THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Tulsi Gabbard, a combat veteran who detests military intervention, joined the MAGA coalition full of hope that Donald Trump shared her beliefs. Gabbard especially despises—or at least despised—the notion of meddling in Venezuela, a once far-fetched idea that she had denounced many, many times.But it turns out that President Trump’s foreign-policy doctrine is not actually isolationist. Although he doesn’t care about defending allies or toppling dictatorships to spread democracy, he’s perfectly happy to intervene overseas to steal resources or simply to show other countries who’s boss.Gabbard has had to swallow her principles, first when Trump bombed Iran, and then when he did the very thing she had accused the neocons of plotting: invading Venezuela to take its oil. As director of national intelligence, she is stuck issuing rote endorsements of the administration’s position. “Kudos to our servicemen and women and intelligence operators for their flawless execution of President Trump’s order… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Photographs by Dina LitovskyThe purge began late Friday night, four days after Donald Trump returned to the White House. Seventeen inspectors general—internal watchdogs embedded throughout the federal government—received emails notifying them of their termination. Three weeks later came the Valentine’s Day Massacre: the ousting of tens of thousands of federal employees with little discernible pattern, across agencies and across the country. By April, entire departments—the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—had been gutted.Workers the administration couldn’t fire were coerced into leaving on their own. Toxicity became HR policy. Employees received an email with the subject line “Fork in the Road.” It offered eight months’ pay to anyone who resigned, and no assurances of job security to those who stayed. A follow-up email encouraged them “to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.” At the end of… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Donald Trump has sent waves of federal agents to Democratic-run “sanctuary cities” over the past eight months, depicting the operations like episodes in a roving MAGA reality show. The places targeted by the president tend to become temporary sites of protest—and produce fodder for his meme-driven administration’s social-media channels. The relentless pressure on ICE to ramp up deportations has left officers on edge. The neighborhoods they’re targeting are on edge too.  Activists have marched in the streets and demonstrated outside federal buildings. But their most effective form of disruption—putting them on the front lines—has been car-powered.In Los Angeles, Washington, and especially Chicago, loose networks of neighborhood-watch groups have organized to detect federal immigration officers and warn people about their presence. They send out online notices and alerts; in the streets, they trail federal vehicles, honking horns and blowing whistles to form a rolling alarm system. From what I’ve observed in… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

If the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties was still functioning as it did before Donald Trump returned to the presidency, Julie Plavsic and her former colleagues would have spent yesterday opening an investigation into the shooting death of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE officer in Minnesota. Although the DHS inspector general takes the lead on criminal investigations of officers, after an incident like this, CRCL’s job would have been to review policies, training, and oversight procedures to try to prevent anything like it from happening again. But today, the office is effectively dormant.Plavsic was a senior policy adviser at CRCL. She and her colleagues were put on leave in March and officially dismissed from their positions two months later. The administration also closed two other offices with mandates to protect the public from misconduct—the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman and the Immigration Detention… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Photographs by Jason AndrewPeople look at you differently when you carry a Geiger counter. Or, at least, when you carry a Geiger counter and exclaim things like “Much less radiation here than you might expect!” But how else are you to know that the radiation in your food is at acceptable levels?They have government inspectors for this, you might say. It is their job.That was before Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency started hacking away at our bureaucracy. Before the federal government was shut down for much of the fall. And before I bought a Geiger counter to do my own food inspections.For a while—maybe since 1883, when the Pendleton Act created a merit-based civil service of experts—we, as a nation, thought to ourselves: Life is too short for everyone to inspect their own food. Let the government handle this. But then along came the Trump administration to wonder: What… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.