NEW: Trump's first year back in the White House has been quite profitable: his presidential grift added billions to the family fortune. The self-dealing comes with a price tag, however, & working families are paying the real costs of Trump's corruption.

"DOGE’s objective was never to save taxpayer dollars. Musk did not 'fail'...DOGE was—and remains, through Vought’s OMB—an effort to extinguish the existing government and create a new one in the image of oligarchs and far-right ideologues."

DOGE isn't really gone, it's just become the way that the Office of Management and Budget operates, writes our friends at @revolvingdoordc.bsky.social. prospect.org/2026/02/05/d...

NEWSLETTER The ongoing measles outbreak in South Carolina threatens to reestablish the formerly-eradicated disease as a national public health threat. For our latest edition of Watchdog Weekly, Julian Scoffield uncovers Trump's playbook to make measles endemic again.

NEW: Elon Musk's DOGE team officially disbanded last year, but its reactionary mission was being carried out in parallel—and continues to be executed today—by OMB Director Russell Vought, a far quieter, but no less villainous, figure. We explain in @prospect.org 🧵⬇️

Tax season is officially upon us. Thanks to DOGE, the IRS is completely unprepared. "The divisions in IRS that process tax returns and provide telephonic and in-person customer service, as well as other duties related to filing season, have lost 8,300 workers, or 17% of their staff, the IG found."

The Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights is holding a hearing to "examine the competitive impact" of the Netflix/Warner Bros. merger. The two witnesses? Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos and Warner Bros. exec Bruce Campbell. This is not serious oversight.

NEW Corruption Calendar: Trump used tariffs to bully foreign governments into regulating Big Tech on Big Tech's terms, and the EPA will no longer consider the value of a human life as it hands corporations a huge win at the literal cost of our health.

NEW: Our @jeffhauser.bsky.social on Kevin Warsh, Trump's Fed chair nominee with ties to a would-be Greenland profiteer. "Warsh’s record suggests commitment to class and personal self-interest, not a broader dedication to an intellectually consistent view of the public interest." Full statement:

In light of last week's revelation that DOGE mishandled Social Security data and violated the Hatch Act, @kjboyle.bsky.social looks back at DOGE's activity at SSA. From dismantling customer service operations to using SSA data to surveil immigrants, DOGE agents must be accountable for much more.

Some of our most devoted readers have been confused about the term “corporate power” and how to measure it. So we’ve attempted to put together an easy guide to help them understand what we mean, how we can measure it. It turns out, there’s more than a few ways to quantify it

no more of this Merrick Garland nonsense

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem should be ousted for unleashing ICE terror. She's caused damage in other ways, too. Her inane $100k grant approval rule has led to a $17 BILLION bottleneck in FEMA aid (and that's before Winter Storm Fern). More in our tracker: therevolvingdoorproject.org/trump-disast...

Amid growing calls for the abolition of ICE, Rep. Delia Ramirez is calling for the entire DHS to be dismantled. Highlighting how much experience the officers who killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti had, Ramirez said, “DHS was built to violate our rights and has been empowered to act with impunity.”

before you take any of the "Trump is pivoting/lamenting/lowering the temperature after the Pretti murder" stories too seriously, absolutely nothing has changed in Minneapolis: "an absolutely brutal day of raids and abductions" says one friend

NEWSLETTER: RDP's new report on Department of Government Efficiency is out and this week's newsletter offers a glimpse into its contents. From veterans denied care, to to citizens left unprotected in disasters, DOGE has sacrificed public welfare on the altar of “efficiency.”

There are 14 outstanding requests for weather-related major disaster declarations, including 6 appeals, with a devastating winter storm coming. But relief is unlikely to arrive soon. FEMA's Office of Response and Recovery is now led by Gregg Phillips. And DHS is busy waging war on Minnesota.

bro there’s a gofundme to crowdfund attorney fees for a preschooler who was kidnapped by our federal government and shipped across state lines and his senator is posting about high school hockey while every other elected official is debating whether to give a zillion more dollars to the kidnappers

I keep thinking about the number of people that have to be involved to kidnap a small child, transport him to one facility or another, then an airport, then a plane, then another facility. Did no one on that chain stop and say hey what the fuck?

“Dems Are Set to Give ICE More Money. Here’s What They Could Do Instead”

If you have read even a single history of fascism, you are already aware that one thing that its rise has in common in every case is an opposition party that refuses to intervene for fear of looking weak or putting the left into power

NEW: In the third installment of our joint series with @cplusc.bsky.social, we explain how the anti-democratic rush to build hyperscale data centers and incorporate AI programs in numerous sectors is exacerbating the cost-of-living crisis—today and in the future.

There's mounting evidence that state regulators are subsidizing Big Tech's out-of-control power consumption by forcing residential customers to fund discounted rates for data centers. This is a boon for investor-owned utilities. For the rest of us, it makes it harder to scrape by every month.

Health insurers are using AI-powered prior authorization to deny needed medical care. Property insurers, too, are increasingly relying on black-box projections of climate risk to justify coverage withdrawals and rate hikes. No transparency, disputed accuracy.

Rent-seeking firms have transformed our personal data into an asset that can be endlessly mined. Now, AI is turbocharging the practice of "surveillance pricing," from RealPage's rent-gouging software to Delta Air Line's use of a pricing technology called Fetcherr.

Fossil fuel-powered data centers spew heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere. Across its full lifecycle—from chip manufacturing to data center operation—AI also contributes to the emission of fine particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide, w/ deadly and expensive consequences.

We need policies to simultaneously decarbonize and democratize our society, to confront climate chaos and grotesque inequality at the same time. Failing to do so will only lock-in more fossil fuel pollution, thus aggravating extreme weather and with it, supply chain disruptions and price shocks.

Whether by preempting regulation of AI inside existing borders or violently establishing new, regulation-free jurisdictions where they can impose their will, billionaire techno-fascists are seeking to end democracy so they can extract rents with no constraints.

We can't afford to let Silicon Valley oligarchs' dystopian vision become reality. Read the full piece, and earlier installments in this joint series with @cplusc.bsky.social, here: revolvingdoorproject.substack.com/p/ai-is-maki...

NEW: Marking DOGE's one-year anniversary, RDP has put together a report probing the origins, the personnel, and the harmful consequences of Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

"The sweeping study... found that using AI in education can 'undermine children's foundational development' and that 'the damages it has already caused are daunting.'" They include limiting kids' cognitive, social, and emotional developmen, and increasing inequity. www.npr.org/2026/01/14/n...

New analysis out today from Rhodium Group showing data centres were one of the major drivers of the first rise in total economy-wide emissions in the US in years Uncontrolled growth of demand has helped boost coal growth, in conjunction with the LNG export boom -> rhg.com/research/us-...

On Tuesday, former DCCC chair Sean Patrick Maloney announced he'd gotten a new job; CEO of the Coalition for Prediction Markets, a newly-launched lobbying org for the not-gambling-but-actually-gambling industry. But what he didn't announce is how it broke his ethics pledge.

ICE officers tell media that the conduct in Minneapolis is part of a plan by Stephen Miller to provoke as much violence and death as possible—which in turn will be taken as pretext for more. “They’re essentially operating now in a resource constraint-free environment and doing very dangerous things”

this, driving a person to suicide because they had the temerity to want to work in public service, is what russ vought hoped to accomplish

Amid ongoing efforts to divorce the climate crisis from affordability struggles, it's good to see more work being done to link the two issues. As I argued in 2024, they're inseparable: prospect.org/2024/11/04/2...

"last week, the House of Representatives approved a bill that could prevent the adoption of regulations that would help prevent future heat-related deaths in manufactured homes." heatmap.news/adaptation/m...

Trump’s obsession may seem like the demented ravings of a wannabe king. Yes, he wants to seize anything he feels like taking—but there’s another element that hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention. To use a phrase out of the Venezuela news: It’s about looting the resources, stupid. trib.al/oF9HpUx

Back in August, our @jeffhauser.bsky.social condemned the failure of Fed Chair Jay Powell, SCOTUS, and the media to defend Lisa Cook from Trump's lawless attempt to fire her. Powell is now right to resist Trump's corrupt prosecution of him, but his earlier failure was selfish and shortsighted.

Who could have predicted that a government that sends out masked thugs in sneakers to kidnap day laborers and Doordash drivers would also fake a civilian airplane to more easily murder fishermen on the high seas?

One of government's most important functions is to reduce the likelihood and magnitude of disasters and provide prompt assistance to victims The Trump administration is doing the exact opposite.

Though he has flown under the radar compared with ex-DOGE chief Elon Musk, OMB Director Russell Vought—the self-described Christian nationalist behind Project 2025—is the key architect of weaponizing the federal money spigot to advance Donald Trump’s fascist agenda.

NEW: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem sat atop millions of dollars in flood prevention grants while the West Coast was being inundated. Now she’s slashing FEMA disaster response staff. In @prospect.org, our @kennystancil.bsky.social details how the Trump regime is exacerbating extreme weather disasters.

When the Trump administration unlawfully shut down FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program last April, it deprived California of roughly $765 million in pre-disaster mitigation funding, Washington of $180 million, and Oregon of $130 million.

A judge in December ordered the Trump administration to reverse the BRIC program’s elimination, but during eight-plus months of legal battle, climate adaptation projects that would have proceeded were frozen. It’s possible that those stalled upgrades may have reduced damage from recent storms.

As of last month, Noem was sitting on more than $900 million in additional FEMA money, a consequence of a June directive requiring her direct approval of grants valued over $100,000.

This means a single right-wing ideologue is now preventing millions of people around the United States from benefiting from congressionally approved investments in better warning systems, stronger infrastructure, and other lifesaving public goods.

In early January 2026, DHS terminated dozens of employees from FEMA’s Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery (CORE) teams, which are essential to the agency’s post-disaster operations.

Historically, CORE workers’ two-to-four year contracts were almost always renewed. Now that Noem’s approval is required, FEMA is bracing for the dismissal of 1,000 CORE employees with expiring contracts this month alone.

Longer-term, DHS is reportedly considering slashing more than 11,500 FEMA employees from a workforce of roughly 23,000—including over 4,300 CORE positions, nearly 6,500 surge staffing roles, and hundreds of full-time permanent workers.