The complicated history of USAID

The Musk-Trump regime seems set on destroying many parts of the government by firing employees or putting them on administrative leave, and shutting down various agencies, even if doing so breaks the law. Another way they are doing that is by simply cutting off funding to agencies they dislike.

It is illegal for the Trump administration to unilaterally dissolve an agency created by Congress, according to legal scholars, government experts and the congressional research facility.

“For all intents and purposes you are dismantling an agency created by Congress, and that’s a violation of the law,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor at Georgetown Law. “It can’t stand unchallenged, in my view.”

And while a president has broad discretion to make changes to programs and reduce the workforce, the Impoundment Control Act prevents him from withholding money appropriated by Congress, the experts said.

“If it turns out that the president can eliminate or defund an agency on a whim, then ultimately Congress is stripped of all power over the budget,” said Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “That would create a precedent that destroys the separation of powers.”

It will be the courts that decide if and to what extent Trump’s takeover of USAID violated federal law.

Many legal experts in and outside of government believe this was the administration’s plan all along: drag out Trump’s most aggressive and controversial policy decisions in court for so long that by the time any permanent judgment comes down, favorable or not, USAID will be nothing but a memory.

“They don’t seem to care what the statutes say,” said Kevin Owen, an attorney who represents both management and federal workers in employment disputes. “The plan from the employment perspective was to fire them all and make them sue. If the administration loses the court cases, so be it. The damage is done.”

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Tesla buyers’ remorse

When the Teslas originally came out, many people who were liberals got them because they felt that buying an electric vehicle was the right thing to do to fight climate change. Tesla’s were one of the first EVs on the market and it branded itself as a cool, futuristic car and because it was quite expensive, rich celebrities were among the early purchasers and others may have felt that having one also made them cool.

But things have changed. Elon Musk is now seen as a truly awful person who is using his proximity and access to the ear of Trump to advance his personal agenda of destroying the government by slashing agencies and laying off thousands of federal workers. It should come as no surprise that his actions are likely to result in increased profits for private businesses, including his own. This is, after all, one of their main goals, to siphon off expenditures used to provide government services for private profit. The companies eying the money that will come their way can hardly contain their glee.
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The misguided ‘return to the office’ policy

Trump and Musk have decreed that the remote work option that became popular during the Covid pandemic is not a good thing because people are not doing much work at home. Hence they have demanded that everyone return to the office full-time. Trump encourages this belief by attacking federal workers as lazy and that the remote work option enables them to goof off.

A White House official said 65,000 workers have signed up to leave their jobs while being paid until Sept. 30. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt described federal employees who have been working remotely as lazy, saying “they don’t want to come into the office” and “if they want to rip the American people off, then they’re welcome to take this buyout.”

A federal worker in Colorado, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution, said the insults directed at the government workforce by members of the Trump administration have been demoralizing for those who provide public services.

Some federal employees are quitting.

Another worker in the Pacific Northwest decided to take the offer on Thursday, even after the judge’s decision. She hopes to use the opportunity to move overseas. But even if the money never comes, she still wants out. She’s unwilling to comply with administration policies such as eliminating diversity initiatives, and she worries that the situation will only get worse for people who stay.

The worker said she opened her laptop, sent her resignation email, and closed it again.

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Creating a government of crooks, fools, and cowards

Danielle Sassoon, acting acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, resigned rather than be complicit in Trump’s demand that she drop corruption charges against New York mayor Eric Adams.

You wouldn’t think it possible that a Federalist Society member and former clerk for the archconservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would show more grit in the face of Trumpism than the entire leadership of the national Democratic Party, but here we are. Three weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term in office, Danielle Sassoon, a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer whom Trump had named acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, has provided the first dramatic check against the Trump Administration’s rampage through the federal government. On Wednesday, she refused her bosses’ orders to drop the criminal-corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams. She offered her resignation, and put her career on the line, rather than do the dirty work Washington directed her to do.

Following her resignation, six other career federal prosecutors in that same office have resigned in the Southern District of New York because they too refused to drop corruption charges against Adams, as ordered of Emil Bove, the acting US deputy attorney general and former personal lawyer to Trump.
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Challenging Trump in the courts

Trump and Musk are treating the government as if it were a private company that they own and that they can fire people at will, put in place anyone they like, and order the agencies to do whatever they want. When it is pointed out that some of the agencies and personnel are statutorily authorized, their response is simple. They simply declare the statute in question is unconstitutional. Of course they have been taken to court multiple times and judges have weighed in to stop the madness.

Here is just one example.

A judge blocked Donald Trump’s attempt to fire the head of a body that protects whistleblowers and investigates corruption.

Late on Wednesday Judge Amy Berman Jackson reversed the White House order sacking Hampton Dellinger as head of the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), and reinstated him in his post pending a court hearing set for 26 February.
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And the looting begins …

[UPDATE: After this news was reported in the media, at 9:12 pm last night the state department modified the document to remove the word ‘Tesla’ from it. Looting in secret is still looting.]

While grants to scientists are being cut and grant review board meetings are cancelled, the State Department, now under the control of Marco Rubio, is reportedly giving Elon Musk’s enterprises $400 million to purchase ‘Armored Teslas’.

The State Department’s procurement forecast, revised as of late December 2024, lists Tesla as the recipient of the largest expected contract, with Marco Rubio’s department planning to buy $400,000,000 worth of “Armored Tesla.”

The award is targeted for Q4, and is forecast to last for five years.

The procurement forecast is listed as having been modified on December 13, 2024, a month after Donald Trump’s election. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Under the heading, “extent competed,” the document reads merely “TBD.”

This is a developing story, check DropSiteNews.com for updates.

Elon Musk is both the head of Tesla and a senior government official who has been relentlessly halting government contracts.

Nobody should be surprised by this, unless they thought Musk’s deep involvement with the running of the government was because of the goodness of his heart.

Fears over pornography

In a long essay, Rebecca L. Davis, a professor of History at the University of Delaware, writes that there is a persistent belief in the US that viewing pornography is harmful. While that belief has remained largely constant over time, what has changed are views about what kinds of erotica causes harm, what form the harm takes, and who is harmed, whether it harms those involved in the creation of it or those who view it or both.

Currently, the danger is perceived to that to young people and as of January 19th of this year, 19 states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia) have age requirement verification requirements for adult-content sites. But not qll sites are complying. Some, especially one of the biggest sites Pornhub, have simply chosen to not provide access to people from those states.

Pornhub put up a firewall rather than comply. If nothing else, the move increased traffic to VPN (virtual private network) services, which provide users with unfettered access to Pornhub regardless of their location by securely connecting to a remote server. The given reason for requiring age verification – that pornography harms the minors who view it – is the latest salvo in a centuries-old American debate over erotica.

These state-level conflicts in the US emerged amid an international push for age verification on adult sites. In 2014, Mexico enacted an age verification law. The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), passed late in 2022, imposed several restrictions on Pornhub and other large pornography sites, including age-verification requirements. A similar measure in Britain, the 2023 Online Safety Act, took effect in January 2025. France, which already required age verification in an earlier law, recently blocked four pornographic sites (Pornhub was not among them) from operating within its borders after finding that the sites failed to check users’ ages adequately. Members of the Canadian House of Commons continue to debate the Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act, which would require age verification. There, as elsewhere, civil libertarians warn that these laws fail to define ‘sexually explicit material’, and raise serious privacy concerns. Pornhub is challenging the laws on multiple fronts.

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Killing science in the US

The benefits of science to society are extremely significant. The so-called scientific revolution has driven much of the medical and technological benefits that we currently enjoy. But many of those those benefits were arrived at slowly and over long periods and thus can become invisible to the general public and targets for ignorant policymakers, such as the one depicted in this cartoon.( I used this in my book The Great Paradox of Science to help make this point.)

Over at Pharyngula PZ has a post about how the situation for science in the US is dire and he is not exaggerating. One of the ways The Trump gang is doing that is by imposing ideological blinkers on what kinds of research can be done. It has frozen all funding for research pending review to see if it “aligns with the new administration’s priorities”. What that looks like in practice is to comb through all the research grants and proposals to look for words like African American, race, gender, minorities, sexual violence, diversity, equity, or any other keyword that they can think of that suggests any attempt to improve the situation of any group other than white affluent men. And of course, anything that is remotely concerned with addressing the problem climate change is going to be cut.
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Sri Lanka’s recovery fueled by women

I have written before about recent positive developments in Sri Lanka where the corrupt nepotistic looters who ran the country into the ground for decades and treated it and its coffers as their own playground to do with as they liked, were thrown out of power, first in a presidential election in September where the leftist candidate Anura Kumara Dissanayake (known as AKD) defeated two members of the old guard. He then immediately dissolved parliament and called for new elections and in November his party won 159 of the 225 seats, with 62% of the vote.

He appointed a woman Harini Amrasuriya, a sociologist, as prime minister. Amrasuriya is the first woman who is not the wife or daughter of a top politician to hold this position in South Asia. The two of them are making big changes.

Two years after Sri Lankans rose up and cast out a political dynasty whose profligacy had brought economic ruin, the country is in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime reinvention.

Anger has steadied into a quieter resolve for wholesale change. Through a pair of national elections last year, for president and for Parliament, the old elite that had governed for decades was decimated. A leftist movement has risen in its place, promising a more equal society.
…

Some of the earliest actions have included ending the V.I.P. culture around politics. Gone are the long motorcades, large security details and lavish mansions for ministers. The president has slashed his traveling entourage. The prime minister’s compound, which under its previous occupant buzzed with the activity of over 100 staff members, now has a library-like quiet, as Dr. Amarasuriya works with a staff of just a dozen.

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Nothing is too big or petty to be a revenge target for Trump

Trump has been on a revenge spree aimed at pretty much anyone and any organization, big or small, that he thinks in some way opposed him before, whether that is real or imaginary.

In the latest move, he has fired the national archivist, presumably because of that organization’s tole in the classified documents scandal in which he was involved. The thing is that she wasn’t even in that position at the time.

Trump dismissed Colleen Shogan as the archivist of the United States, White House aide Sergio Gor posted on X Friday night.

Trump had said in early January that he would replace the head of the National Archives and Records Administration. The government agency drew his anger after it informed the justice department about issues with Trump’s handling of classified documents. Shogan, the first woman in the post, wasn’t the archivist of the United States at the time the issue emerged.

In 2022, federal agents searched Trump’s Florida home and seized boxes of classified records. He was indicted on dozens of felony counts accusing him of illegally hoarding classified records and obstructing FBI efforts to get them back. He pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing. A judge dismissed the charges, ruling the special counsel who brought them was illegally appointed. The justice department gave up appeals after Trump was elected in November.

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