Holy Crap

The White House is now saying that the demand letter to Harvard was sent by mistake and Trump is mad Harvard didn’t realize that.

For DOGE, And All Criminal Actors, There Must Be Consequences and Accountability

For a couple weeks, the green world has been rife with rumors that the Trump White House was preparing a series of executive orders to strip climate groups of their non-profit status. In some versions of the story there were attacks far beyond revoking nonprofit status. But it was all rumors, nothing nailed down or tied to a specific source with direct knowledge, at least in any way that a news organization was able to confirm. Then, last night, Bloomberg finally reported the outlines of the story. Climate groups are in the crosshairs, as is CREW, the corruption in government group. As in the earlier scuttlebutt, Earth Day is purported to be the day when the axe may fall. The full scope of the assault remains unclear. (There is chatter that they’ll soon move on to immigration, voting rights and pro-democracy groups.)

Let’s start with the standard disclaimer: this is all completely illegal. There are a series of criteria for nonprofit status tied to the avoidance of explicitly electoral political activity, financial management, internal governance and other matters. You can lose your status for those reasons. The President cannot remove the status because he doesn’t like you or he doesn’t like your ideas.

Sic DOGE Transit

I learned this afternoon that the entire NIH payment system is currently frozen. So this applies to all grantees. This is because of DOGE’s new “Defend the Spend” caper, which was reported this morning in the Post and which has already led to cutoffs in payments to doctors and health workers serving the poor. The idea behind the plan is to require itemized lists and justifications for all items purchased or money spent with each draw down of funds from a grant account. I’m not clear yet whether this is merely a policy DOGE has imposed or policy backed by an additional software layer they’ve built on to the current system. It sounds like it may be the latter. But I don’t have clarity on that. Intentional sabotage aside, the whole idea seems wholly unworkable without creating crazy bottlenecks. But that sounds like the point.