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2025-04-02 11:01:55

“Musk has made this a referendum on the idea of an American oligarchy,” Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler told me recently, as he warned about the potential fallout from the $25 million that the world’s wealthiest person spent trying to flip a state Supreme Court seat.

In the first major statewide election since Donald Trump’s 2024 victory, oligarchy lost and democracy won. Progressive candidate Susan Crawford handily defeated Musk-backed candidate Brad Schimel to preserve the liberal majority on the Wisconsin high court through at least 2028.

“Today Wisconsinites fended off an unprecedented attack on our democracy, our fair elections and our Supreme Court, and Wisconsin stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price,” Crawford said at her victory party Tuesday night. “Our courts are not for sale.”

It’s a seismic event both inside and outside Wisconsin. On a state level, the court could soon decide the fate of an 1849 abortion ban, a law restricting collective bargaining for public sector unions, and Wisconsin’s gerrymandered congressional maps—the latter of which could help determine which party controls the US House in 2027.

But, because of Musk, the race was much bigger than just a judicial election in Wisconsin. Crawford’s victory provides a blueprint for how Democrats and progressives can run against Musk’s plan for oligarchy all across the country—and win.

“The world’s richest man tried to buy Wisconsin’s democracy in order to corrupt Wisconsin’s judiciary, but Wisconsinites demonstrated that our state is not for sale,” Wikler said in a statement Tuesday night. “In a moment of national darkness, Wisconsin voters lit a candle. Let the lesson of Wisconsin’s election ring out across the country: hope is not lost, democracy can yet survive, and the voice of the American people will not be silenced.”

Musk indeed did everything he could to buy the race, investing more money through his political groups than any donor to a judicial race in US history. He paid people $100 to sign a petition against “activist judges” and gave out three $1 million checks to voters, which drew an unsuccessful legal challenge from Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul.

But, unlike in November, Democrats had an effective plan to counter it.

Wisconsin Democrats launched the People v. Musk campaign in early March, with Wikler calling the race “the first referendum on Musk-ism.”

Crawford, a circuit court judge in Madison, made Musk a central part of her messaging. “I need to talk for just a minute or two about my opponent,” she told a crowd of supporters when I saw her campaign in Kenosha. “Elon Musk.”

Wisconsinites may have been repelled by the idea of a billionaire swooping in to purchase an election. “It’s everything that Wisconsin is not,” Democratic State Rep. Robyn Vining told me. “The Wisconsin work ethic is a big deal. You work hard for what you have, and to have the richest man in the world come in and just to buy a seat for his own advantage, it’s not who we are. As a Wisconsinite, that’s infuriating.” 

The race became an outlet for frustrated Democrats to turn their anger—at losing to Trump again, at the rudderless leadership of the national Democratic Party, at Musk’s massive campaign expenditures—into organizing. As Katie Whitecotton, a Democratic volunteer who hosted a get-out-the-vote canvass in suburban Milwaukee put it, “Our sorrow has turned into rage and into action.”

On the Friday before Election Day, the same day Musk announced he’d be travel to Wisconsin to hand out two million-dollar checks, I met up with Wikler at the local Democratic Party headquarters in Kenosha. There were still posters up for Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Tim Walz, a reminder that the November hangover had not yet fully worn off.

But Democrats were eager to flush the memories of November and fight back against the naked concentration of wealth and power that Musk represented.

“We have a gift and I know that’s weird to say because this is a terrifying time in our country,” Wikler said to a room of Crawford supporters. “Here in Wisconsin, by supporting Susan Crawford, we have a chance to fight back in this moment and say we’ve had enough of these attacks.”

After Harris lost it by 6 points, Crawford carried Kenosha County by about 6 points on Tuesday.

It’s particularly noteworthy that Musk’s effort to buy Wisconsin’s highest court backfired at the very moment that Musk and Trump are threatening to impeach federal judges who rule against the most extreme and unconstitutional parts of the Trump agenda. Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Dallet emphasized that point when she campaigned in suburban Milwaukee for Crawford.

“We realize now, with everything going on, how important our courts are,” Dallet said. “We are the backstop on democracy.”

2025-04-02 06:32:03

On Tuesday, MAGA Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna presided over a colorful hearing devoted to one specific goal: speedrunning a revival of 61 years of conspiracy theories about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Jr. 

In that goal, Luna, the chairwoman of the brand-new Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, and her witnesses—a bouquet of JFK researchers, including famed director Oliver Stone—succeeded admirably. They excoriated the Warren Commission, whose investigation into Kennedy’s death ended in 1964; denigrated what JFK skeptics call the “magic bullet” from Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle, which they say could not possibly have killed Kennedy; and promoted theories that the CIA or perhaps the Mob were involved in Kennedy’s murder.

All this is certainly good fun, and at times, the hearing even briefly raised important questions about government transparency regarding the investigation into Kennedy’s death. Inevitably, though, Tuesday’s hearing couldn’t prove that the CIA killed Kennedy or that Oswald didn’t act alone. At times, it was more about Donald Trump than Kennedy, with Republican members of Congress obliquely trying to prove that the Deep State they suggest could have either killed Kennedy or else covered up the true causes of his death is now coming for Trump too. That Deep State, declared Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, at one point, “is here today. They are right before our eyes.” 

The JFK assassination remains the ur-conspiracy theory in American life, the event about which most Americans have at least some suspicions: recent polls show the majority of Americans don’t believe Oswald acted alone. That’s not new: conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s death began the instant the president was shot, and have continued right up until the present day.

Upon returning to office, Trump took up the politically popular task of declassifying what he claimed were new JFK files, along with others related to the crimes of billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. While the Epstein release was a poorly-conceived stunt that flopped immediately, containing little except documents that have already been public for years, the JFK release contained some genuinely fascinating archival material. It showed the extent of the CIA’s historic activities in other countries and at home—including what one CIA employee wrote were ways that the agency had “exceeded its mandate”—and provided a new window into U.S. spycraft in general. Among other things, the documents help further reveal the jawdropping extent of joint CIA-FBI collaborations inside the United States, including, as one released file described, “breaking and entering and the removal of documents” from the French embassy. 

For Oliver Stone, however, Trump’s release wasn’t enough. The 78-year-old filmmaker, one of the world’s more famous JFK conspiracy theorists, said he believed Congress should reopen their investigation into Kennedy’s death, to force the CIA to reveal what else they may know about it. 

“Nothing of importance has been revealed by the CIA in all these years,” Stone testified, “although we know from other records that there are illegal, criminal activities in every facet of our foreign policy in practically every country on earth.” 

We “do not know and are not allowed to know anything about the CIA’s true history of the United States,” he added.

In her opening statement, Rep. Luna claimed that the panel was originally set to contain more witnesses. “We had more but for various reasons those individuals did not want to come forward,” she said. The handling of the JFK assassination contributed to the “deep distrust” the American people have towards their government, she added. 

Congresswoman Mace didn’t hesitate to make sure the event was viewed through a partisan lens, declaring, “I’m grateful to President Trump for keeping good on his promise of transparency. This is a man who also took a bullet for our country.” It was imperative, she said, to get the truth “out of whatever three letter agency is hiding information.” She also tied a purported Kennedy coverup to modern-day issues closer to her heart, adding, “We saw 51 intelligence leaders sign a letter saying the Hunter Biden laptop was fake… We saw a presidential candidate, Donald Trump, spied on by the political opposition. We saw Biden’s health—the previous administration lied to the American people about the president’s health… We saw the origins of Covid covered up.” The Deep State was, she added, still covering up “the Epstein list, refusing to disclose “who is on that list.” (Journalists who have covered Epstein for years do not believe a concrete “list” of his accomplices exists.)

The closest anyone got to attributing blame in Kennedy’s death was Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter who’s written about Kennedy for years. In response to questions from the Congress members, Morley said that the “intellectual author” of JFK’s death was “probably” the CIA and the Pentagon.

Other Republican members wanted to say wild stuff about the CIA, some of it pulled up from the deepest dregs of JFK history. In his remarks, Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona implied that CIA contact Gary Underhill was murdered after telling someone that he believed a “clique” within the CIA was responsible for Kennedy’s death. (Underhill is believed to have died by suicide, although that, like much else related to JFK’s death, is disputed.)

“Do any of you guys on the panel believe we’re seeing history repeat itself” Crane asked, referencing assassination attempts targeting Donald Trump and “how little we know” about the attempted assassins

“I would see similarities here,” Oliver Stone responded. 

Democratic members used the hearing to make their own political points. Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois pointed out that JFK established USAID, now in the process of a drawn-out death at DOGE and Donald Trump’s hands, and pointedly asked the panelists how Kennedy would have felt about that. Rep. Summer Lee of Pennsylvania noted how the rushed release had exposed personal information, including Social Security numbers, of people mentioned in the files. “The release didn’t really give us a smoking gun,” she said, “but it did produce plenty of collateral damage.” Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas said that while “Republicans are relitigating whether the CIA agents lied 60 years ago,” they aren’t as eager to discuss modern-day security scandals like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth texting about bombing Yemen in a group chat that mistakenly included the Atlantic‘s editor in chief.  

The youngest House Republican, Brandon Gill of Texas, asked the panelists whether the CIA was “in compliance” with Trump’s demand to release all JFK documents. Morley said no, adding that he believes the CIA still has documents “in the hundreds” that have yet to be disclosed.

That would leave plenty more to sift through. While the story of what happened that day in Dallas may never be settled to the unanimous satisfaction of the American people, Tuesday’s odd little hearing proved that JFK’s death can provide lots to argue about in various politically profitable ways for years to come. 

2025-04-02 06:10:36

Chris Milligan arrived in Myanmar in 2012 with a mandate: Help repair diplomatic relations with the southeast Asian country by reopening its United States Agency for International Development (USAID) mission. 

By that point, Milligan had worked for the USAID for more than two decades—a tenure that included working on reconstruction in Baghdad following the Iraq War and coordinating the recovery response to Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake. His Myanmar assignment posed a similarly significant challenge: After decades spent under brutal military rule, the country was in the midst of trying to transition to democracy.

Reopening the USAID mission in Myanmar, at the American embassy in the city of Yangon, was meant to facilitate that process by helping “reestablish [Myanmar’s] capacity to feed its people and to care for its sick, and educate its children, and build its democratic institutions,” former President Barack Obama said during his 2012 visit to the country—the first by a US president.

According to Milligan, the efforts the mission ultimately pursued in Myanmar—such as providing humanitarian assistance, working with local groups to facilitate peace talks, supporting farmers, and partnering with local health organizations to combat diseases—“were really all designed to strengthen the democratic and economic reforms that were ongoing in the country.”

Fast forward to now, and that progress has been decimated, with USAID missions shuttered around the world after the Trump administration reportedly fired all but 15 legally required positions of the agency’s global staff, throwing it into chaos.

In Myanmar—where a civil war has been raging since 2021, when the country plunged back into military rule—the significance of the cuts to USAID is becoming devastatingly clear, as the country reels from the 7.7-magnitude earthquake that hit Friday, killing at least 2,700 people and leaving more than 3,900 injured, according to Myanmar officials. (The US Geological Survey estimates fatalities are actually north of 10,000, and that the economic losses could exceed the country’s GDP.) There are no US officials currently on the ground, and the New York Times reports that a three-person USAID team is not expected to arrive until Wednesday, citing a source with knowledge of the deployment efforts. Even before the earthquake, there were nearly 20 million people in the country in need of humanitarian assistance, a UN official has said.

On Sunday, the US Embassy in Myanmar announced that the American government would provide up to $2 million towards recovery efforts—an amount that Milligan says is paltry compared to prior support for similar natural disasters, like the more than $2 billion USAID committed to recovery efforts in the decade after the 2010 quake in Haiti. On Monday, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce told reporters at a press briefing she rejected the notion that USAID cuts were impacting the earthquake response, claiming, “people are on the ground,” and then confusingly adding, “I would reject the premise that the sign of success is that we are physically there.” The State Department did not respond to questions from Mother Jones for this story.

I spoke with Milligan, who retired from USAID in 2021, via Zoom on Tuesday about the inadequacy of the US response to the earthquake recovery and its impacts on citizens of Myanmar; how the absence of American forces on the ground could give China and Russia a geopolitical edge; and how the recovery effort would be different if USAID were still intact.

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

The State Department claims the cuts to USAID have not impacted their ability to assist with recovery efforts on the ground in Myanmar. Is this plausible? 

When you dismantle an entire bureau of thousands of people who provide humanitarian assistance, no, it’s not plausible that there’s no impact on the US government’s authority to provide humanitarian assistance. And what we’re seeing is that impact. 

At this stage normally, we would have a disaster assistance response team (DART) on the ground. The initial wave of experts would be on the ground within hours, and then the DART would then grow. So, for example, following the 2023 earthquake in Turkey, we had a DART of 200 people on the ground; 160 of them were search and rescue individuals. 

By now, we would have a search and rescue team of hundreds of people on the ground in Myanmar, digging people out of rubble. Now all we’re told is, ‘we may be able to send three people there.’

USAID still maintains humanitarian assistance advisors, who have a specialty in the overall establishment of humanitarian assistance. But the provision of humanitarian assistance requires highly developed technical skills: You need someone who knows all about potable water and child protection; you need security; you need shelter experts; you need communication experts; you need food security experts. That’s why the DART is full of these experts who have careers in delivering this kind of assistance. 

So to say that’s been replaced by three people and $2 million is ludicrous. Meanwhile, China and Russia and others have scrambled with larger teams. They’re actually providing the support that’s required, but it’s not filling the gap of what we would do with a team of 200 people on the ground.

Help contextualize the $2 million American officials said they will provide to Myanmar for recovery—is it adequate, and how does it compare to how the US previously responded to natural disasters like this, in Myanmar or elsewhere? 

This is not adequate. Generally, the US government makes a small pledge, and then builds upon the pledge. So hopefully, the $2 million is seed money, and then there’ll be more funding forthcoming. 

The scale of assistance can vary. On one hand, the response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010—in which we scrambled and provided enormous assistance to the 1.4 million people who were displaced and who needed food and shelter and help—was about a billion dollars within six months. The support we provided following the 2008 Cyclone Nargis—Myanmar’s worst natural disaster in history, which killed more than 80,000 people—was $196 million over the following four years.

So $2 million is not going to have much of an impact at all, and it fails by comparison, because we know that China is already at $14 million. The world is wondering why the country with the most developed expertise, that has the capacity, that has the resources, isn’t stepping up and helping at this time.

I know you worked on the earthquake response in Haiti for USAID. What are the challenges that a place like Haiti, or Myanmar, have in responding to an earthquake, and what role did foreign assistance from USAID typically play in rebuilding? 

Although no two disasters are the same, they do follow similar processes. What you want to do initially is save lives. You want to get people out of rubble, you want to provide emergency shelter, water, food, health care. Secondly, you want to avoid a second rate of death that comes from the spread of diseases, cholera, lack of food. You want to avoid conflict over scarce resources. So there is a rhythm to a response: immediate life saving, relief, recovery, and then finally, back to development. It’s a continuum shared between Haiti or Myanmar, even though the context is always different. 

In Myanmar, you have no central government, really. You have a brutal civil war. It’s more difficult for a national level response. Not only were transportation networks destroyed by the earthquake, they’ve been destroyed by the civil war, and you can’t freely move goods across the country because different territories and land are held by different factions. 

It’s very difficult to mobilize international support that’s needed to rebuild and recover because of the lack of a legitimate government to work with.

I wanted to ask you about China and Russia, given reports that they are among the countries that have sent teams of people to Myanmar to help rescue people from the rubble and assist with on-the-ground recovery. What impacts could their assistance have on building their soft power in the region and undermining US interests?

The United States government provides humanitarian assistance based upon need, not on politics. However, there are enormous dividends to doing so. First of all, it showcases American values of generosity and compassion. It links America directly to communities overseas. It creates enormous goodwill. It increases our diplomatic power as well. 

China already is the major trading power for 120 countries around the world. It’s one of the largest creditor nations in the world. So it has stronger and deeper economic ties to most countries in the world than the United States does. By getting rid of the economic work that USAID does, we’re strengthening China’s economic ties with the world, and by walking away from the work that we do, we’re creating a political vacuum that China is filling.

China needs a world that looks like China. That’s what countries do: they work in their own national interest. The work that we do to build stable, safe, prosperous democracy overseas has all stopped. The support we provide to human rights actors has stopped. The support we provide for free press, free information, has stopped. China will take advantage of this to conform the world for its own benefit at our cost.

The location of the USAID mission is in Yangon, which is the southern part of the country, not in proximity to the earthquake. Certainly they felt the shocks, but the destruction was in the second largest city further north, Mandalay, and then more disruption in the capital Naypyidaw. I’ve been in touch to share my concerns with people there. Very few of them have been able to travel to the earthquake zone. The American staff have all received their termination letters, and the administration has notified Congress that it will be terminating all the local hires as well.

These local hires have spent decades, some of them, working for USAID and the US government, and they’re just going to be let go and dropped—and they will be in a risky situation, because the military government knows who they are and what they’ve been doing. We are going to turn our backs on those who serve the United States government and also serve their own country by trying to bring reforms to it.

How do you think the US response would differ if USAID was still intact? How would things look different on the ground? 

If USAID were still intact, we would have a large disaster assistance response team on the ground. We would have mobilized urban search and rescue teams from Los Angeles County and Fairfax County, Virginia; they would be there with the sniffer dogs and the equipment necessary to pull people out of the rubble. We would have experts—in nutrition, food, water, shelter, protection—on the ground; they would be working with the other donors to find out where the needs are, where are the gaps, and how the United States government can best help. We would be supporting the international coordination effort, which would be led by the UN but with our support. And so what you would have is a more robust international effort, and you’d ultimately be saving more lives.

We have the capacity, we have the ability, and we have the assets to save lives, and the choice has been not to use it, and people are dying.

2025-04-02 04:08:06

On Tuesday, in a series of emails sent at 5 a.m. Eastern Time, all employees—around 20—of the federal Administration for Community Living’s (ACL) Center for Policy and Evaluation were laid off. This follows the news last week that ACL, a subsidiary of the Department of Health and Human Services responsible for key issues around disability and aging, would essentially be shut down as part of a massive restructuring and firing campaign led by HHS head Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which is expected to involve some 10,000 layoffs overall. Although the Kennedy plan claims that at least some of the Administration for Community Living’s responsibilities will be transferred to other Health and Human Services agencies, the dismantling of units like the Center for Policy and Evaluation suggests that many of ACL’s functions will be lost—or at least severely diminished.

The Center for Policy and Evaluation, according to ACL’s website, analyzes services and evaluates programs that are “designed to ensure older Americans and persons with disabilities are able to fully participate and contribute in an inclusive community life,” including through collaboration with other HHS agencies like the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Vicki Gottlich, the head of the Center for Policy and Evaluation until her retirement in June 2024, believes that HHS’ move makes no sense “if you’re interested in government efficiency.”

The center “collects the data on how Older Americans Act money is spent and how many people are served,” Gottlich told me. “It helps states and grantees understand how to run their programs and helps ACL project staff with compliance. In other words, CPE helps make sure federal dollars are well spent.”

Given that the Kennedy-run HHS’ plans for reorganizing “vital” parts (and it’s unclear what “vital” means) of ACL are incredibly vague, it’s still unknown which agency, if any, will take up those responsibilities.

A CPE staffer who received a “Reduction in Staff” notice this morning told me, “I fear this April 1 purge will drain the department of crucial disability subject matter expertise and humanity just when we need it most,” and that “the loss of subject matter expertise may threaten the Department’s ability to meet its statutory and regulatory obligations.”

As I reported last week, ACL also saves federal government funds by supporting programs that help disabled and aging adults remain in their communities, a less costly approach than institutionalization.

While the HHS cuts, and the Trump administration’s wider slashing of federal agencies and services, are nominally about saving money, Jacobs doesn’t believe that eliminating the Administration for Community Living—which helps keep people out of nursing homes—will do so. “Community living costs our taxpayers a third of what it costs for people to live in institutional settings,” [former ACL disability commissioner Jill] Jacobs said. “There are very economically sound reasons for ACL to continue to exist.”

The Department of Health and Human Services has not responded to a request for comment.

2025-04-02 01:13:09

On March 17, Elon Musk appeared on Sen. Ted Cruz’s podcast and falsely alleged that Democrats were giving undocumented immigrants fraudulent access to programs like Social Security and Medicare to lure them to the US.  

“By using entitlement fraud the Democrats have been able to attract and retain vast numbers of illegal immigrants,” Musk claimed.

“And buy voters,” Cruz added.

“And buy voters, exactly,” Musk said. “They basically bring in 10, 20 million people who are beholden to the Democrats for government handouts and who will vote overwhelmingly Democrat as seen in California.”

“It’s an election strategy,” Cruz said. “It’s power.”

Republicans have been alleging for years that Democrats have been buying elections, usually with the help of liberal billionaires like George Soros. Indeed, election deniers, including Musk, widely promoted a conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was “bought by Mark Zuckerberg” because an organization he funded directed election grants to blue areas to juice Democratic turnout. (In reality, it gave grants to both red and blue areas for routine election administration activities to help offset the Covid-19 pandemic.)

These claims are particularly ironic in light of how Musk has engaged in the most openly brazen scheme to buy an election in modern American history, with groups linked to him spending more than $20 million and aggressively pushing the boundaries of legality to flip the Wisconsin Supreme Court in an election on Tuesday that will decide the court’s ideological majority.

It’s not just how much Musk and his groups have spent—more than any donor to a judicial election in US history—but how he has spent this money that makes Musk’s intervention in Wisconsin so alarming.

In addition to funding two dark money political groups that ran TV ads against liberal Judge Susan Crawford and sought to get out the vote for conservative candidate Brad Schimel, Musk resurrected a controversial scheme from 2024, paying voters $100 for signing a petition from his America PAC opposing “activist judges.” He then awarded Scott Ainsworth, a mechanical engineer from Green Bay, $1 million for signing the petition.

On the Friday before the election, he dramatically escalated this sketchy tactic, saying he would travel to Wisconsin to “personally hand over two checks for a million dollars each in appreciation for you taking the time to vote.” Unlike paying a Wisconsin resident to sign a petition, these million-dollar checks were contingent on someone actually voting. Legal experts quickly pointed out that Musk’s pledge violated the state constitution, which prohibits offering “anything of value…in order to induce any elector to…vote or refrain from voting.” 

Musk backtracked, saying the money would only go to people who signed his PAC’s petition, holding a rally in Green Bay on Sunday where he hand-delivered two $1 million checks. The Wisconsin attorney general sued to stop him, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to intervene before the event.

The recipients were allegedly chosen at random, but the winners aroused suspicion on closer inspection. One check went to Nicholas Jacobs, the chair of the state College Republicans. Another went to Ekaterina Diestler, a graphic designer at a packaging company in the Green Bay area that is owned by a Republican donor who has given tens of thousands of dollars to the Trump campaign and other GOP candidates, including $7,500 to Schimel.

Diestler filmed a video for Musk’s America PAC linking her payment to voting—the very thing that is illegal under Wisconsin law. “I did exactly what Elon Musk told everyone to do: sign the petition, refer friends and family, vote, and now I have a million dollars,” she says. (Musk’s PAC has since deleted the post.)

When Musk was heckled at one point during the rally, he blamed it on “Soros operatives,” without any acknowledgment that he was the only billionaire quite literally handing out million dollar checks in the race.  

Undeterred by legal challenges, Musk unveiled a new scheme on Sunday to recruit “block captains” for Schimel, paying people $20 a pop to “hold a picture” of Schimel with a thumps up, with a bonus $20 for those who posts pictures of themselves on social media with a polling site in the background (Wisconsin law forbids electioneering within 100 feet of a polling place).

“You could make over $1000 in one day just by getting out the vote in Wisconsin!” Musk wrote in one post on X. “Easiest money you ever made!” he said in another.

The scale of Musk’s spending and the scope of his aggressive pay-to-play tactics has dramatically raised the stakes of Tuesday’s election. “Musk has made this a referendum on the idea of an American oligarchy,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler told me when I visited the state last week.

“Voters casting a ballot for Susan Crawford are not only voting for their own freedom and their own democracy in their own state,” Wikler added, “they’re also sending a national message about whether wealth has unchecked power in this country, or whether the people still rule.”

2025-04-02 00:14:41

On Tuesday, thousands of staffers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta received early morning emails asking them to resign. The centers affected included those working on reproductive health, chronic disease, occupational safety, birth defects, smoking, tuberculosis, asthma and air quality, accidental and intentional injury, and prevention of violence and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV.

“It’s a blood bath this morning,” one CDC employee messaged me. Several others told me that their entire departments had received the letters. It wasn’t immediately clear whether everyone who had received the notices would ultimately be laid off.

“I regret to inform you that you are being affected by a reduction in force (RIF) action,” the letters stated. “After you receive this notice, you will be placed on administrative leave and will no longer have building access beginning Tuesday, April 1, unless directed otherwise by your leadership.” This action follows the announcement last week, by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to cut 10,000 employees from the agency. “This overhaul will be a win-win for taxpayers and for those that HHS serves,” Kennedy said in a statement. “That’s the entire American public because our goal is to Make America Healthy Again.”

Yet the staffers I talked to weren’t convinced that the cuts would improve public health or efficiency—on the contrary, they said they worried that government efforts to improve the lives of Americans would be undermined.

An employee I’ll call Amanda (she didn’t want me to use her name for fear of retribution) works in the Web-Based Injury and Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS) a team within the Injury Center that is responsible for processing all the data around injuries, including both fatal and nonfatal injuries caused by guns. Her branch of 40 employees all received RIF notices. “The cost analysis, the return on investment, all of the non-fatal and fatal data processing that goes to our lobbyists, our congressmen, our decision-makers, senators—all of that is gone,” she said. Her team also provides data that determine the leading causes of injury-related deaths.

An employee I’ll call Jen is a health scientist in the Division of Violence Prevention, with a specific focus on sexual and intimate partner violence. Jen and her team “had an inkling” that given the Trump administration’s gutting of other programs that prevent sexual violence, their work might be imperiled. In January, the US Department of Education enacted policies that would protect students accused of sexual harassment and assault. In February, the Department of Defense paused its military sexual assault prevention training. That same month, rape crisis centers reported that their scheduled federal funding payments hadn’t arrived.

“All of the actions, including getting rid of my team, is showing sexual violence prevention isn’t a priority,” Jen said, “and in fact, they don’t think it is needed at all.”

Jen noted that the teams in her center that work on opioid overdose prevention and suicide prevention did not appear to be affected by the cuts yet. The fact that those groups were spared may reflect the Trump administration’s focus on the impact of the opioid epidemic, especially on rural communities—yet it’s not clear whether the teams that support this work would remain intact. Amanda, the employee whose data team in the Injury Center all received notices, said that she and her colleagues had been working on machine learning initiatives for opioid overdose and suicide data. That work will cease to exist if her department is laid off.

Another employee, whom I’ll call Emily, told me that her unit, the entire office of public health practice at the Center for Chronic Disease, had also received RIF notices. Many of which, she added, contained factual errors, including misinformation about employees’ previous performance reviews, which are used to calculate their severance pay.

Emily noted that her team’s job is “to work across every programmatic cooperative agreement in the center, across all those staff, and try to create efficiencies in the work that they do, guide them toward measuring the impact and return on investment of our programs.” That mandate seems in line with what the Trump administration through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has identified as their goal. Nonetheless, they all still received the RIF notices.

In addition to harming their work, staffers reported that the disorganized nature of the cuts had created an atmosphere of widespread confusion and stress. Until last week, they said, even leadership had been uncertain of what was to come. Colleagues “were telling me that at 2 a.m. they can’t stop checking their computer,” said Jen. “They’re afraid to step away from their computer because they’re afraid they [suddenly] won’t have access.” Emily added, “It would be great if there was a plan and then some kind of logic to how people are fired. But that’s not the way this administration is functioning.”

Several centers convened all-staff meetings on Tuesday morning. In some cases, employees reported, their leaders had to negotiate with security simply to let staffers who had received RIF notices back in the building to attend the meetings. Those who did not receive the notice reported that metal detectors had been set up at the entrances to at least one CDC building—a security measure that had not existed previously. CDC spokespeople did not immediately respond to my request for comment.

The employees I talked to said they worried that given the sweeping nature of the cuts, much of the work the agency does will simply cease to exist.  “Where’s the plan to replace this work?” asked Jen. “There is no plan. It is just being removed.”