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Updated at 10:56 a.m. on March 14, 2025

Until the second Trump administration took over, the National Institutes of Health—the world’s single largest public funder of biomedical research—was not in the business of canceling its grants. Of the more than 60,000 research awards the agency issues each year, it goes on to terminate, on average, maybe 20 of them, and usually only because of serious problems, such as flagrant misconduct, fraud, or an ethical breach that could harm study participants. “I have been involved with legitimate grant terminations,” one former NIH official, who worked at the agency for many years, told me. “I can count them on the fingers of one hand.”

Yet, in a few weeks, the administration has forced the agency to terminate so many of its active research grants—all seemingly on political grounds—that none of the dozen NIH officials I spoke with for this story could say for certain how many termination letters had gone out. Most thought that the number was now well above 100, and would likely continue to rapidly climb. This morning, in a meeting of grants-management staff, officials were told that approximately a thousand more grants could be targeted for termination, beginning today, one official told me. If the administration had not already, in a matter of weeks, exceeded the total number of cancellations the NIH has executed in the past decade, it will soon—perhaps within hours.

The NIH—an agency that has long prided itself on its mission of science funded by scientists—spends most of its $47 billion annual budget on driving biomedical innovation: developing new drugs and vaccines, containing epidemics, treating cancer, mitigating the harms of heart disease. But the growing scope of cancellations is revealing how willing Donald Trump’s administration is to claw back those resources for political reasons. (All of the current and former NIH officials I spoke with for this story requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the federal government; the NIH did not respond to a request for comment.)

This spate of terminations is the Trump administration’s most aggressive attempt so far to forcibly reshape American science to match its agenda. At the same time, this might also be the most ham-fisted. Many officials told me that, as one succinctly put it, “they’re just going in and picking random grants to terminate.” Although the administration has said it doesn’t want to fund science that touches on certain concepts—gender, DEI, vaccine hesitancy—the terminations so far have few discernible criteria, and don’t operate by consistent protocols; in several cases, they end projects that are only tangentially related to the topics the administration wants to purge. If anything, the grant cancellations have become a game of whack-a-mole, in which political appointees take a mallet to any seemingly relevant research projects that pop into view—without regard to the damage they might do.

Notice of grant terminations has arrived from NIH officials, on NIH letterhead. But the decisions about which grants to cancel and why are primarily being made outside the agency, with pressure coming from the Department of Health and Human Services, several NIH officials told me.

The first round of cancellations, which began on the evening of February 28, focused mainly on grants that included a DEI component or involved transgender participants; officials at the agency were also told to cut off funding to projects that allot money to China. Another round, which began on Monday evening, targets grants that mention vaccine hesitancy or uptake; that same night, the NIH posted on X that it would cut $250 million in grants from Columbia University, one of several institutions that the Trump administration’s Department of Education is investigating for “antisemitic discrimination and harassment.” Two officials told me they expect several more rounds of cancellations, and several said that, based on recent emails sent to staff, grants involving mRNA vaccines, as well as grants that send funds to work in South Africa, may be next. (HHS did not respond to a request for comment.)

The list of grants related to vaccine hesitancy that officials were told to cancel targets dozens of projects. Some—such as a study of vaccine uptake in Alaska Native communities—were perhaps obvious choices, because they so directly addressed vaccine attitudes. But the list also included studies that use vaccine hesitancy as just one of several variables to mathematically model disease transmission. And several researchers who have dedicated their career to studying vaccine behaviors have not yet heard that their grants have been affected. Alison Buttenheim, a behavioral scientist at Penn Nursing, has been watching colleagues’ grants on vaccine uptake get canceled, but as far as she knows, her own NIH-funded work on vaccine hesitancy is still actively funded, though she expects that to change. “I figure it’s only days until it’s axed,” she told me.

“It’s unclear why some of us are getting them or not,” Brittany Charlton, who directs the LGBTQ research center at Harvard’s school of public health, told me. One of her colleagues, Nancy Krieger, told me that she’d received a termination letter for a study about measuring discrimination in clinical settings (including sexism and stigma about sexual orientation or transgender identity). But Charlton has yet to receive a letter for her own NIH-funded studies, which focus much more directly on LGBTQ populations.

One NIH official put it more bluntly: “It is such utter and complete chaos.” In advance of the terminations, several officials told me, agency leadership solicited lists of grants that might, for instance, “promote gender ideology,” or that involved certain types of vaccine-behavior research. NIH officials responded with curated lists of research projects, in several cases including only the bare-minimum number of grants with the most relevance. But many officials then received back spreadsheets populated with a subset of the grants from their own lists, along with several other grants that made only passing mention of the targeted topics. It was as if, one official told me, someone had performed a Ctrl+F search for certain terms, then copied and pasted the results. Multiple rounds of terminations in, officials at some NIH institutes are still unclear on how this new system of cancellations is supposed to work. Nearly two months after Trump’s executive order on cutting DEI programming, for instance, “we still haven’t gotten a definition of DEI,” one official said.

Typically, each NIH grant is shepherded by a team of officials, including at least one program officer, who oversees its scientific components, and a grants-management officer, who handles the budget. When terminations are on the table, those officials are always looped in—usually so they can help determine how to remedy the situation. “Terminations are the final option,” one NIH official told me.

But these recent directions to terminate arrived without warning or the usual steps of deliberation, and they instructed grants-management officers to issue letters by the end of the day they received them, two officials told me—leaving no time to push back, or even react. “There is zero protocol,” one official told me. “It is just, We are told, and it is done.” In at least one case, an official told me, a program officer learned that their grantee’s award had been terminated from the grantee.

The emailed directives also handed NIH officials prewritten justifications for termination. None cited misconduct, fraud, or even low likelihood for success. But the ones targeting research related to transgender people or DEI claimed that the projects in question were “antithetical to the scientific inquiry,” “often unscientific,” or ignoring “biological realities.” The termination-letter templates also noted the NIH’s obligation to carefully steward taxpayer dollars, accused the projects of failing to employ federal resources to benefit the well-being of Americans, and cited new agency priorities as a reason for ending studies. Letters issued to several researchers studying vaccines, for instance, stated, “It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research activities that focuses [sic] gaining scientific knowledge on why individuals are hesitant to be vaccinated and/or explore ways to improve vaccine interest and commitment.” The terminations sent to scientists studying LGBTQ populations contained similar language, and in some cases said that their projects “provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness.”

Those assertions, though, directly contradict the conclusions of NIH officials and the outside scientists who helped award those grants in the first place. No project can receive NIH funds without first being vetted by multiple panels of experts in the field, who judge each proposal based on criteria such as the lead scientist’s track record, the rigor of the study’s design, and the project’s likelihood of addressing a pressing biomedical-research issue. And each proposal submitted to the NIH undergoes two layers of internal review, to ensure that the project meets agency policies and is “aligned with the goals of the institute” potentially funding it, one official told me.

Several letter recipients told me that their grants had received perfect or near-perfect scores in early reviews; others told me that their results were well on their way to publication, proof of some return on the agency’s investment. And all addressed important issues in public health: One, for instance, was studying how stress affects alcohol consumption; another, mpox among men who have sex with men; another, the factors that might influence the success of a future HIV vaccine.

The NIH, a federal agency directed by a political appointee, does sometimes shift its priorities for scientific or ideological reasons. For instance, some NIH institutes have over time gotten pickier about issuing awards to candidate-gene studies, in which researchers try to confirm whether a specific gene affects a biological trait, one official told me. And the first Trump administration placed restrictions on research that could be done using fetal tissue. Both of those shifts, officials said, meant that certain new proposals weren’t green-lighted. But in neither case was the agency forced to issue mass terminations of projects that had already been declared worthy of funds, officials told me.

The clearest example that the NIH officials I spoke with could recall of a grant being terminated at the behest of political leadership was also triggered by a Trump administration: During his first term, Trump pressured the agency to terminate a grant that had been issued to the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which was partnering with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in China. But even that cancellation was partly reversed. In general, “when an administration changes priorities, they change them going forward,” one official said. “They don’t reach back and terminate awards.”

Grant cancellations are tantamount to instantaneous salary cuts for scientists, and can force them to halt studies, fire staff, and tell participants that their time and effort may have been wasted. Jace Flatt, a health and behavioral scientist at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, has had two NIH grants axed, for projects looking at dementia and memory loss in aging LGBTQ populations. If he loses a third NIH grant—as he expects to, he told me—“my lab is gone.” Because the terminations arrived without warning, scientists also had no time to prepare: Sarah Nowak, a vaccine researcher at the University of Vermont, told me she found out that her grant investigating childhood vaccine hesitancy in Brazil was likely on the chopping block when she read an article on the vaccine-related grant cuts in The Washington Post on Monday. (Nowak received her letter the next day.)

Many studies, once terminated, would be difficult, if not outright impossible, to restart, Sean Arayasirikul, a medical sociologist at UC Irvine, told me. Medical interventions in clinical trials, for instance, can’t simply be paused and picked back up; many studies also rely heavily on collecting data at small and regular intervals, so interruptions are equivalent to massive data holes. Plus, participants released from a study won’t always be willing to come back, especially if they’re from communities that medical research has neglected in the past and that already have little reason to place continued trust in scientists. (Arayasirikul received a termination letter for their work investigating how stigma affects HIV preventive care for people of color who are also sexual and gender minorities.)

Terminating grants to match political priorities also creates a fundamental instability in the government’s approach to scientific funding. If researchers can’t count on grants to carry across administrations, their government-funded work will become a series of short-term sprints, making it harder for science to reliably progress. Biomedical breakthroughs—including, say, the generation and approval of new drugs, or clinical trials for chronically ill patients—typically take years, sometimes even decades. And for an administration that has premised itself on efficiency, a never-ending loop of funding bait and switch does not exactly make for minimizing waste. “This says, At any point, we can just up and change our minds,” one NIH official told me. “That is not good stewardship of federal dollars.”

Many of the administration’s actions might well be illegal—especially its targeting of DEI, which a federal judge recently deemed a potential violation of the First Amendment. But NIH officials have been put “in an impossible position,” one told me. Their choices are to either carry out the administration’s wishes and risk defying court orders or resist the changes at the agency and directly disobey their supervisors, putting themselves “at risk of insubordination and therefore unemployment,” the official said. Many have been choosing the first option, perhaps because the threat of losing their livelihood has felt so much nearer, and so much more tangible: They have now spent weeks watching colleagues resign, get fired, or be abruptly put on administrative leave. The environment at the agency has become suffocatingly toxic. “People are being screamed at, bullied, harassed,” one official told me. Some that once protested have since relented—perhaps because they now know that the immediate future will bring only more of the same.

A collective of women ought to have a name, the way a mass of finches are a “charm,” or parrots a “pandemonium.” The struggle would be to find a term that accurately describes what an assembly of women can do together, and also how markedly different each woman—and group—is from the next. What word can possibly encapsulate the joy of women singing in harmony, the unease with which they might circle one another, the trust and distrust that can grow among their ranks?

In Agustina Bazterrica’s new novel, The Unworthy, women are quickly classified. The unnamed protagonist, who writes her story in secret from a former monastery, is one of the titular “unworthy,” a woman given shelter from the toxic, dusty, climate-ravaged outside world but granted no special honors besides, potentially, her survival. Above the monastery’s unworthy hover the “Minor Saints,” “Diaphanous Spirits,” and “Full Auras”—women who have, respectively, had their tongues sliced out, their eardrums punctured, and their eyelids sewn shut—all of whom are elevated (if you want to call it that) to a holy status. These are the “chosen”: With their mauled faces and special privileges (real meat and vegetables instead of the crickets the unworthy eat), they are simultaneously revered and loathed from the very start of the story. The “enlightened,” who hover over even the “chosen,” are locked behind a black door and never seen. Hierarchies breed a hell of a lot of sycophancy and resentment, and this one is no different.

Unlike the bunker in The Unworthy, this brand of female dystopia doesn’t exist in a vacuum. All-female communities tend to be weirdly polarized in the cultural imagination. They’re either paradigms of peace and love or bastions of PMS-motivated backbiting. Particularly in genre fiction, the lines can be very stark. In Herland, the 1915 novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman—the author of the proto-feminist school-curriculum staple “The Yellow Wallpaper”—three male explorers discover a community in which women live and reproduce without men. They are awed by the women’s sense of harmony and fitness. Joanna Russ’s snarling 1975 novel, The Female Man, creates four societies. In one of them, women live without men—and without murder and sexual assault—and in another, the two sexes literally battle for dominance. The message of such stories is clear: On their own, women are free of the burden of violence and inequality.

The appeal of reading about female utopias has recently reached a new zenith. The novel I Who Have Never Known Men was published in 1995, but after its 2022 reissue, it has gone viral on BookTok and sold more than 100,000 copies in the United States. In the book, a group of women live in underground cages on a planet that some believe is not their own. They don’t know how they got there, but one day their guards flee for no clear reason, and they eventually establish a harmonious and cooperative society. There is sadness and death, but never real strife. Even when they must hurt one another—the narrator “know[s] what to do” with a knife to put her suffering sisters out of their misery—the bloodshed is compassionate.

[Margaret Atwood: Go ahead and ban my book]

This sunny side of dystopia stands at odds with a countervailing notion of women in isolation—the kind often perpetuated by novels set in boarding schools or convents—which dictates that woman’s natural enemy is woman. In the classic of the genre, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, most women trapped in a theocratic future America are forced to enslave or torture other women, but some of them actively enlist as foot soldiers in the effort. And outside the genre, girls in novels including Andrés Barba’s orphanage-set Such Small Hands and Mona Awad’s Bunny turn to cruelty when the walls close in on them.

On the surface, The Unworthy appears to fit squarely into this second canon. Yet Bazterrica’s world building and character development transcend this typology: The monastery is a hellhole masquerading as a shrine, and the women who walk its halls are both fiercely loyal and self-cannibalizing. In Bazterrica’s first novel to be translated into English, the similarly dystopian Tender Is the Flesh, human flesh is an industrialized commodity. In The Unworthy, she has similar preoccupations, focusing on how eagerly women might (proverbially) eat one another up. What stands out, though, is how readily she moves between the two opposing notions of what all-female communities can be. She shows us women pushed to extremes, who react with extreme behavior—but can they be faulted for that?

None of this is to say that The Unworthy occupies any sort of middle ground. The novel opens with malice: “Someone is screaming in the dark,” the unnamed narrator writes. “I hope it’s Lourdes. I put cockroaches in her pillow and sewed up the slip, so they struggle to get out, so they crawl under her head or over her face (and into her ears, I hope, nesting there, the nymphs damaging her brain).” Animosity is a founding principle of the story—and of the unworthy’s community. In this bunker run by the “Superior Sister” and an unseen, Wizard of Oz–like “He,” bloody punishments are so frequent that they have become the group’s currency. Women stick needles in one another’s nipples and are made to lie down on glass. They volunteer to walk on burning embers or take floggings with a cat-o’-nine-tails. Still, they are not only grateful to be there but desperate to climb the devotional ladder.

The group’s motto is “Without faith, there is no refuge,” which sounds like a standard religious tenet until you read it literally: If the women don’t commit, they will be without a home. The planet is essentially a desert. “The wars,” the narrator writes, “coincided with the disappearance of many territories, many countries, beneath the ocean.” The protagonist grew up in a world “that was degrading minute by minute. A world where water was scarce, and there was no school, no electricity. A world of floods, in which eight months of rain fell in less than an hour.” Bands of adults hunted packs of wild children. The novel’s rendering of global destruction goes beyond most climate fiction—there isn’t a drop of hope or a speck of verdure. No place can guarantee safety, but the Superior Sister implies that the holiness of the monastery’s “enlightened” inhabitants keeps it safe. It’s a tale as old as time: Pray to the right god, sacrifice in the right ways, and protection will encircle you.

[Read: The remarkable rise of the feminist dystopia]

Except the horrors keep coming, despite the unworthy’s muttered prayers. The narrator’s notes, which she keeps tied to herself underneath her tunic or tucked under wooden floorboards, document her transformation from partial believer to total apostate as tension inside the community ratchets up. Lourdes, she of the cockroach pillowcase, leads a campaign of terror worthy of Robespierre. The women turn on one another more and more. The dynamic unravels even further when a stowaway—who has dragged herself through a hole in the wall—is found at the monastery and deemed clean and worthy enough to join their community. Lucía, the newcomer, possesses a gift, and a moral compass, and the hierarchy of the place begins to shift.

Bazterrica’s story—so cinematically gruesome that it could have been written as a treatment for an A24-produced horror film—comes at a strange inflection point for women in this country. (It was originally published in her native Argentina in 2023.) During recent elections, the media have sometimes treated women as a monolithic voting block; some analysts have credited or blamed them for Donald Trump’s or Joe Biden’s electoral victories, regardless of the clear reality that they do not universally share one another’s hopes, fears, or best interests.

The Unworthy strips away the idea, implicit in I Who Have Never Known Men and its ilk, that women are inherently good stewards, that their leadership would bring humanity into some kind of karmic balance. It does so not because it disdains women, but because it sees them. Lourdes is dastardly but pathetic. Lucía saintly but carnal. The narrator possesses a kind of bravery that can’t be activated on its own. We learn that the Superior Sister “fought in the water wars, the most violent ones, in which the millenary tribes were bombarded, and that she defended her own until the very end, that she was a prisoner, a slave, that she escaped.” Or so we are told. What we know is that she grips her power like a cane that supports her whole weight.

Depicting women in all their complicated glory isn’t especially novel or valiant, but Bazterrica’s novel tries something that most writers shy away from. She makes manifest the rot inside every human, and the tendency to portray them as sinners or saints. She does so not by eschewing extremes, but by embracing them, putting her women in an unendurable situation and then watching their moral compass whirl about in some fictional version of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Ugly times create ugly behavior—unless, that is, you can muster your righteous fortitude and carry on in the right direction.

The skid steer’s hydraulic breaker rose up toward the sky, then plunged into the street below, rupturing the concrete and the yellow paint overlaying it. The jackhammer’s staccato thundered over the din of passing traffic. It was a Tuesday morning in March, and people walking by covered their ears. Others took out their phones to capture the destruction. The bright-yellow paint, now fragmented into a growing pile of concrete, had spelled out the words Black Lives Matter over two blocks on 16th Street Northwest, about a quarter mile from the White House.

The city-sanctioned mural had been created in 2020, after the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes. Floyd’s death catalyzed racial-justice protests nationwide, including in Washington. On June 1, federal authorities used smoke grenades and tear gas to remove protesters from Lafayette Park; President Donald Trump then marched across the park so that he could pose with a Bible in front of a nearby church. Four days later, the area was renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza and the mural was painted.

Many believed that it would become a permanent fixture in the district, and originally, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said that it would be, so it could serve as a “gathering place for reflection, planning and action, as we work toward a more perfect union.” But a few weeks ago, Republican Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia introduced legislation that would withhold millions of dollars in federal funding from the city if it did not remove the mural and change the name of the area to “Liberty Plaza.” D.C. was already facing funding uncertainty and has been shaken by layoffs of federal workers in the thousands. Mayor Bowser decided that fighting to preserve the mural was not a battle worth having.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Civil rights undone]

“The mural inspired millions of people and helped our city through a very painful period, but now we can’t afford to be distracted by meaningless congressional interference,” Bowser wrote in a post on X.

I made my way to Black Lives Matter Plaza on Tuesday, the day after construction crews began removing the mural. I have spent the past several years writing about our collective relationships to monuments and memorials that tell the story of American history. I have watched statues being erected, and I have watched others taken down. In both the United States and abroad, I have wrestled with whether monuments are meant to perform a shallow contrition or honestly account for historical traumas. Part of what I have come to understand is that such iconography can rarely be disentangled from its social and political ecosystem. Symbols are not just symbols. They reflect the stories that people tell. Those stories shape the narratives people carry about where they come from and where they’re going. And those narratives shape public policy that materially affects people’s lives.

The removal of the mural is not the same as a change in policy, but it is happening in tandem with many policy changes, and is a reflection of the same shift in priorities. It is part of a movement that is removing Black people from positions of power by dismissing them as diversity hires, rescinding orders that ensure equal opportunity in government contracts, stripping federal funding from schools that teach full and honest Black history, and suing companies that attempt to diversify their workforce. This goes far beyond an attack on DEI; my colleague Adam Serwer calls it the Great Resegregation:

What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy.

Near the construction site, I walked up to one of the workers holding a stop sign near an intersection. Antonio (he asked me to use only his first name because he wasn’t authorized to speak with reporters) wore a highlighter-yellow vest, his dreadlocks falling down his back from beneath his white hard hat. He told me he lives in Southeast D.C. and remembered feeling a sense of pride when the mural was painted. When he found out that he would be part of the team removing it, he asked not to be behind the wheel of any of the machines. “I just told them I don’t want a part in touching it,” he said, shaking his head. He looked over at the jackhammer pummeling the concrete on the other side of the street. “It was a memorial for the culture, and now I feel like something is being stripped from the culture.”

On the other side of the street was a woman in colorful sneakers and a green beanie. Nadine Seiler stood alone holding up a large cloth sign above her head that read Black Lives Matter Trump Can’t Erase Us.

“The reason that this is happening is that people want to ‘make America great again,’” she told me. “But the same people who want to ‘make America great again’ don’t want white children to know how America became great in the first place”—by “exploiting people who are not white.”

“They’re trying to erase everything,” she said.

Seiler doesn’t blame Mayor Bowser for removing the statue: “She has been put in a difficult position, because ultimately she’s going to lose anyway.” She blames President Trump, the Republican Party, and the American people themselves who are standing by and allowing democracy to erode all around them.

While I was there, Seiler was the only person I saw rallying against the removal of the mural. She came to the United States from Trinidad 37 years ago, and has become something of a full-time protester. She has history with the Black Lives Matter Plaza: She was among the activists in 2020 who hung hundreds of signs affirming Black lives and inveighing against Trump along the fence that surrounds the White House. On multiple occasions, people came and tore the signs down, so for three weeks Seiler “lived on Black Lives Matter Plaza” to protect them. She told me she’s since become the custodian of those signs, and holds many in storage.

I told Seiler I was surprised that more people weren’t there protesting. She said that she wasn’t surprised, but she was disheartened. It was reflective, she said, of the tepid resistance Americans have put up to the new administration more broadly. She’s attended protests over the past several weeks focused on some of Trump’s earliest executive actions: the dismantling of USAID and withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords and World Health Organization; the indiscriminate firing of thousands of federal workers; the blanket access the president has given Elon Musk and his DOGE team to sensitive and classified information; the assault on the rights of trans people; the effort to end birthright citizenship; the pardoning of Capitol insurrectionists; and more. At those protests, she told me, she’d seen maybe 100 or 200 people. This is wholly inadequate given the gravity of what is happening, she said: “There should be thousands of people in the streets. There should be millions of people in the streets.”

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: How the woke right replaced the woke left]

Someone drove by, slowed down, and took a picture of Seiler’s sign before driving off. “We’re not rising up,” she continued. In many other countries, she said, there has been more robust resistance to the rise of authoritarianism. “We’re just sitting here and taking it without barely any pushback.” She added, “It’s very disappointing to me, because I’m an import, and I was sold on American democracy, and American exceptionalism, and American checks and balances”—she lowered her sign and folded it up under her arm—“and we are seeing that all of this is nothing. It’s all a farce.”

Seiler, despite having gotten citizenship two decades ago, doesn’t think that it will protect her if the Trump administration starts going after dissenters. The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder who led protests against Israel at Columbia University and is now in immigration detention, has only reinforced a sense that her days are numbered. “I feel eventually they’ll find a way to come at me,” she said, tears beginning to form in her eyes.

Behind us, the pulverizing of concrete continued. Clouds of dust rose up and surrounded the machines that were cracking the street open. It will take several weeks of work for the mural to be completely destroyed and paved over again. I looked down at the fragments of letters in front of me. The first word they chose to remove was Matter.

Americans hold all sorts of views on tariffs. Some are opposed on free-market grounds. Others are in favor for reasons of national security or to bring back American manufacturing. Those debates are part of a normal democratic process. But President Donald Trump’s first weeks in office have shown that a principled discussion over tariff policy is simply not on the agenda, because the administration’s tariff policy is nonsense.

What we have is chaos. One U.S. uncertainty index of economic policy, which goes back to 1985, has been higher at only one point in the past 40 years: when the coronavirus pandemic began. That, of course, was a global phenomenon that the United States could do little to avoid. What’s going on now, by contrast, is entirely self-inflicted.

[Read: Trump’s most inexplicable decision yet]

Chaos is Trump’s calling card, but few could have expected how quickly the president would ricochet all over the place on the size, nature, and timing of—not to mention the justifications for—one of his signature policies. Before markets can adjust to one pronouncement, the world’s smartphones buzz in unison announcing that the wealthiest nation in the world, whose dollars hold up the global financial system, is hurtling in another direction once again.

Just consider this abridged timeline of the most significant twists and turns thus far:

November 25, 2024: Trump posted on Truth Social that on the first day of his new term, he would “sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25 percent Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States, and its ridiculous Open Borders.”

January 20, 2025: The first day of Trump’s term. No tariffs announced. Instead, Trump signed a memo directing the Commerce secretary to “investigate the causes of our country’s large and persistent annual trade deficits.”

January 26: After the Colombian president rejected U.S. military flights carrying deportees, Trump threatened 25 percent tariffs on all Colombian goods. Colombia threatened to respond but deescalated before the new taxes were put in place.

February 1: Tariffs against China, Mexico, and Canada are on.

February 3: Tariffs (for Mexico and Canada) are off.

February 4: Chinese tariffs go into effect, and the Chinese government announces retaliatory tariffs as well as export controls on key minerals.

February 11: Trump imposes a 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum from all countries.

February 13: Trump threatens reciprocity to any country enacting tariff policies against the United States.

February 25: Trump raises the possibility of tariffs on copper.

February 27: Canada and Mexico tariffs maybe coming back on?

March 1: In the middle of a housing crisis, Trump raises the possibility of tariffs on lumber and timber.

March 4: Okay, yes, the Canada and Mexico tariffs are back on.

March 6: Just kidding, only for some stuff.

March 9: Tariffs “could go up,” Trump says on Fox News.

March 11: Ontario threatens 25 percent tariffs on electricity, causing Trump to promise a 50—yes, 50—percent tariff on Canadian aluminum and steel. By the end of the day, both countries backed off these threats.

March 12: A big day for tariffs. The 25 percent tax on all imports of steel and aluminum go into effect, and in retaliation, the European Union enacted duties on $28 billion worth of American goods, while Canada announced $21 billion in tariffs on American goods.

March 13: Not to be outdone, Trump threatened 200 percent tariffs on wine and other alcoholic beverages from Europe.

To recap, the United States is now in a trade war with its largest trading partner (Canada), its second-largest trading partner (the European Union), its third-largest trading partner (Mexico), and its fourth-largest trading partner (China).

It’s obvious to the point of cliché that businesses rely on regulatory—and fiscal—policy predictability in order to plan hiring, capital investments, and pricing strategies. And that means these past few weeks have been very rough. How can you begin a capital-intensive project if you have no idea what anything will cost? The chaos of the current trade policy is a strange parallel to the chaos that the Trump administration has unleashed on the federal government. One difference is evident, however: Although markets expected the new president to go on a deregulatory spree, they failed to take his affinity for tariffs seriously—or at least thought things would be executed a little more deliberately.  

An adviser to prominent energy companies told me that because “infrastructure projects require five to 10 years for permitting and construction,” some of her clients are pausing normal business decisions. “The current environment is so chaotic that it’s difficult to understand effects [on] permitting pathways, community approvals, and supply-chain costs.” She requested anonymity to speak freely about her clients’ struggles in the early days of the new Trump administration.

The big companies are in a better spot than small businesses. As we’ve already seen when the Big Three automakers were able to get direct relief from the tariffs, large companies that can provide Trump with good PR are able to get carve-outs from tariffs. But small businesses are less suited to absorbing shocks and are less likely to stay abreast of the day-to-day shifts of tariff policy. Many will be unable to game the system.

Uncertainty may also be paralyzing the labor markets. As my colleague Rogé Karma reported last month, job switching is at its lowest level in nearly a decade, even though the unemployment rate remains low. Part of what’s going on is that lack of confidence in the future breeds risk aversion: Employers are too rattled to make a bet on a new hire, and employees are too worried to leave a safe position.

[Read: A great way to get Americans to eat worse]

Some people—such as those who are worried that a backlash may invigorate American support for free markets—would like the public to believe that the country is in the throes of an “economic masterplan” and that the chaos of this moment will cohere into a reasonable strategy. Color me skeptical. For one, the president and his team have yet to articulate a consistent set of arguments for supporting his vision. Instead, the justifications for the tariff policies change as fast as the policies themselves.

If the tariffs are about rebalancing America’s trade and restoring its manufacturing greatness, then why are they being removed? If they’re about improving America’s negotiating position vis-à-vis bordering nations on issues such as fentanyl and immigration, then why are we putting them on Canada?

Is Trump doing this to make Americans richer? Is he doing this to balance the budget? To hit back at other countries for their unfair policies? For national-security reasons? To solve the child-care-cost crisis?

As the Yale Law professor Jerry Mashaw wrote for Fordham Law Review, “The authority of all law relies on a set of complex reasons for believing that it should be authoritative. Unjustifiable law demands reform, unjustifiable legal systems demand revolution.” That our elected officials are required to explain themselves, to give reasons for the actions they take, is a cornerstone of democratic accountability. Without clear reasons, it’s not just businesses that are at stake. It’s democratic governance.

But if sifting through Trump’s roiling sea of rationalizations is important for democratic purposes, it’s also personally significant. Every business, worker, and consumer in the country has a stake in figuring out the why and what of tariffs.

[Read: Don’t invite a recession in]

Ideologues across the political spectrum resent the American voter’s materialism. Environmentalists moan that the public refuses to bear higher energy costs in order to help mitigate the effects of climate change; animal-rights advocates worry that people won’t pay to ensure better treatment of livestock; farm advocates who already benefit from distortionary subsidies have even advocated for price floors. Now it’s the economic populists insisting that the public should be willing to pay higher prices on the path to restoring American greatness. On Truth Social, Trump posted an article with the headline “Shut Up About Egg Prices,” and Republicans are insisting that it’s worth it to “pay a little bit more” to support the president. But “America First” has always been a better slogan than organizing principle. When people have the option to pay for domestic goods at higher prices, they opt out, time and again.

The speed with which Republicans have gone from hammering Democrats about high grocery prices to justifying the inflationary effects of tariffs is remarkable. Yet Republicans are likely to learn the lesson that Democrats did last November: Before they are Republicans, Democrats, or even Americans, my countrymen are consumers first.