There are few things scarier to the conservative mind than mass transportation in a major metropolitan city. To that end, Donald Trump’s pick to run the Department of Transportation, Sean Duffy, is demanding New York City officials provide a list of actions that they will take to reduce crime on the city’s subway system or […]
Amtrak CEO Steps Down as Trump and Musk Threaten to Privatize Company
The latest victim of the Trump administration’s obsession with the appearance of efficiency is the guy who made the trains run on time. Stephen Gardner, the Chief Executive Officer of Amtrak who held the post since 2022, abruptly announced that he would be stepping down from his role Wednesday in the wake of Donald Trump […]
Trump’s FTC Deletes Blogs Critical of Amazon and Microsoft
For a brief period, maybe even just a second, it seemed as though the populism built into the Donald Trump campaign just might preserve the Lina Khan theory of Big Tech regulation at the Federal Trade Commission. Turns out, not so much. Wired first reported that more than 300 blog posts critical of companies like […]
Bill Gates Is Giving Up on Climate Change as Trump Drains the Woke Out of Washington
As if there was any doubt, we can go ahead and officially add climate change to the list of things that we can’t count on billionaires to figure out for us. According to the New York Times, Breakthrough Energy, a joint venture between Bill Gates and a handful of other billionaires who at least nominally […]
How Trump’s Trade War Will Make Your Groceries Even More Expensive
Life these days is expensive. The lingering effects of the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, higher fuel and energy prices, and extreme weather shocks throttling the supply chain have conspired to make many everyday necessities much less affordable. Rising food costs in particular have become a source of financial stress for millions of U.S. households. […]
How to Track the Flood of Bullshit Coming From Trump’s White House
During Donald Trump’s first term, Steve Bannon explicitly laid out what the administration’s strategy would be to get things done: “flood the zone with shit.” The theory is pretty simple: throw out as much bullshit as possible—knowing that there is only so much attention, outrage, and resistance that people can muster—and take wins while everyone […]
‘Most Transparent Administration in History’ Is Shredding Documents and Ignoring FOIA
The Trump administration has given itself the moniker “The Most Transparent Administration in History.” It seems like it’s an “in name only” kind of thing, because the New York Times reports that a senior administration official at the U.S. Agency for International Development—the agency that has been stripped for parts by Elon Musk and the extremely […]
Trump Administration Fires Hundreds of Weather Forecasters and Other NOAA Employees
Hundreds of federal workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were fired on Thursday, in the latest of a series of moves by the Trump administration to cull the numbers of federal workers in the sciences. The purge of the federal payroll is being led by the Department of Government Efficiency, which despite its […]
Trump Just Made Life More Dangerous for One of the Rarest Whales on Earth
Add endangered whales to the list of things the Trump administration doesn’t give a rat’s ass about. On February 20, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, an agency belonging to the Department of the Interior, announced it was cancelling a notice that recommended ship operators in waters occupied by Rice’s whales to restrict their speed […]
We Finally Know Who’s (Supposedly) Running DOGE
After weeks of the Trump administration giving everyone—the press, the court system, its own staff—the runaround on who is in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, we finally have an answer. According to a report from Semafor (and confirmed by government sources at numerous outlets), Amy Gleason is the acting administrator of DOGE. […]