Many parents are probably familiar with a certain type of teen and their approach to school: These kids turn up. They do their homework. They get good-enough grades. They comply, which in academic terms means they’re behaviorally engaged. But they’re not investing in what they’re learning, nor are they that interested in trying to make sense of it. If you ask them how school was, their usual answer tends to be: Meh.

For as long as there have been teenagers, there have surely been kids like this. That’s one reason the disaffected-teen archetype in popular culture is so rich (and relatable): Holden Caulfield, Ferris Bueller, the entire casts of The Breakfast Club and Sex Education—the list goes on. And because plenty of teens are apathetic about school, many parents and teachers are willing to give those kids a pass. They’re just teens being teens, right? No big deal.

This article was adapted from Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop’s new book, The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better. (Crown)

But teen apathy in school is a big deal—and the data indicate that it might be more widespread than many people realize. Here’s a fact that’s important to remember: Kids are wired to want to learn. And when they’re younger, most say they enjoy learning. While researching our new book on teen disengagement, we partnered with the Brookings Institution and Transcend, an education nonprofit focused on how to improve learning environments. With them, we surveyed more than 65,000 students and almost 2,000 parents. We found that 74 percent of third graders say they love school. But during middle school, kids’ enjoyment falls off a cliff. By tenth grade, only 26 percent of teens say they love school—although 65 percent of parents with tenth graders think their kids love it, suggesting a serious disconnect.

Again, the teens who say they dislike school may not be failing—more likely they’re coasting. Think of them as the original quiet quitters, gliding along in neutral, unwilling to put the car in gear. Half of the middle- and high-school kids we surveyed reported operating this way, in what we came to call Passenger Mode. We also interviewed close to 100 teens ourselves—kids in small towns and big cities, kids from wealthy families and those with limited resources—and those in Passenger Mode told us they felt simultaneously overwhelmed and bored. A lot of them simply didn’t understand the point of school. And so they checked out.

[Read: We’re missing a key driver of teen anxiety]

That kind of checking-out can have lasting consequences. Johnmarshall Reeve, a professor at Australian Catholic University, has been researching student engagement—the combination of how kids think, feel, act, and proactively contribute in school—for the past 20 years. He explained to us that young people in Passenger Mode are “wasting their time developmentally” when it comes to building good learning skills. In our reporting, we found that many teens were outside what the psychologist Lev Vygotsky called the “zone of proximal development”: the sweet spot where a student does not find the material so easy that they lose interest, nor so difficult that they give up. This is part of what we identify in our book as a much broader “disengagement crisis,” and it’s affecting plenty of kids getting good-enough grades—the metric many parents rely on to gauge whether students are succeeding. But grades don’t tell the full story.

Teens who don’t enjoy school are unlikely to be cognitively and emotionally engaged in their learning, which means they’re less likely to absorb the knowledge and skills that many of them will need to thrive beyond high school. This disengagement works on a continuum: If kids start to lose interest, then after a while, many stop doing their work; if they stop doing their work, they’re likely to fall behind; if they fall behind, they might feel as if they’re out of options, and soon apathy becomes the norm. Once kids check out, the hurdles to success get higher, and the emotions associated with clearing them get messier. Checked-out kids become less likely than their more engaged peers to develop an identity as a learner: someone who is curious, adaptable, and able to respond to different challenges and environments.

Many people assume that kids in Passenger Mode are lazy. But our research suggests that, in reality, much of the problem lies with the dominant model of schooling, which isn’t designed to help kids feel invested in their learning. One study found that 85 percent of middle-school assignments merely asked students to recall information or apply basic skills, rather than pushing them to engage at a higher level. Similarly, the Brookings and Transcend survey found that only 33 percent of tenth graders said they got to develop their own ideas in school. Of course, we see numerous exceptions: schools that push kids to not only master essential knowledge but also think deeply and apply what they know in class to solve real-world problems. But these schools remain on the fringe. More commonly, kids see the world around them—wars, social injustice, climate change, disinformation, AI technology that can help write novels and solve complex equations—and wonder why on earth they have to, say, study the Pythagorean theorem. If little is asked of them, or if they fail to see real-world applications, they tend to give little in return.

In an ideal world, we might hope for a wholesale redesign of schools, which plenty of innovators are working toward. But changing entire systems can be an excruciatingly slow process. This means it’s crucial for the adults close to teens in Passenger Mode to step in, to encourage them in ways that help them reengage within the existing system. And precisely how parents go about this makes a huge difference.   

When teens check out at school, many parents respond by nagging: Pay attention; do your homework; you have to study for that test. After all, kids might get sick of the scolding and eventually do what they’re told. But nagging doesn’t work as a long-term motivator. Few people feel inspired to work under duress.

That holds true for teens as much as for anyone. In the 2010s, the developmental scientist Ron Dahl and Jennifer Silk, a University of Pittsburgh psychology professor, started wondering what went on inside adolescents’ brains when their parents nagged them. So the two recorded a group of moms offering neutral statements, praise, and criticism. Then they put these moms’ kids—32 boys and girls ages 9 to 17—into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and played the recordings to see which parts of the kids’ brains engaged and which tuned out. Criticism (“You get upset too easily”; “One thing that bothers me about you”) increased activity in the emotion networks of the kids’ brains. It also decreased activation of the cognitive networks used to regulate their emotions, and in the systems that help a person see things from someone else’s perspective. In other words: Rather than focusing on solving the problem that their parents were criticizing them about, the kids got upset and shut down.

An abundance of other research confirms that nagging backfires. John Hattie, a professor at the University of Melbourne, in Australia, examined the effects of parental involvement on student achievement as evaluated by almost 2,000 studies covering more than 2 million students around the globe. He found that when parents “see their role as surveillance, such as commanding that homework be completed,” achievement drops and students are less engaged.

[Read: Lighthouse parents have more confident kids]

Many parents nag for what might feel like a good reason: They worry that otherwise, kids won’t step up to do their homework or other tasks on their own. But nagging can send the message to kids that they are not competent, which deflates, not energizes, them. Nagging also diminishes teens’ sense of autonomy, which they need for important parts of their brain to develop. When parents monitor their kids like drill sergeants, whether that impulse comes from a place of love or despair (or both), they unwittingly impede their kids’ practice in exercising agency and learning to organize themselves effectively. After all: Sometimes the negative consequences of not getting work done or failing an exam are exactly what a kid needs to feel motivated. By giving teens the freedom to fail something—­a test, a quiz, meeting a homework deadline—­parents put them in control, which (over time) does feel motivating.

Moms and dads who ease off the nagging can still do plenty to get their teens out of Passenger Mode. The key, research suggests, is for them to encourage teens to develop more autonomy. Obviously, we’re not suggesting that parents give teens complete independence; they’re young and need guidance. But parents shouldn’t default to working harder to solve a kid’s problem than the kid does. And they probably should give up a little bit of control; think fewer commands and more supportive nudges. To figure out if what you’re saying might gently push a teen toward autonomy, it’s useful to ask: Will this help my child learn to do this on their own?

Consider the cases of the following teens and parents, whom we spoke with while researching our book. One ninth grader in New York, who spends a lot of time in Passenger Mode, told us that not being asked to study for Spanish and getting an 87 on a test felt way better than being hounded to study and then getting a 92: “It makes me feel like I’m not even accomplishing anything when I get a good grade ’cause my mom made me study all night.”

Another teen, from Philadelphia, told us that his mother texts him four times a day to remind him of things: “She texts me at like 11 a.m. when I am in class to remind me about homework that is due that night. She thinks I can’t manage myself at all, but I think I can.”

[Read: Don’t help your kids with homework]

This sort of “command and control” mindset might feel efficient to some parents, but it can rob children of motivation. A more effective tactic, we found, is to encourage kids to make their own plans and to support them as they carry them out—as exemplified by the experience of Luis, a Denver-based high schooler, and his mom, Susan. (We changed Luis’s and Susan’s names to protect their privacy.) One day, Luis announced to his mom that he was probably going to fail his Advanced Placement U.S. History exam. He had taken a practice test and gotten a 1, but he needed a 3 to pass the class, and the test was in two weeks. At first, Susan panicked internally; failing history freshman year would not look good on Luis’s transcript. But she remained externally calm and channeled her social-worker training. The exchange went something like this:

Susan: Well, what are you going to do?
Luis: I don’t know.
Susan: Do you have a textbook? (This was not rhetorical. Susan had never once seen Luis with a history textbook.)
Luis: Umm … yeah, I guess.
Susan: Maybe you should read it?
Luis: Oh! (Luis actually seemed surprised at this.) That’s a good idea. I think it’s under my bed. (Luis headed to his room and returned five minutes later with a shiny, unopened textbook. He sat down at the kitchen table and opened it.)
Susan: Do you have a notebook and pen? Maybe you should take notes while you read the book?
Luis: Good, yeah. I’ll do that. (Luis rummaged in his backpack for a notebook and pen.) Mom, what am I supposed to do when I take notes?

Giving your kid autonomy doesn’t always mean letting go of the reins, but instead trying to see what your kid needs and what they can do, before deciding for them. Susan quickly realized that Luis had made it to freshman AP U.S. History with virtually no understanding of how to study. When Luis announced that he thought he might fail, she curbed the urge to say, “Are you kidding me?” and instead put the onus back on Luis (“What are you going to do?”). When he was stuck, she used invitational language (“Maybe you could … ”). And after their first conversation, she helped him make a plan that broke the work into manageable chunks—providing what educators call “scaffolding.” Eventually, after buckling down for seven days of study, Luis took the exam and got a 3. He told us he was thrilled and felt pride in his accomplishment.

To get better at anything, kids need to practice—and they need to want to practice. Learning is no exception. Luis experienced the success of mastery and felt the spark of internal motivation. Although he still has Passenger moments, he’s more engaged in school as a result of taking charge of his learning. Along the way, thanks to the runway his mom gave him, he developed better work habits, picked up some time-management skills, and practiced organizing himself to reach a goal.

Communicating this way isn’t always easy for busy parents; “just get it done” can feel more expedient than helping children devise a plan and having patience when the plan doesn’t work. But managing teens’ time for them and nagging them to do things will work for only so long. When kids are in Passenger Mode, a better way for parents to counteract their coasting is to notice when they’re stuck in neutral—and then lean gently toward them, to help them find a way to shift into drive.

This article was adapted from Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop’s new book, The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better.

It is a basic fact of American life, so widely known that it hardly needs to be said: College is getting ever more unaffordable. In survey after survey, Americans say that the cost of getting a degree just keeps rising.

But this basic fact of life is not a fact at all. In reality, Americans are paying less for college, on average, than they were a decade ago. Since the 2014–15 school year, the cost of attending a public four-year university has fallen by 21 percent, before adjusting for inflation, according to College Board data analyzed by Judith Scott-Clayton, a professor of economics and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. (Nearly three-quarters of American college students attend a public institution.) The cost of attending a private university has risen in raw terms over the same time period, but is down 12 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. Once tax benefits are factored in, according to a recent Brookings Institution analysis, the average American is paying the same amount for tuition as they were in the 1990s. “People have it in their heads that prices just keep going up, up, up,” Sandy Baum, a nonresident senior fellow at the Urban Institute, told me. “And that’s actually not what’s happening.”

The confusion comes from the idiosyncratic way in which college is priced. Schools set a staggering official price that only a subset of the wealthiest students pay in full. Universities rely on that money to offer financial aid to low-income students; in effect, rich families subsidize the cost of attendance for everyone else. This means that there’s often a chasm between the published cost of attendance, or sticker price, and what people actually pay once financial aid is factored in, or the net price. Unfortunately, the eye-popping sticker prices tend to get the most attention. Within higher-education reporting, articles anticipating the arrival of the $100,000 year of college have become practically a genre unto themselves. “There’s massive problems in the higher-education sector—and we focus on all the wrong ones,” Phillip Levine, an economics professor at Wellesley College, told me. “We can’t stand the fact that the sticker price is so high despite the fact that nobody pays it.”

This pricing strategy took hold in the early 1980s. Since then, Levine has found, the sticker cost of attending a four-year public or private university—tuition plus fees and room and board—has almost tripled after adjusting for inflation. (The past four years, during which pandemic-induced inflation outpaced tuition growth, are an exception to the trend.) With this pace of increase, it’s no wonder that people think college prices are out of control.

[Rose Horowitch: The perverse consequences of tuition-free medical school]

But, as sticker prices have soared, so has the gap between them and the amount that people actually pay. The effect is most pronounced for low-income families, but middle- and upper-middle-income families receive substantial discounts too. In the 2021–22 school year, 82 percent of first-time, full-time undergraduates at public four-year schools received aid, as did 87 percent of those at private institutions. Only students whose families make more than about $300,000 a year and who attend private institutions with very large endowments pay more than they did a decade ago, Levine said.

Higher education might not be cheap—many families still get far less financial aid than they need, and the cost of attendance can rise unpredictably from year to year—but it is clearly getting cheaper. A mix of factors appear to be behind the trend. Increases to the federal Pell Grant have limited out-of-pocket costs for low-income students, David Deming, a political-economy professor at Harvard, told me. State appropriations have rebounded for public universities since the Great Recession. And colleges themselves appear to be offering more aid, which accounts for 70 percent of all discounts, Adam Looney, an economist at the University of Utah who wrote the Brookings study, told me.

Most of the researchers I spoke with predicted that net prices would keep falling over the next few years. The number of 18-year-old high-school graduates is expected to peak this year, followed by a long decline. This will reduce demand for college and force institutions to compete even harder with one another for applicants.

College is getting more affordable: That’s the good news. The bad news is that no one seems to have heard the good news. Nearly half of all adults in the U.S. think that universities charge everyone the same amount, according to a 2023 survey by the Association of American Universities. And, even as college costs fall, a recent poll found that 44 percent of people think that their state’s public-college tuition is likely to increase in the next year. (Twelve percent thought it would decrease, and the rest predicted no change.)

One study found that most high-achieving, low-income students chose not to apply to highly selective colleges with steep sticker prices. They opted instead for schools with lower sticker prices that ended up offering much less financial aid and thus costing more. (For low-income students who are admitted, elite universities, which draw on their enormous wealth to offer generous need-based aid, are almost always the most affordable option.) Another study found that low-income students were less likely to apply to a school when it raised its sticker price, even if those students would have qualified for a full ride based on their financial need. More unfortunate still, sticker shock can lead students to forego college entirely.

In recent years, public confidence in higher education has fallen sharply; researchers attribute much of the decline to perceptions of college costs. More and more Americans are saying that a degree isn’t worth the investment, even though the so-called college wage premium still far outstrips the cost of attendance.

[David Deming: The college backlash is going too far]

When researchers tell people how much more they stand to earn if they graduate from college, their study subjects are more likely to apply. Clearly, colleges should do a better job advertising their value proposition, even as they stress that most people don’t pay the full sticker price. But, given the opacity of the system, just telling people the difference between sticker and net prices has been shown to have little effect on whether those people attend college. Some research suggests that it would be more effective for schools to commit up front to one price for the full four years, something they are loathe to do. “You have to fix knowledge, but then also make some promises to students that, not only is this real, but we’re not going to switch up on you after a year or two—which, to be frank, many universities currently do,” Zach Bleemer, an economics professor at Princeton, told me.

As colleges prepare for a tough enrollment picture, they can’t afford to push students away. And yet higher education’s weird pricing model is probably not going anywhere. After all, colleges haven’t found a better way to get the funding they need for financial aid. “I remember 30 years ago, people saying: ‘This can’t go on. They can’t keep doing this,’” Baum, the Urban Institute fellow, told me. “And they do. And they have to because if you charged everybody the same price, that price would simply be too high for many people.” In other words, it might not be long before we’re hearing about the rise of the $110,000 year of college—even as students are paying less than they do today.

Project 2025, the conservative governing playbook produced by veterans of the first Trump administration, has an entire chapter on how to overhaul USAID. Its authors urged the next president to “scale back USAID’s global footprint,” “deradicalize” its programs, and throttle its funding.

Before the election, Donald Trump disavowed Project 2025 because it veered so far to the right. But now he’s making the plan look downright timid. Project 2025 did not call for freezing all foreign aid or locking USAID employees out of their headquarters. Nor did the treatise suggest shutting down the $40 billion agency and subsuming it into the State Department—all without a single vote in Congress.

As the chair of Trump’s quasi-official Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk has razed USAID with shocking speed. He’s called it “evil,” “a radical-left political psy op,” and “a criminal organization.” The rampage seemed to come out of nowhere, but the 64-year-old agency has long been one of the government’s most vulnerable conservative targets.

[Read: Why Trump can’t banish the weirdos]

Although foreign aid accounts for less than 1 percent of the federal budget, right-wing politicians began attacking it well before Trump. In the 1990s, the late Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina likened the disbursement of American money abroad to shoving taxpayer dollars “down a rathole.” Conservatives have even tried to abolish USAID—most notably Helms in the late ’90s and early 2000s. But the scope of those attempts pales in comparison to what Trump and Musk are doing now, George Ingram, a former USAID official in the Clinton administration, told me. “This,” he said, “is fundamentally different.”

At Musk’s urging, the Trump administration has placed nearly all USAID employees on administrative leave and recalled thousands from overseas postings with virtually no notice. (At the same time, the president declared that the U.S. would “take over” the Gaza Strip—a mission that would presumably require a sizable American deployment.) Trump designated Secretary of State Marco Rubio as USAID’s acting administrator. In one of his first moves, Rubio wrote to senior members of Congress—not to ask for their help in reforming the agency but merely to notify them that the government might reorganize it.

“It’s ridiculous,” Andrew Natsios, a former USAID administrator, told me. He ran the organization for the first five years of the George W. Bush administration and describes himself as “the most conservative administrator in the history of the agency.” Natsios has his share of problems with USAID, including his sense that its staff is often unresponsive to political leadership, a critique that Project 2025 echoes. But Natsios, who’s now a professor at Texas A&M University, is aghast at the Trump administration’s purge of USAID. (He began our conversation by comparing it to the Russian Revolution.) For days, he’s been fielding calls from panicked contacts at the agency. “They are not reviewing each project,” he said. “They’re eliminating entire bureaus, whole programs, simply deleting them without even looking at what they’re doing.”

USAID was created in 1961 to consolidate programs that had grown out of the Marshall Plan, said Ingram, who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Congress considered putting USAID in the State Department but kept it separate so that it could operate more nimbly—like a business, Ingram told me, rather than a bureaucracy.

Presidents of both parties have supported foreign aid, including Ronald Reagan and the second Bush, who weren’t enthusiastic about it as candidates. “Once they got into office, they saw that it was a very important tool of U.S. foreign policy,” Ingram said. Even one of the Project 2025 authors acknowledged that foreign aid has helped America check global adversaries; a former USAID deputy administrator, Max Primorac, credited the agency with countering China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Indeed, authoritarian regimes have long denounced American aid, and now some of them are praising Musk’s efforts. Musk himself promoted a laudatory post on X from a top aide to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. With that adulation in mind, Natsios questioned whether Musk’s campaign against USAID might be “motivated by his desire to please the Kremlin.”

[Read: America can’t just unpause USAID]

Sending taxpayer funds abroad has never been particularly popular, a reality that Trump seized on during his first term by attacking foreign aid as part of his “America First” agenda. In 2017, administration officials reportedly drafted proposals to merge USAID with the State Department, but they never went anywhere. Polling has found that Americans dramatically overestimate the amount of money the government spends on foreign aid, and in a survey released this week, most respondents backed cuts to foreign aid. Natsios faulted the Biden administration for making USAID an even more inviting target for Trump 2.0 by trying to export progressive values such as LGBTQ and abortion rights, especially to countries where they are unpopular. “They brought part of this on,” he said.

By and large, Republican lawmakers have simply watched as Musk and his allies shut down an agency that, according to a paper published on Monday by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, cannot be abolished, moved, or consolidated without authorization from Congress. A few have issued mild protests. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana criticized the pause on distributing HIV/AIDS drugs through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a George W. Bush–era program that enjoys wide bipartisan support domestically and internationally. “It is a Republican initiative, it is pro-life, pro-America and the most popular U.S. program in Africa,” Cassidy wrote on X. “This must be reversed immediately!!”

Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, who until last month served as chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the Trump administration was “right to scrutinize and revamp” USAID, but he strongly defended its purpose and urged the president to eventually resume sending aid abroad. “U.S. foreign-assistance programs not only feed starving women and children in some of the most destitute parts of the world, but they also promote democracy, help stabilize fragile nations on the brink of collapse, and counter our adversaries’ attempts to shift the global balance of power,” McCaul told me.

By contrast, McCaul’s successor atop the committee, Representative Brian Mast of Florida, cheered the administration unreservedly and released a four-minute video “exposing radical, far-left grants” supposedly issued during the Biden administration. His list included $15 million for “condoms for the Taliban,” money to expand “atheism in Nepal,” and various line items promoting LGBTQ rights. (The contraceptives were for Afghan citizens, not members of the Taliban; the Nepal grant promoted religious freedom.)

When I asked Natsios, a lifelong Republican, what he made of the response from GOP lawmakers, he scoffed: “The Republican Party in Congress is a disgrace.”

[Listen: Purge now, pay later]

Advocates for USAID now have little choice but to place their hopes in Rubio, who as a senator defended foreign assistance as “critical to our national security.” In his new role, however, he has characterized USAID as a rogue agency whose leaders misspent taxpayer money and refused to cooperate with Trump’s directives during his first few days in office. “There are a lot of functions of USAID that are going to continue,” Rubio told reporters in El Salvador on Monday. “But it has to be aligned with American foreign policy.”

Natsios used to enthusiastically support Rubio. He told me that he once saw Rubio give “the strongest speech for foreign aid” he had ever heard. He contributed to Rubio’s presidential campaign in 2016—when Rubio was a GOP rival to Trump—and said the then-senator had told him that, had he won, he would have brought him into the White House. Now, Natsios told me, Rubio has a choice to make: “He is going to accept the ideology” of Trump and Musk, “or he is going to get fired.”

While Rubio and other Republicans decide whether, and how much, to fight for U.S. foreign aid, the ripple effects of the firings and funding freeze at USAID are quickly growing. Many policy decisions in Washington take weeks or even months to be felt overseas. Not this one, Ingram said. The moves threaten the jobs of thousands of people connected to the aid industry inside the U.S., and they jeopardize the livelihood of potentially hundreds of thousands of people—or more—in the developing world, who rely on USAID for health care, food, fertilizer, and other crucial supplies. Ingram was stunned: “I have never seen a government action have such an immediate impact.”

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Within hours of taking office on Monday, Donald Trump released a raft of executive orders addressing targets he’d gone after throughout his campaign, such as immigration, government spending, and DEI. He issued full pardons for 1,500 January 6 rioters, and signed the first eight executive orders—of dozens so far—in front of a cheering crowd in a sports arena. But amid the deluge of actions, Trump also signed an executive order that takes aim at his own federal bureaucracy—and allows his perceived enemies within the government to be investigated and punished.

The executive order, titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” opens by stating as fact that the Biden administration and its allies used the government to take action against political opponents. Democrats, it says, “engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.” Its stated purpose, to establish “a process to ensure accountability for the previous administration’s weaponization of the Federal Government against the American people,” reads like a threat. The order calls out particular targets, including the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission—agencies that Trump and his supporters allege betrayed them under President Joe Biden. Trump’s team, led by whoever is appointed attorney general and director of national intelligence, will be sniffing out what it determines to be signs of political bias. These officials will be responsible for preparing reports to be submitted to the president, with recommendations for “appropriate remedial actions.”

What exactly those remedial actions would look like is not clear. The vagueness of the order could result in a “long-running, desultory ‘investigation,’” Quinta Jurecic, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer to The Atlantic, told me in an email.

But the information gathered in such investigations could lead to some federal employees being publicly criticized or otherwise punished by Trump. And beyond theatrics, this order could open the door to the “prosecutions that Trump has threatened against his political opponents,” Jurecic noted. Put another way: In an executive order suggesting that Biden’s administration weaponized the government, Trump is laying out how his administration could do the same.

Trump’s Cabinet is still taking shape, and whoever ends up in the top legal and intelligence roles will influence how this order is executed. Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney-general pick, is an established loyalist with long-standing ties to Trump (he reportedly considered her for the role in his first term, but worried that her past scandals would impede her confirmation). Bondi, in her first Senate confirmation hearing last week, attempted to downplay Trump’s persistent rhetoric on retribution, and avoided directly answering questions about how she, as head of the Justice Department, would engage with his plans to punish enemies. She said that she wouldn’t entertain hypotheticals about the president, though she did claim that “there will never be an enemies list within the Department of Justice.” Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, has a history of political shape-shifting, though she has lately shown fealty to MAGA world.

Well before Trump took office, his allies were signaling their interest in turning federal bureaucracy, which they deride as “the deep state,” into a system driven by unquestioning loyalty to the president. As my colleague Russell Berman wrote in 2023, some conservatives have argued, without even cloaking “their aims in euphemisms about making government more effective and efficient,” that bureaucrats should be loyal to Trump. Russ Vought, the nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget (an unflashy but powerful federal position), who today appeared before Congress for the second time, has previously written that the executive branch should use “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”

The executive order on weaponizing the federal government is consistent with the goals of retribution that Trump expressed on the campaign trail. And accusing rivals of using the government for personal ends has been a favored Republican tactic in recent years. Still, this order confirms that, now that he is back in office, Trump will have no qualms toggling the levers of executive power to follow through on his promises of revenge. Many of Trump’s executive actions this week are sending a clear message: If you are loyal, you are protected. If not, you may be under attack.

Related:

Trump’s pardons are sending a crystal-clear message. Why 2025 is different from 2017

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump’s second term might have already peaked. The attack on birthright citizenship is a big test for the Constitution. You’re being alienated from your own attention, Chris Hayes writes.

Today’s News

A shooter killed at least one student and injured another before killing himself at Antioch High School in Nashville. Donald Trump said last night that by February 1, he would place a 10 percent tariff on Chinese products. He has also pledged to put a 25 percent tariff on products from Canada and Mexico by the same date. An Israeli military assault in the occupied West Bank began yesterday, killing at least 10 people and injuring 40 others, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Evening Read

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Getty

Be Like Sisyphus

By Gal Beckerman

This anxious century has not given people much to feel optimistic about—yet most of us resist pessimism. Things must improve. They will get better. They have to. But when it comes to the big goals—global stability, a fair economy, a solution for the climate crisis—it can feel as if you’ve been pushing a boulder up a hill only to see it come rolling back down, over and over: all that distance lost, all that huffing and puffing wasted. The return trek to the bottom of the hill is long, and the boulder just sits there, daring you to start all over—if you’re not too tired.

Read the full article.

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