If you have tips about the Trump administration’s efforts to remake American science, you can contact Katherine on Signal at @katherinejwu.12.

For decades, the National Institutes of Health has had one core function: support health research in the United States. But for the past month, the agency has been doing very little of that, despite multiple separate orders from multiple federal judges blocking the Trump administration’s freeze on federal funding. For weeks on end, as other parts of the government have restarted funding, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, have pressed staff at the agency to ignore court orders, according to nearly a dozen former and current NIH officials I spoke with. Even advice from NIH lawyers to resume business as usual was dismissed by the agency’s acting director, those officials said. When NIH officials have fought back, they have been told to heed the administration’s wishes—or, in some cases, have simply been pushed out.

The lights at the NIH are on; staff are at their desks. But since late January, the agency has issued only a fraction of its usual awards—many in haphazard spurts, as officials rushed grants through the pipeline in whatever limited windows they could manage. As of this week, some of the agency’s 27 institutes and centers are still issuing no new grants at all, one NIH official told me. Grant-management officers, who sign their name to awards, are too afraid, the official said, that violating the president’s wishes will mean losing their livelihood. (Most of the officials I spoke with requested anonymity, out of fear for their job at the agency, or—for those who have left—further professional consequences.)

[Read: The erasing of American science]

NIH lawyers have told officials at the agency that to comply with court orders, they must restart grant awards and payments. But HHS officials have handed down messages too, several current and former NIH officials told me: Hold off. Maintain the pause on grants. And the NIH’s acting director, Matthew Memoli, who until January was a relatively low-ranking flu researcher at the agency, has instructed leadership to stick to what HHS says. Memoli, HHS, and the NIH did not respond to requests for comment.

NIH officials are used to following cues from their director and from HHS. But they were also used to their own sense of the NIH’s mission—to advance the health of the American people—being aligned with their leaders’. For weeks now, though, they have been operating under an administration ready to dismantle their agency’s normal operations, and to flout court orders to achieve its own ends.

As the freeze wore on, one former NIH official told me, some people at the agency recalled a mantra that Lawrence Tabak, the NIH’s longtime principal deputy director, often repeated to colleagues: As civil servants, your role is not to call the policies, but to implement them. That is your duty, as long as you’re not doing something illegal or immoral. The NIH’s expert staff might have their own ideas about how to allocate the agency’s funds, but if political leaders chose to pour money into a pet project, that was the leaders’ right. This time, though, many at the NIH have started wondering if, in implementing the policies they were told to, they were crossing Tabak’s line. Over and over, the former NIH official told me, “We were asking ourselves: Are we there yet?”

Without the ability to issue research grants, the NIH effectively had its gas line cut. The agency employs thousands of in-house scientists, but a good 80 to 85 percent of its $47 billion budget funds outside research. Each year, researchers across the country submit grant proposals that panels of experts scrutinize over the course of months, until they agree on which are most promising and scientifically sound. The NIH funds more than 60,000 of those proposals annually, supporting more than 300,000 scientists at more than 2,500 institutions, spread across every state. This system backed the creation of mRNA-based COVID vaccines and the gene-editing technology CRISPR; it supported 99 percent of the drugs approved in the U.S. from 2010 to 2019. The agency has had a hand in “nearly all of our major medical breakthroughs over the past several decades,” Taison Bell, a critical-care specialist at UVA Health, told me.

That system ground to a halt by late January, after the Trump administration paused communications across HHS on January 21, and a memo released from the Office of Management and Budget just days later froze funding from federal agencies. The NIH stopped issuing new awards and began withholding funds from grants that had already been awarded—money that researchers had budgeted to pay staff, run experiments, and monitor study participants, including, in some cases, critically ill patients enrolled in drug trials.

Several of the agency’s top officials immediately sought advice from Tabak, who served as interim director from December 2021 to November 2023, and had long been a liaison between the agency and HHS. But Tabak openly admitted, several officials told me, that his power in this moment was limited. Although he had been the obvious choice to act as the NIH’s interim leader after Monica Bertagnolli, the most recent director, stepped down, the Trump administration hadn’t tapped him for the position. In fact, several officials said, the administration had ceased communicating with Tabak altogether. (Tabak declined to comment for this story.)

The role of acting director had instead gone to Memoli, who had no experience overseeing awards of external grants or running a large agency. But, officials said, Memoli had expressed beliefs that seemed to align with the administration’s. In 2021, he had called COVID vaccine mandates “extraordinarily problematic” in an email to Anthony Fauci (then director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) and reportedly refused the shot himself; last spring, Jay Bhattacharya, Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the NIH, praised Memoli on social media as “a brave man who stood up when it was hard.” And last year, Memoli had been deemed noncompliant with an internal review, two officials said, after he submitted a DEI statement calling the term “offensive and demeaning.”

[Read: A new kind of crisis for American universities]

From the moment of his appointment, Memoli became, as far as other NIH staff could tell, “the only person the department or the White House was speaking directly to” on a regular basis, one former official said. And the message he passed along to the rest of the agency was clear: All NIH grants were to remain on pause.

That position was at odds with a growing number of court orders that directed the federal government to resume distributing federal funds. Some of those orders included painstaking, insistent language usually reserved for defendants who seem unlikely to comply, Samuel Bagenstos, who until December served as general counsel to HHS, told me. In written correspondence with senior NIH leadership in early February, current HHS lawyers, too, interpreted the court’s instructions unambiguously: “All stop work orders or pauses should be lifted so contract or grant work can continue” and contractors and grantees could be paid. In other words, put everything back the way it was.

Government lawyers aren’t the final arbiters on what’s legal. But the National Science Foundation, for instance, unfroze its funding on February 2. And the independent lawyers I spoke with agreed with what HHS counsel advised. The continuation of the NIH freeze “is unambiguously unlawful,” David Super, an administrative law expert at Yale University and Georgetown University, told me. The money that Congress appropriates to federal agencies each year is intended to be spent. “If they’re holding it back for policy reasons,” Super said, “they’re violating the law.”

At a meeting on February 6, several of the agency’s institute and center directors demanded that Memoli explain the NIH’s continued freeze. David Lankford, the NIH’s top lawyer, said that the position of the general counsel’s office aligned with that of the courts: Grants should be “awarded as intended.”

But Memoli called for patience, officials with knowledge of the meeting told me. He was waiting for one thing in particular to restart grant funding: He had tasked Michael Lauer, the deputy director of the NIH’s Office of Extramural Research, which oversees grants, to draft a formal plan to make the agency’s funding practices consistent with Trump’s executive orders on gender, DEI, foreign aid, and environmental justice. (Lauer declined to comment for this story.)

Squaring those orders with the NIH’s mission, though, wasn’t straightforward. One sticking point, officials said, was funding for research into health disparities: If the administration’s definition of DEI included studies that acknowledged that many diseases disproportionately affect Americans from underrepresented backgrounds, complying with Trump’s orders could mean ignoring important health trends—and broad cuts in funding across many sectors of research. Cancer, for instance, disproportionately affects and kills Black Americans; men who have sex with men are the population most affected by HIV. “To pretend that entire communities don’t exist—in health, that doesn’t make sense,” Bertagnolli, the former NIH director, told me.

In several discussions that followed, officials with knowledge of those conversations said, Memoli assured NIH officials that health-disparity research could continue, as long as the inclusion of diverse populations in studies was “scientifically justifiable.” But given the administration’s disregard of scientific norms up until this point, “nobody was particularly satisfied by that explanation,” one former official told me.

Still, on February 7, Memoli yielded a bit of ground: He green-lighted the NIH to start issuing a small subset of grants for clinical trials. That allowance fell far short of Lankford and other lawyers’ recommendation to resume grant funding in full—but some officials wondered if the ice had begun to thaw.

That afternoon, Memoli acknowledged to other NIH officials that he understood what the agency’s lawyers were telling him, an official with knowledge of the meeting told me. But then, he offered an alternative justification for holding back the agency’s funds. What if, he said, the halt was continuing, not because the agency was adhering to the president’s executive orders, but because it was pursuing a new agenda—a new way of thinking about how it wanted to fund research? Such shifts take time; surely, the agency couldn’t continue its work until it had reoriented itself.

The lawyers were unmoved. At best, they said, that argument came off as a thinly veiled attempt to disregard court orders. Memoli contemplated this. He had no choice, he insisted: He was following the directions of three HHS officials—Dorothy Fink, then the acting secretary; Heather Flick Melanson, chief of staff; and Hannah Anderson, deputy chief of staff of policy—who had told him, in no uncertain terms, that the pause was to continue, save for the few award subtypes he’d already okayed. In other words, the Trump administration’s political leadership at HHS wanted funding to stay frozen, and that overruled any legal concerns.

And, as officials learned later that day, HHS officials had been planning new ways to limit NIH funding. That afternoon, they foisted a new policy on the NIH that would abruptly cap the amount of funding that could be allocated to cover researchers’ and universities’ overhead. The first Trump administration had tried to cut those “indirect cost” rates in 2017; in response, Congress had made clear that altering them requires legislative approval. And so within days, yet another temporary restraining order had blocked the cap.

[Read: The NIH memo that undercut universities came directly from Trump officials]

By this point, NIH lawyers were grim in their prognosis. If the agency moved forward with slashing indirect cost rates, they explained, individual staff members could be prosecuted for failing to comply with a congressional directive. On February 10, Sean R. Keveney, HHS’s acting general counsel, sent a memo to Flick Melanson that included a directive in bold, italicized font: All payments that are due under existing grants and contracts should be un-paused immediately.

Two days later, Lauer, the extramural-research director, issued a memo authorizing his colleagues to resume issuing awards—what should have been the agency’s final all-clear to return to normalcy.

Even then, the staff remained divided on how to proceed. Some institutes immediately began sending out awards: Lauer’s email spurred one institute, a current official told me, to process 100 grants in a single afternoon. Others, though, still held back. “They’re scared out of their minds,” the official told me. Some worry that, despite what Memoli has said, they’ll be held accountable for somehow violating the president’s wishes, and be terminated.

So far, at least 1,200 federal workers—many of them on probationary status—have been fired from the NIH; a new OMB memo released yesterday indicates that more layoffs are ahead. On February 11, HHS also attempted to unceremoniously reassign Tabak, the deputy director, to an essentially meaningless senior advisory position to the acting HHS secretary, with an office in another city, far from the laboratory he ran at the agency—a demotion that several NIH officials described to me as an insult. Tabak chose instead to retire that same day, abruptly ending his 25-year stint at the agency; Lauer, who had worked closely with Tabak for years, announced his own resignation that same week.

Their departures left many at the agency shocked and unmoored, several former and current officials told me: If Tabak and Lauer were out, was anyone’s position safe? And because Lauer left immediately after clearing his colleagues to issue grants, who would ensure that the agency’s core business would continue? “We’re all still terrified for our jobs,” one current official told me. Agency hallways, where colleagues once chatted and laughed, have sunk under an uncomfortable silence: “No one knows who they can trust.”

The administration has also kept up its attempts to block NIH grants. Even after Lauer’s memo went out, HHS continued to bar agency officials from posting to the Federal Register, the government journal that publishes, among other things, the public notices required by law for meetings in which experts review NIH grant applications and issue funds, one official told me. The NIH might have been allowed to award grants, but logistically, it was still unable to. Finally, on Monday, Memoli announced in a leadership meeting that the agency could resume submitting to the Federal Register. But there were limits: Although officials could post notice of some meetings to review grant proposals, meetings to finalize funding recommendations were still off the table—meaning the NIH would still be in a grant backlog. “We can’t go crazy and put all our meetings on,” Memoli told his colleagues. But if agency personnel responded to this new allowance reasonably, he said, they’d be granted more liberty.

[Read: Grad school is in trouble ]

To Super, the administrative lawyer, curtailing posting to the Federal Register constituted yet another strategy intended to circumvent court orders. “These aren’t legitimate workarounds,” he said. “This is contempt of court.” The NIH’s developing plan to align the agency’s strategies with the president’s executive orders—which, officials told me, is still awaiting formal HHS approval—may end up being a legal battleground too: On Friday, a federal judge declared Trump’s executive order attacking DEI programming a potential violation of the First Amendment.

The longer the pause on NIH funding has dragged on, the more the American research community has descended into disarray. Universities have considered pausing graduate-student admissions; leaders of laboratories have mulled firing staff. Diane Simeone, who directs UC San Diego’s cancer center, told me that, should the pause continue for just a few more weeks, dozens of clinical trials for cancer patients—sometimes “a patient’s best chance for cure, and long-term survival,” she told me—could be at risk of shutting down.

Even if courts ultimately nullify every action that the Trump administration has taken, the NIH—at least in its current form—may remain in jeopardy. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the leader of HHS, has said that he wants to shift the agency’s focus away from infectious disease and downsize the staff. Some Republicans have been pressing for years to slash the number of institutes and centers at the agency, which depends on Congress for its budget, or to disburse its funding to the states as block grants—a change, Bertagnolli told me, that could mean biomedical research in America “as we know it would end.”

At a meeting with NIH leadership on February 13, Memoli explained to officials that “we are going to have to accept priorities are changing.” He didn’t say what those changing priorities might be, but previewed an era of “radical transparency,” language that would headline an executive order from Trump just days later. In this moment, federal judges were “hampering us” from moving forward, into the agency’s future, Memoli said. But the path before them remained the same: The NIH would do as the nation’s leaders wished.

Imagine telling someone five years ago that a carton of eggs would cost more than a pound of salmon fillet or a whole rotisserie chicken. Somehow, today, it does. Prices have doubled in the past year, with a dozen eggs going for as much as $15 in certain urban markets. Restaurants and bodegas are tacking surcharges onto breakfast dishes. Cold cases in big-box stores are empty; grocers are limiting customers to a dozen or two a visit to make stocks last. Google searches for the phrase backyard chickens have tripled in the past two months.

Consumers are furious. Eggs are the second-most commonly consumed grocery item, beating out milk and cereal. The average American eats an egg every 1.3 days, or 277 a year. Eggs provide 4 percent of protein consumed in the country and are one of the least-expensive high-quality sources of the muscle-building macronutrient.

Or at least they were, until a highly pathogenic form of bird flu spread to American flocks in 2022. Today, the Department of Agriculture is tracking 36 separate outbreaks across nine states. The disease has led to the death or culling of 27 million laying hens—nearly 10 percent of the nation’s commercial flock—in the past eight weeks alone.

[Lora Kelley: The breaking point of eggs]

As a result, the egg supply is severely constrained. Businesses are struggling. President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to bring down the cost of consumer goods “starting on day one,” while standing in front of a display of Cheerios, bacon, flour, and, yes, eggs. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture forecasts “little chance” for improved supplies “in the near term.” Americans paying more for their omelets and bacon-egg-and-cheeses are incensed.

It might not make cash-strapped consumers feel any better, but the fact that eggs were ever ubiquitous and cheap is remarkable. Americans’ egg addiction has been made possible only through billions of dollars of technological and infrastructural investment, as well as the immiseration of billions of animals. The industrial advances that made eggs cheap in the 20th century are, in part, responsible for their excruciating cost today.  

Contemporary laying hens are likely descended from dinosaurs. (When you eat a dino-shaped chicken nugget, you eat the present injection-molded into the shape of the past, the child in the shape of the grandparent.) Humans began domesticating the birds thousands of years ago, and Christopher Columbus brought them to this continent in 1493.

The 90 billion eggs that American laying hens now produce each year are a wonder. They are nutritional powerhouses: a complete protein, with all nine essential amino acids, abounding in vitamins B2, B12, A, D, E, and K; choline; selenium; phosphorus; and zinc. They are tasty; saturated-fat and cholesterol give them a tender and unctuous mouthfeel. Plus, they are a handy ingredient, binding compounds together and providing structure and moisture to baked goods.

Contrary to their reputation, eggs are strong too. Their shells are composed of calcium carbonate, known as “nature’s ceramic,” their pointed ovoid shape stellar at dispersing force; in architectural terms, they are palm-size marble cathedrals. In one demonstration at Harvard, a carefully cushioned single egg resisted the weight of 10 lead bricks, or 250 pounds. Try crushing a raw egg by wrapping your hand around it and squeezing: It’s tough if the egg is horizontal to your fingers, and impossible if it is vertical.

Although the egg is resistant to slow, evenly distributed pressure, it is vulnerable to sharp, concussive pressure. It has to be. Neonatal chicks weighing a tenth of a pound peck their way out. Just 5.5 pounds of force will crack an eggshell. A polite handshake applies more pressure, a bite on a bacon-egg-and-cheese perhaps 20 times as much.

This quality makes eggs difficult to transport from farm to market, more like grapes than like milk or rice. Perishability poses another challenge. At room temperature, farm-fresh eggs are safe to eat for weeks. But the government requires eggs to be washed; once washed, they begin to develop dangerous concentrations of bacteria in a few hours. Whole eggs cannot be frozen; the water content in the egg expands, cracking open the shell. Separated whites freeze and dethaw fine, but separated yolks do not. Ice crystallization changes their lipid and protein structure, transforming their mucosal texture into something akin to nut butter or chewed gum. Gelatinization makes it impossible to beat the yolks into dough or whisk them into dressing, unless the frozen egg yolks are preprocessed.

For centuries, none of this was a problem, because nobody was trying to transport these fragile, messy, spoilable ovals long distances. Many American families never bought eggs. Chickens were ubiquitous on farms and homesteads—easy to raise, quick to reproduce, and free to fatten, given that the omnivorous birds are adept foragers and happy consumers of table scraps. Ranchers and growers would sell their “farmwives’ surplus” from April to July, when laying peaked.

Around the turn of the 20th century, as the supply chain started to transform, so did the chicken and the egg. Selective breeding cleaved the broiler bird from the laying hen, the former specialized to grow fat thighs and breasts, the latter specialized to pump out eggs. Chicken farming became an industry of its own, and egg farming another.

Specialized farmers moved their flocks indoors, reducing mortality rates. They figured out that lighting their barns spurred the birds into laying more eggs, and into laying them year-round. One farmer who rigged up a 50-watt bulb noted that his hens were “cackling and behaving in liveliest fashion,” laying eggs at all hours, as recounted in Susanne Freidberg’s Fresh: A Perishable History. Farmers started to lift hens off the floor on wire-mesh systems, making barns easier to muck out and tamping down infection.

[Read: Get used to expensive eggs]

A spate of agricultural innovations helped move the newfound bounty to market. Multiple inventors came up with the egg carton early in the 20th century, meaning farmers no longer had to use baskets and crates. Conveyor belts, incubators, sandblasters for cleaning, and egg-grading machines for measuring helped commoditize the product. The nascent industry piggybacked on innovations in the meatpacking industry. Companies transporting sides of beef in refrigerated trucks and warehouses began accepting eggs too.  

Even so, customers preferred fresh, local eggs to faraway, cold-stored ones well into the 20th century. Eggs were not routinely “candled” to check for spoilage, meaning a home cook never knew what cracking one open would bring, Freidberg writes. For a while, dehydrated powdered eggs became popular. The American military bought millions of pounds to feed soldiers during World War II. Bakeries started using frozen whites and processed frozen yolks. Analysts figured that consumers would opt for these stable products too. “The shell egg is fading in importance,” a member of the American Warehousemen’s Association concluded in 1941. It did not fade in importance. Advances in chicken-rearing, sanitation, shipping, and packaging, as well as advertising, brought consumers around. By the 1960s, many Americans were eating commodity eggs, rather than ones produced by local farmers or hens in backyard hutches.

Industrialization made eggs cheap. But it came with a cost, particularly for the animals that produced them.

Male chicks have no role in egg production, so they are gassed, threshed, or crushed after hatching. Female chicks have their beaks trimmed without anesthetic. Once grown, most are placed in battery cages, each bird allotted 67 to 86 square inches of space, smaller than a piece of printer paper. In these crowded conditions, laying hens cannot preen, move around, or spread their wings. The wire in the cages is slanted to let the eggs roll out, making it hard for the chickens to settle. Although 11 states have banned battery cages, three in five American commercial hens continue to reside in them.

Many birds on industrial farms show obvious signs of distress, afflicted by injury, osteoporosis, liver disease, and prolapse, as well as depression and social derangement. When their egg production drops, generally when the birds are a year or two old, they are gassed and turned into poultry meal, a main component of dog food.

The egg-production system imposes its own costs on consumers. In the 1970s, the country had thousands of small-scale egg farms, vying to win over customers with competitive prices and fresh quality. Today, 150 firms produce 95 percent of the country’s eggs, and a single one, Cal-Maine Foods, accounts for 20 percent of the market. The industry has consolidated vertically as well as horizontally. Two companies supply 90 percent of chicks. A single firm sets benchmark egg prices, hampering price discovery in the market. Consumer advocates and the courts have found evidence of price-fixing, price gouging, and “antitrust conspiracy”—made invisible on grocery-store shelves thanks to creative packaging and brand differentiation.

Of late, the centralization and industrialization of the industry have intensified the bird-flu crisis. The largest commercial egg producers own millions of birds. A single laying house holds as many as 350,000, serried into wire crates and stacked on top of one another. The virus spreads rapidly in such environments. USDA rules obligate farms to cull an entire flock if a single bird is infected; the government then compensates the farm for its losses. The culling policy helps stop the spread of the lethal virus, but the compensation policy reduces farms’ incentive to invest in smaller-scale, more humane, and safer animal-rearing practices that would limit the need for workers to kill so many birds in the first place.  

Some egg producers have managed to eke out higher earnings despite the spread of bird flu, perhaps thanks to cartelization. From 2022 to 2023, retail egg prices tripled, noted Angela Huffman of Farm Action, a nonprofit advocating for small farms. She pointed to data indicating that prices would have gone up only 12 to 24 percent in a competitive market.

The price of a dozen eggs has been a potent political issue for the past half century or so. John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon tussled over eggs in the 1960 presidential contest; a decade later, Nixon took up the issue again as inflation spiked. “Eggs have to be transported, processed, cooked, and served, but 30 cents a dozen to the farmer and $30 a dozen to whoever buys those eggs in a restaurant, that is just too much,” he told reporters in 1972, stressing that he would tackle the middleman for the common man.

During his 1996 campaign for the Republican nomination, a reporter asked Lamar Alexander how much a dozen eggs cost. He did not respond, and was later caught asking an aide to get him the number: “I need to know right now.” The Bob Dole campaign was thrilled. “Lamar may be an outsider when it comes to grocery stores, but he’s an insider when it comes to politics,” it crowed in a press release. “Next time he’s walking across New Hampshire, he might want to stop at a supermarket.”

On the trail last year, Trump lambasted Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for failing to bring food prices down. In office, his administration has blamed egg prices directly on their policies. Biden “directed the mass killing of more than 100 million chickens, which has led to a lack of chicken supply in this country, therefore lack of egg supply,” Trump’s press secretary told reporters last month.  

[Read: The chickens that are surrogates for rare breeds]

This week, the Trump administration laid out a five-point plan to get egg prices down: financing on-farm biosecurity upgrades, providing additional funds to farmers who have to cull their flocks, investing in bird-flu vaccines and therapeutics, eliminating regulations, and increasing foreign imports. Administration officials have critiqued the USDA culling policy, suggesting that vaccination and biosecurity measures should render it unnecessary. “Why does it make any sense to have a big perimeter of dead chickens, when it’s the ducks and the geese that are spreading it?” Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, said on Face the Nation earlier this month.

But pharmaceutical firms have not invested much in bird-flu vaccines. There are no USDA-approved options, and there is no farm-by-farm vaccine infrastructure. “As ugly as it is, just like with the wildfires in California, sometimes you have to cut all the trees down and dig a fire line,” explained Matt Koci of North Carolina State University. “We can’t do anything to save that poultry house, but maybe we can dig enough of a line around it to save neighboring farms.”

Of the proposed policy measures, increasing imports would likely be the most effective. But Trump is waging a global trade war at the moment, and as the coronavirus pandemic demonstrated, companies need time and money to adjust their supply chains. “The system for egg production is both complex and time sensitive,” Emily Metz, the president of the American Egg Board, wrote in a statement. “It’s going to take a sustained period” for supply to catch up with demand.

Consumers aren’t happy, but the chickens are the ones really suffering. At least for protein-loving breakfast eaters, there are always beans.

The totalitarian regime of 1984 brings innovation to the erasure of history. While other dystopias have their bonfires—cinematic conflagrations that turn censorship into spectacle—the Party, in George Orwell’s vision, relies on memory holes. The devices are incinerators, in the end; they burn books (and news and letters and art and all other evidence of the non-Party past) as effectively as bonfires do. But their flames are neatly hidden from view. Memory holes look and operate roughly like trash chutes: All it takes, to consign the past to the furnace, is a flick of the wrist.

Memory holes, in that sense, are propaganda by other means. They may destroy words rather than churning out new ones, but they are extensions of the Party’s insistence that “WAR IS PEACE” and “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” They do the same work as the creation of lies—they unsteady the world—by turning absence itself into a claim of power. The devices are tools of mass forgetfulness. They rob people of their past, of the stories that once bound them to one another, and thereby of their future. But they turn the destruction into a matter of infrastructure. They make the burning effortless. They make it boring. That is their menace—and their genius.

[Read: What Orwell didn’t anticipate]

The bleakness of 1984 has been tempered, in the years since the novel’s publication, with one small bit of relief: The whole thing could be filed away as fiction. But Orwell’s insights are never as distant as we might want to believe, and recent days have provided more proof: The new Trump administration has spent its first weeks in office making memory holes relevant again. Words, websites, policies, programs, funding, research, institutional memory, the livelihoods of roughly 30,000 federal workers—they have all been, in some form, consigned to the chute. Purge, once a term of emergency, has become a straightforward description of policy. It is also becoming a banality.

Memory holes, those analog fictions, translate all too easily to the politics of the digital world. Americans are learning what happens when a president, armed with nearly unchecked power, finds his way to the “Delete” key.

The Trump administration’s purges are, in one way, fulfillments of long-standing political projects: the old aims of small-government conservatism, updated for the age of slash-and-burn partisanship. Trump has long made clear that his approach to leading the government would entail some dismantling of it. The jobs his administration has cut, the agencies crippled and gutted, have been realizations of that plan. The purges are also in line with the president’s own propaganda campaign—his styling of the federal government as a shadowy “deep state” and Washington as a “swamp” in dire need of draining.

The regime of 1984 erases the old truths in order to fill the void with new ones. Many of the Trump administration’s erasures, similarly, have been tactics of “Search-and-Replace.” Last week, Trump abruptly fired several high-ranking Pentagon officials, including Air Force General Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president chose as Brown’s successor a retired three-star Air Force general. The White House, announcing the firings, offered little explanation. It didn’t need to. Trump, limited in his first term by officials who checked him, has learned his lesson. As he declared last week, in a tense exchange with Maine’s governor about the breadth of executive legal power: “We are the federal law.”

Had the president posted his claim to social media rather than offering it as a retort to an adversary, he might have written it, as is his wont, with all-caps insistence. “We are the federal law” is roughly akin to “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH” in the depth of its incoherence. At best, it is a gaffe, uttered in anger. At worst, it hints at a twisted conception of U.S. government—a government so ruthlessly pruned that only one branch remains.

Early this month, The New York Times attempted to quantify the number of government webpages that had been taken offline in the days since Trump’s inauguration. It counted more than 8,000 across “more than a dozen” sites, including those of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Head Start, the Food and Drug Administration, the Census Bureau, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. “The purges,” the reporter Ethan Singer wrote, “have removed information about vaccines, veterans’ care, hate crimes and scientific research, among many other topics. Doctors, researchers and other professionals often rely on such government data and advisories.”

The information had been removed from public access—memory-holed—in response to an executive order Trump signed on one of his first days back in office: a document banning DEI, and the overall encouragement of diversity, equity, and inclusion, from the federal government. The order reads, and functions, as a legal and political document. It crushes DEI through the force of law and the threat of culture-war weaponry. DEI (sometimes also called “DEIA,” to include accessibility under its umbrella) is not one practice but many, a wide range of initiatives meant to bring fairness to environments where it has previously been absent. DEI has led to “disastrous consequences,” the White House order claims, without citing evidence; it is therefore “illegal,” the order stipulates, even as it neglects to provide a precise definition of what “DEI” entails.

[Read: The great resegregation]

Executive orders, given their stakes, typically bring extreme precision to their wording: Language that is actionable should also be, at the very least, legible. This order, though, exerted itself not only through its declarations—DEI as “corrosive,” “pernicious”—but also through all it left unsaid. DEI, under the order’s auspices, might refer to complicated hiring policies. It might refer to the word woman. It might refer to anything that whiffs of “wokeness.” It means, basically, whatever the White House claims it to mean—another example of the way absence can do the work of propaganda.

It is also how an executive order—its mandate limited, in theory, to the workings of the federal government—can extend to, and bear down on, the country at large. In response to DEI’s overnight illegality, universities across the country removed forums from their calendars and pages from their websites—cuts made in recognition, or fear, that research grants and other forms of federal funding, whatever their size or use, might implicate them in the ban. Corporations (among them Amazon, McDonald’s, Target, Google, Meta, and Walmart) scaled back and in some cases ended programs meant to ensure workforce diversity. Some had done so preemptively, in mere anticipation of the new Trump presidency. Some did so assuming that the federal elimination of DEI would expand, eventually, to the private sector.

The memory holes of 1984, dull as they are, are also warnings. They are always there, always available, always ready to consume new bits of history’s paper trail. The White House transmits its warnings, though, through the fog of endless ambiguity. Its DEI order, as a practical matter, is a mandate with few clear rules. Had Black History Month, for example, just been made illegal? How could one tell? What was to be made of the fact that executive agencies banned it from their calendars while the executive himself hosted a BHM event? The questions lingered, in essence unanswered. The order used imperative language but implied the conditional tense, casting readers—the country at large—to live in the blank space of the could.

When the Party of 1984 announces that “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,” it is not trying to persuade. It is reminding people that it no longer needs to. A White House mandate that brings confusion to its demands for compliance—that leaves so much open to interpretation and imagination—makes a similar kind of claim. Words can addle, the propagandist knows, even in their absence. What does DEI mean, really? Who might be accused of using it, in violation of the law? Who will decide the terms?

In this regard, the answer is clear: the White House and its party of one.

The DEI order, despite and because of its ambiguities, imposed itself with remarkable speed and digital-age scale—“flood the zone” tactics, applied to the work of mass erasure. So efficient were the DEI-driven deletions that they were commonly discussed in self-ratifying terms: absences that have been enforced; purges that have been executed. This, too, was memory-hole politics at work. The devices of 1984 serve the Party not only by bringing tidiness to history’s destruction but also by turning the destruction into a passive-voice proposition. Memory holes are so user-friendly—so thoroughly intuitive—that using them quickly becomes a matter of muscle memory. “It was,” Orwell writes, “an automatic action” for people to open the hole’s little flap and consign the past to the fire.

Orwell, with that, breaks his own rule of writing—avoid the passive voice—to suggest how people, too, can be broken. Memory holes make their users part of the machinery. They make the purging of the past thoughtless, easy, mechanical, tautological: a thing that is done because it is done. The devices, in imposing passivity on their users, implicate them in the destruction and absolve them at the same time. They also, as they erase the old words, erode the old grammars. They are tools of a regime that has made itself the subject of every verb, and the agent of every action.

As the White House has expanded its project of erasure to the federal government at large, it has availed itself of the permissions of the passive voice. But it has also anointed a clear agent to carry out its project: the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. The group, neither a full department nor a full part of the government—overseen by the billionaire Elon Musk, who has been neither elected nor Senate-confirmed—has proved the glib literalism of Musk’s expressed desire to “delete entire agencies.” Armed with widespread access to sensitive government information but scant knowledge of how government works, DOGE’s agents have brought data-driven ruthlessness to their deletions. Barreling into federal offices, DOGE members have sown chaos along with pain. They have cut jobs, then reinstated them. They have introduced errors into the system. But DOGE has also operated, for the most part, in the shadows, its threats omnipresent and unaccountable: Big Brother, remade as Big Bro.

[Read: The DOGE project will backfire]

DOGE has done its work, in theory, in the name of “efficiency”: the business of government given a much-needed reorg, with the attendant collateral costs. But the purges, as “retribution,” have also been outgrowths of Trump’s long campaign to redefine certain government employees as likely agents of the “deep state.” The two rationalizations contradict each other, of course—one claims that civil servants do too little, the other that they do too much—but coherence is not the point. The people on the business end of it all, whether officially dismissed or laid off or cut or culled or forced into resignation, were essentially fired for cause. And the cause, as it so often is, was Donald Trump. Power, when claimed in this way, obviates the need for reason. It will take away whatever it wants—livelihoods, knowledge, history, rights, categories of people, democracy itself—simply because it can.

The Constitution, those crinkled pieces of parchment and ink, has always been at risk of being consigned to the flames, even by those meant to uphold it. Indeed, that risk is acknowledged in the document’s language. The past weeks have in some ways been evidence of the system working as it should, with attempted checks on executive power coming from the courts, from Congress, from the American people—and even, this week, from some chastened members of DOGE.

But these are only potential checks. They are safeguards relegated, like so much else, to uncertainty. If the courts find elements of the White House’s erasures to be illegal—and if the White House refuses to heed the decisions—what then? A Constitution in crisis can become, all too easily, a Constitution erased. Memory holes are tools of planned obsolescence. If they do their jobs, the world that is will eventually be fully severed from the world that was. People will comply not because they choose to but because they have been made to forget that other possibilities exist. The Party will rule not through force but through that final kind of efficiency: power pared so completely that only one regime’s vision remains. 1984 is fiction, yes, but the novel’s insight is not. When history is written by the victors, it can be erased by them too.