Here I paste some of my political Facebook posts of the past 2 weeks. I don't trust that they, or my feed, will stay and I think we'll need a record of these days, to look back on and say, "Look what we saved," I pray. Much is already lost for some, I understand. But, as I responded to a friend's post this evening, "...Fight, dammit! It's NOT over -- we still have courts, UCLA, special elections, lots of Dems fighting the good fight, you, protests/rallies, and the chance that some Republican Congresspeople could get some guts... Trump's a bully and Musk's rich -- so what??! Many of us have never caved to a brute nor sold our souls for the almighty dollar, probably most of us haven't. It wouldn't take too many of the right people making pro-democracy choices to turn the tide, Inshallah."
Be Safe! Be Free! Much love.
Feb 8
Yes! Block Musk!
For those who don't subscribe to NYT. (I just caved and subscribed. Why? To support journalists like Katherine Long and to dive deeper into the know.)
"A federal judge early Saturday temporarily restricted access by Elon Musk’s government efficiency program to the Treasury Department’s payment and data systems, saying there was a risk of “irreparable harm.
...
"Judge Engelmayer ordered any such official who had been granted access to the systems since Jan. 20 to “destroy any and all copies of material downloaded from the Treasury Department’s records and systems.
...
Saturday’s order came in response to a lawsuit filed on Friday by Letitia James of New York along with 18 other Democratic state attorneys general, charging that when Mr. Trump had given Mr. Musk the run of government computer systems, he had breached protections enshrined in the Constitution and “failed to faithfully execute the laws enacted by Congress.
"The lawsuit was joined by the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin."
Feb 8
I hold high regard for any journalist reporting on events in the government today based on research and fact. It's courageous and essential.
Feb 8 Repost from Javan Vandeslunt
A few critical things you should know that happened this week:
- Department of Education barred Congress members from entry while DOGE is operating in the building.
- FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force - which aimed to prevent foreign meddling in US elections - had its staff reassigned to drug cartels and transnational criminal organizations.
- Trump demanded that the chairwoman of the bipartisan (mandated 3/3 balance) Federal Election Committee, who has been a member since 2002, be removed. She has so far refused, stating that there is a legal method to remove her and she would not leave until legally removed.
- Task Force KleptoCapture - Tasked with seizing yachts and other assets from Russian oligarchs and returning funds to victim groups - disbanded.
- DOGE Engineers with US Govt systems access - One 19yo programmer confirmed to have leaked sensitive data in past and present assignments, another bragged about his racism on social media and called to "normalize Indian hate". The latter was fired, but JD Vance (whose wife is Indian-American) has since called for him to be rehired. Trump said he "agreed" with Vance when asked about it by the press pool. Getting vetted for govt security clearance with these kinds of prior records is unlikely, raising more questions about who vetted these people, if anyone.
- DOGE blocked from sensitive systems access (private citizen data) in court order, not currently clear if DOGE is complying with court order.
- Guantanamo Bay has received it's first flight of deportees. Trump announced plans to temporarily house 30k deportees at the facility. This is likely performative to show a tough hand with immigrants, but human rights groups will be watching it closely. The facility has nowhere near enough infrastructure for this number of detainees.
- Trump shared "plans" for taking the Gaza Strip as a US territory. This has no GOP support and is likely rage-bait to take reporting attention off other actions. Focus on the important items as they come, this isn't one.
Light is the only cure for darkness. Even if you agree with some of these actions, we should all be aware that they are occurring.
Feb 12
Eternal vigilance
Feb 12
Reposted from Occupy Democrats
BREAKING: Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor sounds the alarm about Donald Trump — says our nation's founders were "hellbent on ensuring that we don't have a monarchy" and we could "lose our democracy."
She really didn't hold back this time...
Sotomayor said that the "first way" the founders devised to avoid the ascent of a monarch was "to give Congress the power of the purse."
She made the remarks at Miami Dade College in Florida.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk have been working around the clock to undermine our system of checks and balances by unilaterally gutting agencies and systems that Congress voted to fund. It's a blatantly illegal power grab.
Sotomayor said that she maintains hope "that other actors in the system, whether it’s Congress or others, will follow the law, because it’s what we all take an oath of office to do."
However, she's understandably concerned that court orders will be ignored in the short term. By ramming through illegal executive orders, Trump can cripple and gut federal organizations while the legality is battled out — or he could try to outright ignore the decisions of the courts.
"Court decisions stand whether one particular person chooses to abide by them or not," said Sotomayor. "It doesn’t change the foundation that it’s still a court order that someone will respect at some point."
She said that the court has faced challenges in the past and the system has been "tested" but thankfully the country "by and large" has "understood that the rule of law has helped us maintain our democracy."
She also warned against the Supreme Court overturning well-established precedents — something that the right-wing justices have become more willing to do, with the very notable example of overturning Roe v. Wade.
"We must be cognizant that every time we upset precedent, we upset people’s expectations and the stability of law," said Sotomayor. "It rocks the boat in a way that makes people uneasy about whether they’re protected or not protected by the law."
"We’re going to lose our democracy," said Sotomayor, unless Americans and "particularly" young people take steps to inform themselves well and combat the misinformation chaos created by the rise of the internet.
Feb 12
The federal government awarded Elon Musk's company a $38.85 million contract on Monday as the billionaire works to slash other contracts.
Critics were not happy to find out that Space Exploration Technologies Corporation – otherwise known as SpaceX – got a multi-million-dollar NASA contract at the same time Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is slashing billions in other government contracts.
Feb 16
Repost from Javan Vandeslunt
A few important things you should be aware of that happened this week:
- A federal judge ordered foreign aid funding to be unfrozen in a preliminary injunction. The administration has until Feb. 18 to show compliance with the order.
- A federal judge ruled that the case brought by federal workers unions regarding the legality of employee buyouts offered by executive orders were legal and could move forward.
- The Treasury's Office of Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office have both begun audits into sensitive systems access which will include members of DOGE. This process will likely take months to show their results according to reps from both entities.
- Trump signed an order expanding steel and aluminum tariffs from 10% to 25%, effective March 12th.
A quieter week this week as the nearly four dozen court challenges that are currently in process work through the system.
Feb 16
Feb 16
FLIP THE HOUSE in 60 Days and STOP Project 2025! Voting day is April 1st! WE NEED ALL Democrats, Progressive and Republicans in America to help flip the HOUSE BLUE in 60 Days!
Feb 16
Copied from A Science Enthusiast
Friendly reminder that it's not an audit, because they're not auditors.
It's a coup.
Feb 17
Copied from The Other 90%
Feb 19
Pasted from Emily Curtis. I don't know her and some friends questioned if the list is reliable. I include my comment in response to those questions below.
Feel free to help vet this list. I previously posted some companies that seemed okay. I got feedback that it would be better to dig deeper, in which case... only Costco might win. I've been looking for a list, have put out asks, but, no bites. Since I found this one, not by HCR, but from her community AND she cited the source she checked, it seemed to me likely reliable. I've checked some of the companies, the places I may go to, and they all do contribute more $ to Reps than Dems. But I'm not even sure if that's the criteria to use. Goods Unite Us gives, "Percentages donated by senior employees and / or company." That they donate more to Reps does not necessarily mean that they support Project 2025 or even in some cases Trump. And it's not necessarily by a huge % that they donate more to Reps than Dems. I've not shared many posts that resonate as potentially important because, upon further research, I couldn't vouch for them or they seemed a little misleading. I've spent hours researching info before sharing out. I'm pretty comfortable with this one. So tell me if you see something wrong. Also please share if you have a better list.
I also add that for the life of me I can't understand how any of this is partisan -- disregarding the Constitution, making enemies of allies; terrorizing US Citizens. (Before anyone asks what I mean -- the impact fear of ICE has in communities with large immigrant population, including legally; Fed employees afraid for their jobs or being fired without care or judgement; turning back the clock on supports for minority groups.) Basic American values are at stake -- regardless of party. I bet some Republicans agree.
I would like to NOT support businesses that support Project 2025, Trump, or that benefit Musk. Although it seems that my tax dollars have done plenty of that. If all I have to go off of is a list of companies that donate, or whose execs donate, more to Reps than Dems, I don't love it, but it's the best rough guide I've got.
Feb 20
Feb 20
Feb 20
Governor of Illinois
Feb 20
Copied from Heather Cox Richardson
February 19, 2025 (Wednesday)
The past week has solidified a sea change in American—and global—history.
A week ago, on Wednesday, February 12, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels, Belgium, that President Donald Trump intended to back away from support for Ukraine in its fight to push back Russia’s invasions of 2014 and 2022.
Hegseth said that Trump wanted to negotiate peace with Russia, and he promptly threw on the table three key Russian demands. He said that it was “unrealistic” to think that Ukraine would get back all its land—essentially suggesting that Russia could keep Crimea, at least—and that the U.S. would not back Ukraine’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the mutual security agreement that has kept Russian incursions into Europe at bay since 1949.
Hegseth’s biggest concession to Russia, though, was his warning that “stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.” Also on Wednesday, President Donald Trump spoke to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, for nearly an hour and a half and came out echoing Putin’s rationale for his attack on Ukraine. Trump’s social media account posted that the call had been “highly productive,” and said the two leaders would visit each other’s countries, offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine.
In a press conference on Thursday, the day after his speech in Brussels, Hegseth suggested again that the U.S. military did not have the resources to operate in more than one arena and was choosing to prioritize China rather than Europe, a suggestion that observers of the world’s most powerful military found ludicrous.
Then, on Friday, at the sixty-first Munich Security Conference, where the U.S. and allies and partners have come together to discuss security issues since 1963, Vice President J.D. Vance attacked the U.S.A.’s European allies. He warned that they were threatened not by Russia or China, but rather by “the threat from within,” by which he meant the democratic principles of equality before the law that right-wing ideologues believe weaken a nation by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. After Vance told Europe to “change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction,” he refused to meet with Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz and instead met with the leader of the far-right German political party that has been associated with neo-Nazis.
While the Munich conference was still underway, the Trump administration on Saturday announced it was sending a delegation to Saudi Arabia to begin peace talks with Russia. Ukrainian officials said they had not been informed and had no plans to attend. European negotiators were not invited either. When U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on Saturday, the Russian readout of the call suggested that Russia urgently needs relief from the economic sanctions that are crushing the Russian economy. The day before, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, an ally of both Putin and Trump, assured Hungarian state radio on Friday that Russia will be “reintegrated” into the world economy and the European energy system as soon as “the U.S. president comes and creates peace.”
Talks began yesterday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In a four-and-a half-hour meeting, led by Rubio and Lavrov, and including national security advisor Mike Waltz, the U.S. and Russia agreed to restaff the embassies in each other’s countries, a key Russian goal as part of its plan to end its isolation. Lavrov blamed the Biden administration for previous “obstacles” to diplomatic efforts and told reporters that now that Trump is in power, he had “reason to believe that the American side has begun to better understand our position.”
Yesterday evening, from his Florida residence, Trump parroted Russian propaganda when he blamed Ukraine for the war that began when Russia invaded Ukraine’s sovereign territory. When reporters asked about the exclusion of Ukraine from the talks, Trump answered: “Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you've been there for three years. You should have ended it three years ago. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.” He also said that Zelensky holds only a 4% approval rating, when in fact it is about 57%.
Today, Trump posted that Zelensky is a dictator and should hold elections, a demand Russia has made in hopes of installing a more pro-Russia government. As Laura Rozen pointed out in Diplomatic, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev posted: “If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US President, I would have laughed out loud.”
“Be clear about what’s happening,” Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark posted. “Trump and his administration, and thus America, is siding with Putin and Russia against a United States ally.”
To be even clearer: under Trump, the United States is abandoning the post–World War II world it helped to build and then guaranteed for the past 80 years.
The struggle for Ukraine to maintain its sovereignty, independence, and territory has become a fight for the principles established by the United Nations, organized in the wake of World War II by the allied countries in that war, to establish international rules that would, as the U.N. charter said, prevent “the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights.” Central to those principles and rules was that members would not attack the “territorial integrity or political independence” of any other country. In 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) came together to hold back growing Soviet aggression under a pact that an attack on any of the member states would be considered an attack on all.
The principle of national sovereignty is being tested in Ukraine. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine held about a third of the USSR’s nuclear weapons but gave them up in exchange for payments and security assurances from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom that they would respect Ukraine’s sovereignty within its existing borders. But Ukraine sits between Russia and Europe, and as Ukraine increasingly showed an inclination to turn toward Europe rather than Russia, Russian leader Putin worked to put his own puppets at the head of the Ukrainian government with the expectation that they would keep Ukraine, with its vast resources, tethered to Russia.
In 2004 it appeared that Russian-backed politician Viktor Yanukovych had won the presidency of Ukraine, but the election was so full of fraud, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe, that the U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results. The Ukrainian government voided the election and called for a do-over.
To rehabilitate his image, Yanukovych turned to American political consultant Paul Manafort, who was already working for Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. When Yanukovych suddenly reversed Ukraine’s course toward cooperation with the European Union and instead took a $3 billion loan from Russia, Ukrainian students protested. On February 18, 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in the Maidan Revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, and he fled to Russia.
Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it. The invasion prompted the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia and on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in U.S. territories. E.U. sanctions froze assets, banned goods from Crimea, and banned travel of certain Russians to Europe.
Yanukovych’s fall had left Manafort both without a patron and with about $17 million worth of debt to Deripaska. Back in the U.S., in 2016, television personality Donald Trump was running for the presidency, but his campaign was foundering. Manafort stepped in to help. He didn’t take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking him, “How do we use to get whole? Has OVD [Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska] operation seen?”
Journalist Jim Rutenberg established that in 2016, Russian operatives presented Manafort a plan “for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland.” In exchange for weakening NATO and U.S. support for Ukraine, looking the other way as Russia took eastern Ukraine, and removing U.S. sanctions from Russian entities, Russian operatives were willing to help Trump win the White House. The Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 established that Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Kilimnik, whom it described as a “Russian intelligence officer,” acted as a liaison between Manafort and Deripaska while Manafort ran Trump’s campaign.
Government officials knew that something was happening between the Trump campaign and Russia. By the end of July 2016, FBI director James Comey opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. After Trump won, the FBI caught Trump national security advisor Lieutenant General Michael Flynn assuring Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak that the new administration would change U.S. policy toward Russia. Shortly after Trump took office, Flynn had to resign, and Trump asked Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn. When Comey refused, Trump fired him. The next day, he told a Russian delegation he was hosting in the Oval Office: “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job…. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
Trump swung U.S. policy toward Russia, but that swing hit him. In 2019, with the help of ally Rudy Giuliani, Trump planned to invite Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, to the White House to boost his chances of reelection. In exchange, Poroshenko would announce that he was investigating Hunter Biden for his work with Ukrainian energy company Burisma, thus weakening Trump’s chief rival, Democrat Joe Biden, in the 2020 presidential election.
But then, that April, voters in Ukraine elected Volodymyr Zelensky rather than Poroshenko. Trump withheld money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s defense against Russia and suggested he would release it only after Zelensky announced an investigation into Hunter Biden. That July 2019 phone call launched Trump’s first impeachment, which, after the Senate acquitted him in February 2020, launched in turn his revenge tour and then the Big Lie that he had won the 2020 election. The dramatic break from the democratic traditions of the United States when Trump and his cronies tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election was in keeping with his increasing drift toward the political tactics of Russia.
When Biden took office, he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked feverishly to strengthen NATO and other U.S. alliances and partnerships. In February 2022, Putin launched another invasion of Ukraine, attempting a lightning strike to take the rich regions of the country for which his people had negotiated with Manafort in 2016. But rather than a quick victory, Putin found himself bogged down. Zelensky refused to leave the country and instead backed resistance, telling the Americans who offered to evacuate him, “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.” With the support of Biden and Blinken, NATO allies and other partners stood behind Ukraine to stop Putin from dismantling the postwar rules-based international order and spreading war further into Europe.
When he left office just a month ago, Biden said he was leaving the Trump administration with a “strong hand to play” in foreign policy, leaving it “an America with more friends and stronger alliances, whose adversaries are weaker and under pressure,” than when he took office.
Now, on the anniversary of the day the Ukrainian people ousted Victor Yanukovych in 2014—Putin is famous for launching attacks on anniversaries—the United States has turned its back on Ukraine and 80 years of peacetime alliances in favor of support for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. “We now have an alliance between a Russian president who wants to destroy Europe and an American president who also wants to destroy Europe,” a European diplomat said. “The transatlantic alliance is over.”
This shift appears to reflect the interests of Trump, rather than the American people. Trump’s vice president during his first term, Mike Pence, posted: “Mr. President, Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war. Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The Road to Peace must be built on the Truth.” Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) said, “Putin is a war criminal and should be in jail for the rest of his life, if not executed." Courtney Kube and Carol E. Lee of NBC News reported that intelligence officials and congressional officials told them that Putin feels “empowered” by Trump’s recent support and is not interested in negotiations; he is interested in controlling Ukraine.
A Quinnipiac poll released today shows that only 9% of Americans think we should trust Putin; 81% say we shouldn’t. For his part, Putin complained today that Trump was not moving fast enough against Europe and Ukraine.
In The Bulwark, Mark Hertling, who served as the Commanding General of the United States Army Europe, commanded the 1st Armored Division in Germany, and the Multinational Division-North in Iraq, underlined the dramatic shift in American alignment. In an article titled “We’re Negotiating with War Criminals,” he listed the crimes: nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children kidnapped and taken to Russia; the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, and energy facilities; the execution of prisoners of war; torture of detainees; sexual violence against Ukrainian civilians and detainees; starvation; forcing Ukrainians to join pro-Russian militias.
“And we are negotiating with them,” Hertling wrote. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo points out that the talks appear to be focused on new concessions for American companies in the Russian oil industry, including a deal for American companies to participate in Russian oil exploration in the Arctic.
For years, Putin has apparently believed that driving a wedge between the U.S. and Europe would make NATO collapse and permit Russian expansion. But it’s not clear that’s the only possible outcome. Ukraine’s Zelensky and the Ukrainians are not participating in the destruction of either their country or European alliances, of course. And European leaders are coming together to strengthen European defenses. Emergency meetings with 18 European countries and Canada have netted a promise to stand by Ukraine and protect Europe. “Russia poses an existential threat to Europeans,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said today. Also today, rather than dropping sanctions against Russia, European Union ambassadors approved new ones.
For his part, Trump appears to be leaning into his alliance with dictators. This afternoon, he posted on social media a statement about how he had killed New York City’s congestion pricing and “saved” Manhattan, adding “LONG LIVE THE KING!” White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich reposted the statement with an image of Trump in the costume of an ancient king, with a crown and an ermine robe. Later, the White House itself shared an image that imitated a Time magazine cover with the word “Trump” in place of “Time,” a picture of Trump with a crown, and the words “LONG LIVE THE KING.”
The British tabloid The Daily Star interprets the changes in American politics differently. Its cover tomorrow features Vladimir Putin walking “PUTIN’S POODLE”: the president of the United States.
Feb 20
Shared from Occupy Democrats
BREAKING: Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rips into Vice President J.D. Vance and says that he "lied to the world" in his recent disastrous speech — enraging MAGA supporters.
AOC is quickly becoming the Republican Party's Public Enemy #1...
"@JDVance, you lied to the world in Munich. If this administration believed in free speech as you claimed, its leaders wouldn’t be threatening members of Congress with criminal investigations for educating the public of their Constitutional rights," Ocasio-Cortez posted on X.
"Look in the mirror," she added.
Vance's speech in Europe has been widely criticized as a betrayal of America's core values. In it, he smeared Western democracies using authoritarian talking points and falsely asserted that our allies are destroying free speech.
He later went on to defend the Trump administration's blatantly anti-free speech decision to ban The Associated Press from the White House for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America."
AOC pounced on Vance, pointing out the hypocrisy of him touting free speech while MAGA Border Czar Tom Homan is busy calling for her prosecution because she held a webinar to educate immigrants on their rights in the face of mass deportation efforts.
The webinar, entitled "Know Your Rights With ICE" was designed to inform undocumented immigrants of perfectly legal tactics such as demanding to see proper warrants if someone knocks on their door and recording interactions with ICE via video or note-taking.
Feb 20
Ukraine stands in defense of liberty, not only for themselves, but for many nations, perhaps for us all. Maybe not all care, but I have no doubt some Congressional Republicans see the danger in what's happening now. May they find courage to protect the Constitution and democracy.
Feb 21
Feb 21
What can we do? Whatever we can. I can FB post a lot , protest some, and write.
I've written some pretty good interviews and love doing them, most of my favorite blog posts are interviews of poets, but let's try this --
If you've been impacted by DOGE/Trump -- whether a fed employee, contractor, or otherwise related -- and want to share your story, I'd love to help shape it, post it, and put face and heart to the numbers. Putting real stories out with the stats always has potential for impact.
Or anyone who wants to speak of impact to immigrant or LGBTQ+ communities -- my heart and pen are here for you.
It can be relatively easy, or a little involved; flexible. Feel free to share with someone who might not be on FB or on my friends list. Just message me if you want to talk.
Feb 21
Repost from Javan Vandeslunt
A few important things you should know from this week:
- Trump continues to stoke concerns about executive overreach. This week tweeting “Long live the king”.
- Trump signed an executive order that gives the President and AG full authority to determine the legality of regulations made by federal agencies. (CPSC, SEC, FDIC, etc) There are no indications that this order would fail a judicial test.
- Trump stated that Ukraine started the war with Russian and called President Zelenskyy a dictator in a press conference. These statements closely resemble Russian talking points about the war.
- DOGE claims are being consistently proven as false or misleading, with line items being grossly erroneous or improperly annualized. The public can access the FPDS to see the errors for themselves.
- Judge has denied the TRO request to halt DOGE from accessing data or terminating workers, brought by 14 states. The layoffs, data access, and buyouts have not failed any judicial review.
- Trump admin claims it has complied with the judicial orders to reverse the blanket freezes on federal funds. States are claiming this is untrue. The RI case, which failed its appeal, had a new hearing on Friday which upheld the TRO. There are at least three cases that have ordered the administration to unfreeze federal funding. Brookings has created a useful tool for tracking daily government spending using publicly available treasury data. This tool helps to see which organizations are being allowed to spend their funds, if you are curious.
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