will never fully know the backstory, but I assume that journalists were in touch with the Alabama branch of the ACLU, which was in touch with the National Welfare Rights Organization, who identified my mother as a good source for a story about the issue, as she was both a victim and an advocate.

A television reporter from Montgomery, a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union, a local reporter from the NBC affiliate in Montgomery, and a reporter and crew from the BBC appeared at our house in Lowndes County. My brothers were wearing their ironed white shirts, my sister and I wore nice dresses, and we all quietly watched the proceedings in our front yard as the BBC reporter interviewed my mother, who shared her story.

My parents got married a year after I was born, but their devotion had long preceded my birth. They met in Birmingham in 1957, and when my father saw young Mattie Debardelaben walking down the street, he smiled and said to his friends, “Here comes my wife.” He must have been struck by her serene manner, her caring expression, and her quiet elegance. I always thought that my mother was tall—she had a bearing that made her appear to be—but in fact, she was only five feet two inches, just like me. She was dark-skinned with wide-set, heavy-lidded eyes, and when she smiled her dimples were revealed. She was a proper lady, who always wore lipstick and nail polish. And when it was time for church, my mother chose from a vivid collection of hats.

My father was about five feet nine inches and usually dressed in the gray or blue work clothes that were basically his uniform—except when he went to church, or when he was being interviewed with my mother by the BBC. They were both very community-oriented. My mother was more of a teacher, thoughtful, soft-spoken, providing guidance to young women who sought her out. Most of her jobs were as an organizer or an advocate. Her mother had died when she was fifteen years old, leaving eight motherless children behind. My mother was the youngest, and she had five siblings who lived in Detroit, a brother who lived in Birmingham, a brother in New Jersey, and her oldest sister, Eula, whom we affectionately called Aunt Honey, who stayed in the family’s hometown in Autauga County.

My father was an only child, but most of the people in Lowndes County were in some way related to him. He treasured being part of a big family. That was one of the things that led to my interest in genealogy: I could not understand how someone with no siblings could have so many cousins. When I heard my father speak—many people said he had the voice and the measured, articulate style of Dr. King—he reminded me of a preacher. Folks would ask him where his church was because of his powerful, charismatic presence.

And so, as the cameras rolled and the reporter took notes, the two of them spoke about what had happened to my mother. What struck me as I listened to them were the years of pain that my mother had never shared, the suffering I had never known about, and the injustice that was never addressed. As children, we didn’t really have access to the intimacy our parents shared as a couple, but during this interview, the love, care, and profound mutual respect that bound them for more than four decades was undeniable. In speaking out that day, my mother was encouraging other women to tell their stories and share them publicly. Much like during the wastewater crisis many years later, people were ashamed of their circumstances, locked in their need for privacy. When she spoke that day, she referred to other women who had undergone the same experience in Tuskegee and showed the world that one didn’t need to have been young or developmentally disabled or impoverished to have been violated. You could be articulate, married, and respectable and still have been victimized by a brutal system.

In 1974, the girls finally won their lawsuit, Relf v. Weinberger (Caspar Weinberger was the head of the Department of Health and Human Services at the time). Judge Gerhard Gesell, a judge in the powerful United States District Court for the District of Columbia, wrote in his decision, “The dividing line between family planning and eugenics is murky.” He described the forced sterilizations in the 1970s as having “improperly coerced” poor women and banned the use of federal funds for any sterilization that was performed without informed consent. He also made sure that local welfare departments could no longer threaten poor women with the loss of their public assistance if they refused to submit to being sterilized. This abominable program was finally shut down in 1979 when federal guidelines outlined very clear protections, even for people who might have sought the end of their reproductive lives.

In December 2015, when these women were well past middle age, the US Senate passed a measure to address the horrors that had been inflicted, but only three states—Virginia, North Carolina, and California—created programs to compensate victims. North Carolina set up a $10 million fund for victims, though only a limited number of women were deemed eligible. Two hundred twenty women in North Carolina received about $45,000. In Virginia, the victims were given $25,000. In California, an unknown number of women, many of them Hispanic, were sterilized in the LA County General Hospital. In 2022, the state legislature created the California Forced or Involuntary Sterilized Compensation Program, and it included both an awareness campaign and funds for survivors from state hospitals or prisons. Finding the victims, however, after so much time has passed, has proven difficult.

 As for the Relf sisters, they received nothing. No damages, no financial compensation. Alabama offered nothing to those who had been sterilized, and the federal government has not intervened. Minnie Lee and Mary Alice, now in their sixties, survive on their Social Security checks.

We never saw the BBC documentary. We never spoke much about what my mother had endured. Life, of course, goes on, and ten years later, in 1983, I visited friends in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I left Atlanta, where I lived at the time, to go on the trip, even though I wasn’t feeling very well. Once I arrived in Chattanooga, I started experiencing extreme bouts of nausea and had a sharp pain in my right side. Alarmed, I called the physician I had been seeing in Atlanta to ask for guidance. “When you come to see me,” he said dismissively, “I am going to remove your uterus because it is rotten anyway.” He suggested some aspirin and went no further. His nurse overheard the conversation, called me back, and said her sister worked for a doctor in Chattanooga. She asked for my permission to put her sister in touch with me, which of course gave. She offered a final bit of advice before hanging up: she told me never to see the Atlanta doctor again.

I was really getting concerned at this point. The pain grew more intense, and I thought that maybe the source was my appendix. I spoke to the nurse’s sister, and she immediately got me an appointment with the Chattanooga physician. He had a kind bedside manner, suspected I had an infection, ordered a pregnancy test, and sent me to the hospital across the street for further tests.

A short time later, I lay on a gurney, sedated but aware of what was going on around me. I was in the hospital’s operating room and faced emergency surgery. as he entered, I overheard the anesthesiologist say, “I can’t give her this medication—she’s pregnant.” There I was, in a twilight state of consciousness, and I felt a burst of excitement at the thought that I was carrying a child. Only a moment later, I learned that I could not carry this pregnancy to term. The pregnancy was irrelevant, my doctor said, because it was an ectopic pregnancy, which is to say it was a nonviable pregnancy located in a fallopian tube.

Helpless and unable to speak, I learned they were going to perform surgery to try to save the tube where the embryo had implanted. When an embryo implants in a fallopian tube, surgery is essential to prevent the tube from rupturing and creating life-threatening internal bleeding. Was this some kind of nightmarish replication of what doctors had inflicted on my mother and so many other Black women? I trusted these doctors; it was clear that they had located the cause of my discomfort. And yet, rationally and irrationally, I felt the danger of becoming another link in the long chain of victimized, experimented-on, mutilated Black women. Times have changed, I thought. It is a thing of the past. But the horrifying question was impossible to ignore: Would they sterilize me too?

That did not happen. But a quieter lack of respect did. I consented to the surgery generally but without being told that I was pregnant and that the surgery involved resectioning my tube—removing the embryo and then reconnecting the fallopian tube to my ovary. I would have liked to have been told that I was pregnant. I would have liked to have known that they had to resection the tube in order to save my life. At no moment did anyone say to me, “Catherine, you are pregnant. But the pregnancy is complicated and cannot be carried to term.” That would have made a world of difference. My demeaning treatment notwithstanding, the operation saved my life. And yet, I had always longed to be a mother, so when I recovered from this ordeal, I grieved.

Photo collage of a smiling Catherine Coleman Flowers alongside her novel Holy Ground.
Mother Jones illustration; Amanda Pitt

I write this after the Supreme Court Dobbs decision overturned the constitutional right to an abortion and antiabortion legislatures all over the country have engaged in an orgy of restrictions on basic health care for women. I know that had I been in exactly the same situation in, say, Ohio, or Texas, or Louisiana today, the doctors might have been unsure of what to do. Not because they were not trained to recognize a life-threatening pregnancy gone awry, but because if they intervened medically, they could face criminal charges.

What had implanted in my fallopian tube was not a viable embryo at all, but tell that to Representative John Becker from Ohio. He had authored legislation in which surgery for abortion services would be covered by health insurance only to save a woman’s life—a standard that is almost impossible to regulate—or in the case of an ectopic pregnancy. But he had a unique approach to the latter that had nothing to do with best practices developed over decades. Under his plan, the physician would be required “to re-implant the fertilized ovum into the pregnant woman’s uterus.” This is medically impossible, just to be clear. And, depending on the state, this could have happened to me—not during the Jim Crow era, but in the twenty-first century in the richest country on the planet. I would have been left to suffer, possibly go septic, with the threat of death before my situation would be deemed a sufficient emergency to require help.

Because of my ectopic pregnancy and the effects of the surgery, becoming pregnant without medical intervention was impossible for me. Yet I longed to be a mother, so I looked into vitro fertilization, a procedure known as IVF. My partner would have to inject hormones into my body so my egg production could be stimulated, and then some would be extracted and fertilized with my partner’s sperm. Then, if successful, the embryo would be implanted in my womb. For some IVF patients, those embryos would be frozen and stored, so parents could have the potential for larger families in the future. IVF has been performed millions of times; about 2 percent of all babies in the US, or more than eight million, are the result of IVF. It was a process that seemed thankfully distant from the hideous abortion wars.

Until the Alabama Supreme Court made sure it wasn’t.

When some frozen embryos in a reproductive-medicine clinic in Mobile were mistakenly destroyed, the couples insisted that these were not mere embryos but actual children and sued the hospital under a state law, the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. On February 16, 2024, the court ruled, in an 8–1 decision, that the embryos were minors and, as Justice Tom Parker wrote in his concurring opinion, “Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.” The majority opinion asserted that there was no “unwritten exception to that rule for unborn children who are not physically located ‘in utero’—that is inside a biological uterus—at the time they are killed.”

This ruling seemed to panic even conservative lawmakers, and our Republican-dominated state legislature immediately passed a law that offered “civil and criminal immunity for death or damage to an embryo to any individual or entity when providing or receiving goods or services related to in vitro fertilization,” including retroactively.

Indeed, it appears that the court this time had gone too far, and it is heartening to see the enraged response. But this is a costly procedure, with a single IVF cycle running about $23,000; many patients require more than one cycle. FertilityIQ, an information service, notes that the average patient will spend close to $50,000 in treatment, much of which is not covered by insurance. I am happy about the outrage. Relieved to see the pushback. But I am acutely aware that when middle-class and wealthy women’s bodies are the issue, the constituency representing them is robust. For poor women, not so much.

And so, over these many years, Black and Indigenous and Hispanic and white women, barely adolescent girls and older women, have all had the agency of their bodies seized by others with the explicit goal of controlling their reproductive lives. I think of enslaved women—my great-great-grandmothers, their sisters and friends, and other enslaved women whose bodies were trafficked and raped on the plantations of my home state. Whose children were seized and sold like animals. Whose capacity to bear children was considered either an asset or a liability but rarely something deeply personal, something that demanded autonomy.

Yes, I know that we have made great progress since the time when plantations dominated our economy. And yet, as we see too often with our justice system, with our economic system, with our political system, and with our medical system, the plantation mentality endures.

SCOOP: RFK Jr. Secretly Recorded Second Wife During Divorce and Acknowledged Being “Polygamous”

In the early 2010s, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went through a contentious divorce with his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy. It was ugly. Richardson had found a diary RFK Jr. kept that chronicled multiple extramarital affairs he had engaged in—possibly numbering in the dozens—and she was enraged and tormented by his infidelity. She was drinking and racked up two DUIs. The two fought for years over the custody of their four children. The battle ended on May 16, 2012, with her suicide by hanging at their home in Bedford, New York.

During that stretch, RFK Jr., who has been nominated by President Donald Trump to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, secretly recorded telephone and in-person conversations he had with Richardson, and in at least one instance he may have violated state law in doing so.

Mother Jones has obtained a cache of these audio recordings that include more than 60 conversations that occurred in 2011 and early 2012. In many of the recordings, Richardson was distraught over the end of her marriage to Kennedy. Sometimes she bitterly lashed out at him, cursing and yelling; occasionally she asked for reconciliation. Knowing he was recording, Kennedy was decidedly more circumspect than was she. He often pressed her to complete the divorce and blamed her behavior for their breakup and his affairs. In none of the recordings did Kennedy inform Richardson that she was being recorded or ask for her consent to be recorded.

“I have witnessed Bobby’s obsessive-compulsive need to not only beat but also annihilate someone he perceives as an adversary.”

In one angry conversation on June 4, 2011, Kennedy, who had married Richardson in 1994 after his first divorce, said to her, “I want to be in a monogamous relationship. I don’t want to be in a polygamous relationship. I think that’s wrong.” Richardson then asked, “But then why have you done it for 10 years?” Kennedy replied, “I did it because I was being abused at home.” (Mother Jones is not publishing the recordings because they contain allegations we have not confirmed and information about third parties that raises privacy concerns.)

Kennedy did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding the recordings.

Most of the recordings were apparently made while both Kennedy and Richardson were in New York state, which is a one-party consent state when it comes to recording a conversation. That means under New York state law only one person in the conversation needs to be aware of the recording for it to be a legal act.

But in one instance, Kennedy recorded a phone conversation with Richardson when he was apparently in California, which is a two-party consent state. Under California law, a person needs the agreement of all parties to a conversation to record a private call. Violating this law is punishable by a fine up to $2,500 and a prison sentence of up to one year.

This call occurred on June 14, 2011. That week, Kennedy was in Los Angeles for the premiere of The Last Mountain, a documentary on mountaintop removal mining based partly on a 2005 book by Kennedy. During that eight-minute-long call, the two argued, as Kennedy pleaded with her to sign a custody agreement, and Richardson aired her grievances about him and asked him to avoid having their 16-year-old son, Conor, publicly photographed with actor Cheryl Hines, Kennedy’s girlfriend whom he later married. On the audio file of this call, Kennedy did not inform Richardson the conversation was being recorded.

The violation of two-party consent in California is a criminal misdemeanor, but it can also be cause for a civil lawsuit. In general, the statute of limitations in California for a criminal misdemeanor is one year. In cases in which one of the participants in a recorded conversation is in a one-party consent state and another in California, according to Conn Law, a California-based law firm specializing in privacy rights, “California courts typically favor the two-party consent law, meaning that when one party is in California, the stricter rule applies.”

Kennedy’s recordings of his conversations with Richardson were covered by a discovery request in the divorce case, according to a person familiar with the legal proceedings, but none of this material was turned over to Richardson’s attorneys.

At one point during the divorce, Richardson came to suspect that Kennedy was making secret recordings.

As part of the legal proceedings, Kennedy filed a sealed, 60-page affidavit loaded with allegations of misconduct by Richardson. It accused Richardson of violent outbursts, excessive drinking, physically abusing him, and threatening suicide in front of their children. In March 2012, months after this affidavit was filed, Richardson, with the assistance of her sisters Martha and Nan Richardson, compiled a point-by-point draft rebuttal to Kennedy’s affidavit.

This document was obtained by Mother Jones, and its authenticity was confirmed by a Richardson family member. In this draft, Richardson stated that Kennedy “has been stealthily tape recording phone conversations in my home.” She also claimed Kennedy “has left his affidavits, transcripts of surreptitiously recorded phone conversations and other documents strewn about for anyone to see.”

The draft accused Kennedy of waging a “scorched earth” campaign against Richardson, and it presented a host of allegations against Kennedy, including the claims that he was a lousy parent, that he misled her about the extent of his infidelity, that he was physically abusive with her, and that he was abusing prescription medicine. She referred to him as a “sexual deviant” and a sex addict, and the document noted she possessed text messages and photographs from Kennedy’s phone related to his affairs.

The draft document described many episodes in their troubled marriage. Richardson acknowledged some of her own faults and recalled a time when she lost her temper and hit Kennedy. But she denied many of the allegations in Kennedy’s affidavit and said she had never talked about killing herself in front of the children.

She also included many negative assessments of her estranged husband. “I have witnessed Bobby’s obsessive-compulsive need to not only beat but also annihilate someone he perceives as an adversary,” she said. She also challenged his veracity: “He is also well known for his passionate, entertaining speech making, hyperbole and total exaggeration.” She added, “He re-jiggers the facts, or makes them up, and rushes to tell as many people as he can so that is the version of reality that gets distributed in people’s minds—classic gaslighting.” She asserted that Kennedy had sold “the media the lie of his perfect family.”

Kennedy did not respond to questions about this document.

There was much anger and sadness—as well as sordid accusations—in Richardson’s draft reply to Kennedy’s affidavit. “I have carried the burden of Bobby and his family’s most intimate secrets since I was fifteen,” she wrote.

Richardson never filed in court a version of this document. Two months later, she was dead.

“Dystopian”: Trump Issues New Order to Stamp Out Trans Youth Healthcare

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order attempting to sharply curtail access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth, up to and including 18-year-olds. 

The executive order does not impose an immediate ban on gender-affirming care. Instead, it directs federal agencies to begin taking steps to end gender-affirming treatments for children. By defining “children” as individuals under the age of 19—including 18-year-olds, who exceed the age of majority—the order goes further than recent laws banning gender-affirming care for minors in about half of the states.

Since taking office, Trump has carried out his anti-trans campaign promises with breathtaking speed and cruelty. On his first day, he declared that the federal government will no longer acknowledge trans people’s existence or protect them under anti-discrimination laws. He has also ordered them out of the military, claiming that being transgender “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.” And he ordered trans federal prisoners—who are at a heightened risk of violence—to be medically detransitioned and transferred to facilities that match their sex rather than their gender identity.

Tuesday’s order represents another crowning achievement for the coordinated anti-trans campaign carried out by influential religious-right organizations over the last several years. Some of those groups have long made clear that their ultimate goal is to end transgender medical care for everyone, not just children. Trump’s new order is a step in that direction. 

“They’re distorting these issues to fit their own political narrative.”

The directive, if allowed to take effect, would devastate much of the remaining access to gender-affirming care for youth in the United States. Many families seeking treatment for their children receive it at specialized clinics, often housed at major hospitals and medical schools that rely on federal funding. Trump’s order takes aim at these clinics, directing agencies to ensure that “medical institutions, including medical schools and hospitals” that receive federal research and education money do not provide gender-affirming care to anyone under 19.

It also directs the secretary of Health and Human Services to cut off federal funding for such treatments. The move is expected to affect Medicaid and Medicare coverage as well as health insurance plans for federal employees. (Twenty-seven states cover gender-affirming care via Medicaid programs.) Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Trump’s HHS nominee, stated publicly last May that he believed gender-affirming care should be “deferred to adulthood.”  

Trump’s order also instructs the Department of Justice to enforce laws that ban “female genital mutilation, ”consumer fraud, and “parental kidnapping,” which, given the context, suggests those laws will be applied against providers of gender-affirming care and states with sanctuary policies for trans youth. “This order is horrifying,” a mother of three children, one of whom is trans, told us. The mother, who requested that her name not be used, describes it as “a heavy handed attempt by the government to take crucial health care decisions away from individuals, parents, and doctors” and predicts it “will cause an almost indescribable amount of pain and suffering to innocent children and families.” 

Shortly after the order was released, LGBTQ rights organizations vowed to defend trans young people’s access to care. Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, Senior Counsel and Health Care Strategist for Lambda Legal called the order “morally reprehensible and patently unlawful” in a statement. 

“The federal government—particularly, this administration—has no right to insert itself into conversations and decision-making that rightly belongs only to parents, their adolescent children, and their medical providers,” Gonzalez-Pagan said. “We stand ready to fight back.”

Trump’s order, which follows on more than $200 million in Republican anti-trans political ad spending during the 2024 election cycle, targets an extremely small minority. Gender-affirming care is rare even among trans youth, as researchers at Harvard University and Folx Health recently made clear. According to an analysis of five years of insurance claims for more than 5 million US youth (ages 8 through 17), only about 0.05 percent received gender-affirming care and were coded as transgender. Among the trans youth, 5 percent were on puberty blockers and 11 percent on hormone therapy.

Leading US medical associations and LGBTQ rights organizations say gender-affirming medical treatments have potentially life-saving mental health benefits for trans youth, who were vulnerable to widespread bullying and discrimination even before Republican politicians made them a political scapegoat. As we’ve previously reported:

Both puberty blockers and hormone therapy have been associated with improved mental health, including fewer thoughts of suicide, for trans teens—which is why they’re supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics and other leading US and international medical associations. Puberty blockers, for instance, temporarily inhibit the development of secondary sex characteristics, like breasts and periods in those assigned female at birth, or facial hair and Adam’s apples in those assigned male at birth—physical changes that can cause clinical levels of distress for youth with gender dysphoria. As trans teens get older, hormone therapy is used to spur the development of secondary sex characteristics associated with the opposite biological sex.

Trump’s order, misleadingly titled “Protecting Children from Surgical and Genital Mutilation” characterizes medical treatments for young people with gender dysphoria as a “stain on the nation’s history” and “junk science.”

“This is some alternate reality that they’re trying to impose on the world that’s counter to the lived experience of not only transgender people, but other people who know and love us,” says Alaina Kupec, president and founder of the transgender advocacy organization GRACE. “It’s just dystopian how they’re distorting these issues to fit their own political narrative.”

Speaking directly to transgender youth, Kupec adds: “Don’t fall into despair and think that you’re not seen or heard and that you’re not valuable. You are and you’re living your authentic self, and you’re living your life with integrity, which is more than these politicians can say, who are knowingly spreading these falsehoods and propagating these false narratives.”

An Unqualified “Predator”: Caroline Kennedy Urges Senate Not to Confirm Her Cousin RFK Jr.

In a scathing letter to the Senate ahead of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s confirmation hearings to become Secretary of Health and Human Services, Biden administration ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy has described her cousin as a hypocritical “predator” who is unqualified for the job and “addicted to attention and power.”

In a video her son, Jack Schlossberg, posted on X of her reading the letter that she sent to Senate lawmakers—which was first reported by the Washington Post—Caroline Kennedy says that she did not raise her concerns over her cousin’s fitness for federal office earlier because she was serving in a government role and “never wanted to speak publicly about my family members and their challenges.” But ahead of RFK Jr.’s hearings before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday, and the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Thursday, she said she felt compelled to speak out. (In November, after Trump won and announced RFK Jr. would be his HHS nominee, Caroline Kennedy called her cousin’s views on vaccines “dangerous.”)

In the video posted Tuesday, she said, “Overseeing the FDA, the [National Institutes of Health], the CDC and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services—agencies that are charged with protecting the most vulnerable among us—is an enormous responsibility, and one that Bobby is unqualified to fill. He lacks any relevant government, financial, management, or medical experience.”

Indeed, RFK Jr. is best known for peddling conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific claims about vaccines, HIV and AIDS, fluoride, and 5G technology, among others, as my colleague Anna Merlan has reported. As Anna wrote of his background:

Kennedy, an environmental attorney by training with no background or credentials in medical or public health, is the founder of the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense. He became one of the loudest voices in the anti-vaccine movement when he began falsely claiming nearly 20 years ago that the shots are tied to autism.


Kennedy’s nomination didn’t come as a surprise. After Kennedy abandoned his own independent presidential campaign, he promptly endorsed Trump’s. As they campaigned together, Trump pledged to let him “go wild on health” in a new administration, as he phrased it, as part of Kennedy’s so-called “Make America Healthy Again” agenda—proposals that amount to dismantling and defunding the government health agencies Kennedy has long railed against.

Those are among the reasons that public health experts, physicians and caregivers have warned of RFK’s potential to destroy American public health, given the power of the position Trump has appointed him to: HHS employs more than 80,000 people and oversees 13 federal agencies. (As I’ve reported, he could also further decimate abortion rights in that role.)

Ambassador Caroline Kennedy’s statement to the US Senate on RFKJr’s nomination for HHS Secretary

This is a reading of a letter she just sent to Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions

I’m so proud of my courageous mother, who’s lived a life of dignity,… pic.twitter.com/feysNA0Wwp

— Jack Schlossberg (@JBKSchlossberg) January 28, 2025

Caroline Kennedy called her cousin’s views on vaccines “dangerous and willfully misinformed,” claiming that he has vaccinated his own six children “while building a following hypocritically discouraging other parents from vaccinating theirs.” She said the “conspiratorial half-truths he’s told about vaccines,” including those focused on the measles outbreak in Samoa, “have cost lives.” And she pointed to a recent New York Times report claiming that RFK would maintain his financial stake in litigation against Merck, the maker of the HPV vaccine to prevent cervical cancer, as evidence that he’s “willing to profit and enrich himself by denying access” to a critical vaccine.

Kennedy alleged that in addition to his anti-science beliefs and lack of qualification for the role, her cousin has a litany of “personal qualities” that “pose even greater concern”: she claimed that he led “his younger brothers and cousins …down the path of drug addiction,” adding that some “suffered addiction, illness and death.” (His brother David died in 1984, at 28 years old, of “multiple ingestion” of three drugs found in his system.) She also recounted a bizarre—and disturbing—anecdote, alleging that he used to kill baby chickens and mice in a blender to feed his pet hawks, which she described as “a perverse scene of despair and violence.”

She claimed that her father, former President John F. Kennedy, and her uncles Robert F. Kennedy, former senator and attorney general (and RFK Jr.’s father), and former senator Ted Kennedy, would be “disgusted” with her cousin.

“The American health care system, for all its flaws, is the envy of the world. Its doctors and nurses, researchers, scientists and caregivers are the most dedicated people I know,” Caroline Kennedy said.

“They deserve better than Bobby Kennedy, and so do the rest of us,” she concluded. “I urge the Senate to reject his nomination.”

RFK did not respond to an email sent Tuesday afternoon seeking comment and ignored questions about the letter from an NBC News reporter.

RFK Jr. ignores questions about the letter released by his cousin, Caroline Kennedy, in which she calls him a “predator” + his upcoming confirmation hearings. pic.twitter.com/zXzqAVXuE4

— Brennan Leach (@brennanleach) January 28, 2025

Spokespeople for White House and the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which is chaired by Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a physician, also did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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