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

The federal Energy Star program is among the most successful government initiatives in modern history. Its signature blue label is now nearly as recognizable as the Nike swoosh or a Coca-Cola can, and appliances bearing it save American consumers some $40 billion annually in energy costs, or about $350 for every taxpayer dollar that goes in.

This week, however, President Donald Trump’s administration moved to kill it, the Washington Post first reported. Grist also reviewed a US EPA document obtained by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that shows the program is slated to be “eliminated.”

“Energy Star has saved American families and businesses more than half a trillion dollars in energy costs,” said Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the ranking member of the committee, in a statement. “By eliminating this program, [Trump] will force Americans to buy appliances that cost more to run and waste more energy.”

Launched in 1992, during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, Energy Star sets efficiency specifications for products ranging from dishwashers to entire homes. Those standards are beyond government-mandated minimums, and Energy Star’s website says the goal is to provide “simple, credible, and unbiased information” people can use to make better decisions.

While Energy Star certification is voluntary, most major manufacturers participate. According to the government, around 9 in 10 households recognize the Energy Star label. Depending on the year, as many as 80 percent say the label “very much” or “somewhat” influenced their purchases. Overall, consumers have bought more than 300 million appliances with the Energy Star label and the program has cumulatively helped avoid 4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

“Energy Star remains one of our most effective bipartisan tools for ensuring energy reliability, affordability, and American competitiveness,” said Paula Glover, president of the nonprofit coalition Alliance to Save Energy. She noted the broader economic impact of the program as well, including creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in the manufacturing, retail, real estate, and energy services industries. “Shutting it down is a risk to those jobs.”

For years, though, Trump has complained about efficiency benchmarks for appliances. Lower-flow showerheads, he said, make showers “five times longer.” LED light bulbs make him look orange. People are flushing efficient toilets ”10 times, 15 times” and, with dishwashers, “ the electric bill is 10 times more than the water.” These claims are, by and large, inaccurate.

Veracity aside, Trump’s efforts play into a larger culture war against appliance standards—one that the White House has continued to aggressively wage since his second term began.

In February, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced it was delaying efficiency regulation of appliances ranging from central air conditioners and freezers to washing machines and dryers. In March, it said it was withdrawing four efficiency standards that the Biden administration had proposed and was pushing back the implementation date of others. Last month, Trump issued an executive order titled, in all caps, “MAINTAINING ACCEPTABLE WATER PRESSURE IN SHOWERHEADS.”

The Energy Star rollback would likely be the most visible attack yet on appliance efficiency, and it even has manufacturers worried. Last month, more than 1,000 companies, cities, and groups wrote a letter to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin urging him to support the program.

“This would be a very big deal,” said the representative of one manufacturer, who asked not to be named given the sensitivity of the potential closure. Energy Star, they explained, helps companies market and move higher volumes of high-efficiency products. “It’s an odd thing that you would jettison a voluntary public-private partnership that costs a rounding error in EPA’s budget and affords consumers billions of dollars of value.”

Beyond eliminating staff, the EPA’s exact plans and timeline for any Energy Star rollback remain unclear. The agency did not respond directly to questions about the program’s future but in an emailed statement told Grist the “EPA is delivering organizational improvements to the personnel structure that will directly benefit the American people.”

Losing Energy Star could have a range of ripple effects. In addition to making selecting products more confusing for consumers, it could hinder people’s ability to qualify for federal, state, or utility incentives that are tied to the certification. There is, for example, a federal tax incentive for building Energy Star homes. Appliance rebates are also often linked to the designation.

“How are those programs now going to know which kinds of appliances they want to give a rebate to or a tax incentive for?” asked Glover. States or utilities could conceivably fill that void with their own standards, creating a patchwork of regulation and incentives. “Having Energy Star that gives a federal standard makes far more sense. It’s certainly easier for consumers to understand what their options are.”

These are among the many details that would have to be worked out if the Trump administration proceeds with its plan.

“I don’t think they expected this kind of pushback,” said Steve Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, about the media attention that the latest change has garnered. “This is getting a lot of publicity.”

The move could also face legal challenges, he said, pointing to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 as one possible roadblock for the administration. It directs the EPA and DOE to, among other things, “promote Energy Star-compliant technologies as the preferred technologies in the marketplace” and “preserve the integrity of the Energy Star label.”

Another possibility is that the DOE takes over as Energy Star’s primary administrator. But as with other aspects of the president’s ambitious agenda, it could take time to sort out real-world impact.

If Energy Star is ultimately eliminated, Nadel said the labels would eventually go away—as would potentially billions in consumer savings. But, he added, “Nothing is done yet.”

On April 3, a Justice Department contracting officer sent the Acacia Center for Justice a “notice of termination for convenience.” The email instructed the nonprofit to discontinue several federally funded programs described as “no longer needed.” Among them was the little-known National Qualified Representative Program (NQRP), which appoints government-paid counsel to detained immigrants deemed unfit to represent themselves in court due to serious mental health needs or cognitive disabilities.

The termination notice put the organization and its dozens of legal partners on high alert. As the federal government’s main contractor for this $35-million program since 2022, the Acacia Center for Justice has relied on federal dollars to refer anywhere between 300 to 400 cases a year to a network of about 35 direct services providers that includes other nonprofits, small private law firms, and solo practitioners.

The following day, the Washington, DC-based group received another letter, this one rescinding the previous order “until further notice.” As they tried to make sense of the confounding messages, within the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review—charged with managing the US immigration courts system— agency officials were discussing how to reduce the scope of the NQRP and “end representation funded by EOIR,” according to internal emails obtained through litigation. The downsizing, they anticipated, should “allow for representatives to withdraw” from ongoing cases and “facilitate finding other representation.”

The planned defunding was the latest in a series of cuts by the Trump administration to legal aid for immigrants. In practice, it would all but eliminate the only available mechanism for immigration courts to designate counsel to people with mental health needs in detention centers across the United States.

Finally, on April 25, the Justice Department dealt the final blow, notifying the Acacia Center for Justice of its decision to cancel the discretionary nationwide initiative that immigrant rights advocates, attorneys, and former immigration judges say is a lifeline for hundreds, if not thousands, of detained people in immigration proceedings. With the exception of detainees in Arizona, California, and Washington—where court-ordered government-appointed counsel provisions remain in place—advocates anticipate these especially vulnerable immigrants will go unidentified and unrepresented, left to face potential deportation without a fighting chance.

“What I fear the most is that they are going to languish in detention with no end in sight,” said Lisa Okamoto, program director for the NQRP at the Acacia Center for Justice, “or without understanding what they are facing.” Without federal funding, immigration attorneys are unlikely to take on these highly complex cases since most detainees, many of whom are held in remote detention centers where pro bono assistance is hard to come by, can’t afford legal representation. (The EOIR declined to comment on the termination of the program.)

“To think of those people behind bars without anybody telling them where they are or why they are there or what might happen to them…” she said, pausing as her voice became emotional. “And then the serious risk of them being put on a plane and possibly even sent to a country they have no ties to.”

The nationwide government-appointed counsel program was created in 2013 in response to a first-of-its-kind class action lawsuit and settlement order in Franco-Gonzalez v. Holder that established the right to legal representation for immigrant detainees in Arizona, California, and Washington, who have been deemed “ incompetent” by an immigration judge to properly defend themselves.

One of the named plaintiffs in the case was Jose Antonio Franco-Gonzalez, a 29-year-old Mexican man with an intellectual disability. A psychological report had found that his cognitive functions resembled those of a toddler. An immigration judge requested a psychiatric evaluation of Franco-Gonzalez, which concluded that he had no idea what kind of court he was appearing in and it would be “impossible for him to stand trial.”

The judge agreed that Franco-Gonzalez’s case couldn’t move forward without legal representation and decided to put it on hold. But Franco-Gonzalez remained in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), without another day in court. Talia Inlender, then a young lawyer giving “know-your- rights” presentations to immigrant detainees at the Santa Ana City Jail, had learned about his case from an ICE officer. When she met him in late 2009, he had been detained for almost five years. Franco-Gonzalez couldn’t sign his own name to join Inlender’s workshop.

Even today, Inlender, now the deputy director of UCLA School of Law’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy, still remembers her first encounter with Franco-Gonzalez. She said his skin looked almost translucent from the lengthy confinement period and he was practically nonverbal. He didn’t know his birthday or age. And, he had little understanding of his situation other than wanting to be reunited with his family members, many of whom were US citizens and lawful permanent residents.

In early 2010, Inlender’s organization at the time, Public Counsel, and the ACLU sued on behalf of Franco-Gonzalez and another detainee, both of whom were “effectively lost” in the system. Franco-Gonzalez was released from detention three days later. (He went on to become a naturalized US citizen.) “But we knew he wasn’t the only one suffering in immigration detention solely as a result of a mental disability,” Inlender said. Around that time, Human Rights Watch published a report titled “Deportation By Default” noting that people with mental illnesses made up an estimated 15 percent of the detained immigrant population.

So they expanded the case to a class action lawsuit to cover detainees whose conditions—including schizophrenia, severe depression, and dissociative identity disorder—might prevent them from having a fair day in court. In Franco-Gonzalez v. Holder, the courts found that detained immigrants with mental disabilities facing deportation were entitled to counsel as a reasonable accommodation based on the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. In fact, that was the “only means” by which someone not competent for self-representation could exercise their rights.

On April 23, 2013, a federal district judge in California issued a permanent injunction requiring the government to appoint a qualified representative to those immigrants and to grant a bond hearing to detainees who had been in custody for six months or more. The permanent injunction only applied to the three states covered by the lawsuit. But just the day before that injunction, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security announced a policy to “enhance procedural protections,” including processes for mental health screenings and competency hearings, throughout the country.

Today, that nationwide program is being gutted. “I know firsthand the difference it makes to have a fair hearing with a lawyer by your side,” Inlender said. “I think it’s just a devastating blow to due process and to all of the individual people and families that are going to be deeply impacted by the termination.”

Amelia Wilson, a law professor and director of the immigration justice clinic at Pace University who served as the NQRP’s program manager from 2016 to 2018, described the program as a “massive seismic change.” Wilson had been involved in deportation defense work on behalf of immigrants with mental health issues for years. Prior to 2013, she said, it was a “hodgepodge system.” She used to get “clandestine calls from immigration judges” alerting her to unrepresented immigrants on their dockets who needed assistance. Sometimes the information about a potential client came from a DHS attorney or guards in detention centers. “I would take cases that would just appear before me,” she said. “But there was no referral system.”

The rollout of the nationwide policy program was imperfect, Wilson said. But it was an opportunity to offer life-saving legal services, in a formalized way, to more people who otherwise would have been unlikely to receive them. By the time she left, the program had been implemented in 25 locations outside of the original Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction and, as of 2024, more than 2,500 immigrants had been given legal counsel through it.

“We could fund not just the attorney but also social workers, experts, post-release planning so if the person was going to be released on bond or if they won their case, it wasn’t just like, here, open the doors, goodbye, good luck,” Wilson said. Most immigration judges were receptive to, if not enthusiastic about, the initiative. “It was a major shift for the population it was meant to serve—by far the most vulnerable of any immigrant group I can think of.”

Detained immigrants in removal proceedings, especially those who are unrepresented, already face an uphill battle. Unlike in the criminal justice system where someone is considered innocent until proven guilty, immigrants seeking relief bear the burden to prove their case. To be found credible, they usually have to recount past events in detail. For people with dementia, for example, or experiencing memory issues due to traumatic brain injury, that alone can present an obstacle.

Gregory Pleasants, a lawyer who worked in the creation of the government-appointed counsel program, said immigrants with mental health needs were often detained indefinitely and subject to solitary confinement. As a result, their conditions only worsened. “Predictably,” Pleasants said, “people who are detained with mental illness just got deported without being heard by a system that is primarily designed to deny detain and deport.”

Pleasants recalled a former client with schizophrenia who had a recurring delusion about something he called a “re-existence plan.” Eventually, after spending time with the man and his family, Pleasants was able to gather information helpful to the case, and the client was allowed to stay in the United States. “No trial can be fair that leaves a person with mental illness alone before a court, especially one as draconian as the immigration system,” Pleasants said. “Without a lawyer, people don’t have a prayer. They don’t have a chance in hell.”

What the NQRP did was build an infrastructure of skilled lawyers, paralegals, and social workers equipped to provide meaningful and trauma-informed detention and deportation defense. For Pleasants, it represented a “brief gleaming moment” of promise that due process could be realized in the immigration system. The dismantling of the program means “that promise is slipping out of our hands,” he added, “and that’s a grievous loss.”

On May 5, nine legal service providers filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s partial termination of the government-paid counsel program. The organizations argue they are faced with an “untenable choice” between having to withdraw representation from some of the roughly 100 affected NQRP cases or continuing the work without payment. Alternatively, they might have to move funds from other critical services and risk staff layoffs.

“We are not talking about a huge amount of money, especially relative to some of the other programs,” said Evan Benz, a senior attorney with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, the only subcontractor providing legal services under the program across Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and North and South Carolina. “But these resources make all the difference in these individuals’ lives because without this program there’s no realistic way that they would ever have a competent and qualified attorney to represent them in their case.”

Laura Lunn, the director of advocacy and litigation at Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network in Colorado, has represented somewhere between 20 and 30 NQRP clients in her nine years as a qualified representative. Often, she explained, these types of cases are more time and resource-intensive because of the added challenges of obtaining testimony, collecting evidence, and doing cross-examination. Lawyers may need to rely more heavily on forensic psychology and country condition expert reports, both of which incur expenses.

Some of Lunn’s clients have experienced audio and visual hallucinations that prevent them from knowing what’s real and what’s not. These symptoms are further exacerbated by prolonged detention. “Imagine trying to synthesize an immigration case while dealing with those types of external stimuli,” Lunn said. Without legal counsel, people will lose in court not because they lack a strong case, but because they simply can’t present the information needed to an immigration judge.

In some instances, someone’s claim to stay in the United States is based on their disability and how it could make them susceptible to harm or even persecution if they are deported back to their home country. Lately, Lunn has been thinking a lot about one of her clients from South Sudan, a survivor of the civil war who became an orphan as a child. As a result of severe PTSD, he heard voices of people threatening to kill him. Ultimately, he was allowed to stay in the United States. “If he had been flown back there,” Lunn said, “I have no doubt in my mind that he would have been targeted and he would have been killed.”

That man is just one of many people Lunn and her organization have helped over the years. She chokes up thinking about those immigrants whose needs may prompt an immigration judge to determine they should be appointed counsel, only for there not to be anyone available to ensure they have a shot at a reasonably fair process. And she wonders: How much longer can they keep assisting their current clients? The Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, which had anticipated more than $310,000 in funding through the NQRP for 2025, has 15 clients whose legal counsel falls under the now-stricken program.

“People have survived so much in their lives to get to the place where a court appoints a qualified representative for them,” Lunn said. “It’s just heartbreaking to think about them being alone again.”

In late March, Ed Martin, then the embattled acting US attorney for DC, showed up at a community meeting at a police station to tout his efforts to combat crime in the district.

Martin politely fielded questions from attendees, even answering one from a man who, citing Martin’s widely condemned description of his office as “President Trumps’ [sic] lawyers,” asked: “How do we as residents trust that you are going to have our back and not be a personal lawyer for the President of the United States, who is a felon and a racist?”

Martin responded by citing Matthew Graves, who had occupied his position under President Biden. “My predecessor” also “worked for the guy elected president, for his polices, for his vision,” Martin said. “And that was his preference. There is nothing wrong with that.”

“The president ran on an agenda,” Martin added. “The agenda includes major policy initiatives that a prosecutor has a role in. And I certainly, as you know, don’t shy away from being public about those.”

As far as I know, that is the most that Martin, whose nomination Trump pulled Thursday due to opposition by GOP senators, has said publicly in defense of his wildly controversial tenure.

It was a dishonest downplaying of his effort to make the country’s largest prosecutorial office into an instrument of MAGA retribution, but also telling.

As US attorney, Martin fired, demoted, and investigated January 6 prosecutors, threatened to prosecute congressional Democrats for hyperbolic political statements, suggested his office would investigate DOGE critics and former prosecutors faulted by Trump, and harassed medical journals, Wikipedia and Georgetown’s law school with threats to punish them over their speech.

Martin’s remarks at the community meeting justified these actions as merely the GOP-version of what Democratic prosecutors did under Biden. I don’t know if Martin really believes that, but it’s not true.

US attorneys do pursue the policies of presidents who pick them, but within legal and normative limits set by the Constitution, Congress, and longstanding practice. No US attorney, until Martin, volunteered to use his office against critics of government policies, including those who “acted simply unethically” and “chase them to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable.” No other US attorney has reportedly attempted to present a grand jury with evidence for a criminal case against the Minority Leader of the US Senate based on five-year-old criticism of the Supreme Court. Nor has a US attorney personally attempted to use criminal investigative power to seize money from environmental groups awarded contracts by the past administration without having any evidence of a crime.

Martin’s Democrats-did-it-first rationalization for debasing his office is not just his. It is the lie justifying Trump’s broader effort to weaponize the Justice Department and turn the entire federal government into an instrument of his personal interest.

Martin, though only an acting US Attorney, got a torrent of negative press coverage in part because he loudly volunteered himself as the leader of Trump’s crusade to use the DOJ against his political enemies. As we wrote in a March: “In a new administration defined by a mixture of malevolence and ineptitude, Martin has emerged as an avatar: a typo-spewing henchman of the moment, eager to help Trump transform the Justice Department into a political tool—and unable to shut up about it.”

The evident defeat of Martin’s nomination is a loss, though by no means a death knell, for proponents of the unitary executive theory’s claim that Justice Department prosecutors are the president’s lawyers, and have always been.

With Martin, Trump tried to force GOP senators to confirm an unqualified bumbler and extremist just because he is Trump’s “favorite US Attorney.” That didn’t work. That makes Martin’s derailed nomination a defeat for Trump too.

Trump backed off the nomination after Senate Republicans said they lacked the votes to confirm him. The fatal blow came from Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), a judiciary committee member who said he would oppose Martin due to his support for January 6 rioters. In January, after initially appearing to oppose Pete Hegseth’s nomination as defense secretary, Tillis, who is up for reelection next year, buckled amid heavy pressure from Trump and supported the former Fox News host’s confirmation. Though Martin sought a lesser post, Tillis’ decision to stand firm against this nomination may signal that Trump’s plummeting poll numbers have diminished his power.

The rejection of Martin’s nomiation is also a sign of the limits of Trump’s effort to rewrite the history of January 6 and the lies that led to it. Martin, as Mother Jones has detailed, was a 2020 election truther who was deeply involved in the Stop the Steal organizing. In the aftermath of January 6, he claimed “antifa” was behind the attack, called it a “hoax,” referred to January 6 attackers as “patriots” and said the marauders who were prosecuted should receive “reparations.” Martin has never renounced those claims. As US attorney, he has continued to promote a conspiracy theory suggesting that the FBI helped plan January 6. He even railed against January 6 prosecutions while appearing, in his official capacity, at a March fundraiser attended by convicted seditionists and an alleged Nazi sympathizer who Martin later tried to distance himself from.

Installing Martin as the head of the office that prosecuted 1,600 people for the attack was a deliberate provocation to anyone, including Republican senators, who rejects Trump’s effort to redefine a deadly attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power as a “day of love.” Ed Martin is a minor figure. But his defeat is a significant sign that Trump’s power to make the government accept his lies is ebbing.

The Conclave has spoken, and President Donald Trump will not be the next pope. Instead, that designation will go to Robert Francis Prevost, who will be known as Pope Leo XIV, the Vatican announced on Thursday.

Leo, who is 69 years old and was born in Chicago, will be the first American pope following the April 21 death of Pope Francis—and everyone wants to claim it as a win for their side of the political aisle. To some on the right, Leo’s selection is a boon for Trump’s “America-first” administration. To other Republicans, he is not pro-Trump enough, based on a series of seemingly critical posts on his X account. The left, on the other hand, is eating those up.

Trump called Leo’s selection “a Great Honor for our Country” in a Truth Social post congratulating him. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk claimed that voting records show Leo is a strong Republican who has consistently voted conservatively. Some of his prior comments appear to make him indistinguishable from the MAGA crowd: The New York Times previously reported that in 2012, Leo spoke out against what he called “alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children.” And as a bishop in Peru, he railed against what he called “the promotion of gender ideology” in schools, which he alleged “seeks to create genders that don’t exist.”

But Trump opponents quickly pointed to Leo’s X account as evidence that the new pope may be a member of the resistance. Leo’s most recent repost shared comments from Evelio Menjivar, an auxiliary bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, who criticized the Trump administration’s seemingly illegal deportations to El Salvador.

Leo also posted two links this year that criticized Vice President JD Vance following Vance’s attempt to use an ancient Catholic concept to justify the administration’s mass deportations of immigrants, which Francis blasted as incorrect. “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others,” read the headline of one article Leo posted. Ten days later, Leo shared another article recounting Vance’s and Francis’ different interpretations of the doctrine. Nonetheless, Vance congratulated him on his selection as pope on Thursday.

In May 2020, at the height of protests following the police murder of George Floyd, Leo wrote: “We need to hear more from leaders in the Church, to reject racism and seek justice.” And during Trump’s first term, Leo shared posts decrying Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and the violence in Charlottesville, where Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides”; supporting Dreamers; urging Trump to take action on climate change; and criticizing Trump’s Muslim ban.

Some political strategists and advocates on the left pointed to these posts as evidence that the pope shared their politics. Some of Trump’s most ardent supporters, on the other hand, were triggered. Conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer called him “anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis” in a post on X.

“Catholics don’t have anything good to look forward to,” she added. “Just another Marxist puppet in the Vatican.”

After far-right activist and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec dug up Leo’s prior X posts, he wrote, “God Save the Church,” and, “The Pope is not infallible on political matters.”

The truth is that only time will tell where Leo falls on the ideological spectrum. As his own record suggests, he will more than likely not be a faithful adherent to either side of the political aisle. Pope Francis was not either. While he supported immigrants and Palestinians under Israeli bombardment and tepidly welcomed gay people into the church, he was firmly anti-abortion, reportedly used an anti-gay slur, and claimed “gender theory…does not recognize the order of creation.”

Like Francis, we can expect Leo to be fully loyal only to the man upstairs.

On Wednesday, following controversy about inconsistencies in her resume, President Trump withdrew his nomination of Dr. Janette Nesheiwat to become surgeon general and gave the nod to alternative medicine practitioner and author Dr. Casey Means.

“Her academic achievements, together with her life’s work, are absolutely outstanding,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “Dr. Casey Means has the potential to be one of the finest Surgeon Generals in United States History.”

Her academic achievements include dropping out of a medical residency in otolaryngology because, she says, she was frustrated that the discipline did not focus on “root causes.” Means’ medical license is inactive, according to Oregon medical board records.

Her life’s work includes co-founding Levels, a business that sells glucose monitors, co-writing the book Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health, and promoting an eight-day online course on metabolic health.

Means has promoted the idea that the national epidemic of chronic disease is attributable to diet and lifestyle choices, an argument that largely echoes the talking points of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. That’s no coincidence: both Means and her brother Calley, who describes himself as a lobbyist and evangelist for healthy food, played a central role in advising Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Calley Means, who now works with Kennedy as a White House health advisor, is said to be assisting with the creation of a “Make America Healthy Again” commission, set to focus on chronic disease and preventable illnesses in children—meaning ones influenced by lifestyle factors like diabetes, rather than vaccine-preventable illnesses like measles. Last September, at a four-hour Senate roundtable hosted by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) that was meant to welcome Kennedy’s MAHA movement to the GOP fold, the senator hailed Casey “the person who is the catalyst for this event.”

In her writing and speaking gigs, Casey Means highlights the importance of metabolic health, an enthusiasm for many alternative health practitioners. Like many of them, she assigns a mystically important role to the gut: In Good Energy, Means states that “conditions like depression and schizophrenia” are “tied to poor gut bacteria,” adding that “researchers can identify a person with depression or schizophrenia just by analyzing their gut bacteria composition.” (The study Means appears to be citing specifically says that more research is needed to determine whether there’s a causal link between schizophrenia and the gut microbiome.) She’s also hailed raw dairy, writing how she wants “to be free to form a relationship with a local farmer, understand his integrity, look him in the eyes, pet his cow, and then decide if I feel safe to drink the milk from his farm.”

But Means’ medical opining has occasionally veered in a more New Age direction. She has claimed that “the universe” speaks to her and that people can “ manifest” what they want by writing it down. “Perhaps the body is simply the material ‘radio receiver’ through which we can ‘tune in’ to the divine,” she wrote in an October 2024 newsletter. “We will get instructions (through human inspiration and reason) for what we need to do to raise the vibration of humanity and create a sustainable future… The future of medicine will be about light. I don’t exactly know how yet.”

“Humans are out of alignment with the Earth and depleting its life force,” she wrote the next month. “And human bodies are now exhibiting signs of blocking the flow of energy through them. This is insulin resistance. We are the Earth.”

Means’ track record of statements about medicine and health that aren’t backed by science are troubling to Jonathan Jarry, a science communicator at McGill University’s Office for Science and Society. He noted that Means’ treatment modality of choice, functional medicine, is not a recognized medical specialty, and that it often involves unnecessary tests and unproven supplement regimens. Functional medicine is “using a veneer of medicine to sell supplements in the hope that these fix a patient’s health problems,” he said. “It is not evidence based.” Jarry was “appalled, yet not surprised in the slightest” about her nomination, which, he said, “shows a continuing disregard for expertise and an embrace of make believe.”

It’s not just people in the scientific community who are displeased with Means’ nomination. Despite seemingly crowd-pleasing views on topics like life forces and raw milk, some of Kennedy’s allies in the anti-vaccine and alternative health worlds have intimated that they see the Means siblings as sinister functionaries of Big Pharma, Big Food, or something much worse. Some of those people greeted Means’ nomination with outrage and dark suspicion, with many claiming Dr. Kelly Victory, a health influencer and ivermectin fan, was Kennedy’s preferred choice.

Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, the founder of the anti-vaccine group Americans for Health Freedom, tweeted that Victory had told her she was being chosen for the position last week, but that she ultimately “was passed over because of her outspoken stance against the mRNA shots. Clearly RFK has no power.” Several other major anti-vaccine figures also tweeted their anger that Victory hadn’t been chosen, including Steve Kirsch, a wealthy Silicon Valley figure turned anti-vaccine crusader. “As surgeon general, @DrKellyVictory would have advocated to pull the mRNA shots from the market immediately,” he tweeted. “Probably why she was not selected. Trump does not want those shots to be pulled.”

Kennedy’s former running mate Nicole Shanahan also expressed immediate displeasure, tweeting that Means’ nomination was “ very strange,” as she hinted at a longtime distrust of Casey and Calley Means.

“Doesn’t make any sense,” she wrote. “I was promised that if I supported RFK Jr. in his Senate confirmation that neither of these siblings would be working under HHS or in an appointment (and that people much more qualified would be). I don’t know if RFK very clearly lied to me, or what is going on. It has been clear in recent conversations that he is reporting to someone regularly who is controlling his decisions (and it isn’t President Trump). With regards to the siblings, there is something very artificial and aggressive about them, almost like they were bred and raised Manchurian assets.”

Shanahan didn’t respond to a request for comment about whose “Manchurian assets” she believes the Means siblings to be.

Shanahan’s tweet was, in turn, a quote tweet of Dr. Suzanne Humphries, an osteopathic physician who’s been critical of vaccines. (Humphries appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast last month to promote those views.) Humphries, too, was critical of Means as a choice, tweeting, “I can’t help but think this is a very carefully groomed and selected person. Just about no clinical experience. Talks a great game about everything but vaccines. Feels all wrong. Why? There were so many better choices.”

Last week, baffling many and delighting a few, HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared during a Trump administration Cabinet meeting that he’s engaged in a hunt for what he said were 300,000 missing children trafficked by the Biden administration.

“We have ended HHS’s role as the principal vector in this country for child trafficking,” Kennedy declared. “During the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking for sex and for slavery, and we have ended that. We’re very aggressively going out and trying to find these 300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration.”

To even remotely understand what Kennedy is talking about requires one’s brain to be thoroughly bathed in the corrosive acid of the right-wing internet, where it’s taken on faith that the Biden administration either allowed hundreds of thousands of children to be trafficked or perhaps actively participated in that trafficking themselves.

Kennedy’s comments are an excellent demonstration of how, in the Trump era, public statements by administration figures and their congressional backers are heavily influenced by the far-right and conspiratorial internet—sometimes in addled, confused, or strangely remixed forms. Why is Attorney General Pam Bondi promising to release an “Epstein client list” that probably isn’t real?Why is Kennedy also claiming that vaccines are made from “ fetus debris,” which is a lie, and promising to fight chemtrails, which don’t exist, but which he recently claimed DARPA is spraying into the sky? Why is Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) claiming he wants a Congressional hearing into “what actually happened” on September 11, as he claimed a “controlled demolition” brought down building 7? Why are Donald Trump and Elon Musk reviving a 1970s conspiracy theory which claims that the gold inside Fort Knox might be gone? Why was a government website where Americans could once order free Covid tests has been transformed into a webpage promoting an extremely longwinded version of the still-unproven lab leak theory? Why is Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) declaring there were “ two shooters” involved in the JFK assassination, before hosting a hearing that in no way proved that?

Rumors, conspiracy theories, memes, jokes, contextless claims and thinly-sourced allegations all now find their way at lightning speed to the White House and to other senior Republican officials, where they’re immediately spat back out in statements and public appearances. These statements make it incredibly clear how deeply online and profoundly conspiracy-brained the modern GOP is—and how much taxpayer-funded time the Trump administration plans to spend pursuing ideas that range from ludicrous to already debunked.

Kennedy, who has previously admitted that he falls for online misinformation “ all the time,” and his bald claim that HHS engaged in the trafficking of children caused uproar and confusion, even among the conservative faithful. “If true, this would be a really really big deal,” tweeted collegiate swimmer turned conservative activist Riley Gaines. “Arrest and prosecute!!!!” “HOLY SHLIT,” tweeted Chaya Raichik of the far-right Libs of TikTok.

The way that the claim about 300,000 missing children made it out of Kennedy’s mouth helps to demonstrate how conspiracy theories function in the current, fever-dream version of the GOP. The claim has a long and increasingly convoluted pedigree in right-wing and conspiratorial spaces: versions circulated during the Biden administration, when a self-proclaimed HHS whistleblower named Tara Rhodas claimed the agency routinely released unaccompanied migrant children into the care of people affiliated with gangs like MS-13. Rhodas suspected that these sponsors would then traffic the children.

The claims are a pastiche of true and unproven: in one 2021 case highly publicized by Republican lawmakers, two children were sent to a home where their sponsors had suspected MS-13 ties. Other migrant children—in cases Republican lawmakers have been less excited to discuss—were sent to places where they were labor trafficked, forced to work in slaughterhouses, farms, and factories.

While the Biden administration may have helped create this situation by pressuring caseworkers to move children out of shelters and release them to sponsors as quickly as possible, Kennedy’s more QAnon-ish claim—that 300,000 children have simply vanished into thin air—seems to have its roots in a August 2024 report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General. That report found the government “could not monitor the location and status” of all unaccompanied minors known to be in the country, including some 291,000 who ICE had never made steps to remove, and another 32,000 who did not appear for court dates. The report did not state that any of the children had been trafficked. As an expert at the Acacia Center for Justice’s Unaccompanied Children Program explained to CBS, this isn’t a problem of “missing kids” but one of “missing paperwork.”

It’s a very long walk from those facts to claiming that the children are “missing,” let alone being sex trafficked. But by in October 2024, JD Vance claimed during a debate with Governor Tim Walz that 300,000 children were missing. Trump gave a lurid version of the line in a December Time interview. “We have 325,000 children here during Democrats—and this was done by Democrats—who are right now slaves, sex slaves or dead,” he said. “What I will be doing will be trying to find where they are and get them back to their parents.” That month, incoming Trump border czar Tom Homan suggested that the “missing” youth had been trafficked and pledged to track them down in an interview with the Washington Post where, with no apparent sense of irony or contradiction, he also discussed how the administration would bring back the family separation policy Trump deployed during his first term.

But while most people who heard about Kennedy’s claim greeted it with bafflement, reflexive outrage, or, rarely, demands for further proof, according to author and journalist Mike Rothschild, the QAnon community celebrated.

“Kennedy’s comments at the Trump cabinet meeting/praise-a-thon are a great example of a conspiracy theory that makes little sense outside the right wing influencer bubble, but a cause for celebration inside it,” Rothschild, who has written a book about QAnon and another on antisemitic conspiracy theories, explains.

Whether he knows it or not, Rothschild adds, “Kennedy is pushing hardcore QAnon-style moral panic to an audience of devotees who are desperate for Trump to finally sweep away the bad guys and deliver on the promises Q made years ago,” namely to uncover sex trafficking being conducted by high-level Democratic politicians.

“For people who aren’t steeped in these theories, it sounds like the ravings of a madman,” Rothschild adds. But Q and its ilk are so mainstream on the right now that it’s finding a large and receptive audience.”

Embracing conspiracy theories has worked incredibly well for the current GOP and Trump administration, a way to keep their base captivated and profitably enraged. In one ongoing example, a February attempt to release Epstein names and flight logs to a group of conservative influencers quickly turned into a mess once it became clear the files weren’t new at all. Nonetheless, Attorney General Bondi has continued to insist new information on the case is forthcoming, claiming this week that the FBI is combing through “tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children.” While Rep. Luna’s first JFK hearing did not produce the second gunman she’s said she’s in search of, she has pledged to keep working to provide “needed transparency about federal secrets to the American people,” including about the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

And while Kennedy’s son Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has provided no further information about the 300,000 children he claims are missing, there’s no question that their speculative existence will be mentioned again, whenever it might be politically profitable to do so.

In Donald Trump’s second term, a familiar pattern is emerging: the president does something illegal, someone sues to stop him, and eventually the Supreme Court decides the case. From which agencies Trump can effectively shutter, to which agency heads he can depose, to whether or not he can disappear people into a Salvadoran gulag or deny infants birthright citizenship, the buck stops with the nine justices on the nation’s highest court.

But that court is not acting…normally. The court’s GOP-appointed 6-3 majority is creating a new legal reality for the country as it determines that the Republican Party’s rightwing priorities are also the Constitution’s preferences. Just in the last few years, it has ended the right to abortion, greenlit discrimination against LGBTQ people, eviscerated the separation of church and state, turned back the clock on voting rights, blasted away gun control laws and regulations, let the firehose of billionaire money take over American elections, gut protections for voting rights, and declared open season on federal regulations big business doesn’t like. And that’s not to mention the court’s willingness to personally deliver wins to Trump, including the grant of criminal immunity for official acts—a decision that redefined the presidency just in time for a reelected Trump to take advantage of this new freedom to crime.

In a new book, Leah Litman, a constitutional law professor at the University of Michigan and co-host of the legal podcast “ Strict Scrutiny,” lays out how the court has gone awry. Litman believes that the court’s recent jurisprudence is driven not by the law, but by the resentments of its GOP appointees. Hence the book’s title: Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes.

“Political culture imagines that the Supreme Court safeguards the Constitution, when in reality it is chipping away at the constitutional rights of historically marginalized groups,” Litman writes, concluding her chapter on the court’s patriarchy-fueled war on abortion and women’s rights. “The court is allowing feelings and politics to trump the law and sometimes just be the law.”

With humor and a healthy dose of pop culture, Litman’s book is a layman’s guide to the court’s current jurisprudence: a court that is not protecting minority rights, democracy, or workers but rather has sided with rich and reactionary elements of American society. Litman pulls in history as well as the logic of recent opinions to argue that “the Court has steadily descended into no law, and just vibes.”

Litman’s book is an accessible primer on our current moment: How did we get to the court we have, and what happens when a court already dedicated to rolling back the clock on democracy becomes one of the few checks against Trump’s anti-democratic rampage. We spoke about her book, the Court, and how it is responding to the unprecedented challenges of Trump’s second term.

My biggest takeaway from the book was that it’s an attempt to take the legal gloss off of the court and show how they’re basically political actors. You make the point in the introduction that it’s not a coincidence that when you get a majority of Republican appointees, then Republican policies become the legally permissible policies. What is the biggest thing that you would have readers take from the book?

I think that is definitely part, trying to remove some of the veneer that is on the Supreme Court—not only to illustrate how their rulings track the political talking points and larger political movement of the Republican Party over the last half century, but also to illustrate how the court works: how they pick cases, how they decide cases, and the amount of power they have to set their own agenda and decide a huge swath of issues that are super important.

You have a chapter on the court’s history on voting rights. In the 2019 case Rucho v Common Cause, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote an opinion saying that federal courts can’t decide partisan gerrymandering disputes. You point out that if you can gerrymander in order to protect your political party, then the logical end point is the end of democracy, because we aren’t doing the whole voters-pick-their-representatives thing anymore. It’s a good example of how the court appears hostile to the basic functions of how democracy works. And it really seems simpatico with Donald Trump, who also doesn’t really like how democracy works.

I was actually going to start my answer there, because it’s, in a lot of ways, easiest to see it articulated by Donald Trump, or Republican senators who say we’re a republic, not a democracy, or when Donald Trump says “We’ve all been victimized,” referring to the outcome of a legitimate presidential election. Of course, those are very pointed, clear statements that they’re just not that into democracy when democracy doesn’t get them what they want.

You can see the same antipathy toward democracy in the rulings of the Republican justices on the Supreme Court, including in Rucho v. Common Cause, where they just think, “Yeah, it’s totally fine for politicians to write a set of rules that give themselves power even when they don’t win a majority of the votes.” That was, in a lot of ways, a natural outgrowth of their antipathy toward enforcing constitutional protections for voting rights, as far as allowing states to adopt voter identification laws or other measures that make it harder to participate in democracy and therefore easier for politicians to, again, pick their voters and disenfranchise some number of people.

I also saw that thread in the court’s immunity ruling from last summer, where they just did not seem bothered by the prospect that an outgoing president would try to interfere with the peaceful transition of power and attempt to launch an insurrection at the Capitol. To them, the real concern was the prosecution of that president—as if that entire fiasco, the real problem was individuals suffering from Trump derangement syndrome, not the underlying threat to democracy. As to why they think this? I think the common thread across all the chapters [of the book] is this notion of conservative grievance and entitlement. They feel like they are the victims. And they honestly feel like they deserve political power, and they are entitled to it, and no amount of evidence, no number of votes, seems to be enough to persuade them otherwise.

You write that in the 1930s, the court had one of those rare moments when it changed course. It had been striking down New Deal laws to fight the Great Depression, a continuation of its Gilded Era cases in which it continually blocked laws that helped working people. Finally, FDR threatened to add justices to the court. In response, the court started upholding New Deal legislation. I imagine Brown v Board of Education is another such course correction. Are there any more recent ones, or ones that you think might be coming?

I’m not sure I can point to other examples similar to the 1930s one, at least with respect to this court. One possibility is what the court is going to say about the constitutionality of multi-member commissions, because that’s an instance where it seems like they want to allow the president to fire members of the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board. My guess is some of them will get cold feet about allowing the president to fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and thereby actually cause another Great Depression or recession. So I don’t know exactly what effect that might have on their rulings on presidential power. It remains to be seen.

They haven’t had any chance to really revisit the immunity decision from last summer, Trump v. United States. But I could see them being like, ‘Oops, we gave the president too much power.‘

Implications are staring them in the face. And yet I’m not holding out hope that there is going to be a clear acknowledgement, admission of wrongdoing, or course correction, for two reasons. One is, unlike the 1930s when the court did actually reverse course, now we have such a polarized media ecosystem where you have Republican politicians, Republican commentators and whatnot, basically creating this alternative universe where they’re telling the Republican justices they’re doing awesome, and their rulings are great, and the real problems are everybody else and not them. That does diminish one of the ways to get justices to admit their mistake.

The second is they have had a few opportunities to acknowledge the administration’s misdeeds, their efforts to evade court orders, their efforts to avoid any prospect of oversight, and kind of tiptoed around the edges, reached some compromise rulings, but not actually acknowledging that this is an administration that’s acting like they are just not subject to the law.

I’m fascinated by this question of power. To jump back into the book, in your final chapter, you talk about the anti-regulation, anti-administrative state agenda of the court today. You write that they’re so busy tearing down regulations but “there’s no attempt to say what the government should look like or why.” I’m curious if you have an idea yourself of what they are going for. Trump is putting forward a very clear agenda of dramatically reducing government. Is that what the court’s GOP-appointees have in mind?

What the President has in mind seems to be something like: No government efforts to basically regulate in the public interest or for people with less power. So, no helping students get access to education, no helping individuals breathe clean air, no helping individuals get health insurance. None of those regulations of corporate interests that actually reduce the power and money of the already powerful.

Instead, the interventions are directed against either their perceived enemies or against the less powerful. Using the law to basically attack institutions that are trying to protect transgender students, using the law to go after law firms that had the audacity to try to hold Donald Trump accountable under the law previously. It’s a very dual state, where, on one hand, it is completely anemic whenever the general public or someone not in the relevant circle needs something, but they preserve these weapons—in particular, federal funding, federal criminal law enforcement, and federal immigration powers—to police disfavored populations.

As to whether this is the vision that John Roberts and others have in mind, my guess is it probably matches Sam Alito’s vision at a minimum. Neil Gorsuch, he’s more of a libertarian, so I’m not sure it totally tracks his. And the others are probably of the view that presidents just get to decide. They’re so committed to this idea that presidents are the singularly important entity under the Constitution, all of the executive power is vested in them that they just get to decide how to deploy the vast sweeping apparatus of the federal executive branch.

A big upcoming case is birthright citizenship. I was surprised they are taking this case so quickly. And to be clear, they’re not technically taking the constitutional issue of birthright citizenship in a few days. They’re considering whether to allow the government to limit birthright citizenship while the question is litigated. What do you make of this decision to hear this piece of the case now?

The court drew out the initial briefing, scheduled it for argument in May. Honestly, a part of me wonders if they have structured the timing so that they will issue this perceived ruling against the Trump administration at the same time they are probably going to be handing him substantial victories or moving the law in deeply conservative directions in other important areas like voting rights, LGBT equality, religious public schools. Kind of get some cover, to basically give them some favorable press and some offsetting press against the other things they are likely to do this term.

I had that thought as well. And since it’s not even the merits, they could, a year later, limit birthright citizenship on the merits.

You’re writing about the court, but you’re not a full outsider, because you did clerk on the court for Justice Anthony Kennedy. My sense of people that are brought into the institution is that they have a reverence and defense of the institution. Your book is literally called Lawless. Can you share if your experience being part of the court for a year informed this book, or if it is unrelated to that experience.

I don’t think they’re entirely unrelated. I did not emerge from my clerkship with a lot of reverence for the court or a desire to be a Supreme Court practitioner and in those circles. I understand the desire of people who are at the court, within the court, around the court, to see it as a place where legal arguments have a chance; it’s not politicized, they are doing some good. There are some cases in which I think that’s true. But I just think it’s misleading and obscuring more than it should to paint the court in that light and to allow it to give that impression.

You’re writing about a court where you’re at least somewhat critical of their efforts over 200 years to increase their own power. And you explain how this court is issuing opinions based on their own grievances, rather than what the law dictates. Then the book lands in this moment where Trump is threatening the rule of law and it’s incredibly important for the administration to listen to the courts. How do you balance those two things?

I hope my book is needed context for people who are thinking about how to respond to this current moment or what to take away from it. We should call on the courts to enforce the law, and expect, in some ways, that they will do so. If we just give up the game and say “It’s hopeless, they’re going to do whatever they want,” we kind of eliminate the capital or costs of them doing even more bad things.

Part of me looks back on the first Trump administration and thinks part of the problem, or the flaw, is people on the left took to defending institutions when those institutions were deeply flawed and just were going to be incapable of actually addressing the threat to democracy, the rule of law, that this form of Trumpism and autocracy posed. Defending the Supreme Court during the first Trump administration, defending like the institution of Congress during the first Trump administration—I just think those were deeply misguided on some level. We should be able to recognize the flaws in our institutions that led us to the moment we are in, and not let any of them escape that examination or accountability.

In your book, every chapter focuses on a grievance the justices are working out. And it’s the same stew of grievances that applies to Trump’s movement: a vindictive patriarchy, not liking minorities, against voting rights, floated by wealthy interests. It’s all part of the same thing. It’s just really complicated to think about one of these institutions stopping the other, because they’re marinating in the same stuff.

That’s exactly right. To show the ways in which the court is on board with the ideology that the Trump administration is expressing, even if it’s doing so in more sanitized language.

I love my dog. She’s trained to go to the bathroom outside. But just because she clears that low bar doesn’t mean I think she should be in charge of the United States government. And similarly, if the Republican-controlled court can and does recognize that Donald Trump cannot declare himself king for all eternity, I am unwilling to say then they should be our rulers as well.

Since she was first elected in 1990 as Washington, DC’s nonvoting delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) has fiercely defended the civil service in Congress. Nearly a quarter of her constituents work for the federal government. So after the second inauguration of President Donald Trump, as Elon Musk’s US DOGE Service targeted agency after agency with layoffs, smears, and all manner of corner-cutting, Norton was a logical person to host a March town hall on this unprecedented attack.

The event, promotional materials said, would “give Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton the chance to speak directly with the District of Columbia federal workforce and provide resources.” The promise of a real dialogue with the congresswoman, however, proved to be a bit of hype.

Conducted over the phone, the event had plenty of town, but no hall. As the host, Norton was spectral at best. She read some opening remarks, but when participants directed questions at her, union reps or a democracy activist provided most of the answers. “Congresswoman, I’d be happy to jump in” was a typical intervention during her many unexplained silences.

A caller identifying herself as a fourth-generation Washingtonian thanked “Lady Eleanor Holmes” for “fighting for us” and said, “We’re just so blessed to have her.” After describing some of the indignities of living as a disenfranchised DC voter, she asked Norton how people could help her fight for DC statehood.

“Congresswoman? Are you still with us?” the moderator asked after fifteen seconds had passed. Then an additional ten seconds went by before Norton reappeared with a 59-word response, of which 13 were “uh.”

“I always love to make sure DC is treated the same as states,” she said, stumbling through a word salad. “I do have a constituent service office to help constituents. They are here to help. Thank you for your support of statehood.”

Norton’s uncertain performance did not escape notice. “It turns out Rep. Norton defers all responses to her constituents’ questions, to someone else,” a YouTube commenter complained. “Not what I expected.”

Perhaps unwittingly, the commenter was speaking for many of the 700,000 residents of the District of Columbia. Norton, who will be 88 in June, is the oldest member of the House of Representatives, and as the town hall illustrated, it shows. “With all due respect to Del. Norton,” says Wendy Hamilton, a DC minister who unsuccessfully challenged Norton in the 2022 Democratic primary, “I am just not certain that she is the best positioned generationally to meet the moment.”

Norton, however, insists that she remains one of the most effective members of the House. “Throughout my career in Congress I’ve passionately defended home rule and DC’s right to govern itself,” she said in an email. “I’m fully able to continue doing so effectively—including against attacks from President Trump.”

Broaching the subject of the advanced age of a member of Congress is still considered unseemly. But the issue has become unavoidable over the past year, especially after Democrats’ unprecedented efforts to pressure then 81-year-old President Joe Biden to drop out as the party’s presidential nominee, after he appeared bewildered during his June debate with Trump. In March this year, a local news outlet discovered Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas), now 82, living in a memory care facility, having slipped away from Congress without much notice. And of course, until her death in 2023, the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) descended into dementia in full view of the country.

“There’s no question that somewhere between six and a dozen of my colleagues are at a point where they’re … I think they don’t have the faculties to do their job,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) recently told Politico.

The gerontocracy is spurring some younger activists to action. California Democrats will consider a resolution, introduced by a 36-year-old party member, to explore setting a mandatory retirement age for state candidates at the party’s convention later this month. David Hogg, a 25-year-old vice chair at the Democratic National Committee, recently announced plans to raise $20 million through an outside group to fund primary challenges against some of the party’s oldest members.

Those efforts, however, may be too late to save the District of Columbia. Thanks to a constitutional anomaly, residents of the Nation’s Capital pay federal taxes but have no voting representation in Congress. In 1970, District residents won the right to elect a nonvoting delegate to Congress. And, in 1973, the passage of the Home Rule Act allowed city residents to elect a mayor and a 13-member city council. But Congress still must approve DC’s budget and all its legislation.

As a result, the District of Columbia is frequently subject to the whims of members of Congress hoping to score points with folks back home. For instance, Congress forced charter schools on the city in the 1990s. A longstanding budget rider prevents the city from spending its own funds on abortion services. Over the past two years, members of Congress have even tried to ban the use of automated traffic enforcement like red-light cameras in DC, a strictly local concern if there ever was one.

But DC residents have never needed a forceful advocate in Congress more than they do right now. Republicans in both houses have introduced legislation to repeal the DC Home Rule Act and return the District’s management to Congress. Trump also has threatened to seize control of the city. He said in February that local officials are “not doing the job—too much crime, too much graffiti, too many tents on the lawns…we can’t have that in Washington, DC.” At the end of March, he issued an executive order creating a federal task force to oversee District affairs.

Now, there’s a much more immediate crisis. As Congress scrambled to pass a continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown in March, it failed to include a few sentences to allow the District to keep spending a previously approved budget, most of which consists of the city’s own funds. For the past two decades, Congress has included such language in continuing resolutions. But this year, the resolution treated DC like a federal agency and cut its spending levels to that of the previous fiscal year. If not corrected, the District will be forced to slash $1 billion from its current budget, a draconian measure that will require immediate, large cuts to public schools, police, and the Metro system.

DC Mayor Muriel Bowser has already imposed a government hiring freeze and limits on overtime and is making plans to furlough city employees. The cuts could affect police coverage for major events this summer, including a military parade for Trump’s 79^th birthday on June 14, which happens to coincide with the US Army’s 250^th anniversary. “After this week,” Bowser wrote in an angry post on X in late April, “if the House has still not passed the POTUS-approved DC budget fix for FY25, we will be forced to finalize plans and make real cuts to deal with a fake budget crisis.”

One of the grim realities of addressing this “fake” crisis is that the city’s only elected representative in Congress is Norton. The DC delegate, like those from Guam and Puerto Rico, can introduce legislation and vote in committee, but not on final bills. Nonetheless, as Norton herself has proven during her 35 years on the job, the role is not without power.

A legendary civil rights icon, she had worked for Bayard Rustin on the staff of the 1963 March on Washington. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed the Yale law school graduate as the first woman to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. When the first DC delegate, Rep. Walter Fauntroy stepped down after twenty years on the job, Norton left her post as a Georgetown law professor and succeeded him.

Since then, she has used her sheer force of will to advance DC statehood and fend off attacks on the District’s self-governance. She has won some victories, too, such as the creation of the 1999 Tuition Assistance Grant that provides up to $10,000 to help DC college students attend public universities or HBCUs outside the city.

A video that went viral 17 years ago shows why Norton is so revered in DC. While she was speaking on the House floor about a DC voting rights bill, a colleague interrupted and asked her to yield her time. “I will not yield, sir!” she thundered back. “The District of Columbia has spent 206 years yielding to people who would deny them the vote! I yield you no ground.”

Today, however, that forceful voice has been greatly diminished just when the city needs it the most. Many critics—mostly off the record— have blamed Norton for contributing to DC’s current budget crisis. “She was conspicuously absent when all this was going down,” says Stephen Jackson, a former head of the DC Ward 6 Republicans. He notes that Norton has been able to “slide under the radar until something big like this happens, and now it’s like, oh.”

In early March, Norton introduced an amendment to fix the budget issue. But inexplicably, she failed to testify in its favor before the House Rules Committee, the rare forum where she could have made her case directly to Republican colleagues, many of whom didn’t seem to understand the gravity of the city’s situation. “Even the guy from Guam testified about an amendment that he had,” Jackson notes. But to be effective in this venue, he continues, “You have to be sharp. You have to stick up for what you want to say.” The amendment failed.

Jackson observes that the Democrats’ aging problem probably contributed to the DC budget crisis in the first place. Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), 77, and Rep. Sylvester Turner (D-Texas), both died within a week of each other in March, right before the close vote on the continuing resolution. Turner, a 70-year-old freshman, had replaced Rep. Shelia Jackson Lee, who died in office in July at the age of 74.

After lobbying by senators from surrounding jurisdictions, notably former Norton intern Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.), the Senate passed a corrective bill to fix the DC budget on March 14. Trump supported its passage. “The House should take up the DC funding ‘fix’ that the Senate has passed, and get it done IMMEDIATELY,” he wrote on Truth Social. “We need to clean up our once beautiful Capital City and make it beautiful again.”

The House, however, left for its Easter recess without scheduling a vote, and there’s no sign Republican leadership plans to bring it up any time soon. Some GOP members have seized on the budget crisis to meddle even more in DC affairs. “We should use this opportunity to make certain that DC isn’t wasting money on ideas like DEI or reparations,” House Freedom Caucus chairman Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) said in an April statement. He suggested using Congress’ oversight authority “to make sure that DC is spending its money to Make DC Great Again, instead of on their usual woke agenda.”

Norton declined my request for an in-person interview. Her office also did not answer a long list of questions about her job performance, and whether she had met personally with any of her GOP colleagues to push the DC budget fix. Instead, a spokeswoman emailed a statement from Norton. “I have one response to people with doubts about my ability to serve,” she wrote. “Watch me.”

As with so many elderly people, the first public signs of Norton’s decline started with a fender-bender. In 2015, as she tried to park her car on Capitol Hill, she pulled straight into an angled space, hitting a neighboring car in the process. Failing to properly navigate the space, Norton just walked away. A couple of wags in a nearby office building captured the episode on video. “If she parks like that,” one can be heard saying, “she should not be a member of Congress anymore.”

After the video went viral, Norton promised to take remedial driving classes. Her driving did not improve. In September 2018, according to a police report, she pulled an illegal U-turn in a Capitol Hill neighborhood one night and hit a DC police cruiser, a previously unreported accident that caused more than $1,000 in damage. Norton’s office told me she no longer drives.

The 2018 car accident took place during an election year. By then already 81 years old, she also drew her first serious primary challenge in almost a decade. Former Obama administration official Kim Ford, then 37, won the support of the city’s popular attorney general and raised more than $100,000 for the race. (Ford did not respond to requests for an interview.) She won nearly a quarter of the vote, more than any recent challenger, but Norton’s lock on the seat has remained secure. She’s been reelected three times since then without a serious challenger, garnering nearly 90 percent of the vote. That record says a great deal about city voters but should also be viewed as an epic failure of local media.

I’m a longtime District resident who used to report on the city government. I pay attention to DC politics. Even so, I hadn’t fully appreciated just how much Norton had declined until 2021 when she spoke at my son’s high school graduation. She had trouble pronouncing the school’s name and told incoherent tales of working in the federal bureaucracy. The charter school administration clearly had expected better. And why wouldn’t they? Until very recently, local media have all but ignored Norton’s decline. After the speech, I discovered that her growing frailty and emerging cognitive issues were something of an open secret among local politicos and journalists, but no one wanted to broach the subject publicly. One explained that her status as a civil rights legend made her untouchable.

Periodically, red flags about Norton’s condition have broken through. For instance, in September 2021, a group of zebras escaped from a Maryland farm and captured local attention. While authorities were trying to round up the liberated animals, Norton’s office issued a truly bizarre press release: “Local news has reported that the zebras were let loose on Saturday or Sunday of last weekend, a period of time during which I was enjoying quiet time at home with family,” Norton’s release said. “My alibi is solid but given my career of fighting for statehood for the District, which includes years of explaining the importance of having consent of the governed, and given my recent opposition to fences, I can understand why the charge was made. I hope the owners find the zebras and that all involved live long, full lives.”

Was this some odd lapse? Was it an attempt at humor? Her spokesperson said the release was obviously a joke. Many DC residents, however, were left scratching their heads.

Former DC councilmember Mary Cheh told me that the last time Norton ran for reelection, “there were conversations. Should we really be voting for her again? Frankly, if you see her get up to a podium, you can see that she’s suffering from physical difficulties. She’s getting up there.” DC pols, she said, have hoped that Norton would “see the writing on the wall” and step down, while helping to identify a good replacement. But, Cheh said, “she doesn’t seem to be moving in that direction.”

What’s notable about Norton’s recent tenure though, aren’t the car crashes or the weird zebra press releases, but just how absent she has been from public life. Last year, she raised more than $200,000 for a virtually nonexistent reelection campaign. She skipped the DC Pride parade, a command performance for local officials, and her usual meeting with the Ward 8 Democrats. She barely put up any campaign signs.

Kelly Mikel Williams, a local advisory neighborhood commissioner who’d worked in the Clinton administration, ran against Norton in 2022 and 2024. He said some DC residents were upset with him for raising Norton’s age in the campaign. “You can’t make that issue with Joe Biden at 81 and not make it with her at 87,” he told me. “They would say she’s gonna die in that office.” And yet, he said, no one wanted to be responsible for pushing her out.

During the recent election, Norton’s opponents say she refused to participate in any debates. One of her few media appearances made it clear why. In May 2024, Team Rayceen, the production company of local LGBTQ personality Rayceen Pendarvis, featured Norton in a series of online candidate interviews. Norton got the softball questions in advance. Even so, she appeared to read the answers from a script.

“I am Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton,” she said when asked to describe her background. “I have been the congresswoman for the District of Columbia since ’91. I am running for reelection again this term. I am a native Washingtonian, and I guess that’s the long and short of it.” She repeated the questions the way a middle school student follows a writing rubric. Question: “Tell us about the importance of the position you are running for.” Answer: “The importance of the position is that I would represent the people of the District of Columbia.”

Erin Palmer, a former DC advisory neighborhood commissioner who ran for the DC council in 2022, was involved in the producing interviews. She says Norton’s performance left Team Rayceen stunned. In the end, they managed to coax about three minutes of talk out of the congresswoman. “The collective consensus was like, ‘What just happened?’” Palmer told me. “I was surprised by the lack of engagement on substance. There were a number of one-word responses. In one interview, you can hear somebody whispering things to her.”

Palmer even half-expected Norton’s staff to call and ask them not to air the interview. But Norton returned for another one in August and her performance was similarly lackluster.

The videos weren’t widely viewed. If they had been, the Jewish magazine Moment might have reconsidered the optics of giving Norton an award in November named after the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Norton is the same age Ginsburg was when she died in 2020. The trailblazing justice had famously refused to retire during the Obama administration, and her legacy was badly tarnished when her death allowed Trump to secure the court’s conservative majority with the appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

This year, Norton has served on the DOGE subcommittee, a grandstanding platform stocked with some of the House’s loudest firebrands from both parties. She can’t compete. Consider her recent appearance at a March hearing called “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the heads of NPR and PBS Accountable.”

Reading from a script, Norton plodded through her remarks, mangled the names of witnesses, and chuckled as she described a DC student participating on a local public radio quiz show as if she’d never heard the story before. Her comments dragged on so long that committee chair Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) let a witness answer Norton’s last question with a surprisingly gentle reminder that the congresswoman’s time was up.

While I was reporting this story, everyone from reporters to political activists to ordinary voters told me that Norton’s condition didn’t matter because she can’t vote in the House anyway. But as the recent budget crisis has proven, having a functioning DC delegate is more critical than many city residents seem to realize.

As lobbyist and former Rep. Tom Downey (D-NY) explains, “A really good member of Congress, regardless of whether they’re voting on the floor, still has committee responsibilities and assignments. It is much more a relationship job than how many bills you’ve gotten passed.”

Downey worked with Norton in the House and now is one of her constituents. He says that while she may not have the same powers as other members, she could still be networking and building coalitions to advance her agenda. But it’s not clear that Norton is doing much glad-handing these days, even when she appears in person. (Witness this video she made with WMATA General Manager Randy Clarke last year to talk about transit infrastructure.)

Transit service in the nation’s capital is thriving thanks to @wmata and investments from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

To celebrate #InfrastructureDecade, @wmataGM Randy Clarke joined Ranking Member @EleanorNorton to discuss how the BIL is keeping the momentum going. pic.twitter.com/rzXkNcdS0U

— Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure (@TransportDems) May 24, 2024

In contrast, the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, 52, has been relentlessly working a charm campaign both in Congress and at the White House to protect DC. When Trump was elected last year, Bowser made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago in an effort to shield the District from some of the president’s baser instincts. Observers credit her with helping temper Trump’s DC executive order, which they suspect could have been much worse. Norton’s office did not respond to questions about whether she has asked for a meeting with the president.

The congresswoman has shown little public recognition of her limitations. In late April, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), announced that his cancer had returned and that he was stepping down as ranking Democrat on the powerful House Oversight Committee. An Axios reporter caught Norton on Capitol Hill and asked if, as the committee’s next most senior Democrat, she was considering running to replace him. “I may,” she replied. Her office quickly backtracked. “After consideration and discussion with House leadership,” Norton said in a written statement to Axios that evening, “I have decided not to pursue the ranking member position on the House Oversight Committee.”

Norton may not have the national profile of, say, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the 85-year-old former House Speaker. But her role in the current DC budget crisis is yet another stark example of the hazards of congressional gerontocracy, where succession plans seem to be anathema, particularly among Democrats. A few people involved in District politics told me Norton has long rebuffed their efforts to persuade her to retire with grace.

But Norton still has her defenders. Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, who served as Norton’s chief of staff for a decade and remains close to her, told me, “This is her decision and I trust her to make it.” (In DC political circles, Brazile was long seen as a likely candidate to succeed Norton, but Brazile, now 65, says she has no interest in the job.)

“She may not be able to do the electric slide the way that she used to,” says Phillip Pannell, a longtime DC activist. “But in terms of her being able to speak out about what’s going on on Capitol Hill, she’s about just as into the fight as the Democratic Party is right now.”

E. Gail Anderson Holness, chair of the DC Ward 1 Democrats, is one of many people who have unsuccessfully urged Norton to mentor potential successors. But she also doesn’t believe this is the time for a new delegate. “We can’t afford to send somebody in there cold because of the disrespect we’re already receiving,” she told me. “She’s the one for now, however long now is.”

Norton’s supporters say it’s not her age but the current hostile Republican Congress and White House that makes defending DC an impossible job. “I don’t believe anyone is up to this task alone, including Eleanor,” says Brazile, “and Eleanor is tough.”

Her office, at least, is productive. In the 118^th Congress, Norton introduced more than 100 bills. Late last year, she co-sponsored a bill with Rep. James Comer (R-KY) that would give DC control of 174 acres of federal land that once housed RFK stadium. Ever since the Washington football team decamped to Maryland in 1996, city officials have been trying to wrest the run-down stadium campus from the feds for redevelopment and a new stadium.

Congress finally agreed, and President Joe Biden signed the transfer bill on January 7. Standing triumphantly in the Oval Office for the signing ceremony were the owners of the Washington Commanders and Bowser. Notably absent was the woman who co-sponsored the measure that made it all happen.

“She is not the same warrior on the Hill that she once was even four years ago,” laments Troy Prestwood, president of the DC Ward 8 Democrats. “We adore her, we admire her. But is she the one to take us to the next level? The answer is no. I don’t think that Eleanor is equipped today in 2025 to battle the type of Goliath that is facing the District.”

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

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is making significant changes to how it will respond to disasters on the ground this season, including ending federal door-to-door canvassing of survivors in disaster areas, WIRED has learned.

A memo reviewed by WIRED, dated May 2 and addressed to regional FEMA leaders from Cameron Hamilton, a senior official performing the duties of the administrator, instructs program offices to “take steps to implement” five “key reforms” for the upcoming hurricane and wildfire season.

Under the first reform, titled “Prioritize Survivor Assistance at Fixed Facilities,” the memo states that “FEMA will discontinue unaccompanied FEMA door-to-door canvassing to focus survivor outreach and assistance registration capabilities in more targeted venues, improving access to those in need, and increasing collaboration with [state, local, tribal, and territorial] partners and nonprofit service providers.”

FEMA has for years deployed staff to travel door-to-door in disaster areas, interacting directly with survivors in their homes to give an overview of FEMA aid application processes and help them register for federal aid. This group of workers is part of a larger cadre often called FEMA’s “boots on the ground” in disaster areas.

Ending door-to-door canvassing, one FEMA worker says, will “severely hamper our ability to reach vulnerable people.” The assistance provided by workers going door-to-door, they say, “has usually focused on the most impacted and the most vulnerable communities where there may be people who are elderly or with disabilities or lack of transportation and are unable to reach Disaster Recovery Centers.” This person spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the press.

“Door-to-door canvassing is another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program,” Geoff Harbaugh, FEMA’s associate administrator for the Office of External Affairs tells WIRED in an email. “Under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Noem, FEMA is changing how it operates and reforming its policies to better support disaster survivors and the American people. President Trump’s recent executive orders empower states to effectively respond to natural disasters and provide resources at the community level.”

Todd DeVoe, the emergency management coordinator for the city of Inglewood, California, and the second vice president at the International Association of Emergency Managers, says that in his years of working in disaster management he has seen how many survivors don’t get information about recovery or resources without door-to-door outreach—despite emergency managers using strategies like direct mailers and radio and newspaper ads.

“Going door-to-door, especially in critically hit areas, to share information is very important,” he says. “There’s a need for it. Can it be done more efficiently? Probably, but getting rid of it completely is really going to hamper some things.”

FEMA’s door-to-door canvassing became a political flash point last year during Hurricane Milton, when an agency whistleblower alerted the conservative news site The Daily Wire that one official had told workers in Florida to avoid approaching homes with Trump yard signs. Former FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell told the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability during a hearing last year that the incident was isolated to one employee who had since been fired. The employee, in turn, claimed that she acted on orders from a superior and that the issue was a pattern of “hostile encounters” with survivors who had Trump yard signs.

Republicans on the Oversight committee alleged that they had received information indicating “widespread discrimination against individuals displaying Trump campaign signs on their property” throughout FEMA. In March, the agency fired three more employees following an internal investigation into the issue.

The Office of Professional Responsibility “investigation found no evidence that this was a systemic problem, nor that it was directed by agency or field leadership,” Hamilton wrote in a letter sent to Oversight chair James Comer.

The canvassing controversy made it into the White House’s 2026 budget, released Friday, which decries “woke FEMA grant programs” and proposes cutting $646 million from “non-disaster” FEMA programs.

“FEMA discriminated against Americans who voted for the President in the wake of recent hurricanes, skipping over their homes when providing aid. This activity will no longer be tolerated,” the budget document states. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

There is no mention in the FEMA memo of the investigation or recent controversy and no reasoning provided for ending the door-to-door canvassing process. FEMA has deployed door-to-door canvassing in states with federal disaster declarations approved under the Trump administration: An agency press release from March mentions teams going door-to-door in West Virginia following February’s severe storms.

The memo comes at a turbulent time for the agency as it prepares for disaster season. In late April, CNN reported that FEMA stood to lose around 20 percent of its staff in buyouts as part of cuts related to Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Last week, Politico reported that the administration had stopped approving allocations for a crucial hazard-mitigation program just a few weeks after news broke that the agency would end one of the federal government’s biggest climate-adaptation programs.

Some of the other reforms in the memo include directives for the agency to “emphasize assistance available from other partners” over federal aid, as well as to emphasize efforts to rely on local- and state-run recovery centers rather than federally run ones, “reducing the need to establish FEMA Disaster Recovery Centers and optimizing support for state and locally led recovery efforts.” The memo emphasizes that the agency intends to “respect the primacy of states, territories, and Tribal Nations in disaster response.”

“Our role is to support our partners, not replace them,” the memo states. “FEMA does not act alone.”

DeVoe says that like many of the responsibilities being shifted from FEMA to local response, the task of surveying survivors door-to-door will now fall to local and state responders. These groups may be hard-pressed to find the budget and manpower, especially as federal programs and grants keep getting cut.

“California, New York, Massachusetts, Florida, Washington, Oregon, Florida, Texas—they’re going to be OK,” he says. “It’s going to be those smaller states—are they going to be OK?”

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) plans to end future funding for research projects focused on vaccine hesitancy and the Covid pandemic, as well as gender-affirming care, climate change, and diversity, equity, and inclusion, among other areas, according to a new draft guidance memo reviewed by Mother Jones.

The internal memo, which has not been finalized, is essentially a how-to document for staff at the NIH on how they should end grants deemed inappropriate by the administration. It includes required template language “provided to NIH” from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), led by Robert F Kennedy Jr., to describe “research activities that NIH no longer supports.” These include:

• Vaccine hesitancy. “It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research activities that focuses [sic] gaining scientific knowledge on why individuals are hesitant to be vaccinated and/or explore ways to improve vaccine interest and commitment,” the memo states, instructing staffers to tell grantees that the “NIH is obligated to carefully steward grant awards to ensure taxpayer dollars are used in ways that benefit the American people and improve their quality of life. Your project does not satisfy these criteria.” (RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine views have been well-documented. It’s unclear whether he played a role in this specific choice of words.)
• The Covid pandemic. “Now that the pandemic is over,” the memo asserts, grant funds intended to “ameliorate the effects of the pandemic” are “no longer necessary.” Later, in a section of the memo labeled “Frequently Asked Questions,” officials write that projects related to the “general biology” of the coronavirus, or things like long Covid, can continue for now. (Although deaths have gone down since the start of the pandemic, hundreds of people still die every week from Covid in the United States.)
• DEI. These are described as “research programs based primarily on artificial and non-scientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives.” The programs, the memo reads, “are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness.” (As my colleague Henry Carnell and I previously reported, research shows DEI programs can enhance innovation and productivity.)
• Gender-affirming care. “Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans,” the memo says. “Many such studies ignore, rather than seriously examine, biological realities.” (According to HHS back in 2023, however, before Trump took office, “Research demonstrates that gender-affirming care improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender diverse children and adolescents” and “has been shown to increase positive outcomes.”)
• Funds that support researchers in China. “Bolstering Chinese universities does not enhance the American people’s quality of life or improve America’s position in the world,” the memo reads. “On the contrary, funding research in China contravenes American national-security interests and hinders America’s foreign-policy objectives.”
• Climate change. This topic, “particularly in the area of health effects of climate change,” is no longer “consistent with HHS/NIH priorities,” according to the memo. (I recently reported on what it’d mean to cut research on the health effects of climate change; ultimately it would be “detrimental” to our well-being, said Columbia University environmental health professor Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou when I followed up with her this week.)
• “Research related to attempts to influence the public’s opinion.” This vague category of research had no other details or explanation.

If you’ve been following the news, much of this guidance likely won’t come as a shock. DEI and climate change research have been on the chopping block since the first days of the new administration. And, as Science and the Washington Post reported in March, the NIH has already moved to cut funding for dozens of ongoing studies on vaccine hesitancy, with language similar to what appeared in the memo reviewed by Mother Jones. Similarly, as Nature reported, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and NIH plan to cancel billions in funding related to the Covid pandemic.

The latest leaked memo provides deeper insight into programs the administration apparently plans to axe, and more reasoning behind the research crackdown.

Trump’s science cuts, including the topic areas listed in the memo, are “like a random grab bag of issues,” says Darya Minovi, a senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “[RFK Jr.] claims that he values gold-standard science,” she says, “but when you look at the programs in which they’ve disinvested, it’s clear they actually have no interest in being guided by evidence and scientific consensus.”

In addition to outlining the agency’s research priorities (or at least the things it won’t be researching), the draft memo also describes how staff should approach funding determinations. For instance, if an NIH award recipient has received funds to attend a conference, but the conference has a session on DEI, the recipient can’t use NIH funds to attend. If a project includes non-priority activities, like DEI, in part, the project may still be viable, the memo reads, if those aims or activities are “negotiated out.” Overall, to avoid issuing awards that support these activities “in error,” the memo instructs NIH staff to “take care to completely excise” all inappropriate activities.

NIH and HHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones.