Mother JonesModify

2026-04-03 22:40:12

President Donald Trump’s dumping of Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday was the kind of shrewd personnel change one might expect from an executive who made a name for himself by firing people. Bondi presided over the unraveling of the Department of Justice. Under her leadership, the DOJ has lost the respect of judges and juries, its ranks have been decimated by lawyers fleeing like rats from a sinking ship, and it racked up embarrassing losses at an unheard of clip. Almost impressively, Bondi has turned the Justice Department from an august symbol of the rule of law into a limping, corrupt enterprise. 

But Bondi wasn’t ousted for her disastrous leadership. Her incompetence, magnified in her handling of the Epstein files, in which she managed to make sure a bad story for her boss wouldn’t go away, contributed to Trump’s growing frustration. But Trump reportedly soured on Bondi because she failed to failed to lock up his political enemies. The irony of the situation, of course, is that Trump’s own involvement is what doomed not just those sham prosecutions, but ultimately the DOJ itself.

Trump spent his first term pining for a Justice Department that would protect him, and an attorney general who would serve like his personal attorney—or hit man. In his second term, Bondi willingly tried to fill that role. But her tenure is living proof of a problem whose origin ultimately lies with the rightwing push for a so-called unitary executive who controls every inch of the executive branch: that sort of presidential power breeds distrust, corruption, and ultimately failure. 

Before Trump returned to the White House, the Supreme Court granted him criminal immunity for official acts. That instantly infamous opinion, Trump v. United States, also emphasized that the Justice Department was the president’s personal playground. The attorney general was no longer the nation’s chief law enforcement official but, in the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, “acts as the President’s ‘chief law enforcement officer.’” Trump could direct investigations and prosecutions; he could even utilize the department’s prosecutorial powers in furtherance of crimes, including politically motivated investigation and charges. 

This Supreme Court constructed an all-powerful presidency on the premise that such power would breed both decisive leadership and democracy accountability. In Trump, Roberts wrote that the Constitution’s framers “deemed an energetic executive essential to…‘the steady administration of the laws.’” And in a 2021 case that acted as a stepping stone to the immunity decision, Roberts assured the public that a unitary executive would create the most politically responsive government. The executive power “acquires its legitimacy and accountability to the public through ‘a clear and effective chain of command’ down from the President, on whom all the people vote,” he wrote.

Bondi was the first attorney general to operate unencumbered by any loyalty to the rule of law, or any pretense of independence. Instead, she was liberated to act, unabashedly, as an appendage of the president. Not long ago, political interference at the Justice Department cost an attorney general his job. For Bondi, that sort of thing was all in a day’s work. In multiple congressional hearings, she demonstrated—through pre-planned zingers hurled at Democratic lawmakers, combatively refusing to answer questions, and praising Trump in terms that would make Stalin blush—that she had no respect for the idea of democratic accountability.

Bondi showed that treating the Justice Department as an instrument of the president’s will is ultimately self-defeating. Whereas Roberts promised “steady administration of the laws,” Bondi delivered embarrassing loss after embarrassing loss, and racked up scandal after scandal. Once elite jobs at DOJ are now so hard to fill that officials are left begging for applicants on social media, even as experience requirements have been slashed. Judges and jurors alike know that the Justice Department has been compromised. 

Let’s survey the wreckage. The Justice Department has mounted numerous prosecutions against anti-Trump protesters who oppose the administration’s cruel immigration sweeps. But in its zeal to punish dissent, dozens of have failed. A prosecutor, the aphorism goes, can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. But Bondi’s DOJ failed to secure an indictment against DC’s famous sandwich-thrower, who hurled a hoagie at a law enforcement official in protest of Trump’s immigration enforcement surge. Undeterred, DOJ hauled the thrower before a jury on a misdemeanor charge, where he was promptly acquitted. 

Last September, the Trump administration launched a showy, chaotic, and violent immigration operation in Chicago. Immigration agents descended from helicopters onto an apartment building in the middle of the night, where they not only detained immigrants but also zip-tied citizens and naked children. The brutal crackdown sparked demonstrations, and in came the Justice Department to prosecute the protesters, often with charges of impeding or assaulting officers. So far, they’ve failed to get a single conviction.

The Chicago Sun-Times has tracked 32 federal prosecutions tied to the Chicago deportation blitz. Of those, half were dismissed, grand juries declined to indict in three, one ended with a jury acquittal, and three will have charges dropped for good behavior. One of the people whose prosecution was dropped was Marimar Martinez, a US citizen who was shot five times by an ICE officer, then smeared as a domestic terrorist and charged with assaulting a federal officer.

On September 20, Trump tapped out a message to Bondi demanding that she hurry up and prosecute three people he held grudges against. “What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia???” he wrote, referring to former FBI Director James Comey, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and New York Attorney General Leticia James. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” When he hit send, Trump reportedly thought he was delivering a private message through his Truth Social media platform. Instead, he posted the instructions for the world to see. Bondi sprang into action.

In her pursuit of a Comey indictment, Bondi and Trump ousted the US attorney in Virginia’s eastern district who wouldn’t go along with the scheme. They replaced him with Florida insurance lawyer Lindsey Halligan. Halligan lacked any prosecutorial experience, and had worked on exactly three federal cases. But she had the qualification Trump and Bondi cared most about: Loyalty, as in all three cases, she had represented Trump. In a government run on the whim of one man, allegiance has proven more important than competence. 

Unfortunately, loyalty isn’t enough to secure a conviction. Halligan promptly engineered indictments against James and Comey, although a judge questioned whether Halligan had made critical misstatements of the law to a grand jury in Comey’ case. The New York Times found that Halligan omitted possibly exculpatory facts to James’ grand jury. Ultimately, a federal judge dismissed both indictments on grounds that Halligan’s appointment was unlawful. When the Justice Department tried to get a new indictment against James, the grand jury refused. The government is still appealing the dismissal of the charges against Comey.

When a video featuring six Democratic lawmakers reminding active-duty military and intelligence officers that they have a duty not to follow illegal orders enraged Trump, DOJ jumped into action. The US attorney’s office in DC, led by Trump ally Jeanine Pirro, sought indictments against the members of Congress. A unanimous grand jury rebuffed them.

Then came the attempted prosecution of the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, whom Trump wants to oust as part of his bid to take control of the powerful central bank. A federal judge in Washington quashed two grand jury subpoenas last month that were part of that criminal investigation. The opinion of Judge James Boasberg laid out not just that the case against Powell is paper thin, but that the Justice Department’s reputation is in such a state of ruin that it can no longer be trusted to act in the interest of justice. Boasberg was clear-eyed about the DOJ’s track record of launching prosecutions at the president’s behest, and how that history tainted the Powell case. The department once enjoyed a “presumption of regularity,” or good faith, before judges. Now, judges are presuming the worst.

In New Jersey last month, a federal judge threw a top prosecutor out of his courtroom and ordered his superiors to come in to testify about who was actually running the state’s US attorney’s office. Bondi had previously split the top job between three people after judges ousted another Trump lackey and former personal lawyer, Alina Habba, from the position, for having been unlawfully appointed. Bondi’s attempt to keep the office in the hands of Trump allies who aren’t Senate-confirmed failed when, last month, another court ruled that the three prosecutors jointly running the office had also been appointed unlawfully. 

“The Administration has made clear that it cares far more about who is running the” US attorney’s office, Judge Matthew Brann wrote, “than whether it is running at all.”

It’s a truth that applies to the department as a whole. Trump is so bent on loyalists—Bondi, Halligan, Pirro, Habba—who will implement his agenda, that he has undermined the department’s ability to function. Perhaps his next attorney general will not be so inept as those four. But the problem for Trump and his withering department remains: A Justice Department carrying out the president’s personal revenge plots is ultimately an untrustworthy institution.

2026-04-03 21:05:11

A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Often political movements end up as circular firing squads, especially when there’s a competition for leadership. The same can be true for cults. With Trump’s misnamed Make America Great Again cult movement, the firing squad is shaped more like a Möbius strip. In the past year or so, MAGA World has been racked with a series of cross-cutting feuds, with incoming and outgoing fire ricocheting across the Trumpian landscape in all directions, causing chaos and confusion, as multiple conspiracy theories clash and vitriolic accusations pile up. An outsider cannot keep track of the infighting without a program or a wire diagram that would make Carrie Mathison proud.

You may have caught particular episodes in this sweeping saga. One of the main ones occurred when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and commentator Tucker Carlson got into a dust-up last year over Israel, with Carlson, an America First anti-interventionist, decrying Cruz for being a pro-Israel warmonger and Cruz slamming Carlson for hosting on his show Nick Fuentes, the antisemitic white nationalist and Hitler fanboy. Cruz accused Carlson of being “complicit in…evil” for platforming Fuentes. This tiff led to a civil war inside the influential Heritage Foundation between those who backed Carlson (including its president) and those who found his association with Fuentes despicable.

This row reflected a deepening fault line among Trump followers between isolationists and hawks, with Israel as the fulcrum and antisemitism (actual or false charges of) imbuing the debate. With this baseline split, it was no surprise that the Iran war has led to more MAGA-on-MAGA catfighting. Fox News loudmouths Sean Hannity, Brian Kilmeade, and Mark Levin, along with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, have been cheerleaders for Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war against Tehran, with Carlson and Megyn Kelly blaming Israel for dragging Trump and the United States into this conflict.

Kelly complained the war was sold to the American public by “Israel firsters, like Mark Levin.” He retorted by calling Kelly an “emotionally unhinged, lewd and petulant wreck.” Then it got nasty. Kelly asserted that Levin had a small penis. He said she was a slut. I’m not making this up:

Adjacent to this fight over Israel and the Iran war, much of the internecine warfare within MAGA has been driven by an absurd conflict between commentator Candace Owens and Erika Kirk, the widow of Turning Point USA chieftain Charlie Kirk. Owens used to be a hotshot at The Daily Wire, a conservative media operation co-founded by Shapiro. But she and Shapiro had a bitter falling out two years ago, as Owens blended her criticism of Israel with explicit antisemitism. She departed and started her own podcast, where she built a massive audience of millions promoting extremism and conspiracy theories.

After Charlie Kirk was shot in September, Owens, who once worked at TPUSA, devoted hours of her show to promoting the conspiracy theory that he had been betrayed by close colleagues and killed by Egypt and France. Or maybe Israel. Or maybe the US government. She suggested that Kirk was about to leave the pro-Israel cause, and this led to his execution by one or more of these nefarious powers. And it gets more bizarre: Owens insisted she had proof that Egyptian military planes had been tracking Erika Kirk for years. I will spare you more of the bonkers details; there are plenty of them. (Another one of Owens’ prominent conspiracy theories is that French President Emmanuel Macron’s wife is really a man, and she alleged Macron had ordered her assassination for outing this secret.)

Erika Kirk begged Owens to cease her conspiracizing about her husband’s death. Owens didn’t. After all, as she peddled this cuckoo narrative, her audience grew. Shapiro called Owens a “vampire.” Laura Loomer, the Islamophobic MAGA influencer and 9/11 conspiracy theorist close to Trump, branded Owens a “grifter” and urged Erika Kirk to sue Owens.

On the other side, Carlson saluted Owens’ search for the truth. And Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center who recently resigned to protest the Iran war, tried to investigate supposed foreign involvement in the Kirk murder when he was in the Trump administration—and pissed off FBI Director Kash Patel by digging through the FBI files on the case without being authorized to do so.

Appearing on Carlson’s independent internet show two weeks ago, Kent, who has past ties to Fuentes (the antisemitic white nationalist Carlson respectfully interviewed), insinuated that Israel killed Kirk. “When one of President Trump’s closest advisers, who is vocally advocating for us to not go to war with Iran and for us to rethink, at least, our relationship with the Israelis,” Kent told Carlson, “and then he’s suddenly publicly assassinated and we’re not allowed to ask any questions about that, it’s a data point. It’s a data point that we need to look into.”

Kent has long been an avid conspiracy theorist, and he has championed the claim that the FBI orchestrated the January 6 riot—a notion that Patel, too, advanced before he became the bureau’s director. But now these former comrades in conspiracy are on the outs. An FBI spokesperson called Kent a “dishonest hack” and assailed him for spreading “baseless conspiracy theories” about Kirk’s murder, adding, “If he had any shame, Joe Kent should be ashamed of himself.”

The night after he was on Carlson’s show, Kent spoke at a gala fundraiser for Catholics for Catholics, a far-right organization that feted…you got it, Owens.

Back to Loomer: She’s been feuding with Marjorie Taylor Greene (who got into a tussle with Trump over the Jeffrey Epstein files), and last month she referred to Carlson as a “vile Jew hater.”

Are you dizzy yet? I haven’t gotten to the nuttiest part.

Last week, Alexis Wilkins, a MAGA-ish country singer and Patel’s girlfriend (for whom Patel has assigned an FBI SWAT unit as a security detail), took the suspicion and paranoia to a new level. In a 13-part thread on X, she claimed she was the victim of an operation mounted against her by a “foreign-linked influence network” that was also conniving to create “chaos in the Republican Party” so the GOP loses the midterm elections and Trump’s agenda is subverted.

Her posts were convoluted, but she cited a bunch of familiar names as seeming participants in this diabolical scheme, including Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security adviser who has become a Christian nationalist champion, Catholics for Catholics, Owens, Kent, and RT, the English-language Russian propaganda outlet.

Presenting an analysis of social media posts—she did her own research!—she insisted that RT and the “Flynn network” were both promoting overlapping messages asserting that MAGA was dead. “The goal of this operation,” Wilkins said, “is not to win a political argument, but to make the fractures feel permanent. To make Republicans believe their movement is over. To make soldiers feel the war isn’t worth fighting.”

Not long ago, Wilkins was accused by a MAGA influencer of being a “honeypot” for Mossad, assigned to influence Patel. Now she contended that Owens’ claim that Israel killed Kirk was part of the same operation that had falsely tagged her as an Israeli spy.

By this point, your head may be hurting. Mine is. And I’ve not covered the entirety of all the MAGA mud-wrestling. Nor have I mentioned the death of Jeff Webb, the so-called “father of modern cheerleading” and a mentor of Charlie Kirk, who expired last week at the age of 76 due to a pickleball accident. Could that be a coincidence?

As I noted above, leadership vacuums can heighten tensions within a movement. Charlie Kirk is gone, and some of this internal bickering can be attributed to the fight for his following of young conservatives. And Trump presumably will be out of office in 34 months. Who inherits what’s left of MAGA? Will the post-Trump cult be anti-interventionist? Or pro-Israel and hawkish? Will it be led by or include antisemites? Much of this combat is propelled by that.

Let us not forget, this is not only about power and influence. There’s much money at stake. Most of these right-wing warriors are competing with each other for eyeballs and ears in the MAGAverse. With an audience of more than 7 million, Owens is raking it in. Her crazy is crazy profitable.

Conspiracism has always run deep in the veins of modern American conservatism, ever since Joe McCarthy claimed everyone other than him and his supporters were secret commies trying to destroy America. The tea party said that Barack Obama had a secret scheme to destroy the economy so he could become emperor (and set up concentration camps for conservatives). Trump pushed the racist birther conspiracy theory. His supporters promoted Pizzagate. He embraced QAnon. Election denialism and Deep State conspiracy theories are articles of faith for MAGA and the GOP.

During transitional phases, underlying tensions in a movement will surface. And when a movement is predicated on deranged notions, what emerges will be batcrap bananas. That’s what’s happening now in Trumpland. These volcanic eruptions triggered by MAGA’s shifting tectonic plates are spewing lunacy.

Will any of this impact politics in the real world? It certainly won’t boost the GOP’s prospects in the midterms. (I’m not sure it matters, but Fuentes told his followers to skip the midterms or vote for Democrats to protest the Iran war.) As jockeying for 2028 begins, these scuffles might shape the GOP battlefield. Fundamentally, what’s happening is that MAGA is revealing its animating forces: extremism, nastiness, paranoia, and madness. And when you let loose the crazy, there’s no telling where it will flow.

2026-04-03 19:30:00

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Texas state officials have led a successful and concerted effort to prevent offshore wind developments in the Gulf. Over the last few years, key leaders whose signatures and support are required to permit energy developments off the coast signaled to investors that such approvals would be unlikely. 

So even as five offshore wind projects resume construction this month after a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s stop-work order for the developments, Texas has none in the mix. The US has a small number of projects operating off the East Coast, totaling some 40 gigawatts. 

Texas leads the nation in wind energy, producing more than a fifth of the country’s wind-sourced electricity. Studies show the region could have similar success offshore, especially given the state’s experience building oil and gas rigs in the Gulf. Yet an auction of federal seabed leases nearly three years ago saw no bids. 

While there are a myriad of reasons no offshore wind projects are operational or underway off the coast of Texas, experts say chief among them is the political hostility from state leaders, and, more recently, the federal government, toward this type of renewable energy.

In August 2023, three federal leases were put up for bid for the first time in the Gulf of Mexico by the Biden administration to build wind farms. 

President Joe Biden had set a goal to produce 30 gigawatts, which the administration said could power 10 million homes and avoid 78 million metric tons of CO2 emissions. One of the federal land sites was off the coast of Lake Charles, Louisiana. The other two were off the Texas coast, some 30 nautical miles from Galveston.

Both renewable energy developers and oil and gas companies, like Shell and TotalEnergies, qualified as bidders for the Texas sites. 

The leaseholder would have been eligible to generate power to sell to Texas’ electric grid or to produce hydrogen power. The Louisiana lease sold for $5.6 million, but no company bid on either of the Texas spots. 

Despite the mature workforce with the know-how to build offshore facilities in the Gulf, Colin Leyden, the Environmental Defense Fund’s Texas director, said there weren’t high expectations that the Texas leases would be the first to go. It was clear that offshore wind had a few high-profile antagonists, he said. 

Any offshore substations or cable landing facilities onshore from sea wind developments would need approval from the state’s coastal lands and seabeds regulator, General Land Office Commissioner Dawn Buckingham. Ahead of the lease sale, Buckingham said her office wouldn’t grant the necessary approvals for an offshore wind farm to commence construction. 

The General Land Office did not respond to questions from Inside Climate News. 

It signaled to investors that Texas was a risky place to invest, said Stacy Ortego, the Gulf of Mexico offshore wind energy campaign manager for the National Wildlife Federation. 

Meanwhile, in Louisiana, state leadership welcomed the investment. Louisiana’s previous governor, John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, put together a climate initiative task force that recommended 5 gigawatts of offshore wind power generation by 2035. 

“That was a strong indicator that Louisiana was open for business for offshore wind,” Ortego said. “Whereas Texas was sending the opposite message.” 

The 2023 auction also came shortly after a legislative session in which nearly a dozen bills sought to curb the expansion of renewable energy across the state, including one that proposed a new process that would make it extremely difficult to build offshore wind farms on the Texas side of the Gulf of Mexico.

When the two leases received no bids, Sen. Mayes Middleton, a Republican from Galveston who sponsored the bill aiming to ban offshore wind, posted that he would refile bills in the following session to ensure that there would never be offshore wind in Texas. Many of those same bills were reintroduced in the 2025 Legislature and were unsuccessful. 

Middleton, who heads an oil company, did not respond to an interview request. 

Wayne Christian, a leader of the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state’s oil and gas regulator, wrote in 2023 to Gov. Greg Abbott and Buckingham to express his concern that while the wind farms would be in federal waters, they would have consequences across Texas lands. He said he was especially worried about coastal communities relying on the Gulf for commercial fishing, tourism, and industrial or transportation jobs, Christian wrote. 

The oil and gas regulator also wrote in defense of the state’s fossil fuel industry, a common sight offshore in the Gulf. Christian said he feared that the Biden administration would not rest until it ended Texas oil and gas. “Something must be done to stop President Biden from implementing these wind farms in the Gulf of Mexico,” Christian said. 

Anna Weiss, director of green initiatives at Vision Galveston, a community nonprofit, has heard the concern that offshore wind would obstruct views and harm tourism. But the turbines would be far offshore, she noted. And Galveston’s shoreline has many industrial applications already.

“Offshore wind would really transform the Texas energy grid,” Weiss said. “We need to balance these concerns and try to understand what it is going to take to move forward together.” 

Nearly three years after Christian’s comments opposing offshore wind, he remains firm in his opinion that it cannot make the same promises of reliability and economic growth as Texas’ methane can. Offshore wind requires massive subsidies and backup generation to account for the vagaries of weather, Christian said in a statement. 

“At the end of the day, Texans deserve energy that is dependable, affordable, and grounded in reality—not policies driven by ideology,” he said in his statement. “That’s why I’ll continue to stand up for the resources that have made Texas the energy capital of the world.” 

The same year the state’s oil and gas regulators lobbied against federal lease sales for offshore wind and the federal government offered clean energy tax credits, state legislators floated the idea of a natural gas subsidy program. In 2025 they approved a $7.2 billion fund of low-interest loans and bonus grants incentivizing new gas-fueled power plants.  

The federal government initially estimated that the two Gulf sites, plus the Lake Charles lease, would generate some 3.7 gigawatts of power, depending on which models of turbines were ultimately selected, enough for almost 1.3 million homes. The coastal turbines with rotor blades reaching nearly 900 feet tall generate three times the power of a land turbine.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management identified that nearly a third of the shallow-water offshore wind potential in the US lies beyond the Texas and Louisiana shores in the Gulf. High wind speeds and proximity to coastal energy users make the area well-suited for such projects, the agency noted. 

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory said after the lackluster auction that while it’s unlikely offshore wind will develop in the Gulf before 2030, there remains significant optimism that it can be deployed as the global industry matures and costs come down. The area’s oil and gas infrastructure and skilled labor give it a head start, a 2023 report from the lab stated.

Part of why the Texas area leases didn’t get any bids was bad timing, said Ortego. Supply chain bottlenecks, rising material costs and higher interest rates contributed to the disinterest, too. But the main reason the leases went unsold, Ortego figures, is political pushback from state leadership. 

If Americans later elect a president friendlier to offshore wind, Ortego said, momentum in Texas could pick up. “There’s a lot of opportunities in the Gulf—we have a very robust offshore energy development industry that’s really poised to take advantage of offshore wind opportunities.” 

Beyond opposition from state officials, there are other barriers in Texas to an offshore wind energy industry taking off in the Gulf. 

One is that offshore wind farms in Texas are more challenging to develop than in other states because of the way the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ electric market works, Leyden said. The competitive energy market makes it difficult for new energy types to join the mix.

New entrants with high price tags do not benefit from, in the case of Louisiana, for example, an integrated utility potentially wrapping all the costs of new infrastructure into the ratepayer base, Leyden said. It’s true for nuclear or hydrogen too, he said, or any resource type that has a premium on the front end. 

“That’s certainly one reason why there hasn’t been as much excitement around development,” Leyden said. 

This lack of enthusiasm is notable because solar, batteries and onshore wind are the cheapest resources available to build in ERCOT, Leyden said. Texas continues to increasingly power the state’s electricity demands with renewables. On February 28, for example, 83 percent of the morning demand was met by solar and wind. Throughout the whole day, renewables provided nearly 70 percent of the state’s power. 

Given how productive offshore wind could be in the Gulf, existing large generators probably feel more threatened by it than by other renewables, Leyden said. “It’s hard to know how much that plays into it as well,” Leyden said. 

Developers also must consider hurricanes in the Gulf. A National Renewable Energy Laboratory report suggested using stronger “typhoon class” wind turbines.

Meanwhile, the attempts by Trump’s second administration to shutter nearly completed offshore wind facilities sends a message to the capital markets that these projects are risky to put money into right now, Leyden said. 

“Don’t discount what the federal administration has done with existing offshore wind projects as having a chilling effect,” Leyden said.  

Last week, the administration disclosed that it had agreed to pay TotalEnergies, the French oil and gas major, nearly $1 billion to stop its plans for building wind farms off the coasts of New York and North Carolina in exchange for the company investing the funds in new oil and gas projects in the United States. 

The Southern Shrimp Alliance, which represents the shrimping industry across eight states, worried about the impact of offshore wind construction and operation in the Gulf when auction plans geared up. Alliance spokesperson Deborah Long said the trade association persuaded the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to eliminate problematic locations. 

“Of the 13 areas BOEM initially identified as suitable for wind energy development in the Gulf—areas that could have catastrophically disrupted access to traditional shrimping grounds—only a single, carefully selected area was ultimately leased,” Long said.  

Shrimpers weren’t only concerned about shrimp. If development harmed sensitive species, like endangered sea turtles and red snappers, the alliance worried its members would be on the hook to pay regulatory fines or see the fishery temporarily closed. 

The wildlife impacts can be overcome, the National Wildlife Federation’s Ortego said. Responsible offshore wind developments reduce noise during site surveying by lowering vessel speeds in areas frequented by endangered species and plan construction schedules in tandem with species’ migration calendars, she said.

The biggest threat to wildlife is not transitioning to cleaner energy, Ortego added. “The effects of climate change far outweigh any potential impacts of offshore wind or other renewable development,” she said. 

The National Audubon Society, a conservancy group for birds, says in a 2025 report that “developing offshore wind energy is a solvable problem for birds, while unchecked climate change is not.” Two thirds of North American bird species are set to face extinction unless climate change is addressed, the group warned. 

To avoid bird collisions and impacts, the Audubon Society recommends siting prospective Gulf wind farms in the middle continental shelf, further offshore. 

After the failed 2023 auction, the Biden administration considered another sale of federal leases for offshore wind. In a letter filed to BOEM in September 2024, Buckingham, the Texas General Land Office commissioner, reminded the agency that access to underwater land for transmission lines required an easement she could approve or deny. 

The land office, she wrote, might very well condition approval on a heightened bond and financial assurance measure beyond what BOEM would require. 

A few months earlier, she told the agency she was “uniquely qualified to shed light on the folly of the Biden administration’s…continued efforts to force-feed the American people failed ‘green’ policies.”

“I am charged with determining whether the granting of an easement is in the best interest of the state. I can assure you that when weighing the interests, I will do so objectively and without being influenced by ‘green’ policy goals,” Buckingham wrote.

That and other opposition against offshore wind comes as the state anticipates up to 5 million more residents by 2036 and a growing queue of large energy users seeking to connect to the state’s grid. A 2025 poll by Texas A&M University at Galveston found that 71 percent of Texans support wind development off the state’s coast. 

One of the study authors, Elizabeth Nyman, an associate professor of maritime studies, said the state has about half the Gulf’s technical capacity for offshore wind thanks to its long shoreline—enough to meet more than 160 percent of the state’s 2025 energy needs. 

Of the 600 Texas residents polled, more than three-quarters ranked both on and offshore wind in the top five energy sources they’d like the state to incentivize.

2026-04-03 02:40:58

Of all the rot that flowed from Pam Bondi’s tenure leading the Justice Department under Donald Trump’s second term, the one that will be remembered beyond this political moment is likely to be her February 2026 hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.

It was there that the attorney general, now former, approached congressional oversight like a vulgar cage fight.

“You’re a washed-up, loser lawyer,” Bondi told Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the committee. “You’re not even a lawyer.”

Coming from the highest law enforcement officer in the country, the taunt was absurd, the stuff of reality television theatrics intended to please our reality television president. It was easy to see why. Bondi was testifying before Congress about the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files, a source of abject rage for the president. And Bondi, who angered both Democrats and Republicans with her conduct over the files, couldn’t afford a bad performance. So there she was, effectively punching her way through a congressional hearing.

“They are trying to deflect from all the great things Donald Trump has done,” Bondi snarled in another moment from the February hearing.

None of which ended up boosting her favorability. On Thursday, two months after the hearing, Trump fired Bondi anyway, claiming in a Truth Social post that she was relocating to an “important job in the private sector.” The ouster comes almost exactly one month after the president fired Kristi Noem, another fierce loyalist, after the former Homeland Security Secretary reportedly pissed him off with her own congressional performance. Together, the firings once again underscored a singular Trumpian truth: that you’re useful to Donald Trump until you’re not. That this is a man who does not hesitate to discard anyone, no matter how much they’ve contorted themselves for the job.

For Bondi, those contortions came in the form of constant debasing, both of herself as a law enforcement official and the Justice Department, where, in little over a year, she politicized the department to the point of transforming it into the president’s personal law firm. All while shredding her already thin credibility—she did, after all, decline to investigate allegations of fraud into Trump University after Trump sent a $25,000 check to a PAC close to Bondi—in the process. And for what? An “important job in the private sector,” it turns out.

“You’re about as good of a lawyer today as you were when you tried to impeach President Trump,” Bondi told Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) at the February hearing. It turns out that in Trumpworld, you’re only as good as your least bad congressional performance.

2026-04-03 00:40:33

Donald Trump’s first national address since launching his war in Iran with Israel on Wednesday night tremendously backfired.

The speech, reportedly designed to reassure Americans that all of his administration’s military goals would be achieved swiftly, provided few new details about how exactly the fighting would continue in the near future.

But one remark was notable: comparing the war against Iran with long, unpopular US wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq to demonstrate how much he has accomplished against “one of the most powerful countries” in just 32 days. Maybe mentioning unpopular wars that dragged on is not a good way to ease anxieties?

Oil prices skyrocketed again in response to Trump’s address, rising more than eight percent. 

While Trump seemed to temper his rhetoric on some of his usual talking points, namely, directly insulting NATO allies and threatening to withdraw from the alliance—something he said earlier that same Wednesday—the president instead stated countries that rely on oil traveling through the Strait of Hormuz should “build up some delayed courage” and take care of the passage. 

“The hard part is done,” Trump said, referring to the extensive airstrikes against Iran that he claims opened the door for re-opening the Strait of Hormuz. The US and Israel bombing campaign has killed nearly 2,000 people as of March 26.

According to the Washington Post, leaders from more than 30 countries will meet Thursday to assess ways to reopen the waterway, including finding diplomatic ways to make the strait “safe” after the war ends (Trump did not state an end date on the war on Wednesday night). Officials say that freeing the strait would necessitate their navies to escort oil tankers. 

It’s another needless Trump war that he is demanding everyone else clean up. 

2026-04-02 19:30:00

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On March 31, the US Forest Service announced plans to move its headquarters from Washington, DC, to Salt Lake City, Utah. It will also close or repurpose all nine of its regional offices, create 15 state offices, and shutter research and development facilities in more than 30 states. According to a news release, the plan is intended to make the agency more “nimble, efficient [and] effective.” Forest Service leaders told staff on a call after the announcement that no changes will be made to fire and aviation management programs or field-based operational firefighters.

Since first announcing its intent to reorganize the agency last July, the Trump administration has marketed the plan as a way to streamline Forest Service operations, with a focus on boosting timber production and communicating more closely with local communities. But during a congressional hearing and public comment period on the subject last summer, more than 80 percent of the 14,000 public comments submitted were negative, with many tribal representatives, conservation groups and former Forest Service staffers opposing the move.

A US Department of Agriculture summary of public comments included concerns that relocating Forest Service staff and further cuts to its budgets “could compromise ecological management, public access, and employee morale.” The current plan incorporates many elements of the original proposal, including the move to Salt Lake City and the closure of regional offices. “Nobody is asking for this,” said Robert Bonnie, who oversaw the Forest Service as a Department of Agriculture undersecretary during the Obama administration. “None of the farm groups want this. No one in conservation wants this. Nobody.”

To Bonnie and other former Forest Service staff, the plan, which will uproot thousands of employees, looks like it will only make the agency’s existing troubles worse, especially given the past year of deep cuts and chaos. “This is not going to strengthen the Forest Service, it is going to weaken it,” Bonnie said. “It’s not about solving problems, it’s about blowing things up.”

Mary Erickson, a retired Custer Gallatin National Forest supervisor, had more questions than answers after the announcement. “I’m not going to say if it’s good or bad at this point,” she said. “It’s just such a sweeping change with no real analysis about if there would be cost savings.”

Under the new proposal, some states will have their own offices and others will be lumped together, similar to the organization of the Bureau of Land Management. This will be a new approach for the country’s 154 national forests, which have long been managed by the nine regional offices that will be shuttered or repurposed. Now, forests in Washington, Oregon, Montana, Alaska, and Idaho will each be managed by their own state office. Forests in Nevada and Utah, however, will be managed together, as will forests in Colorado and Kansas.

Some Forest Service research facilities, including the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Fort Collins, Colorado, will stay open. Others, including the research station in Portland, Oregon, which is responsible for critical work on species like spotted owls, will be closed. Losing local leadership “is not going to improve the programs,” said former Forest Service wildlife biologist Eric Forsman. Forsman, who retired in 2016, studied spotted owls and red tree voles at the agency’s Forestry Sciences Laboratory in Corvallis, Oregon, which will remain in operation. “It may help budgets,” he added, “but it won’t improve the quality of the research or the amount of research that gets done.”

Erickson and others were also concerned about the plan to move high-level bureaucrats out of DC, where the nation’s law- and policymakers reside. “I would push back on this idea that moving out of DC is moving closer to the people you serve. That’s not the role of the national office,” Erickson said. The national office, she added, is supposed to coordinate and create guidance based on national policy. “Forests and districts have always been the heart of local communities and local delivery.”

After talking with current and former Forest Service staffers following Tuesday’s announcement, she also worries that, at least in the short term, disarray created by the reorganization will hamstring the agency’s ability to address the complex and worsening challenges that modern forests face. Those include tree disease outbreaks, the growing wildland-urban interface, and climate change-induced drought. The Forest Service is already reeling from the loss of thousands of employees during the last year, through the terminations and deferred resignations effected by the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

The reorganization may also lead to states playing an even bigger role in forest management, said Kevin Hood, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, who retired in 2025 after decades working in the Forest Service throughout the West. While local coordination isn’t bad in theory, he said, he’s concerned the new structure will be a step toward ceding the management of national forests and other public lands to states.

Tribal representatives, several of whom declined to comment for this story, voiced concerns during the July public comment process that the reorganization would lead to losses of expertise and fractured relationships. Mass staff relocations, one representative wrote, would “destroy irreplaceable knowledge about Treaty rights, forest conditions, and working relationships built over decades, and new staff unfamiliar with the land will make mistakes.”

For many people in conservation, the Forest Service reorganization feels like déjà vu, or even a recurring nightmare.

In 2019, during Trump’s first term, his administration announced a plan to move nearly all Bureau of Land Management staff out of the agency’s DC headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado—then a 66,000-person city located hundreds of miles from a major airport. As with the March 31 Forest Service announcement, the administration said the change would put high-level staff closer to the mostly-Western lands they manage. Instead, many of those staff left the agency altogether, said Tracy Stone-Manning, who directed the BLM under President Joe Biden and is now president of The Wilderness Society.

In fact, by the time the Grand Junction office opened in 2020, only 41 of the 328 BLM employees expected to move West chose to do so, according to a High Country News investigation. For many, moving meant uprooting their entire family, and required a spouse to find a new job in a much smaller market.

The reorganization cost taxpayers $28 million. And the Biden administration ended up moving many high-level positions back to DC, though it did keep some agency leaders in the Grand Junction office, which it renamed the agency’s “Western Headquarters.” John Gale, who headed the office for two years under Biden, sees merit in searching for ways to improve public-lands management. But restructuring and relocation need to be done thoughtfully and carefully to be effective, he said. 

That’s because agencies lose irreplaceable institutional knowledge when people with decades of experience are forced out the door, said Stone-Manning. And while that may not have been the first Trump administration’s intention, it was indeed the outcome of the BLM reorganization. She and others expect the Forest Service to suffer the same fate, with even more dire results for the public.

“Our public lands are not being cared for the way they need to be,” she said. “And what that means is ultimately people will throw up their hands and say the federal government can’t manage them, let’s sell them off.”