If you have tips about the remaking of the federal government, you can contact Charlie, Ian, and Matteo on Signal at @cwarzel.92, @ibogost.47, and @matteowong.52.

DOGE has achieved “God mode.” That’s according to an employee in senior leadership at USAID, who told us that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency now has full, unrestricted access to the agency’s digital infrastructure—including total control over systems that Americans working in conflict zones rely on, the ability to see and manipulate financial systems that have historically awarded tens of billions of dollars, and perhaps much more.

The employee’s account, along with the accounts of several others across federal agencies, offers the clearest portrait yet of just how deep DOGE has burrowed into the systems of the federal government—and the sensitive information of countless Americans.

In the coming weeks, the team is expected to enter IT systems at the CDC and Federal Aviation Administration, and it already has done so at NASA, according to sources we’ve spoken with at each of those agencies. At least one DOGE ally appears to be working to open back doors into systems used throughout the federal government. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who was recently appointed director of the Technology Transformation Services, requested privileged access to 19 different IT systems administered by teams within TTS, according to two federal workers we spoke with who are familiar with his request. With this level of control, Shedd would be able to not only view and modify federal data, but also grant and revoke access to other people. (In a written statement, Will Powell, the acting press secretary for the General Services Administration, of which TTS is a part, said Shedd needs this level of access to rapidly identify “areas for optimization and efficiencies” and insisted that he is working with “appropriate GSA officials” to follow established protocols.)

[Read: The government’s computing experts say they are terrified]

Over the past few days, we’ve talked with civil servants working for numerous agencies, all of whom requested anonymity because they fear what will happen if they lose their job—not just to themselves, but to the functioning of the federal government. Their observations reveal the abnormal degree of power that DOGE has already achieved. Federal agencies are subject to various forms of administrative and legal oversight, but they operate separately from one another for good reasons: to support a specialized purpose and to insulate them from undue outside influence. Now they effectively roll up to Elon Musk. (Neither the White House nor DOGE responded to requests for comment for this story. Earlier this week, a White House official claimed that Musk is not the head of DOGE. He is clearly the group’s functional leader.)

Among the federal agencies we reported on, USAID is the only one where we could confirm that DOGE has acquired God-mode access across the entire digital system. (The Trump administration has sought to effectively shut down USAID since the inauguration.) But as Musk and his acolytes enter a growing number of federal databases and IT systems, their unfettered access at USAID offers a sense of what they might be able to do elsewhere. At NASA, for example, it could mean access to knowledge about sensitive government technologies used for defense. At the CDC, such ability could expose millions of Americans’ health data and allow DOGE to access labs that store deadly pathogens. At Treasury, such access would allow Musk’s employees to view Americans’ names, Social Security numbers, and financial information. “It is not ridiculous to think they’d have bank-account and routing numbers for every single person in the United States,” the senior USAID source said. “What do you do with this information? I had to ask myself, Do I file my taxes this year or not? I had to sit and debate that.”

The federal government does not typically grant such wide-ranging access to a single entity, let alone one that is effectively under the control of an unelected, erratic, and politically extreme actor such as Musk. The group is working on behalf of Donald Trump, but sources we spoke with emphasized that the level of access DOGE possesses means that the organization may already be able to siphon data that Musk or his agents could hold on to forever, long after his time as a government liaison, or even after a potential falling-out with the president.

One experienced government information-security contractor offered a blunt response to the God-mode situation at USAID: “That sounds like our worst fears come true.” The purpose of DOGE’s incursions remains unclear to employees at these agencies. Musk was supposed to help improve the workings of the government—that is DOGE’s stated purpose. But in the offices where the team is reaching internal IT systems, some are beginning to worry that he might prefer to destroy it, to take it over, or just to loot its vaults for himself.

“Once they’re in, they’re in,” the USAID employee told us. And this is a big part of the problem in a nutshell: Access is everything, and in many cases, DOGE has it.

At USAID and other agencies whose employees we spoke with, leaders explained that Musk’s team could copy and remove information from government servers without anybody knowing. The team could then feed this classified information into AI tools, either for training purposes or to mine the data for insights. (Members of DOGE already reportedly have put sensitive data from the Education Department into AI software.) Within USAID, DOGE has full access to human-resources information—Social Security numbers, addresses, reputational data such as performance reviews, plus classified information and disciplinary information. The USAID source noted that DOGE can also control USAID systems that help with disbursement of funds, building-access tools, and payroll: “If they wanted to change how much a person is making, they could modify that, given their access in the system.” According to the employee, DOGE is also inside of an internal system for managing contracts and grants, which functions like a high-security online marketplace where USAID plans and approves billions in government spending.

Inside NASA, according to one agency employee we spoke with, DOGE workers already have access to contracts, partnerships, performance reviews, classified national-security information, and satellite data, among other materials. The NASA worker told us that such knowledge could erase generations of advantage in aerospace and defense capabilities if it falls into the wrong hands. Agency technologies such as propulsion systems, novel materials, and satellites overlap with Department of Defense projects. Someone with information about NASA’s thermal-protection or encryption technologies could take advantage of vulnerabilities in aerospace vehicles, for example.

[Derek Thompson: DOGE’s reign of ineptitude ]

USAID employees have felt more acute effects of DOGE’s operations. Employees there say they have been rattled by the demands of DOGE engineers: “They have walked in and said to senior staff, You have 15 minutes to do this or you’re fired,” the USAID senior leader told us. Now USAID staff are “operating in a zero-trust environment.” With its God-mode IT control at the agency, DOGE can read emails and chats, plus see who’s attending which meetings. The source described employees in a recent meeting growing alarmed when transcription services seemed to turn on without warning. An employee at NASA reported similar concerns, after unfamiliar messages appeared on workstations. “We’re operating believing our systems are completely bugged,” one person told us.

The senior USAID official fears that DOGE could terminate somebody working in a conflict zone like Ukraine, Sudan, or Ethiopia from an agency system. “If they lose access to their USAID laptop, phone, and accounts, for a lot of them that’s their only means of communication. We are putting their lives on the line,” one said.

For those who have watched DOGE storm into their workplace, what is perhaps most terrifying is its attempts to scale. If DOGE were to acquire God-mode administrative access across many systems, several sources told us, that level of control could affect every citizen at home, and many American interests abroad: personal financial data, defense secrets, and more, all in the palm of Musk’s hand.

There’s reason to believe that health information may be next. The Trump administration fired roughly 700 people at the CDC last weekend. As in other agencies, the firings will hollow out expertise but also remove obstacles to further changes. A CDC employee told us that the agency’s Office of the Chief Information Officer is expecting DOGE, but “no one has seen anyone yet.”

The individual, who has knowledge of how CDC information systems work, fears that DOGE could gain access to an abundant store of sensitive information about health and disease. This year, the CDC is supposed to roll out a central data platform for public-health surveillance and emergency response to better address new threats such as H5N1 bird flu and old ones such as measles. The new system, called the One CDC Data Platform, promises to aggregate all of the CDC’s public-health data, including hundreds of thousands of daily anonymized lab tests, data from emergency-room visits, and measurements from wastewater disease-reporting sites.

The design and rollout of this system were already controversial inside the agency, our source said, even before Trump and Musk came on the scene. Putting everybody’s health data in one place carries risks. Although the health data the CDC houses are usually de-identified or aggregated, “people with very stigmatizing illnesses could be identified by certain characteristics” if the data are exposed or misused, the CDC worker said. What’s more, plenty of health data contain information that, when correlated with other data outside the system, could pinpoint specific individuals. Given all of the data that DOGE appears to be capable of siphoning from all over the government, such identification could become much easier. The CDC collects electronic health-record details from all over the country, meaning that this could affect just about everyone—including us, and you too.

CDC systems control more than mere information about disease. At the agency’s facility in Atlanta, the CDC stores the microbes that cause disease and can hold secrets to treatment. Some are relatively benign, such as strains of E. coli. Others are intrinsically dangerous, including the Ebola and Marburg viruses, and bacterium that causes tuberculosis. These materials are housed in labs with associated biosafety levels. The highest level, BSL-4, applies to only a small number of labs around the world containing “dangerous and exotic” microbes, as the CDC describes them, that pose a high risk of spread.

Access to such labs is managed by computers, and management of those computers is local to the CDC. If DOGE got the same kind of access to CDC IT systems as it has elsewhere, would that give the group direct access to CDC facilities? “Yes, those are all out of CDC level,” our source at the agency told us. Does that mean that DOGE could gain direct access to BSL-4 labs? we asked. “It’s definitely possible,” the employee said.

[Read: If DOGE goes nuclear]

Our source hoped that such a prospect would be averted. (To repeat, DOGE hasn’t taken control of CDC IT systems yet, at least as far as our source knew.) But the employee also explained that the recent layoffs will reduce the agency’s ability to defend against IT or security errors, on top of diminishing morale. The CDC did not respond to requests for comment about whether someone with full, local IT control could indeed grant entry to, or control over, BSL-4 labs and their contents.

The risk of harm, abuse, or political revenge is clear. But simple, brazen corruption is also a concern among the federal workers we spoke with. The CDC staffer wondered if DOGE’s unelected and seemingly unaccountable leadership, including Musk, might simply want to sell the public-health data the CDC collects. Democratic leaders have also expressed the worry that Musk’s interest in SpaceX, which has received billions of dollars in contracts from NASA over the years, creates an untenable conflict of interest. The NASA employee worried that Musk would end up “reaping all of the profits of the investment that the American public put into NASA’s research, which was being shared with the country.” NASA holds technical specs and research data for SpaceX competitors, and insiders fear that such information will soon be compromised, too. They also worry that classified NASA R&D in areas such as quantum, biotech, and astrobiology could be stolen for private gain.

A number of lawsuits have been filed seeking to limit DOGE’s access, with mixed results. Meanwhile, Trump and Musk have both attacked judges who have ruled against their interests; Musk has said they should be impeached. Trump has also indicated that he might just ignore the courts—an act that would be challenging to counter, providing plenty of opportunity for the administration to get its way. Across agencies, leaders have started to step aside voluntarily. Jim Jones, head of the Food and Drug Administration’s food division, resigned this week. Michelle King, who ran the Social Security Administration, stepped down too rather than carry out DOGE’s wishes. The resignations may be principled, but they open the door for more compliant replacements.

The request from Shedd, the former Tesla engineer, in particular, illustrates the variety of avenues and back doors that DOGE and Musk’s allies may have available to enter the government’s systems. According to the two federal workers we spoke with about Shedd’s efforts, such access typically is not granted to TTS leadership and requires a specific reason and the permission of each system’s owner. Shedd initially issued a blanket request, the sources told us, and is now attempting to bypass the individual system owners by seeking permission from other officials, circumventing standard security procedures. He also had not completed a background check, which is usually required for such access, at least as of when he first made the request, according to our sources. How much access Shedd has been granted remains uncertain.

This is the DOGE playbook: There are no norms to be respected, and everything is up for grabs. Once the damage is done, it will be difficult to remedy, especially if DOGE staffers can themselves grant or remove access to others at their discretion.

Musk and DOGE’s first month has been so chaotic, their incursions so haphazard, that assessing what has even happened is difficult. DOGE claims to be improving the government, but the agency workers we spoke with feel that they are being hacked instead. So it is worth stepping back to note the most basic fact: No good reason or case can be made for one person or entity to have this scope of access to this many government agencies containing this much sensitive information. Even in one government office, full administrative access to all systems is the rarest privilege. In the aggregate, across the whole of the government, it would be unfathomable.

By reputation, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are builders. Musk has grown two of the largest hardware-innovation companies in the world, Tesla and SpaceX. As for Trump, he once told Golf Digest: “I own buildings. I’m a builder; I know how to build. Nobody can build like I can build.”

But now, united in Washington, the duumvirate of Trump and Musk has made its mark not by building, but by the opposite: demolition.

With the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has claimed for himself an extraordinary amount of power: Serving as the iron fist of the White House, he’s rooting out what he sees as the plague of wokeism in government, halting grants, freezing payments, lighting fires in various departments, and generally firing as many people as he can get away with. On Monday, DOGE claimed to have already saved the government more than $50 billion. Meanwhile, federal judges have ruled that Trump and Musk have violated the law, typically by exceeding the powers of the executive branch and attempting to defund agencies that were initially funded by Congress.

In theory, DOGE exists to promote efficiency. And the need for efficiency is real. The federal government is deeply in debt. Its interest payments now exceed what it spends on defense. Even if the United States had no issue with its debt, it would still be a mitzvah to find ways to make government work better—to take the same tax dollar further, to do one more unit of good. But judging by DOGE’s early returns, the only objective conclusion one can reach about the agency seems to be that it’s out of control. What we’re witnessing in government right now—across the Departments of Energy, Veterans Affairs, Education, and beyond—is not only a bonfire of cruelty but a reign of ineptitude.

[Read: It’s a model of government efficiency, but DOGE wants it gone]

Let’s start with the Department of Energy, which recently faced the brunt of massive DOGE layoffs. Among those who lost their job were dozens of staff members at the National Nuclear Security Administration—scientists, engineers, and safety officials responsible for safeguarding and assembling nuclear warheads. Roughly 100 people were reportedly laid off from the Pantex Plant, in Texas, the most important nuclear-assembly-and-disassembly plant in the country, before they were called back to the office. As Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the nonpartisan Arms Control Association, said: “The DOGE people are coming in with absolutely no knowledge of what these departments are responsible for.”

Next, there’s Veterans Affairs, where the Trump administration offered buyouts to tens of thousands of employees before realizing that, once again, they’d made a mistake. Far from the typical impression some might have of government workers just moving paper around all day, the VA provides health and psychiatric care to millions of U.S. veterans. That means if you offer buyouts to the VA, what you’ll get is a lot of underpaid doctors, nurses, and psychologists taking up offers to leave offices that are already understaffed—which is exactly what happened. Days after the buyout offer, thousands of doctors, nurses, psychologists, and other essential staff got a notice that they were exempt from the offer.

At the Department of Education, which the Trump administration seems to want to destroy, DOGE terminated $1 billion in contracts. But rather than end ideological programs that Musk says he wants to eliminate, these cuts decimated the Institute for Education Sciences, which funds many of the longest-running and most famous studies in education research, including several longitudinal studies on student achievement and school effectiveness. It’s hard to think of a better nonpartisan role for government than data collection. But Musk and his team have gutted some of the best education-data tools we have. Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, told The Washington Post: “There’s a lot of bloat in IES. There’s a lot of problems to be solved. These are problems you solve with a scalpel and maybe a hatchet, but not a bulldozer.”

[Read: The government waste DOGE should be cutting]

DOGE’s cuts will go much further. At the FDA, the Trump administration has fired hundreds of employees, including those involved in testing food and medical devices. At the CDC, more cuts have reached the Epidemic Intelligence Service, which pays disease detectives around the world and stops epidemics in other countries before they spread. At the National Institutes of Health, the administration is set to slash personnel and funding in a variety of ways. If you’re a fan of Musk and Trump, your hope is that these cuts will be all fat and no bone. But remember: This is the same administration that, in an attempt to refocus the Department of Energy on nuclear security, initially gutted the division with the words nuclear security in it.

So far, few DOGE actions have received more attention than the agency’s attack on USAID, which is responsible for foreign aid and global-health spending. Musk seems to be on a gleeful and personal mission to destroy USAID, placing most of its employees on leave, closing its headquarters, and moving what’s left of it to the State Department. According to one report, the administration says that it plans to reduce USAID staffers from 10,000 to about 600. As Musk recently posted on X, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

There is irony here. And there is tragedy. The irony is that, when he was a U.S. senator, Marco Rubio was one of the most outspoken defenders of global aid. In February 2017, he called foreign aid “critical to our national security.” In 2019, he said: “Anybody who tells you that we can slash foreign aid and that will bring us to balance is lying to you.” Today, however, Rubio is in the morally compromising position of overseeing, as secretary of state, the dismantling of the very aid agency he once praised.

[Read: DOGE is failing on its own terms]

The tragedy will be felt at the individual level, with immense human costs. Unless the administration course-corrects and immediately replenishes our global-health grants, there’s just no getting around the fact that a lot of people around the world are going to suffer and die in order to save the typical American taxpayer a negligible sum. The U.S. pays for insecticide sprays in Uganda, for pregnancy services in Zambia, for health-care clinics in the poorest parts of the world. Most notably, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief has saved an estimated 25 million lives and prevented more than 5 million babies from being born with HIV. It’s not yet clear whether PEPFAR will be spared or left to wither away. This wrecking-ball approach to reform has astonished even the most famous critics of U.S. aid programs. William Easterly, an economist who has written that much of American aid props up dictators and goes to waste, told The New Yorker that Trump’s USAID-demolition plan is “horrific,” “illegal,” and “undemocratic.”

Musk has hinted, amid rising criticism, that DOGE will simply reverse any measures that go too far. This sounds good in theory. Move fast; cut stuff; add back whatever you miss. But in practice, you can’t just slash 10,000 programs at once and then reinstall them on a one-by-one basis depending on whether the volume of criticism passes some imaginary threshold. Whatever you think of the failures of progressive governance, “mess around and find out” is not a suitable replacement. Unfortunately, it does appear to be the current methodology of the executive branch.

The president of the United States is demanding that American citizens use only the words that please him, and he is punishing those who refuse to do so. This is the essence of his attacks against the Associated Press, which he has barred from the White House for referring to the Gulf of Mexico as “the Gulf of Mexico.” He is now demanding that the news agency acquiesce to his renaming of the body of water. “We’re going to keep them out until such time as they agree that it’s the Gulf of America,” Donald Trump said to reporters earlier this week.

This is not how it works in the United States of America. In our nation, free speech is a God-given right. It is not something that Trump, Elon Musk, or anyone else can grant or take away. Americans are born with the right to speak freely, and to publish freely. In America, as I have written previously, we are free to criticize the government, which is accountable to the people, not the other way around.

Americans for years have confused the power that techno-authoritarians exercise over the social-media platforms they operate with the responsibilities of government. This confusion in many ways presaged our present moment, and the question of who is in fact running the country—the richest man in the world or the man who was elected president. In the past, some of those who have railed against censorship on privately held platforms, such as Facebook and X, may have had good cultural reasons to gripe, but they didn’t really have a classical free-speech argument. (Mark Zuckerberg, who complained about the White House apparently pressuring him to edit and moderate his platform in accordance with its wishes, did have a reasonable free-speech complaint.)

Trump may wish to run the United States like a business, but there are key differences between what a government can do and what a private company can do. A private-business owner can kick people out of his establishment for saying things he doesn’t like. The government cannot. And while it may be Trump’s prerogative to grant access to the Oval Office only to people who will say the words he wishes for them to say, no American, no one who believes in principles established by the First Amendment, should tolerate Trump’s exceedingly un-American reaction to our most sacred freedom.

Call the Gulf of Mexico whatever you want. Call it the Gulf of America, or the Gulf of Steve Martin, or the Gulf of Flying Spaghetti Monsters. This isn’t about a single body of water, or even politicization of language or the naming and renaming of landmarks. It is about basic American principles. The president is floating a great big test balloon, looking to see just how much of an encroachment on freedom Americans will tolerate. Some Americans, like the leaders of the news site Axios, have preemptively acquiesced. (The explanation they offered—that it would use “the Gulf of America” because “our audience is mostly U.S.-based”—was conspicuously illogical and painfully embarrassing for its cowardice.) Many more Americans still remember what their freedoms mean, and what it means to fight for them.

Memorize these words: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Donald Trump may believe he has the authority to do whatever he wishes, the legislative and judiciary branches be damned. But he still has to answer to the people. Freedom of speech makes this country great. It keeps power in check. It brings truth to light. Trump has tried repeatedly to classify Americans who happen to work as journalists as “enemies” of the people. But they are the people. And it’s none of the government’s business what any of its people choose to say.

Official White House social media accounts posted what it called an ‘ASMR’ video of undocumented immigrant deportation.

There is a rule in politics never to ascribe to malignity what one can explain through incompetence and stupidity. This approach has become difficult to sustain in the case of the Trump administration. But there is another possibility: Both explanations operate simultaneously.

This seems to be true of the latest burst of diplomatic activity by the Trump administration. Before focusing on the malice, however, first note the utter incompetence of the Trump team. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, for example, was speaking the truth when he said at the Munich Security Conference that a Ukrainian cease-fire will probably freeze the battle lines and not involve NATO membership. But Senator Roger Wicker, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was equally correct in calling it a rookie mistake to have given away one’s position in advance. Hegseth stumbled through a retraction, but the damage was done.

The only word to describe Vice President J. D. Vance’s speech at the conference is loutish. He meddled in European politics, was patronizing and hectoring, and seems not to have understood that if you are giving a tough message to allies, you need to combine it with an affirmation of the underlying relationship. Dumber yet was his apparent failure, and the administration’s, to recognize that even the United States needs allies, and that the European nations, with all their troubles, are some of the most important ones we have got.

The latest meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, between an American delegation consisting of the secretary of state, the national security adviser, and a special envoy with two experienced Russian diplomats was even worse. It was a meeting about Ukraine without Ukraine—a move calculated to make the Ukrainian leadership less tractable. It was a meeting about a European war not only without Europeans, but without the slightest consultation with them. Instead, the U.S. made concessions to the Russians—promising to let them send intelligence operatives masquerading as diplomats back to their embassy in Washington without extracting anything in return.

The Trump administration seems not to realize that the Russians are the ones in trouble, not us; that they are the ones with a faltering economy, a stalemated war, and more than three-quarters of a million casualties. Most important, the administration refuses to see Russia under President Vladimir Putin for what it is: a predatory dictatorship bent on rebuilding an empire on the bodies of its former subjects.

The commentary on the meeting offered by the three Americans who acted as if they intended to be stooges was embarrassing.

Steven Witkoff burbled businessman gobbledygook: “It was positive, upbeat, constructive, everybody there to get to the right outcome, solution-based.” Maybe the right flimflam for a real-estate deal, but not for a discussion with a couple of longtime hoods from Moscow Center who represent a country up to its armpits in the blood of innocents. It was a witless thing to say.

National Security Adviser Michael Waltz seemingly could not speak a paragraph without a grovel in the direction of his boss, President Donald Trump. His assessments were those of a courtier praising a king, not of the representative of the great republic conducting affairs of state.

And then there was Secretary of State Marco Rubio, delighted at the possibility of normal relations and exciting economic ties. Not only was this another implicit concession and gift to the Russians—why not extract something for the willingness to restore such ties?—it was a betrayal of all that Rubio used to say about Ukraine. For that matter, it was a betrayal of the sentiments he used to spill out on the campaign trail when he ran for president, invoking the story of his parents who were refugees from Castro’s Cuba. And here he was cheering on negotiations with Russia, the patron and inspiration of that very regime.

The negotiators displayed mainly incompetence, as well as cringeworthy servility to their master in the White House. Trump’s part, though, was pure malignity. Shortly after the meeting ended, he criticized Zelensky, lied about the latter’s polling numbers, and said, in a particularly callous remark, that Ukraine had had a seat at the table for three years. How being invaded and having your civilians tortured, raped, and slaughtered counts as a seat at the table is beyond understanding.

To be clear, no deal was inked in Riyadh, merely a set of commitments to begin working on ending the conflict in Ukraine without participation by the victims or their neighbors, even though the former are our friends and the latter are our allies. But the way it was done, and the mood music that surrounded it, has to confirm some of the worst fears of friends of Ukraine, and those who believe that the United States should stand for something in this world beyond the crudest kind of self-interest.

But an account of the supposed deal Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent put before the Ukrainians in Kyiv, before the Munich Security Conference, makes clear that the crudest imaginable self-interest is what this administration is all about. As one disgusted British observer commented in the podcast Ukraine: The Latest, the terms were more severe than what was demanded of Germany after its defeat in World War I. Bessent’s offer was an attempt to seize the most productive parts of the Ukrainian economy, permanently—unacceptable and shameful even to have presented.

The Trump administration seems to have some notion of the conduct of foreign affairs as being a set of deals, chiefly with America’s enemies, while administering kicks to America’s friends and allies. As a vision it is, in some reasonable sense of the word, evil. It is also appallingly dumb, and one wonders that intelligent men such as Rubio, Waltz, and Witkoff can bring themselves to articulate the demands that it implies.

Like so much of the Trump administration’s program, this will ultimately end in real disaster for others—quite possibly including the overrunning of Ukraine—and in political disaster for itself. The Biden administration never recovered from the debacle of its Afghanistan withdrawal; Obama from the disappearing red line in Syria; Bush from the mishandling of the Iraq War. At a deeper level, these policies will give aid and comfort to America’s enemies, which will never be partners; shatter the alliances that have made us strong; induce fearful former allies to align with the Chinese and develop nuclear weapons; and demoralize the men and women who have to implement policy.

People like Marco Rubio know better. But judging by the transcript of their CNN interview after the Riyadh meeting, the negotiators are determined to pretend otherwise. The level of sycophancy they show toward the president is shocking, but it conceals another source of future disaster. In this administration, no one will contradict the president, and no one will raise alarms about stupid and immoral policies. It’s a good way to walk into brick walls in foreign affairs, as it is with regards to all manner of other policies. In international politics as in economic affairs, public health, and emergency preparedness, this administration is a set of culpable disasters waiting to occur.

In such a situation the least of our concerns may be the souls of those who have chosen sycophancy despite their better selves and previous service. But they will pay a price. I knew a few of those who served in Trump’s previous term. Many of them ended up psychologically damaged, people who had no doubt once believed in integrity and an idea of America and then sacrificed them. History will treat them with contempt, and more important, they will never be whole again.

During Rubio’s abortive presidential campaign, Trump called him “Li’l Marco,” a put-down typical of someone with the manners of a grade-school bully. It was a reference to physical stature. What this sorry episode reveals, however, is that Rubio really has become small in a much more important sense—and in a way that no earnest television interview or ghostwritten memoir can ever fix .

The Trump administration is fully engaged in a drive to eliminate virtually any government activity or mention related to climate change—with a few notable exceptions. Take, for example, a single tax credit in Joe Biden’s signature climate law that may have the best chance of survival out of any climate-coded policy.

A provision in the Inflation Reduction Act, known as 45Q, enlarged a tax credit for any company willing to capture carbon dioxide. A version of this credit has been in place since George W. Bush’s presidency, and in its current iteration, it represents billions of dollars in federal incentives. If the Trump administration moves to keep 45Q intact, that choice would be an unusual vote of confidence from the president for a large government expenditure billed as a way to fight climate change. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)

The politics of this tax credit are unusual in the climate world too. Both the oil industry and some climate-minded Democrats in Congress want to keep it. Among its opponents are environmental groups, as well as avid Donald Trump supporters in South Dakota and other states where carbon-capture infrastructure would be built.

Only in recent years has carbon-capture technology made a name for itself as a climate solution. But it was—and remains—primarily a way to produce more oil. The version meant to help mitigate climate change, by storing carbon in the ground virtually forever, might have made sense when instituted alongside many other climate policies. But as a stand-alone measure, carbon capture starts looking more like a handout to the oil industry.

The climate argument for carbon capture goes like this: If one ton of carbon is captured from an industrial process, such as a refinery, and then injected into underground formations, that’s theoretically one ton less carbon added to the atmosphere, where it would have warmed the planet. This process, however, is both expensive and unprofitable. The IRA tried to solve that problem with 45Q, which raised the maximum tax credit for every ton of carbon dioxide a company captured from $50 to $85, if the intent was to store it forever, or $60, if the intent was to produce more oil—which was carbon capture’s original purpose.

In the 1970s, after the OPEC crisis, the oil industry began to look for new methods to milk existing wells for all they were worth. One method was to inject carbon dioxide underground, where it would act as a solvent, liberating the more stubborn oil residues in otherwise-depleted wells. Today, some 4 percent of American oil is produced with this technique, and the majority of all carbon captured from any industry is used to produce more oil and gas.

The price difference in the tax credit was meant to boost the climate-solution version of carbon capture. But critics say the smaller credit, for enhanced oil recovery, is a generous subsidy to the oil industry, which also ends up with a valuable product to sell. And the product potential is enormous: The Department of Energy has said that, if carbon capture was used to its fullest extent to enhance oil recovery, the American petroleum industry could extract the equivalent of 38 years’ worth of the country’s current crude-oil supply.

45Q has many admirers: Oil-and-gas-industry giants such as Exxon and Shell are all in on carbon capture, and Doug Burgum, Trump’s interior secretary, is a big fan of the technology. Losing the credit—which represents billions, perhaps tens of billions, of dollars that the government is giving up in tax revenues—would be such a blow to the nascent industry that it “would effectively cut it off at the knees,” Jessie Stolark, the executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, told me. And if the credit does survive, it may benefit the oil industry even more: Republican senators just introduced a bill to raise the tax credit for enhanced oil recovery to the same level as the one for long-term carbon storage.

The tax credit also still has fans among Democrats who see it as a way for the country to cut down on its emissions. Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon, was an author of the IRA energy-tax package, and “is strongly supportive of this credit and is already working to defend it from Republican attacks,” Ryan Carey, a communications director with the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, told me. But many environmental groups think carbon capture and storage is a false solution. Although carbon capture and storage is widely said to be necessary to combat climate change in a world where burning fossil fuels continues, as of now, the technology to store carbon long enough to keep it out of the atmosphere permanently hasn’t been proved reliable at scale. Even projects held up as success stories encounter unexpected problems with keeping highly volatile carbon dioxide in place underground.

Communities in the path of carbon capture projects also worry about the safety of the pipeline expansion. To transport highly pressurized carbon dioxide from the places it would be captured—such as ethanol plants and refineries—to wells for storage, the country would need to build a lot of new pipelines. Carbon dioxide is an odorless, colorless gas, and at high enough concentrations, it’s an asphyxiant. If a pipe were to burst, no one might know for a while. The gas is also heavier than air, so it would hug the ground and roll downhill, choking off the oxygen of whoever is in its path. (This happened in 2020, in Satartia, Mississippi; 45 people were hospitalized.)

Karla Lems, a Republican representative from South Dakota, voted for Trump and considers herself a conservative. She is among the most vocal opponents of a pipeline that the company Summit Carbon Solutions plans to build across her state and four others, to bring carbon dioxide from ethanol plants to a storage site in North Dakota. The company is attempting to use eminent domain to clear its way, which incensed Lems. “George Washington said freedom and property rights are inseparable,” she told me. She sponsored a bill now making its way through the state legislature to bar eminent domain for carbon projects. (For a while, Summit planned to put it directly through her family’s farmland, but the company eventually decided to site it on her neighbor’s land instead, she told me. Summit declined to comment for this story.)

To Lems, the 45Q tax credit is exactly the type of handout and government bloat that Trump promised to eliminate. “In my mind, this is a company that stands to make a lot of money from this project, which I believe is just a grift on the taxpayers," she told me. “It’s all a big boondoggle and a scam. We’ll see if the Trump administration can see it for what it is.” Chase Jensen, an organizer at Dakota Rural Action, which is also working to block the Summit pipeline, says many of his group’s dues-paying members voted for Trump and would see it as a betrayal if he decided to keep the tax credit. Many assumed Trump would be against it, given its presentation as a Biden-branded climate solution, he told me. But more than that, he said, “these folks hold property rights as one of the most core rights.” That those rights would be traded so that, as they see it, a corporation could make money would violate their deepest conservative values.

Already, the Summit-pipeline fight has “completely restructured” leadership in South Dakota, Jensen said; 11 Republican representatives who had voted for pro-pipeline legislation lost primary elections for state House and Senate seats. Jensen expects that the Trump administration’s stance on 45Q will be disillusioning for supporters who might have expected the president to side with people over corporations. “People are going to have to reconcile what’s happening,” he said. (Summit has said that the project would need “reassessment” if the tax credit were repealed.)

So far, the U.S. has relatively few carbon-dioxide pipelines—just 5,300 miles’ worth, compared with roughly 3 million miles of natural-gas pipelines. But the Department of Energy predicts that could grow substantially. Without the tax credit, much of that growth would likely be out of the question. With it, the administration could be setting itself up for a new fight that unites climate activists with aggrieved landowners.

In some ways, the politics of this fight look familiar: After the Obama administration failed to pass climate legislation in 2010, the climate movement started making common cause with conservative landowners in Nebraska and other states that the oil pipeline Keystone XL was set to cross. (Some of the same players are fighting the Summit pipeline now.) That fight continued through the entire first Trump administration, and ended only when Biden blocked the project. Now the Trump administration is reportedly looking at resuscitating that pipeline project too. In its first weeks, the second Trump administration has rerun the attacks on climate policy from its first go-round—leaving the Paris Agreement, stripping climate information from public view—but has also taken them further, culling any federal employees and programs that have a whiff of promoting environmental justice.

45Q presents a challenge: Conspicuously preserve a program billed as a Biden-era climate solution, or axe something with bipartisan support that the oil industry—which contains some of Trump’s most important business allies—wants to keep? Already, the administration has appeared to selectively protect at least one big Biden-era climate project in Montana—the expansion of a plant making sustainable jet fuel—after a Republican senator pressed the White House to release the funds. This administration might be skeptical of both big government and climate science, but that ideology can be bent for the right backers.

New Yorkers, despite our reputation for being cantankerous, agree on many things—primarily things we dislike: rats; subway crime; our mayor, Eric Adams.

Adams’s polling was dismal well before he was indicted on federal corruption charges. A 2023 Quinnipiac University poll put his approval rating at 28 percent—the lowest result for a mayor since Quinnipiac began polling New York voters, in 1996. Adams got negative marks on every measure: the city’s handling of homelessness, education, crime, migrants, and the budget. But perhaps most notable were respondents’ views of Adams, the man. More than half of New Yorkers felt that he had poor leadership qualities, didn’t understand people like them, and wasn’t honest or trustworthy. (Less scientific, but equally telling: For the past couple of years, a meme has circulated of a “Club Promoter” Halloween-costume pack featuring a photo of Mayor Adams and the words Includes: Nothing helpful.)

Mayor Adams’s low popularity had as much to do with the chaos and swirl of corruption around his administration as it did with residents’ dissatisfaction with his management of the city. Much like our president, Adams favored putting friends and relatives in positions of power. He installed one friend as chancellor of education and made another his senior adviser on public safety and recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. After the charges against Adams were announced, a number of his associates were indicted too. Many others have since resigned. (Adams pleaded not guilty and maintained that the case was politically motivated.)

Reading the Southern District’s indictment was, for many New Yorkers, simply confirmation of what we’d long suspected: Our mayor was an arrogant egoist using his position to enhance his and his cronies’ lifestyle. It was also embarrassing. Adams’s charges—for conspiracy, bribery, wire fraud, and solicitation of illegal campaign contributions from foreign businesspeople—center on allegations that he did real-estate favors for the Turkish government in return for free travel and perks on Turkish Airlines. I can’t help but feel that a city as great as this one deserves, at the very least, corruption more sophisticated and ambitious than Adams’s alleged attempts to score flight upgrades.

[Read: What Trump is getting from Eric Adams]

Maybe the crimes go deeper. But now we may never know, because Donald Trump’s administration has ordered prosecutors to dismiss the charges against Adams. Emil Bove III, a Trump appointee in the Justice Department, has argued that the charges were politically motivated and the dismissal necessary because the prosecution interfered with the mayor’s ability to govern. It was, he wrote, a threat to “public safety, national security, and related federal immigration initiatives and policies.”

To anyone who believes Bove’s claims that the investigation into Adams was a “weaponization” of the federal government: I have a bridge I’d like to sell you. Immigration initiatives is the key phrase here—Adams has met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and in December hosted Trump’s border czar at Gracie Mansion. After that meeting, Adams said he might consider an executive order to “unravel” immigration rules that he sees as restrictive. The impression is that he has pledged to cooperate with Trump’s deportation agenda in return for his protection.

The Trump administration’s meddling is a perversion of the principles of the Department of Justice, and at least six prosecutors in New York and Washington have resigned in protest. But more than that, it is an insult to the intelligence and common sense of New Yorkers. Today, a judge will hear from Justice Department lawyers and decide whether to grant the administration’s request. If the case is dropped, the mayor’s constituents will be deprived of the opportunity to see him held accountable, and they will be saddled with a mayor who is beholden not to the will of the people but to Trump.

Trump won 30 percent of New York City voters. His national “mandate” is debatable, but in the city it doesn’t exist, in part because so many people reject Trump’s dangerous belief that a president is above the law. Now the Trump administration is telling New Yorkers to apply that logic not just to their president but to their mayor as well.

[Read: Eric Adams’s totally predictable MAGA turn]

One thing the Trump administration gets right is that Adams’s legal troubles are a distraction from doing his job. Back in 2023, when a number of his personal aides had their phones seized, Adams bailed on an important meeting with the White House and congressional leaders about New York’s migrant population. Last week, Kathryn Wylde, from the business advocacy group Partnership for New York, said that the controversies had “derailed” the execution of many policy goals.

After the indictment became public, nearly 70 percent of New Yorkers said Adams should resign. A true public servant would do that, but Adams is a mayor for our times, and seems to care less about serving the public than about serving himself. One of the protesting officials described succinctly in her own resignation letter what she saw as a “quid pro quo”: “an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case.” (Bove and Adams denied any improper quid pro quo.) Adams has not just agreed to be Trump’s puppet: He went to the administration and brought his own strings.

Regardless of what the judge decides, there is someone who can do something: Governor Kathy Hochul, who could—and should—just fire the mayor already.

To many non–New Yorkers, this scandal might seem an abstraction—the way the Los Angeles fires might feel if you’re in Nebraska, or how a Texas school shooting might feel when you’re all the way in Maine. But what’s happening in New York should matter to all Americans, because it is yet another example of the president imposing his own agenda over the law and public consensus. He pardoned the January 6 rioters, renamed Mount McKinley, turned an astonishing proportion of the government over to Elon Musk—and now there’s Eric Adams. In each instance, Trump is sending a message: I’m in charge, whether you like it or not

A year ago this week, Senator John Thune and 21 of his Republican colleagues defied Donald Trump and voted to send $60 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine as it tried to ward off Russia’s invasion. “America cannot retreat from the world stage,” the South Dakota senator later said, explaining his vote. “American leadership is desperately needed now more than I think any time in recent history, and we need to make sure that Ukraine has the weaponry and the resources that it needs to defeat the Russians.”

The vote was gutsy: It drew a rebuke from Trump, who was then heavily favored to capture the GOP presidential nomination. And it was taken even though the bipartisan bill faced uncertain odds in the House, until Speaker Mike Johnson backed it two months later. The measure passed, and assistance continued to flow to Kyiv.

Twelve months later, Ukraine’s future is even more imperiled. Over the past week, the Trump administration has made clear that the United States will no longer be Kyiv’s largest and most crucial supporter, and that it might sideline Ukrainians from negotiations meant to bring an end to the war. But the response from Republicans has been noticeably different. Thune, now Senate majority leader, has remained silent, as have many of his GOP colleagues. He did not respond to interview requests this week.

[Read: The accidental speaker]

Republican capitulation to Trump is a familiar story line, but the moment is nonetheless worth marking. With a few, mostly timid exceptions, the party that once prided itself on standing up to Moscow—the party of Cold Warriors Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush—has bowed to a president who himself is bowing to an adversary. And as Trump officials yesterday embarked on negotiations with their Russian counterparts that could reward Vladimir Putin’s gamble on seizing territory from a sovereign neighbor, Republicans faced a new, extraordinarily high-profile test: whether to prioritize their long-held national-security beliefs or their loyalty to the president.

“The founders intended Congress to be first among equals of the three branches of government, [but] you’d be hard pressed to know it though looking at today’s Republican-controlled Congress,” Richard Haas, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. Haass, who worked in three previous Republican administrations, said that Republicans have been “not just subservient but invisible,” while “not holding hearings or otherwise challenging the Trump administration’s unconditional embrace of Putin’s Russia, the dismissal of Europe’s interests and Ukraine’s demands.”

No representatives from Ukraine or other European nations were present at a hurriedly arranged meeting between U.S. and Russian officials yesterday in Saudi Arabia. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters afterward that Russia and the United States had agreed to work on a Ukraine peace deal and to explore “the incredible opportunities that exist to partner with the Russians” both geopolitically and economically. The message amounted to a dizzying change from President Joe Biden’s isolation of Moscow after the Ukraine invasion, which many Senate Republicans broadly supported.

Last week, Trump’s White House signaled a fundamental shift in relations with both Europe and Russia by stridently dismissing longtime democratic allies while looking to re-establish ties with the nuclear-armed autocracy to the east. The president prioritized a call with Putin over one with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and invited the Russian leader, and not the Ukrainian one, for multiple summit meetings. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ruled out Ukraine joining NATO or receiving substantial future American security guarantees as part of the negotiations to end the war. Vice President J. D. Vance upbraided European leaders for freezing the far right out of government in their nations. And then yesterday, at a Mar-a-Lago news conference, Trump chided Ukraine for the conflict, snapping, “You should never have been there,” and ignoring that it was Russia that invaded.

[Read: The day the Ukraine war ended]

Some Republicans in the Senate offered outright support for Trump’s Putin-friendly view of American security. “I don’t think anybody really believes Ukraine should be in NATO now,” Senator Eric Schmitt told reporters last week. “Unless you want World War III.”

Others took a more measured approach, expressing the wish that the U.S. would still support Ukraine—or at least not yield to Putin—while still avoiding outright criticism of Trump. Senator John Cornyn, who voted for the aid package last year, told reporters after Trump’s call with Putin, “Ukraine ought to be the one to negotiate its own peace deal. I don’t think it should be imposed upon it by any other country, including ours. I’m hopeful.” But he added: “I can’t imagine President Trump giving up leverage. I don’t know what his strategy is for negotiating, but he’s pretty good at it. I think it surprises people, including me, sometimes what he’s able to pull off.”

Few represent the Republican Party’s evolution more than Senator Lindsey Graham, who spent years as the late Senator John McCain’s wingman, earning a reputation as a globe-trotting national security hawk. But he has since become one of Trump’s most obsequious supporters, often offering over-the-top praise of the president in a way that McCain would not have recognized. Over the weekend, Graham highlighted Trump’s plan to seize half of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals as payment for the United States’ support of Kyiv in the war, praising the scheme as “a game-changer.”

Zelensky immediately declined the proposal. But only a few Republican senators—including Mitch McConnell and Susan Collins—publicly opposed Trump’s concessions to Russia. “This was an unprovoked, unjustified invasion,” Collins told reporters. “I appreciate that the president is trying to achieve peace, but we have to make sure that Ukraine does not get the short end of a deal.” Senator Roger Wicker criticized Hegseth’s declaration last week that Ukraine would not recover its territory, deeming the statement a “rookie mistake” on the world stage. But the White House believes those voices of GOP dissent will stay in the minority, a senior administration official told me under the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy.

[Read: Trump is remaking the world in his image]

Trump has been eager to strengthen ties with Putin and asked aides to schedule a summit with the Russian leader in the weeks ahead, the official said. The president has told aides he believes that resetting relations with Russia reduces the chances of a nuclear war and will allow the U.S. new economic opportunities. American officials who spoke to reporters after the Riyadh meeting suggested that Biden-era sanctions on Russia could be lifted, and they did not spend much time in their briefing with reporters discussing Moscow’s violation of international law in invading Ukraine or the war crimes allegations against Putin for the attacks.

Instead, Rubio, whose own views have seemingly evolved since his time in the Senate as a Russia hawk who supported NATO, made a point to repeatedly praise Trump’s approach to Russia. “For three years,” Rubio said, “no one else has been able to bring something together like what we saw today, because Donald Trump is the only leader in the world that can.”

Thom Tillis, another Republican senator who strongly supported the funding bill a year ago, has continued to support Kyiv even though he cast the deciding vote to confirm Hegseth. Tillis, in fact, made a trip to Kyiv on Monday with two other senators, pledging support for the war effort even as the Trump team was landing in Riyadh to begin negotiations without Ukraine.

“I believe, first, we should understand that this is just the beginning of a dialogue. There is no specific framework that’s been mapped out yet,” Tillis said. “We expect that that will come to pass very quickly, we hope, and that Ukraine has to be front and center as a part of the negotiations to make sure that it’s something sustainable.”

Tillis then turned to his colleagues for validation. Both assented. But both were Democrats.