Addendum, Wednesday Feb 5

Regrettably, I have to extend this post due to even more news. The assault on scientific funding and agencies continues, for one thing. Since I posted this, Elon Musk's team has entered the offices of NOAA, since their remit of weather forecasting and climate science has made them a target for the sort of people who believe that any talk of climate change is some sort of liberal plot. Granting opportunities having anything to do with diversity have disappeared from NIH sites, and I have seen reports that the option to request grant extensions has disappeared. There are reports of Musk staffers on the CDC campus today, and yesterday an NSF official said at an internal meeting that the agency is apparently planning to lay off up to half its staff over the next two months.

This is all having exactly the results you would expect in the scientific community: fear and disruption, which I'm afraid are two of the goals from the start. My prediction that what is being done to the NIH, NSF et al. was just a preview of what the new administration intends to do to the rest of the government appears to be accurate. The Office of Personnel Management, following up on its bizarre "Fork in the Road" memo, is telling Federal employees that they are in danger of missing a "once in a lifetime chance" to leave their jobs, which is clearly an effort to panic people into leaving. Agents and staff at the FBI are under attack by the administration is what is clearly retaliation for investigations of the January 6, 2020 insurrection, and the CIA has apparently sent a buyout offer to its entire workforce in what looks like an attempt to gut the agency. And the entire Department of Education is said to be targeted for attempted abolishment by Executive Order. That's just as of this morning. There will be more. Elon Musk has said recently that his goal is to have no regulations at all - they'll just put some back in if any turned out to be useful after all. I think that's bullshit from him, and that he's mostly looking to terrify people while he gets rid of the rules that he finds inconvenient to his businesses or personally annoying. But that's more than bad enough, and has nothing to do with how we supposedly run this country.

Almost all of these actions are illegal, and many are actually unconstitutional. The administration is obviously daring someone to try to stop them, and as mentioned in Part Six below, right now that's the Federal Judiciary. The Republican majority in the Senate and the much slimmer one in the House have signaled that they (so far) are completely uninterested in doing anything about all this - whatever Trump wants, they're in favor of. This seems to be due to a mixture of outright agreement, criminal indifference, fear of losing their positions, and (let's be frank) fear of actual physical violence from the kinds of supporters that Trump attracts. It's not exactly what James Madison had in mind.

We are getting very close to a moment when a judge issues an injunction and the Trump/Musk people just wave it off and keep doing what they're doing, a "Yeah, now enforce it, make us stop" crisis that could quickly shred what remains of constitutional order. I realize that I sound like an paranoid fool, but I see no other conclusion to be drawn. We have to support the rule of law with our voices and actions, loudly and consistently. The re-election of Donald Trump now looks like it could be the worst act of American self-destruction since the Civil War: don't roll over and just let it happen.