Mike Luckovich
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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
May 1, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson
May 02, 2025
President Donald Trump waited until the 101st day of his administration to fire national security advisor Mike Waltz, the official responsible for including the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic on an unsecure Signal chat in which leaders shared classified information about a military strike on the Houthis in Yemen. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who uploaded the classified information in that chat and shared it in another unsecure chat with his wife, brother, and personal friends, is still in the Cabinet.
On April 28 the U.S. campaign against the Houthis cost a $60 million F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet. The plane fell overboard from the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier when the vessel turned sharply to avoid fire from the Houthis while military personnel were moving the aircraft. Both the aircraft and the tow tractor moving it were lost, and one sailor suffered minor injuries.
The Signal scandal does not appear to have changed the Trump team’s communications habits. A Reuters photographer caught Waltz looking at his Signal messages during yesterday’s Cabinet meeting. The list of messages included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, special envoy Steve Witkoff, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Vice President J.D. Vance, whose message began: “I have confirmation from my counterpart….” Although Signal messages appear to violate the Presidential Records Act that requires the preservation of documents from an administration, the Trump team apparently continues to use the app.
Trump announced that he will nominate Waltz to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the position Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) expected but that Trump pulled from her because the Republicans' majority in the House of Representatives is so slim. Secretary of State Rubio will assume the duties of national security advisor. Rubio is now serving as secretary of state, national security advisor, U.S. archivist, and head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). All of these jobs are high-level, work-intense positions.
A spokesperson for the State Department learned about the change in Rubio’s portfolio from a reporter during a press briefing.
At 101 days, the “Department of Government Efficiency” and its leader, billionaire Elon Musk, are also running into trouble. Musk vowed to slash $2 trillion from government spending, but that number kept dropping until he said DOGE will save about $150 billion. As David A. Fahrenthold and Jeremy Singer-Vine noted in the New York Times, that number is largely unsubstantiated. The DOGE team’s list of cuts is riddled with errors. In addition, the nonpartisan nonprofit Partnership for Public Service estimates that DOGE cuts have actually cost taxpayers $135 billion this fiscal year, not including lawsuits.
Yesterday Musk told reporters that Congress will have to get to work to make the cuts he began permanent as he pulls back from government work to oversee Tesla. His foray into politics so badly hurt the company’s performance that it saw a 71% drop in profits in the first quarter of 2025. According to Emily Glazer, Becky Peterson, and Dana Mattioli of the Wall Street Journal, Tesla’s board has begun looking for a new chief executive. While both Musk and Tesla’s board deny the report, Musk will move back toward company business. When asked if he needed a successor in the White House, Musk answered: “Is Buddha needed for Buddhism? Was it not stronger after he passed away?”
It’s not clear that Congress will, in fact, embrace the cuts DOGE has made willy-nilly throughout the government. Three days ago, a Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll found that only 35% of Americans approve “of the way Elon Musk is handling his job in the Trump administration,” while 57% disapprove. “The amazing thing is that they haven’t actually done anything constructive whatsoever. Literally all they’ve done is destroy things,” a current federal employee told Nick Robins-Early of The Guardian. “People are going to miss the federal government that they had.”
As the damage it has caused becomes clearer, DOGE seems unlikely ever to become more popular. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has turned control of the Interior Department over to a DOGE operative, and Wes Siler reports tonight that DOGE is preparing a “reduction in force” for the National Park Service, bringing total workforce losses there to about a quarter of all NPS staff. According to a group of NPS employees calling themselves the Resistance Rangers, the cuts are directed at regional and national offices that support park-based staff in order to make the cuts less visible to the public.
As Siler notes in his Wes Siler’s Newsletter, the National Park Service is an important public-facing part of the federal government. Parks are “highly visible, and serve as symbols of national pride.” He notes that hurting “the visitor experience, attraction closures, and general bad news around NPS may serve to embarrass the administration more than news of, say, reductions to Internal Revenue Service staffing.”
Problems at DOGE continue to emerge. Jake Pearson of ProPublica reported yesterday that the DOGE employee who is working to shrink the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Gavin Kliger, owns stock in four companies the CFPB oversees. This conflict of interest potentially violates federal ethics laws.
Yesterday David Gilbert and Vittoria Elliott of Wired reported that the DOGE operative installed at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Christopher Sweet, is an undergraduate with no government experience. He is using artificial intelligence to comb through the agency’s rules and regulations, compare them with the laws authorizing them, identify rules that can be relaxed or removed, and rewrite them.
A source from HUD told Gilbert and Elliott that such work is redundant: officials created the rules only after “a multi-year multi-stakeholder meatgrinder.” Another source told the Wired reporters they were informed that Sweet is refining a model “to be used across the government.”
As Trump’s poll numbers have dropped, Trump’s team has doubled down on immigration to energize its base. Today Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr., a federal judge Trump appointed to the Southern District of Texas, rejected the administration’s use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to justify deporting Venezuelans from his district. This ruling may have implications for lawsuits elsewhere.
Rodriguez permanently prohibited the Trump administration from deporting Venezuelans from the Southern District of Texas under that law. He noted that the law authorizes such deporations only during wartime or a hostile invasion, and concluded that its “plain ordinary meaning” meant an invasion by military forces, not migration by alleged gang members.
Trump’s empowerment of heavy-handed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tactics led last Thursday to a raid on a house in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in which agents who said they were U.S. Marshals, ICE, and the FBI put a family outside in the rain in their underwear and then tore apart the house. They took the family’s phones, laptops, and life savings. But the people in the house were not the ones on the search warrant. They were all U.S. citizens, a mother and three girls recently arrived from Maryland.
“I told them before they left, I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here,” the woman told KFOR news. “I have to feed my children. I’m going to need gas money. I need to be able to get around. Like, how do you just leave me like this? Like an abandoned dog.”
In his recent interview with Trump, Terry Moran of ABC News revealed that Trump has a problem with a disconnect between his actions and the country’s principles. Trump had a copy of the Declaration of Independence installed in the Oval Office, and Moran asked the president what it means to him. Trump’s answer made it clear he has never read the document. “Well, it means exactly what it says,” he answered. “It's a declaration, it’s a declaration of unity, and love and respect and it means a lot. And it's something very special to, to our country.”
Last night, former vice president Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for president in 2024, gave her first major speech since losing the election. “Throughout my entire career…I have always believed in the ideals of our nation,” she began, “[t]he ideals reflected in the Declaration of Independence, that all are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights. Ideals advanced and affirmed by the service and sacrifice of generations of patriots, the ideals that ground the Constitution of the United States, that here in our country, power ultimately lies not with the wealthy or well connected, but with all of us, with ‘We the People.’”
After excoriating the Trump administration’s “narrow, self-serving vision of America where they punish truth tellers, favor loyalists, cash in on their power, and leave everyone to fend for themselves, all while abandoning allies and retreating from the world,” Harris noted that “this is not a vision that Americans want.” She urged the audience to “gear up for the hard work ahead, and please, always remember, this country is ours. It doesn't belong to whoever is in the White House. It belongs to you. It belongs to us. It belongs to ‘We, the People.’”
LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
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