As an outbreak of measles drags on in Texas, and wary officials monitor the bird flu, the Trump administration is reportedly offering $25,000 buyouts to most employees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

A purported copy of the buyout email, shared by a Rolling Stone reporter on social media, suggests it was sent out Friday night, directing employees to reach out to their HR offices by day’s end next Friday if they want to accept the offer.

The email says the Office of Personnel Management—the same office that sent the “what did you get done this week” email championed by Elon Musk, unleashing chaos across the federal workforce—had approved HHS to offer “voluntary separation incentive payments to a broad population of HHS employees.” OPM’s website also notes that “agencies that are downsizing or restructuring” can offer buyouts up to $25,000 to employees of at least there years who are in good standing. (Thousands of probationary, earlier-career federal workers have already lost their jobs.)

HHS is the vast and highly consequential umbrella agency overseeing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Food and Drug Administration (FDA), among others. The Associated Press reports that workers in all three of these agencies got the email, although it’s unclear how many of HHS’s more than 80,000 overall employees received it. (HHS representatives did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones sent on Sunday.)

With anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at the helm, the ability of HHS to carry out its core functions has become uncertain. Last year, as my colleague Anna Merlan reported at the time, RFK said he would fire and replace 600 people at the NIH on his first day as HHS Secretary. Kennedy did not wind up doing that, but Friday’s email signals the first large-scale effort to drastically reduce the HHS workforce.

The buyout offer comes at a pivotal moment for public health: The CDC is currently monitoring a bird flu outbreak (70 US cases so far, and one death) and a measles outbreak (more than 220 cases, most in Texas and New Mexico, and two deaths). The Republicans’ proposed cuts to Medicaid could affect many of the 72 million low-income, elderly, and disabled people who rely on it for coverage. Medicaid, the nation’s largest health insurance program, is administered by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is also part of HHS. (Trump has nominated celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz to run it.)

Logic, though, has never stopped Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency from seeking to cull federal workers who are tackling problems and providing crucial services to Americans. As I reported on Friday, DOGE is pursuing massive cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the midst of a housing affordability crisis and record homelessness.

HHS workers, at the very least, will have no shortage of colleagues to commiserate with.

Are you an HHS employee? If so, Mother Jones wants to hear about how you are reacting to the buyout offer and how it will affect the work of you and your colleagues. Share your thoughts with us here and one of our reporters may reach out to you to learn more.

Here’s something you won’t read in Mother Jones too often: President Donald Trump was actually right about something—or at least, more right than one of his cabinet secretaries.

In a rare moment of honesty during a Fox News interview that aired Sunday morning, Trump declined to rule out the possibility that the 25 percent tariffs he imposed on Mexico and Canada this past week (and then paused—again), could trigger a recession.

When Sunday Morning Futures host Maria Bartiromo asked if Trump expected a recession this year, he replied, “I hate to predict things like that. There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big—we’re bringing wealth back to America.”

“It takes a little time, it takes a little time,” he added.

Indeed, as Bartiromo pointed out, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta estimates that GDP is expected to shrink by 2.4 percent in the first quarter of 2025—a decline of nearly 5 points from the bank’s positive estimates from mid-February, before the tariffs took effect.

Today exclusively on @SundayFutures with @MariaBartiromo, President Trump @POTUS @realDonaldTrump spoke about tariffs and the economy.@FoxNews pic.twitter.com/wT6zo49wyU

— SundayMorningFutures (@SundayFutures) March 9, 2025

One person who probably was not watching Trump’s interview? Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who was more optimistic in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, saying that Americans should “absolutely not” brace for a recession—despite the fact that, as host Kristen Welker noted, major banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have recently said there is a higher likelihood of it.

“Donald Trump is a winner. He’s going to win for the American people. That’s just the way it’s going to be. There’s going to be no recession in America,” Lutnick told Welker. He conceded that “some products that are made foreign might be more expensive” but argued that “American products will get cheaper, and that’s the point.”

But as this past week has proved, it’s no so simple: When Trump’s tariffs took effect on Mexico and Canada, the stock market took a nosedive and Canadian officials said they would impose retaliatory tariffs, ultimately leading Trump to pause the tariffs, as he’d already done once before—though he has also said global retaliatory tariffs will take effect on April 2.

Economists have warned that tariffs, which are taxes countries levy on imported goods, will be passed on to consumers. That’s because tariffs raise the wholesale cost of finished goods like cars, clothing, produce, and toys, and also the cost of raw materials for farming, manufacturing, and refining (such as Canadian heavy crude, steel, lumber, fertilizer, gypsum, auto parts, etc). Sellers may eat some portion of the increase, but the rest will be reflected in higher prices, economists predict. What’s more, data from Lutnick’s own department showed that retail sales plunged in January.

Spokespeople for the White House and the Commerce Department did not immediately respond to an email on Sunday asking why Trump and Lutnick are not on the same page. In any case, the boss appears to be right on this one.

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

It was raining and the sparkling lights of the City of London shone back from the cold, wet pavement as two young men made their way through streets deserted save for a few police and private security. In the sleeping heart of the global financial system, they felt eyes on them from the city’s network of surveillance cameras, but hoped their disguise of high-vis vests and hoods hiding their faces would conceal them.

Reaching Lime Street, they stopped by a maintenance hole and looked around to make sure no one was watching. One took off the cover, located a bundle of black cables and started hacking away. Hours later, an email was circulated to news desks: “Internet cut off to hundreds of insurers in climate-motivated sabotage.”

Five years ago, climate activists from Extinction Rebellion (XR) and the school strikes movement believed getting huge numbers of people on the streets could persuade the powerful to change course on the climate crisis. Then protesters from groups such as Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil (JSO) put their bodies and freedom on the line to disrupt business as usual, in an effort to concentrate minds.

Now, with climate breakdown worsening and fossil fuel emissions showing no signs of peaking, let alone abating, some of them say it is time to escalate the campaign of disruption, by carrying out clandestine acts of sabotage against the corporations they see as responsible for the destruction of the climate.

In a manifesto published on the WordPress blogging platform, Shut the System (STS), the group that claimed credit for London action that took place in January, says it is “kickstart[ing] a new phase of the climate activist movement, aiming to shut down key actors in the fossil fuel economy.”

“We vow to wage a campaign of sabotage targeting the tools, property and machinery of those most responsible for global warming, escalating until they accept our demands for an end to all support for fossil fuel expansion.”

The Guardian spoke over the Signal encrypted messaging service to an activist from STS. He did not reveal his identity and the Guardian was unable to verify his claims.

He said new laws further criminalizing disruptive protests had made traditional, accountable methods of activism increasingly unsustainable, and a clandestine approach increasingly attractive. He pointed to the case of activists from JSO who received sentences of four and five years—reduced last week after an appeal—for organizing road blocks on the M25.

“If you want to do anything that is disruptive, the penalty is pretty massive now, and so these draconian laws mean it is hard to get very much pressure…by following the kind of things that [Extinction Rebellion] and JSO have done in the past, because people will be arrested and put away for a long time,” he said.

“You can’t just keep doing that,” he said. “The actual number of people who are committed to risk jail time to do this are pretty small in number.”

STS is not the first group to take clandestine direct action against fossil fuel targets. In 2022, unknown activists targeted a pipeline being built to funnel jet fuel from Southampton to west London, cutting holes in the pipe and severing hydraulic cables on a construction vehicle.

This month, another group claimed responsibility for drilling holes in the tires of more than 100 SUVs parked at Land Rover dealerships in Cornwall—a repeat of an action carried out last year. And the Tyre Extinguishers, a campaign group that urges people to take autonomous clandestine action against SUVs in cities by deflating their tires, have targeted hundreds of vehicles through activists heeding their call.

In the City of London, the action of STS, though carefully planned, had minimal impact. “We did our research, as best as we could and we planned about what sort of cables to be looking for, how they might be laid out, and we taught ourselves about opening up these manholes,” the activist said. “We did everything we could to maximize safety for everyone, and then in my small group we found targets and divvied them up.”

A cybersecurity expert said there had been “significant slowdown of internet speed” in the area, but the network continued to function.

“We had varying success throughout the UK,” the activist admitted. STS also claimed actions in Birmingham, Sheffield and Leeds. “I am aware of people in other areas that did this…where they then called up the next day and the phone lines were down. There is obviously a learning curve to these things.”

But actions such as this pale in comparison with the scale of those taken by climate activists abroad. In Germany, activists last year staged attacks against gas pipelines, while others escalated a campaign against concrete with two arson attacks on a Cemex plant in Berlin.

But it is in France where the tactic has been most widely used, with actions ranging from activists filling the holes in golf courses with cement to a full-scale riot when a crowd descended on the construction site of an agricultural reservoir in the country’s drought-stricken south, intent on dismantling it.

Andreas Malm, an associate professor of human ecology at Lund University, said, “France really is the one case in recent years…where you’ve had a radical mass movement that has actually been quite successful—and this is the only movement that has also deployed sabotage consistently as a tactic.”

Four years ago Malm, a Swedish social ecologist, penned How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a polemic on the future of effective climate action and an exploration of the tactic of sabotage. It has become a set text in the movement, and even spawned a movie adaptation.

Malm says that, with issues such as Israel’s wanton destruction of Gaza taking up activist energy, and the energy crisis precipitated by Russia’s war in Ukraine potentially discrediting those targeting fossil fuels as “stooges of Putin,” militant action for the climate has been on a downswing.

Nevertheless, he still sees it as the only sustainable route for climate activists increasingly facing a severe pushback against non-violent disruptive protest.

“One mistake made by the offshoots of XR [such as Just Stop Oil]—they started escalating a little bit and doing slightly more radical stuff…while still sticking to the protocol to wait until the cops come and arrest them,” he said. “If you want to actually escalate and do real material damage to fossil fuel property you cannot stick to this idea. You have to do this without offering yourself as a kind of virtue sacrifice.”

The STS activist who spoke to the Guardian did not see the group’s actions as more extreme than the kinds of things already carried out by other groups. “The only difference is that they stayed around to be arrested,” he said.

The measles outbreak underway across West Texas and New Mexico has intensified, sickening 228 people, and killing two, a child and an adult. Amid the worsening public health emergency, a local historian in Seminole, Texas, Tina Siemens, has been helping a holistic medicine clinic raise money to distribute unproven remedies to families affected by the outbreak.

The same activist told Mother Jones that she had a phone call last week with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to understand the unique health challenges in the Mennonite community.

Siemens said she had been working with a clinic called Veritas Wellness in Lubbock, Texas, to distribute medications, including Vitamin C, cod liver oil, and the inhaled steroid budesonide. Last week, an online fundraiser appeared to collect donations that it says will be “used to defray the cost of essential vitamins, supplements, and medicines necessary to treat children enduring complications from the measles virus and other illnesses.” The fundraiser’s website says the funds will go to Tina Siemens and it lists its creator as Brian Hooker, a biologist and the chief scientific officer of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine advocacy group that Kennedy helmed until he ran for president.

On March 2, Kennedy penned an op-ed for Fox News in which he appeared to endorse the measles vaccines, writing that the shots “not only protect individual children from measles but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons.” Yet in an interview last week, Kennedy claimed, without citing research, that treating measles with steroids, antibiotics, and cod liver oil yielded “very, very good results.” Cod liver oil contains Vitamin A, which is often used in much higher concentrations to prevent complications from the disease, including blindness. There is no credible evidence that cod liver oil itself can treat or prevent measles.

Neither the US Department of Health and Human Services nor Veritas immediately responded to a request for comment for this story.

Siemens told Mother Jones she had been motivated to help in part because she believed that local Mennonite families had been unfairly blamed for causing the outbreak because some of them chose not to vaccinate their children against measles.

She said that she had had a phone call last week with Kennedy and Veritas’ Dr. Edwards, and that the topic of the phone call had been “to understand the Mennonite culture,” which, she said, was important “because Mennonites have typically gotten the blame” for spreading the illness. She noted that not all of the local Mennonite families had skipped the vaccination. “The media is spinning it as it’s all the unvaccinated, uneducated Mennonites, and that’s just not the truth,” she said.

Veritas sells supplements and offers services including “peace consultations,” “movement consultations,” and a “menu” of medications and supplements it can deliver intravenously. According to the website, Dr. Edwards opened the clinic when “a divine appointment in 2011 opened his eyes to the fact that US medical schools only teach a very narrow way of disease and symptom management with pharmaceuticals instead of disease and symptom resolution by addressing root causes.”

The online fundraiser has collected more than $12,000 in donations so far. Siemens said that she had already helped Dr. Edwards to distribute medications to “150 to 200 families,” and that she was glad that people in the community had the choice of whether or not to receive the vaccine. “I’m very, very grateful that we live in a community that has that choice,” Siemens said. “We live in a state that has that choice, for the parents to make that choice for their family.”

“Do not buy swasticars.”

“Constitution, yes. Musk, no.”

“No one elected Elon Musk.”

These are a sample of the messages that targeted Elon Musk over the weekend, as thousands of protesters across the country flooded local Tesla dealerships to express their outrage over the tech CEO’s escalating war on the federal government.

From Ohio to California, people demonstrated outside Tesla showrooms, some attracting large police presences. In New York, where at least nine NYPD officers were seen protecting a single Cybertruck, at least six protesters were reportedly detained. Instances of property damage against Teslas were also reported. Meanwhile, Tesla’s numbers have taken a significant dip amid Musk’s illegal takeovers and mass firings. NBC News reports that February was the electric vehicle company’s “worst month on the stock market since 2022.”

Musk responded to the protests on X Saturday, claiming, without evidence, that an unspecified “investigation” had discovered that ActBlue, a Democratic political action committee, was behind the protests.

The protests targeting Musk come as Democrats struggle to find their political footing under Donald Trump’s administration. As my colleague David Corn wrote, “The Democrats are bringing a teaspoon to a gunfight. This is not how a party battling for its survival and the survival of the nation behaves.”

Two days before staffers at the US African Development Foundation (USADF) refused to let DOGE staffers enter the door to their offices, Donald Trump stood before Congress and mocked what he described as “appalling waste” in foreign aid.

“Eight million to promote LGBTQ+ in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of,” the president scoffed. “Sixty million for indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombian empowerment in Central America. Sixty million.” 

The expenditures he outlined weren’t USADF programs, and it’s unclear if the Lesotho funding, for instance, is even real—the country’s government has said it has “no idea” what Trump was referring to. But as Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE team continue trying to dismantle foreign aid, they’ve stepped beyond the USAID to set their sights on two very small agencies: the USADF and the Inter-American Foundation (IAF), which was founded by Congress in 1969 and funds community development in Latin America and the Caribbean.

On February 19, Trump issued an executive order directing that both agencies should “eliminate non-statutory functions and associated personnel to the extent consistent with applicable law.” In practice, that has meant quickly gutting both in ways that the agencies themselves and some Democratic members of Congress say is illegal, given that both were founded by Congress and should only be dismantled by an act of Congress.

As Trump’s speech made clear, the campaign against these tiny agencies has relied on literal, government-backed disinformation. Trump and DOGE have twisted and mischaracterized the U.S.’ own aid programs to make them sound frivolous, wasteful, and unimportant. Ironically, both agencies have worked towards goals that Trump and Musk have claimed they support: the IAF was specifically focused on reducing what they call “irregular migration” to the United States. And the USADF tries to stabilize economies in rural Africa, in part, a USADF staffer tells Mother Jones, to discourage people from joining terrorist groups which destabilize the region and could be hostile to the United States.

The USADF works in Somalia, where the group Al-Shabaab is based, and in Uganda, which borders the Democratic Republic of Congo; that border is where a rebel group called the Allied Democratic Forces is based, who, among other acts, attacked a Ugandan school in 2023 and killed at least 41 people, many of them students in dormitories that were set on fire.

“If we leave there’s going to be a vacuum not just of U.S. presence, but economic stability,” says a USADF worker who asked for anonymity to freely discuss their work. “And a significant increase in unemployment in young men who are now much more susceptible to joining a terrorist organization… you’re going to start seeing those terrorist organizations reach into other countries and end up In Europe and America.” 

The anti-foreign aid campaign has been pushed forward by wide mockery from Musk’s DOGE and their allies at outlets like Fox News of purportedly “questionable” foreign spending, including “$813,210 for vegetable gardens in El Salvador, $731,105 to improve the marketability of mushrooms and peas in Guatemala, $677,342 to expand fruit and jam sales in Honduras, $483,345 to improve artisanal salt production in Ecuador and $39,250 for beekeeping in Brazil.” The Fox News article refers to these as “big ticket items”—which they are not; they are in fact trivially small amounts compared to the billions spent by, for instance, the Pentagon. A supposedly automated Twitter/X account dedicated to extolling DOGE’s achievements also mocked Guatemalan mushrooms, calling the outlay “a prime example of taxpayer dollars funding foreign pet projects while ignoring American needs.” 

But in fact, as the IAF’s now-deleted website made clear, the real goal of funding such grassroots programs was to help communities “realize opportunities and solve their own problems”—and to stem migration to the U.S.

“People in the Latin American and Caribbean region leave their homes due to violence and insecurity, lack of viable economic opportunities, food insecurity, and increasingly harsh environmental conditions that exhaust their household resources,” a 2023 version of the IAF website explained. “With corruption and impunity commonplace, people can also lose faith that their governments will effectively meet their needs.”

The organization explained that people are “less likely to uproot their lives and migrate if they can remain safely at home, earn a living, provide for their families, and have a say in making decisions to improve their quality of life. We also understand that people are most motivated to stay when they can tackle and see improvement on multiple issues.” In a story on the shuttered IAF website, a Guatemalan woman working with a local mushroom cooperative is quoted saying, “I haven’t migrated to the U.S. because I’ve had the opportunity to work here.” 

Given Trump and Musk’s virulently anti-immigrant rhetoric (despite Musk being an immigrant himself), those efforts to reduce immigration would presumably have been something they should have supported.

If DOGE is looking for “big ticket items” to cut, they also won’t find any at USADF, where the maximum amount that could be given to any organization was $350,000, “after thorough due diligence and a background check on the organization,” according to the employee who worked there.

Trump’s foreign aid freeze caused many of the people the agency works with in Africa to immediately lose their jobs “with no severance or notice,” the USADF worker said. “These are our colleagues. We work with them daily.” 

Musk’s DOGE, along with Trump ally and State Department official Peter Marocco, have been the architects of the destruction of foreign aid. Marocco was placed in charge of IAF last week, after the White House fired its CEO Sara Aviel, who did not respond to a request for comment. Redacted minutes from a hasty February 28 board meeting where Marocco declared himself to be in charge of IAF show that the only people present were Marocco and two DOGE staffers, Ethan Shaotran and Nate Cavanaugh. During the meeting, Marocco claimed he was convening the board on an emergency basis pursuant to Trump’s executive order to reduce the agency’s staffing, and said that he had not been able to reach anyone associated with IAF before calling the meeting. 

“Until I am more familiar with the agency and can appoint a new one, I am designating myself as the acting CEO and president of the IAF,” Marocco declared before immediately closing the meeting. 

An IAF employee told Mother Jones that workers at the agency have been issued reduction in force notices, which are usually given 60 days before employees will be let go. In the case of IAF, for reasons that weren’t explained, it was only 30. “Intentional cruelty is their M.O.,” the employee said.

The shuttering of the IAF also means that millions of dollars from private foundations will also have to be returned. “As a result of this illegal destruction of the agency, taxpayers are giving back more than $5 million dollars donated by the private sector and private philanthropy,” that person told Mother Jones. “Half was in hand and half was committed legally; nearly all will never be invested on behalf of the U.S. in the region.” 

On Wednesday March 5, Marocco arrived at the USADF offices with DOGE staffers to try to execute an administrative coup similar to the one they engineered at IAF. There, however, employees refused to let them enter. The following day, Marocco and the DOGE staffers returned to USADF with five U.S. Marshals, according to the Washington Post. USADF employees, meanwhile, left through a back entrance, one tells Mother Jones.

Later that day, USADF filed a lawsuit suing Trump and DOGE, laying out the aggressive and highly unusual tactics Marocco and the DOGE staff took in trying to wrest control of the agency. On Thursday night, USADF won a preliminary injunction to keep from being shut down, at least for a few days: a judge’s order bars current CEO Ward Brehm from being removed from the foundation’s board and prevents DOGE from adding members to it.  

Nonetheless, a USADF employee told Mother Jones on Friday morning that workers were unable to enter the building with their key cards, which appear to have been disabled. The employee said they and their colleagues plan to try to continue doing their jobs as long as they legally can: “Just as Trump did, I also took an oath of office and I’m abiding by it. I take it very seriously.”

“I’m resigned to the fact that I’m going to lose my job,” the USADF worker said. “But if you’re going to fire me, fire me legally.”

Around 8:30 p.m. on March 8th, Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia and a student leader in last year’s protest encampments, was returning to his University-owned apartment after an iftar meal when he was arrested by Department of Homeland Security agents. Khalil, who is Palestinian, is a legal permanent resident and green card holder, his lawyers say. His arrest marks a dramatic escalation in President Donald Trump’s crackdown on free speech. 

“This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump posted on Monday afternoon, personally taking credit for Khalil’s arrest. “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country—never to return again.” 

On Sunday, the US Homeland Security X account posted that ICE arrested Khalil for leading “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” in order to enforce Trump’s January executive orders on “combatting anti-semitism.” (“Aligned to” is a term that is not used in the US law on “inadmissible aliens” referenced by Trump’s executive order; as of now, there are no reports Khalil has been charged with a crime.)

As we have previously reported, Trump promised to deport student protesters during his campaign. This is his administration’s first explicit attempt to do so. According to public detainee location data, Khalil was taken first to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in New Jersey, then to an ICE detention center in Louisiana. His lawyers and wife spent Sunday scrambling to find him.

“ICE’s arrest and detention of Mahmoud follows the US government’s open repression of student activism and political speech, specifically targeting students at Columbia University for criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza,” Khalil’s lawyer, Amy Greer, told press. “The US government has made clear that they will use immigration enforcement as a tool to suppress that speech.” 

In Trump’s first term, Columbia declared itself a “sanctuary campus,” saying it would not turn over student information to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Last year, the Manhattan university’s campus was one of the epicenters of mass student protest calling for divestment from companies that do business in Israel, among other demands. The university has, for now, not commented on the arrest. 

The day before Khalil’s arrest, the Trump administration announced that they would be “pulling $400 million in grants” from Columbia as part of the “joint task force to combat antisemitism.” ( The task force was launched February 3rd and has produced no reports.) 

Members of a Columbia-donor WhatsApp chat, including Trump advisors, celebrated the funding changes. “One group chat member wrote on Friday that they ‘can’t wait for the rest of the funding to be cut,’” as Natasha Lennard of The Intercept reported. This group chat reportedly includes professors who discussed deporting pro-Palestinian foreign students and faculty.

By the time DHS officers showed up at Khalil’s door, right-wing commenters on and off Columbia’s campus had been agitating for his arrest for days. Shai Davidai, a Columbia professor banned from campus for harassing pro-Palestinian students, posted on X thanking Secretary of State Marco Rubio for the withdrawal of funding—and directly encouraging him to take “strong action” against Khalil individually. 

Khalil’s lawyers disagree. “ICE agents wrongfully arrested Mahmoud Khalil, claiming his student visa was revoked—even though Mahmoud is a legal permanent resident (green card) and not in the US on a student visa,” Greer said. “Confronted with that fact, the ICE agents detained him anyway.”

Khalil is reportedly in a repurposed prison, owned by private-prison company GEO Group. A petition calling for his release has gained over one million signatures in the last 48 hours, and a protest is planned outside ICE’s office in downtown New York on Monday afternoon. 

In Afghanistan, where millions are starving, the France-based NGO Action Against Hunger operates clinics treating severely malnourished children with individualized nutrition plans and feeding tubes. For now.

Thanks to President Donald Trump’s January 20 executive order pausing US foreign development assistance, as well as the administration’s subsequent cancellation of awarded contracts, Action Against Hunger had to cancel its already planned expansion of treatment beds in Kabul and has stopped accepting new patients. Children already being treated are continuing to receive care, but the organization fears it won’t be able to provide follow up treatment if current patients relapse or sustain its work to serve other children in need.

“We are now doing our best to discuss with other donors, to do advocacy, to try to sustain those facilities,” says Cobi Rietveld, the country director for Action Against Hunger in Afghanistan.

This is just one of nearly 10,o00 global development contracts the Trump administration abruptly canceled in the last two weeks. NGOs and intergovernmental organizations tell Mother Jones that other affected programs include one providing nutrition coaching and food to children and lactating women in Haiti; one supplying food, shelter, and clean water to tens of thousands of people in Colombia; and one that administers maternal healthcare and protection from violence to women in Yemen.

The State Department was supposed to issue waivers to programs deemed life-saving in order for them to continue their work, but the Trump administration’s haphazard implementation of the funding freeze and the arbitrary selection of programs to cancel have left program workers in unfathomable situations: NGOs are owed millions for work they already completed, forcing some to lay off dozens of employees. In the past few weeks, aid groups on the ground have also had to turn away people who were promised mobility devices, cash benefits, and food.

In Bangladesh, for example, a 56-year-old refugee needed his old crutches replaced. When he showed up at the treatment center supported by Humanity & Inclusion, an NGO dedicated to helping people with disabilities and other vulnerable populations in conflict zones, nothing could be done for him. “I don’t know how I will be able to move around the camp without my crutches—to eat, to get water,” Shobbir Ahmed told an aid worker.

Humanity & Inclusion says the US government currently owes $19 million for services it completed in 2024. The organization received a limited waiver for its life-saving work in Bangladesh, but it’s unclear which activities will be covered. “We restarted activities there with the waiver we received, but it’s still a risk for us,” says executive director Hannah Guedenet. “We didn’t receive confirmation on which activities they will pay for us to do.”

While the Supreme Court ruled last week that the US government has to pay its debts to contractors for the global aid work they have already completed, no such ruling has been made for work-in-progress contracts that were awarded and now canceled.

Contrary to the administration’s stated mission of increasing efficiency and decreasing government waste, the impulsive withdrawal of foreign aid may cause irreparable—or vastly more expensive—damage down the road. Moreover, there will be no way to continue measuring the progress already completed with US tax dollars. But most importantly, advocates say, ending some of these programs may have dire consequences for the neediest populations.

“These children are actually very sick. For example, we will have a child maybe one year old who will have the weight of a newborn. They are not yet able to crawl, not yet able to sit, and are severely malnourished,” Rietveld says of the Afghanistan program. “If we can’t treat them, they have a very high risk of dying.”

Global aid work can be mutually beneficial. In addition to helping people in underdeveloped countries, the assistance can strengthen relationships with allies and ward off geopolitical adversaries. Without nearly as much US support, China and Russia may see openings to help these countries in exchange for political capital and influence.

“This was real investments of US dollars that we took seriously and managed efficiently and transparently,” says Guedenet. “We were investing money to support our neighbors in other countries for the good of everyone. And I just wish people could understand that.”

In the event that courts order abandoned projects to resume, or the programs can find new funding sources, restarting aid work will be expensive. NGOs must hire new staff, re-market their services, and repurchase fresh food, medications and health supplies. Meanwhile, programs and organizations will not be able to determine the progress their programs made before they were suspended.

This includes one nutrition program Action Against Hungry has been running in Haiti, where 5.4 million people struggle to eat every day.

“We were starting year four of a five year project… Now that we are stopping everything in the middle, we will not be able to measure the impact of the project we have done,” says Martine Villeneuve, Action Against Hunger’s country director for Haiti. “It’s like if you draw something on a board and then you erase it before having time to take a picture of it.”

And restarting the development work from scratch in the near future is the best-case scenario. Not a realistic one.

“The chances,” says Villeneuve, “are very low to find someone to be able to support that level of engagement.”

In what could foreshadow a major new onslaught against queer and trans children, the US Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will hear a case challenging a 2019 Colorado law forbidding licensed therapists from trying to turn LGBTQ kids straight and cisgender.

The court’s decision to hear the case next fall is a major victory for practitioners of “conversion therapy,” a term used colloquially to describe attempts to shift a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Before the 1970s, when being gay was still considered a mental illness, conversion therapy was the standard treatment—sometimes involving “aversion” techniques like electric shocks or chemically induced nausea paired with images of gay porn. Today, conversion therapy mostly involves talk therapy, often between conservative religious clients and practitioners.

Still, talk-based conversion therapy can cause immense harm to LGBTQ people’s mental health, according to leading experts. The American Psychological Association has concluded that efforts to change peoples’ sexual orientation lack “sufficient bases in scientific principles” and that people who have undergone such therapies are “significantly more likely to experience suicidality and depression.”

The same goes for therapies aimed at making trans people identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. In 2015, the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, part of the US Department of Health and Human Services, published a report concluding that “none of the existing research supports the premise that mental or behavioral health interventions can alter gender identity or sexual orientation.” Interventions aimed at a fixed outcome, such as gender conformity or heterosexual orientation “are coercive, can be harmful, and should not be part of behavioral health treatment,” the authors concluded. (Since President Donald Trump took office and ordered government websites stripped of information related to so-called “gender ideology,” the SAMHSA report has been taken down.)

States started banning conversion therapy on minors in 2012, as gay rights was achieving widespread acceptance and the scientific community increasingly recognized that efforts to change sexual orientation both didn’t work and could cause harm. Today, according to the Movement Advancement Project, 23 states have passed laws to revoke licenses from mental health professionals practicing conversion therapy on queer and trans people under the age of 18, and more states have executive orders restricting the practice.

But as soon as those laws began to pass, conversion therapists began fighting back, filing at least 11 lawsuits in eight states from 2012 through 2023. Typically, those cases have argued that the restrictions on therapists’ conversations with minors infringes on the therapists’ First Amendment right to free speech.

Federal appeals courts mostly haven’t bought that argument, ruling that that states have the power to regulate medical treatment, even when that treatment consists entirely of spoken words. But in 2020, the 11th Circuit went the other way, overturning a local conversion therapy ban in Florida in response to a lawsuit by the former president of the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity, the leading US advocacy group for licensed conversion therapists.

During an ATCSI conference I attended in late 2023, presenters showed a video illustrating what their therapy technique, which they called “mindfulness,” looked like:

A young adult client, played by an actor, sits nervously across from [counselor Joseph] Nicolosi Jr. in a room filled with books. Nicolosi Jr. asks him to describe his ideal sexually attractive man. The client responds that the man would be strong, confident, informal. “I would definitely say a guy who’s like, um, on the taller side,” he says.

Then, Nicolosi Jr. asks the client what he would change about himself: Shorter or taller? Stronger or weaker arms? More or less confident? He urges the client to compare himself to the imagined man, and the client says he feels inadequate. “How do you feel about the fact that you feel that inferiority, weakness?” Nicolosi Jr. asks.

“Sadness,” the client says.

“Feel your sadness as you continue looking at that guy,” Nicolosi Jr. urges. “And as you hold them together right now, zero to 10, how strong is your sexual attraction toward him?”

As my colleague Henry Carnell and I reported in that investigation last year, conversion therapists have seized on disputes over the treatment of trans youth—a controversy fomented by religious-right organizations and anti-LGBTQ fringe groups and exploited by Republican politicians—to argue that they should be allowed to encourage kids to not be trans. Accordingly, in recent years, conversion therapists’ lawsuits have increasingly focused on trans people and gender identity, rather than gay people and sexual orientation.

That’s the argument made by Kaley Chiles, the licensed counselor in Colorado who filed Chiles v. Salazar, the case the US Supreme Court has now agreed to hear. Conversion therapy bans “silence counselors’ ability to express views their clients seek on a topic of ‘fierce public debate’—’how best to help minors with gender dysphoria,”‘ Chiles’ petition to the court argues.

Chiles is represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, the powerful religious-right law firm behind the most significant anti-LBGTQ Supreme Court cases of recent years. Targeting Colorado in particular, ADF has found great success using the First Amendment to chip away at the state’s strong anti-discrimination protections for queer and trans people in the name of “religious freedom.” The court’s conservative supermajority has repeatedly sided with ADF, deciding that First Amendment allows Christian cake-bakers and wedding–website designers to refuse service to LGBTQ people planning same-sex weddings.

ADF’s argument on behalf of Chiles likewise centers on her religious beliefs—in this instance, her feelings about trans people. “A practicing Christian, Chiles believes that people flourish when they live consistently with God’s design, including their biological sex,” her petition argues. “Many of her clients seek her counsel precisely because they believe that their faith and their relationship with God establishes the foundation upon which to understand their identity and desires. But Colorado bans these consensual conversations based on the viewpoints [Chiles and her clients] express.”

Like all other conversion therapy bans, Colorado’s ban applies only to licensed therapists, not to religious advisers like priests and pastors. (Of course, church-based conversion therapy can also cause immense harm, as Carnell reported.)

At least two Supreme Court justices are known to be friendly to the argument that conversion therapy for minors is protected by the First Amendment. Last year, when the court declined to take up a nearly identical case challenging a conversion therapy ban in Washington state, Justice Clarence Thomas issued a dissent, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, that described bans on conversion therapy for minors as “viewpoint-based and content-based discrimination in its purest form.”

“Although the Court declines to take this particular case, I have no doubt that the issue it presents will come before the Court again,” Thomas wrote at the time. “When it does, the Court should do what it should have done here . . . consider what the First Amendment requires.” With arguments in Chiles v. Salazar expected to be scheduled for next fall, Thomas will soon get the chance he’s been waiting for.

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

The world needs more planet-heating fossil fuel, not less, Donald Trump’s newly appointed energy secretary, Chris Wright, told oil and gas bigwigs on Monday.

“We are unabashedly pursuing a policy of more American energy production and infrastructure, not less,” he said in the opening plenary talk of CERAWeek, a swanky annual conference in Houston, Texas, led by the financial firm S&P Global.

Wright, a former fracking executive who was picked by Trump to the crucial cabinet position, also attacked the Joe Biden administration for focusing “myopically on climate change.”

“The Trump administration will end the Biden administration’s irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change that imposed endless sacrifices on our citizens,” he said at the conference, for which tickets cost upward of $10,000. “The cure was far more destructive than the disease.”

Wright has been called a climate skeptic, for instance for repeatedly denying that global heating is a crisis. “This is simply wrong: I am a climate realist,” he said.

“The Trump administration will treat climate change for what it is, a global physical phenomenon that is a side-effect of building the modern world,” he added. “Everything in life involves trade-off.”

Though he admitted fossil fuels’ greenhouse gas emissions were warming the planet, he said “there is no physical way” solar, wind and batteries could replace the “myriad” uses of gas—something top experts dispute. Further, a bigger and more immediate problem was energy poverty, Wright said.

“Where is the COP conference for this far more urgent global challenge,” he said, referring to the annual United Nations climate talks, known as the Conference of the Parties. “I look forward to working with all of you to better energize the world and fully unleash human potential.”

The night before his CERAWeek plenary session, Wright had a meeting with top executives of fossil fuel firms including TotalEnergies, Freeport-McMoRan, Occidental Petroleum, and EQT, Axios and Reuters reported. Trump’s interior secretary Doug Burgum, who will address CERAWeek attenders on Wednesday, also attended the dinner meeting.

Trump obtained record donations from the fossil fuel industry in his 2024 campaign. In April, he came under fire for a meeting at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, at which he reportedly asked more than 20 executives, from companies including Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Occidental, for $1 billion and promised, if elected, to slash climate policies.

Under Biden, Wright said, ordinary Americans suffered. “The expensive energy or climate policies that have been in vogue among the left in wealthy western nations have taken a heavy toll on their citizens,” he said, putting the word “climate” in scare quotes.

US citizens “heat our homes in winter, cool them in summer, store period foods in our freezers and refrigerators and have light, communications and entertainment at the flip of a switch,” he said—a lifestyle that “requires an average of 13 barrels of oil per person per year.”

Meanwhile poorer countries lack energy, he said, meaning they need more fossil fuels. “The other 7 billion people on average, consume only three barrels of oil per person per year,” he said. “Africans average less than one barrel.”

The comments came after Wright addressed the Powering Africa Summit in Washington DC on Friday, saying that it would be “paternalistic” and “100 percent nonsense” to encourage Africa to halt coal development because of climate concerns.

“Coal transformed our world and made it better, extended life expectancy and grew opportunities,” he said.

The comments came under fire from climate advocates globally. “One of the transformations caused by American fossil fuels was destroying our previously well-balanced climate and plunging some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in Africa into a life dealing with extreme weather and lost homes and livelihoods,” said Mohamed Adow, founding director of Power Shift Africa, a non-governmental organization and thinktank based in Nairobi.

The African continent also had huge potential to expand renewable energy, “but lacks the right investments to exploit these resources”, said Ali Mohamed, the chair of the African group of negotiators and Kenya’s special envoy for climate change.

At CERAWeek, Wright said the Trump administration was embracing an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy. “Anything that adds affordable, reliable energy, we are in favor of,” he told reporters in a press conference after his speech, where he also announced the extension of a permit for the company Delfin, which is developing a floating liquefied natural gas project off the coast of Louisiana.

But domestic oil and gas production soared to record levels under Biden. And Trump has launched a war on renewable energy, temporarily suspending all clean energy development on federal lands and attacking wind and solar in speeches.

Wright’s speech was not made available to the public via live stream, sparking outrage from climate advocates. “As energy secretary, Chris Wright is supposed to serve the American people, not the fossil fuel industry,” said Allie Rosenbluth, a campaign manager at the non-profit Oil Change International. “It’s unacceptable, though not surprising, that this former fracking CEO is depriving the public of the chance to see what he’s saying to fossil fuel executives.”

Wright has long been a fixture at the CERAWeek fossil fuels conference. Before joining the Trump administration, he led the oil and gas company Liberty Energy for 13 years. Ahead of his press conference, one representative from an oil industry podcast said the energy secretary was “brilliant.”

“He’s one of us,” the person said. “He gets us.”

Additional reporting by Oliver Milman