Beach wear
“Mons Bola” (epoxy and composite resin, paint, pigment, acrylic, brass, nylon, silicone rubber), by Jillian Moore, at the Fuller Craft Museum.
Trump’s assault on the federal workforce is right out of dictators’ playbook
Nazi rally at Nuremberg in the 1930’. Trump has expressed admiration for Hitler.
Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban, whom Trump and his circle admire.
From The Conversation (except for picture at top)
The Authors of this piece:
Associate Professor of Political Science, Michigan State University
Distinguished Practitioner in Grand Strategy, Jackson School of Public Affairs, Yale University
Professor of Political Science, Penn State
From The Conversation (except for picture at top)
With the recent confirmations of Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – two of the most controversial of President Donald Trump’s high-level administration nominees – the president’s attempt to remake government as a home for political loyalists continues.
Soon after coming to office for a second term, Trump aggressively sought to overhaul Washington and bring the federal government in line with his political agenda. He is spearheading an effort to purge the government’s ranks of people he perceived as his opponents and slash the size of long-standing bureaucratic agencies – in some instances dismantling them entirely.
At the helm of much of this is businessman Elon Musk, who is not only the world’s richest man but also the largest donor of the 2024 election and the owner of multiple businesses that benefit from lucrative government contracts.
Musk – and a small cohort of young engineers loyal to him but with little experience in government – descended on Washington, announced their control over multiple government agencies, fired career civil servants, and even strong-armed access to government payment systems at the Treasury Department, where the inspector general had just been sacked.
This unprecedented sequence of events in the U.S. has left many observers in a daze, struggling to make sense of the dramatic reshaping of the bureaucracy under way.
Yet, as researchers on authoritarian politics, it is no surprise to us that a leader bent on expanding his own power, such as Trump, would see the bureaucracy as a key target. Here’s why.
A well-functioning bureaucracy is an organization of highly qualified civil servants who follow established rules to prevent abuses of power. Bureaucracies, in this way, are an important part of democracy that constrain executive behavior.
For this reason, aspiring strongmen are especially likely to go after them. Whether by shuffling the personnel of agencies, creating new ones, or limiting their capacity for oversight, a common tactic among power-hungry leaders is establishing control over the government’s bureaucracy. Following a failed coup attempt in 2016, for example, Turkish President Reccep Tayyip Erdoğan fired or detained as many as 100,000 government workers.
In the short term, greater executive control over the bureaucracy gives these leaders a valuable tool for rewarding their elite supporters, especially as diminished government oversight increases opportunities for corruption and the dispersion of rewards to such insiders. Erdoğan, for example, by 2017 had worked to fill lower-level bureaucratic positions with loyalists of his party, the AKP, to ensure the party’s influence over corruption investigations.
In the long term, this hollowing out and reshaping of the bureaucracy is part of a broader plan in which aspiring autocrats usurp control over all institutions that can constrain them, such as the legislature and the courts. As we document in our book, “The Origins of Elected Strongmen,” attacks on the bureaucracy constitute a significant step in a larger process in which elected leaders dismantle democracy from within.
Take control of bureaucracy
The seemingly bizarre series of events that have transpired in Washington since Trump came to power are highly consistent with other countries where democracy has been dismantled.
Take Benin, for example. Its leader, Patrice Talon – one of the wealthiest people in Africa – came to power in democratic elections in 2016.
Soon after taking control, Talon created new agencies housed in the executive office and defunded existing ones, as a means of skirting bureaucratic constraints to his rule. The central affairs of the state were in the hands of an informal cabinet, initially led by Olivier Boko, a wealthy businessman considered to be Talon’s right-hand man despite not having any official position in government.
Talon and his inner circle used this control over the state to enrich themselves, turning the country into what one journalist referred to as “a company in the hands of Talon and his very close clique.”
Consolidating control over the bureaucracy was just one step in a larger process of turning Benin into an autocratic state. Talon eventually amassed greater power and influence over key state institutions, such as the judiciary, and intervened in the electoral process to ensure his continued rule. By 2021, Benin could no longer be considered a democracy.
Purge civil service
A similar dynamic occurred in Hungary. After governing relatively conventionally for one term, Prime Minister Viktor Orban was defeated in elections in 2002. He blamed that outcome on unfriendly media and never accepted the results as legitimate.
Orban returned to office in 2010, bent on retribution.
Orban ordered mass firings of civil servants and put allies of his party, Fidesz, in crucial roles. He also used the dismantling of bureaucratic constraints to pad the pockets of the elites whose support he needed to maintain power.
As a Hungarian former politician wrote in 2016, “While the mafia state derails the bureaucratic administration, it organizes, monopolizes the channels of corruption and keeps them in order.”
Likewise in Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez had his cronies draw up a blacklist of civil servants to be purged for signing a petition in support of a referendum to determine whether Chávez should be recalled from office in 2004; government employees who signed were subsequently fired from their jobs.
More than a decade later, Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s current leader, would conduct his own purge of civil servants after they signed a petition to hold another recall referendum. After multiple rounds of government and military purges, Maduro was able to overturn an election he lost and jail his opponents, knowing full well the judges and generals would follow his orders.
Benin’s leader, Patrice Talon, consolidated control over the bureaucracy as part of a larger process of turning the country into an autocratic state. Yanick Folly/AFP via Getty Images
Foster culture of secrecy and suspicion
Orban and Chavez, like Talon, were democratically elected but went on to undermine democracy.
In environments where loyalty to the leader is prioritized over all else, and purges can happen at a moment’s notice, few people are willing to speak up about abuses of power or stand in the way of a power grab.
Fostering a culture of secrecy and mutual suspicion among government officials is intentional and serves the leader’s interests.
As a World Bank report highlighted in 1983, in President Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire, now Democratic Republic of Congo, the bureaucracy had been “privatized by the ruling clique,” creating a climate in which “fear and repression … prevented any serious threat from dissenting groups.”
When leaders gain full power over the bureaucracy, they use it to reward and punish ordinary citizens as well. This was a tried-and-true tactic under the PRI’s rule in Mexico for much of the 20th century, where citizens who supported the PRI were more likely to receive government benefits.
In short, when aspiring autocrats come to power, career bureaucrats are a common target, often replaced by unqualified loyalists who would never be hired for the position based on merit. Recent events in the U.S., as unprecedented as they may seem, are precisely what we would expect with the return of Trump, a would-be autocrat, to power.
Noisy water
“Thunder Hole,’’ at Acadia National Park, Maine, by Colleen Pearce, in the spring show at Southern Vermont Arts Center, in Manchester, Feb. 22-May 25.
Sun on snow
“Mount Lafayette (highest peak in New Hampshire’s Franconia Range) in Winter’’ (1870), by Thomas Hill (1829-1908)
Denis O’Neill: Our greatest president and our worst
Musings 2025 ~ Presidents Day
By Denis O’Neill, essayist, memorist and screenwriter
How ironic that on this Presidents Day, the two Republicans widely considered to be our very best and worst Presidents presided/preside over a nation on the brink of Civil War. The irony goes deeper. Abraham Lincoln, our 16th President, led the Union against the one and only President of the Confederacy (1861-1865), Jefferson Davis. The issue was slavery.
Today, America’s 47th President, Donald Trump, a man who along with father, Fred, was sued by the federal government in the 1970’s for not renting Trump apartments to Blacks in Queens, and who after the 2017 Ku Klux Klan march in Charlottesville, Va., said, “There were good people on both sides.” (Fred Trump marched with the Ku Klux Klan in New York City in the 1920’s, so the Trump family’s fondness for white supremacy is longstanding.) Son Donald, who is basically supported now, and was elected by the states that lost the Civil War, and who is partial to the cause that led to it, would have more in common this Presidents Day with Confederate President Davis.
It is surreal to realize that our country is capable of electing two human beings that reflect bookends of intelligence and humanity. The current President, of course, is the only convicted felon and twice-impeached president. He also dodged serving in Vietnam by dint of “bone spurs’’ in his feet. He also stole top-secret government documents and plotted the overthrow of our democracy. As he takes a two-handed axe through the power of executive action to federal programs that support women, the environment, poor people, gay people and the arts, his Vice President, J.D. Vance, has been in Europe defending the neo-Nazi political party in Germany and laying the groundwork to sell out Ukraine to the Russians. Brown is the color of his shirt, and that of the man he works for.
His first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, and his longest serving Chief of Staff, John Kelly, said that Donald Trump is the most ignorant human being either man had ever encountered. Here is but one scrap from the horse’s mouth:
“Trees fall down after a short period of time abut 18 months they become very dry they become really like a matchstick and they get up, you know there’s no water pouring through and they become very very uh... they just explode. They can explode.” ~ DJT
Because it’s Presidents Day... and because once upon a time we had a President whose greatness reflected the brightest beacon of message and eloquence... here is but one brief passage from Abraham Lincoln, truer today than ever before. (Note: my father, Charles O’Neill, was a Civil War historian and a Lincoln scholar. His dear friend, Bill Speed, was ta descendent of Lincoln’s closest friend, Joshua Speed. As a kid, we spent many a happy outing at the the Speeds’ Pound Ridge, N.Y., home, on occasion touching and reading letters from Lincoln to his friend Joshua. My father believed that Lincoln was not only our greatest President, but quite possibly our greatest writer.
“I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true – I am not bound to succeed but I am bound to live up to what light I have - I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him when he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.” ~ A.L.
I am not a religious person, but if there is a God, I hope she helps us on this 2025 Presidents Day. I will give the last words of this Musing to the sentiment once uttered by Scopes trial lawyer Clarence Darrow... a quote at one time attributed to Mark Twain. “I have never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”
As a country we will forever mourn the obituary of President Abraham Lincoln. As a liberty-loving American, I look forward to reading with great pleasure the obituary of the Trump presidency.
Cambridge’s big move to address housing crisis
Sunrise over Central Square in Cambridge
Eric Kilby photo
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
The Cambridge City Council last week enacted a revolutionary change in its land-use rules that abolishes the long-entrenched ordinance that created districts where only single-family houses could be built. The new rule doesn’t ban the construction of single-family houses but does permit the construction of apartment or condo buildings of up to six stories in most parts of the city, provided that 20 percent of the units are set aside for “affordable housing.’’
That will bring down the city’s sky-high building costs over the next few years by expanding supply. It should be considered in Rhode Island’s most densely populated areas. (I live in a neighborhood with mixed single-family houses and apartment houses, some quite big. They work well together, assuring a wide range of age demographics, and there’s plenty of shopping within walking distance for most residents.)
That old supply and demand!
Consider that housing costs in Austin, despite it being considered a very “hot” (popular) city, have been falling in large part because of a housing construction boom, with the median home price declining 7.1 percent in the December 2023-December 2024 period! The “yes in my backyard” movement has become powerful in Austin and some other big cities in the West, even as the “not in backyard’’ stance remains dominant in many places in New England, very much including politically “liberal communities’’ increasingly known for their hypocrisy. (No land windmills please!)
Take a look for powerful lessons:
We need more than Providence’s pallet houses, although any roof in a storm….
‘Metallic frankness’
“Partridges in the Snow,’’ (1891) by Jozef Chelmonski
Via Wikipedia
“The differences between summer and winter on beaches in areas where the winter conditions are rougher and waves have a shorter wavelength but higher energy. In winter, sand from the beach is stored offshore.’’
Graphic by Paul Webb with credit to Steven Earle’s Physical Geology.
“The house is hard cold. Winter walks up and down the town swinging its censer, but no smoke or sweetness comes from it, only the sour, metallic frankness of salt and snow. I dress in the dark and hurry out. The sleepy dogs walk with me a few strides, then they disappear. The water slaps crisply upon the cold-firmed sand. I listen intently, as though it is a language the ocean is speaking. There are no stars, nor a moon.’’
Mary Olive (1935-2019), American poet. She spent much of her life in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod.
Prepare to go out in society
“My Mom Told Me to Always Wear a Slip (half slip)’’ (Saori weaving of cotton and paper yarns, painted dowels, fishing line, wooded hangin unit), by Carolyn Letvin, in the group show “New England Collective XV: Blueprint of Imagination,’’ at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, through March 1.
Sampling the sweet maple sap?
“Truants” (oil), by Eastman Johnson (1824-1906), who grew up in Maine and was a co-founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City.
‘Dance hungry and wild’
Eastern Cottontail Rabbit
“Song of the Rabbits Outside the Tavern’’
by Elizabeth Coatsworth (1893-1986), Maine-based poet
We who play under the pines,
We who dance in the snow
That shines blue in the light of the moon
Sometimes halt as we go,
Stand with our ears erect,
Our noses testing the air,
To gaze at the golden world
Behind the windows there.
Suns they have in a cave,
And stars each on a tall white stem
And the thought of fox or of owl
Seems never to bother them.
They laugh and eat and are warm,
Their food is ready at hand
While hungry out in the cold
We little rabbits stand.
But they never dance as we dance
They have not the speed nor the grace,
We scorn both the cat and the dog
Who lie by their fireplace,
We scorn them, licking their paws
Their eyes on an upraised spoon--
We who dance hungry and wild
Under a winter's moon!
Amy Maxmen: Urgent data on flu goes missing
The picture at the right represents avian flu, the one at the left the most common influenza.
From Kaiser Family Foundation Health News
“Missing and delayed data causes uncertainty. It also potentially makes us react in ways that are counterproductive.”
— Jennifer Nuzzo, head of the pandemic center at Brown University
Sonya Stokes, an emergency room physician in the San Francisco Bay Area, braces herself for a daily deluge of patients sick with coughs, soreness, fevers, vomiting, and other flu-like symptoms.
She’s desperate for information, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a critical source of urgent analyses of the flu and other public health threats, has gone quiet in the weeks since President Donald Trump took office.
“Without more information, we are blind,” she said.
Flu has been brutal this season. The CDC estimates at least 24 million illnesses, 310,000 hospitalizations, and 13,000 deaths from the flu since the start of October. At the same time, the bird flu outbreak continues to infect cattle and farmworkers. But CDC analyses that would inform people about these situations are delayed, and the CDC has cut off communication with doctors, researchers, and the World Health Organization, say doctors and public health experts.
“CDC right now is not reporting influenza data through the WHO global platforms, FluNet [and] FluID, that they’ve been providing information [on] for many, many years,” Maria Van Kerkhove, interim director of epidemic and pandemic preparedness at the WHO, said at a Feb. 12 press briefing.
“We are communicating with them,” she added, “but we haven’t heard anything back.”
On his first day in office, President Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from the WHO.
A critical analysis of the seasonal flu selected for distribution through the CDC’s Health Alert Network has stalled, according to people close to the CDC. They asked not to be identified because of fears of retaliation. The network, abbreviated as HAN, is the CDC’s main method of sharing urgent public health information with health officials, doctors, and, sometimes, the public.
A chart from that analysis, reviewed by KFF Health News, suggests that flu may be at a record high. About 7.7% of patients who visited clinics and hospitals without being admitted had flu-like symptoms in early February, a ratio higher than in four other flu seasons depicted in the graph. That includes 2003-04, when an atypical strain of flu fueled a particularly treacherous season that killed at least 153 children.
Without a complete analysis, however, it’s unclear whether this tidal wave of sickness foreshadows a spike in hospitalizations and deaths that hospitals, pharmacies and schools must prepare for. Specifically, other data could relay how many of the flu-like illnesses are caused by flu viruses — or which flu strain is infecting people. A deeper report might also reveal whether the flu is more severe or contagious than usual.
“I need to know if we are dealing with a more virulent strain or a coinfection with another virus that is making my patients sicker, and what to look for so that I know if my patients are in danger,” Stokes said. “Delays in data create dangerous situations on the front line.”
Although the CDC’s flu dashboard shows a surge of influenza, it doesn’t include all data needed to interpret the situation. Nor does it offer the tailored advice found in HAN alerts that tells health care workers how to protect patients and the public. In 2023, for example, a report urged clinics to test patients with respiratory symptoms rather than assume cases are the flu, since other viruses were causing similar issues that year.
“This is incredibly disturbing,” said Rachel Hardeman, a member of the Advisory Committee to the Director of the CDC. On Feb. 10, Hardeman and other committee members wrote to acting CDC Director Susan Monarez asking the agency to explain missing data, delayed studies, and potentially severe staff cuts. “The CDC is vital to our nation’s security,” the letter said.
Several studies have also been delayed or remain missing from the CDC’s preeminent scientific publication, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Anne Schuchat, a former principal deputy director at the CDC, said she would be concerned if there was political oversight of scientific material: “Suppressing information is potentially confusing, possibly dangerous, and it can backfire.”
CDC spokesperson Melissa Dibble declined to comment on delayed or missing analyses. “It is not unexpected to see flu activity elevated and increasing at this time of the year,” she said.
A draft of one unpublished study, reviewed by KFF Health News, that has been withheld from the MMWR for three weeks describes how a milk hauler and a dairy worker in Michigan may have spread bird flu to their pet cats. The indoor cats became severely sick and died. Although the workers weren’t tested, the study says that one of them had irritated eyes before the cat fell ill — a common bird flu symptom. That person told researchers that the pet “would roll in their work clothes.”
After one cat became sick, the investigation reports, an adolescent in the household developed a cough. But the report says this young person tested negative for the flu, and positive for a cold-causing virus.
Corresponding CDC documents summarizing the cat study and another as-yet unpublished bird flu analysis said the reports were scheduled to be published Jan. 23. These were reviewed by KFF Health News. The briefing on cats advises dairy farmworkers to “remove clothing and footwear, and rinse off any animal biproduct residue before entering the household to protect others in the household, including potentially indoor-only cats.”
The second summary refers to “the most comprehensive” analysis of bird flu virus detected in wastewater in the United States.
Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University, said delays of bird flu reports are upsetting because they’re needed to inform the public about a worsening situation with many unknown elements. Citing “insufficient data” and “high uncertainty,” the United Kingdom raised its assessment of the risk posed by the U.S. outbreak on dairies.
“Missing and delayed data causes uncertainty,” Nuzzo said. “It also potentially makes us react in ways that are counterproductive.”
Another bird flu study slated for January publication showed up in the MMWR on Feb. 13, three weeks after it was expected. It revealed that three cattle veterinarians had been unknowingly infected last year, based on the discovery of antibodies against the bird flu virus in their blood. One of the veterinarians worked in Georgia and South Carolina, states that haven’t reported outbreaks on dairy farms.
The study provides further evidence that the United States is not adequately detecting cases in cows and people. Nuzzo said it also highlights how data can supply reassuring news. Only three of 150 cattle veterinarians had signs of prior infections, suggesting that the virus doesn’t easily spread from the animals into people. More than 40 dairy workers have been infected, but they generally have had more sustained contact with sick cattle and their virus-laden milk than veterinarians.
Instead, recently released reports have been about wildfires in California and Hawaii.
“Interesting but not urgent,” Nuzzo said, considering the acute fire emergencies have ended. The bird flu outbreak, she said, is an ongoing “urgent health threat for which we need up-to-the-minute information to know how to protect people.”
“The American public is at greater risk when we don’t have information on a timely basis,” Schuchat said.
This week, a federal judge ordered the CDC and other health agencies to “restore” datasets and websites that the organization Doctors for America had identified in a lawsuit as having been altered. Further, the judge ordered the agencies to “identify any other resources that DFA members rely on to provide medical care” and restore them by Feb. 14.
In their letter, CDC advisory committee members requested an investigation into missing data and delayed reports. Hardeman, an adviser who is a health policy expert at the University of Minnesota, said the group didn’t know why data and scientific findings were being withheld or removed. Still, she added, “I hold accountable the acting director of the CDC, the head of HHS, and the White House.”
Hardeman said the Trump administration has the power to disband the advisory committee. She said the group expects that to happen but proceeded with its demands regardless.
“We want to safeguard the rigor of the work at the CDC because we care deeply about public health,” she said. “We aren’t here to be silent.”
Amy Maxmen is a Kaiser Family Foundation Health News reporter. amaxmen@kff.org
Sculpted dignity
“Arrow Maker” (circa 1868), (marble), by Edmonia Lewis, at the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine.
— Photo by Luc Demers
Daily workout
"Women's Work?” (gouache on paper), by Betsyann Duval, in the “Musings” show at Bromfield Gallery, Boston, though March 2.
Chris Powell: Daring to bring them back to the office?
The Connecticut State Capitol, in downtown Hartford.
Ragesoss photo
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Interviewed this week by WTIC-AM1080 morning host Brian Shactman, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont remarked that state government is in good condition. But as the conversation turned to the loss of vibrancy in the cities, with so many former office workers now working from home, the governor noted that he wanted office workers, including state-government employees, to return to their workplaces. In regard to the state employees, he added, "I lost in arbitration."
So how good can the condition of state government be when its chief executive lacks the authority even to get its employees to return to their workplaces?
While the governor seemed to shrug off the situation, his expression of haplessness should have mortified people in the radio audience who want their government to work for the public and not the public to work for their government.
The leader of the Republican minority in the state House of Representatives, Rep. Vincent J. Candelora, of North Branford, has proposed legislation to empower state government agencies to require their employees to work in state government offices. But Democrats overwhelmingly control the General Assembly and its Labor Committee, to which Candelora's bill has been referred, and the state- employee unions overwhelmingly control Democratic legislators generally and those on the Labor Committee particularly.
So does the governor want really want state employees back in their workplaces, to improve both state government's efficiency and the environment of the cities? Or was he just striking a pose? Does the governor really want, instead, the continued support of the state- employee unions during his prospective campaign for re-election next year?
He will answer the questions by insisting on passage of Candelora's bill -- or by winking as it is discarded.
xxx
Years ago many people who worried about social conditions, including the late Connecticut U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, complained that television programs and movies had gotten too violent and sexually explicit, that children were spending too much time watching them, and that such entertainment was coarsening the culture and inspiring bad and even criminal behavior.
The Oklahoma newspaper publisher and columnist Jenkin Lloyd Jones may have lamented it best. "We are drowning our youngsters in violence, cynicism, and sadism, piped into the living room and even the nursery," Jones wrote. "The grandchildren of the kids who used to weep because the Little Match Girl froze to death now feel cheated if she isn't slugged, raped, and thrown into a Bessemer converter."
Jones and Lieberman were right but little came of it, since sex and violence sell, money is hard to resist, and having government fix the problem might have involved unconstitutional censorship. The problem really was for parents to solve, but many parents preferred to use television as a babysitter, whether the kids were watching Sesame Street or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
These days social media are said to be bigger causes of psychological disturbance in children than television. So Connecticut Atty. Gen. William Tong and some state legislators want state government to regulate social media to reduce their appeal to children.
There will be constitutional problems with this too, as well as practical problems, since social-media technology is so advanced . Young people probably will figure out how to evade any regulation, creating an endless cycle of regulation and evasion even as state government already has more than enough to do.
As with television years ago, the real problem with social media is a lack of parenting. Children have cell phones, computers and Internet service only if their parents provide them. Educators are discovering that the distractions and conflicts caused by social media can be eliminated just by banning cell phones in school.
But the attorney general and the legislators proposing to regulate social media excuse parents from responsibility. While many children these days have only one parent, if that many, regulation of social media by parents would be far more effective and fairer than regulation by government. Parents should not be excused.
But then it's much easier for politicians to scold businesses than their own constituents.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Eric Nost/Alejandro Paz: How to find climate information that Trump regime tries to suppress
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.
Information on the Internet might seem like it’s there forever, but it’s only as permanent as people choose to make it.
That’s apparent as the second Trump administration “floods the zone” with efforts to dismantle science agencies and the data and websites they use to communicate with the public. The targets range from public health and demographics to climate science.
We are a research librarian and policy scholar who belong to a network called the Public Environmental Data Partners, a coalition of nonprofits, archivists and researchers who rely on federal data in our analysis, advocacy and litigation and are working to ensure that data remains available to the public.
In just the first three weeks of Trump’s term, we saw agencies remove access to at least a dozen climate and environmental justice analysis tools. The new administration also scrubbed the phrase “climate change” from government websites, as well as terms like “resilience.”
Here’s why and how Public Environmental Data Partners and others are making sure that the climate science the public depends on is available forever:
The Internet and the availability of data are necessary for innovation, research and daily life.
Scientists analyze NASA satellite observations and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather records to understand changes underway in the Earth system, what’s causing them and how to protect the climates that economies were built on. Other researchers use these sources alongside Census Bureau data to understand who is most affected by climate change. And every day, people around the world log onto the Environmental Protection Agency’s website to learn how to protect themselves from hazards — and to find out what the government is or isn’t doing to help.
If the data and tools used to understand complex data are abruptly taken off the Internet, the work of scientists, civil society organizations and government officials themselves can grind to a halt. The generation of scientific data and analysis by government scientists is also crucial. Many state governments run environmental protection and public health programs that depend on science and data collected by federal agencies.
Removing information from government websites also makes it harder for the public to effectively participate in key processes of democracy, including changes to regulations. When an agency proposes to repeal a rule, for example, it is required to solicit comments from the public, who often depend on government websites to find information relevant to the rule.
And when web resources are altered or taken offline, it breeds mistrust in both government and science. Government agencies have collected climate data, conducted complex analyses, provided funding and hosted data in a publicly accessible manner for years. People around the word understand climate change in large part because of U.S. federal data. Removing it deprives everyone of important information about their world.
Bye-bye data?
The first Trump administration removed discussions of climate change and climate policies widely across government websites. However, in our research with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative over those first four years, we didn’t find evidence that datasets had been permanently deleted.
The second Trump administration seems different, with more rapid and pervasive removal of information.
In response, groups involved in Public Environmental Data Partners have been archiving climate datasets our community has prioritized, uploading copies to public repositories and cataloging where and how to find them if they go missing from government websites.
Most federal agencies decreased their use of the phrase ‘climate change’ on websites during the first Trump administration, 2017-2020. Eric Nost, et al., 2021, CC BY
As of Feb. 13, 2025, we hadn’t seen the destruction of climate science records. Many of these data collection programs, such as those at NOAA or EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, are required by Congress. However, the administration had limited or eliminated access to a lot of data.
Maintaining tools for understanding climate change
We’ve seen a targeted effort to systematically remove tools like dashboards that summarize and visualize the social dimensions of climate change. For instance, the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool mapped low-income and other marginalized communities that are expected to experience severe climate changes, such as crop losses and wildfires. The mapping tool was taken offline shortly after Trump’s first set of executive orders.
Most of the original data behind the mapping tool, like the wildfire risk predictions, is still available, but is now harder to find and access. But because the mapping tool was developed as an open-source project, we were able to recreate it.
In some cases, entire webpages are offline. For instance, the page for the 25-year-old Climate Change Center at the Department of Transportation doesn’t exist anymore. The link just sends visitors back to the department’s homepage.
Other pages have limited access. For instance, EPA hasn’t yet removed its climate change pages, but it has removed “climate change” from its navigation menu, making it harder to find those pages.
During Donald Trump’s first week back in office, the Department of Transportation removed its Climate Change Center webpage. Internet Archive Wayback Machine
Fortunately, our partners at the End of Term Web Archive have captured snapshots of millions of government webpages and made them accessible through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The group has done this after each administration since 2008.
If you’re looking at a webpage and you think it should include a discussion of climate change, use the “changes” tool“ in the Wayback Machine to check if the language has been altered over time, or navigate to the site’s snapshots of the page before Trump’s inauguration.
What you can do
You can also find archived climate and environmental justice datasets and tools on the Public Environmental Data Partners website. Other groups are archiving datasets linked in the Data.gov data portal and making them findable in other locations.
Individual researchers are also uploading datasets in searchable repositories like OSF, run by the Center for Open Science.
If you are worried that certain data currently still available might disappear, consult this checklist from MIT Libraries. It provides steps for how you can help safeguard federal data.
Narrowing the knowledge sphere
What’s unclear is how far the administration will push its attempts to remove, block or hide climate data and science, and how successful it will be.
Already, a federal district court judge has ruled that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s removal of access to public health resources that doctors rely on was harmful and arbitrary. These were put back online thanks to that ruling.
We worry that more data and information removals will narrow public understanding of climate change, leaving people, communities and economies unprepared and at greater risk. While data archiving efforts can stem the tide of removals to some extent, there is no replacement for the government research infrastructures that produce and share climate data.
Eric Nost is associate professor of geography at the University of Guelph, in Canada, and Alejandro Paz is energy and environment librarian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
William Morgan: A small shop sends me onto some trails of history
Consider this my $5 history lesson, or a ticket down the rabbit hole.
The White Whale, a delightfully cluttered shop in Hudson, N.Y., is one of my favorites along the mile-long row of antique emporiums that forms Warren Street. Even though Hudson became a very popular home for New York émigrés during COVID, earning it the nickname of “Brooklyn North,” the various whale-themed places recalls Hudson’s founding as a port by Nantucket whalers fleeing the Royal Navy during the American Revolution. I bought this Camden, Maine, harbor scene by the Cape Ann painter Frederick W. Smith at the White Whale.
Frederick W. Smith (1885-1967?), Camden Harbor
Not really being a collector, I tend to look for smaller items, such as postcards and photographs, which despite their diminutive size, have larger stories to tell. On our last trip to Hudson, I paid $5 for a bookplate. The woodblock print of woodland, stream, and windmill once identified a tome from the library of R. Percy Alden.
Clearly someone with New England roots, Robert Percy Alden (1848-1909) was unknown to me. He apparently went into the lumber business and built an English-style manor house in Cornwall, Penn., in 1881. That his architect was Stanford White, fresh from apprenticing with Henry Hobson Richardson in Boston and before he joined with Charles McKim and William Rutherford Mead to form the Gilded Age’s most important architectural firm, suggests that Alden was both well-connected and aspirational.
Percy’s wife, Mary Ida Warren, whom he married in Paris, died at the age of 46 when a candle set her bed clothes on fire. Villa Alden’s last public appearance was as the set for a 2001 slasher film called WatchUsDie. Today, the house is a wedding venue.
Alden Villa, Cornwall, Penn., 1881
The artist of the bookplate is identified only by initials, J.A.W. Given the familial connections of a certain caste of New Englanders, I am assigning the design to the famous turn-of-the-century landscape painter Julian Alden Weir (1852-1919). The bookplate turns up in a New York bookseller’s catalogue, in Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, or The Ecclesiastical History of New England, printed in 1702, and for sale for $8,500. Before Alden, the book had been owned by Robert Weir, a Hudson River School painter mostly known for his monumental mural “Embarkation of the Pilgrims,” in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. Weir was a professor at the U.S. Military Academy, and both his son Julian and Percy Alden were born in West Point.
The younger Weir had two farms in Connecticut, one in Branchville, near Ridgefield, and the other in Windham, places where he gathered such fellow artists as John Henry Twachtman and William Lathrop.
One presumes that the scene in the bookplate is in Branchville, where Weir and Twachtman spent a summer perfecting woodblock engraving. William Lathrop was the figurehead of the artists’ colony in New Hope, in Bucks County, Penn., and the leading practitioner of Pennsylvania Impressionism. Lathrop’s son, a flyer in World War I and founder of a private boarding school called Solebury, was named Julian. His grandson, also Julian, a bookstore owner in New Hope, Penn., is the son of the Finnish-American sculptor Karl Karhumaa, a professor at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
The Percy, a home style offered by Alden Homes in Lebanon, Penn.
William Morgan is the author of, among other books, Academia: Collegiate Gothic Architecture in the United States, Monadnock Summer and The Cape Cod Cottage (which will be published next month). He grew up in Bucks County, Penn., and is an alumnus of the Solebury School.
Anything to get to spring
Artful Ice Shanties, an outdoor display of fanciful ice-fishing-inspired structures, runs through Feb. 23 at Brattleboro's Retreat Farm. Come see the fanciful dome-shaped “Cosmic Energy Portal,” the wooden “Yurt John,” complete with compost toilet, a whimsical “Soup Shack" shaped like an oversized can of—you guessed it—Campbell's tomato soup, and many more
Our ignorance will cost us our liberty
Oliver Ellsworth
Remarks by Oliver Ellsworth (1745-1807), of Windsor, Conn., published Dec. 10, 1787, during the great debates about the U.S. Constitution. He would go on to become the third U.S. chief justice
‘To the Landholders and Farmers:
The publication of Col. Mason’s reasons for not signing the new Constitution, has extorted some truths that would otherwise in all probability have remained unknown to us all. His reasons, like Mr. Gerry’s, are most of them ex post facto, have been revised in New York by R. H. L. and by him brought into their present artful and insidious form. The factious spirit of R. H. L., his implacable hatred to General Washington, his well-known intrigues against him in the late war, his attempts to displace him and give the command of the American army to General Lee, is so recent in your minds it is not necessary to repeat them. He is supposed to be the author of most of the scurrility poured out in the New-York papers against the new constitution.
Just at the close of the Convention, whose proceedings in general were zealously supported by Mr. Mason, he moved for a clause that no navigation act should ever be passed but with the consent of two-thirds of both branches; urging that a navigation act might otherwise be passed excluding foreign bottoms from carrying American produce to market, and throw a monopoly of the carrying business into the hands of the eastern states who attend to navigation, and that such an exclusion of foreigners would raise the freight of the produce of the southern states, and for these reasons Mr. Mason would have it in the power of the southern states to prevent any navigation act. This clause, as unequal and partial in the extreme to the southern states, was rejected; because it ought to be left on the same footing with other national concerns, and because no state would have a right to complain of a navigation act which should leave the carrying business equally open to them all. Those who preferred cultivating their lands would do so; those who chose to navigate and become carriers would do that. The loss of this question determined Mr. Mason against the signing the doings of the convention, and is undoubtedly among his reasons as drawn for the southern states; but for the eastern states this reason would not do. It would convince us that Mr. Mason preferred the subjects of every foreign power to the subjects of the United States who live in New-England; even the British who lately ravaged Virginia—that Virginia, my countrymen, where your relations lavished their blood—where your sons laid down their lives to secure to her and us the freedom and independence in which we now rejoice, and which can only be continued to us by a firm, equal and effective union. But do not believe that the people of Virginia are all thus selfish: No, there is a Washington, a Blair, a Madison and a Lee, (not R. H. L.) and I am persuaded there is a majority of liberal, just and federal men in Virginia, who, whatever their sentiments may be of the new constitution, will despise the artful injustice contained in Col. Mason’s reasons as published in the Connecticut papers.
The President of the United States has no council, etc., says Col. Mason. His proposed council would have been expensive— they must constantly attend the president, because the president constantly acts. This council must have been composed of great characters, who could not be kept attending without great salaries, and if their opinions were binding on the president his responsibility would be destroyed—if divided, prevent vigor and dispatch—if not binding, they would be no security. The states who have had such councils have found them useless, and complain of them as a dead weight. In others, as in England, the supreme executive advises when and with whom he pleases; if any information is wanted, the heads of the departments who are always at hand can best give it, and from the manner of their appointment will be trustworthy. Secrecy, vigor, dispatch and responsibility, require that the supreme executive should be one person, and unfettered otherwise than by the laws he is to execute.
There is no Declaration of Rights. Bills of Rights were introduced in England when its kings claimed all power and jurisdiction, and were considered by them as grants to the people. They are insignificant since government is considered as originating from the people, and all the power government now has is a grant from the people. The constitution they establish with powers limited and defined, becomes now to the legislator and magistrate, what originally a bill of rights was to the people. To have inserted in this constitution a bill of rights for the states would suppose them to derive and hold their rights from the federal government, when the reverse is the case.
There is to be no ex post facto laws. This was moved by Mr Gerry and supported by Mr. Mason, and is exceptional only as being unnecessary; for it ought not to be presumed that government will be so tyranical, and opposed to the sense of all modern civilians, as to pass such laws: if they should, they would be void.
The general Legislature is restrained from prohibiting the further importation of slaves for twenty odd years. But every state legislature may restrain its own subjects; but if they should not, shall we refuse to confederate with them? their consciences are their own, tho’ their wealth and strength are blended with ours. Mr. Mason has himself about three hundred slaves, and lives in Virginia, where it is found by prudent management they can breed and raise slaves faster than they want them for their own use, and could supply the deficiency in Georgia and South Carolina; and perhaps Col. Mason may suppose it more humane to breed than import slaves—those imported having been bred and born free, may not so tamely bear slavery as those born slaves, and from their infancy inured to it; but his objections are not on the side of freedom, nor in compassion to the human race who are slaves, but that such importations render the United States weaker, more vulnerable, and less capable of defence. To this I readily agree, and all good men wish the entire abolition of slavery, as soon as it can take place with safety to the public, and for the lasting good of the present wretched race of slaves. The only possible step that could be taken towards it by the convention was to fix a period after which they should not be imported.
There is no declaration of any kind to preserve the Liberty of the press, etc. Nor is liberty of conscience, or of matrimony, or of burial of the dead; it is enough that congress have no power to prohibit either, and can have no temptation. This objection is answered in that the states have all the power originally, and congress have only what the states grant them.
The judiciary of the United States is so constructed and extended as to absorb and destroy the judiciaries of the several states; thereby rendering law as tedious, intricate and expensive, and justice as unattainable by a great part of the community, as in England; and enable the rich to oppress and ruin the poor.
It extends only to objects and cases specified, and wherein the national peace or rights, or the harmony of the states is concerned, and not to controversies between citizens of the same state (except where they claim under grants of different states); and nothing hinders but the supreme federal court may be held in different districts, or in all the states, and that all the cases, except the few in which it has original and not appellate jurisdiction, may in the first instance be had in the state courts and those trials be final except in cases of great magnitude; and the trials be by jury also in most or all the causes which were wont to be tried by them, as congress shall provide, whose appointment is security enough for their attention to the wishes and convenience of the people.
In chancery courts juries are never used, nor are they proper in admiralty courts, which proceed not by municipal laws, which they may be supposed to understand, but by the civil law and law of nations.
Mr. Mason deems the president and senate’s power to make treaties dangerous, because they become laws of the land. If the president and his proposed council had this power, or the president alone, as in England and other nations is the case, could the danger be less?—or is the representative branch suited to the making of treaties, which are often intricate, and require much negotiation and secrecy? The senate is objected to as having too much power, and bold unfounded assertions that they will destroy any balance in the government, and accomplish what usurpation they please upon the rights and liberties of the people; to which it may be answered, they are elective and rotative, to the mass of the people; the populace can as well balance the senatorial branch there as in the states, and much better than in England, where the lords are hereditary, and yet the commons preserve their weight; but the state governments on which the constitution is built will forever be security enough to the people against aristocratic usurpations:—The danger of the constitution is not aristrocracy or monarchy, but anarchy.
I intreat you, my fellow citizens, to read and examine the new constitution with candor—examine it for yourselves: you are, most of you, as learned as the objector, and certainly as able to judge of its virtues or vices as he is. To make the objections the more plausible, they are called The objections of the Hon. George Mason, etc.—They may possibly be his, but be assured they were not those made in convention, and being directly against what he there supported in one instance ought to caution you against giving any credit to the rest; his violent opposition to the powers given congress to regulate trade, was an open decided preference of all the world to you. A man governed by such narrow views and local prejudices, can never be trusted; and his pompous declaration in the House of Delegates in Virginia that no man was more federal than himself, amounts to no more than this, “Make a federal government that will secure Virginia all her natural advantages, promote all her interests regardless of every disadvantage to the other states, and I will subscribe to it.”
It may be asked how I came by my information respecting Col. Mason’s conduct in convention, as the doors were shut? To this I answer, no delegate of the late convention will contradict my assertions, as I have repeatedly heard them made by others in presence of several of them, who could not deny their truth. Whether the constitution in question will be adopted by the United States in our day is uncertain; but it is neither aristocracy or monarchy can grow out of it, so long as the present descent of landed estates last, and the mass of the people have, as at present, a tolerable education; and were it ever so perfect a scheme of freedom, when we become ignorant, vicious, idle, and regardless of the education of our children, our liberties will be lost—we shall be fitted for slavery, and it will be an easy business to reduce us to obey one or more tyrants.
City planner
“Architects of the Future, City Inside Her” (woodblock and screenprint with gold leaf), by Chitra Ganesh, in the “Better on Paper’’ show at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, Mass.