Dude we can see where your makeup ends. We can always see where your makeup ends. You have a shoepolish-brown face and pink ears: we can see that: we do see that every day. You look ridiculous.

Tom Nichols on the horror of today:

The president of the United States ambushed a loyal ally, presumably so that he can soon make a deal with the dictator of Russia to sell out a European nation fighting for its very existence.

Trump’s advisers have already declared the meeting a win for “putting America first,” and his apologists will likely spin and rationalize this shameful moment as just a heated conversation—the kind of thing that in Washington-speak used to be called a “frank and candid exchange.” But this meeting reeked of a planned attack, with Trump unloading Russian talking points on Zelensky (such as blaming Ukraine for risking global war), all of it designed to humiliate the Ukrainian leader on national television and give Trump the pretext to do what he has indicated repeatedly he wants to do: side with Russian President Vladimir Putin and bring the war to an end on Russia’s terms. Trump is now reportedly considering the immediate end of all military aid to Ukraine because of Zelensky’s supposed intransigence during the meeting.

Vance’s presence at the White House also suggests that the meeting was a setup. Vance is usually an invisible backbencher in this administration, with few duties other than some occasional trolling of Trump’s critics. (The actual business of furthering Trump’s policies is apparently now Elon Musk’s job.) This time, however, he was brought in to troll not other Americans, but a foreign leader. Marco Rubio—in theory, America’s top diplomat—was also there, but he sat glumly and silently while Vance pontificated like an obnoxious graduate student.

Vance was there to be a shithead, and he fulfilled the task very thoroughly.

After the meeting, Trump dismissed the Ukrainian leader and then issued a statement that could only have pleased Moscow:

I have determined that President Zelensky is not ready for Peace if America is involved, because he feels our involvement gives him a big advantage in negotiations. I don’t want advantage, I want PEACE. He disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office. He can come back when he is ready for Peace.

Yes if only Roosevelt had told Churchill he didn’t want advantage, he wanted PEACE, so let’s all do a deal with Herr Hitler.

Vance, for his part, fully inhabited the role of a smarmy talk-show sidekick, jumping in to make sure the star got the support he needed while slamming one of the guests. The vice president is an unserious man who tries to insert himself into serious moments, but this time the stakes were much higher than the usual dustups with the media or congressional Democrats. He chuckled as Brian Glenn, a journalist from the right-wing channel Real America’s Voice who is reportedly dating Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, asked Zelensky the tough and incisive question of why he had not worn a suit in the Oval Office. (Perhaps he’ll ask Musk why he wore a hat [baseball cap] and T-shirt to a Cabinet meeting, but I doubt it.)

The sheer rudeness shown to a foreign guest and friend of the United States was (to use a word) deplorable as a matter of manners and grace, but worse, Trump and Vance acted like a couple of online Kremlin sock puppets instead of American leaders.

Sock puppets is what they are, really. Wally Smiths on the global stage.

But no matter how disgusted anyone might be at Trump and Vance’s behavior, the strategic reality is that this meeting is a catastrophe for the United States and the free world. America’s alliances are now in danger, and should be: Trump is openly, and gleefully, betraying everything America has tried to defend since the defeat of the Axis 80 years ago. The entire international order of peace and security is now in danger, as Russian autocrats, after slaughtering innocent people for three years, look forward to enjoying the spoils of their invasion instead of standing trial for their crimes. (Shortly after Trump dismissed Zelensky from the White House, Putin’s homunculus, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, posted on X: “The insolent pig finally got a proper slap down in the Oval Office.”)

Ah yes the insolent pig who doesn’t like being invaded by a neighbor.

Solidarity with the insolent pigs.

The reviews roll in.

Updating to add

And even more bullying and insulting of Zelenskyy for having the nerve to resist invasion by a dictator.

Also very bad:

The Trump administration has begun firing employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the world’s premier centers for climate science.

The firings are expected to cost more than 800 people their jobs, out of a total of about 13,000 staff members, according to two people familiar with the situation who declined to be identified for fear of retribution. The notifications went out on Thursday afternoon.

Because weather isn’t important. Nobody needs to know about the weather.

“This loss of talent at NOAA is going to set the agency back years and compromise the integrity of missions that directly support human health and safety, economic prosperity and national security,” the analyst said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “This is not a move toward efficiency; it’s a move toward putting Americans in danger every day.”

…

The firings on Thursday are expected to be just the first wave of departures. Several hundred more staff members are expected to leave on Friday as part of the so-called deferred resignation program, according to a person familiar with the matter. On top of that, the Trump administration is expected to cancel contracts of workers affiliated with NOAA, which could cost the agency as many as 2,500 personnel.

Good good good. Remember: weather doesn’t matter.

Those who remain will see their jobs get more difficult. The General Services Administration, which manages government facilities, has begun canceling some of the contracts for buildings that NOAA uses, according to a person familiar with the matter. The agency has frozen credit cards used to pay for travel and sharply restricted the amount of money employees are able to put on those cards for other purchases.

…

“Gutting NOAA will hamstring essential lifesaving programs that forecast storms, ensure ocean safety and prevent the extinction of whales and sea otters,” said Miyoko Sakashita, the director of oceans projects at the Center for Biological Diversity. “I think most Americans want these kinds of vital government services protected, and we’ll do everything we can to defend them.”

NOAA has been singled out for especially deep cuts by members of the Trump administration. Project 2025, the policy blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation that is reflected in many of the actions taken by the Trump administration so far, calls the agency “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” The document urges that NOAA be dismantled and some of its programs be terminated.

Ahhh yes, good thinking. If NOAA is no longer there to inform us about climate change, there won’t be any climate change. It’s a good idea to close your eyes while driving, too: if you can’t see it it can’t smash into you.

Shame of a nation.

Now Trump, like any furious teenager, has gone to his social media to whine and yell and threaten.

In a Truth Social post following a heated exchange between Trump, Vance and Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, Trump called the meeting “meaningful,” but added, “I have determined that President Zelenskyy is not ready for Peace if America is involved.”

“We had a very meaningful meeting in the White House today. Much was learned that could never be understood without conversation under such fire and pressure,” the president wrote in the post. “It’s amazing what comes out through emotion, and I have determined that President Zelenskyy is not ready for Peace if America is involved, because he feels our involvement gives him a big advantage in negotiations.”

“I don’t want advantage, I want PEACE,” Trump added in the post. “He disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office. He can come back when he is ready for Peace.”

So Trump’s going to let Putin swallow Ukraine because Vance manipulated him (Trump) into a tantrum. And those are the people running the show.

Oh my god oh my god oh my god

As you may recall, Trump issued an executive order on February 7 that said

Washington “shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.”

He ordered the Departments of State and Homeland Security “to prioritize humanitarian relief, including admission and resettlement through the United States Refugee Admissions Program, for Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.”

…

On X this month, South African native Elon Musk, Trump’s top adviser, accused his home country of pushing “openly racist ownership laws.” South Africa rejected a license for his Starlink internet company because it did not meet BEE requirements.

Ebrahim Rasool, the South African ambassador to Washington, said Trump’s order is based on false premises, including that “Afrikaners would fit the bill of refugees because refugees have a sense of being poor, dispossessed and oppressed.” None of that, he added during an interview, applies to Afrikaners, “the highest income earners in South Africa.”

South Africa’s 2017 land audit showed that White people own 72 percent of individual farm and agricultural holdings, compared with 4 percent for “Africans,” which refers to the Black population. Compare that with the overall population, which is 81 percent Black and 7 percent White, almost the opposite of the landownership demographics.

With that context, the South African government recently approved an Expropriation Act that allows it to acquire land for “nil compensation” under narrow circumstances. Those limited situations include “where the land is not being used and the owner’s main purpose is … to benefit from appreciation of its market value,” and “where an owner has abandoned the land by failing to exercise control over it.”

No land has been confiscated under the law. There are no plans to force landowners away from their properties.

“The people of this country know the pain of forced removals,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa told parliament, as happened to Black people under apartheid. “That is why we will never allow forced removals again.”

But Musk and Trump (in that order) are making a point.

H/t What a Maroon

I thought being a mayor, especially of one of the world’s biggest cities, was a secular kind of job.

Silly me.

Also, he makes it sound like a party, like the secularized commercialized Xmas we’re so used to, but Ramadan is a month of fasting. The fasting is dawn to dusk, and it’s not just eating it’s also drinking, so it’s unhealthy at best and risky at worst.

It’s not something to pretty up with party lights, and it’s not something mayors or councilors or MPs should be promoting and cheering.

But it’s a blanket problem.

The president of the International Paralympic Committee says he is opposed to “blanket solutions” for transgender participation policies.

Andrew Parsons was speaking after United States President Donald Trump signed an executive order that prevents transgender women from competing in female categories of sports.

Sigh. I hate that journalistic caution that obscures the journalist’s meaning. The word “after” renders the rest of the sentence empty. Was Parsons disputing Trump’s executive order, or no? Mere chronology is not helpful.

Last week, International Olympic Committee (IOC) presidential candidate Seb Coe backed the move, and has also suggested he would consider introducing a blanket ban if elected next month.

“One thing that is important to us of course is to protect the female category, this is the number one priority,” Parsons told BBC Sport. “But we also have to acknowledge that there is a growing population of transgender athletes, [and] that they would like to compete at the highest possible level.”

Either Parsons or the BBC is muddying the waters here. There is no “But” if he means women should shut up because lots of men want to compete in their sports. Yes indeed there is a growing population of men who would like to compete in women’s sports at the highest level but they should not be allowed to do that, ever. Protecting the female category isn’t just “one thing” that’s important to “us”; it’s the only fair thing to do.

Heather Cox Richardson yesterday:

This morning, Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought and Office of Personnel Management acting director Charles Ezell sent a memo to the heads of departments and agencies. The memo began: “The federal government is costly, inefficient, and deeply in debt. At the same time, it is not producing results for the American public. Instead, tax dollars are being siphoned off to fund unproductive and unnecessary programs that benefit radical interest groups while hurting hardworking American citizens. The American people registered their verdict on the bloated, corrupt federal bureaucracy on November 5, 2024 by voting for President Trump and his promises to sweepingly reform the federal government.”

Vought was a key author of Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump administration, and in July 2024, investigative reporters caught him on video saying that he and his group, the Center for Renewing America, were hard at work writing the executive orders and memos that Trump would use to put their vision into place. But his claim that voters backed his plan is false. An NBC News poll in September 2024 showed that only 4% of voters liked what was in Project 2025. It was so unpopular that Trump called parts of it “ridiculous and abysmal” and denied all knowledge of it.

But the policies coming out of the Trump White House are closely aligned with Project 2025 and, if anything, appear to be less popular now than they were last September. Under claims of ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been slashing through government programs that are popular with Republican voters like farmers, as well as with Democratic voters.

Yesterday, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Douglas A. Collins celebrated cuts to 875 contracts that he claimed would save nearly $2 billion. But, as Emily Davies and Hannah Natanson of the Washington Post reported, those contracts covered medical services, recruited doctors, and funded cancer programs, as well as providing burial services for veterans. The outcry was such that the VA rescinded the order today. Still on the chopping block, though, are another 1,400 jobs at the VA. Those cuts were announced Monday, on top of the 1,000 previous layoffs.

Despite the anger at the major cuts across the government, Vought announced that agency heads should prepare for large-scale reductions in force, or layoffs, and that by March 13 they should produce plans for the reorganization of their agencies to make them cost less and produce more with fewer people. Before Trump took office, the number of people employed by the U.S. government was at about the same level it was 50 years ago, although the U.S. population has increased by about two thirds. What has increased dramatically is spending on private contractors, who take profits from their taxpayer-funded contracts.

In his memo today, Vought instructed agency heads to “collaborate” with the DOGE team leads assigned to the agency, who presumably report to Elon Musk.

Also today, Trump signed an executive order putting the DOGE team in charge of creating new technological systems to review all payments from the U.S. government and then giving the head of DOGE the power to review all those payments. “This order commences a transformation in Federal spending on contracts, grants, and loans to ensure Government spending is transparent and Government employees are accountable to the American public,” the executive order says.

Make no mistake: This order transforms federal spending by taking it away from Congress, where the Constitution placed it, and moves it to the individual who sits atop the Department of Government Efficiency.

Yesterday the White House announced that the acting head of DOGE is Amy Gleason, who was hired on December 30, 2024, at the technology unit that Trump tried to transform into the Department of Government Efficiency. Nevertheless, members of the White House, including President Donald Trump, have repeatedly referred to Musk as “the head of [DOGE].”

Musk appeared to be in charge of the first Cabinet meeting of the Trump administration today. As Kevin Liptak and Jeff Zeleny of CNN reported: “If anyone was still in doubt where the power lies in President Donald Trump’s new administration, Wednesday’s first Cabinet meeting made clear it wasn’t in the actual Cabinet.” Katherine Doyle of NBC News described “Senate-confirmed department heads spending an hour as audience members.”

A photograph of the meeting in which Musk, wearing a Make America Great Again ball cap and a T-shirt that said “Tech Support,” appears to be holding court while Trump appears to be sleeping reinforced the idea that it is Musk rather than Trump who is running the government. When Trump did speak, CNN fact checker Daniel Dale noted, his remarks were full of false claims.

Cabinet officers, who had brought notes for the statements they expected to make, sat silent, while Musk, the unelected billionaire from South Africa who put more than a quarter of a billion dollars into electing Trump, spoke more than anyone except Trump himself.

Only one month in. 47 months to go.

Huh. It turns out Musk and Trump can’t just fire probationary employees just by saying yer fiyered.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Office of Personnel Management to rescind earlier instructions telling federal agencies to “promptly determine whether these employees should be retained at the agency.”

The directions, communicated in a Jan. 20 memo and Feb. 14 internal email, are “illegal” and “should be stopped, rescinded,” Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California said from the bench.

The ruling does not reinstate dismissed employees.

“The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe, to hire and fire employees within another agency,” Alsup said Thursday night. “It can hire its own employees, yes. Can fire them. But it cannot order or direct some other agency to do so.”

Huh. I wonder why no one bothered to look into that first. Seems kind of sloppy.

Alsup called probationary employees “the lifeblood of our government.”

“They come in at the low level and they work their way up, and that’s how we renew ourselves and reinvent ourselves,” he said.

But there are too many. Trump says so.

The fix is in. The Tate bros are out.

Manoshpere bigot Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan—who still face rape and human trafficking charges in Romania, among others—are on their way to the United States after the Trump administration strong-armed Romania into lifting travel restrictions.

The Tate brothers have been ardent Trump supporters for years, and it seems to have paid off. A Trump official mentioned the Tates in a call with Romania earlier this month, according to the Financial Times. Trump’s special envoy Ric Grenell brought up the brothers again to Romania’s foreign minister on his trip to Munich.

And “brought up” is apparently cravenspeak for “demanded the immediate release of.”

“I have never heard of a foreign government asking Romania to lift preventive measures to allow some suspects to leave the country,” foreign Romanian Judge Cristi Danilet told the Associated Press. “If I had been a judge, this would not have happened. If it is true, it means that there is no more rule of law and sovereign countries.”

It’s true; they’re back in the US now, while Trump claims to know nothing about it.

Trying to square the circle.

In interviews with Mother Jones, queer and trans workers who hold wide-ranging roles in the federal government, some with more than a decade of public service, say they have been living and working in fear since Trump regained office—afraid of being targeted or even fired for their gender identity, sexual orientation, or past efforts to support other LGBTQ employees. All eight federal workers interviewed for this story requested anonymity to protect themselves or their colleagues from workplace retaliation. 

Transgender workers, in particular, tell Mother Jones they’re afraid of being fired every day simply for being who they are. 

Hang on. Hang on. It’s not for “being who they are.” It’s the very opposite of that. It’s for claiming to be who they are not. Unless of course you translate “who they are” as “people who claim to be who they are not.” Endless spiral. That’s the core of trans ideology, and there’s no escaping it, because that’s all there is.

Oops! She thought she was writing in her private secret diary…how embarrassing.

Huh, I wonder why some knobhead in The Times gave me a bad review for a book where I criticise their paper’s coverage of working class people, their obsession with demonising trans women, the dominance of privately educated people in journalism, the stranglehold rightwing billionaires have on the media, and the cosy relationship between lobby journos and politicians?

It’s a mystery!

And then she does it again. Must be Thursday.

She could have written War and Peace except for the fact that no she couldn’t.

So anyway, after all that, of course I had to read the review.

Ash Sarkar, a two-legged viral outrage generator beloved by television producers, came to prominence during the late 2010s. Whether in TV studios self-identifying as a communist or at street demos screaming the word “Nazi” at people, Sarkar was an inescapable presence of those high-pitched times.

Inescapable indeed. There was that time she somehow found herself being a talking head in a BBC documentary on Nazism, alongside actual historians of Nazism such as Richard Evans. She contributed absolutely nothing.

What did Sarkar, a senior editor at the left-wing news site Novara Media, want back then, other than being internet famous for owning, burning, calling out and clapping back at room-temperature IQ pundits on breakfast television, or seeing her absolute boy Jeremy Corbyn in 10 Downing Street? “It’s about the desire to see the coercive structures of state dismantled,” she told one interviewer in 2018, “while also having fun.”

Be careful what you wish for. It turns out to be Trump and Musk who are doing the dismantling.

Her prose is leaden. The pages swarm with “emboldening effects”, “culture wars being stoked”, “vulnerable minorities”, “anti-migrant crackdowns”, “strong bulwarks”, “custodians of the status quo”, “individual subjectivities” and “pervasive feelings”. Sometimes she doesn’t make any sense at all: “Social media has partially, but dramatically, democratised the public sphere.” Good luck figuring out what a partial dramatic democratisation is.

…

As the book loses steam she goes back to calling people Nazis. Gender critical feminists, Sarkar reckons, are “not a million miles away” from Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy.

Really? Women who say that men are not women are comparable to Rudolf Hess?

Well no wonder the BBC included her in that documentary about the Nazis.

And then there’s good ol’ Bob.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was slammed Wednesday for downplaying a measles outbreak that has led to the country’s first child death from the disease in decades.

Donald Trump’s health secretary waved off the active Texas outbreak—where pediatricians on the ground have reported children being accepted into care unable to properly breathe—as a normal thing that happens every year.

Scores of physicians have rung alarm bells that the latest outbreak, impacting over 100 people in West Texas and neighboring New Mexico, is a “crisis” that is far from normal—especially for a disease that was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000.

The Texas Department of State Health Services said Wednesday the child who died from measles was “school-aged” and unvaccinated. They were hospitalized last week and had died by Wednesday morning.

But that’s normal. No biggy. I’m sure the kid’s parents are just getting on with their day.

The death is the first since 2015, when measles was blamed as the cause of death for an immunocompromised Washington woman who physicians did not know had the disease until after her death. Before that case, the country had gone 12 years since it had last recorded a measles death of any kind.

Kennedy told reporters there have now been two deaths this year from the disease, which is largely preventable with a widely-available vaccine, but he did not elaborate on the second case.

Kennedy of course didn’t say the “largely preventable” part. That should be in parentheses rather than between commas. Kennedy doesn’t want to admit that measles is largely preventable.

There were 18 people hospitalized as of Wednesday morning, Texas health officials said. Those in Lubbock, which is ground zero for the outbreak, say that number is steadily growing.

Dr. Lara Johnson, the chief medical officer of a children’s hospital in the city, told NBC News her team has cared for “around 20” kids with measles. [All] of those patients were admitted because they were struggling to breathe. None had been vaccinated.

None. had. been. vaccinated.

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, a former physician who was slammed by his medical colleagues earlier this month for voting to confirm Kennedy, told parents Wednesday to protect their children from measles by getting the “safe and effective” vaccine.

After voting for Kennedy. Rethink your life, Senator.

But don’t worry. They’re not breaking anything that actually matters. They say so themselves.

“We’re cutting down the size of government. We have to,” Trump said earlier on Wednesday during the first cabinet meeting of his second term. “We’re bloated. We’re sloppy. We have a lot of people that aren’t doing their job.”

The administration already moved to fire thousands of probationary employees who were not yet entitled to civil service protections. The president on Wednesday said that the Environmental Protection Agency plans to cut up to 65% of its employees. Employees at the labor department and the Social Security Administration are also reportedly bracing for dramatic downsizings.

See? Stupid shit. Frivolous. Unnecessary. Who needs an environment? What good is labor? Social security is a libbrul plot to weaken us.

Addressing the cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Musk conceded that Doge had made some mistakes in its rapid-fire approach to shrinking and in some cases attempting to entirely eliminate agencies. He conceded that Doge “won’t be perfect”, including when it “accidentally” cancelled an Ebola-prevention effort that the tech billionaire insisted had been restored “immediately” and with “no interruption”.

An official with the US Agency for International Development (USAid), one of Doge’s first targets, disputed Musk’s claim, telling the AP that agency funds for Ebola response had not been released since Trump froze foreign aid last month.

Listen up: white people don’t get Ebola. That’s all you need to know.

At least they tell us a joke now and then.

Trump’s top aides are struggling to contain disputes at the White House and across the administration following billionaire Elon Musk’s ultimatum to federal workers to list their accomplishments or lose their jobs, said three government officials familiar with the tensions.

Before the weekend, the White House felt confident that coordination had been improving between senior staffers and Musk, two of those people said. In the first weeks of Trump’s new administration , some White House officials had expressed concerns over the tactics of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, as Reuters previously reported.

Chief of staff Susie Wiles had pulled Musk aside to ask him to loop her in on his plans instead of surprising her team with major decisions, according to two separate sources with knowledge of the conversation who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions.

After that conversation, Musk had begun keeping Wiles informed of DOGE’s activities on a daily basis, said one of the officials with direct knowledge of the matter. The White House believed it had Musk’s agreement that he would seek approval from cabinet secretaries before he used the government’s human resources agency, the Office of Personnel Management, to send emails directly to federal workers, two of the officials said.

But the plan appears to have quickly fallen apart. After Trump urged Musk to “get more aggressive” with DOGE in a post on his Truth Social site on Saturday, OPM ordered the nation’s 2.3 million civil-service workers in an email to detail their accomplishments at work. The email landed shortly after Musk posted on his social media site X that not responding to the request would be viewed as a resignation, an ultimatum that sent shockwaves through Washington.

You have to wonder why Trump gives Musk his orders via “his Truth Social site“ rather than the more usual way, i.e. directly. You also have to wonder why Musk issues his threats to civil-service workers via his social media site.

Trump and Wiles did not sign off on the email, those three people said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media. Musk, however, told a cabinet meeting on Wednesday that he had asked Trump if his team could “send out an email to everyone, just saying: ‘What did you get done last week?’ The president said yes. So, I did that.”

He did that and he also said – on his soshul meeja site – that not replying=resignation. So in effect the email was not “just saying” wudja do lassweek.

In response to questions from Reuters, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement the sources are “wrong” and that the “White House was not caught off guard.” Trump signed off on Musk’s email idea, and DOGE and the OPM gave the White House a heads up, she said.

Uh huh, but what about the non-reply=resignation part?

She called the media’s “obsession” with Trump, Musk and DOGE “pathetic” and said it proves the media is still out of touch with American voters. 

I beg your pardon? It’s pathetic for the media to report what Trump, Musk and DOGE are doing? They should just ignore it and cover sports instead?

It’s Trump Derangement Syndrome Derangement Syndrome.

Yet another bad thing.

A new map and data from The Wilderness Society illustrate the potential reach of executive and secretarial orders issued to fulfill President Trump’s fossil fuel-centric “energy dominance” vision. 

Places at risk include Bears Ears National Monument, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the watershed of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

Trump’s day-one executive orders and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s secretarial orders from two weeks later positioned drilling and mining interests as the favored users of America’s public lands and threatened to scrap existing land protections and conservation measures. Following those orders, assistant secretaries were supposed to have submitted action plans to Secretary Burgum on Feb. 18 with steps to review, revise and rescind protections for potentially hundreds of special places nationwide. The department has not yet commented on the content of these plans or committed to any public input or transparency around the process. 

In the absence of that transparency, the new Wilderness Society map gives a sense of some of the places that could fall under the Trump administration’s punitive microscope, including natural and cultural treasures like Bears Ears National Monument, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the watershed of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.  

“As we speak, the Trump administration’s Department of the Interior is deciding which of our treasured places to sell out for drilling and mining. Our analysis shows that their plans could end up removing or reducing protections for tens of millions of acres’ worth of wildlife habitat, ancient cultural sites and outdoor recreation areas,” said Dan Hartinger, senior director of agency policy at The Wilderness Society.  

There’s more. It’s all horrifying.