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.

A group that represents pharmacies that have been producing off-brand versions of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs just filed another lawsuit against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This time, it’s over the health regulator’s decision to remove semaglutide — the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk’s (NVO) popular…

Read more...

The shortage of Novo Nordisk’s (NVO) blockbuster diabetes and weight-loss drugs is officially over, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Read more...

Gilead (GILD) said on Tuesday that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has accepted its application for a twice-yearly injectable drug designed to prevent HIV. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) granted a conditional license for a vaccine designed to protect chickens from the bird flu, in an effort to…

Read more...

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.

A pharma industry group is urging the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to block what it calls a “dangerous” Super Bowl ad from the digital healthcare company Hims & Hers (HIMS), promoting an off-brand version of Ozempic.

Read more...