Democracy Now

We look at how Elon Musk’s executive branch agency, the Department of Government Efficiency, known as ”DOGE,” is wreaking havoc, with young male software engineers slashing government services and funding in what legal experts are saying could amount to a “constitutional crisis.” Most of the DOGE staffers are pulled from Musk-linked tech companies and have limited work and educational experience. “Even if these young men are very technically gifted … some of them seem to have questionable backgrounds,” says Wired reporter Vittoria Elliott, who has revealed key details about the staffers in a series of articles. One DOGE staffer, Marko Elez, resigned and was later reinstated after he was traced to racist social media posts. DOGE’s lack of oversight, training and transparency poses “an incredible risk,” adds Elliott, as its unvetted and underqualified staffers take control of the sensitive data of Americans.

• Constitutional Crisis: Trump Admin Hints It Will Ignore Judge's Ruling to Block Musk from Treasury Records
• Freed Palestinians Say They Were Held by Israel in "Torture Center" Without Food, Water
• In Occupied West Bank, Israel Kills Two Women, Including One 8 Months Pregnant
• U.N. Warns U.S. Cuts Could Lead to 6 Million AIDS-Related Deaths as Trump Moves to Dismantle USAID
• National Institutes of Health Moves to Cut $4 Billion in Biomedical Research
• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Brink of Being Shuttered After Saving Consumers $21 Billion
• Trump Announces 25% Tariff on Steel and Aluminum
• U.S. Judge Blocks Transfer of Venezuela Immigrant Detainees to Guantánamo
• NBC: Trump Preparing to Relaunch Immigrant Family Detention Policy
• Trump Freezes U.S. Aid to South Africa over "Unjust Racial Discrimination" Against Whites
• African Leaders Call for Ceasefire, Direct Talks with Rebels Amid Escalating Eastern Congo Conflict
• Sam Nujoma, Namibia's First President, Who Led His Country to Independence, Dies at 95
• Ecuador's Daniel Noboa and Luisa González Headed for Rematch in April Presidential Runoff
• Mass Anti-AfD Protests Continue in Germany as Far Right Gathers for "Make Europe Great Again" Summit
• Trump Fires Kennedy Center Board Members, Announces Plan to Install Himself as New Chair
• Halftime Performer Stages Super Bowl Protest, Holding Up Flags of Sudan, Palestine
• Louisiana Spent $17.5M to Remove Unhoused People to Cold Warehouse Ahead of Super Bowl

The Trump administration is planning to shutter the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights at the Environmental Protection Agency and has placed nearly 170 employees on administrative leave. “I’m very concerned about the deregulation and the focus on corporate profits,” says Mustafa Santiago Ali, the former head of the environmental justice program at the EPA. He resigned in 2017 to protest a Trump administration proposal to severely scale back the size and work of the agency. “Any time that we place profit over people, then we are putting a crosshair on our most vulnerable, our most marginalized,” says Ali.

A lawsuit by a coalition of labor unions Thursday prompted the Labor Department to agree not to release any sensitive economic and privacy data to DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency led by billionaire Trump donor Elon Musk. Musk’s group has already gained access to sensitive files and computer systems across other key agencies as part of a push to restructure much of the federal government. “There are huge problems with what Elon Musk and his team are doing to access the most critical personal data that this country owns,” says Rob Shriver, senior adviser to the accountability group Democracy Forward, which filed the lawsuit over Labor Department data, and a former acting director of the Office of Personnel Management. Legal challenges have also reversed the Trump administration’s executive order to freeze trillions in federal funding, delayed a buyout offer sent to most of the federal workforce to encourage mass resignations, and at least partially blocked Musk from accessing the Treasury Department’s payment system. We also speak with Public Citizen’s Robert Weissman, who calls Musk’s actions “an authoritarian rampage through the government … designed to access information, surveil the country, destroy the institutions of government and advance corporate interests without restraint.”

We speak with Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna of California about the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on the federal bureaucracy and the gutting of various agencies, led by the president’s unelected billionaire adviser Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

“No DOGE employee should have access to any of Americans’ sensitive, confidential information, and they should not have access to be able to stop payments,” he says. Khanna calls Musk’s actions “unconstitutional” and says the Trump administration must be held accountable. “There is a movement now which is pushing back. We did not have that for a couple months, I acknowledge that. But the Democratic Party in this last week has had a new energy and a new resolve to stand up.”

Khanna also comments on the use of Guantánamo Bay to detain immigrants, Trump’s colonial proposals to seize Gaza and other foreign territories and more.

• Trump Sanctions ICC over War Crimes Investigations Against Israel
• Trump Says Palestinians Will Be "Happy, Safe and Free" After Mass Expulsion from Gaza
• Senate Votes to Confirm Project 2025 Architect Russell Vought as White House Budget Chief
• DOGE Staffer Marko Elez Resigns over Racist and Hateful Social Media Posts
• Lawmakers Denied Access to EPA as Trump Admin Shutters Environmental Justice Office
• Scott Turner Confirmed as HUD Secretary as DOGE Prepares to Slash Billions from Housing Department
• First Female Coast Guard Commandant, Linda Fagan, Evicted from Home After 3-Hour Notice
• Rights Groups Condemn NCAA over Ban on Trans Women in Sports
• January 2025 Was Hottest on Record, Hitting 1.75 Degrees Above Preindustrial Levels
• Trump Nominates "Sharpiegate" Scientist to Reprise Role at NOAA
• Mourners at Memorial for Altadena Fire Victims Demand Equity in Rebuilding Process
• Trump Administration Shackled Indians for 40 Hours Aboard Deportation Flight

As the Trump administration, led in part by his unelected adviser Elon Musk, sets its sights on cutting the Department of Education, we speak to longtime educator Jesse Hagopian about what he calls an “extremist, authoritarian power grab to dismantle public education and enforce ideological conformity.” Hagopian, whose new book, Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education, traces the history of racist educational censorship, adds, “This isn’t about protecting children. We know that dismantling the Department of Education is really about imposing … the violence of organized forgetting.”

We speak to Jewish Currents editor-at-large Peter Beinart about his new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, which is “addressed to my fellow Jews” and criticizes what he characterizes as the increasing privileging of Zionism as a part of Jewish identity. “The Jewish community is structured to basically make the existence of a Jewish state, a state that privileges Jews over Palestinians, sacred, … elevat[ing] ethnonationalism — a Jewish state — over Judaism itself,” Beinart says. In response, he challenges the erasure of Zionism’s explicitly colonial roots and political myths about majoritarian rule, arguing for the acceptance of more critical stances toward the state of Israel within Jewish communities.

World leaders are rebuking Donald Trump’s proposal for the United States to take over the Gaza Strip, ethnically cleansing the region of Palestinians. “There’s no question that even though the entire region would reject it … the fundamental reality is that we are heading to the complete destruction of Palestinian society in Gaza as a matter of status quo,” says our guest Omar Baddar. Baddar, a Palestinian American political analyst and member of the National Policy Council of the Arab American Institute, also discusses Trump’s recent statements signaling a potential breakdown of the official ceasefire in Gaza.

• Protests Erupt Against Trump and Musk Takeover of Gov't Agencies
• NOAA Receives Order to Halt "International Engagements"; HHS Workers Placed on DEI "Hit List"
• Sen. Brian Schatz Warns Against "Creeping Fascism" as He Leads Filibuster Against OMB Nominee Vought
• Unions Sue to Prevent DOGE from Accessing Labor Dept. Data
• CIA Sends White House Email with Names of Recent Hires; DOJ Official Accuses FBI of "Insubordination"
• Trump Signs Order Banning Trans Women and Girls from School Sports
• Judge Blocks Trump's "Cruel and Unusual" Order to Move Trans Women Prisoners to Men's Wards
• Federal Court Puts Indefinite Hold on Trump's Order Ending Birthright Citizenship
• Texas Empowers National Guard Soldiers to Arrest Asylum Seekers at U.S. Border
• ICE Agents in Colorado Go Door to Door Demanding IDs and Asking People to Turn In Their Neighbors
• Protests Nationwide Denounce Trump Administration's Immigration Raids
• First Deportation Flight Carrying Immigrant Prisoners Arrives at Guantánamo
• Guatemala Agrees to U.S. Demands to Accept Deportees from Other Countries
• Israeli Defense Minister Orders Plans for "Voluntary Departure" of Palestinians from Gaza
• Swedish Gunman Kills 10 at Adult Education Center That Serves Immigrants
• Panama Canal Authority Denies Trump's Claim of Free Passage for U.S. Ships
• Javier Milei Withdraws Argentina from World Health Organization, Blasts Social Justice Groups
• Ecuador's President Slaps Tariffs on Mexican Goods, Mirroring Trump's Authoritarian Moves
• Trump's Release of Water from California Dams Won't Help Farms or L.A. Firefighters

We speak with Karla Gilbride, the former general counsel of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, who was fired by President Trump in late January along with two commissioners at the federal agency that enforces civil rights law in the workplace. The EEOC was created as part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and is tasked with investigating discrimination based on race, ethnicity, sex and other characteristics, but the Trump administration is gutting the agency as part of its larger assault on DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion. The EEOC says it will no longer focus on anti-trans discrimination and vows to uphold a binary view of sex and gender.

The Trump administration claims an order to withhold funds from hospitals that offer gender-affirming care to transgender youth is “already having its intended effect” as hospitals announce a halt to gender-affirming care for trans patients. The American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal and others filed a lawsuit Tuesday on behalf of transgender youth who say the order is depriving them of medical care “solely on the basis of their sex and transgender status.” ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio says the situation is “catastrophic for transgender people of all ages, particularly transgender youth,” and notes Trump’s near-daily attacks are targeting a community that makes up less than 1% of the U.S. population. “We need to see people standing up.” We are also joined by pediatrician Dr. Jeffrey Birnbaum, who has vowed to keep working with transgender youth patients in New York. “Keep politics out of science,” says Dr. Birnbaum.

As President Trump continues to sign new executive orders attacking transgender people and their rights, we hear voices of protest from New York, where hundreds of people rallied Monday outside NYU Langone Hospital in Manhattan to demand it continue providing gender-affirming care for trans patients, after news that some patients had been dropped by the hospital. This comes after the Trump administration signed an order withholding federal research and education grants from hospitals that offer gender-affirming care to transgender people under 19.

President Donald Trump met at the White House Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, where Trump again suggested ethnically cleansing Gaza of its Palestinian population. Trump has already mused about moving Gaza’s population to Jordan and Egypt, which those countries have flatly rejected, but on Tuesday he went even further and said the United States should “own” Gaza and develop it into a seaside tourist destination. “Nothing has been more destabilizing for the region over the last eight decades than the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Israel, and nobody at any level is going to sign up for a continuation of that,” says Palestinian American analyst Yousef Munayyer, who calls Trump’s plan “ethically and morally repugnant.” We also speak with former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy, who says Israeli society is currently “giddy with excitement” over Trump’s presidency. But he adds that “perhaps Israel’s greatest Achilles’ heel is if it actually falls for the idea that America is all-powerful.”

• Trump Calls for Ethnic Cleansing of Entire Gaza Strip and for U.S. to "Take Over"
• U.S. Ignores ICC Arrest Warrant Seeking Netanyahu's Arrest for Crimes Against Humanity
• "A Serious Violation of International Law": Palestinians Reject Trump's Gaza Takeover Bid
• Palestinian Poet Refaat Alareer, Killed in 2023 Israeli Strike, Finally Laid to Rest in Gaza City
• Trump Places 10,000 USAID Workers on Leave and Orders Them to Return to U.S.
• Trump Orders U.S. Withdrawal from U.N. Human Rights Council and U.N. Agency for Palestinian Refugees
• Federal Workers Sue DOGE, Alleging Musk Illegally Compromised Personal Information
• Democratic Lawmakers Protest Elon Musk's "Hostile Takeover" of U.S. Government
• Ukraine's Zelensky Accepts Trump's Bid to Trade U.S. Arms for Rare Earth Minerals
• Senate Confirms Trump Loyalist Pam Bondi as Attorney General
• Proud Boys Lose Trademark Rights to Historic Black Church It Attacked in 2020
• ACLU Sues to Block Trump's Ban on Gender-Affirming Care for Transgender Youth
• Senators Advance Nominations of RFK Jr. for Health Secretary, Tulsi Gabbard for Intelligence Chief
• Hundreds of Women Raped and Burned to Death as M23 Rebels Seize Eastern DRC's Goma
• Philippine Congress Impeaches Vice President Sara Duterte over Corruption, Assassination Threats

An executive order that purports to combat antisemitism on university campuses is likely to chill free speech and target students for pro-Palestine, antiwar and anti-racist views. The order, signed by President Trump, threatens to deport noncitizen college students and other international visitors who take part in protests considered antisemitic under a broad and contested definition of the term. Though the order gives them new teeth, these threats of deportation are not new, as our guest Momodou Taal, a doctoral student at Cornell University who was threatened with deportation last year, can attest. While public outcry forced Cornell to lift Taal’s suspension and allow him a limited return to campus, he is still effectively banned from campus life and blocked from teaching positions. “There’s somewhat of a great irony that students who were protesting apartheid are now subject to forms of exclusion bordering on apartheid,” says Taal about his ongoing exclusion.

Rights groups and legal scholars say the new executive order violates constitutional free speech rights and would likely draw legal challenges if implemented. “This is basically a textbook authoritarian playbook meant to stifle any criticism of what’s going on in Israel,” explains our other guest, Etan Nechin, a New York correspondent for Haaretz. Students like Taal, however, say they will not allow the government and their administrations to prevent them from speaking out. Taal says his pro-Palestine activism comes out of his obligations as “a human being” and that “when fascism is at the door, what we do is come together and unite even stronger.”

Before Guantánamo became what it’s known for — the “forever prison in the war on terror” — its “ambiguous sovereignty” as a U.S. military base was long utilized to incarcerate Caribbean asylum seekers to the U.S. We speak to scholar Miriam Pensack, who researches the history of Guantánamo, in light of President Trump’s recent proposal to once again imprison asylum seekers at the base’s prison complex. Pensack says that existing racist anti-migration policies in the Caribbean, including the Dominican Republic’s detention and deportations of people with Haitian ancestry, suggest a likely collaboration with Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.

As Secretary of State Marco Rubio visits Latin America on his first foreign trip in his new post, we look at the Trump administration’s policy orientation toward the right-wing government of El Salvador and the left-wing government of Guatemala with journalist Roman Gressier. Rubio is visiting both countries during his trip, which is expected to cement Trump’s ties to Salvadoran strongman enthusiast Nayib Bukele and to the conservative opposition in Guatemala. Rubio’s top agenda items are anti-immigration enforcement and U.S. competition with China.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is visiting Latin America on his first foreign trip in his new post. One of his stops is Panama, where President Trump has threatened to invade and take over control of the critical trade route of the Panama Canal in response to its growing ties to China. It is a deeply unpopular proposition in Panama, seen as a “reversion to the mid-20th century imperial encroachment that Panama so intentionally confronted over the course of the Canal transition.” It is also, “on a logistical level,” essentially “impossible,” according to Panama City-based scholar Miriam Pensack. In what Pensack calls a “troubling” development, Panama has announced it will more closely cooperate with Trump’s policing of migration from Central America to the United States as a diplomatic concession to his threats.

• Trump Suspends Trade War with Canada & Mexico; China Hits U.S. with Retaliatory Tariffs
• Democrats Protest Outside USAID Headquarters as Trump Seeks to Dismantle Agency
• Federal Judge Extends Injunction on Federal Spending Freeze
• Trump Administration Freezes Work of Consumer Protection Agency as Elon Musk "Deletes" Free IRS Tax Preparation Software
• Trump Administration Deactivates Famine Early Warning System Network
• M23 Insurgents Declare "Humanitarian" Ceasefire in Eastern DRC After Bloody Seizure of Goma
• Trump Says "No Guarantees" Gaza Ceasefire Will Hold Ahead of Netanyahu White House Visit
• Israeli Settlers Attack Palestinians in Masafer Yatta, Including Oscar-Nominated Director Basel Adra
• Israel Builds Military Bases in Syria After Ouster of Bashar al-Assad
• Three Students Sue Columbia After Their Suspension for Palestinian Rights Activism
• Senate Confirms Climate Change-Denying Fracking Exec. Chris Wright as Energy Secretary
• Bukele Agrees to Lock Up U.S. Citizens, Deportees in Mega-Prison Rife with Abuse
• U.S. Businesses Close Doors for "A Day Without Immigrants" Amid Trump Crackdown
• "Competent White Men Must Be in Charge": White Supremacist Darren Beattie Gets State Department Role
• German Protesters Condemn Chancellor Front-Runner Merz for Working with Neo-Nazi Party