magine, just for a moment, that you run a foreign entity hostile to the United States. And imagine that you had the wherewithal to hire the services of a newly elected president. What might you pay them to do?
Undermining democracy might be useful, as well as taking a bulldozer to the carefully constructed but rather fragile checks and balances built into the Constitution. But that wouldn’t create true chaos. And because it would strengthen your presidential pawn, it could make him a threat. You’d need more.
You’d definitely want to trash the economy, and as quickly as possible—preferably creating as much confusion as you could along the way. Decimating the health system would be useful, too, since epidemics and outbreaks of food poisoning can be effective at furthering economic disruption and undermining social cohesion. Disrupting essential benefits like Social Security would be effective, too. If you also could mess with agriculture and essential services like weather forecasting, you could generate some real turmoil.
Now take a look at the Trump administration agenda, much of it implemented by unelected co-president Elon Musk. Do you sense a pattern?
No, I am not saying that Donald Trump is the paid agent of some foreign power or other nefarious force, although you don’t have to look hard to find people seriously suggesting such things. I have no reliable information on which to evaluate such claims and, frankly, no emotional bandwidth to try, so I won’t go there. But the Trump/Musk agenda has become increasingly hard to understand as anything other than calculated destruction.
TARIFFS AND CLOSURES AND LAYOFFS—OH MY!
I won’t spend much time on the big stories like Trump’s trade wars that you’ve no doubt seen if you follow the news at all. Let’s just acknowledge that while there have been legitimate critiques of the assorted free trade agreements negotiated during the nineties (some lightly modified by Trump during his first term) and there’s a case to be made for considering modifications, there is no sense—none, zero—in Trump’s wild, on-again, off-again zigzags. Companies like automakers have built huge, complex, cross-border manufacturing and supply chains that can’t be changed in a week, a month, or a year. Trump has created instant chaos for industries, their workers, and all the assorted ports, truckers and other services and suppliers who depend on them. This is crazy.
Meanwhile, Musk’s (fake) “Department of Government Efficiency” is laying off tens of thousands of federal workers—effectively shutting down entire agencies, despite having no legal authority to do so—and cancelling without warning many billions of dollars of contracts, causing the businesses and nonprofits who hold those contracts to lay off more workers. You don’t need a Ph.D. in economics (and at the rate Trump has been threatening to defund universities, you may not get one) to know that fired workers stop buying stuff, which means the businesses selling the goods and services those workers used to buy also have to lay off workers. There’s a term for this. It’s called “a recession.” Oh, and staff cuts at the Social Security Administration are apparently so severe that former officials are warning that benefits could start to be interrupted this spring.
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The recent stock market implosion is not random chance.
But you probably knew all that, so enough of the big-picture stuff. Let’s get granular and dig into some details you may not have seen because there are just too many of them happening at the same time. I’ll admit upfront that I’m not an impartial observer here: As I’ve noted here before, I’m doing some communications work for Defend Public Health, a network of healthcare workers, researchers and allies trying to salvage at least some of our public health system from the Trump/Musk onslaught. And like other advocacy organizations, we try to get our messages out through the same channels others use, like news coverage and social media.
And hoo-boy, is this a wild news environment. You’ve heard of a four-alarm fire? This is a 40,000-alarm fire. It’s like being stuck in the middle of the movie “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and trying to send out a press release through every dimension of the multiverse at the same time. There’s so much chaos going on in so many places, with so much new every day and so much of it being hidden, that the media, even the outlets that are sincerely trying, barely know where to look or what to try to cover, and even the most frantic social media doomscrollers struggle to keep up.
MINDLESS CRUELTY
Let’s start with some particularly mindless acts of cruelty that didn’t get much national coverage. You may have heard of the Fulbright Scholarships, officially described as “the United States government’s flagship program of international educational and cultural exchange.” Each year this program sends hundreds of US students, teachers, artists and scholars abroad to study, teach and do research, and brings hundreds from abroad here.
Trump and Musk suddenly cut off the money that thousands on Fulbright scholarships and other State Department exchange programs were depending on for things like paying rent and buying groceries, leaving them high and dry with no idea when their expected stipends would resume. Seriously. The participants’ stories quoted by WUOB public media in Athens, Ohio are heartbreaking.
And then there are the mass firings underway at the Veterans Administration, which appear to have originally included staff at the Veterans Crisis Line. They apparently were even starting to cut staff at the suicide prevention line for veterans until several enraged members of Congress made noise. Now it was all apparently a “clerical error.” Sure.
And in a twofer, Trump’s Dept. of Agriculture managed to simultaneously screw small farmers and hungry children by abruptly ending two programs that provided schools and food banks over $1 billion a year to buy food from local farmers. And in Hawaii, food banks across the islands reported that food shipments being sent through a separate program were suddenly cut off. Neither the food banks nor Hawaii Public Radio, which reported the story, were able to get clear answers as to why the shipments were cut off or when or whether they might be restored.
Still out in the Pacific, you may remember the devastating fire that wiped out much of the town of Lahaina on the Hawaiian island of Maui in August 2023, killing over 100 and wiping out thousands of homes and businesses. The federal government was funding nonprofits who employed 131 residents whose workplaces were destroyed by the fire, paying them to help other displaced residents find new homes and jobs, as well as to do assorted other cleanup, recovery and humanitarian work. Seems like the sort of thing you’d like your tax dollars to go to, doesn’t it? Gone. The workers were all laid off, the funding cut with no warning.
Let’s stay in Hawaii for a minute—partly because I live here now and have a particular interest in the place, and partly because what’s happening here seems both shrouded in mystery and more than a little ominous.
Local news reports have indicated that multiple federal buildings may be offloaded by DOGE, but it’s not clear which ones. By process of elimination, one can deduce that one listed as potentially surplus may be the temporary headquarters of the Hawaii Volcano Observatory in Hilo, part of the US Geological Survey. That may or may not be alarming. HVO is working on a new permanent headquarters, but there have been no recent updates on progress, so this could be normal or it could be scary. Hawaii Island has two very active volcanoes on its land mass, and the 2018 Kilauea eruption took out 700 homes, so monitoring volcanoes here is no joke. Inquiries to HVO from 48 Hills were forwarded to the main USGS office in Washington, and then… silence.
TSUNAMI WARNINGS? WEATHER FORECASTS? DO WE REALLY NEED ‘EM?
DOGE has ordered severe cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, which includes the National Weather Service and serves as a major repository of climate research and data (and thus was a major target highlighted by Project 2025). NOAA covers both weather and oceans and includes the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, which has lost at least one staff position, among other cuts in the Pacific region.
Like volcanoes, tsunamis are serious business here. A 1946 Tsunami killed 173 in and around Hilo and 14 on Maui, and another in 1960 killed 61 and remade the city of Hilo. The folks who keep tabs on these things are not expendable bureaucrats.
We asked the offices of Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono and Representative Jill Tokuda, whose district includes Hilo and all of Hawaii Island, for any information they have on these cuts. They had no response, which – given that they’re Democrats not generally shy about criticizing Trump – likely means that they’re as in the dark as everyone else.
Although all the cuts to NOAA aren’t completely clear, they seem to be widespread and brutal. Half a dozen NOAA and NWS employees in Monterey were let go in late February, including three at the Monterey weather station that serves 11 counties. Other reported cuts may include cancellations of leases to multiple key National Weather Service facilities. Meteorologist Daniel Swain, whose Weather West blog and social media posts are required reading for anyone interested in West Coast weather, has posted that such cuts, if they happen, “would spell the end of US numerical weather prediction—the scientific models, run on supercomputers, used to create virtually all weather forecasts.”
And it’s not just the buildings. National Weather Service Employees Organization General Counsel Richard Hirn told ABC News in early March that due to staff cuts, “hundreds of operational personnel who usually staff the 122 NWS forecast offices, 13 River Forecast Centers, and two tsunami warning centers will disappear overnight.” Given the extreme weather events of the last few years in California and across the US, this seems like genuine sabotage. Even if the idea is to privatize all weather forecasting, as some theorize, the chaos during the transition could be disastrous.
If sabotaging weather forecasting isn’t enough to devastate agriculture, the administration is working to compound the damage by deleting vital climate information from federal websites. Apparently in service of the fantasy that climate change is a hoax, Inside Climate News reports, “The Trump administration has deleted thousands of climate-related web pages from the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) website, stripping farmers of critical resources as droughts, floods and shifting growing conditions intensify.” As with many of these issues, lawsuits are flying – in this case filed by a group of farmers with the assistance of Earthjustice. In the meantime, private parties are left scrambling to try to save and reassemble as much data as possible.
But hey, never fear. If disaster strikes, DOGE has moved to terminate the lease on the Army Corps of Engineers’ Florida headquarters, in the heart of hurricane country. It’s not like the guys taking the lead on preserving the Everglades and the state’s drinking water as well as leading hurricane response are doing anything important down there. In another corner of the South, a grotesquely symbolic DOGE move: The administration has moved to sell the Freedom Riders Museum and Montgomery Bus Station in Alabama.
MAKE AMERICA SICK AGAIN
Others among the nearly 750 leases that DOGE recently claimed to be terminating included facilities used by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Indian Health Service. While initial severe cuts to the Indian Health Service were rescinded, other services that citizens of Native American tribes depend on remain at risk, and both reporters and local officials have had trouble getting clear answers.
Other issues on the health front look grim. Peter Lurie, former Associate Commissioner for Public Health Strategy and Analysis at the FDA and now leading the Center for Science in the Public Interest, has warned repeatedly about FDA staff cuts. In early March he argued that DOGE has “taken a flamethrower to the staff directory at FDA” and endangered public safety in the process.
Cuts to research at the National Institutes of Health mean not only fewer studies – and thus fewer new treatments and cures—but also, as my Defend Public Health colleagues James Alwine and Elizabeth Jacobs, both epidemiologists, pointed out in a recent commentary for The Hill, fewer researchers: “We are already seeing universities cut back on admission of graduate students for health science programs, even rescinding offers of admission that have already been sent. Postdoctoral training and clinical research training programs will follow.”
And, as HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine agenda takes hold, NIH just cancelled over 40 grants involving studies of vaccine hesitancy – as a measles outbreak spreads among the unvaccinated in the Southwest. Since NIH is currently without a permanent director, this must have been directed from above. An internal NIH email obtained by NPR states, “It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research activities that focuses gaining scientific knowledge on why individuals are hesitant to be vaccinated.” Ponder that. It is now official policy of the world’s premier medical research institution that there are things about healthcare that it prefers not to learn.
The health cut—and there’s more we haven’t talked about—aren’t limited to the US Almost from the moment Trump took office, Musk and DOGE targeted the US Agency for International Development, the major source of US health assistance overseas, bizarrely calling it a “criminal enterprise.”
US foreign policy, of course, has always been a strange, Jekyll and Hyde phenomenon. With one hand, we fight bloody, stupid wars in places like Vietnam and Iraq and support or foment antidemocratic coups in Iran, Chile, and more other countries than I can name. But with the other, we do some genuinely good, life-saving work, feeding millions of people who would otherwise die of malnutrition and providing healthcare to millions who would suffer or die from preventable or treatable illnesses without the billions of dollars the US spends on such help. That good side of US foreign policy, the side that saves lives and reduces suffering every single day, is the side that Trump and Musk have decided to obliterate.
Something like 10,000 USAID contracts have been terminated, originally reported as 90% of the total, though now the official figure is 83%, and the global toll will be devastating. Food and healthcare programs all over the world will simply stop unless impoverished local governments or private donors can backfill at least some of the funding. Not yet entirely clear is the fate of PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—possibly the only truly good thing to come out of the George W. Bush administration. PEPFAR has provided tens of millions of people with life-saving anti-HIV medication, HIV testing and other services.
PEPFAR funding was cut off during the first DOGE assault, then supposedly restored after howls of outrage, but multiple reports have questioned whether the money spigot has really been turned back on. Stories like this March 11 report from South Africa abound: clinics with thousands of desperate patients, funding cut off and workers with no idea whether they will have jobs again or not. In addition to PEPFAR, other USAID programs addressing AIDS and tuberculosis remain in danger, and while court orders were supposed to stop some of the immediate layoffs, long-term prospects remain highly uncertain.
What did I say before about mindless cruelty?
RESISTANCE IS NOT FUTILE
Amazingly, the above barely scratches the surface of the destruction and misery that Trump, Musk and their teams have begun inflicting during less than two months in office—the US is now bombing Yemen and attempting to deport whoever it wants by invoking a 228-year-old law with a terrible legacy, by the way. Although I’m told that the universe has an essentially infinite supply of pixels, a full accounting might well exhaust that supply.
But all is not lost. I mean it.
If one lesson of the last two months is that the Trump reboot is infinitely worse than Trump 1.0, the other lesson is that resistance can work, and we need more of it.
All sorts of injured parties, the list is nearly endless, have filed lawsuits against the administration, and many have won their initial court battles—on birthright citizenship and some of the anti-diversity, equity and inclusion orders, for example. On March 13, US District Judge William Alsup ordered the administration to reinstate thousands of workers fired in February at the Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior and Treasury departments. Alsup made clear that he’d lost patience with the government’s lawyers, saying, “Come on, that’s a sham. Go ahead. It upsets me, I want you to know that. I’ve been practicing or serving in this court for over 50 years, and I know how do we get at the truth. And you’re not helping me get at the truth. You’re giving me press releases, sham documents.”
There have been signs of foot-dragging on obeying some of these rulings, and most will surely be appealed, but they gum up the works and slow the damage. That matters.
On the same day as Alsup’s ruling, Trump abruptly yanked the nomination of anti-vaccine and anti-abortion zealot Dave Weldon to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hours before his scheduled confirmation hearing. Weldon blamed Republican Senators Susan Collins and Bill Cassidy for refusing to support him, which implies that the growing campaign against him in the days leading up to the hearing played a role. The fact that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised both senators he’d moderate his anti-vaccine stances in order to get their votes and then immediately backtracked probably didn’t help.
Economic pressure can play a role as well. The February 28 Economic Blackout Day appears to have taken a bite out of Target’s online traffic and helped Costco, which, in contrast to Target, publicly reaffirmed its commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.
And then there’s Tesla, the biggest of Elon Musk’s enterprises and the major source of his wealth. Astute 48 Hills readers may recall that back in November 2022 I suggested avoiding buying a Tesla because of Musk’s increasingly sketchy politics—and I got some heat for it. Apologies will be graciously accepted.
Well, Tesla’s in trouble. After a huge post-election run-up, Tesla’s stock price imploded by 41.3% between Jan.1 and March 13, erasing a sizeable chunk of Musk’s wealth, per Marketbeat.
And all over the globe, Tesla sales are down. We won’t have complete figures until the company’s first quarter sales report in early April, but what stats have trickled in from around the world look bleak. Reports of US January vehicle registrations, released in March, were quite good for electric vehicles – up 14% overall, with big gains for Ford, General Motors, and several other manufacturers. But Tesla registrations dropped by 11%, bringing its share of the US EV market down to 42.5%. That may sound good, but as recently as September 2023 it was hovering near 60%. And the January sales drop, of course, was before the full extent of the DOGE rampage had become clear.
Things are looking tough for Tesla all over the world. In China, there are signs of weakening demand for Tesla vehicles (probably more due to strong competition from locally produced EVs than to Musk’s politics). And the company’s sales have absolutely cratered in Europe, where that whole Nazi salute thing didn’t go over well. All of this made the recent Tesla photo-op at the White House, with Trump (who famously doesn’t drive) making a public show of buying one of his hatchet man’s cars—look rather desperate.
Protests keep happening at Tesla showrooms, not just in the US, but worldwide—which would seem to undercut Musk’s claim that it’s all a Democratic Party operation. And in London, activists replaced a bus stop billboard with a mock Tesla ad showing Musk standing in one of his vehicles giving the “Sieg heil!” salute with the caption: “Goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds. Tesla, the Swasticar.” Ouch.
Does this really matter? It might. Musk’s power comes from his money, and as his fortune shrinks and his business falters, he looks smaller, weaker and more desperate by the day. And it’s not just Musk. The stock market has dropped big-time as the layoffs and Trump’s trade wars spook investors.
And if the GOP’s wealthy backers start to seriously fear losing their fortunes and threaten to turn off the money spigot for Trump’s congressional enablers, things could get very interesting indeed.
