Elon Musk may be gone from the Trump administration — and his friendship status with President Donald Trump may be at best uncertain — but his whirlwind stint in government certainly left its imprint. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), his pet government-slashing project, remains entrenched in Washington. During his 130-day tenure, Musk led DOGE in eliminating about 260,000 federal employee jobs and gutting agencies supporting scientific research and humanitarian aid. But to date, DOGE claims to have saved the government $180 billion — well short of its ambitious (and frankly never realistic) target of cutting at least $2 trillion from the federal budget. And with Musk’s departure still fresh, there are reports that the federal government is trying to rehire federal workers who quit or were let go. For Elaine Kamarck, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, DOGE’s tactics will likely end up being disastrous in the long run. “DOGE came in with these huge cuts, which were not attached to a plan,” she told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. Kamarck knows all about making government more efficient. In the 1990s, she ran the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government program. “I was Elon Musk,” she told Today, Explained. With the benefit of that experience, she assesses Musk’s record at DOGE, and what, if anything, the billionaire’s loud efforts at cutting government spending added up to. Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. What do you think Elon Musk’s legacy is? Well, he will not have totally, radically reshaped the federal government. Absolutely not. In fact, there’s a high probability that on January 20, 2029, when the next president takes over, the federal government is about the same size as it is now, and is probably doing the same stuff that it’s doing now. What he did manage to do was insert chaos, fear, and loathing into the federal workforce. There was reporting in the Washington Post late last week that these cuts were so ineffective that the White House is actually reaching out to various federal employees who were laid off and asking them to come back, from the FDA to the IRS to even USAID. Which cuts are sticking at this point and which ones aren’t?First of all, in a lot of cases, people went to court and the courts have reversed those earlier decisions. So the first thing that happened is, courts said, “No, no, no, you can’t do it this way. You have to bring them back.” The second thing that happened is that Cabinet officers started to get confirmed by the Senate. And remember that a lot of the most spectacular DOGE stuff was happening in February. In February, these Cabinet secretaries were preparing for their Senate hearings. They weren’t on the job. Now that their Cabinet secretary’s home, what’s happening is they’re looking at these cuts and they’re saying, “No, no, no! We can’t live with these cuts because we have a mission to do.”As the government tries to hire back the people they fired, they’re going to have a tough time, and they’re going to have a tough time for two reasons. First of all, they treated them like dirt, and they’ve said a lot of insulting things. Second, most of the people who work for the federal government are highly skilled. They’re not paper pushers. We have computers to push our paper, right? They’re scientists. They’re engineers. They’re people with high skills, and guess what? They can get jobs outside the government. So there’s going to be real lasting damage to the government from the way they did this. And it’s analogous to the lasting damage that they’re causing at universities, where we now have top scientists who used to invent great cures for cancer and things like that, deciding to go find jobs in Europe because this culture has gotten so bad.What happens to this agency now? Who’s in charge of it?Well, what they’ve done is DOGE employees have been embedded in each of the organizations in the government, okay? And they basically — and the president himself has said this — they basically report to the Cabinet secretaries. So if you are in the Transportation Department, you have to make sure that Sean Duffy, who’s the secretary of transportation, agrees with you on what you want to do. And Sean Duffy has already had a fight during a Cabinet meeting with Elon Musk. You know that he has not been thrilled with the advice he’s gotten from DOGE. So from now on, DOGE is going to have to work hand in hand with Donald Trump’s appointed leaders.And just to bring this around to what we’re here talking about now, they’re in this huge fight over wasteful spending with the so-called big, beautiful bill. Does this just look like the government as usual, ultimately?It’s actually worse than normal. Because the deficit impacts are bigger than normal. It’s adding more to the deficit than previous bills have done. And the second reason it’s worse than normal is that everybody is still living in a fantasy world. And the fantasy world says that somehow we can deal with our deficits by cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. That is pure nonsense. Let me say it: pure nonsense.Where does most of the government money go? Does it go to some bureaucrats sitting on Pennsylvania Avenue? It goes to us. It goes to your grandmother and her Social Security and her Medicare. It goes to veterans in veterans benefits. It goes to Americans. That’s why it’s so hard to cut it. It’s so hard to cut it because it’s us. And people are living on it. Now, there’s a whole other topic that nobody talks about, and it’s called entitlement reform, right? Could we reform Social Security? Could we make the retirement age go from 67 to 68? That would save a lot of money. Could we change the cost of living? Nobody, nobody, nobody is talking about that. And that’s because we are in this crazy, polarized environment where we can no longer have serious conversations about serious issues. See More:

As President Donald Trump kicked off a birthday military parade on the streets of Washington, DC, what’s estimated as roughly 2,000 events were held across the US and beyond — protesting Trump and Elon Musk’s evisceration of government services, an unprecedented crackdown by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and countless other actions from the administration in its first five months. Held under the title “No Kings” (with, as you’ll see, one conspicuous exception), they’re the latest in several mass protests, following April’s Hands Off events and a wave of Tesla Takedown demonstrations in March.As The Verge’s Tina Nguyen went to downtown DC, we also sent reporters to No Kings demonstrations spanning the country, plus a “No Tyrants” event in the UK. How would they unfold after promises of “very heavy force” against protesters in the capital, after the deployment of thousands of military troops in a move a judge has bluntly called illegal, and after promises to “liberate” the city of Los Angeles from its “burdensome leadership” by local elected officials? What about the overnight killing of a Minnesota Democratic state representative and her husband, and the shooting of a Democratic state senator and his wife?The answer, at the events we attended, was fairly calmly — even against a backdrop of chaos.Downtown Los Angeles, CaliforniaAn inflatable baby Donald Trump, dressed in a diaper, hovered over throngs of people rallying outside of Los Angeles City Hall. Demonstrators outnumbered clumps of California National Guard members in fatigues posted up along sidewalks. “Go home to your families, we don’t need you in our streets,” one young person wearing a long braid down her back tells them while marching past. “Trump come catch these hands foo!” the back of her sign reads. I can’t see what the front says, but I can tell there’s an empty bag of Cheetos pasted to it.The big baby joins the march, floating through the streets of Downtown LA over demonstrators. A flatbed truck rolls ahead of it, the band — maybe LA’s own Ozomatli? — singing “We don’t like Trump” to the tune of “We Want The Funk.” Ducking inside Grand Central Market from the march, I talk to Puck and Twinkle Toes — two demonstrators in line for the public restrooms. Twinkle Toes tells me she’s part of an activist clown collective called Imp and Circumstance, wearing pink and white clown makeup and a striped pink and white bow wrapped around a loose hair bun atop her head. She’s here exercising her right to free speech, she says. Demonstrators in Los Angeles marched alongside an inflatable Donald Trump baby dressed in a diaper.“The more people that are out here, the more we know that this is not okay. That we don’t want an autocrat. We want democracy,” Puck tells me, adding that the Pride March in Hollywood last weekend was “nothing but love and sunshine” despite protests and burning driverless cars making headlines in downtown. “The news tries to make you think all of LA is rioting. It’s not.” Puck says.Back out on the streets, a young man quickly writes “Fuck ICE” on a black wall with white spray paint before a group of older demonstrators wearing floppy hats shushes him away — warning him that tagging will only attract more law enforcement.Further along, another older man with tufts of white hair sticking out under his Lakers cap walks stiffly and slowly along under the summer sun. A Mexican flag draped across his shoulders, he crosses Hope Street. A young man wearing a Nike cap makes his way over to ask if he wants water; the old man accepts a bottle and keeps walking without stopping. The march has looped around downtown, and is coming to an end back at City Hall. As I make my way to my bus stop, a line of police vehicles — sirens blasting — whizzes past me, back toward the crowd still gathering around City Hall.The Los Angeles Police Department issued a dispersal order for parts of downtown Los Angeles later in the afternoon, citing people “throwing rocks, bricks, bottles and other objects.” Law enforcement reportedly cleared crowds using gas, and the LAPD authorized the use of “less lethal” force.— Justine CalmaPortland, OregonFour different “No Kings” protests in the greater Portland area on Saturday drew massive crowds of tens of thousands across the city. Various activists, government officials, and representatives for politicians spoke at the rallies, which also featured music and live performances. (One advertised free drag shows.) Protesters of all ages came with dogs, strollers, flags, banners, and hand-made signs. At the downtown waterfront, some tourist boats appeared to still be departing, but the bike rental stand (which also sells ice cream) was closed for the day with a hand-lettered explanation reading “No crowns, no thrones, no kings” and “Americans against oligarchy.” Women appearing to be organizers passed out free American flags; many attendees came with their own American flags modified to fly upside down. Most protesters brought signs expressing a wide range of sentiments on the theme of “No Kings.” Some signs were surprisingly verbose (“If the founders wanted a unitary executive (a king) we’d all still be British”) while others were more succinct (“Sic semper tyrannis”). Others opted for simple images, such as a picture of a crown crossed out, or — less frequently — a guillotine. Image: Sarah JeongThe waterfront park area was filled with people from the shoreline to the curb of the nearest street, where protesters held up signs to passing cars that honked in approval. The honking of a passing fire truck sent the crowd into an uproarious cheer. Portland is about a thousand miles from the border with Mexico, but the flag of its distant neighbor nation has emerged as protest iconography in solidarity with Los Angeles. The rainbow pride flag was flown as often as the Mexican flag. Military veterans were scattered throughout the crowd, some identifying themselves as having seen action in conflicts spanning from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Emanuel, an Air Force veteran, told me that he had turned out in defense of the constitution and due process, saying, “Nobody has any rights if one person doesn’t have any rights.” Image: Sarah JeongAnger was directed at ICE and the mass deportations all throughout the day, in signage, in chants, and in rally speeches. The previous night, about 150 people protested at a local ICE facility — coincidentally located by the Tesla dealership — a mile south of downtown, near a highway exit. The ICE facility protests, which have been continuous for some days, have been steadily building up. A couple of “No Kings” signs were present on Friday. (The following day, a handful of “Chinga la migra” signs would show up at the “No Kings” protests). Demonstrators stood on the curb urging passing cars to “Honk if you hate fascists,” successfully eliciting car horns every few seconds, including some from a pristine white Tesla. Federal law enforcement in camo and helmets, their faces obscured, maced and shot at protesters with pepper balls, targeting them through the gates and sniping at them from the rooftop of the building. A handful of protesters — many wearing gas masks and respirators — formed phalanx formations in the driveway, wielding umbrellas and handmade shields. On Saturday, a speaker at one of the “No Kings” rallies advertised the occupation of the ICE facility, saying, “We’re a sanctuary city.” The crowd — replete with American flags both upside down and right side up — cheered. — Sarah JeongNew Port Richey, FloridaNearly every intersection on Pasco County’s State Road 54 looks the same: a cross-section of strip malls, each anchored by a Walmart or Target or Publix, surrounded by a mix of restaurants, nail salons, and gas stations. It’s not an environment that is particularly conducive to protests, but hundreds of people turned out in humid, 90-plus degree weather anyway. The overall size of the crowd is hard to determine, but it’s larger than I — and other attendees — anticipated, given the local demographics. (Trump won 61 percent of the vote in Pasco County in 2024.) New Port Richey, FL. Image: Gaby Del ValleEveryone is on the sidewalk; an organizer with a megaphone tells people to use crosswalks if they’re going to attempt to brave the six-lane highway. Two days earlier, Governor Ron DeSantis said Floridians could legally run over protesters on the street if they feel “threatened.” New Port Richey, FL. Image: Gaby Del ValleSo far, most drivers seem friendly. There are lots of supportive honks. One woman rolls down her window and thanks the protesters. “I love you! I wish I could be with you, but I have to work today!” she yells as she drives away. Not everyone is amenable. A man in a MAGA hat marches through the crowd waving a “thin green line” flag and yelling “long live the king!” as people in the crowd call him a traitor. A pickup truck drives by blasting “Ice Ice Baby,” waving another pro-law enforcement flag. The protesters have flags, too: American flags large and small, some upside down; Mexican; Ukrainian; Palestinian; Canadian; different configurations of pride and trans flags. Their signs, like their flags, illustrate their diverse reasons for attending: opposition to Trump’s “big beautiful” funding bill, DOGE’s budget cuts, and ICE arrests; support for immigrants, government workers, and Palestinians. One woman wears an inflatable chicken suit. Her friend pulls an effigy of Trump — dressed to look both like an eighteenth-century monarch, a taco, and a chicken — alongside her.New Port Richey, FL. Image: Gaby Del ValleMost of the demonstrators are on the older side, but there are people of all ages in attendance. “I thought it was going to be maybe 20 people with a couple of signs,” Abby, 24, says, adding that she’s pleasantly surprised at both the turnout and the fact that most of the protesters are of retirement age. Abe, 20, tells me this is his first protest. Holding a sign that says “ICE = GESTAPO,” he tells me he came out to support a friend who is Mexican. Three teenagers walk by with signs expressing support for immigrants: “While Trump destroys America, we built it.” “Trump: 3 felonies. My parents: 0.” As I drive away, I notice nine counter-protesters off to the side, around the corner from the main event. They wave their own flags, but the demonstrators seemingly pay them no mind.— Gaby Del ValleHistoric Filipinotown, Los AngelesWearing a camo baseball cap — “Desert Storm Veteran” emblazoned on the front — Joe Arciaga greets a crowd of about 100 people in Los Angeles’ Historic Filipinotown around 9:00AM.“Good morning everyone, are you ready for some beautiful trouble?” Arciaga says into the megaphone, an American flag bandana wrapped around his wrist. The faces of Filipino labor leaders Philip Vera Cruz and Larry Itliong, who organized farm workers alongside Cesar Chavez, peer over his shoulders from a mural that lines the length of Unidad Park where Arciaga and a group called Lakas Collective helped organize this neighborhood No Kings rally. “I’m a Desert Storm veteran, and I’m a father of three and a grandfather of three, and I want to work for a future where democracy is upheld, due process, civil rights, the preservation of the rule of law — That’s all I want. I’m not a billionaire, I’m just a regular Joe, right?”, he tells The Verge.Joe Arciaga speaks to people at a rally in Historic Filipinotown, Los Angeles. Image: Justine Calma“I am mad as hell,” he says, when I ask him about the Army 250th anniversary parade Donald Trump has organized in Washington, DC coinciding with the president’s birthday. “The guy does not deserve to be honored, he’s a draft dodger, right?” Arciaga says. He’s “livid” that the President and DOGE have fired veterans working for federal agencies and slashed VA staff.Arciaga organizes the crowd into two lines that file out of the park to stand along Beverly Blvd., one of the main drags through LA. Arciaga has deputized a handful of attendees with security or medical experience with whistles to serve as “marshals” tasked with flagging and de-escalating any potentially risky situation that might arise. Johneric Concordia, one of the co-founders of the popular The Park’s Finest barbecue joint in the neighborhood, is MCing out on Beverly Blvd. He and Arciaga direct people onto the sidewalks and off the asphalt as honking cars zip by. In between chants of “No hate! No fear! Immigrants are welcome here!” and rap songs from LA artist Bambu that Concordia plays from a speaker, Concordia hypes up the organizers. “Who’s cool? Joe’s cool?” He spits into the microphone connected to his speaker. “Who’s streets? Our streets!” the crowd cheers. An hour later, a man sitting at a red light in a black Prius rolls down his window. “Go home!” he yells from the intersection. “Take your Mexican flag and go home!”The crowd mostly ignores him. One attendee on the corner holds up his “No Kings” sign to the Prius without turning his head to look at him. A few minutes later, a jogger in a blue t-shirt raises his fist as he passes the crowd. “Fuck yeah guys,” he says to cheers.By 10AM, the neighborhood event is coming to a close. Demonstrators start to trickle away, some fanning out to other rallies planned across LA today. Concordia is heading out too, microphone and speaker still in hand, “If you’re headed to downtown, watch out for suspicious crew cuts!” — Justine CalmaSan Francisco, California1/10Most of the crowd trickled out after 2pm, which was the scheduled end time of the protest, but hundreds stayed in the area. Image: Vjeran PavicLondon, UKLondon’s protest was a little different than most: it was almost entirely bereft of “No Kings” signs, thanks to the fact that about two miles away much larger crowds were gathered to celebrate the official birthday of one King Charles III. “We don’t have anything against King Charles,” Alyssa, a member of organizers Indivisible London, told me. And so, “out of respect for our host country as immigrants,” they instead set up shop in front of the US embassy with a tweaked message: “No kings, no crowns” became “no tyrants, no clowns.” London, UK. Image: Dominic PrestonOf the hundreds gathered, not everyone got the memo, with a few painted signs decrying kings and crowns regardless, and one brave Brit brandishing a bit of cardboard with a simple message: “Our king is better than yours!”London, UK. Image: Dominic PrestonStill, most of the crowd were on board, with red noses, clown suits, and Pennywise masks dotted throughout, plus costumes ranging from tacos to Roman emperors. “I think tyrants is the better word, and that’s why I dressed up as Caesar, because he was the original,” says Anna, a Long Island native who’s lived in London for three years. “Nobody likes a tyrant. Nobody. And they don’t do well, historically, but they destroy a lot.”For 90 minutes or so the crowd — predominantly American, judging by the accents around me — leaned into the circus theme. Speakers shared the stage with performers, from a comic singalong of anti-Trump protest songs to a protracted pantomime in which a woman in a banana costume exhorted the crowd to pelt a Donald Trump impersonator with fresh peels. London, UK. Image: Dominic PrestonDuring a break in festivities, Alyssa told the crowd, “The most threatening sound to an oligarch is laughter.”— Dominic PrestonProspect Park, Brooklyn, New YorkThe No Kings protest at Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza was a calmer affair. Instead of gathering under the picturesque memorial arch, protesters were largely sequestered to a corner right outside Prospect Park, with some streets blocked off by police. The weekly farmers market was in full swing, meaning people cradling bundles of rhubarb were swerving in and out of protest signs that read things like, “Hating Donald Trump is Brat” and “Is it time to get out the pitch forks?” Like during the Hands Off protest in April, New York got rain on Saturday.Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Image: Mia SatoThe area where protesters were gathered made it difficult to count the crowd, but there were hundreds — perhaps a few thousand — people that streamed in and out. At one point, some protesters began marching down the street alongside Prospect Park, while others stayed at Grand Army Plaza to chant, cheer, and hold signs up at oncoming vehicles. With its proximity to the public library, the park, and densely populated neighborhoods, the massive intersection is a high-foot traffic area. Cars blared their horns as they passed, American flags waving in the chilly afternoon breeze.Jane, a Brooklyn resident who stood on the curb opposite the protesters, said she isn’t typically someone who comes out to actions like this: before the No Kings event, she had only ever been to one protest, the Women’s March. (Jane asked that The Verge use her first name only.) Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Image: Mia Sato“I’m deeply concerned about our country,” Jane said, pausing as a long stream of trucks and cars honked continuously in support of the protesters in the background. “I think Trump is behaving as an authoritarian. We’ve seen in Russia, in Hungary, in Hong Kong, that the slide from freedom to not freedom is very fast and very quick if people do not make their voices heard,” Jane said. “I’m concerned that that’s what’s happening in the United States.” Jane also cited cuts to Medicaid and funding for academic research as well as tariffs as being “unacceptable.”Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Image: Mia SatoThe event was peaceful — there were lots of kids present — and people were in good spirits despite the rain. Protest signs ran the gamut from general anti-Trump slogans (“I trust light tampons more than this administration”) to New York City-specific causes like “Andrew Cuomo can’t read” (there is a contenious mayoral election this month). One sign read, “Fix your hearts or die,” an iconic line from the late director, David Lynch’s, Twin Peaks: The Return. And of course, amid nationwide immigration raids that have been escalated by the involvement of the federal government, ICE was top of mind: one sign simply read, “Melt ICE,” and another protester held a large “NO ICE IN NYC” sign. Though it was smaller and more contained than other events, the protest didn’t lack conviction: attendees of all ages stood in the cold rain, chanting and blowing into vuvuzela, banging the lids of pots and pans. At one point a man stood on the median on the street, leading the group in chants of “No justice, no peace.” Cars laid on the horn as they drove by.— Mia SatoAkron, OhioIt’s been raining pretty hard the last few days in Akron, OH, so much that I didn’t think there’d be a large turnout for our chapter of the No Kings protest. But I was emphatically proven wrong as the crowds I saw dwarfed the Tesla Takedown protests last month. Officially, the protest was to take place in front of the John F. Seiberling Federal Building on Main Street in Downtown Akron. But the concentration of people spilled over from that small space down Main Street and up Market Street. All told, though there were no official counts, I estimate somewhere between 500 to 900 people in this blue enclave in Northeast Ohio.The mood was exuberant, buoyed by supporters who honked their horns as they passed. The chorus of horns was nonstop, and when a sanitation truck honked as it went by, cheers got louder. The chants the crowds were singing took on a local flare. Ohio is the home of the Ohio State Buckeyes and anywhere you go, shout “O-H” and you’ll invariably get an “I-O” response. The crowds used that convention to make their own chant, “OH-IO, Donald Trump has got to go.”There was no police presence here and the crowd was very good at policing itself. Ostensibly out of concern for the incidents where people have rammed their cars into protestor crowds, the people here have taken up crossing guard duties, aiding folks who wish to cross Main or Market Streets. Toward the end of my time at the protest, I saw an older gentleman wearing Kent State gear and holding a sign that read, “Remember another time the National Guard was called in?” His sign featured a drawing of the famous photo from the event in which four Kent State students during a protest of the Vietnam War were killed by National Guard troops. I caught up with him to ask him some questions and he told me his name was Chuck Ayers, a professional cartoonist, and was present at the shooting. Akron, OH. Image: Ash Parrish“When I saw the National Guard in front of the federal building in LA,” he told me, “It was just another flashback.”He did not tell me this at the time, but Ayers is a nationally recognized cartoonist, noted for co-creating the comic strip Crankshaft. He’s lived in Ohio his entire life and of course, drew that sign himself. As he was telling me about how seeing news of the National Guard being deployed in LA, I could see him strain to hold back his emotions. He said it still hurts to see this 55 years later, but that he was heartened to see so many people standing here in community and solidarity. He also said that given his pain and trauma he almost didn’t come. When I asked why he showed up when it so obviously causes him pain he said simply, “Because I have to.”— Ash ParrishOneonta, New YorkOn a northward drive to Oneonta — population roughly 15,000, the largest city in New York’s mainly rural Otsego County — one of the most prominent landmarks is a sprawling barn splashed in huge, painted block letters with TRUMP 2024. (The final digits have been faithfully updated every election since 2016.) It’s Trump country, but not uniformly Trumpy country, as evidenced by what I estimated as a hundreds-strong crowd gathered in a field just below Main Street that came together with a friendly county-fair atmosphere. Kids sat on their parents’ shoulders; American flags fluttered next to signs with slogans like SHADE NEVER MADE ANYONE LESS GAY, and attendees grumbled persistently about the event’s feeble sound system, set up on the bed of a pickup truck. It was the kind of conspicuously patriotic, far-from-urban protest that the Trump administration has all but insisted doesn’t exist.Image: Adi RobertsonBeyond a general condemnation of Trump, protest signs repped the same issues being denounced across the country. The wars in Gaza and Ukraine made an appearance, as did Elon Musk and Tesla. A couple of people called out funding cuts for organizations like NPR, one neatly lettered sign reminded us that WEATHER FORECASTING SAVES LIVES, another warned “Keep your nasty little hands off Social Security,” and a lot — unsurprisingly, given the past week’s events — attacked mass deportations and ICE. An attendee who identified himself as Bill, standing behind a placard that blocked most of him from sight, laid out his anger at the administration’s gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency. “I think if it was not for protests, there would be no change,” he told me.The event itself, supported by a coalition including the local chapter of Indivisible, highlighted topics like reproductive justice and LGBTQ rights alongside issues for groups often stereotyped as Republican blocs — there was a speech about Department of Veterans Affairs cuts and a representative from the local Office for the Aging (whose words were mostly lost to the sound system’s whims). Rules for a march around the modest downtown were laid out: no blocking pedestrians or vehicles, and for the sake of families doing weekend shopping, watch the language. “Fuck!” one person yelled indistinctly from the audience. “No, no,” the event’s emcee chided gently. The philosophy, as she put it, was one of persuasion. “We want to build the resistance, not make people angry at us.”Image: Adi RobertsonBut even in a place that will almost certainly never see a National Guard deployment or the ire of a Truth Social post, the Trump administration’s brutal deportation program had just hit close to home. Only hours before the protest commenced, ICE agents were recorded handcuffing a man and removing him in an unmarked black car — detaining what was reportedly a legal resident seeking asylum from Venezuela. The mayor of Oneonta, Mark Drnek, relayed the news to the crowd. “ICE! We see you!” boomed Drnek from the truckbed. “We recognize you for what you are, and we understand, and we reject your vile purpose.”The crowd cheered furiously. The stars and stripes waved.- Adi RobertsonSee More: Policy

Lousy ROI Elon Musk counts the cost of his four-month blitz through US government Term at DOGE did serious damage to his brands, only achieved a fraction of hoped-for savings. Joe Miller and Alex Rogers, Financial Times – May 30, 2025 9:28 am | 59 Elon Musk wields a chainsaw at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February to illustrate his aim to cut government waste Credit: Jose Luis Magana/AP Elon Musk wields a chainsaw at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February to illustrate his aim to cut government waste Credit: Jose Luis Magana/AP Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more Elon Musk’s four-month blitz through the US government briefly made him Washington’s most powerful businessman since the Gilded Age. But it has done little for his reputation or that of his companies. Musk this week formally abandoned his role as the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), which has failed to find even a fraction of the $2 trillion in savings he originally pledged. On Thursday, Donald Trump lamented his departure but said Musk “will always be with us, helping all the way.” Yet the billionaire will be left calculating the cost of his involvement with Trump and the meagre return on his $250 million investment in the US president’s election campaign. “I appreciate the fact that Mr Musk put what was good for the country ahead of what was good for his own bottom line,” Tom Cole, the Republican chair of the House Appropriations Committee, told the Financial Times. After Doge was announced, a majority of American voters believed Musk would use the body to “enrich himself and undermine his business rivals,” according to a survey, instead of streamlining the government. Progressive groups warned that he would be “rigging federal procurement for billionaires and their pals” and cut regulations that govern his companies Tesla and SpaceX. Democratic lawmakers said Doge was a “cover-up” of a more sinister, self-serving exercise by the world’s richest person. Early moves by the Trump administration suggested Musk might get value for money. A lawsuit brought by the Biden administration against SpaceX over its hiring practices was dropped in February, and regulators probing his brain-implant company Neuralink were dismissed. Musk’s satellite Internet business Starlink was touted by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick as a potential beneficiary of a $42 billion rural broadband scheme. An executive order calling for the establishment of a multibillion-dollar Iron Dome defense system in the US looked set to benefit Musk, due to SpaceX’s dominance in rocket launches. The gutting of various watchdogs across government also benefited Musk’s businesses, while a number of large US companies rushed to ink deals with Starlink or increase their advertising spending on X. Starlink also signed agreements to operate in India, Pakistan, and Vietnam, among other countries it has long wished to expand into. But while Doge took a scythe to various causes loathed by Musk, most notably international aid spending and government contracts purportedly linked to diversity initiatives or “woke” research, it also caused severe blowback to the billionaire’s businesses, particularly Tesla. At one point during his Doge tenure, Tesla’s stock had fallen 45 percent from its highest point last year, and reports emerged that the company’s board of directors had sought to replace Musk as chief executive. The 53-year-old’s personal wealth dropped by tens of billions of dollars, while his dealerships were torched and death threats poured in. Some of the brand damage to Tesla, until recently Musk’s primary source of wealth, could be permanent. “Eighty percent of Teslas in the US were sold in blue zip codes,” a former senior employee said. “Obviously that constituency has been deeply offended.” Starlink lost lucrative contracts in Canada and Mexico due to Musk’s political activities, while X lost 11 million users in Europe alone. Probes of Tesla and SpaceX by government regulators also continued apace, while the Trump administration pressed ahead with plans to abolish tax credits for electric vehicles and waged a trade war vehemently opposed by Musk that threatened to further damage car sales. In the political arena, few people were cheered by Doge’s work. Democrats were outraged by the gutting of foreign aid and by Musk’s 20-something acolytes gaining access to the Treasury’s payment system, along with the ousting of thousands of federal workers. Republicans looked askance at attempts to target defense spending. And true budget hawks were bitter that Musk could only cut a few billion dollars. Bill Gates even accused Musk of “killing the world’s poorest children” through his actions at Doge. Musk, so used to getting his way at his businesses, struggled for control. At various points in his tenure he took on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Transport Secretary Sean Duffy, and trade tsar Peter Navarro, while clashing with several other senior officials. Far from being laser-focused on eliminating waste, Musk’s foray into government was a “revenge tour” against a bureaucracy the billionaire had come to see as the enemy of innovation, a former senior colleague of Musk’s said, highlighting the entrepreneur’s frustration with COVID-19 regulations in California, his perceived snub by the Biden administration, and his anger over his daughter’s gender transition. Trump’s AI and crypto tsar, David Sacks, an influential political voice in the tech world, “whipped [Musk] up into a very, very far-right kind of mindset,” the person added, to the extent that was “going to help this administration in crushing the ‘woke’ agenda.” Neither Musk nor Sacks responded to requests for comment. Musk, who claimed Doge only acted in an “advisory role,” this week expressed frustration at it being used as a “whipping boy” for unpopular cuts decided by the White House and cabinet secretaries. “Trump, I think, was very savvy and allowed Doge to kind of take all those headlines for a traditional political scapegoat,” said Sahil Lavingia, head of a commerce start-up who worked for Doge until earlier this month. Musk, he added, might also have been keen to take credit for the gutting of USAID and other moves but ultimately garnered unwanted attention. “If you were truly evil, [you] would just be more quiet,” said Lavingia, who joined the initiative in order to streamline processes within government. “You would do the evil stuff quietly.” The noise surrounding Musk, whose ability to dominate news cycles with a single post on his social media site X rivaled Trump’s own hold on the headlines, also frustrated the administration. This week, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller took to X to indirectly rebut the billionaire’s criticism of Trump’s signature tax bill, which he had lambasted for failing to cut the deficit or codify Doge’s cuts. Once almost synonymous with Musk, Doge is now being melded into the rest of government. In a briefing on Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that following Musk’s departure, cabinet secretaries would “continue to work with the respective Doge employees who have onboarded as political appointees at all of these agencies.” She added: “The Doge leaders are each and every member of the President’s Cabinet and the President himself.” Doge’s aims have also become decidedly more quotidian. Tom Krause, a Musk ally who joined Doge and was installed at Treasury, briefed congressional staff this week on improvements to the IRS’s application program interfaces and customer service, according to a person familiar with the matter. Other Doge staffers are doing audits of IT contracts—work Lavingia compares with that done by McKinsey consultants. Freed from the constraints of being a government employee, Musk is increasingly threatening to become a thorn in Trump’s side. Soon after his Doge departure was announced, he again criticized the White House, this time over its plan to cancel clean energy tax credits. “Teddy Roosevelt had that great adage: ‘speak softly but carry a big stick’,” Fred Thiel, the chief executive of Bitcoin mining company MARA Holdings, told the FT. “Maybe Elon’s approach was a little bit different.” © 2025 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way. Joe Miller and Alex Rogers, Financial Times Joe Miller and Alex Rogers, Financial Times 59 Comments

Gone CDC can no longer help prevent lead poisoning in children, state officials say Under Trump, the CDC's Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program was cut. Beth Mole – May 23, 2025 11:54 am | 97 The three recalled pouches linked to lead poisonings. Credit: FDA The three recalled pouches linked to lead poisonings. Credit: FDA Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more Amid the brutal cuts across the federal government under the Trump administration, perhaps one of the most gutting is the loss of experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who respond to lead poisoning in children. On April 1, the staff of the CDC's Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program was terminated as part of the agency's reduction in force, according to NPR. The staff included epidemiologists, statisticians, and advisors who specialized in lead exposures and responses. The cuts were immediately consequential to health officials in Milwaukee, who are currently dealing with a lead exposure crisis in public schools. Six schools have had to close, displacing 1,800 students. In April, the city requested help from the CDC's lead experts, but the request was denied—there was no one left to help. In a Congressional hearing this week, US health secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told lawmakers, "We have a team in Milwaukee." But Milwaukee Health Commissioner Mike Totoraitis told NPR that this is false. "There is no team in Milwaukee," he said. "We had a single [federal] staff person come to Milwaukee for a brief period to help validate a machine, but that was separate from the formal request that we had for a small team to actually come to Milwaukee for our Milwaukee Public Schools investigation and ongoing support there." Kennedy has also previously told lawmakers that lead experts at the CDC who were terminated would be rehired. But that statement was also false. The health department's own communications team told ABC that the lead experts would not be reinstated. While Milwaukee continues to struggle, a Stat report Friday hints at losses yet to come. Looking back at the national scandal of lead-contaminated apple-sauce pouches, Stat reported that at least six of the CDC scientists and experts who worked on that nationwide poisoning event are gone. The poisonings were first revealed in cases in Hickory, North Carolina, where officials relied on help from the CDC to track down the source. The CDC's investigation subsequently identified 566 lead-poisoned children across 44 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, DC, and helped get the tainted applesauce off shelves, Stat noted. If the poisonings had happened now, "we wouldn’t have been able to do the broad outreach to tell all the state lead programs to look out for this, and we wouldn’t have been able to measure the impact because CDC is the one that does that across state lines," one laid-off CDC worker told the outlet. Further, the CDC's Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program is what funded the three North Carolina epidemiologists who collect and process lead-testing data. The funding runs out in October, and with the program now wiped out, it's unclear what will happen. "It’s hard to sleep through the night," Ed Norman, head of the children’s environmental health unit at North Carolina’s health department, told Stat. He tried asking CDC staff what happens after October, but everyone he had been in touch with is gone. Beth Mole Senior Health Reporter Beth Mole Senior Health Reporter Beth is Ars Technica’s Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes. 97 Comments

The Trump administration has slashed the US Space Force's workforce by almost 14 percent, a dramatic cut that could have an enormous impact on the smallest and youngest branch of the US Armed Forces.As Defense One reports, early retirement and voluntary-resignation programs, both widely used tactics by the newly-minted Trump administration to slash government budgets, are having an "outsized impact" on the Space Force.According to chief of space operations general Chance Saltzman, 14 percent, or roughly 780 civilians, are affected. That's considerably higher than the ten percent that officials had warned would be cut earlier this month.It's a troubling development that could directly undermine the Pentagon's mission to secure the United States' interests in space.During a Senate Armed Services committee hearing this week, Saltzman warned that the Space Force could leave the nation's efforts to protect its assets in orbit woefully behind schedule, allowing adversaries to gain the upper hand.Meanwhile, the Department of Defense is also heavily affected and is expected to lose five to eight percent of its civilian workforce."I'm worried about replacing that level of expertise in the near term as we try to resolve it and make sure we have a good workforce doing that acquisition," Saltzman said.And even more Space Force staffers could soon walk, taking deferred-resignation offers."The DOD is really looking at what the size of the civilian workforce is, and so if those incentives to reshape the workforce affect the Space Force, I'm not sure exactly where we're going to end up, what our final size is going to be," Saltzman said. "As soon as I understand what that size is, then we will redistribute, and reallocate this for."The cuts came at an extremely unfortunate time for the Space Force."We were in a period of managed growth, and so there was a deficit when we were trying to get to a larger civilian workforce, and we were asked to stop, and then asked to offer some to resign early," Saltzman said at the committee hearing.Beyond early retirements and voluntary resignations, the Space Force was already planning to cut its workforce by as much as eight percent, according to an announcement earlier this year.Where the cuts leave the Space Force's efforts to gain the upper hand in the space domain remains to be seen. Officials have long warned of adversaries, including Russia and China, that are developing space-based weapons and potentially leaving the US behind."We are not adequately funded for the new missions that I've been given in space superiority," Saltzman said.Despite all of these cuts, the White House announced that it would build an enormous, potentially half-a-trillion-dollar "Golden Dome" missile and air defense shield, indicating that its priorities may simply lie elsewhere.More on the Space Force: The Space Force Is Working on an Aircraft Carrier for SpaceShare This Article

Snehal Antani has been tinkering with technology since childhood. His father, an electrical engineer, would give him broken devices and task him with fixing them.  He moved into computer science as an undergraduate, eventually earning his master's degree. He then worked for IBM and eventually served as CIO for GE Capital and CTO for Splunk. In 2018, he joined Joint Special Operations Command, a division of the United States Special Operations Command, as CTO. He started Horizon3.ai, an AI pen testing company, with JSOC colleague Anthony Pillitiere in 2019. Here, he describes his unusual career path and how he deploys the skills he learned along the way to facilitate innovation. Can you tell me about your early tech education? When I went to undergrad at Purdue, I knew I was going to do computer science. What I love about computer science is that it’s horizontal -- so I can apply that to any vertical that I'm interested in. I was interested in stock trading while I was an undergrad, so I was able to write code to learn how to trade stocks. The software programming and systems architecture skills that I picked up could be applied to solve any job. What did the early portion of your career teach you?I optimized for learning. I used to sit in the hallway in front of my team lead’s office at IBM. He couldn't see me, but I could see his whiteboard. I would try to understand something he had explained to me. I was too afraid to go in and ask for more information, so I would literally sit on the floor and just stare at it, trying to make sure I understood it in detail.  Related:I wanted to be an expert in distributed systems and enterprise software. The first few jobs I took were all about learning as much as I could in that domain.  I was an awful speaker. I forced myself to become a better communicator. I then moved over to learn how to launch products in product management. I was an awful product manager the first year. But there was no way I was going to get better except by throwing myself into that arena and trying to figure it out.  In 2012 I got recruited to be a CIO at GE Capital. I had never managed anyone before. GE made a bet on me. I learned a lot and I was able to impact the organization as well. Having a solid technical foundation and being able to communicate well were probably the two most important skills I developed early in my career. Can you describe a scenario in which you felt out of your depth? When I was in IBM, there was a customer in Germany struggling with their tech. Their banking system kept crashing. Steve Mills, who was a legendary senior vice president, sent out a message that said, "This customer is struggling. No one can figure out what's wrong. Who here knows how to fix this problem?" I was a nobody at IBM. I replied directly to Mills and said, "I think I can fix this problem. Send me." Related:Once it got there, they were explaining their problem. I had no idea what they were talking about. All I could think was, "I’m going to get fired. I just embarrassed myself and my company." Suddenly, everything in my brain clicked: every single aspect of enterprise software technology, operating systems, distributed systems. We ended up solving the problem about 90 minutes later.  How has life in the C-suite changed for tech folks? I remember going into meetings at GE Capital. People thought I was there to manage the projector. Some of those teams struggled to understand the role technology played in creating a competitive edge. GE had just come off gutting and outsourcing the bulk of their technology DNA. Throughout the 2000s it didn’t seem that there was a belief that technology was a competitive advantage. I think there was a realization that they had gone too far. They started to try to bring in more technical talent. In the mid 2000s through 2015, tech was a back-office function. I believe that’s shifted dramatically, especially now when you think about AI and the advantage you can create using technology. There are certainly CIOs in my network who still view themselves as a back-office function. They don’t want to learn the business. But I believe that type of CIO is in the minority now. Related:Why did you join Joint Special Operations Command in 2018? I was 21 when 9/11 happened. I remember this feeling of both helplessness and the desire to do something about it. Was there a multiplier way to affect change -- one calorie in causing 10 calories of impact? There wasn’t an obvious way for me to do that. I remember in 2014 watching the rise of ISIS. The desire to make a difference came back at a much more intense level. The Special Operations community had invited me to do some planning sessions with them. How could they increase the velocity of innovation in order to keep up with the adversary?  Terrorist organizations were able to use off the shelf technology -- open-source software, cloud computing, drones -- to innovate lethal capabilities that were otherwise only available to armies. And so, the question was, how do we accelerate the innovation velocity? A lot of that experience was drawn from my time at GE Capital. I was able to join as the first ever CTO. For me, it was about purpose and impact. There’s no clearer mission than looking at human beings putting themselves in danger to help others. Anything that we could do using technology to reduce risk to them was an incredible opportunity. How did you come to found Horizon3.ai? I met Tony, my co-founder, at JSOC. We saw a challenge: We have no idea we’re secure until the bad guys show up. Are we fixing the right vulnerabilities? Are security tools actually working? We wanted to find a way to build an autonomous system that allows you to hack yourself as often as you want. Fiercely prioritizing problems that mattered was the first thing that we were able to do because our autonomous agent was able to hack organizations, tell you exactly how it hacked them, and then tell you exactly what to fix and how to fix it. Once you fix it, you can run a retest to verify that you're good to go. Find, fix, verify is the primary experience within the product. 

In May 2015, prominent right-wing intellectual Charles Murray published a book calling on the superrich to fund an American rebellion against their government.Titled By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, the book argued that the growth of the regulatory state was worse than dangerous: It was an existential threat to the American way of life. For this reason, federal authority had become fundamentally illegitimate. The normal political process — most notably elections — was hopelessly compromised, to the point where no candidate promising to roll back the size of the state could hope to win.The best solution, in Murray’s eyes, was for wealthy donors to fund a legal defense designed to facilitate a mass campaign of civil disobedience against the regulatory state. This so-called Madison Fund would defend people accused of noncompliance in court and pay any assessed fines if they lose. With enough donations, the Madison Fund could ensure that nearly anyone could disobey regulations with impunity.By the People has largely been forgotten today. It was published one month before Donald Trump descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower, announcing a presidential bid that would alter the course of history. Trump’s rejection of old GOP orthodoxies, including its libertarian hostility to programs like Social Security, suggested that Murray’s anti-government radicalism might belong to an era of the past.But the events of the second Trump term, most notably DOGE’s lawless gutting of the federal government, suggest that the book deserves a second look. Its extreme hostility to the very idea of liberal governance, its skepticism of democracy, and its faith in the primacy of the wealthy over the law all prefigured the way that Trump and Elon Musk would assail key functions of government in 2025.Moreover, it helps us understand why mainstream conservatives — the sort who pledge unending fealty to the Constitution and the founders — have been so okay with all of this. It’s not only that people on the right fear crossing Trump; it’s also, in part, that they share his belief that the American government is no longer worthy of respect.For if the state has become too big to command legitimacy, to the point where ordinary citizens are justified in disobeying it, then why should anyone care if the duly elected government breaks laws in pursuit of shrinking itself?By the People, explainedCharles Murray has been a leading intellectual figure on the right for a very long time. Generally speaking, his work has focused on class and race inequality in the United States — and, more specifically, with the idea that welfare programs either do little to fix these problems or actually make them worse.His most (in)famous book, 1994’s The Bell Curve, argues that much of America’s class and racial stratification can be explained by gaps in IQ — suggesting, in one of its most provocative chapters, that white people have higher IQs than Black people due to their superior genes. The book made theorizing about genetic differences between the races acceptable among certain corners of the mainstream right, paving the way for scientific racism’s resurgence in the Trump era.By the People is, in some ways, a more ambitious book than The Bell Curve. Moving away from social policy, Murray strays into the realm of political theory — arguing not just that liberal policies have bad consequences, but that that they are fundamentally illegitimate uses of state power. The concept of “legitimacy,” generally speaking, refers to the principle used to assess whether a particular government is morally justified in exercising political power. In Murray’s view, the key principle is government non-interference in personal affairs. The modern regulatory state, and its involvement in life ranging from setting education policy to licensing barber shops, has become so corrosive of American liberty that it cannot be seen as legitimate.“It is part of our national catechism that government is instituted to protect our unalienable rights, and that when it becomes destructive of those rights, the reason for our allegiance is gone,” he writes. “At that point, revolution is not treason, but the people’s right.”Charles Murray speaking at the 2013 FreedomFest in Las Vegas. Gage Skidmore/Flickr Creative CommonsTo support this claim, he quotes a list of luminaries — ranging from Alexis de Tocqueville to Grover Cleveland — to argue that Americans have almost always believed in a state whose legitimacy is grounded in self-limitation.“The federal government lost its legitimacy in theory during the constitutional revolution of 1937-1942, lost its legitimacy in practice during the 1960s, and it has been downhill ever since,” he writes. “It is by that historical understanding that many of us who are devoted to limited government have thought of ourselves as living in a post-American country, governed by people who mouth the clichés about America as the land of the free without understanding what freedom means.”It may occur to you, at this point, that Murray has a democracy problem. Very few Americans actually agree with this libertarian vision of the American state, and they express that disagreement by electing non-libertarian politicians. In a democracy, the key principle of legitimacy is not libertarian theories of rights but rather popular sovereignty. It is the people, collectively, who decide on the limits of power — under conditions of free debate and exercised within constitutional constraints. If the people think the regulatory state is legitimate, why should Charles Murray and his libertarian friends get to ignore the laws that everyone else voted for?By the People offers two contradictory answers to this question. The first is that the people really have turned on the government, a big claim Murray supports with data showing a consistent decline in trust in government over the years. But this is measuring something different than basic legitimacy. Moreover, Murray once again has a democracy problem. If voters really were so furious about big government that they believed the entire state was illegitimate, then why aren’t radical anti-government politicians winning in landslides? To this, we have Murray’s second answer: that the people are bought off. They have become so dependent on government goodies that there is no hope for a return to pre-New Deal America.“The proportion of Americans who depend on the federal government to put food on the table, whether through welfare, Social Security, a government paycheck, or a paycheck financed by a federal contract, will continue to increase, and it will push the Republican Party to the center in all presidential elections,” he writes.Here Murray betrays himself: admitting, implicitly, that he does not really care about popular sovereignty. He admits that people routinely choose, in democratic elections, to authorize and reauthorize an expansive state — but dismisses their right to make a choice he personally finds antithetical to liberty. He is certain his libertarian view of legitimacy is true, regardless of what the people think, and thus is convinced that people like him are justified in ignoring the law.But how could anyone ever hope to win a fight against the federal leviathan when the people have been bought off by Social Security? This is where his “Madison Fund” financing civil disobedience comes in: Murray believes that successfully defending people who ignore regulations will help others realize that a better future without government interference could actually be possible.And it all starts, in his mind, with one good billionaire.“The Madison Fund could get started,” he writes, “if just one wealthy American cared enough to contribute, say, a few hundred million dollars.”By the People as Trumpist urtextMurray’s specific vision for a “Madison Fund” was certainly idiosyncratic. But his broader argument about legitimacy was widely shared on the 2010s right, heard often among the Tea Party types who dominated conservative politics for most of the Obama presidency.Indeed, By the People was received warmly among traditional conservatives, some of whom described its wild arguments as helpfully restrained. “If you want a book that will crisply outline what has happened to Madisonian America since the Great Depression, without scaring the neighbors, it’s your lucky day,” Charles C.W. Cooke writes in National Review. Some even suggested it didn’t go far enough. Writing in Law and Liberty, Lenore Ealy argued that Murray gave short shrift to the concerns of social conservatives. And that liberal America “created for itself a soft despotism” where people from various “identity groups” wield power to silence “men and women unwilling to subsume their identity in the will of the State.” Rolling back the state is not far enough, Ealy says — there needs to be a revolution in “cultural mores” that beats back identity liberalism.By the People remains useful as an unusually clear explanation of how widely shared premises on the establishment right led the country to Trumpist perdition.It is striking that, even before Trump, the idea that the modern American state was fundamentally illegitimate was such a prevalent view among conservative activists and intellectuals. The question was not whether the right must always defer to the democratic process, but how far it might have to go to get around it.In Trump’s second term, we are seeing the fruits of this vision. In many ways, you can draw a straight line between the basic premises of By the People and Trump’s assault on the federal government. The mechanisms are very different, but the ends are strikingly similar.During the 2024 election, Elon Musk became the billionaire anti-government donor Murray dreamed of, contributing “a few hundred million dollars” to the Trump campaign. His alignment with Trump got him appointed the head of a government-slashing committee that we now know as DOGE; once in power, he and his allies attempted to gut the functioning of various different federal agencies (to various degrees of success).Elon Musk at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2025 in Maryland. Andrew Harnik/Getty ImagesDOGE was not an effective cost-cutting mechanism. Nor has it turned up significant evidence of fraud. What it has accomplished, rather, is make federal agencies less capable of implementing duly authorized regulations. Effectively, it’s done what Murray wanted from the opposite end: decreasing the scope of the regulatory state not by resistance from the bottom, but a top-down effort to strip its capabilities. (Nor is Musk alone in this; look at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s firing of large chunks of America’s public health officials).The legal authority for all of this is dubious at best. Trump and DOGE have simply asserted the power to mass-fire employees and redirect congressionally appropriated funds, even though there are good reasons to believe that they do not have the legal authority to do either. Like Murray, they do not see the law as morally binding. These aren’t just simple parallels. The influence of ideas like By the People’s helps us understand why a conservative movement that once claimed to stand for the constitutional order has become comfortable with Trump wrecking it.The essential idea of Murray’s book, and much of pre-Trump conservatism, was that the federal government had become hostile to founding American ideals: that the administrative state represents an unconstitutional cancerous growth on a brilliant governing framework.“We have overseen and sanctioned the growth of an administrative system that concentrates the power to make laws and the power to enforce them in the hands of a vast and unaccountable administrative apparatus that finds no comfortable home in our constitutional structure,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a 2015 concurrence. “The end result may be trains that run on time (although I doubt it), but the cost is to our Constitution and the individual liberty it protects.”If you take this position, thinly veiled comparisons to fascism and all, then the fact that Trump and Musk have frequently exceeded legal boundaries starts to look a lot less problematic. Through this lens, the administration is trying to rescue the Constitution’s original design from a liberalism that has corrupted it. Any legal violations along the way are offenses against a political order that at present does not deserve citizens’ allegiance. In February, the news outlet NOTUS asked Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) about the lawfulness of the Trump/Musk agenda. Tillis conceded that it “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” However, he added, “nobody should bellyache about that” — because “it’s not uncommon for presidents to flex a little bit on where they can spend and where they can stop spending.”Thom Tillis is not a firebreather: He’s a purple state senator widely seen as a moderate. That he would take such a permissive position on what even he admits is lawbreaking shows the corrosive influence of Murray-style thinking on the right today.By the People, on its own, may be a mostly forgotten book. But it remains useful as an unusually clear explanation of how widely shared premises on the establishment right led the country to Trumpist perdition.This story was adapted for the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.Correction, May 21, 9:20 am ET: A previous version of this story misdescribed Trump’s 2015 descent down the golden escalator at Trump Tower.See More:

OpinionMay 20, 20254 min readA Good Workout Gets Your Helpful Gut Microbes in Shape, TooA workout boosts the fitness of your gut microbiome. This creates molecules that aids your immune system, metabolism, and moreBy Lydia Denworth Jay BendtThe idea that our workouts could benefit the trillions of microbes that live in our guts—bacteria and viruses that help our immune systems, metabolism, digestion, and other key bodily functions—isn’t obvious. At least it’s not as obvious as the connection between diet and the gut microbiome, as these microbes are called. But evidence is growing that an aerobic workout such as jogging can improve the health of the gut microbes, which in turn improves overall physical health. There are early indications that the relationship works the other way, too: a healthy gut microbiome seems to increase exercise capacity.“When people think about the gut, they default to diet and probiotics,” says Sara Campbell, an exercise physiologist at Rutgers University who specializes in gut microbiota. But now many scientists are “moving toward the reality that exercise can be beneficial for the intestines,” she says.A “healthy” microbiome usually means gut bacteria are abundant and diverse; exercise appears to affect both these qualities. The gut microbes of an elite athlete are more diverse than those of nonathletes or recreational athletes. But a more pertinent issue for health, says Jacob Allen, an exercise physiologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is “what the microbe is actually doing.”On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Aerobic exercise encourages activity in bacteria that produce short-chain fatty acids, which provide essential support for physiological processes.One important finding is that aerobic exercise encourages activity in bacteria that produce short-chain fatty acids, which provide essential support for physiological processes. Most fatty acid molecules consist of 16 or 18 carbons, but—as the name suggests—short-chain fatty acids range from just one to six.Of these smaller molecules, butyrate has emerged as an especially important link between exercise and the gut. It supplies energy for a variety of tissues, including the epithelial cells lining the gut, and it can reduce inflammation and improve the ability of cells to take in insulin. Our bodies naturally make a little bit of butyrate, but most is produced by microbes, and its output is boosted by aerobic exercise. (Very few studies have looked at the connection between strength training and butyrate levels, and those that have didn’t find the same effect.)This link between exercise and the gut was barely a glimmer in scientists’ eyes some 15 years ago, when exercise immunologist Marc Cook was a graduate student at the Urbana-Champaign campus. He knew exercise improved symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease, particularly the type called ulcerative colitis. But scientists didn’t understand why. Cook turned to mice to investigate and found that if they ran on a wheel, they were protected against a mouse version of colitis. In addition, there was a sevenfold increase in beneficial bacteria in the lining of the rodents’ colons.In a 2018 study, Allen, Cook (who is now at North Carolina A&T State University), and others tested a gut-health exercise intervention in humans for the first time. They trained both lean and obese people, all of whom were sedentary, to exercise on a treadmill or bike. Everyone started at moderate intensity three days a week and increased to one hour of high-intensity exercise per session.After six weeks all participants showed increases in butyrate and two other short-chain fatty acids, acetate and propionate. They also got the expected benefits of exercise, such as reductions in fat mass and improvements in cardiorespiratory fitness. (All the effects were greater in lean people, a finding that the researchers don’t yet understand.) After a further six weeks in which everyone stopped exercising, microbes in the gut returned to baseline levels, and health benefits decreased.Researchers haven’t fully teased out which effects of exercise can be directly attributed to microbiota versus the other changes brought on by physical activity, but there is a clear difference in gut environment. “We know there’s a slight shunting of blood toward the muscles and away from the gastrointestinal tract during exercise,” Allen says. That causes a small decrease in oxygen in gut tissue. There are changes in pH and temperature within the GI tract as well. Each of these shifts could affect which microbes survive.Studies in humans are complicated by the enormous diversity of microbiomes from person to person and from group to group. Researchers are now trying to account for differences in response. Campbell is investigating variations by sex. Cook is studying the effects of short-chain-fatty-acid-producing bacteria in Black people, who have a high rate of hypertension. In a pilot study, he and his colleagues identified bacteria associated with high blood pressure in Black athletes, and they hope to identify a target for intervention.As for the effects of microbiota on exercise capacity, most of that evidence comes from mice. Animals dosed with antibiotics to kill off their microbiomes exercise less than mice with healthy microbiomes and reach exhaustion faster. Research has also shown that an intact gut microbiota contributes to more muscle development.This evolving research doesn’t change the standard recommendation for human exercise, which is to engage in at least 150 minutes of moderate physical activity a week. But it adds strength to the arguments for doing such activity and may ultimately help explain why people respond to exercise differently. Someday there may even be a way boost the microbiome so that it responds better to time in the gym. Already, though, the science gives new meaning to the idea of gutting out your workout.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Under the second Trump administration, there is one group of people getting expedited access to refugee status and resettlement in the US. It’s not citizens of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where 6.1 million people have been internally displaced due to decades of fighting among armed groups and widespread gender-based violence. The US is not currently accepting more DRC citizens as refugees under President Donald Trump.It’s not Afghan citizens either, despite the continued human rights violations, especially against women and girls, perpetrated by the Taliban after the US withdrawal from the country in 2021. Instead, the Trump administration is now revoking temporary protections for many Afghans already in America, which could result in their deportation back to Afghanistan.And it’s not the Sudanese people, of whom nearly 8.6 million have been internally displaced amid a conflict between military and paramilitary forces.A subset of white South Africans, known as Afrikaners, are the only people Trump has newly admitted to the US as refugees. Trump has described them, without evidence, as victims of a “genocide that’s taking place” and anti-white discrimination, echoing rhetoric that has long circulated on the far right. And he’s sought to punish South Africa for that by cutting off US aid. (The US government will have to admit some refugees from other countries who were already in the resettlement pipeline before Trump took office, per a court order issued in late March after the president tried to suspend almost all refugee admissions. But that court-ordered acceptance is a sharp contrast from the administration’s enthusiastic outreach to Afrikaners.) Trump’s effort to label Afrikaners “refugees” is based on dubious pretenses. The South African government and even some white South Africans argue that, after the end of the apartheid system, which supported white minority rule in South Africa until the early 1990s, white people remain a privileged class. The typical Black household has 5 percent of the wealth of the typical white household. And police data does not show that Afrikaners, many of whom are farmers, suffer from disproportionate levels of violence that would amount to genocide. As a small minority of the population, white people still own a majority of the country’s land. That hasn’t stopped Elon Musk from criticizing the country’s land ownership laws as “racist” against white people following the signing of a land reform bill earlier this year.The law allows the government to seize property without compensation only in limited circumstances, including when the land is not in use or has been abandoned and if the owner is merely holding it as an investment in the hope that it will appreciate in value. Afrikaner farmers have argued that the law could be used to seize their land against their will, but the government has contested that claim, and there is no evidence that this is occurring.Instead, the evidence suggests Trump is selectively plucking a white minority for resettlement, even as nonwhite people facing war and famine around the world have been shut out from protection in the US.On Monday, the first group of these Afrikaners, 49 people in total, arrived in the US, where they will be offered a “rapid pathway” to US citizenship and receive assistance from a refugee office within the Department of Health and Human Services.To learn more about the impetus behind Trump’s decision, as well as about the situation in South Africa, I spoke with Jacob S. Dlamini, a Princeton University history professor whose research has focused on South African apartheid. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.Do white Afrikaners have a legitimate claim to refugee status?I grew up under apartheid, literally under signs that said, “Whites only.” White boys chased Black folks for sport when I was growing up. This feels like a real kick in the gut. There is no substance to the claim that Afrikaners as a group have been persecuted. These are not refugees by any stretch of the imagination. They are people who simply do not want to live under majority-Black rule.Some of them will talk about crime. I come from a family of small business owners who have suffered because of crime. I’ve lost friends to crime. I’ve lost relatives to crime. Independent stats show that whites as a group are not disproportionately targeted. If anything, it’s poor people who bear the brunt of South Africa’s crime problem — and it is a serious problem.In his executive order granting refugee status to white Afrikaners, Trump referenced the South African government’s recent land reform bill, which he claims allows the seizure of “ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation” and is “fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.” Does that square with the reality in South Africa?The very first piece of legislation that Nelson Mandela signed into law when he became president in May of 1994 was a land reform bill whose job was to correct what is essentially South Africa’s original political sin, and that was the taking away of land from indigenous peoples and allocating it to white South Africans for exclusive ownership. For the past 30 years, the government has actually failed spectacularly on that front. That failure helps explain why today, in May 2025, whites still own more than 70 percent of farmland in South Africa. [Editor’s note: Only 7 percent of the country’s population is white.]In fact, as white farmers themselves have been pointing out ever since Trump announced his plans to do this, no single white farmer has had land taken away from him, and there is no suggestion that that’s going to change anytime soon.Do you think Trump’s policy is evidence of Elon Musk’s influence in this administration?Musk is not the only South African who’s got Trump’s ear. There’s a whole cohort of white men who grew up, for some of their lives, under apartheid in South Africa. That is significant.The mistake that the media in the US has been making has been to focus on Musk and to assume that it all radiates from him to Trump. In fact, there’s this whole cohort of white men who have yet to come to terms with democracy in South Africa, meaning that a poor Black person who has no prospects in life has as much say politically when it comes to elections as does a very rich white person. That’s what it comes down to.They’ve lost their power, which is not the same thing as privilege. For example, it’s still the case that when you look at corporate South Africa, 62.1 percent of corporate leaders are white, and most of those are men. Only 17.2 percent are so-called Black African. And that is 30 years since the advent of democracy.What do Trump’s policies mean for the South African government?They’re in for four years of hell with Trump. But it is also, I’m hoping, a wake-up call for the current [African National Congress] government to take South Africa’s poor much more seriously. The incompetence and the corruption of the past 30 years have, in some ways, pushed the ANC off the higher moral ground that it occupied when Mandela was president. Trump’s decision to treat the chief beneficiaries of apartheid as victims of a genocide taking place only in his head gives the ANC a chance to get back on that moral high ground by reminding the world just how criminal apartheid was.The single biggest mistake that the ANC made at the moment of transition in 1994 was to assume that all that you needed to do to correct the injustices of apartheid was to create a Black capitalist class. All that this did was create this massive patronage system that had government contracts at its center. This made the Black bourgeoisie dependent on government business and encouraged corruption. Looking back over the last 30 years, we can see that thinking that you could use government contracts to create a Black business class was just a terrible idea. Ironically, the ANC copied the idea from successive apartheid governments, which used government patronage to build an Afrikaner business class. There is not a single Afrikaner [billionaire in US dollars] in South Africa today who did not get their start on the back of apartheid government contracts.Corruption is endemic, and it’s a huge problem. Of course, the thing about corruption in South Africa that we forget is that it’s non-racial, it cuts across racial lines. Because you need these cross-cultural and racial networks to move money around, to launder money. It’s a national enterprise.Who has suffered because of the incompetence and the corruption? It’s all South Africans, especially the poor. White Afrikaners as a group have not suffered exclusively. How should we think about Trump’s decision to welcome white Afrikaners as refugees in the context of his gutting of US refugee admissions broadly?It is bitterly ironic that he has stopped the processing of refugee applications for everyone except this group of privileged white South Africans. Marco Rubio kicked out South Africa’s ambassador to the US for pointing out the basis of Trump’s animus toward South Africa, but there is no mistaking the white supremacist underpinnings of this. There is no mistaking the crude racism at the heart of this. You have here an administration that has and is punishing people who really need all the help they can get, who are coming here or are here for better opportunities for their kids and for themselves, but it will stop at nothing to take this very privileged group of white South Africans and turn them into refugees, when, in fact, they’re anything but refugees.I grew up under apartheid. My mother went to her grave without having voted in the country of her birth. I grew up fighting the system. I now find myself in 2025 having to relitigate whether apartheid was wrong. That is what this amounts to: taking people who benefited and continue to benefit from this awful system called apartheid and turning them into victims and refugees. What Trump is communicating is that apartheid was right. That is morally repugnant and just plain obscene.See More:

On a crisp morning in early April, Dan McEvoy and Bjoern Bingham cut clean lines down a wide run at the Heavenly Ski Resort in South Lake Tahoe, then ducked under a rope line cordoning off a patch of untouched snow.  They side-stepped up a small incline, poled past a row of Jeffrey pines, then dropped their packs.  The pair of climate researchers from the Desert Research Institute (DRI) in Reno, Nevada, skied down to this research plot in the middle of the resort to test out a new way to take the temperature of the Sierra Nevada snowpack. They were equipped with an experimental infrared device that can take readings as it’s lowered down a hole in the snow to the ground. The Sierra’s frozen reservoir provides about a third of California’s water and most of what comes out of the faucets, shower heads, and sprinklers in the towns and cities of northwestern Nevada. As it melts through the spring and summer, dam operators, water agencies, and communities have to manage the flow of billions of gallons of runoff, storing up enough to get through the inevitable dry summer months without allowing reservoirs and canals to flood. The need for better snowpack temperature data has become increasingly critical for predicting when the water will flow down the mountains, as climate change fuels hotter weather, melts snow faster, and drives rapid swings between very wet and very dry periods.  In the past, it has been arduous work to gather such snowpack observations. Now, a new generation of tools, techniques, and models promises to ease that process, improve water forecasts, and help California and other states safely manage one of their largest sources of water in the face of increasingly severe droughts and flooding.Observers, however, fear that any such advances could be undercut by the Trump administration’s cutbacks across federal agencies, including the one that oversees federal snowpack monitoring and survey work. That could jeopardize ongoing efforts to produce the water data and forecasts on which Western communities rely. “If we don’t have those measurements, it’s like driving your car around without a fuel gauge,” says Larry O’Neill, Oregon’s state climatologist. “We won’t know how much water is up in the mountains, and whether there’s enough to last through the summer.” The birth of snow surveys The snow survey program in the US was born near Lake Tahoe, the largest alpine lake in North America, around the turn of the 20th century.  Without any reliable way of knowing how much water would flow down the mountain each spring, lakefront home and business owners, fearing floods, implored dam operators to release water early in the spring. Downstream communities and farmers pushed back, however, demanding that the dam was used to hold onto as much water as possible to avoid shortages later in the year.  In 1908, James Church, a classics professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, whose passion for hiking around the mountains sparked an interest in the science of snow, invented a device that helped resolve the so-called Lake Tahoe Water Wars: the Mt. Rose snow sampler, named after the peak of a Sierra spur that juts into Nevada. James Church, a professor of classics at the University of Nevada, Reno, became a pioneer in the field of snow surveys.COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA, RENO It’s a simple enough device, with sections of tube that screw together, a sharpened end, and measurement ticks along the side. Snow surveyors measure the depth of the snow by plunging the sampler down to the ground. They then weigh the filled tube on a specialized scale to calculate the water content of the snow.  Church used the device to take measurements at various points across the range, and calibrated his water forecasts by comparing his readings against the rising and falling levels of Lake Tahoe.  It worked so well that the US began a federal snow survey program in the mid-1930s, which evolved into the one carried on today by the Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Throughout the winter, hundreds of snow surveyors across the American West head up to established locations on snowshoes, backcountry skis, or snowmobiles to deploy their Mt. Rose samplers, which have barely changed over more than a century.  In the 1960s, the US government also began setting up a network of permanent monitoring sites across the mountains, now known as the SNOTEL network. There are more than 900 stations continuously transmitting readings from across Western states and Alaska. They’re equipped with sensors that measure air temperature, snow depth, and soil moisture, and include pressure-sensitive “snow pillows” that weigh the snow to determine the water content.  The data from the snow surveys and SNOTEL sites all flows into snow depth and snow water content reports that the NRCS publishes, along with forecasts of the amount of water that will fill the streams and reservoirs through the spring and summer. Taking the temperature None of these survey and monitoring programs, however, provide the temperature throughout the snowpack.  The Sierra Nevada snowpack can reach more than 6 meters (20 feet), and the temperature within it may vary widely, especially toward the top. Readings taken at increments throughout can determine what’s known as the cold content, or the amount of energy required to shift the snowpack to a uniform temperature of 32˚F.  Knowing the cold content of the snowpack helps researchers understand the conditions under which it will begin to rapidly melt, particularly as it warms up in the spring or after rain falls on top of the snow. If the temperature of the snow, for example, is close to 32˚F even at several feet deep, a few warm days could easily set it melting. If, on the other hand, the temperature measurements show a colder profile throughout the middle, the snowpack is more stable and will hold up longer as the weather warms. Bjoern Bingham, a research scientist at the Desert Research Institute, digs at snowpit at a research plot within the Heavenly Ski Resort, near South Lake Tahoe, California. JAMES TEMPLE The problem is that taking the temperature of the entire snowpack has been, until now, tough and time-consuming work. When researchers do it at all, they mainly do so by digging snow pits down to the ground and then taking readings with probe thermometers along an inside wall.There have been a variety of efforts to take continuous remote readings from sensors attached to fences, wires, or towers, which the snowpack eventually buries. But the movement and weight of the dense shifting snow tends to break the devices or snap the structures they’re assembled upon. “They rarely last a season,” McAvoy says. Anne Heggli, a professor of mountain hydrometeorology at DRI, happened upon the idea of using an infrared device to solve this problem during a tour of the institute’s campus in 2019, when she learned that researchers there were using an infrared meat thermometer to take contactless readings of the snow surface. In 2021, Heggli began collaborating with RPM Systems, a gadget manufacturing company, to design an infrared device optimized for snowpack field conditions. The resulting snow temperature profiler is skinny enough to fit down a hole dug by snow surveyors and dangles on a cord marked off at 10-centimeter (4-inch) increments. Bingham and Daniel McEvoy, an associate research professor at the Desert Research Institute, work together to take temperature readings from inside the snowpit as well as from within the hole left behind by a snow sampler.JAMES TEMPLE At Heavenly on that April morning, Bingham, a staff scientist at DRI, slowly fed the device down a snow sampler hole, calling out temperature readings at each marking. McEvoy scribbled them down on a worksheet fastened to his clipboard as he used a probe thermometer to take readings of his own from within a snow pit the pair had dug down to the ground. They were comparing the measurements to assess the reliability of the infrared device in the field, but the eventual aim is to eliminate the need to dig snow pits. The hope is that state and federal surveyors could simply carry along a snow temperature profiler and drop it into the snowpack survey holes they’re creating anyway, to gather regular snowpack temperature readings from across the mountains. In 2023, the US Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that operates many of the nation’s dams, funded a three-year research project to explore the use of the infrared gadgets in determining snowpack temperatures. Through it, the DRI research team has now handed devices out to 20 snow survey teams across California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Utah to test their use in the field and supplement the snowpack data they’re collecting. The Snow Lab The DRI research project is one piece of a wider effort to obtain snowpack temperature data across the mountains of the West. By early May, the snow depth had dropped from an April peak of 114 inches to 24 inches (2.9 meters to 0.6 meters) at the UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab, an aging wooden structure perched in the high mountains northwest of Lake Tahoe.Megan Mason, a research scientist at the lab, used a backcountry ski shovel to dig out a trio of instruments from what was left of the pitted snowpack behind the building. Each one featured different types of temperature sensors, arrayed along a strong polymer beam meant to hold up under the weight and movement of the Sierra snowpack.   She was pulling up the devices after running the last set of observations for the season, as part of an effort to develop a resilient system that can survive the winter and transmit hourly temperature readings. The lab is working on the project, dubbed the California Cold Content Initiative, in collaboration with the state’s Department of Water Resources. California is the only western state that opted to maintain its own snow survey program and run its own permanent monitoring stations, all of which are managed by the water department.  The plan is to determine which instruments held up and functioned best this winter. Then, they can begin testing the most promising approaches at several additional sites next season. Eventually, the goal is to attach the devices at more than 100 of California’s snow monitoring stations, says Andrew Schwartz, the director of the lab.The NRCS is conducting a similar research effort at select SNOTEL sites equipped with a beaded temperature cable. One such cable is visible at the Heavenly SNOTEL station, next to where McEvoy and Bingham dug their snow pit, strung vertically between an arm extended from the main tower and the snow-covered ground.  DRI’s Bjoern Bingham feeds the snow temperature profiler, an infrared device, down a hole in the Sierra snowpack.JAMES TEMPLE Schwartz said that the different research groups are communicating and collaborating openly on the projects, all of which promise to provide complementary information, expanding the database of snowpack temperature readings across the West. For decades, agencies and researchers generally produced water forecasts using relatively simple regression models that translated the amount of water in the snowpack into the amount of water that will flow down the mountain, based largely on the historic relationships between those variables.  But these models are becoming less reliable as climate change alters temperatures, snow levels, melt rates, and evaporation, and otherwise drives alpine weather patterns outside of historic patterns. “As we have years that scatter further and more frequently from the norm, our models aren’t prepared,” Heggli says. Plugging direct temperature observations into more sophisticated models that have emerged in recent years, Schwartz says, promises to significantly improve the accuracy of water forecasts. That, in turn, should help communities manage through droughts and prevent dams from overtopping even as climate change fuels alternately wetter, drier, warmer, and weirder weather. About a quarter of the world’s population relies on water stored in mountain snow and glaciers, and climate change is disrupting the hydrological cycles that sustain these natural frozen reservoirs in many parts of the world. So any advances in observations and modeling could deliver broader global benefits. Ominous weather There’s an obvious threat to this progress, though. Even if these projects work as well as hoped, it’s not clear how widely these tools and techniques will be deployed at a time when the White House is gutting staff across federal agencies, terminating thousands of scientific grants, and striving to eliminate tens of billions of dollars in funding at research departments.  The Trump administration has fired or put on administrative leave nearly 6,000 employees across the USDA, or 6% of the department’s workforce. Those cutbacks have reached regional NRCS offices, according to reporting by local and trade outlets. That includes more than half of the roles at the Portland office, according to O’Neill, the state climatologist. Those reductions prompted a bipartisan group of legislators to call on the Secretary of Agriculture to restore the positions, warning the losses could impair water data and analyses that are crucial for the state’s “agriculture, wildland fire, hydropower, timber, and tourism sectors,” as the Statesman Journal reported. There are more than 80 active SNOTEL stations in Oregon. The fear is there won’t be enough people left to reach all the sites this summer to replace batteries, solar panels, and drifting or broken sensors, which could quickly undermine the reliability of the data or cut off the flow of information.  “Staff and budget reductions at NRCS will make it impossible to maintain SNOTEL instruments and conduct routine manual observations, leading to inoperability of the network within a year,” the lawmakers warned. The USDA and NRCS didn’t respond to inquiries from MIT Technology Review.  DRI’s Daniel McEvoy scribbles down temperature readings at the Heavenly site.JAMES TEMPLE If the federal cutbacks deplete the data coming back from SNOTEL stations or federal snow survey work, the DRI infrared method could at least “still offer a simplistic way of measuring the snowpack temperatures” in places where state and regional agencies continue to carry out surveys, McAvoy says. But most researchers stress the field needs more surveys, stations, sensors, and readings to understand how the climate and water cycles are changing from month to month and season to season. Heggli stresses that there should be broad bipartisan support for programs that collect snowpack data and provide the water forecasts that farmers and communities rely on.  “This is how we account for one of, if not the, most valuable resource we have,” she says. “In the West, we go into a seasonal drought every summer; our snowpack is what trickles down and gets us through that drought. We need to know how much we have.”