NewsFlash

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is planning to conduct a large-scale study to re-examine whether there is a connection between vaccines and autism, federal officials said Friday. Dozens of scientific studies have failed to find evidence of a link. But the C.D.C. now falls under the purview of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long expressed skepticism about the safety of vaccines and has vowed to revisit the data.

MORE - https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/03/08/us/trump-news


[Good Lord.]

Several major universities are rescinding provisional offers to incoming PhD students, quite late in the game, throwing their futures into turmoil. And then there's

UCSD, facing federal cuts, will no longer guarantee funding for incoming grad students

Reeling from hundreds of millions in potential budget cuts, UC San Diego has decided it can’t and won’t guarantee that the first-year graduate students who enroll this fall will get their full stipends and tuition.  The university is sending admissions letters to prospective students with a newly-added clause that says, “The funding commitment stated in this letter may be modified, reduced, or rescinded and is not guaranteed.” It’s a startling departure for UCSD, which last year pulled in about $2.3 billion in research grants and philanthropic gifts. The school has long guaranteed full stipends and tuition for doctoral and master of fine arts students.

SNIP

UCSD has said it expects a $55 million state budget cut, based on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget, and at least $150 million in cuts from the National Institutes of Health. The campus gets, on average, about $50 million a month from the agency. Funding from the National Science Foundation could also be cut, and the NIH has begun to cancel active research grants in areas the Trump administration opposes, the journal Nature has reported.

The university, which has more than 41,000 workers, has already frozen most faculty hiring and done the same for staff, except for those working in the university’s huge health care system. Chancellor Pradeep Khosla declined several requests to discuss the school’s finances with The San Diego Union-Tribune. A university spokesperson declined to answer questions about whether UCSD is considering dismissing junior faculty who joined the campus in the past year or so, or how many staff workers could face job losses.

Faculty say the shakiness of the school’s funding could alienate existing graduate students and those it is trying to recruit. The university currently has about 9,300 grad students, a group whose work over the years has played an important role in areas like medicine, helping to develop the landmark HIV drug Biktarvy and the ischemic-stroke treatment known as tPA.

MORE - https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ucsd-facing-federal-cuts-will-no-longer-guarantee-funding-for-incoming-grad-students/ar-AA1AvOQq

SEE ALSO - https://www.yahoo.com/news/universities-anticipate-funding-losses-elon-175501498.html

https://www.statnews.com/2025/02/19/trump-funding-freeze-grad-student-postdoc-acceptances-paused-nih-research/

Elon Musk says upgrade of FAA’s air traffic control system is failing and SpaceX needs to take over Verizon’s contract

https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/27/business/elon-musk-faa-air-traffic-control-failing-spacex/index.html?iid=cnn_buildContentRecirc_end_recirc

SEE ALSO

WASHINGTON (AP) — A satellite company owned by Elon Musk has the inside track to potentially take over a large federal contract to modernize the nation’s air traffic communications system. Equipment from Musk’s Starlink has been installed in Federal Aviation Administration facilities as a prelude to a takeover of a $2 billion contract held by Verizon, according to government employees, contractors and people familiar with the work.

Musk said that the network used by air traffic controllers is aging and requires drastic and quick action to modernize it. “The Verizon system is not working and so is putting air travelers at serious risk,” Musk on Monday posted on X, the social media site he has owned since 2022.  The emergence of Starlink as a potential replacement for the Verizon-led effort underscores the extraordinary conflicts of interest inherent in Musk’s position as both a senior White House adviser to President Donald Trump and a business mogul in charge of a sprawling array of companies. It is not clear what role Musk might be playing in helping Starlink parent company SpaceX win such business.

MORE -  https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-starlink-spacex-faa-bbe9495978cac61b60c2971168e2921f

Trump officials want to measure the economy's health in a way that may hide DOGE cuts

A series of comments from Trump officials in recent days raised concerns that the administration may try to look differently at a key economic measure of America's economic health: the quarterly reading of the gross domestic product (GDP). It's an idea under consideration, but its exact form is unclear. Elon Musk is the idea's most vocal proponent, saying that a "more accurate measure of GDP would exclude government spending."  At issue is that the government already publishes precisely such a figure known as the Value Added by Private Industries (VAPI). But the fact that Musk is pushing it amid his DOGE work — another Trump official has gone further by suggesting that it might be possible to pick and choose government spending — has raised questions about whether this is primarily an attempt to minimize some of the negative effects from Musk's efforts.  "It seems like a strange place to start to say, hey, we're going to have the greatest economy in the history of the globe, but we're going to have to measure it differently because you can't see it," Doug Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, said in a recent episode of Yahoo Finance's Capitol Gains podcast.

"That's not a great sales job," he added.

MORE -  https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/trump-officials-want-to-measure-the-economys-health-in-a-way-that-may-hide-doge-cuts-140044377.html


SEE ALSO

[SNIP]

The Trump administration and Republican lawmakers are preparing to manipulate the federal budget and doctor US government data in order to mislead the American public about the true cost of their proposed $4 trillion tax cut, the draconian budget reductions needed to pay for it, and the ruinous impact these policies will have on the US economy, which is already veering dangerously in the direction of a recession. David Wilcox, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who served until last week as FESAC’s chairman, said in an interview that disbanding the advisory committee—an all-volunteer panel of experts from the private sector and academia—will deprive the public of an independent, nonpartisan brain trust whose goal was to help the government improve statistical accuracy in response to new technologies and ever-changing economic conditions.

Last week’s FESAC purge was particularly alarming because it came just days after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street plutocrat and Trump campaign bundler, announced plans to alter an important measure of US economic growth—Gross Domestic Product, or GDP—by stripping out all government spending. GDP combines consumer purchases, business investments, net exports, and yes, government spending, to measure the total monetary value of goods and services produced in the United States. There are many valid criticisms of GDP as a measure of economic health, including that it doesn’t account for unpaid work, the shadow market, income inequality, or climate change, among other shortcomings, but it is nevertheless closely watched by economists, governments, corporations, investors, and households worldwide.

By excluding government spending from the official GDP estimates issued by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Trump administration could downplay the economic damage of firing hundreds of thousands of federal workers and slashing billions from the federal budget. In other words, they could gaslight the public into believing that the economy is doing better than it actually is, which could come in handy if economic conditions continue to deteriorate. “This administration wants to write its own narrative,” said Stephanie Kelton, a professor of economics and public policy at Stony Brook University. “If laying off tens or hundreds of thousands of federal workers is going to drag down macroeconomic indicators in ways that are unhelpful to them, they’re apparently quite willing to just rewrite definitions so they can inculcate themselves to the extent possible from the fallout.”



SNIP

FROM - https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/trump-manipulate-economic-data-fesac/

MRNA vaccines now face attacks from some in the GOP

Researchers racing to develop bird flu vaccines for humans have turned to a cutting-edge technology that enabled the rapid development of lifesaving COVID shots. There's a catch: The mRNA technology faces growing doubts among Republicans, including people around President Donald Trump. Legislation aimed to ban or limit mRNA vaccines was introduced this year by GOP lawmakers in at least seven states. In some cases, the measures would hit doctors who give the injections with criminal penalties, fines, and possible revocation of their licenses. Some congressional Republicans are also pressing regulators to revoke federal approval for mRNA-based COVID shots, which President Donald Trump touted as one of the signature achievements of his first term.

The opposition comes at a critical juncture because vaccines using mRNA have applications well beyond avian flu and COVID. They hold the promise of lifesaving breakthroughs to treat many diseases, from melanoma to HIV to Zika, according to clinical trials. The proposed bans could block access to these advances. MRNA is found naturally in human cells. It is a molecule that carries genetic material and, in a vaccine, trains the body's immune system to fight viruses, cancer cells and other conditions. An advantage of mRNA technology is that it can be developed more quickly to target specific variants and is safer than developing a vaccine made from inactivated virus.

"Right now, if we had a bird flu pandemic, we would have a shortage of the vaccine we need," said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. "The one thing that could save us is mRNA vaccine. The challenge would be if mRNA is banned. This is truly dangerous policy."

MORE - https://abcnews.go.com/Health/mrna-vaccines-now-face-attacks-gop/story?id=119553285

NEW YORK (AP) — Federal immigration authorities arrested a Palestinian graduate student who played a prominent role in protests against Israel at Columbia University, according to his attorney. Mahmoud Khalil was inside a university-owned residence Saturday night near Columbia’s Manhattan campus when several Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entered his apartment and took him into custody, his attorney, Amy Greer, told The Associated Press. Greer said she spoke by phone with one of the ICE agents during the arrest, who said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Informed by the attorney that Khalil was in the United States as a permanent resident with a green card, the agent said they were revoking that too, according to the lawyer.

The arrest appeared to be among the first known actions under President Donald Trump’s pledge to deport international students who joined the protests against the war in Gaza that swept college campuses last spring. His administration has claimed participants forfeited their rights to remain in the country by supporting Hamas, a terror organization.

When ICE agents arrived at the campus building Saturday, they also threatened to arrest Khalil’s wife, an American citizen who is eight months pregnant, Greer said. The authorities declined to say why Khalil was being arrested, according to the attorney. The were initially told he was transferred to an immigration detention facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. But when his wife tried to visit Sunday, she learned he not there — and may have been transferred as far away as Louisiana, Greer said. “We have not been able to get any more details about why he is being detained,” Greer told the AP. “This is a clear escalation. The administration is following through on its threats.”

A Columbia spokesperson said law enforcement agents must produce a warrant before entering university property, but declined to say if the school had received one ahead of Khalil’s arrest. The spokesperson also declined to comment on Khalil's detention. Messages seeking comment were left Sunday with the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE. In a message shared on X Sunday evening, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the administration “will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

The Department of Homeland Security can initiate deportation proceedings against green card holders for a broad range alleged criminal activity, including supporting a terror group. It would ultimately be up to an immigration judge to revoke someone's permanent resident status, according to Camille Mackler, founder of Immigrant ARC, a coalition of legal service providers in New York. “This has the appearance of a retaliatory action against someone who expressed an opinion the Trump administration didn’t like,” Mackler said.

Khalil served as a negotiator for students as they bargained with university officials over an end to the tent encampment erected on campus last spring, a role that made him one of the most visible activists in support of the movement. He was also among those under investigation by a new Columbia University office that has brought disciplinary charges against dozens of students for their pro-Palestinian activism, according to records shared with the AP. The investigations come as the Trump administration has followed through on its threat to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to Columbia because of what the government describes as the Ivy League school’s failure to squelch antisemitism on campus.

The university's allegations against Khalil focused on his involvement in the Columbia University Apartheid Divest group. He faced sanctions for potentially helping to organize an “unauthorized marching event” in which participants glorified Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack and playing a “substantial role” in the circulation of social media posts criticizing Zionism, among other acts of alleged discrimination. “I have around 13 allegations against me, most of them are social media posts that I had nothing to do with,” Khalil told the AP last week. “They just want to show Congress and right-wing politicians that they’re doing something, regardless of the stakes for students,” he added. “It’s mainly an office to chill pro-Palestine speech.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/ice-arrests-palestinian-activist-helped-162258497.html

SEE ALSO

https://abcnews.go.com/US/ice-arrests-palestinian-activist-green-card-columbia-university/story?id=119616144

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/



[Well, so much for freedom of speech. Basically they just "disappeared" this man. How secret police of them.]

EDIT 10 March:

SNIP

ICE’s arrest and detention of Mahmoud follows the US government’s open repression of student activism and political speech, specifically targeting students at Columbia University for criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza,” Khalil’s attorney Amy Greer said. “The US government has made clear that they will use immigration enforcement as a tool to suppress that speech.” Khalil is currently being held at a detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, according to a source with direct knowledge of the case.

SNIP

Khalil, a recent graduate, was apprehended by two plainclothes Department of Homeland Security agents at the university-owned apartment building where he lives with his wife, a US citizen, Writers Against the War on Gaza said in a news release. The DHS agents said the US Department of State revoked Khalil’s student visa, although he does not have a student visa, but rather a green card, and is a lawful permanent resident, WAWOG said. When Khalil’s wife, who is eight months pregnant, showed the agents his green card, “one agent was visibly confused and said on the phone, ‘He has a green card’,” according to the news release.

“However, after a moment, the DHS agents stated that the State Department had ‘revoked that too.’ Khalil’s wife then phoned his attorney, who spoke with the agents in an attempt to intervene,” WAWOG said. “When Khalil’s attorney requested that a copy of the warrant be emailed to her, the agent hung up the call.”

FROM - https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/10/us/mahmoud-khalil-columbia-university-israel-hnk/index.html


[NOTE:  The State Department cannot "revoke" a green card without going through an immigration judge. That did not happen.]

Trump administration to detain families with children in ICE custody

The Trump administration will be detaining families with children at two South Texas detention facilities, a DHS spokesperson told ABC News Friday, restarting a practice that the Biden administration sought to restrict. The Trump administration plans to hold families at the detention centers in Karnes City and Dilley in Texas. "The best option for illegal aliens is to self deport. If they leave now, they may still have an opportunity to return and live the American dream,” DHS Spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.

During the first Trump administration, hundreds of families who came across the southern border were separated under the zero-tolerance policy. One of the officials who helped implement that policy was now Border Czar Tom Homan, who in recent months has said that as an alternative to family separation, “families can be deported together.”

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/live-updates/trump-2nd-term-tariffs-ukraine/?id=119377651&entryId=119570905

If you can deal with the paywall issue, the following two opinion pieces in the New York Times are impressive.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/opinion/free-speech-trump-maga.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/opinion/trump-martin-free-speech.html

Not really a newsflash, but symptomatic.

WASHINGTON -- A young economist who had uprooted her life for civil service. A fierce housing advocate terminated just before buying her first home. A semifinalist whose dreams were dashed before they materialized. For decades, the Presidential Management Fellows program was seen as a building block for the civil service with the expectation that the few who earned the position would one day become leaders in the federal workforce. Now the road ahead is uncertain. Hundreds of the fellows have been terminated or placed on administrative leave amid a nationwide slashing of the federal workforce. One of President Donald Trump's executive orders ended the program, which was created in 1978 to entice highly qualified workers with advanced degrees to join the federal government.

Trump's Republican administration had ordered agencies to lay off nearly all probationary employees, potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of workers in one fell swoop. That included recent classes of the fellows program, which has a two-year probationary period. Fellows had persevered through an intense selection process that included multiple tests and evaluations as well as a blind interview. The agency website said about 10% of applicants are accepted, although that number has been recently as low as just 3%.


[SNIP]


FROM  https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/young-people-aspired-government-service-dismayed-trump-ending-119628081

[Comment - I am really sad to see this program end. I was a semi-finalist years ago. It is incredibly difficult to get qualified as a PMF, and the people who do earn that distinction go on to do good things. Went on, rather. They've killed that. The best & brightest are no longer desirable as they follow the rule of "non-political" public service, rather than swearing oaths to a given leader.... Such a shame.]

Trump’s Call to Scrap ‘Horrible’ Chip Program Spreads Panic - The president’s attack on the key tenet of the Biden administration’s industrial policy has set off concerns that he may claw back its funding.

As President Trump addressed Congress last week, he veered off script to attack a sensitive topic, the CHIPS Act, a bipartisan law aimed at making the United States less reliant on Asia for semiconductors. Republican lawmakers had sought and received reassurances over the past few months that the Trump administration would support the program Congress created. But halfway through Mr. Trump’s remarks, he called the law a “horrible, horrible thing.” “You should get rid of the CHIP Act,” he told Speaker Mike Johnson as some lawmakers applauded.

The CHIPS program was one of the few things to unite much of Washington in recent years, as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle worked with private companies to draft a bill that would funnel $50 billion to rebuild the U.S. semiconductor industry, which makes the foundational technology used to power cars, computers and coffee makers. After President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. signed it into law in 2022, companies found sites in Arizona, New York and Ohio to construct new factories. The Commerce Department vetted those plans and began to dole out billions of dollars in grants.  Now, Mr. Trump is threatening to upend years of work. Chip company executives, worried that funding could be clawed back, are calling lawyers to ask what wiggle room the administration has to terminate signed contracts, said eight people familiar with the requests.

SNIP

So far, the Commerce Department has signed contracts to grant more than $36 billion in federal subsidies under the CHIPS Act. Samsung, Intel, Micron, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, known as TSMC, and others in response have pledged to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. chip-making facilities. Mr. Trump has proposed replacing those incentives with tariffs that increase the cost of making chips overseas. On Tuesday, he said that the threat of tariffs had compelled TSMC, the world’s biggest maker of advanced semiconductors, to increase its U.S. investment by $100 billion and double the number of plants it is building in Arizona, to six.

“We don’t have to give them money,” Mr. Trump said. “We just want to protect our businesses and our people, and they will come because they won’t have to pay tariffs if they build in America.”

SNIP

MORE - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/technology/trump-chips-act.html

Republican leaders in Congress have directed the committee that oversees Medicaid to cut $880 billion from the next budget. They say these cuts aren’t necessarily aimed at Medicaid, the insurance program for 72 million poor and disabled Americans. The cuts could come from Medicare, for instance. But Trump has vowed not to touch that very popular program. And a sum this large can’t come from anywhere else.

The Republican process is just getting started, and we don’t yet know how lawmakers will change the program. Most Medicaid money goes to states, so the best way to think about the proposal is as a cut to state budgets. State lawmakers could react by dropping coverage, raising taxes or slashing other parts of their budget. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain a few possible scenarios. Medicaid was designed to divide a patient’s medical bills: the federal government and the state would each pay a set share. (A state’s contribution depends on how poor it is.)

The law is precise about what Medicaid must cover — cancer screenings and kidney transplants, for instance, but not prosthetic legs — and Republicans can’t change that with a budget bill. Every state has to cover certain populations, including poor children, pregnant women, people with disabilities and patients in nursing homes who run out of money.  Most states also choose to cover an optional group that was added as part of Obamacare in 2014: anyone who earns less than a certain income (around $21,000 for a single person). Republicans want to impose a work requirement on this group for people who aren’t disabled. That idea is popular with the public but would save the federal government only around $100 billion, not enough to meet the G.O.P. target.

Anything more to lower the federal government’s share would put the burden on states. And lawmakers there could deal with the problem in their own ways. They could cut optional populations like the Obamacare group. Twelve states have laws that will automatically do this if federal funding drops. If they don’t want to drop people, states can drop optional benefits, such as prescription drug coverage. After those cuts, states face tough choices. They could pay doctors, hospitals and nursing homes less for care. But there is a limit. If Mississippi suddenly started paying $50 for an echocardiogram instead of around $160, cardiologists might stop seeing Medicaid patients. (Many Medicaid patients already struggle to find care because the program pays doctors so little.) Cuts like these could also put some nursing homes or rural hospitals out of business.

Even so, states would still need a lot more money for Medicaid, usually their second-largest expense after education. Where could they get it? They’d have to sacrifice other priorities. One option is to cut education. Another is to raise taxes. None of these would be required by federal legislation; it’s up to the states how they cope. That allows Republicans in Congress to say they are not cutting Medicaid benefits or eligibility, even if that is the inevitable effect in most places.  Republicans point out that the original pact between Washington and the states has frayed, and feds are covering more than their share. That’s true. Through various accounting gimmicks, states have lowered their Medicaid contributions and now pay about a third of the bill, on average. Plus, Washington assumed almost the whole cost of the 2014 Obamacare expansion.

But that expansion has made Medicaid popular. More than half of Americans say someone in their family has used the program, and only 17 percent support cutting its budget. Local lawmakers also probably won’t win over voters by chopping education or raising taxes to save Medicaid. That’s why Democrats have settled on Medicaid as their top talking point about the G.O.P. budget plan. Republicans tried to cut Medicaid’s budget in 2017, too. Grassroots opposition helped defeat the effort, as did extensive lobbying by Republican governors, who urged senators not to leave them with a huge fiscal hole. The unpopularity of that bill — and its failure — helped Democrats retake the House the next year.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/briefing/republicans-medicaid.html

Ontario premier threatens to ‘shut off electricity completely’ for US if trade war escalates

President Donald Trump may have delayed most – though not all – of the tariffs he had imposed on Canada and Mexico, but that hasn’t stopped America’s northern neighbors from responding forcefully in retaliation. Ontario Premier Doug Ford at a press conference that he would move forward with a 25% surcharge on electricity exports to three US states starting Monday, warning that he will would turn off access if the United States adds new tariffs on Canadian goods. “If the United States escalates, I will not hesitate to shut the electricity off completely,” Ford told reporters. “Believe me when I say I do not want to do this, I feel terrible for the American people, because it’s not the American people who started this trade war. It’s one person who’s responsible. That’s President Trump.”

Ford on Monday said the 25% surcharge “will cost families and businesses” in New York, Minnesota and Michigan and add around “$100 per month to the bills of hardworking Americans.”

MORE at https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/10/business/canada-electricity-us-tariffs-doug-ford/index.html

Trump Left No Doubt That He and Musk Are Coming for Social Security

Democrats should be shouting from the rooftops about the threat to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Donald Trump narrowly won the 2024 election after promising that he would fix an economy that he insisted was on life support. Yet, in the first address of his second presidential term to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, Trump barely discussed this supposedly fundamental concern—even though the economy is dramatically more troubled today than it was when Joe Biden left office.

Glossing over issues such as resurgent inflation, stalling job grown and the fact that trade-war jitters had just caused the Dow to drop 1,300 points in two days, Trump instead devoted inordinate amounts of his speech to fawning remarks about billionaire Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn assault on federal agencies, objections to transgender athletes, and gripes that Democrats didn’t want to clap for him. As a USA Today headline announced, “Trump’s Speech Was All About Dodging Responsibility for the Economy He’s Crashing.” Democratic strategist Sawyer Hackett complained that, in a 99-minute-long address, “Trump spent 1 minute and 25 seconds on inflation and prices—and used the entire section to blame [former President] Biden. Zero solutions, zero policy announcements,” while Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said, ”I did not hear one word from Trump tonight about the economic reality facing 60 percent of our people [who live paycheck to paycheck], or the enormous stress that they are living under.”

But Trump did find time to speak, at considerable length. about how he thinks the nation’s Social Security Administration is a chaotic mess of waste, fraud and abuse. Claiming to have uncovered “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program,” the president repeated disproven assertions and outright lies in a speech that suggested that millions of Americans must be gaming the system. “Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security numbers for people aged 100 to 109 years old,” Trump claimed. CNN fact checkers immediately explained, “The vast majority of these people do not have dates of death listed in Social Security’s database. But that doesn’t mean they are actually receiving monthly benefits. Public data from the Social Security Administration shows that about 89,000 people age 99 or over were receiving Social Security benefits in December 2024, not even close to the millions Trump invoked.”

Trump is no fool. He knew serious media outlets would challenge the false premises of his remarks before he left the Capitol. So why cast so much shade on a program he claims to support? And why devote so much of this major speech to fantastical claims about Social Security “fraud” involving people claiming to be 150, 200 or older?

Longtime defenders of Social Security have an unsettling answer to that question.

“Trump is spewing misinformation about Social Security so he can ultimately justify cutting your benefits,” argued US Representative Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat who is a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee. Former secretary of labor Robert Reich explained, “Trump keeps spreading lies about Social Security. What he isn’t telling you is that he’s actively trying to dismantle it—firing thousands of SSA employees and shuttering regional offices. Why? To pave the way for privatization so Wall Street can gamble with our retirement.”

MORE - https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-social-security-threat/

SEE ALSO

Donald Trump’s former lawyer wrote Sunday that expected cuts in health benefits for lower-income Americans will destroy his presidency and the Republican Party. Michael Cohen, once the president’s attorney and fixer who pleaded guilty to campaign finance crimes allegedly on behalf of Trump, wrote in a Substack essay that Trump “rode to power on the backs of working-class Americans.” However, his alliance with budget hatchet man Elon Musk, “who thinks government assistance is a joke,” will alter voters’ loyalty.

“Here’s where the story takes a turn: Trump will soon learn that his support isn’t infinite,” Cohen wrote. “His base might be rabid, but even the most die-hard MAGA voter has a breaking point. And when grandma’s Social Security check disappears, when their Medicaid is yanked away, when the reality of Musk’s economic war on the poor sets in; who do you think they’re going to blame?” “You screw over 72.5 million people, and you pay the price,” Cohen continued, referring to the number of Americans on Medicaid. “Unfortunately, they will suffer. But, there is a light at the end of the tunnel…Musk’s economic jihad against working Americans will be the thing that sinks Trump’s presidency and the Republican party. And for once, the chaos will actually work in the favor of the American people.”

Republicans are aiming to slice $2 trillion in spending, which could leave Medicaid and Medicare on the chopping block. The Congressional Budget Office said that sizable cuts to Medicaid or Medicare will be needed to make the goal. As the threat loomed, Trump got heckled by Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) during his address to Congress over the possibility of slashing Medicaid. Green was later censured. In that address, Trump spewed lies about Social Security to perhaps discredit it, raising further suspicion that it will be targeted.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-former-lawyer-names-thing-131434588.html

Former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) warned that President Donald Trump feels “untouchable” and that there’s no telling what he may attempt do next. “The biggest failure of all of us during this Trump era has been the failure of imagination,” the vocal Trump critic told MSNBC’s Michael Steele on Sunday. “We have not imagined how bad and how low he’d go. He tried to overthrow an American election four years ago. I have no doubt that he could try to stop the midterm elections.”

Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee, said Trump “sees himself as a king” and that the Republican Party agrees. He summed up all the ways GOP lawmakers are “lining up to pay tribute” to Trump, with proposals to put his face on U.S. currency, make his birthday a federal holiday, and add his mug to Mount Rushmore. Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) even backed an unconstitutional third term in office for Trump. Walsh warned viewers to take it all seriously, including talk of a third term. “It’s too easy to have fun with this,” he said. “But Michael, this is scary sh*t.”

Later in the interview, Walsh added that Trump feels emboldened given that he’s never faced consequences for what he’s done. “Look at all he’s gotten away with, and no one’s ever held him accountable,” he said. “And here he sits in the White House, he’s got no legislative branch to worry about, the Republican Party is his. Who’s gonna stop him? The courts? The people? He feels untouchable right now.” He warned that Trump may next defy a Supreme Court order. “And then what does the Republican Party do?” he asked.


MORE at https://www.huffpost.com/entry/joe-walsh-scary-trump_n_67ce6723e4b0c670035862c2

Trump’s Tariffs Could Help Tesla, by Hurting Its Rivals More

The electric car company led by Elon Musk builds all the cars it sells in the United States in California and Texas, shielding it from tariffs that could devastate competitors.

As President Trump puts new tariffs on goods from China and threatens a trade war with allies like Mexico and Canada, one global company is likely to suffer less than most of its competitors: Tesla. But the electric car maker led by Elon Musk, which accounts for a third of the billionaire’s wealth, is also vulnerable if relations with China worsen. That country is the company’s second-largest market after the United States and it produces more cars there than anywhere else. Tesla has built largely self-sufficient supply chains in the United States and China, a rarity in a world of interconnected trade. As a result, the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on Chinese goods, and the continuing threat to put them on Mexican and Canadian products, might help Tesla by hurting its competitors more.

MORE - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/08/world/asia/trump-trade-musk-tesla.html