Saturday, May 17, 2025
Friday, May 16, 2025
Thursday, May 15, 2025
NOAA Is Struggling As Hurricane Season Nears
Vacancies at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are raising fears among current and former agency officials and Democrats that cuts to the federal workforce have left the country with too few experts to help prepare for weather disasters ahead of the looming Atlantic hurricane season.
POLITICO first reported on Wednesday that NOAA posted 155 job openings at the National Weather Service, the public safety agency whose regional offices make up the nation’s first line of defense for imminent storms and disasters. . . . . NOAA managers are pleading with employees in emails to pursue reassignments to fill those jobs, which in many cases would amount to demotions.
“There appears to be a panic level on the part of the department to try and undo the damage they’ve done to the weather service.”
The vacancies are mostly for meteorologists who embed in local offices scattered throughout the country and coordinate with local officials like mayors and emergency managers to provide timely information for storm preparation, helping reduce loss of life and property.
NWS is also backfilling crucial roles like hydrologists and information technology specialists who help fine tune radar systems, said Tom DiLiberto, a former NOAA official who spoke at the Wednesday event. Those functions are essential for events like the hurricane season that officially begins June 1, DiLiberto said.
“We’re not prepared. We’re heading into hurricane season as unprepared as anytime as I can imagine,” he said.
Five former NWS chiefs said in an open letter earlier this month that the Trump administration’s cuts could lead to “a needless loss of life.” They said offices are so thinly staffed that some roles will have to be filled on a part-time basis. The former NWS directors said 250 employees were fired or took buyouts in February, and another 300 have since departed.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has also endured layoffs and curtailed or cut disaster response programs.
“This is not fear mongering. These are challenges by design, by the actions of the Trump administration,” Rep. Gabe Amo (D-R.I.) said. “We know that there’s a likelihood of a very intense [hurricane] season. So why would we put ourselves in a position to not be the most prepared possible?”
DiLiberto said Trump’s actions will also further obscure climate-driven dangers. NOAA recently shuttered its database of disasters that cause at least $1 billion of damage, taking a key public resource offline. DiLiberto said datasets tracking polar sea ice in the Arctic and greenhouse gases at NOAA are also under threat.
“The Trump administration takes an axe to NOAA, whose mission is to protect the American people and their livelihoods,” he said. “NOAA is in trouble.”
Wednesday, May 14, 2025
ICE Tactics Are Fueling a Trump Immigration Backlash
The long-running television show Cops became a propaganda boon to American law enforcement soon after its debut in 1989. The morality of the show is not complicated: The heroes are guys in uniforms braving danger to restore order. They face off against shirtless, drunken louts yelling in the street or barreling down the highway at 100 miles per hour.
Immigration enforcement in service of President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign has been the aesthetic opposite of a Cops episode. In social-media clips and grainy security-camera footage, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers appear in dark clothing, some wearing masks or neck gaiters that make them look like bandits. The people they target may be walking down the street, sitting in a car, or otherwise going about their lives. Few are engaged in obvious criminal behavior.
In one recent example that went viral, ICE officers in Maryland stopped a 51-year-old mother and smashed through her car window to arrest her while her teenage daughter sat in the passenger seat filming and crying. In another, security-camera footage of the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk—a student from Turkey whose visa was revoked over an op-ed—shows her crying out in fear as plainclothes officers swarmed her on the street and put her in a car. (She was released on Friday.) A Massachusetts neighborhood devolved into chaos last week when ICE officers arrested a distraught teen trying to stop them from hauling away her mother.
Many Americans have recoiled at these scenes, comparing officers’ tactics to those of authoritarian regimes. Yet the arrests in the videos do not show conduct outside the bounds of typical ICE protocol. This is what immigration enforcement looks like. It’s messy and emotional, and requires officers to arrest people for an offense that many Americans do not view as a crime.
Whenever public attention on immigration shifts from the border to U.S. streets, support for aggressive enforcement tends to erode. It happened during Trump’s first term. It’s happening even faster now.
Immigration was one of Trump’s best-polling issues when he took office in January, and his rating on the issue continues to rank higher than his overall job approval. But in the past two months, Trump’s immigration approval rating has seen a double-digit downturn. . . . . 53 percent of respondents disapproved of Trump’s handling of immigration, compared with 46 percent who approved. Other polls taken around the 100-day mark of Trump’s presidency found similar results.
A president’s approval numbers on immigration can be misleading, because the measurement contains two distinct components. One element is about stopping illegal border crossings. , , , , But a quiet border does not provide a dramatic visual image.
The other part of a president’s immigration performance relates to people who are already here. Polls show far less enthusiasm for aggressive ICE enforcement that sweeps up immigrants without criminal records in U.S. communities. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that only about one-third of Americans want to see the deportation of all immigrants living in the country illegally. . . . . support for deporting violent criminals is nearly universal, but backing drops to the single digits when it comes to people who are married to a U.S. citizen or who came to the U.S. as children.
Alexander Kustov, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who studies immigration, attributes some of the slump in Trump’s approval to . . . . Trump is “not doing what most people want,” he said. He’s doing much, much more. He’s overreaching.
“I think there’s this tendency to assume that if people are skeptical or dislike immigration, they would just be happy with anything, but there are limits,” Kustov told me. “People don’t like chaos at the border. But if you just randomly and mindlessly deport people without due process, it’s also actually pretty chaotic too.”
Soon after Trump designated Tom Homan to be the White House border czar, Homan began playing down expectations that ICE would round up immigrants en masse. ICE would focus on national-security threats and violent criminals, he said—“the worst of the worst.” It sounded like moderation.
That type of selective immigration enforcement does not make for much of a mass-deportation campaign, however. . . . aggressive immigration enforcement on U.S. streets, filtered through bystanders’ cellphone videos, is so politically perilous.
Trump and his top officials took a different path when they returned to power, opting instead for a shock-and-awe campaign that sent migrants to Guantánamo Bay on military jets and banished others to a nightmarish megaprison in El Salvador. ICE operations on U.S. streets, and rumors of them, have left immigrant neighborhoods across the country on edge. Immigration attorneys and advocacy groups are reenergized, winning in court and bringing media attention to the most sympathetic or outrageous cases.
ICE says three-quarters of the immigrants it arrested during Trump’s first 100 days had criminal records, but the agency did not provide a breakdown of their crimes. Traffic offenses, drug crimes, and immigration violations—such as reentering the United States after a deportation—are typically the leading categories.
Tom Warrick, a former DHS official who served under both Republican and Democratic presidents, said the current administration would be smart to spend heavily building up the immigration court system and providing more due process, not less. . . . . . Polling shows that a majority of Americans aren’t opposed to deportations per se, but believe that the government should follow the law and give detainees a fair hearing.
Warrick told me it won’t be easy for the Trump administration to simply ignore public opinion and forge ahead with three and a half more years of harsh tactics. If it does, that could feed the sanctuary-jurisdiction movement that Trump officials are trying to stamp out.
Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s immigration policies—and the political messaging behind them—has led the attack on due-process rights for ICE detainees. Last week he said the White House is considering wartime measures that would suspend people’s constitutional right to challenge their arrest and imprisonment. ICE is not required to publicly release the names of those it arrests. Stripped of habeas protections, the immigrants in the grainy videos being seized off the street could be quickly deported with no recourse to challenge their detention. But most wouldn’t show up in any video at all.
Tuesday, May 13, 2025
Monday, May 12, 2025
The Real Math Behind Supposed DOGE Cuts
In November, when Donald Trump first announced his plan to place Elon Musk in charge of a new Department of Government Efficiency, the idea was widely written off as a joke. Then Trump took office, and DOGE began its very real stampede through the government. As an effort to meaningfully reduce federal spending, however, DOGE remains wholly unserious.
Musk initially promised that he would eliminate $2 trillion of the $7 trillion federal budget, before scaling back his ambitions to $1 trillion, and then $150 billion. Even that revised target is highly improbable.
Precisely measuring the budgetary effects of the Musk experiment remains difficult, but we can begin by looking at the claims made by DOGE itself. In late February, its website claimed to have achieved $55 billion in annual-spending reductions. However, its “wall of receipts” detailed only $16.5 billion of this total. Half of that figure came from a typo claiming $8 billion in savings from terminating an $8 million contract. As The New York Times has reported, that was far from the only accounting error. Once such mistakes as false contract cancellations, triple counts of the same reform, and the inclusion of contracts that expired decades ago were fixed, verified budget savings stood at just $2 billion.
A common sleight of hand is canceling a “blanket purchase agreement”—in which the recipient had been given the equivalent of a credit limit to incur necessary costs on a project—and then claiming savings of the full credit limit rather than the (in many cases substantially lower) amount that was actually spent. Even assuming that the website’s stated savings have become twice as accurate as they were in February, annual savings would reach perhaps $15 billion, or 0.2 percent of federal spending.
Fortunately, more reliable sources than DOGE’s self-reported figures exist. The best is the Treasury Department’s monthly accounting of spending by agency and program. Any true DOGE spending reductions should show up in these budget totals, as should the results of other White House initiatives, including cuts to public-health spending and the ongoing efforts to eliminate USAID and the Department of Education.
These spending data do not flatter the Musk project. Total federal outlays in February and March were $86 billion (or 7 percent) higher than the levels from the same months a year ago, when adjusted for timing shifts. This spending growth—approximately $500 billion at an annualized rate—continues to be driven by the three-quarters of federal spending allocated to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense, veterans’ benefits, and interest costs. These massive expenses have been untouched by DOGE’s focus on small but controversial targets such as DEI contracts and Politico subscriptions.
Perhaps the highest-profile cuts under the Trump administration so far have been to public-health spending and foreign aid. And yet, even here, the numbers are rounding errors in the context of the federal budget. Public-health spending, previously about $8.2 billion monthly, fell to $7.1 billion in March, led by cuts to the National Institutes of Health and the Health Resources and Services Administration, the latter of which funds state and local health grants to serve underprivileged families.
Monthly spending on targeted foreign-assistance programs has fallen from $2.4 billion to $1.4 billion. This includes spending on “Global Health and Child Survival” programs—which includes highly effective funding to combat HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, and other illnesses in less developed countries— falling by half to $400 million a month.
These cuts have already been highly disruptive to beneficiaries, contractors, and employees, and they threaten immense long-term harm. And yet, their total monthly savings have totaled just $2.1 billion. At the Department of Education, another shutdown target, spending has remained steady aside from the early termination of post-pandemic funding that was already scheduled to phase out over the next year.
Cost reductions from laying off federal employees have been too small to show up in the data. This is not surprising, because even laying off one quarter of the 2.3 million federal civilian employees would shave off just 1 percent of federal spending. To be fair to DOGE, more savings will materialize in October, when the salaries of the 75,000 federal employees who took a buyout come off the books. That should save Washington $10 billion a year, or 0.1 percent of federal spending—except even that is an overestimate, because Washington will surely end up hiring contractors to perform at least some of the work previously handled by those civil servants, and many contractors cost more than employees.
Trump and Musk have already hit their easiest targets that do not directly burden most MAGA voters, such as government employees, foreigners, academics, and recipients of contracts with some kind of DEI component. More recent moves to slash Social Security customer-service and veterans’-health personnel have faced a backlash from affected Republican voters. Congress has shown little interest in passing legislation to ratify the executive branch’s cuts, meaning many of them will likely be reversed in court.
That, by the way, is the good news for DOGE. The bad news is that the project seems quite likely to expand long-term budget deficits. Slashing IRS enforcement will embolden tax evasion and reduce revenues by hundreds of billions of dollars over the decade. Laying off Department of Education employees who ensure collection of student-loan repayments will increase the deficit. Illegally terminated federal employees are already being reinstated with full back pay, leaving the government with little to show for its trouble besides mounting legal fees.
Even if DOGE somehow manages to end up in the black, any modest savings it achieves will be completely overwhelmed by the GOP’s push to expand the 2017 tax cut at a cost of roughly $500 billion annually. Claims that Washington can no longer afford to spend 0.1 percent of its budget providing lifesaving HIV treatments to 20 million impoverished Africans cannot be taken seriously when the administration and Congress are preparing to cut taxes and expand other spending by trillions of dollars.
None of this is to say that DOGE has failed. Musk might not have followed through on his unfocused and evolving promises to eliminate payment errors, balance the entire budget, and implement regulatory reform. But he has successfully given the White House cover to purge and intimidate the civil service, helped Congress justify exorbitant tax cuts, rewarded MAGA voters with revenge against their perceived enemies, and granted himself the ability to access sensitive government data and possibly ensure his companies’ continued government contracts. Sure, annual budget deficits remain on track to double over the next decade. But if you thought DOGE was really about cutting costs, you were never in on the joke.
Sunday, May 11, 2025
Will SCOTUS End Separation of Church and State
The beginning of the end of the separation of church and state started with recycled tires—specifically, recycled tires used for playground padding at a Missouri church’s preschool. The end could arrive this summer, in the form of a Supreme Court ruling requiring Oklahoma to fund the nation’s first religious charter school, a Catholic institution that is “faithful to the teachings of Jesus Christ.”
The Constitution provides that the government “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The Court has said the two religion clauses are intended to facilitate religious practice “without sponsorship” (the establishment clause) and “without interference” (the free-exercise component). But there are occasions, particularly when it comes to matters of government funding, when those clauses are in tension with each other. As the court has grown increasingly conservative in recent years, it has consistently resolved this conflict in favor of free exercise, expanding the sphere of what protecting religious liberty requires and constricting, to the point of near-invisibility, the scope of what the establishment clause forbids.
Which brings us back to tires. In 2017, the Justices considered a claim by Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia. Its preschool and daycare center had been excluded from a Missouri playground resurfacing program; the church claimed that this infringed on its religious freedom. The Court ruled 7–2 for the church. “The exclusion of Trinity Lutheran from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified, solely because it is a church, is odious to our Constitution,” the Court said in a decision by Chief Justice John Roberts. Justice Elena Kagan joined the majority, and Justice Stephen Breyer concurred separately, emphasizing that the program was akin to providing churches with police and fire protection.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, and in hindsight their warning looks prescient—it’s not only playground surfaces that can be slippery. “To hear the Court tell it, this is a simple case about recycling tires to resurface a playground. The stakes are higher,” Sotomayor wrote. “This case is about nothing less than the relationship between religious institutions and the civil government—that is, between church and state. The Court today profoundly changes that relationship by holding, for the first time, that the Constitution requires the government to provide public funds directly to a church. Its decision slights both our precedents and our history, and its reasoning weakens this country’s longstanding commitment to a separation of church and state beneficial to both.”
A footnote in the Missouri ruling noted that it did not “address religious uses of funding.” That distinction didn’t last long. As Sotomayor predicted, playground padding was just the start. Three years later, in 2020, the Court ruled that a Montana tax-credit program for private-school tuition had to include religious schools. This time, all four liberal Justices dissented. In a 2022 case from Maine, the conservative majority, bolstered to six with the arrival of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, went even further. In parts of the state so rural that there are no public high schools, Maine pays for students to attend other public or private schools, but not sectarian ones. The Court said that limitation violated the rights of parents who wanted their children to receive a religious education. “What a difference five years makes,” Sotomayor lamented in a dissent. “Today, the Court leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation.”
Now comes Oklahoma, where the Catholic Church created St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School is seeking state recognition to become an explicitly religious charter school. The state’s current charter schools include a science-and-technology-focussed school, a Cherokee-language immersion program run by the tribe, and a “classical academy” sponsored by conservative Hillsdale College. . . . . The school would be open to all applicants, whether Catholic or not, but students would be required to attend Mass.
Oklahoma’s Statewide Charter School Board granted approval to St. Isidore, but the state’s Republican attorney general—Gentner Drummond, who is now running for governor—sued to block that action. The Oklahoma Supreme Court agreed that allowing St. Isidore to operate as a public Catholic charter school would violate both the establishment clause and the state constitution’s ban on spending government funds to support religious institutions.
Things may be trending in a different direction at the U.S. Supreme Court, judging by the oral arguments held before the Justices on Wednesday. Lawyers for St. Isidore and the Charter School Board argued that refusing to open the charter-school program to religious schools violates the free-exercise clause. . . . On the other side, Gregory Garre, who served as George W. Bush’s Solicitor General and is representing Drummond, contended that charter schools are public schools, and that teaching religion as truth in public schools has long been impermissible under the establishment clause. Even as St. Isidore complained of being singled out for unfavorable treatment because of its religious status, Garre noted, the school was asserting that it deserved an exemption from ordinary rules that require charter schools to agree not to discriminate in hiring. The school said, instead, that it “complies with all applicable state and federal laws and statutes to the extent the teachings of the Catholic Church allow.”
Significantly, St. Isidore is down a Justice who would likely be inclined in its direction. Barrett recused herself from the case without explanation; it was presumably because of her connection to Nicole Stelle Garnett, a former Notre Dame colleague and close friend of hers who has been a leading proponent of religious charter schools and who advised St. Isidore. Barrett’s absence means the three liberal Justices, who would likely vote against the school, could prevail in an alliance with just one of the conservatives, because a 4–4 tie would leave the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling in effect. Even so, Wednesday’s session was not encouraging for those who had hoped an expressly religious charter school would be a step too far, even for this conservative Court.
This one, though, is especially disturbing because the new stance conflicts with a 1994 federal law that established support for charter schools, which requires that a charter be “nonsectarian in its programs, admissions policies, employment practices, and all other operations” and “not affiliated with a sectarian school or religious institution.”
To the extent that opponents of religious charter schools have any hope of success, it rests with the Chief Justice, who, like five other Justices, is a product of Catholic education. . . . . Roberts wrote the majority opinion in the three recent cases expanding the scope of religious liberty, so this is an uphill climb. His questions at oral argument, though, could be read as tilting toward either side.
In the end, it may not matter. Even if Roberts isn’t willing to go along, another case involving religious charter schools will come up, with Barrett not recused, and the votes in favor of public religious education will be seemingly assured. That would open the floodgates to religious charter schools in forty-seven states whose laws now prohibit them, with the inevitable accompaniment of hard questions. What happens when a charter school claims its religious beliefs allow it to educate only members of the faith? What if, as Sotomayor asked, a school wants to teach creationism, not evolution?
Religious liberty is a positive good; it is a fundamental American precept. So, too, is the separation of church and state, and that is where the problem with the current Court’s approach arises. “Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Government,” James Madison wrote, in 1822. Two centuries later, the incredible shrinking establishment clause would have worried him. It should trouble us as well.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)