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

Once upon a time, not long ago, Elon Musk was worried sick about climate change. Stopping it became an overarching career mission, reflected in both his business decisions and everyday actions. He gave the electric vehicle industry a jolt after taking over Tesla Motors in 2004. He joined President Donald Trump’s first business advisory council in 2017, then resigned in protest when Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement. He directed Tesla to buy up $1 billion worth of Bitcoin in 2021 and accept the cryptocurrency in formal transactions, only to backtrack when he remembered that Bitcoin mining is, by design, a heavily energy-intensive process that requires masses of fossil fuel­–powered computer servers to run at all times. It was such a notorious moment in the crypto world that one speaker led “FUCK ELON” chants during that year’s Bitcoin conference.

What a remarkable thing, then, for Musk to embrace Trump more closely than ever as the reelected president decorates his administration with oil-industry shills and with crypto insiders, whose energy-intensive mining rigs and data centers make them something of a natural complement to the fossil fuel industry’s expansionist goals.

But of course, it tracks with his general shifts in ideology and mission since the COVID era. Scientific nerdery gave way to virus conspiracies; climate change took a back seat to his longtime A.I. fears as his former nonprofit, OpenAI, achieved staggering successes; Tesla’s dangerous self-driving cars and dubious robotics earned priority over the electrification of transport. Musk has been happy to re-embrace Bitcoin because incorporating the currency into Tesla’s assets and accounting has allowed him to artificially boost the company’s profit reports and keep investors happy. The Earth is one thing, but revenue is another.

The core issue can be boiled down to the fact that Bitcoin mining is—to put it lightly—really, really, really bad for the environment. This is primarily due to a system it relies on called “proof of work.” Take the computer servers with access to online blockchain protocols, set them up with high-efficiency chips (like those highly coveted GPUs) that can transmit more computing power at a faster rate, and run those servers 24/7 to solve the cryptographic puzzles required to unlock new Bitcoins. To replicate this operation at scale requires whole data centers’ worth of GPUs, which produce audible noise and require a lot of water to keep cool. A 2024 paper published in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability found that the water usage of US Bitcoin miners alone is as much as the average yearly water consumption of 300,000 US households. On top of that, a single Bitcoin transaction uses enough water to fill a swimming pool.

Much of the power used to keep these things running is sourced from fossil fuels, with all the attendant emissions. It’s been estimated that worldwide Bitcoin mining and transactions have consumed more power than countries like Finland each year. It’s worrying enough that even Republican lawmakers in crypto-friendly red states, like Arkansas, have passed bills to regulate the digital-asset industry’s noise and air pollution. (Those efforts might be undercut should Trump carry through with an ill-advised campaign promise to ensure all Bitcoin is mined within US borders only. Ironically, however, his trade war with China has prevented American Bitcoin miners from securing needed equipment.)

The techno-centric vision for Trump 2.0 was laid out in various written screeds from Musk’s Silicon Valley friends at Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital hydra (and crypto funder) whose namesake founders became enthusiastic Trump converts and staffers this election cycle. Marc Andreessen’s “ Techno-Optimist Manifesto” insisted upon building out energy “abundance” instead of cutting back on any fossil-fuel use; Ben Horowitz’s “ Politics and the Future” blog announcement pledged his support for any political candidate who believed, like he did, that crypto “will create a fairer, more inclusive economy”; the duo’s co-written “ Little Tech Agenda” all but declared war against the regulatory state in the wake of Biden administration attempts to impose tighter crypto regulations.

With Andreessen himself having joined Musk in keenly advising Trump throughout the presidential transition, the new administration has gotten to work implementing all facets of the Andreessen Horowitz blueprint—and yes, the crypto and energy policies are not incidental, because top-down climate denial is hardly irrelevant to their goals. The Securities and Exchange Commission, now a far more crypto-friendly agency under Trump, has also scrapped a Biden-era requirement for large companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions in depth. The president has once again withdrawn the US from the Paris Agreement, with no objection from Musk this round. In fact, his already-infamous Department of Governmental Efficiency has been targeting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency for data purges, grant freezes, and mass firings. It’s not a coincidence that Musk is doing this under the aegis of a fake “department” that’s named for the Dogecoin cryptocurrency and was staffed with Marc Andreessen’s help.

(Also not a coincidence: that the primary zero-carbon energy source the new Department of Energy is interested in expanding is nuclear power, a fixation of both Andreessen’s and Horowitz’s. Why is that? Well, it’s a good way to thumb their noses at misguided environmentalists who protested fission plants after the Three Mile Island meltdown. Also, they want more data and mining centers to be powered by nuclear power specifically.)

While purges of NOAA and EPA data are troubling for many reasons, one of the biggest is that they’ve censored key resources for tracking American energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Those have been especially useful markers for independent researchers surveying and tracking how America utilizes its electricity, both dirty and clean. There’s Digiconomist, the much-cited project from Dutch economist Alex de Vries, that keeps a public monitor of Bitcoin mining’s environmental and emissions impacts. There’s also the fact that this data affects the pricing and regulation of agricultural commodities—and since Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will be considered commodities like gold and silver, it will be the agriculture-focused members of Congress who lead legislative oversight. What could go wrong?

Digital-asset evangelists are especially sensitive to the climate critiques, which popped up time and again during the pandemic-era crypto bubble as myriad celebrities—even the nominally environmentalist ones—got in on the grift. Some crypto ventures, like the alternative currency and blockchain Ethereum, shifted to coin-mining methods that were far less energy-intensive.

But Bitcoin truthers and like-minded users are dedicated to their all-systems-go, all-the-time approach. Why should the government make it easier for anyone to scrutinize and call out their electricity needs? And why should banks and other firms express any skepticism over cryptocurrency’s actual value, or take the time to meet their climate and environmental goals, when they could just be forced to mine this stuff instead? Trump himself has been cozying up to the stuff in increasingly concerning ways, from a disastrous meme currency to a coin-hoarding private venture to the establishment of a crypto arm for his Truth Social network, dedicated data centers, and all. No better way to ensure regulatory capture than to grant the president his own funny money.
To that end, why should the government do anything to oppose the “financial innovation” tech in which some powerful VCs just so happen to have staked millions of dollars? If the consequence happens to be a hotter, less-inhabitable Earth, so be it. At least the crypto mavens will have their digital riches to isolate them from the real-world consequences of these decisions.

True believers in crypto have often championed it as the answer to so many of our financial, political, and even cultural woes. It’s decentralized, giving money and power back to the people without having to rely on evil banks or governments. It allows anyone to keep their money safe from inflation and the finicky, unpredictable economy. So what if it takes a few million gallons of water and untold amounts of greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere each year?

This is the currency of the future. It’s just too bad that there might not be a habitable future to spend it in.

On Tuesday afternoon, a federal judge in New York’s Northern District heard opening arguments in the case of Momodou Taal v. Trump. Neither party was present in the courtroom—in large part because Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has been trying to find Taal for days, reportedly staking out his home and entering his university’s campus.

Taal, a British-Gambian doctoral student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, sued the administration on February 15 to challenge Trump’s executive orders curtailing free speech and seeking to deport pro-Palestinian activists, which have been paired with a wave of attacks by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers—in some cases masked and hooded—on graduate and undergraduate students.

At 12:52 a.m. on Friday—within five days of Taal’s lawsuit—Taal’s lawyers received an email “inviting” their client to “surrender to ICE custody.” At 7:00 p.m. the following day, Trump’s lawyers filed a brief informing Taal that the State Department had already revoked his visa, without his knowledge, on March 14—the day before Taal filed his lawsuit. Days later, ICE agents arrived on Cornell’s campus attempting to find and seize him.

Over the past two weeks, the Trump administration has targeted at least eight foreign academics in America for deportation, often sending officers to snatch them off the street or in their homes, retroactively changing what they’re charged with, and shipping them halfway across the country, far from their families lawyers—increasingly in apparent defiance of court orders against their rendition. Members of the commentariat like venture capitalist Paul Graham have mused that “ the students ICE is disappearing seem such a random selection.”

But experts and people close to the cases say it’s not random at all. The scholars in question are immigrant academics—Gambian, Palestinian, Korean, and Turkish—targeted for pro-Palestinian social media posts, op-eds, and participation in last year’s campus-based opposition to the continuing slaughter in Gaza.

Momodou Taal knew this was coming for months. “Given my public exposure, if he were to deport student protesters, I think I would be at the top of the list as a target,” he told Mother Jones in January. But, Taal said in a recent Intercept podcast appearance, his personal stakes pale in comparison to those of Palestinians in Gaza, where the number of known dead has passed 50,000—as the US continues shipping bombs and warplanes to Israel, and as Israeli officials threaten a full-scale military takeover of the territory, “I know it’s a very frightening moment,” Taal said in that Intercept appearance, “but for me, this is the time to double down.”

Taal’s lawsuit, filed with fellow Cornell doctoral student Sriram Parasuram and Mukoma Wa Ngugi, a Cornell literature professor, asserts that Trump’s late January executive orders cracking down on campus speech violate both Taal’s right to political expression and the rights of those around him to hear it.

“It’s quite calculated and deliberate,” Taal told me on Thursday.

ICE agents, usually plainclothed and sometimes masked, are accosting students in the streets, using what even former House Rep. Ron Paul calls “Gestapo” tactics.

Trump’s executive orders conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, Taal said, have “clearly placed a target upon many people’s backs.” Taal recommends that students in his situation “lawyer up”—because the Trump administration, he said, is not acting alone: right-wing groups such as Canary Mission, an online doxxing platform that collects the personal information of anti-Zionist students and professors, have claimed credit for some students’ detentions.

Suing the president, Taal said, “is the only form of redress many of us have, in this moment, as a form of protection.” Yunseo Chung, a Korean undergraduate at Columbia University who has been a legal permanent resident of the US since she was seven years old, filed suit on Monday for a temporary restraining order to prevent her deportation. Her case went to court on the same day as Taal’s, and her order was quickly granted; Taal’s own request for a temporary restraining order was denied by a New Jersey judge a day after it was filed.

“I think the stakes in all these cases are the same,” said Abed Ayoub, the executive director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), whose lawyers are representing Taal. While each case has its nuances—some students have been detained, others have not; some are on green cards, others on visas—“what we’re seeing is an attack on the First Amendment rights of folks in this country to express themselves,” Ayoub said.

Chung’s suit accuses the Trump administration of a “larger pattern of attempted US government repression of constitutionally protected protest activity and other forms of speech,” and asserts that the federal government aims to “retaliate against and punish noncitizens like Ms. Chung for their participation in protests.” Taal’s asserts that Trump’s executive orders prohibit noncitizens from “engaging in constitutionally protected speech” that the Trump administration “may subjectively interpret as expressing a ‘hostile attitude” to its interests by deploying the threat of deportation.

That threat, Taal says, casts a frighteningly broad net. “It’s important that people recognize that it could be anyone, and that they need to rise up, and escalate, and refuse this to be normalized,” Taal said Thursday.

Chung and Taal are now two of many. Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of Palestinian nationality, and a Columbia graduate student until December of last year, is also suing the president for the right to have his immigration case heard near his home in New York; he was arrested by ICE at his Manhattan residence on March 8 and, after initially being imprisoned in a New Jersey immigration detention facility, was remanded to an ICE “processing center” in Louisiana, where he is still being held. His fellow Columbia graduate student, Ranjani Srinivasan, fled the US for India on March 11 after ICE came knocking at her door. International students and professors Badar Khan Suri of Georgetown University in Washington, DC, Rasha Alawieh of Brown University in Rhode Island, Alireza Doroudi of the University of Alabama (who has not publicly engaged in pro-Palestine activism), and Rumeysa Ozturk of Tufts University in Massachusetts have also been seized in the past two weeks.

Chilling footage of Ozturk’s arrest swept the internet Thursday: six masked individuals in civilian clothes surrounded the graduate student on a sidewalk in Somerville.

“Hey ma’am,” one said, and grabbed Ozturk’s wrists. She screamed as several others surrounded her.

“Can I just call the police?” Ozturk asked in the surveillance video. “We are the police,” one masked, hooded person responded. They handcuffed her and dragged her away.

In a Thursday press conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended Ozturk’s abduction. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa,” he told reporters Thursday. Ozturk’s “lunatic” behavior appears to consist only of co-authoring one student newspaper op-ed, exactly one year before she was detained, asking her university to acknowledge a student government resolution calling for divestment from Israel. She has not been charged with any offense, but was painted by Rubio as “a social activist that tears up our university campuses”—and was forcibly disappeared.

Rubio’s State Department, meanwhile, has issued new guidance calling for extensive screening of student visa applicants’ social media for any posts that “demonstrate a degree of approval” of what it calls “terrorist activity.”

Ayoub, of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, says the recent spate of ICE abductions echoes the Nixon era: In 1972, the Nixon White House deployed an extensive surveillance program against Arab communities in the United States—scrutinizing the visa status of anyone who appeared to have an Arabic last name—ostensibly to screen out terrorists.

In practice, Ayoub said, the policy inevitably led to unjust detainments, deportations, and even disappearances: “A number of our community members just disappeared,” he said. “There was no social media, and nobody walked around with a cell phone. So people just disappeared, and you wouldn’t hear from them until six, seven months later.” More than 150,000 people were investigated.

“Before all of this started,” Ayoub said, “I was warning people that we will see the same: people just picked up and moved to a location where we’re not going to hear from them, because this is the practice of what happened before.”

Then, as now, he said, those in power were “banking on not everybody being upset, on people buying into the ‘threat to national security’ type of language.” But it’s no longer as easy for authorities to move in darkness; this time, people are organizing. The same day that footage of Ozturk’s arrest was released, more than one thousand people rallied on her behalf in Somerville, and protests in support of Mahmoud Khalil have been taking place across the country since his arrest almost three weeks ago.

The Trump administration, Ayoub said, is “betting on the idea that not many are going to come out and defend the students, or support the students, or defend their right to express their opinions in this country. But that, I think, is where they’re mistaken.”

Amid intense outrage over the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts student who was ambushed and detained by plainclothes federal immigration officers this week, Marco Rubio appeared gratified.

“We revoked her visa, it’s an F-1 visa, I believe,” the secretary of State told reporters at a press conference in Guyana on Thursday when asked about the arrest. “We revoked it and I’ll tell you why.”

“If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student,” Rubio continued with increasing conviction, “and you tell us that the reason you are coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we are not going to give you a visa.”

“Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas,” he added, estimating that as many as 300 people have similarly had their visas revoked as the Trump administration pursues its dramatic crackdown on free speech.

Yet nowhere in his remarks did Rubio provide evidence that Ozturk—who was on her way to break the Ramadan fast when federal agents in face masks arrested her in broad daylight—participated in the types of destructive behavior Rubio outlined as grounds for deportation. Instead, as many have now reported, Ozturk was the co-author of a 2024 opinion piece in a student newspaper criticizing Tufts’ handling of student demands to divest from companies with ties to Israel. A Fox News description of the same op-ed even appeared to acknowledge the scant evidence that Ozturk was the kind of trouble-making activist characterized by Rubio: “While her op-ed never mentioned support for Hamas, the terrorist network, it did call on the university to divest from companies,” the Fox story noted.

In a court filing, Ozturk’s attorneys noted that she has been criticized by Canary Mission, a website documenting individuals it deems as holding hateful views toward Israel. The site, which focuses on students and professors, has been referenced in multiple court cases related to campus protests over Gaza. As Ozturk’s own lawsuit notes:

“In February 2025, the website Canary Mission published a profile on Rumeysa, including her photograph, claiming she “engaged in anti-Israel activism in March 2024….” The profile describes Rumeysa as “a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.” Its sole support for the contention that Rumeysa “engaged in anti-Israel activism” was a link and screenshots of the March 2024 opinion piece.

The lawsuit also cited Rubio’s push as a US senator to punish pro-Palestinian activists protesting Israel’s devastation of Gaza. Here he was in 2023, calling on then-President Joe Biden to revoke visas and initiate deportation proceedings for foreign nationals who were supposedly “supporting Hamas.”

“You are not even American,” he said from the Senate floor. “You’re a foreign national. You’re here because we gave you a visa to be here temporarily, and now you’re out there defending and supporting Hamas, a terrorist organization? You need to go.”

That language eerily echoes the rhetoric Rubio used Thursday, as he once again seemed to imagine himself chastising protesters face-to-face: “Don’t come here. If you’re going to do that, go somewhere else. Don’t come here.”

Now, as Trump’s secretary of State, Rubio is far better positioned to convince the president to embrace his undemocratic approach to the country’s visa process. That access to power doesn’t seem to have convinced him to stop talking about protesters like a puffed-up bully at the playground.

On Thursday, the federal Department of Health and Human Services moved, through a department-wide restructuring order, to eliminate the Administration for Community Living (ACL), a subsidiary established in 2012 to support disabled and aging people—part of a broader series of cuts that will see the firing of some 10,000 HHS staff. HHS’ press release on the restructuring claims that ACL’s responsibilities will be redesignated elsewhere within the department, which has yet to issue further details or clarify its plans. An unknown number of the administration’s workers will also be laid off.

Jill Jacobs, a Biden-era commissioner of ACL’s Administration on Disabilities, was shocked to hear the news. “It’s not something that’s been on anyone’s radar, not a conversation that anyone’s been having,” said Jacobs, who is now the executive director of the National Association of Councils on Developmental Disabilities.

Mia Ives-Rublee, senior director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the nonpartisan Center for American Progress, believes that the move “shows that this administration is not committed to community living and the Americans with Disabilities Act.”

The decision by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s HHS is only the latest Trump administration action to bring harm to disabled people. Disability experts I spoke to expressed that the decision reflected a lack of awareness of the Administration for Community Living’s crucial role for disabled and aging Americans. That may not be surprising given the department’s current leadership; Kennedy mainly talks about disability in the context of conspiracy theories that vaccines cause autism in children. Now, disabled people worried about cuts to their Medicaid coverage will also have to worry whether the assistance they receive through independent living centers will continue.

“There’s nothing in here that explains how they are going to continue implementing these programs,” said Alison Barkoff, ACL’s acting administrator and assistant secretary for aging for most of the Biden administration. “Where exactly are they going to go? Who is the staff that’s going to implement them? Is this the first step in cutting further programs?”

A central part of ACL’s purpose has been oversight of state protection and advocacy agencies for disabled people, providing grants for approved independent living centers, support for employment programs for disabled people, and assistance with adult protective services—all with the goal of helping disabled and aging people live successfully within their communities, rather than in institutions.

“The real concern,” Barkoff says, “is that if ACL and its programs are spread across the [HHS] department, we will see more people forced into institutional settings, out of their own homes, out of their own communities.” A letter from the co-chairs of the Disability and Aging Collaborative, which consists of 62 member organizations that focus at least in part on disability and aging, cautions that the changes could result in “homelessness and long-lasting economic impacts.”

The Administration for Community Living was designed for “bringing programs together to make sure that there were efficiencies and synergies between aging and disability networks,” said Barkoff, now director of George Washington University’s health law and policy program. To do so, ACL coordinates with other HHS agencies like the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in areas like Home and Community-Based Services, and externally, with agencies like the Department of Transportation. ACL’s own workforce, Jacobs said, “is comprised of people with disabilities and older Americans.”

The ACL had not been a notable target of the Republicans before Thursday. On Wednesday, Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) even cosponsored a bipartisan bill aiming to require ACL “to provide peer support services for children, grandparents, and caregivers impacted by the opioid crisis.”

Even Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for an arch-conservative remaking of the federal government—which the Trump administration has consistently followed—counted on ACL to remain in place: it proposes distributing funds provided by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act through the agency. Now that President Donald Trump has started hollowing out the federal Department of Education with an eye to its abolition, Ives-Rublee and Jacobs want to know how the federal government will continue to serve disabled students. “How are they going to do that,” Ives-Rublee said, “when they basically destroyed ACL?”

But Ives-Rublee isn’t convinced that the Trump administration can necessarily make good on its plan. “It’s going to be very, very important for community members to come together and start filing lawsuits,” she said, “because this is incredibly illegal—to be reducing staff and reducing the ability for individuals with disabilities to receive services.”

While the HHS cuts, and the Trump administration’s wider slashing of federal agencies and services, are nominally about saving money, Jacobs doesn’t believe that eliminating the Administration for Community Living—which helps keep people out of nursing homes—will do so. “Community living costs our taxpayers a third of what it costs for people to live in institutional settings,” Jacobs said. “There are very economically sound reasons for ACL to continue to exist.”

Rebecca Denison expected to have a short life. She’d acquired HIV as a college student in the 1980s, she told the audience at an infectious disease conference in San Francisco earlier this month, and got an official diagnosis in 1990. “Back then,” she said matter of factly, “it was understood we were all going to die.” Within six years, that all changed. A new generation of drugs called protease inhibitors, when combined with other drugs, made the virus virtually undetectable in people with HIV, giving them a much greater chance of living to old age.

“Your work saved my life,” Denison, now an advocate for HIV-positive women, told the room.

She’s not alone. Over the last three decades, the development of preventative medicines, along with better testing and treatment, has cut new annual HIV infections by a staggering 60 percent globally. Now, a strategy of taking drugs before an HIV encounter—pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP—can reduce the risk of transmission during sex by up to 99 percent.

Then last year, scientists unveiled another critical development: In a clinical trial of more than 5,000 girls and young women in Africa, a twice-annual shot called lenacapavir, administered as PrEP, blocked HIV infection for 100 percent of the more than 2,000 participants who’d received it. Shortly after, in a 3,000-person multigender study across seven countries, 99.9 percent of participants who got lenacapavir did not acquire HIV. A drug that worked this well (and required an injection just once every six months, no less) had never been seen before.

“I was sobbing,” Anna Katomski, a former program analyst at the United States Agency for International Development, recalls when she first saw the results presented at a conference. Lenacapavir isn’t a vaccine; such a thing has eluded scientists for decades. But as Science put it in an article naming the drug its 2024 “ Breakthrough of the Year,” it may be the “next best thing”—a long-lasting, injectable, highly efficacious preventative. “There was just such a feeling of optimism,” Katomski says, adding, “It’s like, oh my God, we might have this tool that can really put an end to HIV.”

But now, that’s all at risk. As Denison warned in her speech at the conference in San Francisco, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who once said HIV was caused by the “gay lifestyle” and “poppers,” now leads the Department of Health and Human Services; thousands of government workers, including Katomski, have seen their jobs terminated or funding cut, and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, led by tech billionaire Elon Musk, shuttered USAID, a decision that officials say will hamper the country’s ability to fight malaria, polio, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and other diseases across the world. The clawbacks don’t end there: Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration is considering cutting funds at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for domestic HIV prevention, too.

Particularly worrisome for HIV researchers is the threat to PEPFAR—the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—a program created in 2003 by Republican President George W. Bush to bring HIV treatments to the world, largely delivered through USAID. On January 20, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to “ reevaluate and realign” the country’s foreign aid policies and called for a 90-day review of related programs. Shortly after, the Trump administration ordered the shutdown of operations at USAID, including work on PEPFAR. The administration has since backtracked, issuing a waiver allowing some PEPFAR programs to continue, including PrEP for pregnant and lactating women, but not for other “key populations” like LGBTQI people and sex workers, says Nidhi Bouri, the former deputy assistant administrator for global health at USAID. With foreign aid now under review through April 19, PEPFAR’s future is unclear.

This is a program that, throughout its 20-plus-year history, has saved an estimated 26 million lives. “It is the greatest act of humanity in the history of fighting infectious diseases that the world has ever known,” former PEPFAR head John Nkengasong recently told Science magazine.

So what would it mean to walk away from this great act of humanity? In short, says Dr. Monica Gandhi, who directs the University of California, San Francisco-Bay Area Center for AIDS Research, it would be a “disaster.” Without a renewal of US aid, UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima told the Associated Press last month, the world could see more than six times more new HIV infections by 2029 and a tenfold increase in deaths, to more than 6 million. Quite literally, it’s death by a thousand cuts.

Gandhi also worries about the possibility of HIV gaining resistance to drugs. As she explains, effectively treating HIV requires a daily combination of antiretroviral drugs. Without reliable access to clinics and aid, she warns, people may try to stretch their pill supply, taking medicine less often or sharing with family members. “If you do this kind of rationing, what it leads to is drug resistance.”

And PEPFAR isn’t the only HIV program at risk. Several high-profile studies have also shut down in response to Trump’s order. One set of trials known as the MATRIX study, a $125 million endeavor funded by USAID, was designed to evaluate new HIV prevention products for women, including a dissolvable vaginal film, a dissolvable vaginal insert, and a vaginal ring meant to prevent pregnancy and HIV transmission. Dr. Catherine Chappell, an assistant professor and OB-GYN at the University of Pittsburgh who helped lead the trial for the vaginal ring, says Trump’s order meant her phase I clinical trial was abruptly ended mid-data collection. “We had participants in South Africa that still had these [placebo] rings in their vaginas,” she says. Chappell worries that dropping the study midway through could have “irreparably damaged” researchers’ relationship with the community. “It is just completely unethical,” she says.

Similarly, Katomski, the former USAID analyst, had been in the midst of data analysis on the MOSAIC study, a three-part trial intended to evaluate various forms of PrEP (oral, injectable, and vaginal ring) in women and girls. When the study stopped, so did Katomski and her colleagues’ analysis and data dissemination to partners and participants. “It not only is such a violation of ethics codes that we follow as researchers,” she says, “but also, from a scientific standpoint, it’s just such a waste of US taxpayers’ dollars.” Before losing her job at USAID, Katomski’s research division was considering trials for lenacapavir, the 2024 “breakthrough” drug. “All of that’s just been cut off,” she says.

It’s unclear how, exactly, this recent shift in priorities happened. Over the last 20 years, PEPFAR has seen wide bipartisan support. In a 2023 op-ed published in The Hill, a group of senators, including Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), one of Trump’s most vocal supporters, urged the reauthorization of PEPFAR, writing: “We must come together once again to reauthorize PEPFAR and work to end AIDS as a public health threat by 2030. Now is the time to remind the world what American leadership can accomplish when we put our minds and hearts to it.” Even former Sen. Marco Rubio, now Trump’s secretary of state—who oversaw the purging of USAID—praised the agency’s work on “more than two dozen occasions” over the years, according to fact-checking site PolitiFact, “from hurricane relief to battling infectious diseases to aiding refugees.”

In short, after decades of research, science delivered the most effective preventative HIV drugs the world has ever seen—and the US is throwing up its hands and abandoning efforts to share them with those most in need. That isn’t just a moral failing, experts say, but also goes against the country’s self-interest. For decades, officials have seen foreign disease prevention as a form of “soft power”—it engenders trust within the global community while ensuring fewer infections both abroad and, ultimately, at home. “When you prevent disease transmission—whether that be HIV, whether that be tuberculosis, whether that be malaria—in one area of the world,” Katomski says, “it prevents that disease from coming back to the United States.”

All of this is to say, now is a uniquely bad time to walk away from HIV research and aid. As Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told conference attendees via video in San Francisco: “We can end the global HIV epidemic. We have the resources to do so.”

“Now is not the time to pull back,” he said, “for history will judge us harshly if we squander the opportunity that is before us.”

This story was originally published on the author’s substack, Field Notes with Alexander C Kaufman, to which you can subscribe here.

Last week, Greenlanders trudged through snow and ice to cast ballots in their most closely watched parliamentary elections in modern history—possibly ever.

Just two months earlier, Donald Trump had returned to power, vowing to achieve what American presidents had tried and failed to do before: bring the world’s largest island under Washington’s direct control. Since World War II, the United States has boasted a large security presence in the autonomous Arctic territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. During a speech before Congress a week before the March 11 election, Trump repeated his offer for Greenlanders to join the United States but vowed to take the island “one way or the other.”

Greenlandic voters overwhelmingly rejected the invitation. While virtually all major parties support independence from Denmark, the party that won the most seats in the legislature backs a slow separation from the Nordic nation, which provides the bulk of Greenland’s public funding.

More than anything, however, the election came down to fish.

The incumbent left-wing government placed new rules on who could obtain fishing permits. To better spread the wealth from the biggest industry among the island’s roughly 56,000 people, the government wanted to redistribute quotas to a greater number of fishermen over the next 10 years. The new quota system had yet to come into effect. But regulators pursued a strict methodology that barred members of the same family from obtaining competing permits. If one fisherman loaned money to another for a boat, for example, the two would count as a single unit under the new quota system.

That created problems, according to Christian Keldsen, director of the Greenland Business Association, the largest industry group on the island. “With the money I may have made in the industry, if I wanted to use that to finance others downstream, that would not be possible going forward,” he told me.

That made the political messaging from the pro-business Demokraatit party—whose platform calls for maximizing “personal freedom” and ensuring that the public sectors “never stand in the way of” private enterprise—appealing to voters.

In its manifesto, the center-right party—known as the Democrats—said the fisheries law will make the industry “less efficient.”

“The sad truth is that the new fisheries law will harm the earnings of individual fishermen overall, while the economy will also deteriorate,” the document reads. “This means that there will be less money to improve the healthcare system. Less money to raise the level of primary schools. Less money to ensure better daycare institutions. Less money for the elderly. Less money for sports. In short; less money to run the country in the best possible way.”

The Democrats gained seven seats in Greenland’s single-chamber legislature, the Inatsisartut, seizing roughly one-third of the 31-seat parliament.

Keldsen said the party won a clear mandate to reform the fisheries law. What the new government does besides that depends largely on which party the Democrats form a coalition with.

The centrist party Naleraq, which is more pro-American and advocates the fastest-possible pathway to independence from Denmark, doubled its share of the parliament to eight seats, vaulting the party into second place.

“If you look at the Democrats, they focused on things that are important to people—housing, health care, education and growing the economy,” said Mads Qvist Frederiksen, the executive director of the Arctic Economic Council, a regional business group that includes Greenlandic industry.

“Independence from Denmark and Donald Trump did not take up a lot of the campaign,” he told me by phone. “But for Naleraq, it did.”

The party managed to secure most of the votes in the less populous northern reaches of Greenland, where its populist message played better than in the more populous, cosmopolitan and industrialized south. Given its strength in the new parliament, it’s a natural opposition party.

That makes an alliance between the Democrats and the left-wing Inuit Ataqatigiit party, which controlled the outgoing government, more likely. Another potential coalition partner may be the pro-Denmark Atassut party, which came in fifth place.

But Keldsen warned that the Democrats are “fairly open” to “all scenarios.”

“If you take the Naleraq situation, they’re more aligned on business, but they stand far from each other on sovereignty,” he said. “With the IA, they’re very close on sovereignty, but very far apart on business.”

Siumut—a center-left party that held the junior role in the outgoing governing coalition—fell from second to fourth place this time, likely because once-loyal voters affected by the fisheries law jumped ship to the Democrats this time. That could make a tie-up with the Democrats harder.

The one thing uniting all parties: Opposition to becoming part of the United States.

In a joint statement issued on March 13, two days after the election, the heads of all five parties condemned Trump’s “repeated statements about annexation and control of Greenland.”

“As party chairmen, we find this behavior unacceptable to friends and allies in a defense alliance,” they wrote.

It’s not hard to see why. Survey data on public opinion in Greenland was scarce ahead of the election. But 85 percent of Greenlanders opposed joining the US in a poll taken in January, while just 56 percent backed independence.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s remaking of the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) entered a new phase on Thursday, when officials announced that the department’s workforce would shrink by another 10,000 staff to comply with President Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s orders to drastically shrink the federal government.

HHS announced that the “dramatic restructuring” of the agency will include cuts to offices including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Combined with HHS’s other efforts to reduce its workforce—the buyout offers it recently made to employees and its January “fork in the road email” that offered federal workers eight months’ pay to resign—the department’s overall workforce will go from 82,000 to 62,000 full-time employees, a reduction of nearly 25 percent. In a six-minute video posted to X detailing the plans, Kennedy acknowledged that the cuts will bring about “a painful period for HHS.”

We are streamlining HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective. We will eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments, while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for a Healthy America or AHA. This… pic.twitter.com/BlQWUpK3u7

— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) March 27, 2025

The agency offered some details on the specific offices that will see cuts, including the NIH, which will lose about 1,200 employees; the FDA, which will lose about 3,500 employees, which HHS claims “will not affect drug, medical device, or food reviewers, nor will it impact inspectors”; the CMS, which will lose about 300 employees, which the agency says “will not impact Medicare and Medicaid services”; and the CDC, which will lose about 2,400.

HHS’ 28 divisions will be reduced to 15, to include a new division called the Administration for a Healthy America, which “will centralize core functions such as Human Resources, Information Technology, Procurement, External Affairs, and Policy,” according to the HHS news release; that office will also now include the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), which HHS says “will break down artificial divisions between similar programs.”

The press release from HHS also announced the dismantling of the Administration for Community Living, which oversees vital programs and services for disabled and aging people. It includes independent living centers and protection and advocacy agencies, which were established by Congress and perform important tasks such as investigating claims of abuse in group homes for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities; in 2022, ACL also unveiled a National Strategy to Support Family Caregivers. In a LinkedIn post, former ACL acting administrator and Assistant Secretary for Aging Alison Barkoff said that ACL “has been incredibl[y] effective, with lean staffing and programs with incredible returns on investments.” Its dismantling, Barkoff wrote, was “yet another” move that hurt disabled and older adults, in addition to ongoing attacks on Medicaid and an executive order hollowing out the federal Department of Education as a prelude to abolishing it altogether.

While the press release said that programs under ACL will be reorganized, there will likely be disruptions along the way. “We are deeply concerned that these HHS organizational changes and workforce reductions may undermine the momentum and implementation of our nation’s first-ever National Strategy to Support Family Caregivers,” said Jason Resendez, President and CEO of the National Alliance for Caregiving, in a press release.

HHS will also shutter five of its regional offices, which amount to half of the total. It is not immediately clear how this will affect the agency’s return-to-office mandate, which required employees within 50 miles of an HHS office to begin working in-person five days a week; those who live more than 50 miles from an HHS building have been ordered to report to any federal office building—which, as previously reported, led federal workers to question how offices would manage the influx of in-person employees.

Spokespeople for HHS did not immediately respond to specific questions from Mother Jones about which regional offices would close, the 13 specific divisions that will be consolidated, and how many, if any, employees of the ACL would lose their jobs.

The department claims that, in total, the measures will save the agency $1.8 billion annually. The agency said it would also appoint a new Assistant Secretary for Enforcement “to combat waste, fraud, and abuse in federal health programs.”

“Over time, bureaucracies like HHS become wasteful and inefficient even when most of their staff are dedicated and competent civil servants,” Kennedy said in a statement. “This overhaul will be a win-win for taxpayers and for those that HHS serves.”

Some public health experts, though, believe otherwise.

Dr. Tom Frieden, former CDC director under President Obama, said in a post on X: “CDC has been the flagship of public health for generations, pursuing its core mission of saving lives and protecting people from health threats of all kinds. A weaker CDC means a sicker America.”

Jill Rosenthal, director of public health policy at the nonpartisan Center for American Progress, said in a statement: “This is not ‘streamlining’ work—it’s slashing what Americans across the country rely on to keep them, their families, and their communities healthy. This move to gut HHS will bring to a screeching halt crucial efforts to ensure Americans that our food is safe, drugs and medical devices are up to standards, our family members can access needed health services, and our communities are protected from health emergencies.”

Some also find it hard to believe that the cuts will not affect the work of the targeted offices. “I worry how losing 3,500 people at the FDA will ensure drug, medical devices, and food are still inspected and approved efficiently,” one CDC researcher told us. “Those function areas were already understaffed,” she said, adding that it was also unclear how cuts to the FDA would help achieve HHS’ new stated goals to tackle “chronic illness by focusing on safe, wholesome food, clean water, and the elimination of environmental toxins.”

“I just don’t see how things can operate the way they are now with 10-20,000 less people,” said an employee of the Administration for Children and Families.

An NIH employee said he saw the news as proof that “RFK Jr. is carrying out the marching orders of President Musk with total disregard for how these ‘changes’ will impact public health and the public health system.”

“He’s not a doctor. He’s not a scientist,” the NIH employee said of the HHS head. “In fact, just the opposite. He’s a conspiracy theorist.”

“This Make America Healthy Again nonsense will do just the opposite of what they’re claiming it will do,” he added. “It will make us sicker. Mentally and physically.”

Multiple HHS employees told us on Thursday morning that they had received no internal announcement of, nor further information on, the planned cuts, and had instead learned about them from the news media. Due to the lack of detail on which employees would lose their jobs, according to those staffers, the potential impacts of the cuts on public health and the agency’s mission were still impossible to determine. Several said they expected to receive more information on Friday about how their offices would be affected by the changes.

An NIH scientific review officer said the lack of internal communication was “part of why we have been mired in such uncertainty and chaos.”

“We often learn [about changes] from outside sources,” like the media or former colleagues, she said. She characterized the lack of communication as “yet another move that feels designed to be demoralizing and stressful for the workforce.”

“It’s not clear what our leadership knows, or if they have been consulted,” she added. “Without that, it’s difficult to imagine changes being effective and efficient and in service of our mission.”

Even without knowing whether they will be impacted, employees are bracing for the worst. “The mood is pretty awful,” another ACF worker said. “Supervisors told us we could go home if we needed to.”

On the night of the Oscars, the long line outside of a lower Manhattan nightclub snaked around the block. Young and fashionable, the crowd was hoping to get into an unusual political fundraiser—a combination panel discussion, DJ set, and award show watch party—benefiting the New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old socialist.

It would be difficult to understand the various downtown personalities who had banded together to throw this fundraiser unless you, like most of those in the audience, were chronically online. There were stalwarts of the “ dirtbag left,” including hosts of the podcasts Chapo Trap House and TrueAnon. Others were drawn from the stylish fringes of the city’s arts and literature scene, not typically a contingent known for its earnest support of political candidates. But as one of the hosts, activist and former Disney Channel star Rowan Blanchard, told New York Magazine, “He’s different.”

Mamdani, who represents Astoria in the state Assembly, is currently defying most expectations for how far a socialist can go in the mayoral race. The slick, highly produced videos touting his core policy proposals— free bus fare, a rent freeze for all rent-stabilized tenants, free childcare up to age 5, and city-owned grocery stores—have monopolized online attention. As Mayor Eric Adams struggles to gain reelection momentum and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo commands a 20-point lead in polls, Mamdani has risen above a slew of more established progressive challengers. He is the first, and so far the only, primary candidate to announce that he has hit the cap for public matching funds, raising almost $1.5 million from 18,000 donors.

Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran political strategist based in New York City, had a simple explanation for Mamdani’s emergence as the leading progressive contender: “He’s not boring! He’s handsome, articulate, and his ideas are very romantic and interesting.” But, Sheinkopf said, the central question was this: “Does his profile fit the moment?”

As Mamdani gains ground across the city, so has the democratic socialist cause. The city’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter has added 1,500 members—about a quarter increase—since last October, when it endorsed Mamdani. “We’re not only winning elections with downwardly mobile college-educated people,” said Grace Mausser, co-chair of the local chapter. “We’re becoming more diverse.”

Mamdani is betting that his platform will do more than galvanize disaffected young leftists from gentrified corridors of the city. His theory is that the saliency of universal services will win over working-class voters, particularly those who have become disillusioned by the Democratic party. Whether or not he succeeds, Mamdani’s candidacy is a test of the widespread appeal of a left-wing economic populist platform, at a time when Democrats desperately need to find a better message.

“The directness of our politics requires no translation,” Mamdani told me. “Our campaign is driven by a belief that, while there may not be an ideological majority in New York City, there is a majority of New Yorkers who feel left behind by the economic policies of this mayor and by politics today.”

Earlier this month, I met Mamdani at a Ramadan street market in Astoria’s Little Egypt neighborhood, the heart of its Middle Eastern community. Mamdani is a practicing Muslim, and Ramadan is his favorite time of the year. But, he told me, “calling people for money when you can’t drink water is quite the experience.”

A few hours earlier, he had hopped off the Amtrak from Albany, where the state legislature is in session, and gone straight to a Ramadan iftar. But Mamdani couldn’t stick around to actually eat and broke his fast while walking to the subway, on his way to a fundraiser hosted by Cynthia Nixon, the Sex and the City actress and onetime gubernatorial candidate. By the time we met at 10 p.m., Mamdani was 30 minutes late, but as upbeat as ever.

The mayoral race has turned Mamdani into a local celebrity in Astoria. As we made our way through the few blocks of Steinway Street that had been closed for food vendors, he was recognized at every turn. Mamdani is boyishly good-looking, with a kind of class-clown appeal. At the market, a significant portion of his supporters were young women hoping to take a selfie. But many also expressed a deep sense of identification with Mamdani, who would be both the first South Asian and first Muslim mayor of New York City. A refrain I heard throughout the night was excitement that “someone like you” and “one of us” was running for office.

Mamdani’s surging popularity seems to be because of—rather than in spite of—factors that would be considered liabilities in the traditional calculus of New York City politics. He has steadfastly condemned Israel’s war on Gaza, even as pro-Israel PACs have spent millions to sink progressive candidates nationwide. Mamdani likes to joke that, as a Muslim and a socialist, he is “no stranger to bad PR.”

Several days earlier, a recent Columbia graduate and legal permanent resident named Mahmoud Khalil had been detained by ICE over his pro-Palestine activism. Afterward, when Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, visited GOP lawmakers at the state capitol, Mamdani decided to confront him. The ensuing video of Mamdani pushing against state troopers and shouting at Homan, “How many more New Yorkers will you detain?” went viral.

At the market, some seemed to relish in his display of anger—one person said to Mamdani, “I don’t know how you didn’t punch Homan in the face.” It seemed rare for a politician to express the outrage that so many felt around the Trump administration. Mamdani told me he hadn’t anticipated how emotional he would be. “[Homan] walked that hallway with such a smirk, eating an apple,” Mamdani said. “So I asked him the questions that many people want answered.”

As the video spread, Mamdani’s legislative offices were inundated with racist messages, while fundraising poured in. The campaign said that it had raised nearly $250,000 in the day or so after the video was posted.

Mamdani has something of a dream pedigree for a New York City leftist. His mother, Mira Nair, is an internationally renowned writer and director. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a prominent scholar of post-colonialism and African history. They met when Nair interviewed Mahmood on a research trip to Kampala, Uganda, for her 1991 film Mississippi Masala, starring Denzel Washington. Zohran was born in Kampala and moved to New York City at seven, when his father took a posting at Columbia University.

By his own admission, Mamdani wasn’t the most dilligent student. “There were moments of seriousness that increased with time,” he told me. But his family history—his father was expelled from Uganda under the dictator Idi Amin—taught him that “whether or not you care about politics, politics sure cares about you.”

After Mamdani graduated from Bowdoin College with an Africana Studies major, he returned to New York City and worked on a series of long-shot progressive campaigns. In 2018, he managed journalist Ross Barkan’s unsuccessful bid for state Senate. Even then, Barkan told me, there was a sense that Mamdani would not be out-campaigned: “He wanted you out at 6 a.m., and you weren’t going home until late at night.” Though Mamdani was willing and able to debate even the most “rabid right-winger,” Barkan said, he also understood that “if you can’t persuade, you’ve got to show you have a backbone.”

All the while, Mamdani had an intermittent career as a self-described “B-list rapper.” He curated the soundtrack for his mother’s 2016 Disney film Queen of Katwe and, along with a childhood friend and collaborator, produced some of its music. In 2019, under the moniker Mr. Cardamom, he released the song “Nani,” with a music video featuring the Indian actress and chef Madhur Jaffrey.

Mamdani brought that penchant for showmanship to the state Assembly after being elected in 2020, ousting a popular incumbent. As a legislator, Mamdani was skilled at winning over powerful allies. In 2021, he helped the taxi drivers’ union win debt relief, with the backing of New York Sen. Chuck Schumer. When union members went on a hunger strike to try to force a deal, Mamdani fasted alongside them all 15 days. And, in 2023, Mamdani and the state senate’s deputy majority leader introduced an eight-bill package to “Fix the MTA,” in part by dramatically increasing funding, and won a free bus fare pilot.

When Mamdani announced his mayoral campaign last October, he was just wrapping up his second term in office, and very few New Yorkers knew his name. Politico reported that some DSA-aligned lawmakers had even tried to dissuade the organization from endorsing him. One thought that his candidacy was so doomed as to be potentially “ruinous” to the democratic socialist cause at large.

That doesn’t appear to be likely. Though there are still three months left until the June primary—and many voters won’t really start paying attention until May—a recent poll shows Mamdani 10 points ahead of the next progressive candidate, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander.

At the market in Astoria, a young man named Mikey told us that he had seen Mamdani’s TikTok about making bus fare free. He asked Mamdani, “What do you tell people who say your ideas are a little…” Mikey made an expansive gesture. “Well, I don’t want to say ‘unrealistic,’ but…”

Mamdani is used to defending the feasibility of his economic proposals. One city calculation put the cost of eliminating bus fare at $652 million annually. He has said that providing universal childcare up to age five would likely cost at least $5 billion annually. When talking to Mikey, Mamdani brought up the sheer size of the city’s budget—$112.4 billion this year—and argued that funding is more a reflection of political willpower than actual fiscal constraints. After all, he often points out, the NYPD spent nearly $1.1 billion on overtime last year.

But a significant portion of the city budget is dependent on the governor and state legislature. (There’s a reason that mayors lobby state lawmakers for funding on “ Tin Cup Day.”) Mamdani has proposed paying for some of the programs through raising the state’s corporate tax rate—which would certainly be met with considerable resistance in Albany—and removing property tax exemptions for institutions like Columbia and New York University.

Though all the Democratic primary candidates have made affordability a core issue, Mamdani is hoping that the straightforward nature of his economic proposals will help him break through. “Voters pay attention to a TV ad or a mailer for 10 seconds—if you’re lucky,” Trip Yang, a New York City Democratic political consultant, said. “You need to get your message out there immediately.”

Mamdani has also argued that his economic policies are resonating with outer-borough voters who drifted away from Democrats, some toward Trump. In a video filmed after November’s election, Mamdani went to those parts of Queens and the Bronx with the biggest shifts and asked people why they voted for Trump or didn’t vote at all. Many pointed to rising costs and described their frustration with the Democratic party. One man said he didn’t vote “because I don’t believe in the system anymore.”

Mamdani isn’t the only one who thinks that this opens an opportunity for a candidate outside of the establishment, especially one with bold ideas. “The details of policies are not what moves most people,” Ana Maria Archila, co-chair of the New York Working Families Party, told me. “What moves people is a sense of direction and the perception that someone will actually fight for them.”

A few weeks ago, I spent an afternoon talking to New Yorkers around downtown Brooklyn. Few could name any mayoral candidates besides Cuomo and Adams. When I described Mamdani’s platform, I was sometimes met with a deep skepticism bred from too many unfulfilled campaign promises. I spoke to Virginia McRae, a retiree in her late seventies, after a Sunday service at her Baptist church in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill neighborhood. She told me that even though affordability and accessibility were priorities for her, “it doesn’t feel like anyone can address these problems.”

Mamdani is beginning to reach some voters, though. Taahira, a consultant in her early forties, said that Mamdani had vaguely stood out during a local arts organization’s candidate forum. He seemed to care about everyday people and operate beyond the sway of “corporate dollars,” she told me. Taahira was cautiously optimistic that recent events—including the Trump administration’s crackdown on student protesters—have forced New Yorkers to “acknowledge that there must be a shift” in the political ecosystem. But could Mamdani really become the next mayor? She shrugged. “Time will tell.”

An employee at one government-run national research lab spent half a day this week cancelling orders for equipment—time that, as a technician, he could have spent running experiments.

That worker is one of many whose “PCard,” or purchasing card, will be revoked at the end of the month—part of an internal order by the Department of Energy to reduce the number of such cardholders across the system by two-thirds. Effectively an official credit or debit card, PCards are used by the national laboratories, which conduct research on a wide range of scientific and technical subjects ranging from environmental management to national security, to save valuable time and streamline transactions. But to the Trump administration, the cards are further evidence that there’s an epidemic of overspending on science—so they’re on the DOGE chopping block, whatever the consequences.

The technician’s name and the laboratory employing him have been withheld to ensure his safety. He is passionate about the work he does in the field of research: “things [that] have benefited us so much over the years.” He received notice via email, which Mother Jones has reviewed, citing the upcoming changes.

The email conceded that the decrease in PCard holders is “significant” and listed the remaining employees authorized to use the cards. While the email said more announcements would be coming, there was no acknowledgement of how the changes would disrupt workflows or research.

This is not the first time the administration has targeted government cards. At the end of February, the Trump administration ordered all credit cards frozen by March 26th in his “Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Cost Efficiency Initiative” executive order. The order, which was not cited in the Department of Energy email correspondence reviewed, excludes disaster relief or other critical services as determined by the agency head. The National Park Service and parts of the Pentagon were already hit with $1 PCard limits.

Rather than yielding savings, suspending the cards seems to have already cost both time and efficiency on researchers’ part: Some orders the technician had already made—to purchase materials required for ongoing experiments—wouldn’t have been charged for several weeks, forcing him to cancel them so they wouldn’t charge a card that would be defunct.

That just kicks the can down the road: one of the remaining or new cardholders will have to refile the orders. Some have little to no experience with the process, says the technician: “We may eventually get what we need, but it’s just going to push everything back. There’s going to be a lot of delays.”

That felt, he said, like the “opposite of efficiency.” There are already processes in place—not just in that lab, but everywhere government purchasing cards are used—to ensure that there isn’t fraud or misuse of funds. Every purchase requires a paper trail that is reviewed. “If there’s even something slightly off, the accounting department is going to contact me back,” the technician explains.

To the technician blowing the whistle on the changes, it looks more like a method to limit and throw up hurdles to scientific research, which has been a general goal of the Trump administration. He points out that the research funding has already been allocated—the cards do not, in fact, draw on some kind of unchecked scientific slush fund.

“This attack on science and research is not just going to just hinder us from advancing,” the technician said, “but actually set us back.” In that sense, the administration is achieving its goal: there is “apprehension” in the lab these days, he says, and colleagues he works with are fairly certain their contracts will not be renewed.

The policy is only succeeding in “creating a bottleneck,” the technician laments. “We’re going from a five-lane highway down to a two-lane highway.” He pauses. “I should say, two lanes [as in] one way in each direction.”

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

Cities looking to eliminate fossil fuels in buildings have notched a decisive court victory. Last week, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by plumbing and building trade groups against a New York City ban on natural gas in new buildings. The decision is the first to explicitly disagree with a previous ruling that struck down Berkeley, California’s first-in-the-nation gas ban. That order, issued by the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in 2023 and upheld again last year, prompted cities across the country to withdraw or delay laws modeled after the Berkeley ordinance.

While New York City’s law functions differently from Berkeley’s, legal experts say that this month’s decision provides strong legal footing for all types of local policies to phase out gas in buildings—and could encourage cities to once again take ambitious action.

“It’s a clear win in that regard, because the 9th Circuit decision has had a really chilling effect on local governments,” said Amy Turner, director of the Cities Climate Law Initiative at Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “Now there’s something else to point to, and a good reason for hope for local governments that may have back-burnered their building electrification plans to bring those to the forefront again.”

In 2021, New York City adopted Local Law 154, which sets an air emissions limit for indoor combustion of fuels within new buildings. Under the law, the burning of “any substance that emits 25 kilograms or more of carbon dioxide per million British thermal units of energy” is prohibited. That standard effectively bans gas-burning stoves, furnaces, and water heaters, and any other fossil-fuel powered appliances. Instead, real estate developers have to install electric appliances like induction stoves and heat pumps. The policy went into effect in 2024 for buildings under seven stories, and will apply to taller buildings starting in 2027.

Berkeley’s law, on the other hand, banned the installation of gas piping in new construction. The first-of-its-kind policy was passed in 2019 and inspired nearly a hundred local governments across the country to introduce similar laws. But the ordinance quickly faced a lawsuit by the California Restaurant Association, which argued that gas stoves were essential for the food service industry. In April 2023, the 9th Circuit court ruled in favor of the restaurant industry, holding that federal energy efficiency standards preempted Berkeley’s policy.

In January 2024, a petition by the city of Berkeley to rehear the case on the 9th Circuit was denied. The denial included a detailed dissent by eight of the 29 judges on the 9th Circuit, who argued that the court’s ruling had been decided “erroneously” and “urge[d] any future court” considering the same argument “not to repeat the panel opinion’s mistakes.” Writing a dissent at all is unusual for an action as procedural as denying a rehearing, Turner noted. “It was clearly drafted to give a road map to other courts to find differently than the 9th Circuit did.”

One year later, that’s exactly what happened. In the New York City lawsuit, building industry groups and a union whose members work on gas infrastructure used the same logic that prevailed in the Berkeley case, arguing that the city’s electrification law is preempted by energy efficiency standards under the federal Energy Policy Conservation Act of 1975 (EPCA).

This law sets national efficiency standards for major household appliances like furnaces, stoves, and clothes dryers. Under the law, states and cities can’t set their own energy conservation standards that would contradict federal ones. The trade groups argued that EPCA should also preempt any local laws, like New York City’s, that would prevent the use of fossil-fuel powered appliances that meet national standards.

“By design, the city set that level so low as to ban all gas and oil appliances,” the groups wrote in their complaint. “The city’s gas ban thus prohibits all fuel gas appliances, violating federal law” and “presents a significant threat for businesses in New York City that sell, install, and service gas plumbing and infrastructure.”

Citing the 9th Circuit’s dissent, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed those claims. The plaintiffs’ argument broadens the scope of EPCA beyond reasonable bounds, District Judge Ronnie Abrams wrote in the court’s opinion. Regulating fuel use within certain buildings is standard practice in states and cities, she noted: New York City, for example, has banned the indoor use of kerosene space heaters for decades. “Were plaintiffs correct about the scope of EPCA, these vital safety regulations would likewise be preempted—an absurd result that the court must avoid,” Abrams wrote.

The decision could help reassure some states and cities that withdrew electrification plans after the Berkeley case, said Dror Ladin, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, a nonprofit that submitted an amicus brief on behalf of local environmental groups in the lawsuit. “This ruling demonstrates that there’s absolutely no reason to interpret the Berkeley decision so broadly,” he said. The argument brought forth by trade groups “is one that would bar a whole host of health and safety regulations, and alter the power of cities and states in a way that we’ve never seen in this country.”

By agreeing with the 9th Circuit dissent’s interpretation of EPCA, last week’s decision bolsters all types of electrification policies, including the one in New York City and those modeled after Berkeley, Turner noted. “This decision we’ve just gotten from the Southern District is more broadly protective,” she said. “Even if the air emissions route is not right for a city for whatever reason, other variations of a building electrification requirement or incentive could pass muster.”

The trade groups behind the lawsuit have said they will appeal the decision. Meanwhile, legal challenges using the same arguments brought against Berkeley’s gas ban have been launched against New York’s statewide building code and electrification policies in places like Denver; Montgomery County, Maryland; and Washington, DC.

Judges in those cases will inevitably refer to the Berkeley decision and last week’s ruling by the Southern District of New York, said Ladin—and he hopes they’ll give more weight to the latter. “Berkeley is not a well-reasoned decision, and this judge saw right through it, and I think many other judges will see through it too.”