Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.

Elon Musk is targeting federal agencies, slashing workforces, and crippling programs that support millions of people around the world. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic join to discuss how Musk and President Donald Trump are carrying out plans to purge thousands of employees from the federal government.

This week the Trump administration dismantled USAID, the world’s single largest humanitarian donor. “USAID has the thought leadership, the technical ability, to run aid programs at a large scale that nobody else has,” Anne Applebaum said last night. Removing the agency “means probably the collapse of food-aid programs across Africa, probably the collapse of aid to help refugees. USAID runs vaccination programs for children all over the world; it will mean children will not get polio vaccines.”

The takedown of USAID may also have an effect on the ongoing war in Ukraine, Applebaum explained. The agency has a role in restarting the Ukrainian energy grid, as well as in helping provide seeds and technology to Ukrainian farmers. “USAID thinks not only in terms of humanitarian aid, it also thinks more broadly about economics,” she continued. “Ukraine plays a big role in world food production; they want Ukrainian farmers to be back working.”

With Musk leading the takedown of USAID, “it’s a test case for ‘Can agencies just be abolished without Congress having any say?’ but it’s also a test case in cruelty,” Applebaum said. “Are Americans willing to accept a high level of cruelty and death just on the president’s whim?”

Meanwhile, pushback among Democrats has been limited. “Democratic strategists are warning [the party] not to make this their issue because Democrats have to be saying ‘We’re making your lives better, voters,’” Michael Scherer said last night. “If they’re seen as the party of defending a bureaucracy both [that] people don’t know about [and] that helps people very far away, they’re way off their message of eggs and butter.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Eugene Daniels, the chief Playbook and White House correspondent for Politico; Asma Khalid, a White House correspondent at NPR and a political contributor for ABC News; and Michael Scherer, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

It took the Trump administration—and, really, Elon Musk—all of 10 days to dismantle USAID, the world’s single largest humanitarian donor. On January 24, a memo from the State Department ordered virtually every foreign-assistance program funded by the United States government to halt work for 90 days. Four days later, the State Department said that lifesaving humanitarian assistance should continue, and that special waivers could be granted to select programs. Nevertheless, soup kitchens stopped handing out food, clinics suspended care, and truckers paid through aid programs stopped delivering medicine.

Then came the purge. Early yesterday morning, the Department of Government Efficiency, a Musk-led group that has been announcing what stays and goes in Washington, told employees not to come to work. Musk posted on X an hour later, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” More than 1,000 employees—including some in war zones—were locked out of their work accounts. Earlier today, Politico reported that nearly all of USAID’s Washington-based staff will soon be placed on leave, and ABC News reported that staff on foreign assignments are being evacuated.

USAID, which has distributed aid to hundreds of millions of people around the world for 60 years, estimates that it has extended children’s life expectancies by six years in many of the countries it works in. But its $40 billion in annual spending—about 0.7 percent of the U.S. budget—has been criticized for inefficiencies, and many Americans accuse the government of spending too much on foreign aid. Some of those critiques are arguably fair. In 2022, for example, USAID spent more than $100,000 on theatrical productions in Ireland and Colombia. (That said, Americans also tend to drastically overestimate the amount we spend on foreign aid.) USAID was established by Congress as an independent agency, and by law, only Congress can dissolve it. The White House, though, seems determined to do away with it as an independent agency; yesterday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he is now the acting head of USAID. If the agency is successfully subsumed by the State Department, it could, in theory, continue in a slightly diminished form—or be totally gutted. When reached for comment, a State Department spokesperson referred me to Rubio’s recent statements to the media. One of them read: “USAID may move, reorganize, and integrate certain missions, bureaus, and offices into the Department of State, and the remainder of the Agency may be abolished consistent with applicable law.”

So far, the administration has framed the foreign-aid pause as temporary. But even if much of USAID’s work is allowed to resume in a few months, the intricate global-health ecosystem being torn apart will not be easily repaired. Famine and disease—two of the issues against which USAID has made the most progress—don’t stop when funding does, and can spread disastrously in even a short window. Prior to the stop-work order, at least 220,000 people worldwide got their HIV medication every day at clinics supported by the U.S. government. Juli Duvall-Jones, who oversees an HIV clinic in eastern Ivory Coast, told me that the pregnant women her clinic serves are no longer receiving their daily treatment, meaning that some children will almost certainly contract HIV during birth or through breastfeeding. People who are exposed to HIV have only 72 hours—less than the amount of time many clinics have now been closed—to begin a medication regimen called post-exposure prophylaxis that can help prevent infection. A pause of any length in USAID-funded anti-HIV efforts will cause more people to contract the disease. Missing doses of treatment can make it less effective. Without treatment, the disease kills young people in about 12 years, and older adults even faster.

[Read: Melinda Gates on why foreign aid still matters]

The head of one aid group, who, like several aid workers I spoke with, asked that neither she nor the group be named for fear of permanently losing their USAID funding, told me that her organization—which, among other projects, treats severely malnourished children and babies in Sudan—is now scraping by on money diverted from other projects. Most aid efforts operate on extremely thin margins, so any pause in funding is felt almost immediately. “We can sort of keep it going for a few days,” she said. But once the money runs out, these children will lose the supplemental oxygen, fortified foods, and 24/7 medical supervision they need. Many, she said, will die in two to six hours.

As the 90-day pause drags on, longer-term consequences will start to become clear. In Uganda, the national government has stopped spraying insecticide and distributing bed nets to pregnant women and young kids; during the country’s next rainy season, which spans from March to May, malaria cases and deaths may spike. The Center for Victims of Torture, a global nonprofit, has furloughed most of its staff and stopped rehabilitation programs in Jordan, Uganda, and Ethiopia, including one for women among the estimated 100,000 raped in a recent war in Tigray, Ethiopia. Scott Roehm, CVT’s director of global policy and advocacy, told me that many of the center’s clients attempted suicide prior to getting help. He fears what will happen to people who have to stop their treatment—and those who never get help at all.

Right now, it seems unlikely that all or even most of USAID’s programs will resume at the end of April. Yesterday, Donald Trump said Ukraine should give America its lithium in exchange for aid, suggesting that programs that don’t give the U.S. an immediate win may be cut for good. The longer the pause lasts, the more devastating the effects will be, not just for aid recipients but also for Americans. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a monitoring tool funded by USAID, has been offline since Friday. Without it, aid workers may struggle to intervene early enough to prevent mass starvation, and farmers have lost a major tool for anticipating agricultural shocks. Michael VanRooyen, an emergency physician who has led humanitarian work in Darfur, Rwanda, and Ukraine, estimates that an extended pause in food aid could kill hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children. USAID workers leading the agency’s response to an active Ebola outbreak in Uganda were among those locked out of work systems. Without their involvement, the U.S. could miss signs that the outbreak is growing or changing—or even that a new pandemic is brewing.

Democratic lawmakers have started pushing back on the demolition of USAID. Yesterday, Brian Schatz, a Democratic senator from Hawaii, said in a statement that “dismantling USAID is illegal and makes us less safe,” and placed a blanket hold on nominees for State Department positions until USAID is back up and running.

[Read: The constitutional crisis is here]

But if the agency is restored—next week, next month, or years from now—restarting its work won’t be as simple as turning the flow of cash back on. After the week USAID has had, staff might be hard to come by. According to one group of development workers tracking the fallout, the aid freeze has caused nearly 9,000 Americans and far more people around the world to lose their jobs. Many may decide to pursue work outside the humanitarian sector, which typically offers low pay and benefits. Even if the pause ends quickly, the federal government has given workers little incentive to return. Musk has called USAID “a criminal organization,” “a ball of worms,” and a “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.”

Whoever does come back to work will need to get back in touch with the people who lead local organizations (many of which have or will have gone defunct), the world leaders with whom they once partnered, and the people who shuttle supplies around the world. Susan Reichle, a foreign-assistance expert who served in every presidential administration from George H. W. Bush’s to Trump’s first term, told me that the pause has already broken trust that could take years to repair. “USAID staff are having to meet with ministers of health, ministers of power, ministers of education” to tell them that work has stopped, Reichle said. “And they can’t tell them if or when those partnerships will ever continue.”

Having a measured, humane debate about the way the U.S. distributes humanitarian aid is possible. It is in the country’s interest to spend aid money effectively. And the way the United States distributes global aid could certainly be improved. But the instant retraction of much of the world’s food and health-care infrastructure will create damage that cannot be undone. After three months, “many of those people will be dead, or so severely harmed and malnourished that it causes them irreversible and deep suffering,” Lawrence Gostin, the faculty director of Georgetown’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, told me. A pause on saving lives means exactly that.

Donald Trump spent decades in business gleefully suing and angrily being sued by his adversaries in civil court. But since winning reelection, he has suddenly posted a remarkable string of legal victories, as litigants rush to settle their cases.

On November 20, 2024, lawyers for Trump and Elon Musk’s company X, filed a joint letter to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco without press release or fanfare. That court was expected to rule on the legal merits of a set of 2021 lawsuits that Trump had filed against X, Facebook, and YouTube, alleging that the companies had unlawfully removed his social media accounts under government pressure weeks after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Oral arguments in 2023 had gone poorly for Trump, and many legal observers saw little hope for him. As recently as August 2024, nearly two years after Musk took over the company formerly known as Twitter, X had filed a brief with the Ninth Circuit arguing that Trump’s case lacked merit and that it had been properly dismissed by a lower court.

[Read: Why Trump won’t stop suing the media and losing]

Now, the attorneys told the court in the November letter, no ruling would be needed in the case. “We write to advise the court that the parties are actively discussing a potential settlement,” read the joint letter, which was also signed by lawyers for Trump’s co-plaintiffs.

The attorneys did not explain the sudden shift in strategy. The merits of the case had not changed, but the broader context had: The litigants were no longer adversaries, and the plaintiff was about to become president of the United States. Musk had just spent more than $250 million to help elect Trump, moved into his Palm Beach property, accepted a position as a transition adviser, and was celebrating his new nickname—“first buddy.” The day before the letter was filed, Trump had appeared in South Texas with Musk to watch the launch of Musk’s latest Starship rocket.

In seeking to settle with Trump, X, it turned out, was at the start of a trend. A series of litigants that have fought the newly reinstated president in court, in some cases for years, have now lined up to negotiate. ABC News and its parent company, Disney, settled with Trump in December.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who had been threatened with jail by Trump as recently as September, traveled to Mar-a-Lago on January 10 to negotiate a settlement with Trump in the Facebook case, which named Zuckerberg personally as a defendant. The deal they struck, according to two people briefed on the agreement who requested anonymity to discuss the arrangement, will cost Meta $25 million in damages and legal fees, a remarkable turn of events that coincided with other demonstrations by Zuckerberg of new fealty toward Trump. The Wall Street Journal reported today that $22 million will go to fund Trump’s presidential library, with the rest going to legal fees and the other plaintiffs.

“We don’t have any comment or guidance to offer,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone told me in a text message, before confirming the $25 million settlement.

These agreements stand to give the most litigious president in American history symbolic victories for himself and financial victories for his legacy. The settlement negotiations raise the question of whether Trump is using his new powers to bully his legal opponents into submission, and whether the litigants are seeking to purchase favor as they try to navigate the many regulatory threats from his new government.

Neither X nor the president’s legal team have publicly disclosed the terms of their settlement discussions with Trump, or even confirmed whether the cases have been settled. Ari Horltzblatt, the attorney for X who filed the settlement notice in the Ninth Circuit, declined to comment when reached by phone. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Multiple co-plaintiffs with Trump, who filed his 2021 case as class action lawsuits, also declined to comment this week when reached by The Atlantic. “No comment at this time,” Jennifer Horton, a Michigan school teacher who lost her Facebook account after posts that were flagged for COVID misinformation, wrote to me in a text message. “Check back with me later in week. I can’t talk right now,” radio host Wayne Allyn Root, who lost his Twitter account, wrote in an email.

[Paul Rosenzweig: It’s not amateur hour anymore]

Trump based his 2021 legal crusade against the social media giants on the assertion that they banned his accounts because of government pressure, in violation of the First Amendment. His co-defendants, including the feminist writer Naomi Wolf, have claimed substantial financial harm—“at least $1 million,” in Wolf’s case—from having their own accounts banned. The companies have argued that Trump has failed to show clear evidence that their decisions were directly dictated by a government power. Trump’s argument also has been complicated by the fact that he ran the federal executive branch at the time that his accounts were shut down; Joe Biden was still president-elect.

Ironically, some legal observers argue that Trump might now be committing the very sin that he accused Democrats of perpetrating against him—using the power of his incoming presidency to pressure private companies to take actions for his personal benefit. They worry the companies are agreeing to settlements less from fear that they would lose in court than fear that they would win.

“Trump may be doing what he claimed Biden was doing but he never really did,” Eric Goldman, a professor of law at Santa Clara University who has been tracking the X and Meta cases, told me. “If there is a cash settlement, it is because it’s just a staggering economic transaction to buy influence.”

The precedent for such legal surrender was established late last year by ABC News, which had been sued by Trump for defamation; the case concerned comments by the network host George Stephanolopolous that Trump had “been found liable for rape,” when a New York court had found him liable for sexual abuse under state law—though the judge later clarified that the behavior in question was “commonly considered ‘rape’ in other contexts.” ABC News struck a settlement with Trump in mid-December that sent $15 million from parent company Disney to help build his future presidential library and paid $1 million in legal fees, shocking First Amendment attorneys. (Attorneys for Disney had concluded that the case posed substantial risk, The New York Times reported, and that the settlement was a small price to pay to resolve it.)

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that the parent company of CBS News, Paramount Global, was considering a settlement with Trump over his $10 billion claim that 60 Minutes illegally interfered with the election by favorably editing an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. Paramount is in the process of merging with Skydance Media, a deal that would require approval by Trump appointees. “We have no comment,” Paramount Global spokesman Justin Dini told me in a statement.

Trump has also sued Gannett, the owner of The Des Moines Register, alleging consumer fraud for a poll the Register published before the 2024 election that showed Harris with a lead over Trump in Iowa days before the election. (Trump won the state.) Gannett has signalled that it intends to contest the case in federal court.

The Founding Fathers, for all their foresight, did not concern themselves with the possibility that a future president might use civil litigation to extract money or fealty. The U.S. criminal code does little to prevent the president, who is exempt from its primary conflict of interest provisions, from continuing civil litigation or profiting from court cases once he takes office.

[Read: The strategy behind Trump’s policy blitz]

Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, told me that the current situation gives enormous power to a president who has indicated a willingness to use litigation to get his way. “What law prevents him from basically extorting media companies? Absolutely no law at all,” Painter said. “These suits are going to settle. It is not just the money he is getting from it. We are going to have the media be cowed by the president of the United States.”

The Trump case against YouTube and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of parent company Google, filed in 2021 with the X and Meta cases, has been lying dormant in a Northern California courtroom since December 2023, pending the outcome of the Ninth Circuit appeal of the case against X.

Musk’s decision to settle before an opinion now opens the possibility that the YouTube case will be revived unless that company too seeks a settlement. Jose Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google, declined this week to comment on the company’s legal strategy.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.

This week Joe Biden delivered his farewell address to the nation, in which he warned of the looming threat of unchecked power. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss the president’s speech as well as what to expect from Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Although Biden’s administration can claim various key moments of success over the past four years, his presidency was consciously framed around defending and protecting democratic norms, McKay Coppins said last night. But after he lost his party and the White House “in a pretty dramatic fashion to usher in the return of Donald Trump,” McKay continued, “it’s going to be hard to make the case that he did what he set out to do.”

Meanwhile, Trump has vowed to take dramatic steps in the earliest days of his presidency, including mass deportations. “You’re going to see a flurry of executive orders,” Zolan Kanno-Youngs said. The administration is “reaching and trying to be creative when it comes to accomplishing” Trump’s immigration agenda.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: McKay Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Andrew Desiderio, a senior congressional reporter at Punchbowl News; Asma Khalid, a White House correspondent at NPR and a political contributor for ABC News; and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent for The New York Times.

Watch the full episode here.

Four years ago, scores of police officers were attacked only yards away from where Donald Trump will swear to defend the Constitution and faithfully execute the duties of his office. The scene, in the words of one officer, was “a non-stop barrage” with “weapons and things being thrown, and pepper spray, and you name it … You could hear them yelling. You could hear them, screams and moans, and everything else.” One officer later said that he was certain he would die the moment he entered the crowd: “You know, you’re getting pushed, kicked, you know, people are throwing metal bats at you and all that stuff. I was like, yeah, this is fucking it.”

All of this happened because Trump, according to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report, could not accept his loss in the 2020 election, and so he tried on January 6, 2021, to “direct an angry mob to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election and then leverage rioters’ violence to further delay it.” The crowd that attacked the Capitol, Smith wrote, “was filled with Mr. Trump’s supporters, as made clear by their Trump shirts, signs, and flags,” and they “violently attacked the law enforcement officers attempting to secure the building.”

The ensuing riot was one of the worst days for law enforcement since 9/11. More than 140 officers were injured on January 6, but we know only the names of some of the most famous victims of the mob, such as Officers Michael Fanone, Aquilino Gonell, Harry Dunn, and others who have testified to Congress or given interviews. Their injuries were severe. Fanone was beaten to the point of a concussion and a heart attack; Gonell was attacked by more than 40 rioters and assaulted with his own riot shield. He has since undergone multiple surgeries and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

In his campaign for reelection, the man who conjured this violence against his own government—and then stood by as police from multiple jurisdictions were attacked—portrayed himself as the guardian of law and order. (One of the themes of the 2024 GOP convention was “Make America Safe Again.”) This strategy worked: Trump yet again nabbed the endorsement of the National Fraternal Order of Police. The FOP vice president, Joe Gamaldi, said in November that police see Trump’s victory as a mandate from voters who are “tired of all the chaos and disorder we’re seeing in our streets. We are tired of the ‘defund the police’ talk, and basically we’re just tired of the crap.”

[Read: Trump’s empty promise of ‘law and order’]

The new president’s supporters may be tired of what they mistakenly believe is a rise in crime in the streets, but they’ve memory-holed Trump’s willingness to throw a swarm of raging insurrectionists against the same police forces that will be protecting him at today’s inauguration. Nothing, however, should be allowed to erase the truth that the party of law and order is now led by not only a convicted felon, but one who callously looked on as outnumbered police officers did battle for hours to protect the lives of the members of the United States Congress.

I understand the anger that some police officers feel when the public assumes that they’re all corrupt bullies, potential killers no better than the men involved in the ghastly 2020 murder of George Floyd. My father and brother were both police officers (Dad in the 1950s, and my brother from the 1960s to the 1980s). Our next-door neighbor when I was a boy was a police officer, and I grew up among cops in my small New England city. Most of them became “law and order” Republican voters when Richard Nixon was able to turn riots—including the mess at the 1968 Democratic National Convention—into a campaign issue.

Trump has done the same through his three presidential campaigns, depicting America as a lawless hellhole. At least Nixon, however, had the advantage of pointing to the other party, and to his political opponents, as the source of danger to Americans and their armed protectors. Trump has managed to erase from millions of minds the fact that the people who attacked the police on January 6 were his own supporters, acting on what they believed were his wishes.

“I would like to see January 6 burned into the American mind as firmly as 9/11,” the conservative writer George Will said in 2021, “because it was that scale of a shock to the system.” But like so many of Trump’s outrages and scandals, the attack on the Capitol has faded into the noise of the 2024 campaign. Trump today will likely thunder on about the return of law and order and swear to make America’s streets safer, but American voters, no matter their party, should remember what actually happened to scores of police officers because of Trump’s own actions.

Police officers at the Capitol were being attacked with an assortment of weapons—bear spray, flagpoles, even their own equipment. (“My helmet came down and felt like someone was on top of me and I couldn’t see anything,” the Capitol Police officer Winston Pingeon told ABC News in an October 2024 interview. “And I remember just thinking, I have to protect my gun, because they stole my baton.”) During all of this, Trump, as usual, was tweeting: “I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order-respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!” Meanwhile, the mob pressed on. One officer recounted that rioters dragged him into the crowd, where they beat and tased him while yelling things such as “I got one!” and “Kill him with his gun!”

[Tom Nichols: Trump’s dangerous January 6–pardon promise]

Trump now refers to many of the rioters who have been convicted and jailed as “hostages.” He has promised to pardon some of them upon taking office. “Most likely, I’ll do it very quickly,” he said on Meet the Press last month, adding that “those people have suffered long and hard. And there may be some exceptions to it. I have to look. But, you know, if somebody was radical, crazy.”

The once and future president seems to have a forgiving definition of radical. On the campaign trail, he lauded a choir formed by some of the jailed insurrectionists. He even lent them his voice; their song, “Justice for All,” includes Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, and Trump regularly played it at his rallies. “Our people love those people,” Trump said last May.

Four of this “J6 Prison Choir” were charged with assaulting a law-enforcement officer. One rioter, Julian Khater, had already pleaded guilty to assaulting multiple officers before the song was recorded. He was sentenced to almost six years in prison. Another choir member, Shane Jenkins, was also sentenced to six years in prison after being convicted of seven felonies and two misdemeanors, including throwing makeshift weapons at the police. “I have murder in my heart and head,” he wrote to an associate in the weeks after the riot, according to the Justice Department.

Trump has described January 6 as “a day of love.” The police who were there know better. Many of them live with physical and psychological scars. Four of them committed suicide within a year. “Tell me again how you support the police and law and order when all these things are happening?” Gonell asked last spring.

Safely back in the White House, Trump will never have to answer that question. But every time he and other elected Republicans claim to be the party of law and order, Americans should remember the day that the 47th president was willing to sacrifice the men and women on the thin blue line on the altar of his own ambitions.