Hello, and here’s to the end of the 11th week of Trump’s second term. We dropped into your inboxes on Thursday to walk through what’s been a frantic week, but we still have a packed edition of the Sunday newsletter today — offering a week in review of the Trump administration with updates on the aftermath of Trump’s tariff announcement, a look at items you may have missed, a rundown of the massive demonstrations yesterday, and a big-picture thought on the hash this White House has made of everything in less than 80 days.
@moreperfectunion MASSIVE: Millions flooded cities across the U.S. demanding Trump, Musk, and DOGE take their hands off vital services. Backlash against the billionaire attack on government is growing. From the Wisconsin Supreme Court election to massive protests, people are fed up. #handsoff
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The Rundown: Trump Versus …
Our Health
- The administration blocked federal family-planning funding in multiple states. The cuts to the funding, commonly known as “Title X,” placed immediate pressure on providers like Planned Parenthood that offer cancer screenings, sexually transmitted infection tests, birth control and more to people with lower incomes or no health insurance.Here’s what to know: The administration claimed to have concerns about “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs at Planned Parenthood and other organizations. In his first term, however, Trump also sought to “defund” Planned Parenthood by blocking the use of federal health programs (such as Medicaid) at Planned Parenthood health centers. Trump tried going after Planned Parenthood directly in his first term too.Long story short, Trump is pursuing a vendetta against a health organization that provides abortion — just as he has in the past. “DEI” is merely his newest excuse.
- The mass firings at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)? Maybe some of them are off. (We have more on this in this issue’s Big Picture section.)
- … but HHS may be on the verge of throwing out decades of data and results from research into Alzheimer’s, HIV, cancer, and other diseases and conditions. The data is flagged as ‘under review’ in computer systems at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — but due to the agreements under which the affected data was gathered with research partners outside the government, the information can’t be backed up outside of NIH’s systems.
- The ex-vaccine chief at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has turned whistleblower. The Wall Street Journal reports that Dr. Peter Marks, who left the FDA last week, told the paper that “the health secretary’s team has sought nonexistent data to justify anti-vaccine narratives”:
Kennedy’s team requested that Marks turn over data on cases of brain swelling and deaths caused by the measles vaccine—data that Marks said doesn’t exist because there have been no such confirmed cases in the U.S.
Our Families
- Not content to stop at taking fresh food from the mouths of schoolchildren while simultaneously hurting American farmers, the administration threatened to suspend federal funding for schools that serve students in lower-income households (known as Title I) unless the schools’ districts certified they had eliminated “DEI” programs. In a letter to recipients of the funding, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon told school districts to comply within ten days.
- The administration also picked a fight with libraries — firing staff and shutting down grants at the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which funds programs like e-book lending and interlibrary loans for local library systems. In many systems, the IMLS funds also support story times for low-income families. Make illiteracy great again?
- The administration is winding down a program that has helped 17,000 military veterans who fell behind on their mortgages stay in their homes. The program was part of a set of measures under the Biden administration to combat homelessness among veterans; during Biden’s term, veteran homelessness dropped to its lowest level since record-keeping began in 2009.
- You might think that workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs are already overwhelmed by veterans worried about keeping their homes (see above), or by veterans who’ve lost jobs across the federal government — but on Friday the department told staffers at the beleaguered department about plans to eliminate 72,000 jobs, and encouraged workers to accept deferred resignation to avoid being laid off.
New—Veterans Affairs (VA) Secretary Doug Collins sent an email to employees this afternoon announcing a Reduction in Force (RIF) "of up to 15% from the roughly 470,000 full-time equivalent employees we currently have, to roughly 398,000 employees" + offering Deferred Resignation.Email shared w me:
— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) 2025-04-04T23:30:22.160Z
Our Leadership
- The president ousted four-star General Timothy Haugh as head of the National Security Agency — the premier U.S. government agency devoted to intelligence gathering on telecommunications and digital systems — reportedly at the urging of a far-right activist, Laura Loomer. Loomer — best known for 9/11 conspiracy theories and for saying that if Kamala Harris won, the “White House would smell like curry” — met with Trump in the Oval Office last week to show him a hit list of people she claimed were disloyal to him.
- Showing all the judgment of a man who would fire a four-star intelligence agency chief on the word of a social-media crank, Trump skipped the dignified transfer ceremony for the remains of four U.S. soldiers who died in a training exercise in the eastern European nation of Lithuania. (Other presidents routinely attended these ceremonies.) Instead of showing his respects to the remains — which had been seen off by a delegation of Lithuanian leaders that included the nation’s president, Gitanas Nausėda — Trump traveled to Florida to golf.
Our Rights
- The administration continued to expand our constitutional crisis last week by thumbing its nose at an order to bring a father flown by the government from Maryland to a Salvadoran prison even though he lived in the U.S. under temporary protected status. The White House press secretary insisted that the government’s hands were tied because the Maryland resident was no longer in the country — a remarkable admission of impotence from a government that throws its weight around at every opportunity. The president of El Salvador joked about the father’s plight, posting a response to the court order that featured a cartoon rabbit making a confused face.
Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, responded to news of the judge’s order by posting a GIF of a confused bunny on X.
— Anna Bower (@annabower.bsky.social) 2025-04-04T22:48:28.342Z
- The administration even punished the Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyer assigned to the Maryland case for admitting, WHILE ARGUING AGAINST issuing the court order, that the Maryland man should never have been sent to El Salvador. Claiming that the attorney had “fail[ed] to zealously advocate” for the government, the DOJ put him on indefinite paid leave — and also suspended the lawyer’s supervisor.
- The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) wants the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to provide it with data on as many as 7 million immigrants the DHS suspects of being in the U.S. without documentation. The request massively expands the scope of data sought by DHS, which previously had asked for information on 700,000 people — and caused alarm inside the IRS. Federal law requires IRS officials to closely guard tax data, and violating the laws that control sharing of tax data carries civil and criminal penalties.
@washingtonpost The IRS is nearing an agreement to allow immigration officials to use tax data to confirm the names and addresses of people suspected of being in the country illegally, according to four people familiar with the matter, culminating weeks of negotiations over using the tax system to support President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Under the agreement, Immigration and Customs Enforcement could submit names and addresses of suspected undocumented immigrants to the IRS to cross-reference with confidential taxpayer databases, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of professional reprisals. Normally, personal tax information — even an individual’s name and address — is considered confidential and closely guarded within the IRS. Unlawfully disclosing tax data carries civil and criminal penalties. However, tax information may be shared with other federal law enforcement under certain, limited conditions — and typically with approval from a court. It would be unusual, if not unprecedented, for taxpayer privacy law exceptions to be used to justify cooperation with immigration enforcement, the people said. The proposed agreement has alarmed career officials at the IRS, the people said, who worry that the arrangement risks abusing a narrow and seldom-used section of privacy law that’s meant to help investigators build criminal cases, not enforce criminal penalties. Caption from article by Jacob Bogage and Jeff Stein.
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- Planned Parenthood was at the Supreme Court last week to defend patients’ right to use federal Medicaid funding at its health centers. Attorneys for Planned Parenthood said that South Carolina had violated patients’ civil rights by blocking them from seeking reimbursement for cancer screenings, birth control, and other services provided at Planned Parenthood clinics. The Trump administration, supporting S.C.’s effort to block patients’ care, took the position that Planned Parenthood had no legal standing to stand up for its patients. If the Court rules against Planned Parenthood, it will lead to more Republican-dominated states blocking access. It’s worth noting that the first state to systematically do this, Texas, ranks 50th in women’s health outcomes.
- An election denier, Harmeet Dhillon, has been confirmed to lead the civil rights division of the DOJ — the section that traditionally handles voting-rights violations. Dhillon, who in recent years has been a legal advisor to Trump, claimed without basis in 2020 that “wholesale ignoring of laws passed by legislatures … change[d] the outcome of the national election.” She has also denigrated the civil rights of LGBTQ+ people in public comments — saying in an interview that a landmark gender-discrimination law “was passed by Congress to protect women’s rights — not the rights of men pretending to be women.”
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Fewer than one percent of people who seek gender-affirming surgery report that they regret that decision — but the White House has nevertheless pushed the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to research “regret and detransition following social transition as well as chemical and surgical mutilation of children and adults.” (The quoted language, which is offensive, was written by an acting director of the NIH.)
NEW: After cancelling nearly all projects on trans health, the Trump admin has now directed the NIH to study the negative consequences of transitioning.This will create “a distorted research ecosystem where only politically favorable findings are permitted to exist”, researcher Harry Barbee says.
— Max Kozlov (@maxkozlov.bsky.social) 2025-04-03T21:37:02.050Z
Our Safety
- The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) — which the Trump administration says it hopes to eliminate — has ended grants to help local governments make their communities safer from the impacts of disasters worsened by climate change. The investments were “a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program [that] was more concerned with climate change than helping Americans affected by natural disasters,” a FEMA spokesperson dismissively explained. In related news, the Midwest and South are suffering through a “once in a generation” series of storms that saw 14 tornadoes touch down and has so far resulted in 16 deaths.
- Speaking of the Midwestern storms: due to job slashing ordered by Elon Musk’s “DOGE” team, the National Weather Service office in Louisville had too few workers on hand to assess storm damage from a tornado outbreak in the city. Weather service officials were reduced to asking Kentuckians to share their photos of the damage with the federal government.
“Due to recent staffing cuts at the National Weather Service’s Louisville office, officials are saying storm crews likely won’t be able to survey damage and confirm tornadoes for several days…NWS officials are asking folks to send them photos of damage.” www.wave3.com/2025/04/03/n...
— JM Rieger (@riegerreport.bsky.social) 2025-04-04T11:55:39.663Z
Our Wallets
We talked about the Trump tariffs in an email last Thursday. The economic damage from them is already piling up:
- Volkswagen announced the addition of ‘import fees’ to U.S. models manufactured in other countries;
- Nintendo put off the much-anticipated presale of the Switch 2 gaming console in the United States, warning that the company needed to “assess market conditions”;
- Jaguar-Land Rover completely paused shipments to the U.S. through April;
- Board game makers warn that import fees from China, a center of game production, could put them out of business;
Trump’s tariffs have also intensified a climate of policy uncertainty that has led companies to cancel planned U.S. investments. According to the Washington Post, more planned factories in the U.S. were canceled in the first three months of 2025 than in 2023 and 2024 combined — taking with them thousands of high-paying manufacturing jobs.
The whole point of the tariffs, allegedly, is to move manufacturing into the US. But look at what is actually happening. This is anti-industrial policy.
Elsewhere, the Social Security Administration (SSA) — previously reported to be in the middle of an attempt to rewrite its software that an experienced government technologist called “likely to fail” — plans to axe 50% of its technology workforce. (You read that right, and no, it makes no bleeping sense to us either.) As CNN reports, “the planned purge comes as the agency’s long-glitchy technology is suffering more outages than usual.”
Also in the offing are more layoffs across the rest of SSA, from which 7,000 workers have been pushed out since Trump returned to the White House.
The Big Picture: Blunders All Around
The incompetence just doesn’t stop. Last week we discussed how national security advisor Michael Waltz used Signal, a commonplace chat app, to discuss sensitive information about military strikes. It turns out that we literally didn’t know the half of it; the Washington Post reported that Waltz organized 20 separate chats in Signal for discussion of national-security matters. Needless to say: if one wanted to keep classified information about U.S. military movements safe from spying eyes, an app any regular person could download to their phone is not the right tool for that.
Waltz was hardly alone in the administration, however, in showing no sign of understanding how to do their jobs:
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced a bloodbath of firings across public-health agencies on April 1 — but said later in the week that some of the firings he ordered had been mistaken. His comments attempting to walk back the layoffs were incoherent:
“There were a number of instances where studies that should have not have been cut were cut, and we’ve reinstated them. Personnel that should not have been cut were cut ― we’re reinstating them, and that was always the plan,” he claimed. … “The part of that, DOGE — we talked about this from the beginning — is we’re going to do 80% cuts, but 20% of those are going to have to be reinstalled, because we’ll make mistakes.”
This administration talks constantly about running the government more like a business. We can’t think of a single business that runs by randomly dumping employees in huge numbers with no apparent thought for whether operations can continue without the ousted staff.
Meanwhile, the Trump tariffs that tanked U.S. stock markets and retirement accounts appeared to use a formula ridiculed by economists and bankers. Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and ex-New York Times columnist, called the formula “something written by a student who hasn’t done the reading and is trying to bullshit” — and then insinuated that administration officials didn’t even formulate it themselves:
The Trump formula is apparently what you get if you ask ChatGPT and other AI models to make tariff policy. … In my post immediately following the [tariff] announcement I speculated that Elon Musk’s Dunning-Kruger kids might be responsible for those tariff numbers. That now looks like a distinct possibility.
It’s hard to overstate the astonishment that greeted word of the administration perhaps leaning on AI to formulate its economy-wrecking tariffs:
ChatGPT ass presidency
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@aoc.bsky.social) 2025-04-04T20:28:28.265Z
Still, as losses to Americans’ retirement accounts continue to mount and as federal workers get whipsawed between firings and rehirings, the Trump administration projects a serene confidence that all in the country is well:
LMFAO
— Ben Wikler (@benwikler.bsky.social) 2025-04-04T21:16:09.566Z
Nothing to see here, the White House is telling Americans. Please disperse.
The Fight-Back Forecast: Crowded With a Chance of Marching
The message is: crowd large.Many politicians, administrators, and business leaders, in bowing to Trump, have drawn confidence and comfort from the perceived vibe shift.Events like this puncture that delusion.
From a look at the demonstrations across the country on Saturday, Americans are in no mood to disperse. The 50501 Movement to advance what it calls “the fight to uphold the Constitution and end executive overreach.” Turnout was high in cities and towns from coast to coast:
This is Utah in case anyone’s wondering how pissed off people are. I have never seen anything like this.
— Nate Blouin (@nateforutah.bsky.social) 2025-04-05T19:06:40.776Z
Fight for freedom, save America. #HandsOff
— Maxwell Frost (@maxwellfrost.bsky.social) 2025-04-05T18:33:23.221Z
@ohio.50501 COLUMBUS! Look at you!! You showed out today and we couldn’t be more proud!! 😍🥲 Thank you once again to our amazing speakers and partners for this Nationwide Day of Action! We don’t have exact numbers yet, but I can tell you, more than 5,000 of you showed up, in the rain! Everything remained peaceful and we will not stop! #columbusohio #columbus #peoplesmovement #ohio #april5 #democracy #50501 @50501Movement
Also on the streets yesterday: Hands Off, a coalition effort working to show grassroots support for defending our country from Trump and Musk’s job-cutting, cash-grabbing onslaught:
Thousands of protesters gathered at the Japanese American Historical Plaza on Portland’s waterfront before they started marching south down Naito Parkway onto the Morrison Bridge.#HandsOff protest live updates: www.oregonlive.com/politics/202…
Richmond, VA. 👏#HandsOff(📸 MjustBea)
Tesla Takedown demonstrations continued as well, with crowds maintaining high energy after last Saturday’s national day of action:
We haven't even officially started yet! #[email protected] @ezralevin.bsky.social @leahgreenberg.bsky.social @teslatakedown.com @sarahdohl.bsky.social @repmarkdesaulnier.bsky.social
— Indivisible ReSisters Contra Costa (@indivisresistcoco.bsky.social) 2025-04-05T18:57:22.799Z
The 50501 Movement plans another round of nationwide demonstrations on April 19. We’ll share info on how to find one near you as that date draws near.
And if you’re looking to get a daily fix of everyday people taking small actions to fight back (and how you can join in), we highly recommend Chop Wood, Carry Water.
Waste, Fraud & Abuse Watch
Elon Musk’s “DOGE” government-looting operation appears to have helped itself to a headquarters. A federal judge in the District of Columbia allowed the sale of the vacated headquarters of the U.S. Institute of Peace — which overlooks the Lincoln Memorial — to the General Services Administration. “DOGE” had previously ousted the nonprofit from the building, with help from FBI agents, D.C. police, and the nonprofit’s former security company; a 28-year-old “DOGE” official who the administration purported to put in charge of what had been an independent non-governmental organization then arranged the sale of the building to the federal government’s landlord, the General Services Administration.
The building’s sale price? A tidy $0. (Can that even be considered a “sale”?)
Chart of the Week
People really, really dislike Trump’s approach to the economy.
NEW 🧵A quick thread of charts showing how Trump’s economic agenda is going so far:1) US consumers are reacting very very negatively.These are the worst ratings for any US government’s economic policy since records began.
— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch.ft.com) 2025-04-04T12:51:30.100Z
Win of the Week
NBC News: A federal judge just issued a final judgement and permanent injunction against the Trump admin — ruling that the National Institutes of Health must continue funding research grants at their original, full amounts. @msnbc.com
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1.bsky.social) 2025-04-05T01:25:14.404Z
Politicians Standing Up, Literally
Cory Booker, the greatest filibusterer of all time
Senator Cory Booker concludes his record-breaking Senate Floor speech after 25 hoursMassive applause for Booker
Politicians Running Scared
Elon Musk — who seems super-sore about losing in his effort to buy a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court
Elon Musk’s first public comment after the Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Republicans endorsed — and Musk spent millions of dollars supporting — lost.
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yasharali.bsky.social) 2025-04-02T05:29:03.270Z
People Standing Up
In the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral in central London, a crypt memorializes the building’s designer, Sir Christopher Wren. In Latin, the sign at the crypt tells visitors:
“Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.”
This weekend, people stood up everywhere. To find Americans doing their part, look around you.
Massive #HandsOff rallies across the country 🔥🔥🔥
We’ll let recording artist Richard Hawley play us out:
That’s all for now. Follow us on Bluesky or Facebook for updates throughout the week — and look for us in your inbox again on Sunday, April 13.
Thanks & ’til then—
the TrumpVersusUS team