On the campaign trail last fall, President Donald Trump promised a “new era of soaring income, skyrocketing wealth, millions and millions of new jobs, and a booming middle class. We are going to boom like we’ve never boomed before.” On Fox News this weekend, he promised a “period of transition.” He added: “It takes a little time. But I think it should be great for us. I mean, I think it should be great.” When the host asked, “Are you expecting a recession this year?” he didn’t say no.

The White House has traded a message of prosperity now for a message of prosperity soon, forecasting that the budget cuts and tariffs the Trump administration is implementing will redound to the country’s welfare in the near future: Businesses will bring their overseas operations back to America; a leaner government will leave more income for American firms and households. But economists doubt that the Trump administration’s policy changes will promote growth. And Trump’s message isn’t inspiring confidence among businesses and consumers. That alone might be enough to pitch the country into a downturn.

Already, Trump’s policies are slowing down the economy. The administration has kicked off a global trade war. It announced tariffs on Canada and Mexico, spurring the Canadian government to retaliate with its own tariffs, which then spurred Washington to retaliate for the retaliation; abruptly reversed some of the levies; increased tariffs on China, causing China to impose tit-for-tat measures; added tariffs to aluminum and steel products; proposed “reciprocal” tariffs on countries with taxes on American goods; and floated the idea of putting export tariffs on American agricultural products.

The tariffs are slowing trade and increasing costs for American consumers. Companies including Best Buy, Target, and Walmart have warned that they will have to bump up prices as import costs rise. Moreover, the unpredictability around the implementation of the tariffs has led to chaos in the markets. An index of policy-related uncertainty hit its highest-recorded level, aside from the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. Businesses are less sure of the country’s prospects now than they were after 9/11 or during the housing-market collapse in 2007. Manufacturing firms are pulling back on investment; companies are slowing down mergers and acquisitions; firms are downgrading their earnings estimates. The stock market has lost $4 trillion in value, as traders dump equities for safer investments.

Asked to clarify the White House’s trade policies this weekend, Trump responded: “We may go up with some tariffs. It depends. We may go up. I don’t think we’ll go down, or we may go up.” Businesses should stop whining about needing policy certainty, he said: “They always say that we want clarity,” but they “have plenty of clarity.” The real issue, he argued, was that “our country has been ripped off for many decades, for many, many decades, and we’re not going to be ripped off anymore.”

Beyond new taxes on businesses and consumers, the Trump administration is rescinding federal contracts and firing tens of thousands of federal workers, in many cases illegally. These cuts have not yet shown up in the jobs report, but economists expect them to, starting next month. Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement firm, estimates that the government has let more than 60,000 workers go—enough to wipe out nearly half of the employment gains the economy notched last month—and notes that private businesses are amping up layoffs as well.

The Trump administration argues that the country has to go through a “detox period,” as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it. Yet the administration is not just cutting waste and eliminating fraud. The cuts at the IRS, for instance, are likely to reduce federal revenue by denying the government the resources it needs to audit high-income taxpayers. The Social Security cuts could interfere with seniors’ ability to access their retirement benefits.

The chaos emanating from Washington comes at a time when the economy is already slowing. Consumers are still being battered by high prices, particularly for housing; credit-card debt and default rates are climbing; the labor market is seizing up, with workers afraid to quit their jobs and hiring rates falling. As a result, indexes of consumer sentiment and small-business optimism are plunging. Last month, households became more pessimistic about current labor conditions, future business conditions, future income, and future employment prospects, the Conference Board reported.

Voters’ fear of a “detox period” or a “period of transition” could itself force the country into a literal vibecession, as households, feeling dour, pull back. Consumer spending makes up roughly two-thirds of the economy, and consumers make spending decisions not only on the basis of their own finances but also on their sense of where the country is headed. Reading the headlines on tariffs and hearing about DOGE-related job cuts, some families might put off the purchase of a new car. Others might cut short a summer vacation, decide to wait on a home-improvement project, or quit ordering pizza on Fridays. At the same time, firms might decide to wait on building a new plant or expanding into a new region, reducing employment gains and sapping revenue from other firms.

A downturn could result—or, even worse, given the tariffs’ impact on prices, a period of stagflation. Congress and the Federal Reserve would be faced with the choice of increasing spending and lowering interest rates to help create jobs, or lowering spending and increasing interest rates to hold down prices, incapable of doing both at the same time. The Trump White House might compound the pain by, as Elon Musk suggested, slashing Medicaid and Social Security benefits to finance tax cuts for rich households.

“It takes a little time,” Trump said of his promised boom. “But I think it should be great.” Instead, we might have a recession. We might have it soon. It definitely won’t feel great.

The opening salvo of President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign has made immigrants across the United States fear that simply going to work, school, or the supermarket might result in a life-altering arrest.

Sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, real and imagined, are everywhere on social media. Teachers say students are panicked that ICE will take their parents while they’re in class. One Maryland doctor who treats patients with cancer and chronic pain from worksite injuries told me that many are skipping appointments. “They’re terrified,” he said.

That much, according to Trump officials, is going to plan, backed by a $200 million messaging campaign called “Stay Out and Leave Now.”

The results of the actual deportation push appear to be more modest, though not for lack of effort. ICE officers, some working six or seven days a week, made about 18,000 arrests last month, according to internal data I obtained. (ICE stopped publishing daily-arrest totals in early February as its numbers sagged.) By comparison, the agency tallied roughly 10,000 arrests in February 2024. The latest government data show that deportations were actually higher toward the end of Joe Biden’s presidency, when ICE was removing a larger number of migrants picked up along the Mexico-U.S. border.

[Rogé Karma: The truth about immigration and the American worker]

At its current pace, ICE is nowhere near delivering what Trump promised. The president made mass deportations a centerpiece of his campaign and said during his inauguration speech that ICE would deport “millions and millions of criminal aliens.” Vice President J. D. Vance said that the administration would “start with 1 million.” But ICE doesn’t have the resources or staffing to do what Trump wants. The agency has fewer than 6,000 enforcement officers nationwide. Much of their work is essentially immigration case management—ensuring compliance with court appointments and monitoring requirements—not kicking down doors in tactical gear or staging mass roundups in the streets.

ICE has never deported 1 million people in a year, let alone half that many. Tom Homan, the White House “border czar,” who has been working out of an office at ICE headquarters in Washington, told me on Friday that the mass-deportation campaign remains on track and just needs Congress to cough up the money to allow it to kick into a higher gear.

Trump is happy with the results so far, Homan insisted. “The president has never told me he’s not happy,” Homan said. “I’m not happy.”

Administration officials are considering ways to help ICE boost its numbers, including legal tools to potentially give officers new authorities to enter homes. But in the meantime, the gap between Trump’s expectations and reality has senior officials in immigration enforcement on edge. The administration is churning through ICE leaders, blaming them for failing to deliver results. ICE staff members were stunned last month when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the demotion of the agency’s acting director, Caleb Vitello, barely a month into the job.

Vitello, a career ICE official who is also a certified mindfulness coach, had been viewed by his colleagues as a solid pick to steer the agency through a stressful time of intense scrutiny. He had worked in the White House with Stephen Miller during Trump’s first term. ICE officials figured he’d be as capable as anyone of managing the agency’s many masters—Miller, Noem, and Homan.

ICE started off the new administration with a conspicuous show of force, but the enforcement blitz soon began to fade. Vitello tried to issue daily quotas for the number of immigrants officers should arrest, but ICE teams were coming up short. They had burned through the lists of names and addresses they’d compiled prior to the inauguration, and they were too busy trying to make their quotas to research new targets. More and more people were refusing to answer the door when ICE knocked, leaving agents waiting outside.

The administration targeted several “sanctuary” cities that limit cooperation with ICE, but their big operations brought underwhelming results.

Noem blamed internal leaks and “crooked deep state agents” at the FBI for the relatively modest figures. It was a baffling claim. She and Homan had been conducting ICE raids on live television, even bringing along Dr. Phil to publicize the effort. Everyone knew they were coming.

On February 11, Noem ousted Vitello’s key deputies at ICE. Ten days later, she tried to demote Vitello. Noem wanted to bring in a trusted former aide and GOP political operative, Madison Sheahan, the head of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, who’d gotten that job in 2023 at age 26.

Noem wasn’t aware that ICE leadership roles typically require years of law enforcement or litigation experience, according to one senior DHS official who spoke with me on condition of anonymity. Although Sheahan had restored black-bear hunting to Louisiana and scored federal dollars for oyster farms, she wasn’t a lawyer or a cop. Vitello remained in the acting-director role, leaving ICE staff puzzled about who was in charge. DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

[Gisela Salim-Peyer: The ‘right way’ to immigrate just went wrong]

On Sunday, two weeks after Vitello’s demotion was announced, ICE named a new acting director, Todd Lyons, a veteran official Noem had promoted less than a month earlier to oversee enforcement operations. Sheahan was named to the deputy-director role. Noem called the pair “work horses” who would deliver “results” and “achieve the American people’s mandate.”

The leadership stumbles point to the core problem with Trump’s grandiose deportation plan, which has the potential to become the “Build the Wall!” equivalent of his second term. Trump wants ICE to erase the immigration wave of the past decade and spearhead a MAGA social and cultural transformation. He has ordered federal law-enforcement agencies from across the government—the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals, even the FBI—to drop what they’re doing and help ICE catch more immigrants.

Homan’s mission is twofold: stopping illegal migration and ramping up deportations. One of those things is already undermining the other.

Illegal border crossings hit record levels under Biden but declined sharply last year as his administration shut off asylum access and worked with Mexico to crack down on unlawful crossings. Trump’s return to office—which has been accompanied by the deployment of thousands of U.S. soldiers and the threat of a one-way ticket to Guantánamo—has sent the border numbers plunging in recent weeks to levels not seen since the 1960s.

Fewer border crossings leaves ICE with a smaller number of easy deportees. That puts more of an onus on ICE to find deportees in U.S. cities and other communities nationwide, a much more resource-intensive task.

Not every ICE arrest leads to a deportation, and so far, Trump’s removal numbers are lagging behind last year’s, when Biden deported more than 271,000 people during the 2024 fiscal year, the highest total in a decade. Most of those deportees were migrants taken into custody along the Mexico-U.S. border, not immigrants arrested by ICE well inside the United States.

Homan was at ICE in 2012, when the agency set its high-water mark with 409,000 removals and Barack Obama was derided as the “deporter in chief” by immigrant advocates. Homan speaks of that era with nostalgia, a time before the sanctuary movement pushed Democratic mayors to eschew cooperation with ICE. During the past decade, the agency has lost much of its ability to work with police and jails in the big U.S. cities that ICE considers its most “target-rich” environments.

Now one of the challenges for Homan, Miller, and others is to get the president to turn his attention to enforcement metrics besides deportations, such as higher numbers of ICE arrests and fewer crossings at the Mexico-U.S. border.

“People have focused on deportations, but they got to remember we’ve secured the border,” Homan said. Under Biden, millions of migrants who crossed the Mexico-U.S. border were released into the United States with pending asylum claims and temporary residency, he noted. Biden curbed access last year, but Trump has ordered that the doors be slammed shut.

Yesterday, DHS said that it will roll out a new mobile-application tool called “CBP Home” for migrants to tell the government when they voluntarily leave the United States. Its name is a play on the CBP One app that Trump pilloried on the campaign trail: Biden officials used CBP One as a queue-management tool for asylum seekers and migrants from Mexico trying to schedule appointments to arrive at border crossings.

Trump has made CBP Home one more way to scare people into leaving. “Self-deportation is the safest option,” the department said when announcing the new app.

The administration is trying a variety of strategies to raise its deportation figures closer to what Trump wants. Other approaches for getting more aggressive are under review but haven’t been attempted yet.

Homan says that ICE’s “aperture”—the demographics of the immigrants it wants to arrest—will widen once the agency finishes tracking down “the worst of the worst.” ICE told Congress last summer that there were about 650,000 immigrants with criminal records on its docket—a pool of potential deportees large enough to keep officers busy, Homan said. ICE data show that the top-three criminal categories in that group are traffic offenses, which include drunk driving; immigration violations, such as illegally reentering the United States; and assault.

[Adam Serwer: The deportation show]

ICE officers have been ordered to drop Biden-era rules that took a hands-off approach to immigrants who lacked legal status but hadn’t committed crimes. An internal memo sent to ICE officers last month that I obtained has instructed the agency to arrest more of the immigrants who report at ICE offices for mandatory “check-ins” as part of the terms of their provisional status in the United States.

That includes immigrants who entered the U.S. legally under one of the Biden administration’s “lawful pathways” programs, if they haven’t already applied for asylum protections. And it directs officers to take a new look at immigrants who aren’t eligible for U.S. residency but whose deportations have been deferred because they are at risk of torture or persecution in their home country.

The ICE memo urges officers to assess whether those immigrants can be sent to third countries, as Trump officials secure deals with El Salvador, Guatemala, and others to take immigrants that the United States can’t easily deport.

The well-worn ICE tactic known as “knock and talk” that attempts to convince immigrants to open their door for officers has had diminishing returns as the publicity around the deportation campaign has left more potential deportees on guard. Officers can’t force their way into a residence without a criminal warrant signed by a judge—a message that advocacy groups and social-media users have disseminated widely. (Homan has called for the Justice Department to consider whether Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others who share “know your rights” bulletins can be charged with impeding federal officers.)

Trump officials have been looking for a work-around to solve the problem of closed doors. Last month, DHS created a registration requirement for immigrants residing in the United States without legal status. Homan and two other DHS officials said that registry violations could allow ICE to bring criminal charges that would potentially give the agency a new way to enter a private residence without consent.

The administration is also working to get ICE more money, the lack of which has been perhaps the agency’s biggest impediment. Trump has backed a continuing resolution to fund the government through September that includes approximately $500 million in new money for ICE, equal to about 5 percent of the agency’s annual budget. The additional funds would allow ICE to continue adding detention capacity and removal flights incrementally, but they wouldn’t buy the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history.

[Rogé Karma: Why Democrats got the politics of immigration so wrong for so long]

That’s the goal of the budget-reconciliation package that GOP lawmakers in the House and the Senate are negotiating with each other and intend to pass without Democratic votes.

The sums they’re discussing are staggering. The bill advanced by Senator Lindsey Graham, the budget-committee chairman, would provide $175 billion for border security and immigration enforcement, roughly 20 times ICE’s entire annual budget.

One Democratic Senate staffer tracking the bill told me that it’s likely months away from a vote but could be approved this summer. “It’s effectively a blank check,” said the staffer, who was not authorized to speak to reporters on the record.

The money could finance the expansion of ICE capacity from its current level of about 45,000 detainees a day to Homan’s goal of more than 100,000. Most important, it would allow ICE to channel federal dollars to pro-Trump states and counties, where the agency can train more sheriff’s deputies and other local cops to make immigration arrests. That’s when Trump’s mass-deportation campaign could get a mass-deportation force to carry it out.

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As the head of the Office of Special Counsel, Hampton Dellinger had a triple target on his back from the start of Donald Trump’s presidency: He was a Joe Biden appointee, he was the head of one of the independent regulatory agencies that the Trump administration is targeting, and his duty was to fight to protect the jobs of tens of thousands of civil servants the president has tried to fire.

So when Dellinger received an email on Friday, February 7, telling him that he’d been dismissed, he wasn’t surprised. He also wasn’t going to quietly concede. Under a law that’s stood for decades, the special counsel serves a five-year term and “may be removed by the President only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” The following Monday morning, Dellinger filed a suit challenging his firing, and by that night, a federal judge had temporarily reinstated him.

During the following month, Dellinger led a bifurcated life that he joked was “like a Severance episode, except I was always at work”: one workplace “where I was advocating for others, and that was the place I wanted to be completely focused,” he told me on Friday. “But then the other side of it was trying to keep my job.”

OSC is a classic post-Watergate creation, designed to insulate the functioning of the federal government from political and other improper interference. It’s charged with protecting whistleblowers inside the executive branch and with identifying violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits politicking by government officials. If OSC believes that federal employees have been improperly fired, it can file a case with the Merit Systems Protection Board.

This makes an otherwise obscure office very important right now, because the Trump administration, with Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service leading the charge, has laid off huge swaths of the federal workforce in apparent defiance of laws designed to protect them, with more cuts promised. Last Wednesday, Dellinger won a major victory: The MSPB ruled that the U.S. Department of Agriculture must temporarily rehire nearly 6,000 probationary employees while an investigation proceeds into whether they were wrongfully fired. He told me that he was ready to try to get tens of thousands more probationary employees reinstated.

Instead, Dellinger found himself out of a job a few hours later. On Wednesday night, a panel of judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled for the administration and against Dellinger, declaring that he would be removed while he pursued his appeal. The next day, Dellinger announced that he was ending his fight.

“I knew it would take at least a year to get a final decision” in court, he told me. “It may well have gone against me, and by that point, seeing the damage that’s taking place on a daily basis at federal agencies, I knew there would be almost nothing I could do should I ever get back into my job.”

In his statement ending his challenge, he wrote: “I strongly disagree with the circuit court’s decision, but I accept and will abide by it. That’s what Americans do.” That was a pointed response to comments by several government officials, including Musk and Vice President J. D. Vance, who have questioned whether the executive branch has to follow judicial rulings. “I think the key to our country is respect for the rule of law, and I think there’s been too much disrespect of late,” he told me. “So I wanted to make it clear that just because I’m unhappy with the decision, I in no way contest its binding nature.”

What is at stake right now is not just the fate of whistleblowers and probationary employees but also the underlying principle of independent agencies within the executive branch. Such bodies have existed since the 1930s and are written into laws passed by Congress, but as I wrote recently, Trump allies have argued in Project 2025 and elsewhere that independent regulatory agencies are unconstitutional because they limit the president’s control of the executive branch. They have promised to politicize traditionally detached parts of the government.

If courts conclude that this independence is unconstitutional, then most existing protections for whistleblowing seem doomed. Congress concluded when passing these laws that the executive branch needed internal watchdogs. They are generally presidentially appointed—like Dellinger, and like inspectors general inside major departments—but, once in place, insulated from pressure. Without them, whistleblowers have no clear recourse besides going to Congress (no easy feat for all but the most major scandals) or the press. Either path is uncertain and fraught with dangers of retaliation.

Gutting the current regime may result in more of the problems that Musk is supposedly fighting, Dellinger argued. “I think it’ll mean that government is less effective,” he told me, because fewer routes will exist for employees to shed light on failures. “I think it may lead to an increase in waste, fraud, and abuse. And I think we’re not going to know for sure what it means, because you don’t have these independent watchdogs who are able to make their work public.”

The entire existing vision of the executive branch, constructed by an idealistic liberal vision of government held accountable by legal structures and processes, seems currently under threat. Dellinger is a fitting figure to be in the middle of this fight. He’s spent his career moving between government service and practicing law in the private sector. (He’s also contributed to The Atlantic.) His father, Walter Dellinger, served as the acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration and was regarded as one of the most brilliant Democratic lawyers of his generation. Hampton Dellinger told me he remains hopeful that the decades-old vision of the federal government is not dying.

“The fact that people are resisting unlawful orders, I think, is vital,” he said. “I still have faith in the judiciary, even if my case didn’t succeed. I have faith in generations younger than me.” If the federal government is to run on anything other than patrimonialism, those generations will have to find a way to rebuild it after the current assault.

Related:

Trump tests the courts. “It feels like it’s chaotic on purpose.”

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The diseases are coming. Colleges have no idea how to comply with Trump’s orders. Trump drops the mask.

Today’s News

The U.S. stock market plunged today amid concerns over the economic pain that President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariff policies could bring.

ICE agents arrested the Columbia University graduate student and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil over the weekend. According to Khalil’s lawyer, agents said that they were operating under State Department orders to revoke his green card. The State Department declined to comment on Khalil’s case.

Elon Musk blamed a “massive cyberattack” for a series of outages on X.

More From The Atlantic

DOGE’s plans to replace humans with AI are already under way. Europe can’t trust the U.S. anymore. Teens are forgoing a classic rite of passage. Kara Swisher: Move fast and destroy democracy.

Evening Read

Lila Barth for The Atlantic

Turtleboy Will Not Be Stopped

By Chris Heath

On overpasses and by roadsides they gather, holding banners and placards. In the early days, only a few people showed up, congregating at chosen times and scattered locations around Boston. But their cause has grown and their numbers have swelled. For Labor Day 2024, plans were made for “standouts,” as the organizers called them, in more than 70 places—all over Massachusetts, yes, but also in Ohio, Kansas, Florida, California, and elsewhere.

These assemblies are the most visible manifestation of what is usually referred to as the Free Karen Read movement. If in the fullness of time it will seem strange that such unity and passion should have been mustered in defense of a 45-year-old Massachusetts financial analyst and adjunct college professor accused of killing her police-officer boyfriend by backing into him with her car … well, not to these people gathered today.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Theo Wargo / Peacock / Getty

Listen. Lady Gaga’s latest album, Mayhem, is “an ode to her early career—and a powerful demonstration of growth,” our music critic Spencer Kornhaber writes.

Read. Waste Wars, by the journalist Alexander Clapp, tracks how the garbage of rich countries ends up in some of the world’s poorest places.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

This weekend, I drove to the North Carolina mountains with my family, and we spent most of the drive both ways listening to Big Ugly, the brand-new record by Fust, one of my favorite musical discoveries of the past year. The Durham-based alt-country band is led by Aaron Dowdy, who is a Ph.D. student in Duke University’s literature department but also firmly rooted in his native Appalachian Virginia. The lead track, “Spangled,” rhymes Route 11 with repossession and includes the memorable image of “feeling like a sparkler / that’s been thrown off a roof.” I’m obsessed.

— David

Isabel Fattal and Shan Wang contributed to this newsletter.

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