Lindsay P Cohn

Wise words from WEB DuBois to gird us today: "It would be shame and cowardice to surrender this glorious land and its opportunities for civilization and humanity to the thugs and lynchers, the mobs and profiteers, the monopolists & gamblers who today choke its soul and steal its resources."

This line graph illustrates the percentage change in agency staff levels from the previous year for nine major U.S. federal scientific and health organizations between the fiscal years 2016 and 2025. The agencies tracked include the CDC, Department of Energy, EPA, FDA, NASA, NIH, NIST, NOAA, and NSF. For the majority of the timeline between 2016 and 2023, the agencies show relatively stable fluctuations, generally staying within a range of +5% to -5% change per year. However, there is a dramatic and uniform plummet starting in the 2024–25 period. Every agency depicted shows a sharp downward trajectory, with staffing losses ranging from approximately -15% to over -25%. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows the most significant decline, dropping to roughly -26%, while the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) shows the least severe but still substantial drop at approximately -15%.

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again.

www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

But wait, there's more:

Judge William Young also issued his long-awaited judgment in the case, which covers every noncitizen member of the two leading plaintiff organizations.

First, he vacates the enforcement policy. And second, he gives future ideological targets a right to quickly go to court.

En Guinée, démission du gouvernement dirigé par Bah Oury Cinq jours après l’investiture du président Doumbouya, qui a mis fin à une transition de quatre ans, le Premier ministre a remis sa démission et celle de son gouvernement.

Military leaders making moves to consolidate power in Guinea?General Doumbouya was just given a seven year mandate.

On the human terrain stuff?

The House Ethics Committee found that Matt Gaetz did all of the horrible things previously claimed—sex trafficking minors, prostitution (including of minors), drugs, drunk driving, obstruction, the works. The Florida Bulldog has secured and published the House report this evening.

You’re welcome for my service

It represents the Hulk Smash school of how military conflict works and so lots of us from a more Clausewitzian school find it annoying.

2) the rather arrogant and dismissive attitude about things like jus in bello and trying to limit civilian harm; Summers is from the inter arma silent leges school that says war is nasty and it’s dumb to try to limit how nasty it is

There are a couple of issues with it, mainly 1) the argument that we would have “won” Vietnam if the politicians had just untied the military’s hands and let them do whatever they wanted - this argument is problematic both empirically and as normative theory.

Well good

LOL enjoy

The Soldier and the State by Samuel P. Huntington

And we can’t leave out this offender

Then there was this one, which I was asked to review for H-Diplo and was originally excited … then I read the book and was like 😳 and asked to be excused from writing the review and they were like “you have a BAD review?? THAT’S GREAT” so I had to be the a**hole who writes a terrible review

On Strategy: a critical analysis of the Vietnam War by Harry Summers

OMG I have so many but how has no one yet said

🚨HOLY CRAP. An ICE whistleblower just revealed a secret memo authorizing ICE officers to break into homes without a judicial warrant, which DHS's own legal training materials say is unconstitutional!

ICE then hid the memo from the public, passing it along by word of mouth and private conversation.

❤️

4) would love to see some ethics on this list, maybe French’s The Warrior Code, or Shanks Kaurin’s On Obedience
5) love your logistics picks! Would add (for a great widening of the aperture on manpower issues) Parrott’s The Business of War
6) in miscellaneous would add Biddle’s Military Power

3) on civ-mil, it’s probably better not to perpetuate the Huntington mythology. Finer’s Man on Horseback and Nordlinger’s Soldiers in Politics are both excellent books that are far more historically accurate than H and Nordlinger’s typology is easier to understand than H’s and covers the same ground

1) love this list (mostly 😁)
2) While I’m a fan of Posen, studies of doctrine have built well beyond his contribution. I’d recommend Kier’s Imagining War, Rosen’s Winning the Next War, and Avant’s Lessons From Peripheral Wars …

Quartered Safe Out Here is one of my all-time faves

Last year a whistleblower said DOGE had illegally accessed a Social Security database. SSA now acknowledges it's true—& that DOGE employees had secret agreement w/ unidentified political advocacy group to use SocSec data to help overturn election results. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Decades-Old Rule that Allowed Logging on Vast Swaths of US Land Ruled Unlawful by Oregon Court — Inside Climate News The Forest Service didn’t make a ‘reasoned decision’ in using a categorical exclusion to exempt timber harvests from environmental reviews to ease wildfire mitigation and habitat improvement, the judg...

Sharing some more good news apple.news/AwtepVoHeQxq...

There are now a half dozen occasions in the last year in which NATO intelligence services have discovered that high classified intelligence reporting furnished to the Trump White House were furnished to the Kremlin within hours (I posted the story about this in Handelsblad).

Back in 2020, Lindsay Cohn, Dani Lupton and I wrote about the danger of domestic law enforcement making itself indistinguishable from the military

www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Minneapolis duo details their ICE detention, including pressure to rat on protest organizers Two Minneapolis friends who have been monitoring immigration officers’ actions during the Trump administration’s latest crackdown say they were detained without charge for several hours in distressing...

abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory...

U.S workers just took home their smallest share of capital since 1947, at least American workers aren’t just getting the smallest share of GDP since records began. Their share of employment is shrinking and shrinking

U.S workers just took home their smallest share of capital since 1947, at least finance.yahoo.com/news/u-worke...

Department of War rebrand could cost from $10 million to ‘hundreds of millions,’ CBO says The final figure would likely hinge on the extent of replacement for signs, letterhead, name plates and digital coding related to many websites.

Estimates on the cost to implement the Department of War name change range from $10 million to $125 million, but it could rise to "hundreds of millions," the CBO said this week.

This may seem funny and can easily be dismissed as it's just Leavitt being Leavitt. The genuine problem is that in a global crisis where words matter and are a part of escalation management, no one can believe what the United States says, or trust what they hear from the WH.