Feb: 23: What Really Happened Last Week

The DOGE job destruction program, screwing our allies, and some reasons for hope

Hello friends!

Not My President’s Day protest, NYC

It’s my beginning-of-the-week paywalled post! Copy this and send it to a friend who says they are “tuning out the news.”

I’m a journalist with two decades of experience. I’ve covered technology and policy in depth, and I have a special interest in media literacy and mental health—how we experience the news, and what it does to us.

For at least the first 100 days of this Trump term, this will be a weekly, highly curated list of relevant news, bright spots, and action steps, focusing on the topics of this newsletter: caregiving, youth, climate change, human rights, mental health.

I’m also going to be answering your questions, so please let me know if you have any!

Don’t worry and please don‘t hit unsubscribe: my Friday essays will remain free for all. And if you want a paid subscription but can’t afford it, just hit reply and ask !

Here’s my criteria for this news roundup:

• Real events that have real consequences for real people now.

• I’m trying to avoid pseudo-events, purely symbolic gestures and speculation. That means I’m leaving out some stuff you’ve probably seen elsewhere.

• I am presenting impacts alongside responses and solutions.

• I want to model healthy, balanced news consumption. I don’t know that I can become the only news you read, but I can at least point the way to a better news habit. I believe this is going to be crucial to our mental health and our ability to show up for others, including our kids, in this accelerating polycrisis.

In This Week’s Edition:

1. DOGE Coup/Job Destruction Program

2.American Gulag

3.Screwing Our Allies

4.New York, New York

5.Good News/Wild Card

1. DOGE Job Destruction Program

Trump has continued to illegally block at least 396 Billion dollars in funding already appropriated by Congress. All over the country, untold numbers of people are sitting around waiting and wondering and worrying what is going to happen, if they get their money or don’t.

And the so-called Department of Government Efficiency continues to kick civil servants to the curb.

Here’s a partial count. Some of these firings may be reversed, all of them are arguably illegal/unauthorized:

• On Saturday afternoon (?!), yesterday, DOGE sent a mass email to all. federal. employees. saying they needed to “document their work” in an email by Monday 11:59 pm, or it would be considered a resignation. The State Department and Kash Patel’s FBI immediately were like “nah.” Always fun when different members of the broligarchy are openly arguing about how to proceed.

• 220,000 ”probationary” workers across the federal government have been pink-slipped

• 75,000 are taking ”deferred resignation” — a judge ruled that this program could proceed, and the Trump administration then declared that it was closed. They got fewer than they wanted. About 150,000 federal workers, or 7 percent, leave the government in a given year.

• USAID-10000

• Department of Energy-2000

• CFPB-”almost everyone” ~1,750

• Interior, (Parks, Bureau of Land Management) -2,300

• Department of Veterans Affairs -1,000

• NIH-1,200, including Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 700

• DHS-405

• EPA-171

• 39- Education Dept

• Six top Pentagon officials, including Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. a four-star fighter pilot known as C.Q., only the second Black man to hold the job at the top of the military.

Impact:

It’s people’s livelihoods. It’s morale. It’s institutional knowledge and history. It’s prosperity and safety and research and innovation. It’s jobs across the country.

I don’t give investment advice, but I expect the economy to start doing very badly (there was a stock drop on Friday). Destroying a lot of jobs at once, along with public confidence, will do that.