
The Sunday Subject: February 2, 2025
On week two of his second term, Donald Trump and his loyalists escalated their unconstitutional efforts to seize and consolidate power.
Last week Trump signed a flurry of executive orders pushing his authoritarian agenda. The avalanche of executive action continued this week, beginning with the administration’s purging of career officials who have worked on criminal investigations into Trump. The President fired dozens of DOJ prosecutors, six of the FBI’s top executives, and multiple FBI field office leaders involved in the two cases brought by former special counsel Jack Smith regarding his handling of classified documents and the January 6 insurrection (there is no precedent for the mass termination of FBI and DOJ personnel). Amidst his so-called war on the “deep state,” Trump also fired 17 inspectors general – independent watchdogs who carry out critical oversight in the federal government – across federal agencies. Next, the White House ordered a temporary funding freeze on all federal grants and loans to ensure that all federal spending aligned with Trump’s flurry of anti-diversity, equity and inclusion executive orders. The move was blocked by a federal judge, as it is illegal for a president to limit, halt, or refuse to carry out spending authorized and appropriated by Congress and signed into law; however, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on X that the funding freeze was still in “full force,” creating confusion and disarray within federal agencies. If implemented, it would halt a wide array of critical functions and programs including financial aid for college students, healthcare research grants, state aid for disaster reconstruction, school meals for low-income students, early childhood education centers, WIC nutrition assistance for pregnant women and infants, wildfire preparedness, Pell grants, veterans’ benefits, and USAID foreign assistance that provides life-saving care, along with global development and security programs, among others. Shortly after the order was released, about 60 top-ranking workers at USAID were put on immediate administrative leave amid an investigation into an alleged effort to thwart Trump’s orders, and days later roughly 400 USAID contractors were laid off. On Tuesday evening, the Trump administration sent a mass email to roughly two million federal workers offering a buyout to resign in a further attempt to purge the federal government of career civil servants. Meanwhile, the administration has ramped up ICE raids, with officials in tactical gear carrying out increasingly indiscriminate and Gestapo-like arrests in dehumanizing spectacles across the country, including in formerly restricted locations like churches, hospitals, and schools. At the same time, Trump ordered the Pentagon to detain migrants at Guantanamo Bay while stripping 600,000 Venezuelan refugees of their legally-secured Temporary Protected Status. Furthermore, after gutting a key aviation safety committee and firing the heads of the TSA and Coast Guard in his first week in office, Trump blamed Wednesday’s deadly plane crash in Washington, DC on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at the Federal Aviation Administration under Democratic administrations. Trump then started a trade war with Canada and Mexico, and potentially China – the three largest US trading partners – by signing an executive order imposing 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada and a 10% duty on China, to which Mexico and Canada immediately responded with their own retaliatory tariffs. Trump also signed a series of executive orders targeting trans people, including banning trans service members from the military, limiting access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth, and ordering trans federal prisoners to be medically detransitioned and then moved to facilities that correspond to their sex at birth. He also revoked clearances and vital government security protection for former officials who spoke out against him as an act of revenge. Meanwhile, Democratic leaders have largely abdicated, failing to oppose the administration’s anti-democratic onslaught in any meaningful way.
The Trump administration handed Elon Musk, a private citizen, complete access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, which the government uses to disburse trillions of dollars including Social Security and Medicare benefits and federal salaries.
Musk, who has been tasked by Trump with finding ways to slash government spending, had recently fixated on the Treasury’s highly sensitive payment system – essentially the nation’s wallet. After the election, actors affiliated with Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) started pressuring officials for access to the Treasury’s payment process, which carries out payments submitted by agencies across the government, disbursing more than $5 trillion in fiscal year 2023. On Monday, Scott Bessent was confirmed as treasury secretary, and by Saturday, Bessent handed DOGE full access to the payments system. “It’s like a bank heist and the bank is America,” a source in the federal government told independent journalist Marisa Kabas. “Not really being hyperbolic to say control of those systems would allow an extremely fast collapse of the economy.” Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon raised further concerns, writing on Bluesky that “Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk’s own companies. All of it.” Meanwhile, Musk’s tech associates have infiltrated another agency, taking control of the highest ranks of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which essentially functions as human resources for the entire federal government, and the General Services Administration (GSA). On Friday, DOGE personnel locked some OPM career civil servants out of their computer systems and agency databases, while top USAID security officials who thwarted DOGE-affiliated people’s attempts to improperly access classified USAID information and security systems were put on leave. According to Mike Masnick, “A private citizen with zero Constitutional authority is effectively seizing control of critical government functions…. Where Musk merely broke [Twitter] through incompetence last time, he’s now breaking the actual mechanisms of governance — and doing it with the same reckless playbook that turned Twitter into a ghost town.”
The German parliament passed non-binding measures to restrict migration with the assistance of the AfD, breaking a long-standing convention of rejecting coalitions with the extremist right.
The non-binding motion, introduced by center-right CDU leader Friedrich Merz, proposed the rejection of all migrants at the border, including asylum-seekers. The left-wing SPD and Green parties said the proposal violated EU and German law. The motion passed only with the backing of the AfD, violating German mainstream parties’ long-standing convention against cooperating with the extremist party and sparking nationwide protests and condemnation. A subsequent bill aimed at reducing immigration numbers and family reunion rights, put forth by the CDU and backed by the far-right, was rejected by the German parliament.